German soldiers saw Italians as cowardly, Russians as death-defying, British as tough, and Americans as soft, and with very rare exceptions these estimations did not change over the course of the war. The initial battles set the tone that continued until 1945, aside from a few expansions and variations. Only when the tide began to turn against Germany did subtle shifts occur. For instance, in the second half of the war, as the Red Army began advancing, ever more quickly, to the borders of Germany proper, Germans tended to emphasize Russian soldiers’ brutality over their bravery.
Bravery in battle was also a key criterion for evaluation of one’s own comrades. No one liked “staff wallahs.”681 Those who weren’t actively engaged in combat opened themselves up to accusations of cowardice, and one’s superiors were expected to lead the vanguard. One POW complained:
PRINCE HEINRICH XLII of REUSS was my “Abteilungskommandeur.” He was a major in 1940, a Lieutenant Colonel in 1942—all due to his connections. As soon as the battle of KIEV began, this gentleman withdrew and became ill. As soon as the battle of KIEV had been won and we had settled down in the town, he turned up again. When the battle down in the CRIMEA started, that man was nowhere to be seen. When we were in SIMFEROPOL, after two or three weeks of quiet, he turned up again. When things got going at SEVASTOPOL, during the winter of 1943, he was ill again, his weight shrank to under 100 lbs, he looked so wan, and then he left. He is generally looked upon as a rather degenerate type of man.682
A positive counterexample was Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg:
VIEBIG: He’s frightfully smart, and extraordinarily intelligent—at any rate that’s how he has always been described to me. That’s to say he’s a German officer type; just as much a fighting man as a General Staff Officer with incredible energy, considerate and thorough.683
Although Major Viebig thoroughly condemned Stauffenberg’s role in the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler, he was full of praise for the count as a military personality. Significantly, Viebig saw Stauffenberg as a combat soldier, even though the latter had only spent three months at the front. General staff officers were often viewed critically, but Stauffenberg’s “energy,” combined with the fact he had been seriously and visibly wounded in Tunisia, outweighed any skepticism his rank might have brought with it.
Soldiers also approved of Field Marshal Rommel for his energy, even though they otherwise perceived him as an ambivalent figure. “He was impressive as a soldier,” opined a Colonel Hesse. “He was no great leader but he was a
Soldiers had an almost exclusively negative view of those who failed to conform to the ideal of the brave warrior, those who were thought to have fled without a fight or even gone over to the enemy. As of summer 1944, there was no end to the conversations in British and American POW camps about excessive numbers of cowards in the German ranks. A Lieutenant Zimmermann from the 709th Infantry Division recalled driving along a country road from Cherbourg to the front: “Troops were already streaming along the road in any order: Labour Service, Flak and a few infantrymen. I said: ‘Boys, don’t run away, don’t make the bloody affair even worse than it is.’”685 Zimmermann knew that Cherbourg would soon be lost, but he still felt that order should continue to rule and that soldiers should bravely fight on. The fact that German soldiers were retreating pell-mell made the inevitable defeat even worse, as it undermined the core of Zimmermann’s belief in what it meant to be a soldier.
Very rarely, and only among nonofficers, did soldiers admit that they had considered abandoning their positions and running away. A Private Leutgeb told a bunkmate about the battle in Normandy:
