Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (43 page)

The only exceptions were a handful of elite units in the
Waffen SS, the military wing of the organization, who took their instructions to fight to the final bullet more literally. It is striking how few SS men British and
American forces succeeded in capturing either in
France or Germany. American and British reluctance to take any SS prisoners cannot, by itself, explain this phenomenon. Another explanation is that many, if not all, SS units continued to fight in the sort of hopeless situations in which regular troops laid down their arms. Wehrmacht soldiers observed this fanaticism with ever
greater disbelief. Sacrificing their own lives, observed Lieutenant Colonel von der
Heydte, was a manifestation of the “false ethics, that faithful into death complex,” which the SS, like Japanese
kamikazes, cultivated among their ranks.
⁶¹⁸

With the exception of the Waffen SS, German ground forces possessed enough common sense to give up fighting when they were no longer able to put up an organized and effective defense. Soldiers simply refused to
sacrifice their lives in such situations. Sacrifice to no military end was not part of their universe of norms. Becoming a
casualty had to serve some sort of instrumental value. If there was no purpose in dying, soldiers tended to lay down their arms, especially on the Western Front, since it was not considered dishonorable to surrender to the Allies.

Such patterns of behavior can be seen again in the battle for the fortress of
Saint-Malo. When German troops were surrounded in the citadel there, the commandant, Colonel
Andreas von Aulock, let it be known that “everyone should prepare to die and remind himself that you can only die once. It was a battle to the last, to the point where we were supposed to sacrifice ourselves.” That was how
Georg Neher described the situation to a bunkmate in the U.S. POW camp
Fort Hunt. “The day before we surrendered he ordered the sappers to lay landmines here and there. They weren’t aimed at the Americans, but us. Of course, we didn’t do that.… We had survived up until then and done ourselves proud on the battlefield, and now we were supposed to die a pathetic death. I would have rather thrown a grenade in the colonel’s bunker.” But to the soldiers’ relief, they determined that “Aulock wasn’t serious. It was all bluster. He never intended to die. He just said what he did so he would be mentioned a couple of times in the Wehrmacht reports and be promoted to general. He wanted to be interned as a general and a bearer of the [
Iron Cross with] oak leaves.”
⁶¹⁹
Aulock achieved his ends. Reports of the colonel’s heroic
persistence delighted Hitler, who remarked that
Aulock should serve as a model for all other garrison commandants. Aulock got his Oak Leaves and the promise he would be promoted to major general. Ironically, due to a clerical error, it was Aulock’s brother Hans and not Aulock himself who ended up getting promoted.

Even high-ranking officers like this colonel did not fight to the bitter end, although some of them felt pangs of conscience about being
captured alive by their enemies. “Strictly as a soldier, I have nothing to be ashamed of,” said Lieutenant General
Wilhelm von Schlieben, the fortress commandant at
Cherbourg, shortly after he was interned. “I simply say that things would have ended more happily, if I’d died.”
⁶²⁰
It would have been a “historical deed,” Schlieben added, if he had thrown himself into the machine gun fire. Rear Admiral
Walter Hennecke, one of Schlieben’s fellow POWs, reported that the latter had indeed tried to end it all. Hennecke had hindered his fellow officer by arguing “That’s tantamount to suicide. There is no point to it.”
⁶²¹

Colonel
Hans Krug, who was captured by
British landing forces
in Normandy on June 6, 1944, had a mind-set similar to Schlieben’s:

As British forces surrounded Krug’s bunker, he had called his division commander over a still functioning telephone connection and asked for instructions. But the commanding general refused: “ ‘Do whatever you consider right.’ I said: ‘Won’t you give an order, sir?’ ‘No, I can’t survey the situation.’ I said that to him too. He said: ‘No, you act according to your conscience!’ ” Krug was bewildered. He had accepted orders to defend his position to the last man, and now he was supposed to decide for himself. He didn’t know what to do, although the hopelessness of his
military position was obvious. He later formulated his dilemma as follows: “If it affects the prestige of the F
ÜHRER
and the R
EICH
, then we shall carry out this order. Or isn’t it more important for me to save these valuable young lives from completely useless destruction.”
⁶²³
In the end, Krug surrendered, but he continued to have pangs of conscience about not falling in battle.

The urge to
fight until the bitter end was even stronger on the Eastern Front.
German soldiers’
fear of the Red Army, encouraged by Nazi propaganda, and the brutality of the war as it was waged on both sides did not make internment as a POW seem like a very attractive prospect. “Then there’s another point which rather bothers me personally, and that is the following,” reflected General
Cramer. “It also has to do with my experience in R
USSIA
about which you also know. It is of course a fact that the final fighting in
A
FRICA
was not so intense as that in R
USSIA
, because the soldiers know that to be a PW in
E
NGLAND
is bearable in contrast to being killed in R
USSIA
.”
⁶²⁴
In addition to the last
battles in
Tunisia, Cramer had personally experienced the collapse of southern German lines on the Eastern Front after Stalingrad had been surrounded. He was thus in a position to compare the Wehrmacht’s two greatest
military catastrophes in the years 1942 and ’43, and there was undeniable truth to his observation, as countless other examples show.
⁶²⁵
German soldiers’ fear of the Red Army meant that many of them refused to capitulate in the final year of the war. When surrounded in places like Tarnopol, Vitebsk, Budapest,
Poznan, and finally
Berlin, the last defenders of the Third Reich often preferred the most hair-raising attempts to break through to their own lines to the option of simply surrendering. In so doing, thousands of soldiers marched to their own
deaths like lemmings. Had they capitulated, most of them would have
survived.
⁶²⁶
Nowhere in the West, neither in Cherbourg and
Saint-Malo nor
Metz and
Aachen, did German soldiers show the same reluctance to surrender. But such reluctance was only a tendency, not an iron rule. Hundreds of thousands of Wehrmacht troops did allow themselves to be captured on the Eastern Front. The estimated number was 860,000 from 1941 to 1944.
⁶²⁷

The German
navy developed a relationship all its own to the trope of fighting down to the last bullet. As we have seen, the German navy command, ever conscious of the shame of the sailors’ rebellion of 1918, had placed utmost priority upon making amends in World War II. The fatalist command that navy men be ready to “die with honor” followed immediately upon Britain’s entry into the war, which few of the top leaders had expected.
⁶²⁸
Navy Commander in Chief
Raeder may
have covered up the 1939 case of the crew of the
MS
Admiral Graf Spree
sinking their own ship to avoid a lopsided battle with the British and save their own skins. But he also ordered that in future German warships were to battle to victory or go down with flags flying.
⁶²⁹
There are numerous examples of navy commanders demanding this sort of sacrifice from their men during the course of the war. And Raeder’s successor,
Dönitz, placed even more emphasis on “dying with honor” in the second half of the conflict.

For example, in November 1942, when Dönitz learned that Captain
Hans Dietrich von Tiesenhausen, commander of
U-331, had waved the white flag in order to save his helpless vessel from enemy aircraft, he immediately condemned the action and promised to have the captain court-martialed upon his return to Germany. “There can be no doubt in the Navy,” Dönitz fumed, “that waving a white flag or taking down one’s flag is equivalent to dishonorable surrender … and a violation of the venerable
military and seaman’s principle of preferring to go down with honor rather than lowering one’s flag.” In Dönitz’s view, the commander should have sunk his own vessel after exhausting his capacity to do battle rather than heading for the
African coast in order to better the chances of saving his crew. “Officers are to be instilled with the uncompromising rigor to regard the honor of the flag as more important than the lives of individuals,” Dönitz added. “There is no such thing as raising a white flag in the German Navy, either at sea or on land.”
⁶³⁰

It had become a general trend during the nineteenth century for warships to refuse to surrender, and the same behavior can be found in various navies in the first half of the twentieth.
⁶³¹
In Germany,
Hans Bohrdt’s painting
The Last Man
had provided an iconic image of this idea during
World War I. Bohrdt’s work was a stylized representation of a naval battle off the
Falkland Islands in December 1914, in which sailors from the capsized cruiser
MS
Nuremberg
had supposedly held up German flags to approaching British warships, and subsequently drowned.
⁶³²

During World War II, the German navy leadership cultivated the cult of fighting to the last bullet in special ways. In late March 1945, to Dönitz’s satisfaction, Hitler ordered that fortifications in Western Europe should be placed under the command of navy officers. “Many fortresses have been surrendered without fighting to the bitter end,” Hitler noted, “but never a [German] ship.”
⁶³³
In his political testament,
Hitler even wrote that the navy had completely lived up to his idea of honor for German officers, that “the surrender of territory or a city is intolerable and above all troop commanders are responsible for leading by example and sacrificing their own lives to do their duty.”
⁶³⁴

Naturally, we should ask here how much such statements actually reflected reality, and how much wishful thinking. In spring 1944, German naval forces in the
North
Atlantic were barraged with orders and warnings that stressed the importance of repelling the coming invasion and getting sailors to
sacrifice their lives.
Dönitz even ordered submarines to surface and ram enemy ships if necessary.
⁶³⁵
But that command remained just words. In practice, Dönitz was careful about deploying his resources, for instance only sending submarines into the
English Channel if there was a good chance they could carry out their missions successfully. He never again spoke of them ramming enemy ships, and the only sailors sent on what amounted to
suicide missions were small close-combat units, who used hastily improvised
weapons like human
torpedoes, boats packed with explosives, and, as of 1945, tiny, two-man submarines. Losses among pilots of one-man torpedoes were horrendous and in no way justified by military results. Yet news of the willingness with which young German sailors sacrificed their lives got around, making its way even to Imperial Japan’s ambassador, who compared their bravery to that of the
kamikaze pilots.
⁶³⁶

A closer look reveals that what actually happened at sea was considerably more ambivalent than navy captains made it seem in their final
radio messages. For example, on May 27, 1941, when the battleship
Bismarck
was sunk, Admiral
Günther Lütjens radioed: “We’re fighting to the final shell. Long live the Führer.” Yet that was an exaggeration.
In reality the
Bismarck
kept battling until the heavy artillery on board was disabled. One hundred fifteen men from a crew of 2,200
survived. In this respect, Lütjens behaved in much the same way as Rear Admiral
Heinrich Ruhfus in
Toulon. Both knew how their respective lopsided battles would end, yet neither wanted to give up without a fight. Ruhfus tried to gain time in order to destroy the port, while Lütjens seized the opportunity to inflict damage on British ships. But when his artillery was put out of commission after a short exchange of fire, the crew of the
Bismarck
began preparing to abandon ship. Many died as
British navy men subjected the defenseless vessel to a barrage of gun and artillery fire. Before they sank their own ship, around a thousand
Bismarck
crew members escaped overboard. But high seas and fear that
German submarines might be lurking prevented British sailors from launching an efficient rescue operation.