Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (39 page)

From this excerpt one would expect such frank critics of the Nazi regime to be against the party’s anti-Semitic policies. But the conversation takes the following turn:

Today, the argumentative mix found in the protocols is dumbfounding. One reason is the very nature of everyday conversations. As
the nineteenth-century German author
Heinrich von Kleist already sensed, much of what we think only gets “finished” in the act of speech.
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Opinions and attitudes do not simply exist a priori of concrete social interactions, like objects in a drawer that one can take out at will. Often, thoughts first coalesce in conversation, one word following the other, and they do not exist for very long. Under the influence of mood, a need for consensus, or a misapprehension, or because the conversation is just idle chatter, people sometimes try out opinions or thoughts that they will discard the next time they converse with someone. For that reason, real arguments are rare in the protocols, despite the fact that the men concerned did not come together of their own free will, and the amount of time they were forced to spend together would otherwise encourage conflicts. Of course, there were a few genuine arguments of the “I beg to differ” variety
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and at least one running feud of the sort that can happen between people sharing an apartment.
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This shows that arguments were in fact recorded and thus happened very rarely. As in all other everyday conversational situations, soldiers might agree with an opinion only to reject it in their next conversation, and the desire to establish a relationship was often far more significant than the content of what was said.

The vagaries of human conversation make it difficult to determine how deeply anchored bits of National Socialist ideology were in the consciousness of POWs. We can only say for sure that ideology played a role in absolutely unambiguous statements. An example is this one by nineteen-year-old navy midshipman
Karl Völker:

Völker was the classic
ideological warrior of the sort
Daniel Goldhagen envisions: a willing executioner, driven by delusional eliminatory and pornographic visions of violence, who gave his all to exterminate Jews. Völker’s tales, which elicit a skeptical response from his listener, are most likely the result of an intensive study of the SS magazine
Der
Stürmer
and anti-Semitic group training in the
Hitler Youth. Such stories may seem completely bizarre, but the speaker here both believes in and draws conclusions from them. People like Völker did indeed exist.

In the minds of most of the POWs, though, National Socialism was something different than the piecemeal, if internally consistent, theory
about the “eternal laws of life” one can read out of the writings and speeches of everyone from Nazi
ideologue
Alfred Rosenberg to Hitler himself.
Hoerkens’s analysis concludes, on the basis of conversations between 621 soldiers, that the majority tended to view Nazi racial policies negatively and that only 30 of them could be described as ideological warriors. Junior officers, above all lieutenants, made up the lion’s share of this minority. They were still children in 1933 and thus had been socialized most intensely by the Third Reich.
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It is among them that we can best speak of a Nazi picture of the world.

When the rest of the soldiers talk about politics, race, Jews, and related topics, it is not a coherent worldview but rather a patchwork of diverse and often contradictory fragments. Committed National Socialists were able to tell stories full of
empathy about Jews they had known personally and express dismay at the “scandalous treatment” of the minority by a “cultured people.” At the same time, there was a basic level of agreement with Nazi racial policies, as the example of navy W/T operator
Hammacher in May 1943 shows:

Examples concerning the “Jewish actions” have already revealed that soldiers could be critical of the methods employed for mass executions, while feeling indifferent to or even supportive of the executions themselves. The same applied to
ideology and
racism in general. Negative opinions predominated on these topics. “I have always been opposed to those SS swine,” a
Lieutenant Oehlmann opined. “I was always against the persecution of the Jews, too. One should have been able to exile the Jews but one shouldn’t have treated them like that.”
⁵⁴⁵
This was hardly a fundamental rejection of anti-Semitic policies, although views on the topic grew more and more critical as confidence in victory dissolved. “It will be a disgrace being a German after the war,” one POW complained. “We’ll be as much hated as the Jews were.”
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“The greatest mistake was the expulsion of the Jews,”
seconded another. “That and particularly the inhuman treatment,” agreed a third.
⁵⁴⁷

In general, we can assume that such topics were most often broached by those who objected to the persecution and execution
of Jews, while those to whom the Final Solution seemed necessary would have spoken up less often. Phrases liked “international” or “world Jewry” or “Jewified” England and America—together with stereotypes such as Jews being “work-shy”—occur with regularity. The reference
frame of categorical
inequality and the everyday anti-Semitic practice clearly had a deep psychological effect on POWs. Nonetheless, it still remains largely uncertain what that meant for the men’s perception and behavior in concrete situations. The capacity of
attitudes and mental
dispositions to inspire action is often overrated. They only predispose individuals to anti-Semitic behavior in extreme cases, such as the navy man cited above. It would require intense analysis of concrete situations to determine whether someone killed Jews out of anti-Semitic conviction or as a result of group dynamics. Sometimes, peer pressure made people into mass murderers without any sort of individual motivation on their own part. This conclusion is supported by evidence from the Wehrmacht, including the various positions and situations in which soldiers found themselves. Anti-Semitism may have been one basis for what they did when they battled, retreated, fought against partisans, and spent their free time, but it was not a sole motivation. As exemplified in POWs’ remarks
about the Jewish
ghettos, many of the men felt some
empathy with the victims and were shocked at their living conditions: “These Jews were doing hard labour there at the main airport and were treated badly, like animals.”
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But that sympathy did not have any consequences in terms of the question of whether they would carry out or refuse an order to secure a ghetto.

For instance, a
Lieutenant Rottländer told of a friend who had suffered after having participated in a mass execution:

Rottländer’s listener,
Lieutenant Borbonus, has an immediate response: “Well, what on earth can you do if it is ordered by higher authority?”
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When there was sufficient distance between the speaker and the events described, POWs related news of atrocities in much the same tone that people today talk
about child soldiers in Africa or bestial deeds of the Taliban. We may find certain acts terrible, but our
frame of reference for atrocities is abstract and doesn’t have much to do with our own lives or those of our interlocutors. An engineer who designs mobile phones does not perceive himself as being connected with the fact that coltan, essential to modern telecommunications, is strip-mined in war-torn Congo. Likewise, soldiers were not personally affected if Jews were being slaughtered
somewhere else by others
. The same distance applies, mutatis mutandis, for ideological and
racist concepts. It is unclear how such concepts related to what they did in World War II. Take, for example,
Heinrich Skrzipek, chief quartermaster of U-187:

Even if most of the racist
stereotypes used in the protocols are anti-Jewish, the things POWs said reflected the entire spectrum of Nazi prejudice. Stereotypes are applied to
Germany’s allies (“Those yellow monkeys aren’t human beings; they are still animals”;
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“The Italians themselves don’t know what they want. They’re a stupid race”
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) and its enemies (“I can’t even look on a Russian as a human being”;
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“Poles! Russians! There’s a lousy crowd working in there”
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) alike.

Racism could even serve as the basis for a surprisingly melancholic statement on the postwar future: “One thing is obvious: E
UROPE
will
perish, regardless of whether the Germans or the English are beaten, as these two races are the props of culture and civilisation. It is tragic that such prominent races should have to fight each other instead of fighting Slavdom together.
”
⁵⁵⁵
Stereotypes and
prejudices are constant elements of cultures, and they shape individuals’ orientation and group social practice.
⁵⁵⁶
In a society in which categorical
inequality directs state policy, is considered a scientific standard, and is bolstered by massive propaganda, collective stereotypes are cemented. Nonetheless, as our sources show, this did not happen to the extent that
Goebbels,
Himmler, or Hitler would have liked and that Holocaust research long declared it did.
Ideology is merely the basis of attitudes, and we know little about whether those attitudes in fact inspired action.

Conversely, we can say that the
ideology of fundamental human inequality made antisocial behavior toward oppressed groups seem acceptable and even desirable. That is why sympathy with adversaries and victims, although present in protocols, was the exception and not the rule.

Astonishingly, a concept that does not occur at all in our sources is the idea of the
Volk
community. Considering how much attention has been given to this psychosocial category in recent research on Germans in the Third Reich, it is surprising that soldiers never once refer to what should be a central aspect of their mentality.
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Nor does the concept crop up in other sources, such as reports on state-sponsored “Strength Through Joy”
vacations and other Nazi social provisions. This is even more baffling since the
Volk
community reflected civilian and not military organizational structures. The complete absence of this phrase should make future researchers skeptical about the extent to which such integrative elements permeated Nazi society.