Soldaten полностью

Within the core units of the Waffen SS, we find a unique amalgamation of racism, callousness, obedience, willingness for personal sacrifice, and brutality. Individually, all these elements can be identified within the Wehrmacht as well. It is easy to identify a rabid anti-Semite such as Gustav von Mauchenheim, the notorious commander of the 707th Infantry Division, who murdered some 19,000 civilians in the Soviet Union in 1941.⁸⁴⁰ One can also prove that individual Wehrmacht units, particularly elite ones, were responsible for numerous atrocities. The 1st Mountain Division or the 4th Tank Division, for instance, executed large numbers of prisoners and civilians.⁸⁴¹ Additionally, there were plenty of units that defended their positions down to the last man. But in the Wehrmacht, instances of radicalism never coalesced into a stable, coherent whole. Regular army units were more heterogeneous in their perceptions and actions than the Waffen SS. It was only isolated regiments and battalions in specific phases of the war that stood out as excessively brutal. The political spectrum within the Wehrmacht was also broader than in the Waffen SS. In the elite division “Grossdeutschland,” committed Nazis like Major Otto-Ernst Remer fought side by side with men like Colonel Hyazinth von Stachwitz, apparently a critic of the Nazi system.

The units of the Wehrmacht that most closely resembled the Waffen SS were the paratrooper divisions.⁸⁴² They put on similar elitist airs, were distinguished from the rest of the Wehrmacht by their uniforms, had numerous committed Nazis in their ranks, and tended toward radicalism.⁸⁴³ Recalling his experiences in Normandy in 1944, Colonel Kessler described paratroopers as virtual barbarians whose excesses were covered up by the military brass: “The SS and the paratroops, too, behaved like swine. Back at AVRANCHES they blew up the jewellers’ safes with hollow charges.”⁸⁴⁴ Yet even paratroopers paled in comparison to the Waffen SS in terms of their use of violence against women and children, their belief in final German victory, and their willingness to keep fighting down to the last round of ammunition.⁸⁴⁵

Ultimately, in comparison to the Wehrmacht, the Waffen SS was not only comprised of different sorts of people with a manner and a frame of reference all their own. It also had a different relationship to the most extreme sorts of violence.

Before we turn to the question of how National Socialist the Wehrmacht’s war really was, let us summarize the key points of individual soldiers’ frame of reference. The decisive factors in their basal orientation—the way in which they perceived and interpreted events—were the military value system and their immediate social environment. Differences of ideology, background, education, age, rank, and branch of service mattered little on this level. The exceptions were the differences just discussed between the Waffen SS and regular Wehrmacht soldiers.

Cultural ties reinforce this conclusion. These include, above all, ties to a canon of military virtues, the accompanying official and perceived responsibilities, and the accolades one could receive for carrying out one’s duty. As we saw in our brief comparison of German, Italian, and Japanese soldiers, each group had a specific national frame of reference. This helps explain why some German soldiers continued to fight even after they knew the war was lost.

On the other hand, soldiers in the concrete situations in which they had been deployed often did not know that the war was lost, or if they did, were unable to comprehend what defeat meant. Moreover, the issue of whether the war was still winnable was sometimes irrelevant to soldiers trying to carry out a specific task, be it holding their position, avoiding capture by the enemy, or saving the lives of subordinates. Knowledge of the larger context does not automatically rule out actions independent of that knowledge. As a general rule, interpretations and decisions in concrete situations are usually made without reference to the “big picture.” Thus, it is not surprising that most of the soldiers whose voices we encounter in the surveillance protocols seem ignorant of the larger context.