Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (5 page)

In his role as comrade, an individual soldier does not just become a voluntary or involuntary part of a group, forfeiting autonomy in the process. He also receives something in return:
security, dependability, support, and recognition. From this perspective, camaraderie entails not only a maximum concentration of social duty, but also the
relief
from duties vis-à-vis all other normally significant aspects of the world. The soldier’s frame of reference and, in particular, the soldier’s practical everyday existence are highly determined by this give-and-take. In the practical situation of war, camaraderie is no longer a tool of socialization that brings some duties while relieving others. A group of comrades becomes a literal unit of survival, creating binding forces that would never have such power under normal circumstances. This is not a feature unique to National Socialism. In their wide-ranging study of Wehrmacht soldiers,
Edward A. Shils and
Morris Janowitz also emphasized the central importance of camaraderie as the primary unit of individual orientation and interpretation in wartime.
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Camaraderie is less about a specific view of the world or ideology, than orientation. Many individuals feel emotionally more at home with their comrades than with
family members, who do not share their experience as soldiers and thus cannot understand them. Camaraderie is by no means a romanticized military myth. It is a social environment whose importance outstrips all rival environments.

In 1973, scholars at
Princeton University carried out a remarkable experiment. A group of
theology students were told to compose a short essay on the parable of the Good Samaritan and then take it, upon command, to a specific campus building, where it would be recorded for
radio. The students waited around for that specific instruction, but suddenly an
authority figure would appear and say: “Are you still here? You should have been over at the building a long time ago. Maybe the assistant is still waiting! You better hurry!” Each of the students duly hastened off to turn in his essay. In front of the entrance to the building in question, they found a seemingly helpless person lying on the ground, coughing and moaning with his eyes closed. There was no way to enter the building without noticing this person, apparently in the greatest of need. How did the theology students react? Only sixteen of forty subjects tried to help; the rest hurried on past the sufferer in order to keep their appointment. Even more confusingly, post-experiment interviews suggested that many of the subjects who had not helped claimed not even to have noticed that a fellow human being was in distress, despite practically stumbling over him.
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The experiment shows that people have to perceive before they can act. When we work toward a goal with extreme concentration, we simply shut out things unrelated to that goal. Focus of this sort does not admit
moral questioning. It is the product of a necessary and almost always functioning economy of action that seeks to avoid what is nonessential. There is a vast gap between what people believe about their own moral values, convictions, and commitments and their actual behavior. In concrete
situations
that demand decisions and action, the decisive factors rarely have much to do with ethical considerations and moral tenets. What matters is the achievement of a goal or the fulfillment of a task. The central question is what is the best and most efficient way to get things done. The theology students were not primarily concerned with the ethos of helping out one’s fellow man, but with the speed they were supposed to keep up to fulfill a task. The inventors of the
Good Samaritan experiment, the psychologists
John Darley and
C. Daniel Batson, concluded that people who were not in a hurry would likely stop and try to offer assistance. Those in a hurry,
on the other hand, would continue to hurry even if the task was to deliver a speech on the parable of the Good Samaritan.
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A
situation
itself seems to have much more influence on what people do than the
personal characteristics that get them into a certain situation. That conclusion is supported by the established fact that in the Third Reich, people didn’t need to be
anti-Semitic to murder Jews or otherwise altruistic to rescue them. In both cases, it was enough for people to find themselves in a social situation in which one or the other course of action seemed called for. Once a given decision has been made, though, subsequent ones follow the path previously trodden. If an individual had taken part in one mass execution, the probability rose that he would participate in a second or third one. The same was true for people who offered assistance.

Of course, not everything people perceive and do can be reduced to external references. It goes without saying that different individuals bring various tendencies of perception, social
interpretive
paradigms, age-specific experiences, and special talents, weaknesses, and personal preferences with them into situations that call for interpretation and response. With this in mind, social situations always represent temporary structures that can be used and expanded with various degrees of freedom. A lot depends on the individual. It is certain that the grotesquely simplified relations of power in concentration camps or during the mass executions tended to appeal to violently inclined members of the SS, the reserve
police corps, and Wehrmacht soldiers, offering them an opportunity to live out their sadistic desires, while calling forth repulsion in more sensitive, nonviolent people. It makes a big difference what sort of personality structure is confronted with what sort of situation. At the same time, though, we should not overestimate the significance of personal difference. As the Holocaust and the Nazi war of annihilation show, the vast majority of civilians, as well as soldiers, SS men, and police officers, behaved in discriminatory, violent, and inhumane fashion if the situation at hand seemed to encourage and promote such behavior. Only a tiny minority proved capable of humane resistance. According to the standards of the time,
humane behavior was
deviant, and
brutality was
conformist. For that
reason, the entire collection of events known as the “
Third Reich” and the
violence it produced can be seen as a gigantic experiment, showing what sane people who see themselves as good are capable of if they consider something to be appropriate, sensible, or correct. The proportion of people who were
psychologically
inclined toward violence,
discrimination, and excess totaled, as it does in all other social contexts as well, 5 to 10 percent.

In psychological terms, the inhabitants of the Third Reich were as
normal as people in all other societies at all other times. The spectrum of perpetrators was a cross section of normal society. No specific group of people proved immune to the temptation, in
Günther Anders’s phrase, of “
inhumanity with impunity.” The real-life experiment that was the Third Reich did not reduce the variables of personality to absolute zero. But it showed them to be of comparatively slight, indeed often negligible, importance.

Even as early as 1935, the vast majority of Germans would have been able to identify what was particular about the society of the
Third Reich, and they would have contrasted it to the previous
Weimar Republic: incipient economic
improvement, enhanced feelings of
security and orderliness, regained
national pride, and an
identification with the Führer would have been among those points. Precisely because of the radical distinctions perceived between the
Third Reich and the Weimar Republic, often dismissed as an era of overly bureaucratic systems, this second-order reference
frame was unusually conscious. Interviews with people from the time are full of statements about a “new” and “better” age dawning, in which the outlook was “pointing up again,” things were “moving forward,” young people were “getting off the streets,” a sense of “community” was becoming palpable. In terms of people’s historical experience, the years between 1933 and 1945 were much more clearly contoured than either the preceding Weimar Republic or the post–World War II reconstruction periods in either West or
East Germany. That’s why it is easier to sketch out a frame of reference for the Third Reich than for comparatively calm periods. The Third Reich was a period with a remarkable density of experiences, full of change and characterized by an eight-year phase of radical euphoria and a four-year period of rapidly increasing
fear,
violence, loss, and insecurity. The fact that this period etched itself so indelibly into German history is not just due to Nazi crimes
against humanity and extreme mass violence. It also has to do with the sense of being involved in something new and momentous, of working on a common National Socialist project. In short, people felt a part of a “great age.”

But the history of social mores and mentality during the Third Reich is usually viewed through the prism of the
Holocaust—as though the end of a monstrously dynamic social process full of contradictory half
developments and “
path dependencies” (decisions or outcomes that depend on previous decisions or outcomes) can shed analytic light on the beginning of that process. This is understandable because the horrors inflicted by National Socialism are indelibly etched on our historical understanding of the movement and its campaigns of
annihilation. But methodologically, such an approach is pure nonsense. No one would think of writing the biography of an individual from his death to his birth or of reconstructing the history of an institution from the back to the front. Developments are open solely toward the future, not the past. Only in retrospect do developments appear inevitable and compulsory. While they are still developing, social processes contain a rich variety of possibilities, of which only a handful are actually taken up, and they in turn create certain
path dependencies and a dynamic of their own.

When we try to reconstruct people’s behavior within the reference
frame Third Reich, we have to trace how they were “national socialized,” how the mélange of
ideological desires at play when the
Nazis came into power became part of revised social practice in Germany. We also need to look at what stayed the same after Hitler became German chancellor on January 30, 1933. Numerous critics have pointed out that we should not confuse the social reality of the Third Reich with the increasingly perfected images developed by the scriptwriters and directors in
Joseph Goebbels’s
Ministry of Propaganda. The Third Reich did not consist of an endless series of Olympic Summer Games and Nuremberg party rallies, of parades and pathos-laden speeches enrapturing young, blond, pigtailed devotees with tears in their eyes. The Third Reich consisted first and foremost of a multitude of mundane everyday factors that structure people’s lives in every imaginable society.
Children attended school, and adults went to
work or to the unemployment office. They paid their rent, did their shopping, ate breakfast and lunch, met up with friends and family members, read newspapers and books, and talked sports or politics. While all these dimensions of everyday life may have become increasingly tinged with ideology and
racism over the twelve years of the Third Reich, they remained habits and
routines. Everyday life is characterized by business as usual.

Despite the extreme nature of National Socialism, the citizens of Germany did not wake up in a completely new world on the morning of January 31, 1933. The world was the same—only the news was
different.
Sebastian Haffner, the well-known German journalist and historian, for instance, described the events of January 30 as a change of government, not a revolution, and the Weimar Republic had seen more than its fair share of
changes of government. Haffner’s experience of January 30, 1933, consisted of “reading the
newspapers, and the feelings they engendered.”
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German newspapers discussed the possible consequences and significance of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, but they did much the same with all other newsworthy stories as well. Haffner recounts conversations he had with his father, discussing what percent of the populace was truly Nazi, how foreign countries were likely to react, and what the
working classes would do. In other words, the two men talked about all the things politically interested citizens discuss when confronted with unwelcome events whose ultimate ramifications are unclear. Haffner and his father, in any case, came to the conclusion that the Hitler government had an extremely weak foundation and thus a poor chance of lasting for long. All in all, they found, there was little real reason to worry.

To put the matter in different words: large parts of the existing frame of reference continued to function, and “life carrying on as usual” could be interpreted as a triumph over the
Nazis. How could people have hit upon the idea in early 1933 that they needed an entirely new
interpretation of
reality, that what was happening was not something one could evaluate using customary criteria? Even if someone had sensed that the times were different, where would he have gotten the instruments to decode this new reality?

Social psychologists have clearly defined the
phenomenon of “
hindsight bias” for the belief, once the end of a social process is determined, to have known from the beginning how things would turn out. In retrospect, one can always find scores of indications for a nascent collapse or disaster. Contemporaries interviewed after the Third Reich all tell of their fathers or grandfathers exclaiming on January 30, 1933: “This means war!”
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Hindsight bias allows people to position themselves on the side of foresight and knowledge, whereas in reality people who are in the midst of a process of historical transformation never see where that process is headed. To paraphrase
Sigmund Freud, people who share an illusion can never recognize it. Only from a great distance can we achieve a perspective from which we can identify the misunderstandings and mistakes of historical actors. Even when one, two, or three levels of functionally differentiated social structure change,
countless other ones remain exactly as they were before. In the early Third Reich, there was still bread in the bakeries, and the streetcars still ran. People were still studying toward university degrees and worrying about their sick grandmothers.