Decades have passed since World War II, yet still today we seek to determine the accountability of the ordinary German citizen during Hitler’s regime. When thinking stereotypically about the “Nazis,” most people tend to proffer an image of a nation of Hitler-idolizing, sadistic, and warmongering fanatics whose sole aim was to conquer the world and annihilate the Jews.
It is true that hundreds of thousands of average Germans readily and deliberately took part in the persecution and mass murder of innocent people. However, despite rumors of widespread killings and the genocidal goals of Hitler’s regime, a vast number of Germans remained passive bystanders. The German people were not, by nature, merciless executioners, and they possessed stable personalities before Hitler came to power. In fact, Germans’ family lives were remarkably similar to those of average middle-class British or American families.1
The surprising fact that only one-third of German voters supported the National Socialist Party before Hitler’s takeover in 1933 indicates that the majority of the nation did not endorse its political agenda. Furthermore, Hitler’s ascent to power may not have been possible without the twin economic disasters of the inflation of 1923 and the Great Depression that began in 1929.2 However, in a short amount of time, his regime managed to create the impression of having eradicated decades of deprivation, restored economic stability, established a sense of security through remilitarization, and achieved the peaceful annexation of the Rhineland, Sudetenland, and Austria. This led to the gradual acceptance or even praise of Hitler’s regime by opponents of National Socialism, as national pride replaced the shame of Germany’s defeat and the subsequent imposition of the Versailles Treaty.
German historian Sebastian Haffner reckoned with credibility that, by 1938, Hitler had succeeded in winning the support of “the great majority of that majority who had voted against him in 1933.” The personalized focus of the regime’s “successes” reflected the incessant efforts of propaganda, which had been consciously directed to creating and building up the “heroic” image of Hitler as a towering genius.3 The Führer myth and Führer cult both played a major role in fashioning an infallible superman leader and a caring shepherd of the German flock. By early 1939, the German Volk were confident their shepherd would continue to lead them to greener pastures, not to war.
Despite the fact that war was one of the last things Germans wanted when Hitler came to power, and despite the Führer repeatedly claiming to desire peace, the National Socialists’ propaganda campaign for war was highly effective. As a result, Hitler’s popularity increased for the first two years of the war. As an example, at the outbreak of war, the National Socialist Party counted some 5.5 million members, but by war’s end it had over 8 million. The general membership of the NS Party consisted primarily of the urban and rural lower middle classes. Some 7 percent belonged to the upper class, another 7 percent were farmers, 35 percent were industrial workers, and 51 percent were what can be labeled as middle class. At the peak of party membership toward the end of the war, 63 percent of the members were male and 37 percent female, yet the total of eight million still represented a mere 10 percent of Germany’s population at the time.4 These figures suggest that only a minority of politically active Germans actually joined the National Socialist Party.
Hitler’s popularity during his time in power was significantly influenced by the disproportionate number of young people in Germany’s population, a generation more predisposed to the ideology of National Socialism. In 1933, for instance, nearly one-third of the nation comprised individuals between the ages of eighteen and thirty. The National Socialists’ emphasis on concepts such as “blood and soil,” the unity of the Volk, German culture, the restoration of national pride, the promotion of ethical values, pageantry, allegiance to the flag, songs, war games, comradery, group discipline, the sanctity of sacrifice, and dedication to the nation and their father-figure Führer all contributed to creating a near unquestioning devotion to the “savior” of Germany’s economy and society.
In a speech featured in the film Triumph of the Will, Hitler pledged that soon young people would not even be able to imagine the bygone “infection of our poisonous party system. Hitler Youth,” he said, “has been consigned to us and has become ours, body and soul. They live in this proud Germany of the Swastika and will never again let it be ripped from their hearts.” The ability to shape the minds and hearts of future National Socialists rested largely on the dedication of teachers to National Socialist principles, which included a perspective on human nature that emphasized race and conflict, a conviction of the absolute superiority of the Aryan race, and a communal code grounded in the concepts of Volk and Führer.5
Special training courses as well as camps molded the teaching body into instruments of National Socialist indoctrination. Teachers who were not entirely supportive of the new regime found that they could maintain a balance between conformity and dissent as long as they did not openly criticize Hitler or NS policies. As one former student explained it, “People floated along in a confused jumble of Christian and National Socialist attitudes.”6 Nevertheless, the prevalence of antisemitic sentiment increased, with teachers joining their students in verbally and in some instances physically assaulting Jewish children. Although only one in three or one in four teachers may have displayed fervent support for NS ideology, it was enough to create a miserable existence for those Jewish children who were ostracized as unwanted.7
National Socialist educators realized that their early approach to antisemitism was too extreme and subsequently adjusted to reduce overt racial hatred. Instead, they emphasized the formation of a collective consciousness in which individuals deemed to be racial outsiders were excluded. This more moderate version of Gleichschaltung allowed individual teachers greater flexibility to tailor their approach to their own circumstances and preferences, while still conveying the clear ethical directive to show reverence to the Führer, expel those deemed alien, make sacrifices for the Volk, and embrace challenges. Although compliant teachers may not have embodied the archetypal National Socialists advocated by party leaders in 1933, they prepared their pupils for inclusion in the Hitler Youth and for devotion to the Volk.8
Alfons Heck, a former member of the Hitler Youth, offered a firsthand account of how NS disinformation shaped moral reasoning. In 1940, when Alfons witnessed the Gestapo arresting his best friend, Heinz, along with all of the Jewish people in his village, he did not think to himself, “How awful that they’re arresting Jewish people.” Instead, having internalized the indoctrination about the so-called Jewish menace, he thought, “What a shame that Heinz is Jewish.”9
Though the term Gleichschaltung literally translates as “same-switching” or “same-shifting,” it has no equivalent in English. To an electrician, the term would be understood as “phasing” or “synchronization.” The closest meanings implied by the NS mind-set include a process of forcible coordination or enforced (political) conformity. On the other hand, Ausschaltung is the process of being switched off, disconnected, or eliminated, the fate of all those who would not or did not conform to mainstream society or the Aryan prototype.
Almost imperceptibly, while the public scarcely took notice, the government worked to align all aspects of society with the ideology and objectives of the party. This process involved the coordination and regulation of political, economic, social, and cultural institutions, including trade unions, media, education, and religious organizations, in order to ensure adherence to National Socialist principles. All organizations faced two options: either comply with Gleichschaltung or face dissolution.10 Through Gleichschaltung, the regime aimed to eliminate any opposition or dissent and establish a totalitarian state in which the NS Party exerted complete control over all facets of society. The use of associations and societies as a means of educating the population was undoubtedly effective, as most adult Germans belonged to at least several of these organizations.11 Those who were able to find employment, particularly young people, could take pleasure in becoming part of the community, enjoying the benefits of their work, and contributing to larger nationalist and socialist endeavors.
The National Socialist ideology fostered the objective of eradicating social and economic stratification within German society while promoting a feeling of unity and camaraderie among Germans. The government provided common individuals the chance to possess their own homes with gardens and recognized the contributions of the working class and farmers through festivities that highlighted their significance and a sense of inclusion within an elite community. The subordinate groups of the German Labor Front dedicated themselves to enhancing workers’ sense of belonging and communicating the essence of their socialist vision through activities during their leisure time. Such tangible social and economic transformations enticed an increasing number of Germans to adopt National Socialism.12
National Socialism functioned as an ideological system that met the customary roles that are attributed to such a belief structure. It provided solutions to the uncertainties that life presents, imbued purpose in the midst of randomness, and elucidated the workings of the world. In addition, it created its own framework of morality, disapproving of self-interest as unethical while extolling altruism as virtuous. By evoking a generational chain of ethnic comrades (Volksgenossen) to Germans’ ancestors and descendants, NS ideals incorporated the individual within the collective well-being of the nation. Hitler presented National Socialism as the antidote to the feeble and effeminate Weimar Republic, offering instead a bold, masculine order. In place of religion, National Socialist culture provided an absolutist secular faith.13 Tragically, the road to Auschwitz would be paved with the perceived unquestionable morality of these beliefs.
National Socialism offered a comprehensive system of meaning to all ethnic Germans, communicated through potent symbols and collective festivities. It taught individuals how to differentiate between allies and adversaries, genuine believers and dissenters, non-Jews and Jews, resembling a religion. Its emphasis on self-sacrifice and rejection of self-centeredness exhibited parallels to ethical teachings in other cultures. However, while international covenants advocated for universal human rights, NS public culture expressed the opposite premise: “Not every being with a human face is human.”14
National Socialist dogma emphasized nationalism, German traditions, and militarism, and the majority of citizens either fully embraced these ideals or at the very least pledged loyalty to the new regime, resulting in overall dutiful submission by German society. No significant resistance was evident, and any opposition from the socialist and Communist factions was brutally quelched, leaving no large-scale organized opposition.15
According to historian Claudia Koonz, by scrutinizing the popular press of Germany and four other European nations (France, Great Britain, Italy, and Romania) from 1899 to 1939, it becomes evident that before 1933 Germans were less antisemitic in their attitudes and actions toward Jews compared to their neighbors.16 This begs the question of how ordinary Germans, who had no greater prejudice than people elsewhere in Europe, became indifferent bystanders and collaborators in acts of persecution?
Goebbels was known for his racist beliefs, but his ministry did not focus much on promoting racial hatred before 1939. For racial reeducation to be effective, it had to come from seemingly impartial sources rather than propaganda. Knowledge, rather than propaganda, had the ability to alter attitudes.17
In portraying himself as a symbol of virtue and champion of moral righteousness, Hitler positioned his regime as the vehicle that would reinstate ethical order.18 Remarkably, he spoke very little about race and instead focused on three key themes in his early 1930s speeches: denouncing the Versailles victors, insulting his opponents, and discussing topics such as honor, struggle, glory, and morality.19 He promised to revive “family, honor, and loyalty, Volk and Vaterland, culture and economy,” and to restore the “eternal foundation of our morality and faith.” According to Hitler, Germans’ struggle was not just for themselves but for Germany, a notion of selflessness that received a resounding response of approval from the audience.20 In fact, between the spring of 1933, shortly after his accession to leadership, and the launching of World War II, only on three occasions did Hitler vent his phobic racial hatred to the masses.21
Instead of repeatedly verbally announcing persecution and exclusion of the Jewish population, Hitler allowed the legal system and the terror organizations to carry out the dirty work for him. The legal exclusion of Jews from the Volksgemeinschaft likely exerted a psychological impact on the general public by fueling a belief in Aryan supremacy, and it also served the interests of those who coveted Jewish positions and assets. Although German Jews were understandably distressed by this discrimination, there was a range of popular opinions on antisemitism, and by 1939 a consensus had formed that most Germans were unfazed by the Jews’ exclusion from the “People’s Community.”22
AudioVolumeUpThe NS leaders’ antisemitism was common knowledge, but a well-managed public relations strategy enabled many moderate Germans to justify their support for the National Socialist regime. They could embrace the emphasis on ethnic identity and economic revitalization while downplaying National Socialist atrocities as secondary or even trivial. Media coverage of concentration camps and mass arrests portrayed the state’s actions as protective measures, and dissenting opinions were discredited as being influenced by foreign powers.23
On the other hand, historian Sara Gordon ascertains in her analysis of German public opinion based on German Security Service reports during the war, as well as on Allied questionnaires collected during the occupation,
It would appear that a majority of Germans supported elimination of Jews from the civil service; quotas on Jews in professions, academic institutions, and commercial fields; restrictions on intermarriage; and voluntary emigration of Jews. However, the rabid anti-Semites’ demands for violent boycotts, illegal expropriation, destruction of Jewish property, pogroms, deportation, and extermination were probably rejected by a majority of Germans. They apparently wanted to restrict Jewish rights substantially, but not to annihilate Jews.24
Nevertheless, indifference and a willingness to tolerate the persecution of Jews—to consider it unimportant—was a defining feature of the attitude of the majority of “ordinary Germans” during the Reich.25
In January 1933, all Germans were considered part of the same nation. However, in the following six years, the National Socialist regime gradually expelled those whom it considered to be Jewish. Despite the initial resistance from non-Jewish shoppers and merchants who continued to frequent businesses owned by Jews, militant National Socialists felt empowered to persecute Jews. This was done through actions such as smashing windows or scrawling graffiti near Jewish homes, as well as by taunting Jews on the streets with derogatory terms like “Yid” or “Jewish Pig.” Furthermore, roving gangs of NS thugs assaulted Jews and destroyed or stole their property. While most Germans did not support radical anti-Jewish measures, the NS leaders faced a dilemma as the violence that pleased their most ardent supporters turned away potential supporters who were crucial for political stability.26 The new leaders exploited their technologically advanced media to maintain power despite irreconcilable expectations between radical and moderate supporters.
Claudia Koonz asserts, perhaps rather contentiously, that while many bystanders may have sympathized with defenseless Jews tormented by brown-shirted bullies, most Germans, like other Europeans and North Americans, saw the legal expulsion of Jews from certain aspects of public life as an adjustment to counteract the perceived special rights enjoyed by Jews in those areas. She adds that, though cultural antisemitism was prevalent among most Germans, only a minority of resolute racists approved of punishing innocent people.27 While it is prudent to not take a stance on the motivation behind excluding or persecuting Jews, it is likely that most German adults were neither brainwashed nor terrorized. They simply complied with regulations they agreed with and found ways to evade those they opposed. Jewish Germans who left the country relate shared memoirs revealing that both violent antisemites and courageous friends coexisted in Germany.28
Various media such as books, magazines, newspapers, radio, and exhibits bombarded Germans with information about the alleged Jewish threat. Academic research institutes provided false evidence of Jews’ “otherness,” offering an alternative source of knowledge about “Jewry.” This seemingly objective evidence contributed to the expulsion of Jews from the moral community. While rational antisemitism lacked sound evidence in 1933, fraudulent research in the mid-1930s dignified by scholarly sources made Jews strangers in Germany. The majority of Germans initially deplored the destruction of Jewish property and boycotts but gradually accepted the “outsider” status of Jews as a basic fact.29
To effectively carry out their crimes, perpetrators needed to maintain a moral self-image despite their heinous acts. Scholarly racism aided this process in several ways. First, by dehumanizing individual Jews and labeling them as “Jewry,” perpetrators could justify any action against them. Second, by projecting their own intentions onto the victims, they absolved themselves of personal responsibility. Deportation and mass murder grew to be seen as preemptive self-defense against an imagined lethal threat. Third, the focus on finding honorable methods of solving the “Jewish problem” placed the morality of the perpetrators above the suffering of the victims. Lastly, the endorsement of a stoic and unsentimental attitude steered the perpetrators away from feelings of pity.30
As a result of such lack of empathy, Jewish citizens of the Third Reich were systematically stripped of their dignity, their rights, and their property, and many lost their lives. Starting in late 1941, over 260 trains deported more than one thousand Jews each from Germany, with similar “purging” of Jews from Austria and annexed regions so that, by late 1943, Germany had achieved Judenfrei (Jew-free) status.31 In the interests of social hygiene and spurred by the work ethic, academic persecutors did not torment or murder: they “cleansed” and “purified” the Volksgemeinschaft.
It would not have been difficult for Germans to acquire information about the treatment of deported Jews, as almost anyone returning from service in the east, including the military, SS, and other involved organizations, could provide details. The mass-murder process of the Holocaust occurred in different ways across Europe, and the large number of participants made it impossible to keep the operation a secret.32 In the aftermath of the war, survivors, perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders, and their descendants held heated debates about how much ordinary Germans knew about the Final Solution. Millions of people made a conscious decision to remain willfully ignorant about the atrocities and simply chose not to inquire about these crimes.33
Claudia Koonz concludes that the Final Solution was neither the result of actions on the eastern front in 1941 nor the theory or implementation of a single agency. Rather, powerful groups within the government, NS Party, and SS reached a consensus for genocide within Germany during the regime’s first six years of networking, theoretical debates, and factional disputes prior to the invasion of Poland in 1939.34 Germans did not become National Socialists because of a dislike for Jews, Koonz suggests; rather, they became antisemites because of their affiliation with National Socialism.35
As already observed, Germany’s younger generation represented a prodigious majority and force among the proponents of National Socialism, as well as membership in the SA and SS. Most had experienced the damaging effects of either World War I or the economic slump and political confusion of the Weimar Republic years—or both. Added to parental absence or partial neglect, this cohort was prone to anxiety and depression that was easily manifested in aggression against the perceived enemy responsible for their childhood or teenage troubles: the Jew.
The generation that grew up during the war era frequently exhibited either vulnerable egos or domineering egos that readily turned to violent solutions when confronted with challenges, particularly those encountered during the Great Depression. A considerable proportion of people from this group became members of paramilitary groups that existed before or during the Third Reich. Moreover, the psychological predisposition of the younger generation rendered them inclined to blindly follow an omnipotent and faultless leader, such as the Führer.
There is ongoing controversy among experts as to whether or not the National Socialist leaders who perpetrated the crime of genocide were aberrant and pathological. This would imply that their compliers, in particular the henchmen directly involved in torturing and killing, may also have been mentally ill. Despite such questioning, the theory of dispositional instability fails to explain the obedience of the rank and file who ran the Holocaust machine. A working example is the Majdanek death camp trial in Germany, during which neighbors of the camp staff were reportedly shocked when camp guards were arrested by the police, accused, and eventually convicted of horrific crimes. After the war, these men and women had supposedly led lives as good citizens, with no manifest signs of mental disorder.36
Researcher Michael Selzner concedes that attempts to explain conformity to National Socialist directives as a result of distinctive lines of personality in abnormally large numbers of Germans have failed. Instead, he maintains that, given the proper circumstances, even a small proportion of the population—10 percent for instance—possessed the psychological traits of the National Socialist perpetrator personality.37
Following up this line of thought—that is, the power exerted by the perpetrators over their compliers or executioners—the surprising and now well-known research of Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, first carried out in the 1960s, comes to mind. The experiments measured the willingness of study participants—men from a diverse range of occupations with varying levels of education—to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts of cruelty conflicting with their personal conscience.
Even if we deny the adequacy of Milgram’s experiment, the haunting truth remains that people obey authority, despite inner agony and personal morality. Compelling as this evidence might appear, the “simply following orders” reasoning leaves much to question. One important factor is that Milgram’s model does not fully match the historical structure of the Shoah itself. These torturers and executioners were clearly more implicated than ordinary people simply doing ordinary jobs. Some of these everyday citizens became part of a killing machine while many others refused to comply.38
A psychological study of the question of responsibility of the compliers led the German political sociologist Stefan Immerfall to search for ways of reconciling microsocial and macrosocial factors. To address the question of how to connect individual behavior and its change over time to the evolution of a genocide system, he suggested four processes of key importance: time dynamics, disintegration, fragmentation, and entrapment.39
Time dynamics: Genocide evolves step-by-step and does not simply appear out of nothing. Even if Hitler was determined to exterminate Jews, there was initially no fixed “solution to the Jewish problem.” The National Socialists embarked on a path of anti-Jewish policies that ultimately led to the Final Solution, but the consequences were neither conceivable nor foreseeable when the perpetrators initially came to power. The gradual escalation of anti-Jewish sentiment made it easier for the general population to comply with each single step and more difficult to refuse the next one. Harm harbors more harm, and bystanders gradually transform into potential perpetrators.40
Disintegration: Following their takeover, the National Socialists destroyed all opposing organizations. Add to this the threat of reprisals from the terror apparatus and surveillance, and the destruction of civil society resulted in extremely unfavorable conditions for any attempt at collective action.41
Fragmentation: Between 1934 and 1944, most of the German population, including those who had not voted for Hitler, did not feel imminently threatened by official repression, so long as they went with the flow. The 1938 Kristallnacht pogroms were not to be repeated because the regime sensed that most Germans did not like to witness acts of mass violence and public disturbance. As a consequence, visible outbursts of violence were abandoned; instead, the identification, deportation, and later destruction of Jewish and other targets became highly routinized. Jews were removed from public life in a gradual way. Many Germans had a fair idea of what might be happening in the concentration camps in Poland to which Jews were transported, but as they were removed from direct visibility, the lack of proximity paved the way for large-scale indifference.
Another aspect of fragmentation is division of labor, according to which the Holocaust was, in fact, the collective result of many smaller steps. The town official only filled out the appropriate paperwork, the trainmaster only put together train schedules, and each process was separate from the preceding one, until the victim was put to death. Routine work, not only on the organizational level but also at the level of the individual links in the chain, minimizes the inclination and the opportunity to raise moral questions.42
Entrapment: Even before the onset of war, many Germans were, to a certain degree, not simply passive but semiactive participants in the National Socialist system. What may have begun as mental approval of the system’s positive and appealing goals became a trap once the war had fully unfolded. At this point, the number of victims was disproportionately larger than the initial target group of German Jews who should be “encouraged” to leave Germany. Drawn into the Holocaust and its brutal abuse of entire populations—principally in the occupied Eastern European territories—soldiers and civilians, perpetrators and bystanders alike, now began to fear reprisals. The Germans had good reason to assume that they might become collectively a global target of blame and revenge, depending on whether they, as individuals, had supported or resisted Hitler. This condition made it extremely difficult for Germans to distance themselves from the National Socialist regime until its final demise.43
On the battlefield, soldiers of the German army did not greatly differ from their nemesis counterparts, the Allies. On both sides, these men were convinced they were carrying out, not only their duty to their homeland, but a higher calling. The average German soldier on the Normandy battlefield had been told that the enemy had declared war on Germany and that it was his responsibility to defend his home. But just how tainted by National Socialist principles of Aryan superiority, racial prejudice, and Hitler’s infallibility were the members of the German armed forces?
In January 1933, the military played a key role in persuading President Paul von Hindenburg to dismiss Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and appoint Hitler as chancellor instead. The armed forces had come to the conclusion that Hitler alone was capable of peacefully reaching the national consensus that would allow the creation of the Wehrstaat (defensive state), and thus the military leadership successfully pressured Hindenburg.44
As part of an effort to preserve the army’s traditional semi-independence, beginning in the mid-1930s the military progressively aligned itself with National Socialist principles in a bid to persuade Hitler that, in the wave of Gleichschaltung (forcible coordination), it was not necessary to end the traditional military entity of a “state within a state.” The unplanned result of their effort to defend the “state within a state” by “self-Gleichschaltung” was to ultimately weaken such a status. Meanwhile, a new generation of technocratic officers was coming to the fore, a group that was much less anxious about preserving the military “state within a state” and more set on progressively transitioning into a National Socialist Wehrstaat.45
On December 8, 1938, the OKW (Armed Forces High Command) instructed the officers of all three branches to become fully versed in National Socialist ideology and to apply the regime’s values in all situations. Beginning in February 1939, pamphlets were issued that were presented as required reading in the military. The titles are self-conclusive: Hitler’s World Historical Mission, The Battle for German Living Space, Hands off Danzig!, and The Final Solution of the Jewish Question in the Third Reich. The last treatise stated, “The defensive battle against Jewry will continue, even if the last Jew has left Germany. Two large and important tasks remain: firstly, the eradication of all Jewish influence, above all in the economy and in culture and, secondly, the battle against World Jewry, which tries to incite all people in the world against Germany.”46
The renowned historian Richard Evans maintains that junior officers in the army were inclined to be particularly fanatical National Socialists, a third of them having joined the party by 1941. Buttressing the mission of the junior leaders were the National Socialist Leadership Guidance Officers, a group created with the sole purpose of indoctrinating the troops for the “war of extermination” against Soviet Russia.47 Among higher-ranking officers as well, close to 30 percent were party members by 1941.48
German historian Jürgen Förster claims that the Wehrmacht followed Hitler’s criminal directives during Operation Barbarossa not solely because of their sense of duty to carry out orders but because they had been convinced that the Soviet Union was run by Jews and that it was Germany’s service to the world to annihilate “Judeo-Bolshevism.” The majority of Wehrmacht officers sincerely believed that most Red Army commissars were Jews who embodied the Red Army’s backbone and driving force. They were persuaded that the best way to win the war against the Soviet Union was to exterminate the commissars by implementing the “Commissar Order” in a move to divest the Russian soldiers of their allegedly Jewish leaders.49
Beginning in 1943, the inflow of officers and conscripts who had been educated chiefly within the National Socialist indoctrination system gradually intensified Hitler’s politics of hatred in the army.50 The German officer corps that originally had been dominated by the German nobility and upper classes was broken down by Hitler into a “people’s officer corps.” By eliminating the institutional social restrictions that had formerly stipulated who qualified to become an officer, Hitler made rank dependent on combat ability and verve, thus emboldening soldiers to fight with increased grit in an effort to improve their chances of a swift rise through the ranks. In this manner, the Wehrmacht turned into a “soldiers’ community” bonded by a shared ambition, fanaticism, and crime.51 As evidence of the above claims, it has been proven that the vast majority of Wehrmacht officers fully cooperated with the SS in murdering Jews in the Soviet Union.52
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, “By its very nature, the phenomenon of war entails excesses, blunders and acts of violence going beyond military necessity.” There is no such thing as a “clean” war, and even a war waged in accordance with international humanitarian law involves an unleashing of violence against persons and property with all the attendant suffering and destruction. Obviously, in such circumstances it may be difficult to draw the line between what is lawful and what is not, an act that is legitimate and one that is not, an act that is morally acceptable and one that is not.53
The majority of those who carried out the Holocaust willingly became agents of systematic extermination. This was due, in part, to the hardening circumstances of war and deprivation, which resulted in soldiers and paramilitary personnel being conditioned to unquestioningly follow orders and execute them mindlessly. Such individuals were accustomed to accepting and enduring hardships, including the pain and death of both themselves and their enemies. As one soldier on the eastern front noted, “One becomes cruel and without feelings. One is no longer one’s self.”54
According to the German scholar Felix Römer, members of the German armed forces did not fully embrace National Socialism uniformly but instead exhibited diverse shadings or stages and were not devoid of inconsistencies within their belief. Even social groups such as the working class, who were thought to be resistant to the appeals of National Socialism before 1933 and beyond, underwent a change of heart after joining the military and serving with loyalty while never posing a mutinous threat similar to the one that occurred in November 1918. Historian Robert Gellately states that not all Germans in uniform believed in the tales of an international Jewish conspiracy that needed to be halted, and some rejected the torrent of hateful rhetoric while still identifying with National Socialism.55
German men on the eastern front committed atrocities in a manner resembling hunters, lynch mobs, and serial killers rather than soldiers. Discussions about whether these perpetrators viewed their actions as a “blood sport” or a “noble cause” have taken place ever since the war crimes trials. One has to factor in that, between 1933 and 1939, those involved in racial warfare had undergone mental training in preparation for their later tasks. Prior to setting foot on Polish soil, soldiers had been indoctrinated with the core tenets of NS ideology, including reverence for the Führer, devotion to the Volk, a belief in the justice of conquest, and the existence of a Jewish peril.56 The commander of the notorious Order Police Battalion 101 further solidified this indoctrination by claiming that the Jewish civilians that the soldiers were about to exterminate were responsible for the terrorist air raids over German cities.57
During a lecture trip to Glasgow in 2001, German military historian Sönke Neitzel learned of the existence of secretly recorded conversations of German prisoners of war. British intelligence services had covertly recorded thousands of German POWs during World War II and created protocols from passages of conversations they found significant. Neitzel collaborated with social psychologist Harald Welzer to study around fifty thousand pages of British archives and an additional one hundred thousand pages collected by the National Archives in Washington, DC. The researchers’ findings, published in 2012 under the title Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying, reveal the unaltered views and feelings of German soldiers fresh from the heat of the battle. Though not all Germans may have reacted to the outbreak of World War II with euphoria, some seventeen million German men let themselves be drafted in the armed forces over the course of the war.58 These transcripts shed light on how these men perceived the ugly business of war and, in particular, what they thought about the mass murders taking place in Eastern Europe.
Plenty has been written about the sordid dimensions of the unrestrained violence and heinous war crimes committed during World War II. The authors of Soldaten suggest that rules are least relevant in ground combat. “Wherever soldiers take prisoners,” they claim, “secure occupied territories, and battle partisans, particular forms of logic dominate. Individually perpetrated violence, such as rape or killing, becomes not only more possible but increasingly likely.” The state of being at war creates a social space that is more open to violence than in peacetime.
One of the distinguishing features of World War II was the National Socialists’ campaign of exterminating certain groups—an action that took place outside of the war context itself. Another damning practice of the German belligerents was their genocidal treatment of Soviet POWs. Narrative examples of these crimes can occasionally be found in the surveillance protocols, and it is likely that the vast majority of the German military, even in the western theater, was aware of these crimes. However, this knowledge—and occasional involvement—did not appear to hold much importance in the soldiers’ frame of reference. They were more concerned with their own survival and comforts—or lack thereof—than to find empathy for the suffering of others, in particular of those they believed to be racially inferior.59
In the POWs’ conversations, they rarely question their own or their colleagues’ often criminal treatment of prisoners of war, the local population, or partisans (the fate of which was far worse than uniformed fighters as partisans and members of the Resistance did not fall under the prisoner-of-war regulations of the Hague Convention). “The soldiers do not think to question their behavior,” the authors write. “Their task is to take care of the necessities: ‘work,’ ‘extreme measures’ and ‘retribution.’ They focus on achieving results, not finding reasons.”60
This unquestioning willingness to be part of a larger picture can be found in the context of those active in the Holocaust itself: at each level of the implementation of this genocide, from marksmen to camp doctors who decided which unfortunate prisoner would die immediately and which detainee would be forced to work, the perpetrators were more concerned with methods of killing than with justifying its necessity.61
In a rare instance of obtaining source material from an executioner in Czechoslovakia, the unwitting former henchman described to a colleague his experience of murdering Jews as follows:
At the barracks, it was a treadmill. They came from one side, and there was a column of maybe 500 or 600 men. They came in through the gate and went up to the firing range. There they were killed, picked up and brought away, and then the next six would come. At first you said, great, better than doing normal duty, but after a couple of days you would have preferred normal duty. It took a toll on your nerves. . . . But orders were orders.62
Members of the German armed forces carried out acts that they never would have been either capable of—or allowed—under normal circumstances. Particularly in the eastern theater of war, these soldiers experienced what it felt like to commit murder without the fear of consequences, to exercise total power over their victims, and to do something completely out of the ordinary, a monstrous deed, yet remain free from any possible reprisals or punishment. Violence of this kind needs neither a motive nor a reason: it is its own motivation.63 According to the authors of Soldaten,
The trope of sacrifice, too, allowed Germans to kill without feeling guilty. Ideologists of annihilation like Himmler or practitioners like Rudolf Höss [Auschwitz Camp commander, not Hitler’s crony Rudolf Hess] continually stressed that destroying human lives was an unpleasant “task” that ran contrary to “humane” instincts. But the ability to overcome such scruples was seen as a measure of one’s character. It was the coupling of murder and morality—the realization that unpleasant acts were necessary and the will to carry out those acts in defiance of feelings of human sympathy—that allowed the perpetrators of genocide to see themselves as “respectable” people, as people whose hearts, in Höss’s words, were not bad.64
Not all soldiers displayed such complete indifference, and in fact a large number condemned the mass killing of Soviet POWs as “a downright disgusting bit of work,” “dreadful,” or “ghastly business.” One soldier stated that the war was a point of cultural shame and the greatest crime in human history. Upon hearing about a Russian village’s entire male population being executed following someone shooting at the occupying German troops from a house, a sergeant in a POW camp exclaimed, “Why do we do all these things? It’s not right.”65 Another soldier stated that his fellow soldiers had given Germany a bad name for decades to come, and another, upon hearing about a mass execution in the Soviet Union, declared, “I tell you. If that’s the way things are, I’ll stop being German. I don’t want to be German anymore.”66
In general, however, members of the military preferred to consider unpleasant acts as not their affair but the “business” of the omnipresent Führer and his high command. On the whole, the soldiers did not form individual opinions of the National Socialist state, Hitler’s dictatorship, or even the persecution of Jews.67 In some instances, however, soldiers repeated the myths that had been told them when they were younger, such as in this account of a nineteen-year-old sailor: “I know what the Jews did. About 1928 or 1929 they carried off the women and raped them and cut them up and the blood—I know of many cases—every Sunday in their synagogues they sacrificed human blood, Christian blood.”68
But even die-hard National Socialists often expressed empathy toward Jews they had personally known and were dismayed at the “scandalous treatment” of the Jewish minority by a “cultured people.” Another opined, “I was always against the persecution of the Jews, too. One should have been able to exile the Jews but one shouldn’t have treated them like that.” One POW warned, “It will be a disgrace being a German after the war. We’ll be as much hated as the Jews were.” “The greatest mistake was the expulsion of the Jews,” seconded another. “That and, particularly, the inhuman treatment,” added a third.69
Refusing orders, displaying cowardice, or deserting the armed forces were hardly options, as such offenses entailed execution. During the course of World War II, some twenty thousand German soldiers were handed down the death sentence. By comparison, only 146 American soldiers were put to death, but an estimated 150,000 Soviet military were executed by their own courts during that time.70
How can we evaluate the German soldier’s mind-set and behavior during World War II? The experts who authored Soldaten sum up their findings in several points. Their extreme behavior and near religious trust in the Führer, as well as “temporally specific contexts of perception,” affected the perspective, interpretation, and actions of soldiers. In addition, “role models and the desire to set a good example” probably influenced the men’s behavior more than other factors. Their “soldierliness,” as it was perceived and implemented as a group, determined and dictated their individual actions.71 It was the military’s social environments that compelled the armed forces to act in a certain manner, rather than an ideological mission, such as fighting against a perceived “global Jewish conspiracy” or a “Bolshevik genetic inferiority.”72
The soldiers’ widely diverse and sometimes diametrically opposed views of the war were rarely echoed in their actions. In battle, most soldiers behaved in a similar manner, “regardless of whether they were Protestants or Catholics, Nazis or regime critics, Prussians or Austrians, university graduates or uneducated people.” The Soldaten authors conclude, “The decisive factor in the atrocities . . . was a general realignment from a civilian to a wartime frame of reference. . . . Within this context, soldiers could murder Jews without being anti-Semites and fight fanatically for the fatherland without being committed National Socialists.”73
The evidence has demonstrated that German soldiers were motivated by a dual sense of duty: to safeguard their homeland and families, as well as to obliterate the enemy in order to prevent a potential invasion and the perceived corruption of Germany. These soldiers had been subject to rigorous ongoing indoctrination in National Socialist principles and lived in fear of the death penalty for any hint of defeatism, noncompliance, or desertion. Consequently, many soldiers who may have been kind and compassionate civilians at home mindlessly followed the example of their violent comrades.
It is reasonable to assert that the German military, much like the civilian population, was repeatedly exposed to highly effective NS programming. A majority in the armed forces were young people who were educated under the misguidance of National Socialist dogma. However, it remains a challenge to determine the degree to which each individual succumbed to such NS indoctrination and how many still allowed their innate moral codes to prevail.
1. Berit Brogaard, “Group Hatred in Nazi Germany: 80 Years Later,” Psychology Today, July 1, 2018.
2. Robert Gellately, Hitler’s True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 316.
3. Ian Kershaw, “The Führer Myth: How Hitler Won over the German People,” Spiegel International, January 30, 2008.
4. Chris McNab, Hitler’s Masterplan: The Essential Facts and Figures for Hitler’s Third Reich (London: Amber, 2011).
5. Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003), 131.
6. Melita Maschmann, Account Rendered: A Dossier on My Former Self (London: Abelard-Schumann, 1965), 31.
7. Koonz, Nazi Conscience, 148–49.
8. Ibid., 161–62.
9. Ibid., 5.
10. Ibid., 72–73.
11. Ibid., 89.
12. Gellately, Hitler’s True Believers, 320.
13. Koonz, Nazi Conscience, 2–3.
14. Ibid., 273.
15. Gellately, Hitler’s True Believers, 317.
16. Koonz, Nazi Conscience, 9.
17. Ibid., 12–13.
18. Ibid., 14.
19. Ibid., 27.
20. Ibid., 31.
21. Ibid., 100.
22. Gellately, Hitler’s True Believers, 317–18.
23. Koonz, Nazi Conscience, 102.
24. Sarah Ann Gordon, Hitler, Germans, and the “Jewish Question” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 201–208.
25. Ulrich Herbert, ed., National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000), 23.
26. Koonz, Nazi Conscience, 44.
27. Ibid., 165–66.
28. Ibid., 178.
29. Ibid., 192–93.
30. Ibid., 259.
31. Ibid., 272.
32. Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939–1945 (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 244, 257–58.
33. David Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion under Nazism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 102.
34. Koonz, Nazi Conscience, 15.
35. Ibid., 35.
36. Stefan Immerfall, “Courage and Conformity in Comparative Perspective—Nazi Germany and Beyond,” paper presented at the Thirty-Fifth Congress of the International Institute of Sociology, Krakow, Poland, November 16, 2001, pp. 2–4.
37. Michael Selzner, “Psychistorical Approaches to the Study of Nazism,” Journal of Psychohistory 4, no. 2 (1976): 215–24.
38. Immerfall, “Courage and Conformity in Comparative Perspective,” 2–4.
39. Ibid., 11–13.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Michael Geyer, “Etudes in Political History: Reichswehr, NSDAP and the Seizure of Power,” in The Nazi Machtergreifung, ed. Peter Stachura (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983), 101–23.
45. Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis and War in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 143.
46. Jürgen Förster, “Complicity or Entanglement? The Wehrmacht, the War, and the Holocaust,” in The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 270.
47. Richard J. Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape the Nazi Past (London: I. B. Tauris, 1989), 59.
48. Bartov, Hitler’s Army, 49.
49. Förster, “Complicity or Entanglement?,” 273–74.
50. Antony Beevor, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943 (New York: Viking, 1998).
51. MacGregor Knox, “1 October 1942: Adolf Hitler, Wehrmacht Officer Policy, and Social Revolution,” Historical Journal 43, no. 3 (2000): 801–25.
52. Allan Millett and Williamson Murray, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War, 1937–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2000), 141.
53. Jean-Jacques Frésard, The Roots of Behaviour in War: A Survey of Literature (Geneva: International Committee of the Red Cross, 2004), 27.
54. Hannes Heer, Tote Zonen: Die Wehrmacht an der Ostfront (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999), 312.
55. Gellately, Hitler’s True Believers, 326.
56. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998), 48.
57. Koonz, Nazi Conscience, 260.
58. Neitzel and Welzer, Soldaten, 35.
59. Ibid., 77.
60. Ibid., 80.
61. Ibid., 122.
62. Ibid., 127.
63. Ibid., 137.
64. Ibid., 149.
65. Ibid., 145.
66. Ibid., 146.
67. Ibid., 226.
68. Ibid., 232.
69. Ibid., 234–35.
70. Ibid., 272.
71. Ibid., 318.
72. Ibid., 319.
73. Ibid.