Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (2 page)

At first glance what we have here is a spectacular combination of topics—
war, enemy soldiers, youths,
music, Russian expanses, crimes
against humanity, and admiration for
one’s
adversary—that don’t seem to cohere. Yet they are narrated in a single breath. That is the first thing we need to recognize. The stories we will be examining in this book deviate from what we expect. They were not intended to be well rounded, consistent, or logical. They were told to create excitement, elicit interest, or provide space and opportunity for the interlocutor to add commentary or stories of his own. In this respect, as is true for all everyday conversations, the soldiers’ stories tend to
jump around in interesting ways. They are full of ruptures and sidebar narratives, and they aim to establish consensus and agreement. People do not converse solely in order to exchange information but to create a relationship with one another, establishing commonalities and assuring themselves that they are experiencing one and the same world. The soldier’s world is that of war. That is what makes their conversations seem so extraordinary to readers today. For the soldiers themselves, they were perfectly normal.

The
brutality, harshness, and absence of emotion of war are omnipresent, and that is what is so disturbing for us reading the dialogues today, more than sixty years after the fact. Involuntarily, we can only shake our heads in dismay and frequent incomprehension. Yet in order to understand the world of these soldiers, and not just our own world, we need to get beyond such moral reactions. The matter-of-factness with which extreme acts of brutality are related shows that killing and the worst sorts of violence were part of the narrator’s and audience’s everyday reality. The POWs discussed such topics for hours on end. But they also conversed about airplanes, bombs, radar devices, cities, landscapes, and women:

Male conversations are like this. The two soldiers protocolled here, a
Luftwaffe lance corporal and a sergeant, at times describe the
Russian campaign like tourists, telling of “delightful” towns and memories. Then, suddenly, the story becomes about the spontaneous rape of female forced
laborers. The sergeant relates this like a minor, ancillary anecdote, before continuing to describe his “trip.” This example illustrates the parameters of what can be said and what is expected in the secretly monitored conversations. None of the violence related goes against his interlocutor’s expectations. Stories about shooting, raping, and robbing are commonplace within the war stories. Rarely do they occasion analysis, moral objections, or disagreements. As brutal as they may be, the conversations proceed harmoniously. The soldiers understand one another. They share the same world and swap perspectives on the events that occupy their minds and the things that they’ve seen and done. They narrate and interpret these things in historically, culturally, and situatively specific
frameworks of reference.

Our aim in this book is to reconstruct and describe these frameworks in order to understand what the soldiers’ world was like, how they saw themselves and their enemies, what they thought about
Adolf Hitler and
Nazism, and why they continued fighting, even when the war seemed already lost. We want to examine what was “National Socialist” about these reference frameworks and to determine whether the largely jovial men in the POW camps were indeed “
ideological warriors” who set out in a “war of
annihilation” to commit
racist crimes and stage
massacres. To what extent do these men conform to the category,
popularized by
Daniel Goldhagen in the 1990s, of “
willing executioners”? Or, alternatively, do they more greatly resemble the more differentiated, morally ambiguous picture of Wehrmacht soldiers that has emerged from the popular historical exhibits by the
Hamburg Institute for Social Research and countless historical examinations? Today’s conventional wisdom is that Wehrmacht soldiers were part of a gigantic apparatus of
annihilation and thus were participants in, if not executioners of, unparalleled
mass murder. There is no doubt that the Wehrmacht was involved in criminal acts, from the killing of civilians to the systematic murder of Jewish men, women, and children. But that tells us nothing about how individual soldiers were involved in such criminality, or about the relationship they themselves had toward their deeds—whether they committed
crimes willingly, grudgingly, or not at all. The material here gives detailed information about the relationships between individuals and their actions and challenges our common assumptions about “the Wehrmacht.”

One fact needs to be acknowledged. Whatever they may encounter, human beings are never unbiased. Instead, they perceive everything through
specific filters. Every culture, historical epoch, or economic system—in short every form of existence—influences the patterns of perception and interpretation and thus steers how individuals perceive and interpret experiences and events. The surveillance protocols reflect, in real time, how German soldiers saw and commonly understood World War II. We will show that their observations and conversations are not what we would usually imagine—in part because they, unlike we today, did not know how the war would
end and what would become of the
Third Reich and its Führer. The soldiers’ future, both real and imaginary, is our past, but for them it was an unfinished book. Most of the soldiers are scarcely interested in ideology, politics, world orders, and anything of that nature. They wage war not out of conviction, but because they are soldiers, and fighting is their job.

Many of them are anti-Semites, but that is not identical with being “Nazis.” Nor does
anti-Semitism have anything to do with willingness to kill. A substantial number of the soldiers hate “the
Jews” but are shocked at the mass executions by
firing squads. Some are clear “anti-Nazis” but support the
anti-Jewish policies of
Hitler’s regime. Quite a few are scandalized at hundreds of thousands of Russian
POWs being allowed to starve to death, but do not hesitate to shoot POWs themselves if it seems too time-consuming or dangerous to guard
or transport them. Some complain that Germans are too “humane” and then tell in the same breath and in great detail how they mowed down entire villages. Many conversations feature a lot of boasting and chest-puffing, but this goes well beyond today’s males’ bragging about themselves or their cars. Soldiers frequently seek to rack up points with tales of extreme
violence, of the
women they
raped, the planes they
shot down, or the merchant
ships they sank. On occasion, we were able to determine that such stories were untrue and intended to make an impression, even by relating, for instance, how they sank a ship that was transporting children. That is beyond the pale today, but the parameters of what could be and was said then were different from what obtains today, as are the things which they hoped would elicit admiration and respect. Acts of violence, back then, belonged to that category. Most of the soldiers’ stories may initially seem contradictory, but only if we assume that people act in accordance with their “
attitudes,” and that those attitudes are closely connected with ideologies, theories, and grand convictions.

In reality, people act as they think is expected of them. Such
perceived expectations have a lot less to do with abstract “views of the world” than with concrete places, purposes, and functions—and above all with the groups of which individual people are a part.

To understand and explain why German soldiers waged war for five years with a ferocity still unparalleled today, causing an eruption of violence that claimed 50 million lives and decimated an entire continent, we have to see the war, their war, through their eyes. The following chapters will be concerned in detail with the factors that influenced and determined the soldiers’ perspective, their
frames of reference. Readers who are not interested in Nazi and military frames of reference and are more curious about the soldiers’ narratives and discussions about violence,
technology,
extermination, women, or the Führer should proceed directly to
this page
. After we have given a detailed account of the soldiers’ views on fighting,
killing, and dying, we will compare war as waged by the
Wehrmacht with
other
wars, thereby elucidating what was specifically “National Socialist” about World War II. This much we can reveal in advance: the results of this examination will often be unexpected.

Human beings are not Pavlovian dogs. They don’t react with conditioned reflexes to predetermined stimuli. Between stimulus and reaction, something highly specialized happens which epitomizes human
consciousness and which distinguishes our species from all other forms of life. Humans
interpret what they
perceive and on the basis of interpretation draw conclusions, make up their minds, and decide what to do. Belying Marxist theory, human beings never act on the basis of
objective conditions; nor do they act, as disciples of
rational choice theory long wanted us to believe, solely with an eye toward cost-benefit calculations. Waging war is neither the only logical result of
cost-benefit
analysis nor a necessary consequence of objective circumstances. A physical body will always fall according to the laws of gravity and never otherwise, but whatever human beings do they could always have done differently. Nor do magic entities such as “
mentalities” make people behave a certain way, although
psychological structures no doubt influence what human beings do. Mentalities precede but do not determine
decisions. Even if people’s perceptions and actions are bound up with social, cultural, hierarchical, and biological or anthropological circumstances, human beings always enjoy a certain freedom
of interpretation and action. But the ability to interpret and decide presupposes orientation and knowledge of what one is dealing with and what consequences a decision can have. And a frame of reference is what provides orientation.

Frames of reference vary drastically according to historical periods and cultures.
Orthodox Muslims, for instance, categorize suitable and unsuitable
sexual behavior within a completely different framework from that of secular inhabitants of Western society. Nonetheless, no member of either group is able to interpret what he sees outside references not of his own choice or making. They influence, guide, and even steer his perceptions and interpretations. That is not to say that transgressions of a preexisting frame of reference do not occur in special situations. It is possible to observe or think something new. But this is relatively seldom the case. Frames of reference guarantee economy of action so that most of what happens can be sorted within a familiar matrix. That makes things easier. People called upon to act don’t need
to start from the very beginning with the question: what is actually going on here? In the vast majority of cases, the answers to this question are preprogrammed and accessible, saved in a corpus of cultural orientation and knowledge. Most everyday tasks are taken care of by
routines, habits, and certainties, and that saves individual human beings a colossal amount of work.

Thus when we want to explain human behavior, we first must reconstruct the
frame of reference in which given human beings operated, including which factors structured their
perception and suggested certain conclusions. Merely analyzing objective circumstances is inadequate. Nor do
mentalities explain
why
someone did a specific thing, especially in cases where members of a group whose minds were all formed the same way arrive at entirely different conclusions and
decisions. This is the systemic limit upon theories about ideological
wars and totalitarian regimes. The question always remains: how are “
world views” and “
ideologies” translated into individual perceptions and
interpretations and how do they affect individual behavior? In order to understand those things, we analyze
frames of reference as a way of reconstructing the perceptions and interpretations of people in specific historical situations, here German soldiers during World War II.

When frames of reference are ignored, academic analyses of past actions automatically become normative, since present-day standards are enlisted to allow us to understand what was going on. As a result, past wars and violence often appear bafflingly “horrible,” even though
horror is a
moral and not an analytical concept. Moreover, the behavior of people who exercise violence appears abnormal and
psychopathic, despite the fact that when we reconstruct the world from their perspective their rationale for using violence is entirely logical and understandable. Analyzing frames of reference allows us to view the violence of World War II in
nonmoral,
nonnormative fashion. The aim is to understand the preconditions for psychologically normal people to do things they would not otherwise do.

We have to distinguish between different
orders of frames of reference:

Frames of the
first order
are the broad sociohistorical backdrop against which people of a given time operate. They are what sociologist
Alfred Schütz called “the
assumptive world,” the things we pre-presume must be the case. They include categories of good and evil and true and false, what is edible and what is not, how much distance
we should maintain when speaking to one another, and what is polite or rude. This “world as we feel it to be” has its effects on us less as beings capable of self-reflection than as creatures influenced by the unconscious and our emotions.
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