Tapping Hitler's Generals

The objective of the research project was to reconstruct the frame of reference of German and Italian soldiers, thereby demonstrating how the experience of war was perceived and interpreted by a cross-section of soldiers from the Axis powers. Harald Welzer and I published the project’s first book in April 2011, Soldaten: Protokolle vom Kämpfen, Töten und Sterben, which has been translated into nineteen languages and appeared in English in September 2012.[‡] While Tapping Hitler’s Generals was dedicated ‘solely’ to material from the higher echelons of the Wehrmacht leadership, Soldaten assesses the entire inventory of sources and attempts to concentrate on ordinary men. The study reveals the extremely limited horizon for reflection among soldiers, their enthusiasm for technology, the perception of war as a kind of work that one simply had to get done, the rapid acclimatisation to mass violence, and finally the enjoyment of committing violent acts. We document once more the widespread knowledge of all kinds of war crimes, as well as outrage over the Holocaust and the mass murder of Soviet prisoners of war.

The study makes it clear that the great mass of Wehrmacht soldiers were not interested in politics, that politics did not shape perception among the soldiers, and that ideology played at most a subordinate role in the consciousness of most Wehrmacht soldiers. Of course, German soldiers did not exist in a vacuum during the Third Reich–they were part of National Socialist society, accepting and shaping its social framework. Soldaten elucidates, however, that the degree to which specific National Socialist values can be traced to their frames of reference was limited, at least in the second half of the war. We do not doubt that there was a hard core of soldiers who combined set pieces of Nazi ideology into a more or less self-contained understanding of the world. And we also point out that ideologised soldiers were found with particular frequency in the Waffen-SS or in the elite units of the Wehrmacht. Soldaten therefore does not completely neglect the influence of ideology on action or the perceptions of simple soldiers, but it does seek to relativise them significantly. Practically everyone was certainly loyal to the Nazi state, and, of course, this cannot be confused with a crude ideologisation. Most of them may not have seen at the time what we see today in the Nazi state, yet they certainly perceived a distorted image. It is also interesting that soldiers made a distinction between Hitler and the Nazi regime; for most of them, Hitler was a sort of pater patriae, not the National Socialist ‘Führer’ who was responsible for war, murder and war crimes.

Many soldiers indeed were anti-Semites and anti-communists, which definitely made it easier for them to pledge their loyalty to the Nazi state. The critical fact remains, however, that their perception of war, their interpretation of events, their expectations for the future and so on were not determined primarily by political or ideological patterns or set pieces in the narrower sense, but rather by their experiences on the front, of the battles in which they found themselves. This is why approval of the Nazi state changed significantly as the defeats began to occur. Their loyalty to their nation, and above all to the institution of the Wehrmacht, remained unbroken. And this was the actual secret of the Nazi state: the loyalty of the soldiers to the Wehrmacht was absolutely unshakeable because they viewed it as an efficient and successful organisation in which they could fulfil their duty for the Fatherland, regardless of social class or political conviction. Yet many soldiers did not see this during the war–even if this may strike us as astonishing today.

Soldaten therefore goes against Omar Bartov’s thesis of the National Socialist infiltration of Wehrmacht soldiers. And it relativises the concept of the Volksgemeinschaft (national community), at least in its most extreme manifestation, as Thomas Kühne recently argued.[e] Kühne’s thesis is that the exclusion of the Jews from German society, and their murder, was a decisive factor in creating the national community. The creation of this community was therefore achieved through crimes (in both the narrow and broad sense of the term), because these performed an integrating social function. Mass murder, according to Kühne, bestowed a feeling of identity sui generis upon the national community as a whole in the Third Reich. The claim here is that the Nazi state successfully overcame societal rifts qua crimes. Perpetrator research has in fact shown how groups are constituted and consolidated as communities in and through the act of mass murder (culture of participation, outsiders play a key role for the inner differentiation of the group).