Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (8 page)

As much as the Nazi regime and parts of the Wehrmacht leadership spoke of fanaticism and
willingness to sacrifice in their official correspondence, the way in which medals were awarded rarely conformed to that ideal. In contrast to the highest British military medal, the
Victoria Cross,
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the Knight’s Cross was handed out posthumously in approximately 7 percent of cases only. Bearers of the Knight’s Cross were not those who had fanatically sacrificed their own lives by throwing themselves in front of tanks. More often, they were soldiers and troop leaders who could boast clearly defined success. The Knight’s Cross was a reward for special performance and not a National Socialist encouragement to make the ultimate sacrifice. Hitler only ever involved himself in the awarding of the highest medals. Division and squadron commanders handed out other accolades. Awards commending the political spirit of a soldier remained very rare.

The Third Reich complemented this complexly calibrated system of awards for bravery with a variety of distinctions, unique to Germany,
designating function in battle. The navy had badges for U-boats, E-boats (speedboats), destroyers, the High Seas Fleet, armed merchant cruisers, blockade runners, minesweepers, small battle units, and naval artillery. The same was true for the Luftwaffe, which came up with clasps to show how many air raid missions crew members had flown. The German army created a special Infantry Assault, General Assault, Tank Battle, Antiaircraft, and Tank Destruction badges. The most prestigious of these were doubtlessly the
Close-Combat Clasp, commissioned in November 1942, which was given “as a visible acknowledgment to those soldiers who had engaged in hand-to-hand combat.” Soldiers who had absolved fifty days of such fighting, where one could see “the whites of the enemy’s eyes,” were given the
Gold Close-Combat Clasp. It was considered the highest decoration in the infantry. But the chance of staying alive long enough to receive one was slim. Only 619 awards were recorded, beginning in late summer 1944, an occasion celebrated by Nazi propaganda.
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Policies concerning accolades in the Third Reich primarily rewarded frontline soldiers. Historian
Christoph Rass has calculated that within the
253rd Infantry Division 96.3 percent of all
Iron Crosses were awarded to combat units.
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Noncombat soldiers were only eligible for the far less prestigious
War Merit Cross. The result was a gap in
status since men who didn’t directly face the enemy had few chances of receiving an accolade, while their comrades on the front line, assuming they could stay alive, could rack up medal upon medal.

Massive numbers, some 2.3 million, of Iron Crosses Second Class, were handed out, but more than 85 percent of members of the Wehrmacht did not receive even the lowest commendation for bravery. Their uniforms remained bare, while the
military biographies of seasoned frontline fighters were on display for all the world to see. That brought social prestige and created intentional social pressure. German men knew that they could only prove themselves at the front. As a result, soldiers on
home leave often illicitly donned
medals to impress their friends and families and to avoid looking like shirkers.
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Nonetheless, by rewarding the most dangerous wartime deployments, accolades played an important practical role as an incentive in the Third Reich.

The Wehrmacht was careful to protect the prestige of their accolades by clearly defining when they should be awarded and introducing rules to ensure that they reflected true achievement and service.
With the massive number of
Iron Crosses handed out, it was hardly possible to prevent abuse, yet the transparency of the accolade system during World War II still made it much more widely accepted than the system in place in World War I. The Wehrmacht also did its best to commend soldiers as quickly as possible.
Dönitz was not averse to awarding
Knight’s Crosses over the radio if a submarine captain reported achieving a particularly significant victory. Nazi propaganda constantly featured the bearers of awards for extraordinary bravery, and
Goebbels made a handful of them into full-fledged media stars.
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Significantly, in designing such
medals, the
military downplayed the
swastika symbol. The exception was the
German Cross (
Gold Class), which led conservatives, in the words of one commentary, “to feel less than enthusiastic … about the presumptuous National Socialist emblem.”
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The symbolism of and policies with which
awards were bestowed were designed to create a sense of social acknowledgment, and this anchored
military values deep within soldiers’ frames of reference. As we will see, the normative models that resulted influenced how German men perceived the world and, in the majority of cases, how they acted as well. But those models didn’t nece
ssarily transfer to Nazi
ideology; indeed, emphasis on ideology seems to have engendered resistance. As historian
Ralph Winkle determined in conjunction with World War I, only in a minority of cases did individual
pride at receiving an accolade lead to an acceptance of the
political leadership’s concurrent and comprehensive expectations concerning individual behavior.
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Against the backdrop of a social culture of categorical
inequality and a Wehrmacht culture emphasizing the military values of hardness and bravery, we can reconstruct the contours of the typical soldier’s frame of reference as he went to war. Significantly, the central values of this orientation remained stable throughout the war, even as soldiers’ appraisals of the military leadership and the National Socialist system changed markedly. The military reference frame also obtained across individual differences of politics, “philosophy,” and character. In terms of their high estimation of the military values just sketched out, out-and-out National Socialists did not differ from committed anti-Nazis, which is why the two groups didn’t behave differently during the war itself. The main differences, as we will discuss later, occurred chiefly between Wehrmacht soldiers and the Waffen SS.

They say that war brutalizes, that soldiers are turned into beasts by the experience of violence, by being confronted with mutilated bodies and dead comrades or, in the case of a campaign of annihilation, with masses of murdered men,
women, and
children. Even the Wehrmacht and the SS were concerned that constant exposure to extreme violence, be it as witnesses or perpetrators, would damage soldiers’ “manly discipline” and lead them to engage in unconstrained, unregulated brutality—at the cost of the efficiency needed for both World War II and mass exterminations.
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The idea of war brutalizing soldiers plays a central role in social-psychological research on violence.
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Scholars assume that extremely violent experiences change the way people evaluate their worlds and make them more prone to violent acts of their own. Autobiographies and war fiction reinforce the impression that over time, soldiers become brutal as they themselves are exposed to increasing brutality.

But the words of the Luftwaffe first lieutenant cited above suggest that this notion may be misleading. The
brutalization hypothesis excludes the possibility that violent behavior can be something attractive for which one “itches,” and it presumes, with no real proof, that people need to be somehow pre-trained to commit acts of extreme violence. Perhaps all that is needed is a weapon or an airplane, some adrenaline, the feeling of having power in areas where one normally has none, and a social framework in which killing is permissible, even desirable.

The hypothesis of successive adjustment to and acceptance of violence may have more to do with self-images that historical actors
would like to maintain and the preconceived ideas of researchers than with the realities of war. The surveillance protocols contain an abundance of material suggesting that soldiers were extremely prone to
violence right from the start of World War II. The quote introducing this chapter, for instance, was recorded early on in the war, at a point when the conflict had not become an all-or-nothing struggle for survival. Moreover, the first lieutenant in question had only experienced war from above, from the air. Thus, while many soldiers may recount a process of brutalization when they recall violent events, by their own admission the time in which they are socialized to accept extreme violence often spans no more than a few days.

Let us take the example of a conversation between
Lieutenant Meyer,
*
a Luftwaffe pilot, and Lieutenant Pohl, a Luftwaffe observer, from April 30, 1940:

In Pohl’s own account it only took him three days to get used to the violence he began exercising as part of the German campaign in
Poland.
Already on day four of his mission, feelings of desire predominated, as he illustrates with the phrase “before-breakfast amusement.” His conversation partner, apparently somewhat taken aback, articulates the hope that those killed were enemy soldiers exclusively, but this hope is quickly dashed. Pohl says he shot at “people,” i.e., civilians: in retrospect, the only thing he can’t accept is that horses were hit as well. Meyer seems to sympathize with that.

Pohl then continues his narrative by telling how he bombarded an entire city:

Pohl seems most concerned about inflicting maximum damage before his plane crashed and indeed, as he himself stresses, taking as many lives as possible. He takes aim where the town is “chockablock,” and he’s unmistakably irritated at not having achieved the desired results.

Meyer’s next question is one of professional curiosity: