Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (45 page)

The reference frame of German soldiers firmly anchored the virtues of following orders, doing one’s duty, and fighting bravely to the last, and this ethos made itself apparent throughout the stories soldiers told about their own battle experiences—and even more so when they discussed comrades, enemies, and allies.

With few exceptions, German soldiers in all three
military branches had an extremely negative view of Italians. Wehrmacht troops had difficulty understanding Italian behavior, which they perceived as tantamount to an unwillingness to fight. Their commentary was correspondingly dismissive. Italian behavior was a “tragedy.”
⁶⁴⁶
“If only those blasted Italians … would do something,” one POW carped.
⁶⁴⁷
Other telling excerpts from the protocols: “They have no self-confidence”;
⁶⁴⁸
“They’re in a blue funk”;
⁶⁴⁹
they “were a frightful lot!”
⁶⁵⁰
“The dirty dogs,” groused another German soldier, “give themselves up if they have the slightest trouble!”
⁶⁵¹
“They’re so terribly soft,” concurred someone else.
⁶⁵²
Militarily, Germany’s Italian allies were seen as useless. “You can only consider 130,000 Italians equal to about 10,000 Germans,” reckoned one POW.
⁶⁵³
Another joked that every Italian tank carried with it a white flag,
⁶⁵⁴
while someone else quipped that “if [our enemies] were only the Italians then the B.D.M. [the League of German Maidens] and the old peasants from the C
HIEMSEE
would be quite enough.”
⁶⁵⁵
German soldiers mocked
Benito Mussolini’s pretensions: “The Italians are supposed to be descended from the Romans, but the Romans would have achieved more with spears and shields than they have!”
⁶⁵⁶
In short, German soldiers found that Italians “are the worst soldiers we have anywhere in E
UROPE
.”
⁶⁵⁷

A few
Italian units did come off slightly better in the judgments of their allies. The Italian paratrooper division
“Folgore” may have been poorly equipped, “but at least they were men.”
⁶⁵⁸
And there
was one situation in which Italian fighters did perform up to scratch: “Under
German leadership they (the Italian soldiers) are excellent,” a
Sergeant Funke reported about the battles in
Tunisia in April 1943. “At
E
NFIDAVILLE
in the retreat they received the order: ‘Young Fascists will die where they stand.’ Thirty Italians held out there for three days.”
⁶⁵⁹
Some POWs also mentioned poor Italian equipment and supplies as mitigating factors. But of the eighty-four German generals interned at
Trent Park, only one brought this up. The ratios were similar at other
British facilities and in
American POW camps.

No doubt, the negative view of Italians as soldiers, which established itself as early as 1941 and which was also on ample display in official files and in field posts and soldiers’ diaries, exaggerated the situation. But it was not entirely untrue. The stereotype was based on experiences on the battlefield, where Italian units often crassly failed to live up to German standards, or British ones for that matter.

Military virtues were also the criteria German soldiers used to evaluate their other allies.
Slovak soldiers were second only to members of the Wehrmacht;
Romanians were “very good, notably better than they were in the last war”
⁶⁶⁰
and “not at all bad soldiers.”
⁶⁶¹
Spanish mercenaries also came in for praise: “The Spanish Legion is very good—the only thing is that they’re a frightful mixture, but from the military point of view they’re good soldiers.”
⁶⁶²
Hungarians, however, were deemed “a worthless lot” since they were perceived to have simply run away from the Russians.
⁶⁶³

German soldiers used the same reference frame to judge their enemies. Wehrmacht soldiers had the greatest respect for the British, who were seen as “
tough and brave opponents” who fought fairly.
⁶⁶⁴
In
Dunkirk and
Greece, British troops had fought fantastically. They were “excellent airmen”
⁶⁶⁵
and “tough guys” … “like us.”
⁶⁶⁶
“Put a British soldier in a German uniform and you won’t notice the difference,” one soldier for the Wehrmacht’s
Afrika Korps thought.
⁶⁶⁷
Yet higher-ranking officers didn’t always join in the praise: “If the English get a few hits, they just clear off, and they don’t go to it—like our people do, and when they do, they’re very clumsy.”
⁶⁶⁸
The commander of the Wehrmacht’s
1st Paratroop Division even opined about
Allies in Italy: “In their whole attitude toward the war, the masses of the enemy won’t be able to absorb heavy losses in the long term.”
⁶⁶⁹

American troops were less admired than the British because their victories were allegedly only the result of their material advantages,
which Wehrmacht soldiers considered unfair. As soldiers, U.S. troops were “cowardly and petty”;
⁶⁷⁰
they hadn’t “any idea what real hard warfare means”;
⁶⁷¹
“they cannot endure privations”;
⁶⁷²
and they were “inferior to [
Germans] in close combat.”
⁶⁷³
“The American swine,” scoffed one POW, “take to their heels if they’re really attacked.”
⁶⁷⁴
Again in conjunction with fighting in Italy, one general concluded: “Generally speaking, the Americans, with a few exceptions, are considered poorer
fighters because they lack driving force and have no desire.”
⁶⁷⁵

By contrast, German soldiers had enormous respect for their Russian
adversaries, whose capacity for
sacrifice and brutality was a source of
fear. A sample of opinion: “Those people have a terrific
toughness of spirit and body”;
⁶⁷⁶
“They fight to the very last, the Russians, my God, they can fight”;
⁶⁷⁷
“You wouldn’t believe how fanatically the devils fought.”
⁶⁷⁸
Nonetheless, precisely because they seemed to display such contempt for death, Russians often struck Germans as soulless, oxlike, fighting beasts.
Crüwell related: “Near
U
MAN
, in that first battle of encirclement in the
U
KRAINE
, my tanks literally had to crush the people to death because they wouldn’t give themselves up. Just imagine that.”
⁶⁷⁹
Still, Crüwell had high regard for Red Army soldiers because they fought so brutally. Higher-ranking German officers still thought there was no way a soldier who battled tirelessly and fiercely for his country could be a bad soldier. That was in keeping with the militaristic ethos of the Wehrmacht. A
Major Blunt from the Luftwaffe related how 125 Russian
bombers attacked a German bridgehead over the
Berezina River near
Bobryusk in 1941. German fighter pilots
shot down 115 of the planes. But for Blunt, the Russian attack was neither senseless nor insane. On the contrary, the incident only proved what “grand fliers” the Russians were.
⁶⁸⁰

German soldiers saw Italians as cowardly, Russians as death-defying, British as tough, and Americans as soft, and with very rare exceptions these estimations did not change over the course of the war. The initial battles set the tone that continued until 1945, aside from a few expansions and variations. Only when the tide began to turn against Germany did subtle shifts occur. For instance, in the second half of the war, as the Red Army began advancing, ever more quickly, to the borders of Germany proper, Germans tended to emphasize Russian soldiers’ brutality over their
bravery.

Bravery in battle was also a key criterion for evaluation of one’s own comrades. No one liked
“staff wallahs.”
⁶⁸¹
Those who weren’t
actively engaged in combat opened themselves up to accusations of
cowardice, and one’s superiors were expected to lead the vanguard. One POW complained:

A positive counterexample was Colonel
Claus von Stauffenberg:

Although Major
Viebig thoroughly condemned Stauffenberg’s role in the failed attempt to
assassinate Hitler, he was full of praise for the count as a military personality. Significantly, Viebig saw Stauffenberg as a combat soldier, even though the latter had only spent three months at the front. General staff officers were often viewed critically, but Stauffenberg’s “energy,” combined with the fact he had been seriously and visibly wounded in Tunisia, outweighed any skepticism his rank might have brought with it.

Soldiers also approved of Field Marshal
Rommel for his energy, even though they otherwise perceived him as an ambivalent figure. “He was impressive as a soldier,” opined a
Colonel Hesse. “He was no great leader but he was a
real soldier
, an intrepid, very brave man, very harsh, even towards himself.”
⁶⁸⁴

Soldiers had an almost exclusively negative view of those who failed to conform to the ideal of the brave warrior, those who were thought to have fled without a fight or even gone over to the enemy. As of summer 1944, there was no end to the conversations in
British and
American POW camps about excessive numbers of cowards in the German ranks. A
Lieutenant Zimmermann from the
709th Infantry Division recalled driving along a country road from
Cherbourg to the front: “Troops were already streaming along the road in any order: Labour Service, Flak and a few infantrymen. I said: ‘Boys, don’t run away, don’t make the bloody affair even worse than it is.’ ”
⁶⁸⁵
Zimmermann knew that Cherbourg would soon be lost, but he still felt that order should continue to rule and that soldiers should bravely fight on. The fact that German soldiers were retreating pell-mell made the inevitable defeat even worse, as it undermined the core of Zimmermann’s belief in what it meant to be a soldier.

Very rarely, and only among nonofficers, did soldiers admit that they had considered abandoning their positions and running away. A
Private Leutgeb told a bunkmate about the battle in
Normandy:

In soldiers’ eyes, the only thing worse than someone who refused to fight was someone who deserted.
Major Heimann recalled a case from the battles for
Aachen:

In their conversations, POWs treated desertion as something unthinkable. “I could never have done it myself and I don’t think any men from G
ERMANY
proper would ever desert, only
Austrians and all those
Volksdeutsche [ethnic Germans from outside Germany proper],” a
sserted one lieutenant in late December 1944.
⁶⁸⁸
It was rare for soldiers to directly address the topic before the end of 1944. One exception: “I shall probably be sentenced to death, but it’s better to be alive under sentence of death
for desertion, than to be lying dead on the battlefield.”
⁶⁸⁹
Interestingly, the soldier who said this was a member of the SS division “Frundsberg.” By July 1944, the German situation was so miserable that even the
Waffen SS was no longer a monolithic bloc of fanatic political warriors. In order to avoid accusations of shirking and cowardice, most German soldiers who had deserted concealed that fact and sought to portray their behavior as conforming to
military norms. They had only given up because the war was
now
lost and it
no longer
made sense to keep fighting. Hopelessness was named far more often as a reason for desertion than any political motivations. This may have been due to the POWs’ communicative situation: especially while being held prisoner, individuals were not permitted to question military values.
⁶⁹⁰