Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (4 page)

A total institution initially attempts to rob initiates of all forms of self-control. Only after the “initiation” or “apprenticeship” has been completed does a measure of freedom and a spectrum for possible behavior open up. This phenomenon is extreme even in peacetime, and it is the more so during
war, when acts of battle are no longer simulation, but everyday reality, and one’s own
survival may well depend on the smooth functioning of one’s unit. At that point, the total institution becomes a
total group, allowing only specific spectrums of action precisely defined by rank and command structure.
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In comparison with civilian roles of every sort, the
frame of reference of soldiers at war is characterized by the lack of alternatives. One of the soldiers, whose conversations with a comrade were secretly recorded, put it so: “We’re like a machine
gun. A weapon for waging war.”
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In decisions of what, when, and with whom, a soldier’s behavior is not subject to his own
perception,
interpretation, and
decision making. The leeway with which a command can be interpreted according
to one’s own estimation and abilities is extremely small. Depending on the circumstances, the significance of
roles within frames of reference varies considerably. Under the pluralistic conditions of
civilian life, it can be quite negligible. Under the conditions of war or other extreme situations, though, the significance can be total.

Parts of various civilian roles can also be transferred to the military context, where they become matters of life or death. A harmless action like transferring files can suddenly become murderous, if the context changes. As early as 1962, in his seminal work
The
Destruction of the European Jews,
Holocaust historian
Raul Hilberg underscored the negative potential of people employing civilian skills for homicidal purposes:

Applied to war, that would mean: every mechanic could repair
bombers whose deadly payloads killed thousands of people; every butcher could, as a member of a procurement enterprise, be complicit in the plundering of occupied areas. During World War II,
Lufthansa
pilots flew long-range sorties in their
Fw 200s not to transport passengers, but to
sink British
merchant
ships in the
Atlantic. Yet because their activity in and of itself didn’t change, those who played these roles rarely saw reason to engage in moral reflection or to refuse to do their jobs. Their basic activity remained the same.

Specific
interpretive
paradigms are tightly connected with the sets of demands that accompany every role.
Doctors see an illness differently
than do patients, just as perpetrators view a crime differently than do victims. The paradigms that direct these
interpretations are, in a sense, mini frames of reference. Every
interpretive paradigm, of course, includes an entire universe of alternative interpretations and implies nonknowledge. That is disadvantageous in situations so new that previous experience does more to hinder than to help our ability to deal with them.
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Paradigms are effective in familiar contexts since they remove the need to engage in complex considerations and calculations. One knows what one is dealing with and what the right recipe is for solving a problem. As predetermined, routinized frames for ordering what is happening at a given moment, interpretive paradigms structure our lives to an extraordinarily high degree. They range from stereotypes (“
Jews are all …”) to entire cosmologies (“God will not permit Germany’s demise”), and are both historically and culturally very specific. German soldiers in World
War II typecast their enemies according to different criteria and characteristics than soldiers in the
Vietnam War did, but the procedure and function of the typecasting are identical.

Interpretive paradigms are especially central to how soldiers in World War II experienced others, their own mission, their “race,” Hitler, and Jews. Paradigms equip frames of reference with prefabricated interpretations according to which experiences can be sorted. They also include interpretations from different social contexts that are imported into the experience of war. This is especially significant for the notion of “war as a
job,” which in turn is extremely important for soldiers’ interpretations of what they do. This central role can be gleaned from phrases like the “dirty work” or the “fine job” done by the
Luftwaffe that recur in the soldiers’ conversations. The interpretive paradigm from industrial society for how soldiers experienced and dealt with war also informs philosopher
Ernst Jünger’s famous description of soldiers as “
workers of war.” In Jünger’s words, war appears as a “rational work process equally far removed from feelings of horror and romanticism” and the use of weapons as “the extension of a customary activity at the workbench.”
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In fact,
commercial work and the work of war are indeed related in a number of respects. Both are subject to
division of labor, both depend on technical, specialist
qualifications, and both are
hierarchically structured. In both cases, the majority of those involved have nothing to do with the finished product and carry out orders without
asking questions about whether commands are sensible. Responsibility is either delegated or confined to the particular area on which one directly
works.
Routine plays a major role. Workers and soldiers carry out recurring physical movements and follow standing instructions. For instance, in a
bomber, pilots, bombardiers, and gunners with varying
qualifications work together to achieve a finished product: the destruction of a target, whether that target might be a city, a bridge, or a group of soldiers in the open field. Mass executions such as those perpetrated against
Eastern European Jews were not carried out only by those who fired the guns, but by the truck drivers, the cooks, the weapons maintenance personnel, and by the “guides” and “carriers,” those who brought the victims to their graves and who piled up the corpses. The mass executions were the result of a precise
division of labor.

Against this backdrop, it is clear that
interpretive paradigms give war a deeper meaning. If I interpret the killing of human beings
as work, I do not categorize it as a crime and, thereby, normalize what I am doing. The role played by interpretive paradigms in the reference frame of war emerges clearly from examples like the ones above. Actions that would be considered deviant and in need of explanation and justification in the normal circumstances of everyday civilian life become normal, conformist forms of behavior. The interpretive paradigm, in a sense, automatizes moral self-examination and prevents soldiers from feeling guilt.

Part of an
orienting frame of reference is very simple: it is a universe of regulations and a position within a hierarchy that determines what sort of orders an individual can be told to carry out and which orders he himself can issue to subordinates. Civilian life, too, has a spectrum ranging from total
dependence to total
freedom, depending on the
roles one has to play. A
business tycoon may enjoy immense freedom of action and be beyond the command of anything but the law in his business. But the situation might be very different in his
family life, where he may be bossed around by a dominant father or an imperious wife.

By contrast, such things are eminently clear in the military. In the
army, rank and function unambiguously determine how much leeway individuals have. The lower down one is in the hierarchy, the more
dependent one will be on others’ commands and decisions. Yet even within
total institutions like a military boot camp, a prison, or a closed psychiatric clinic, everyone enjoys at least a small measure of freedom of action. In his book
Asylums,
sociologist
Erving Goffman has convincingly described how people can exploit rules in total institutions for their own purposes. According to Goffman, when people in such institutions use jobs in the kitchen or the library to get organized or smuggle desired goods, they are engaged in “
secondary
adjustments,” pretending to follow the rules but actually advancing their own interests. Occupying troops enjoy numerous opportunities for secondary adjustment. In June 1944, for example, a certain
Lieutenant Pölert related: “I sent home a tremendous amount of butter and three or four pigs from France. It may have been three to four cwt of butter.”
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Soldiers welcomed such sides of
war from which they could
personally profit. The leeway afforded by secondary adaptation, however, drastically declines in actual battle and can only be exploited if one enjoys violence. In any case, as the situation grows more confined and drastic, the
frame of reference becomes less differentiated.

In cases like total institutions with a limited frame of reference, freedom of choice is minimized while security of orientation grows. At the same time,
social
duties can intervene in established, unambiguous decision-making structures and make group ties or even chains of command more permeable. For instance, the commandant of the
Dautmergen concentration camp, Erwin
Dold, disobeyed orders and organized
food for “his” inmates, in a unique attempt to improve their chances of
survival. He did this in the secure knowledge that his wife supported and even expected such behavior.
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Another example of the impact of social duties was soldiers who suddenly felt moral scruples when carrying out mass executions, after noticing resemblances between children they murdered and their own kids.
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Nonetheless, we should be under no illusions about the effect of social duties. We know of a great number of cases in which the real or imaginary presence of
a wife actually encouraged soldiers to kill because they felt they were acting in harmony with the wishes and choices of their spouses.

Social
duties emerge clearly in the recorded conversations of tank commander
Heinrich Eberbach. In October 1944, while interned in the British POW camp
Trent Park, he talked about whether he should voluntarily assist Allied propaganda efforts:

The profound influence of social ties results from the fact, contrary to popular assumption, that people behave within social relationships and not for causal reasons or according to rational calculation. Social ties are thus a crucial variable in determining what people decide—all the more so when decisions are made under stress, as in
Stanley Milgram’s famous simulation. In that experiment, social constellations were decisive in how obediently the subjects behaved toward the authority figure.
²⁸

Social proximity, perceived or actual, and the duties bound up with it constitute a central element in frames of reference. In the discipline of history, this element rarely comes into focus since, as a rule, sources rarely contain information about a person behaving in a specific way because he felt a sense of duty toward someone else. Further complicating the matter is the fact that social duties are not necessarily conscious. Sometimes they are so deeply internalized that they serve as points of orientation without an individual being aware of them. Psychologists call this phenomenon
delegation.

When we pause to consider the one-dimensional reference frame of soldiers faced with military situations and the restriction of soldiers’ social environment to their comrades, we begin to see the significance of a sense of social duty. Whereas in civilian life, family, friends,
schoolmates, and fellow students or workers represent a pluralistic corpus of diverse figures of reference, soldiers at the front essentially have only their brothers-in-arms. And they are all working within the same reference frame toward the same goal of fulfilling their military tasks while ensuring their own
survival.
Solidarity and cooperation are decisive factors in battle. Thus, the group always represents the strongest element of the frame of reference. Yet even when they are not engaged in active fighting, individual soldiers are highly dependent on the group. A soldier does not know for how long the war will go on or when he will get his next home leave or transfer, situations in which he will distance himself from the
total group and rejoin a pluralistic community. Much has been written about the force of
camaraderie. Along with its socializing functions, camaraderie also reveals antisocial elements when it is directed externally. The internal norms of the group determine standards of behavior, while the standards of the nonmilitary world are considered subordinate and insignificant.