PREFACE

The exact role of the military in the Nazi genocide during World War II remains difficult to assess because of the wide variety of combat experiences and occupation actions on the eastern front. During the postwar years the “myth of the clean Wehrmacht” helped to exonerate former generals and facilitate the Federal Republic’s rearmament as well as NATO membership. However, the shocking photographs of soldiers committing atrocities, presented by a controversial exhibition of the Hamburg Institut für Sozialforschung, discredited this apologetic legend, suggesting instead that the entire army might have been involved in war crimes. This charge triggered angry rebuttals by veterans like ex-chancellor Helmut Schmidt that their units were without blame, until Holocaust historians like Omer Bartov assembled evidence that proved the Wehrmacht’s general complicity in the “war of annihilation” beyond doubt. But what is still heatedly debated is the exact degree of involvement of different units at the front and in the hinterland in antipartisan reprisals, political executions, and shooting of Jewish civilians.

Inspired by this controversy, I decided to reexamine my father’s letters from the field, since they offer a nuanced picture of what German soldiers thought and did during the war. This resolve turned into a curious voyage of discovery that tested my loyalties as a son and professionalism as a historian. Growing up in a dead father’s shadow in post-war Germany was not easy, because a contentious teenager could not argue with a ghost. When generational rebellion brought me to the United States, we were separated not only by my distaste for his conservative-nationalist politics but also by a vast physical and cultural distance. No doubt, a desire to explain the collaboration of educated Germans with the Nazis was one of the motives behind my becoming a historian who explored topics like the academic illiberalism of students or the perversion of ethics among professionals. But I remained reluctant to carry such investigations into my own family, since it meant painful disclosures of things some members would rather forget. It took until my retirement from the directorship of the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam to muster the courage to confront this legacy.

This unusual source consists of some 350 letters sent by Konrad Jarausch, a high school teacher and journal editor, from occupied Poland, training grounds in Germany, and POW camps in Russia between September 1939 and his death in January 1942. Although as a member of the reserves he could only report from the perspective of the rear, he was close enough to witness the devastating impact of the “breath of war.” A first set of letters focuses on the Polish campaign, describing the chaos in the wake of the German advance, the treatment of POWs, and the interactions of the population with the occupation regime. A second section of the correspondence deals with the details of the training of recruits in Poland as well as in Germany, illustrating the process of militarization of civilians in the Wehrmacht. The final and most original group of letters presents a chilling account of the mass death of Russian POWs in the German receiving camps for want of adequate food supply. In between there are close descriptions of army life and ten unpublished essays on the suffering of the conquered East that provide an inside view, close to the perspective of an ordinary soldier.

It seemed important to share these documents with the public, since they are more detailed and analytical than comparable messages from the field. Most collections available in English, like the last letters from Stalingrad, only contain selections from widely different individuals. Other editions like Karl Fuchs’s show the naive enthusiasm of Nazified youths, while Willy Reese’s confession describes the horror of the actual fighting. In contrast, Jarausch’s letters document the experience of a single, mature academic over two and one half years and contain more critical reflections on the war. Although they are personal in tone, since most were addressed to his wife, brother, and friends, they are written in a clinical language and present meticulous descriptions. When the military historian Klaus Jochen Arnold attested to their unusual character, we decided to collaborate and prepare an accurate transcription. Along with a personal introduction and an explanation of their significance for military history, we published a selection from this correspondence and some fifty pictures as “Das stille Sterben . . .” Feldpostbriefe von Konrad Jarausch aus Polen und Russland, 1939–1942.

For the German edition we ultimately settled on a form of presentation that would constitute a “letter diary” of Konrad Jarausch’s experiences in Poland, the Reich, and Russia. On the one hand, the frequency of correspondence presented the opportunity of having almost daily progress reports, but on the other it also posed the challenge of considerable repetition and overlap. Instead of aiming for a full-length scholarly edition or a narrative interspersed with only a few snippets of quotations, we chose a selective and annotated presentation that would preserve the integrity of the author’s voice and convey the vividness of the descriptions as well as the depth of his reflections. For this reason we reproduced several complete letters at the beginning so as to give a sense of their style, but subsequently eliminated many redundancies and trivial references of interest only to the family. Since we aimed for easy readability, we kept our commentary to a minimum, only explaining the rationale of the edition and providing separate introductions into his personal life as well as military career. German reviewers seem to have found this editorial compromise workable.

Due to the cultural distance to German topics, this English-language edition is both somewhat shorter and more elaborate. While the letters have been carefully translated by Eve Duffy, the introductions were recast considerably. Since interest in the minutiae of the German war machine is limited in the United States, only about half of the correspondence has been kept. Additional notes have been added so as to make the text more intelligible for readers with little background knowledge. In response to the preoccupation with memory, the personal introduction has been expanded by the addition of a new postwar section. In order to locate information where it is most needed, the military history essay has been broken up into specific introductions for each section of the letters, dealing with the onslaught on Poland, military training there and in the Reich, and the Soviet campaign. Since letters tend to touch upon many different subjects, each chosen text received a brief title, highlighting an aspect of particular importance. Finally, Richard Kohn, a leading American military historian, has added a foreword on the differing experiences of German and American soldiers in World War II.

As a lost voice from the past, the letters must themselves stand in the center of this volume, with the various introductions playing merely a subsidiary role. But since sources rarely “speak for themselves,” they need to be edited in such a manner as to make them audible to a later audience. The selected letters are therefore given a brief header and then identified by date, place, and correspondent, whenever possible. But the texts have been stripped of merely formulaic greetings as well as good-byes in the interest of saving space. In the letters chosen, the coherence of the text has been respected, even if their contents wander from one subject to another, because that is the charm of personal correspondence. The translation has striven for a crisp and accessible English style that avoids any pretence of historicity. In order to preserve readability, we have resisted the Teutonic temptation to display our learning in elaborate footnotes; instead, a minimalist commentary merely identifies persons and places, explains forgotten military events, and deciphers intellectual allusions. Only in some especially important cases have suggestions for further reading been added.

The significance of this wartime correspondence lies in the ambivalent role of its author as reluctant accomplice in and clear-eyed witness to important aspects of the war in the East. Although too old to engage in actual fighting, Konrad Jarausch was close enough to the front to provide detailed descriptions of German occupation policy in Poland, graphic comments on the training of new recruits, and shocking accounts of the mass death of Russian POWs, somewhat neglected by the burgeoning Holocaust literature. At the same time, he had the leisure to record sustained reflections on the historical meaning of the war, the prospects of the fighting and the (im-)morality of the German cause that go beyond the usual concerns of soldiers, voiced in letters home. Especially his conflicted attitude, hoping for and wanting to participate in a German victory while increasingly noticing and being repelled by Nazi brutality, sheds fresh light on the contradictory feelings of decent professionals who supported the war. Finally, his discovery of solidarity with Russian POWs also offers an inspiring example of the possibility of recovering a shared humanity amid catastrophe.

Konrad H. Jarausch
Berlin and Chapel Hill, spring 2010