The German War (14 page)

Conscientious objection normally came under military jurisdiction, on the grounds that it was the issue of call-up papers, not their ratification by the recipient, that spelled the beginning of military service. It was so grave and rare an offence that it was heard by the highest military court, the Reich Military Tribunal in Berlin-Charlottenburg, whose senior judge was Admiral Bastian. Since the military mutinies of November 1918 had started in the naval base at Kiel, the naval officer corps went to great lengths to re-establish its credentials as a bastion of counter-revolution. As one judge from the navy boasted, ‘In determining the punishment I take into account whether the defendant could be considered a revolutionary type or not. I make sure that 1918 will not be repeated. I exterminate revolutionary types.’ Military judges saw the rise of desertion, pacifism and a failure of nerve as the symptoms of defeat. ‘As is well known, the increase in desertion in 1918 can be traced back primarily to the fact that our court martials dealt with weak-willed soldiers and those of diminished capacity in a faulty manner, namely, far too leniently,’ as one judgment of the Wehrmacht’s military bench read.
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The military judges were interpreting the ‘Special Penal Regulations during War’ which came into effect on the day of German mobilisation, 26 August 1939. Drafted by lawyers in the early years of the regime, these stipulated death as the standard penalty for ‘demoralising the armed forces’. The key regulation was Article 48 of the pre-war Military Penal Code, and the legal commentators had targeted especially ‘members of sectarian groups and pacifists’. The court duly affirmed that the duty to obey took precedence over ‘the duty to follow one’s conscience’. Further articles covered refusal to swear the oath of personal loyalty to the Führer required of every new recruit and classed any subsequent failure to carry out military duties as ‘desertion’. Some judges even offered Jehovah’s Witnesses the opportunity to perform military service in a non-combat role, an opportunity which they generally rejected. Those who recanted could expect a suspended prison sentence and loss of civil rights (held over for the duration of the war), and in the meantime they were sent to a punishment battalion, deployed in mine-clearance and other dangerous duties on the front line. Children were put into care and the family businesses and homes forcibly sold to put pressure on those who proved obdurate. In some cases, relatives who were not co-believers were allowed to visit the prison at Berlin-Plötzensee and plead with the objector to change his mind. Stays of execution and extended spells in the condemned cells near the guillotine increased the pressure.
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The night before he was scheduled to die at Brandenburg-Görden prison, Bernhard Grimm received a visit from the prison chaplain, Dr Werner Jentsch. Afterwards, in the stillness of the night, the 19-year-old wrote his farewell letter to his mother and brother, telling them about ‘a Protestant Pastor who visited me [and] referred to the Old Testament as a history book of the Jews and the exegesis of Revelation as a very dangerous story and put the Day of Judgement off into the unknown future’. Grimm had previously signalled his willingness to serve as a medical orderly or in another non-combat role but this had been refused by the court. Having just withstood this final theological temptation to recant, he assured them, ‘My dearest ones, we can only be grateful that everything is so far advanced . . . After the first small terror, which is only to be expected, at my asking and trusting in Him our heavenly Father took me still more firmly by the hand.’ When Jentsch returned in the morning to accompany Bernhard Grimm to the guillotine, he was greatly impressed by the young man’s resolve.
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During the first year of the war, 112 German soldiers were executed, nearly all of them for conscientious objection, with Jehovah’s Witnesses accounting for the great majority. Like other millenarian sects before them, they believed that they were living in the ‘final days’ and that the Last Judgement was nigh. The Jehovah’s Witnesses were joined by small numbers of Reform Adventists and Christadelphians, one of whom, Albert Merz, was executed. But such was the pressure to participate that other ‘peace churches’ like the Quakers and Seventh Day Adventists negotiated non-combat roles for their members within the military, while the German Mennonites turned their back on their Anabaptist tradition and announced in 1936 that their youths were ‘enthusiastically ready’ to do military service. Reared on a diet of religious nationalism and anti-Semitism, many Seventh-Day Adventists joined them on the front line. The thin ranks of those who were willing to face execution for their pacifist beliefs were joined by a single Austrian Catholic priest, Franz Reinisch, who, in his turn, inspired the farmer Franz Jägerstätter to reject military service; and, in the whole Reich, there was just one Protestant conscientious objector, Hermann Stöhr. Pariahs within their own churches, not one of them received any support from their bishops. Werner Jentsch, the German Christian prison chaplain who had accompanied Grimm to the scaffold, wrote a short theological tract setting out the arguments he had used to try and persuade the young man to recant, which the Military Tribunals agreed to distribute for use by other chaplains dealing with such cases.
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When considering such instances of unshakeable faith, military judges wondered whether they were in fact dealing with madness. A plea of diminished responsibility was a theoretical possibility, given that the authorities were themselves ready to equate ‘people who refuse military service for religious reasons’ with ‘peace-talkers and freedom-crazy enthusiasts’ and classify them as ‘unrealistic and peculiar psychopaths’. The answer to this judicial question had been supplied soon after conscription was reintroduced in 1935 in a psychiatric study of eleven Jehovah’s Witnesses conducted at Breslau University under the direction of Professor Johannes Lange. It concluded that they were not deranged but merely cowards or attention-seekers who ought to be handled in the same way as others who refused to carry out military service. The psychiatrists did, however, acknowledge at a 1936 professional conference that a small minority were guided by ‘sincere faith’ and courted martyrdom.
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At the end of November 1939, the Chief of the Wehrmacht High Command, Wilhelm Keitel, took the matter up with Hitler personally, who confirmed that, ‘if it is not possible to destroy the will of the man who refuses military service, the sentence has to be carried out’. Individual religious convictions could not be allowed to trump the greater good of the national community, even if publicising these cases did not seem to be having the desired exemplary effect. By the end of 1939, they were beginning to look like ‘propaganda for the opponents’, as Friedrich Fromm, the commander of the Replacement Army, warned. By early 1940, Jehovah’s Witnesses were themselves secretly circulating printed copies of farewell letters from the condemned to inspire further resistance amongst their brethren. Keitel ordered the military courts to cease publicising the sentences, although a further 118 conscientious objectors were executed during the following five years.
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Health professionals also signalled their keenness to combat the wider ‘loss of nerve’, the ‘victory’ of cowards and neurotics in the armed forces and of hysterical women on the home front, which they too believed had led to the defeat of 1918. In 1936, a section for Military Psychiatry and Psychology was added to the Military Medical Academy and Otto Wuth was appointed Chief Psychiatrist to the Army Medical Corps. Military psychiatrists were determined to prevent another epidemic of ‘war shakers’ by refusing to allow temporary battle shock to be inflated into a ‘neurosis’. And they pointed to the salutary effect in 1926 of ceasing to pay military pensions on neuro-psychiatric discharges from the army: the ‘shell-shock cases with shaking, paralysis, mutism, Ganser syndrome and so on’ had allegedly disappeared ‘almost entirely’.
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In September 1939, Friedrich Panse was called up and immediately assigned to the Military Psychiatry section at Ensen, on the east bank of the Rhine. Having served in the last year of the First World War, Panse had gone on to study medicine and then trained under the famous psychiatrist and director of the Berlin Charité, Karl Bonhoeffer. Panse had qualified as a doctor, but harboured academic ambitions and, with his higher doctorate still to write, he set out to make his career under the Third Reich, joining the SS, the Party and a string of its professional associations. He and his patron at the University of Bonn, Kurt Pohlisch, worked enthusiastically for the new Hereditary Health courts, setting up a pioneering databank on the families of those designated ‘hereditarily ill’. They wrote expert reports, assessing cases for compulsory sterilisation, and lectured to colleagues on the subject. Authorities like Karl Bonhoeffer participated too, at least enough to give a seal of approval to the energetic efforts of the younger generation. Hungry for recognition, Panse was still waiting to be appointed to a full academic chair when war broke out.
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In the first month of the war, Wuth, Panse and their colleagues helped the Wehrmacht distinguish between those ‘who
cannot’
and ‘those who
do not
want’ to serve. Expecting the Polish campaign to bring a rush of cases of ‘classical war neuroses’, similar to those of the previous war, they found that the campaign had produced digestive problems rather than shakes. They were not interested in the widespread allegations by officers of ‘nervousness’ among German soldiers which had led to massive reprisals against Polish civilians. Instead, two professional conferences in January and February 1940 revealed their energetic attempts to draw sharp lines between those with genuine ‘psychosomatic disturbances’ and malingering ‘psychopaths’ who they recommended should be sent to concentration camps. The army responded by establishing three special units for such misfits. The point, as Otto Wuth explained, was to ‘teach them to be men’. The military itself tended to be more sympathetic to the ‘misfits’ than the psychiatrists were. Significantly, it was the Wehrmacht High Command which decided to curb the neurologists, refusing to allow such extreme treatments as electric shock therapy, which had been tried for shell shock in the previous war, without patient consent.
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If there was a ‘psychosis’ at work here, it was amongst Germany’s military and civilian elites. The ferocity and speed of their onslaught against such tiny and powerless groups of pacifists and ‘war neurotics’ in 1939 speaks of a desperation not just to avoid repeating the mistakes of the previous war, but somehow to expunge that experience. Theirs was a kind of premature excess of violence, and the intellectuals who prepared its way were at least as often non-Nazis as Nazis. Already in 1919, the young theologian and former military chaplain Paul Althaus was denouncing pacifism and arguing for the need for Germans to prove themselves worthy of God’s grace by overcoming their defeat: ‘A great people which does not stand with resolute will and all its force behind its historic rights . . . surrenders its historic rights and simply deserves the violent peace which has put it in chains. That is the hard but healthy and manly justice of history.’ Propagating the fear that Germans risked being abandoned by God gave religious power to conservative and radical nationalist interpretations of November 1918 as a ‘stab in the back’. Other Lutherans before him had argued that the Germans had replaced the Jews as the ‘Chosen People’, but Althaus gave it a contemporary relevance. In his own ‘theology of creation’, he insisted that Christian universalism could only be lived out through separate nations, each imbued with its own character and identity and required to learn God’s plans for it through its historical struggles. Nationalism was not just natural; it was a sacred duty. Unlike Calvinist predestination, this German Lutheran variant repeatedly emphasised the moral risk of failure. Mixing the subtlety of theological argument with the militant language of radical nationalism honed in his First World War sermons, Althaus soon became a formidable and central figure in the Luther revival of the 1920s, alongside Werner Elert and Emanuel Hirsch, taking a prestigious chair in theology at Erlangen in 1925 and becoming President of the Luther Society a year later, an honorific post he would occupy for the next forty years. In this version of Protestant providentialism, Germans had become God’s chosen people, but they would have to redeem themselves if they were to prove worthy of His trust.
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Such ideas were common currency amongst the educated classes. By 5 September 1939, August Töpperwien had already registered that ‘Adolf Hitler’s struggle against Poland and England will be ruthlessly total: total commitment of all means in his power, total degradation of the enemy. How brave and how profound is Luther’s teaching on the two kingdoms’, the Solingen teacher comforted himself. That distinction between earthly and heavenly precepts allowed the pious Protestant to accept that it was impossible to act in the world without sinning and yet to go on seeking moral orientation in the war, mainly by reference to the theology of Althaus and Hirsch. Töpperwien remained a loyal reader of
Eckhart,
a journal close to the Confessing Church and highly critical of the Nazi German Christian movement, taking in an eclectic spread of German writers from anti-Nazi dissidents like Hans Carossa and Edzard Schaper to conservatives like Paul Ernst and racists such as Heinrich Zillich. From the outset his doubts over the Führer’s actions made him ask himself whether Hitler was sent by God or sent to try God, but he did not doubt his right to lead or Germans’ need to stand fast. Holding out against the ‘spirit of November 1918’ featured as a measure of their own salvation. To fail for a second time would prove that Germany was not God’s chosen nation.
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This national Protestant version of German redemption was just one variant in an anti-liberal and anti-democratic culture which strove to overcome
the
German disaster of 1918. With their fear that history would follow a cyclical path, conservatives believed that they had to intervene drastically to avoid repeated failure. In the early 1920s, German culture had been awash with predictions of post-war decay, decline and degeneration, epitomised by Oswald Spengler’s
Decline of the West.
These dire predictions had been overturned by the ‘national rebirth’ in 1933, and many Catholic and Protestant intellectuals continued to hope that the Nazis’ ‘national revolution’ would lead to a spiritual revival even after their first flush of enthusiasm had been tempered by disappointments with the Nazi Party, if not with Hitler himself. Yet their key ideas – especially their rejection of Weimar democracy, liberalism, pacifism, socialism, the Jews and those who had accepted defeat – did not change. The outbreak of a new war brought everything they had thought about 1918 back into focus, testing their belief in Germany’s redemption to the core. This generalised urge to avoid the mistakes of the previous war helps to explain why the Reich’s professional elites were so prepared to engage in lethal violence from the very outset. It also explains the fact that the most extreme measures were not always the work of the most obviously radical and Nazi agencies.
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