Alex J. Kay and David Stahel
THE ADVANCES MADE over the last two decades in our understanding of German occupation policies in the Soviet Union and the crimes committed there by the Wehrmacht, the Schutzstaffel (SS), police forces, the civil administration, agricultural authorities, and NSDAP agencies have been immense, yet the discussion in serious scholarship regarding the extent of Wehrmacht participation in atrocities on both an individual and a collective level could not be more divided. Christian Hartmann reopened the discussion with his recent study of five German divisions on the eastern front in 1941 and 1942, which concluded that criminal conduct was largely a feature of rear area security formations and not the frontline units, which made up the greater part of the troops deployed in the east. Hartmann even wonders whether the Wehrmacht can be regarded as a perpetrator organization of the National Socialist regime at all.1 Although Hartmann certainly deserves credit for devising the kind of scheme that helps make sense of the different structural and situational factors that could help determine a particular unit’s propensity for criminal behavior, his conclusions contrast starkly with those reached by Dieter Pohl in his analysis of Wehrmacht policies in the Soviet Union during the entire three-year occupation. Pohl found that the number of divisions deployed on the eastern front in which no war crimes were committed was “low” and added that members of the Wehrmacht may have constituted the majority of those responsible for mass crimes carried out on the part of the German Reich.2
Of the up to 18 million men who served in the Wehrmacht during World War II, 10 million were deployed at one time or another between 1941 and 1944 in the conflict against the Soviet Union.3 It was in the eastern theater of war that the military struggle was most brutally fought and in which more of Nazi Germany’s mass crimes were committed than on any other front. The total number of Soviet dead comes to a staggering 27 million people.4 As around 8.5 million of these were members of the Red Army, the majority of the dead—more than 18 million noncombatants—comprised civilians and unarmed, captured soldiers.5 What can we say, then, about the proportion of Wehrmacht soldiers fighting on the eastern front involved in war crimes? Rolf-Dieter Müller concludes that the percentage of German soldiers stationed on the eastern front involved in war crimes was “if anything smaller still” (eher noch geringer) than the estimated 5 percent of German soldiers involved in war crimes in occupied Italy.6 The contrast between this figure and the estimate subsequently attributed to Hannes Heer could scarcely be greater. According to Heer, “60 to 80 percent” of German soldiers who fought on the eastern front participated in war crimes.7 Although Hartmann neglects to cite a specific figure himself, he makes it clear that he shares Müller’s view.8 In his recent study Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East, the American historian Stephen G. Fritz has favorably repeated the figure of 5 percent.9 How credible is a figure of 5 percent or less? In his review of Fritz’s book for the journal German History, Jeff Rutherford responded: “Such a low estimate is simply untenable, as numerous studies have demonstrated front line troops’ involvement in enforcing the starvation policy, rounding up slave laborers, waging a ruthless war against alleged partisans and, as [Fritz] himself points out, carrying out scorched earth retreats.”10
Rutherford cites some important contexts here, in which German troops committed war crimes. The ruthless antipartisan war and scorched earth retreats are two of the five major complexes of crimes examined by Hartmann in his aforementioned study Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg and frequently cited in discussions of Wehrmacht criminality.11 Rutherford’s remaining two examples, on the other hand, are rarely addressed: the enforcement of the starvation policy and the rounding up of slave laborers. Both tasks—the systematic starvation of civilians and prisoners of war, and the abduction of men and women for deployment as forced laborers—constitute by any standard war crimes.12
This brings us to a key argument overlooked in the current literature: the sheer brutality of the German conduct of war and occupation in the Soviet Union has overshadowed many activities that would otherwise be (rightly) held up as criminal acts. In identifying what might be categorized as secondary crimes, our understanding of what constituted criminal behavior is enhanced, while the number of perpetrators is significantly expanded. As many of the examples below will reflect, such crimes often constituted a less overt breach of the international laws of war and, in some cases, exhibited a less direct relationship between the perpetrator’s action and the victim’s suffering, but these considerations do not ameliorate the criminal responsibility of the German soldiers involved. The examples draw in part on recent advancements in scholarship, providing fresh insights into new areas of criminality, but are largely based on a reconceptualization of the day-to-day reality of life for the average Landser on the eastern front.
As recently as 2005, the social psychologist Harald Welzer noted that from the available sources we know relatively little about “the exploitation of sexual opportunities by the powerful occupying soldiers.”13 The historian Waitman Beorn concluded for the eastern front: “The power dynamics alone suggest that any relationship between a Jewish woman and an occupying soldier was at least partially exploitative.”14 While exploitative is not the same as criminal, some of these relationships most certainly were criminal, and included rape and sexual slavery. Even the divisive exhibition War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941 to 1944 (Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944) organized by the Hamburg Institute of Social Research, which has been criticized for presenting the Wehrmacht as a “criminal organization,”15 did not address the subject of rapes perpetrated by German soldiers due to a lack of written sources.16 It is unclear how widespread this phenomenon was because the Nazi authorities prosecuted Germans for “racial mixing,” while victims and witnesses were frequently killed.17 In order to protect privacy and honor, female survivors were reluctant to speak about this type of assault.18 As a result of more recent research carried out by Regina Mühlhäuser, however, we now have a much clearer idea of the nature and extent of acts of sexual violence committed by German soldiers in the Soviet Union.19 Sexual violence against Soviet women was no exception. In some occupied localities, all the women were raped by German soldiers. In several cases, entire units participated in extreme acts of sexual violence.20 The command of the German Ninth Army noted in early August 1941, the distinct increase in “plundering,” “rape and so on,” even in the combat zone.21
As in most military codes of law, rape in the Wehrmacht was officially a crime under the classification of crimes and offences against morality. Yet in the years between 1939 and 1944 only 5,300 members of the Wehrmacht were charged with sexual crimes. In fact, the number of convictions peaked in 1940, and then went into decline until 1943. By removing the compulsion to prosecute lawlessness, the notorious Jurisdiction Decree Barbarossa of May 1941 effectively prevented the punishment of most sexual violations in the war against the Soviet Union, even though the decree nominally categorized “grave actions that are caused by a lack of sexual restraint” as punishable offenses.22 In fact, in the words of Christian Hartmann, nothing had such an enduring influence on “the conduct of the Ostheer and in particular its troops at the front” as the Jurisdiction Decree Barbarossa.23 Felix Römer notes that the decree provided “the pseudo-legal basis for German policies of violence on the eastern front,”24 and adds that “the creation of a lawless region through the abolition of obligatory criminal prosecution” as a result of the Jurisdiction Decree Barbarossa made this “a deeply radical order that was to form the basis of German tyranny in the occupied Soviet Union.”25 In practice then, the main criterion that prompted criminal prosecution in the Wehrmacht, rather than respect for any legal framework, was the perceived threat to Manneszucht (military discipline), which was the most important edict of German military life and was especially important for Nazi Germany given its preoccupation with the autumn of 1918 and the breakdown of military discipline leading to mutiny. In 1941, sexual crimes were officially prohibited, but the regulation was seldom enforced and many officers viewed the conduct of their soldiers as a “natural” outcome of privations of deployment in the war and the absence of brothels (at that time) in the east.26 Beginning in 1942, Wehrmacht brothels soon became a fixed feature of larger towns and cities in the occupied hinterland. It was hoped that they would lead to a reduction in instances of sexually transmitted diseases and, according to the Wehrmacht High Command, prevent “unwanted bastards,” in which “Germany [had] no interest.”27
Not all forms of sexual contact involved violence or even the threat of coercive behavior, since the desperate conditions created by the German occupation forced countless Soviet women to solicit themselves for food. Furthermore, many women—especially young women—opted to work in military brothels rather than be subjected to deportation to the Reich and the feared labor deployment there. For example, around 85 percent of the women who were solicited for the Wehrmacht brothel in the central Ukrainian city of Poltava were still virgins according to a medical examination.28 The result allowed German soldiers to believe that their actions were consensual and therefore freed them of any guilt. Yet, as one German solider observed of the women who sold themselves for sex: “Some of them had babies, but they did not have enough food to feed themselves or their young. So, for a loaf of bread, one could have a good night with them. Some of my comrades took advantage of the women’s plight; they had their good night.”29 Another soldier, William Lubbeck, noted that the same process was common in his regiment. “Putting a loaf of bread under their arm, these men would head for a certain area a couple of miles behind the front where there were hungry Russian women or girls who would willingly exchange sexual favours for food. . . . I knew of no one who was reprimanded or punished for engaging in this type of act.”30 In March 1942, the Army High Command noted: “In larger towns, a clandestine, completely uncontrolled brothel trade has developed in many places.”31
Beyond sexual criminality and exploitation, the question of soldiers’ guilt must extend to include actions that were deemed to be of military necessity during the Barbarossa campaign and which later became standard practice throughout the German Ostheer (eastern army). Included in the May 1941 army administrative regulations for the occupation of Soviet territories was a directive entitled Guidelines for Booty, Confiscation and Exacting of Services (Richtlinien für Beute, Beschlagnahmung und Inanspruchnahme von Dienstleistungen), which translated into the open exploitation of the occupied areas for the army’s benefit. In recognition of the enormous burden carried by the motorized transport columns, the Army Quartermaster-General Generalmajor Eduard Wagner, issued his own Order for the Securing of Booty during Operations (Befehl für Erfassung der Beute bei Operationen). This was intended for army and corps commands and aimed at keeping the operations moving by utilizing captured stocks of vital resources and materials such as foodstuffs, motor vehicles, fuel, horses, wagons, and ammunition.32
The great need to supplement the existing supply system was not limited to the utilization of captured Red Army equipment, but extended to the plunder of the local populace. German soldiers ruthlessly looted the impoverished countryside, sometimes out of need, but also out of a desire for personal enrichment. The process also involved countless acts of wanton destruction, especially if nothing of value could be located. Importantly, even before the war, many Soviet peasants had lived at subsistence level and the consequence of the rampant German looting was for many an eventual death sentence. Konrad Jarausch tellingly wrote home: “Everyone is constantly looking for ‘booty’.” He then noted that even in such a poor country it was still possible to get honey and kilos of butter.33 Likewise, after observing a collapse of the supply system in his area of operations, Franz Frisch remarked, “we were on our own. Whatever little there was to be taken, we took.”34 Helmut Pabst wrote about how he and his comrades looted onions and turnips from people’s gardens and took milk from their churns. “Most of them part with it amiably,” he wrote home in a letter, but he also made clear his indifference to the suffering of the local people: “Willingly or unwillingly, the country feeds us.”35
Soviet peasants naturally sought to protect their precious winter food stocks by hiding them and claiming they had nothing left to give, which in some cases was also the truth, but to many German soldiers this constituted resistance and forestalled any feelings of sympathy for their plight. As Willy Peter Reese wrote: “We saw the hunger and the misery, and under the compulsion of war, we added to it.”36 He then continued:
The cooks slaughtered cattle and pigs on the way and requisitioned peas, beans, and cucumbers everywhere. But the midday soup wasn’t enough to get us through our exertions. So we started taking the last piece of bread from women and children, had chickens and geese prepared for us, pocketed their small supplies of butter and lard, weighed down our vehicles with flitches of bacon and flour from the larders, drank the over rich milk, and cooked and roasted on their stoves, stole honey from their collective farms, came upon stashes of eggs, and weren’t bothered by tears, hand wringing and curses. We were the victors. War excused our thefts, encouraged cruelty, and the need to survive didn’t go around getting permission from conscience.37
Yet for Soviet civilians the need to survive at the margins of subsistence living was a question of life and death, which was not the case for the Wehrmacht. German soldiers did not want to experience hunger, while the civilian population was confronted with starvation. As one man wrote after German soldiers looted his home: “We had saved a few scraps of food—a little butter, a small amount of meat and some white bread. Naturally, everything has now been stolen from us.”38
The looting of peasant homes held very real consequences in the long winter months when food stocks were depleted and people starved, but German soldiers typically took no responsibility for this and in fact continued to supplement their own rations with whatever remained to be plundered.39 Many Soviet peasants, especially those in Ukraine, had already seen or experienced the torments of hunger in their own lifetime and knew that starvation was only the most direct consequence of their diminished food stocks. Malnutrition greatly increased the danger of life-threatening illnesses and disease, particularly for the old, weak, and very young. Whether death resulted from starvation or complications brought on by undernourishment, the cause was the same and the role played by everyday German soldiers, even if at times unwittingly, cannot be ignored. Even soldiers who did not participate in the looting benefited from their comrades’ actions, thus reinforcing the legitimacy and indeed desirability of the acts themselves and, in turn, functioning as a further incentive to their officially sanctioned theft.
The burden of guilt for the perpetrators was often largely avoided because the suffering and high mortality rate among Soviet civilians was neither the intended result of their actions, nor something that German soldiers remained to witness. A rationalization of their actions was not difficult to achieve: Soviet peasants had always been poor and were used to dealing with scarcity; it was war and beyond their control; retreating Soviet troops were to blame. While their actions led to mass starvation and also, frequently, to death, the role played by German soldiers was less immediate than, for example, in the execution of real or imagined partisans or massacres of Jews, which is why secondary crimes have largely been ignored in discussions of Wehrmacht criminality in the east. The end result, however, was very often the same. The difference was a subjective one: unlike other criminal activities, the vast majority of German soldiers in the east, including many nonparticipants in the looting, partook of eating stolen foodstuffs and therefore circuitously contributed to the Soviet loss of life without incurring any sense of guilt or wrongdoing. Tellingly, Ivan Ivanovich Steblin-Kamenskii, a Russian interpreter serving with the German 206th Infantry Division, noted in his diary in March 1942: “All in all, it is very hard for me to see this new, unknown face of the German soldier, without any human feeling. Having more than is needed for nutrition, he then takes away the last [food] from women and children. I’m completely overwhelmed, shocked, insulted, and yet I can do nothing and have to serve with them.”40
With the practice of looting food from the local populace well established, German soldiers had no compunction about plundering other essential items as the campaign extended into the colder months. By October 1941, with the temperature dropping below freezing at night, Russian homes were again raided for winter clothing, which the army could not supply to its troops. Franz Frisch recalled: “The winter conditions drove German soldiers to ransack peasant homes looking for anything to supplement their uniform. We used bed covers, tablecloths, curtains, anything at all to provide a layer of warmth.”41 The process of dispossessing Soviet civilians was both ubiquitous and ruthless. Helmut Günther noted: “The time of the large-scale ‘procurement’ had started . . . every unit’s main concern was to maintain its own stock of material, even if not by the most ethical means.”42 More to the point, Willy Peter Reese wrote in his journal: “Any woollen garments we found became ours. Blankets, scarves, pullovers, shirts, and especially gloves we made off with at any opportunity. We pulled the boots off the old men and women on the street if ours were wanting.”43 Soldiers rationalized their actions because, while they were fighting in the bitter cold, Soviet civilians could, in theory, remain in their warm homes. However, German forces destroyed thousands of homes and, indeed, entire villages (more than 600 in Belarus alone),44 forcing countless civilians to become refugees. Dire food shortages resulting from German requisitioning had the same effect, with untold numbers dying as a result of weakness, fatigue, and exposure to the elements. Even at this point civilians were exploited by soldiers who stole their valuable sleighs, leaving them unable to transport their last, most valued possessions. As Walter Tilemann recalled from the winter of 1941–1942: “No one was interested that the sleighs were also essential for the Russian people. In this terrible winter all pity had literally turned to ice.”45
As temperatures continued to drop in November 1941, and the German advance came to a halt in many places, peasants near the front, who had earlier been stripped of their food and winter clothing, were now forced out of their homes, often with no place else to go. Henry Metelmann, a soldier in Army Group South, wrote of how his unit acquired shelter in the freezing conditions:
Our orders were to occupy one cottage per crew, and to throw the peasants out. When we entered “ours,” a woman and her three young children were sitting around the table by the window, obviously having just finished a meal. She was clearly frightened of us, and I could see that her hands were shaking, while the kids stayed in their seats and looked at us with large, non-understanding eyes. Our Sergeant came straight to the point: “Raus!” [Out!] and pointed to the door. When the mother started to remonstrate and her children to cry, he repeated “Raus!,” opened the door and waved his hand towards the outside in a manner which could not be mistaken anywhere. . . . Outside it was bitterly cold . . . I watched them through the small window standing by their bundles in the snow, looking helplessly in all directions, not knowing what to do. . . . When I looked back a little later, they were gone; I did not want to think about it anymore.46
Metelmann may have expressed unease about the practice, but there were many German soldiers for whom the bitter cold and extreme fatigue extinguished any sensitivity toward the people they rendered homeless. Other soldiers felt no compassion at the best of times and denounced Slavic peoples as backward and even dangerous enemies. Wilhelm Prüller’s diary relates the ruthlessness of the expulsion process. “You should see the act the civilians put on when we make it clear to them that we intend to use their sties to sleep in. A weeping and yelling begins, as if their throats were being cut, until we chuck them out. Whether young or old, man or wife, they stand in their rags and tatters on the doorstep and can’t be persuaded to go. . . . When we finally threaten them at pistol point, they disappear.”47 No doubt many Soviet peasants could well guess at the fate that awaited them and their families without shelter during the coldest months of the year, with temperatures dropping as low as minus forty degrees.
Even in American captivity after the war in Europe had already ended, far away from the cold and privations of the eastern front, the pitilessness of some German soldiers was still in evidence, as the following conversation between Corporal Karl Huber and Private Walter Gumlich illustrates:
H: Someone came and stole the cow from a Russian, and the Russian defended himself. And then the Germans hanged fifty or a hundred men and women, and they remained hanging there for three or four days. Or they had to dig their own graves, and then stand at the edge of the grave, and then they were shot and fell in, backwards. Fifty to a hundred men and even more. That was “retribution.” But it didn’t do any good. Or set fire to the villages. . . . Partisans were, of course, dangerous, we of course had to defend ourselves against them, but that was something completely different. . . .
G: Oh, please, these were wartime operations. They’re not really criminals.
H: When entire families are exterminated and children shot, and so on, the family literally wiped out? We’re guilty when the military seizes a peasant’s last piece of bread, steals it, without any right whatsoever or any kind of order.
G: Skip it!
H: Hey, don’t defend them!48
While Soviet peasants were certainly the most numerous victims of such German behavior, they were not even the most vulnerable. Columns of captured Soviet POWs were deprived of boots, coats, and anything of value, which greatly reduced their chances of survival in the dreadful conditions of German POW camps. While numerous German letters make reference to German troops looting enemy soldiers, few say anything about what their defenseless captives were left with to protect themselves against the cold. For many the only limit to such activity was concern for their own well-being, as Siegfried Knappe noted, “we did not dare wear the heavier quilted jackets for fear of being shot as a Russian.”49
German soldiers worked closely with employment offices and General Plenipotentiary for Labor Deployment Fritz Sauckel in the systematic recruitment of millions of Soviet civilians to work in German industry and agriculture, often by employing methods of extreme brutality. Civilians were also put to work in the towns and the countryside of the occupied Soviet Union itself or sent to one of the many forced labor camps set up by local army commands throughout the area of operations.50 By May 1944, Army Group Center’s zone of operations, which contained some 1.9 million Soviet civilians, had no less than three hundred thousand performing directly military tasks.51 The Wehrmacht was furthermore responsible for the illegal forced labor of captured Soviet prisoners of war. Over a million were transported to the Reich for this purpose but Soviet POWs were also deployed in the occupied eastern territories, for example, clearing the battlefield or in road construction.52 Here average German soldiers saved themselves heavy labor and menial domestic tasks by putting POWs and civilians to work for them. In a letter home from late 1943, Georg Scharnik explained how, before a retreat, any Soviet men of military age were seized and put to work in the rear building roads. This, he explained, saved German soldiers work and prevented the men from being conscripted by the Red Army.53
Other soldiers expressed delight when Soviet civilians were located near to their camp so they could serve as a workforce. “Sometimes we have luck. There are still civilians. They must sew my buttons, warm water, wash . . . they do it willingly.”54 Not surprisingly, such enthusiasm was absent from the account of Anna Nosova, who spoke of having to wash hundreds of German uniforms covered in blood and lice.55 Even more exploitative was the forced recruitment of Soviet women for labor in Germany, which Birgit Beck’s research suggests could sometimes be avoided if the women consented to work as Wehrmacht prostitutes.56 German institutions in the east became so reliant on Soviet slave labor that, as late as July 1944, Army Group Center felt able to request a workforce of one hundred thousand complete with equipment for the construction of redoubts. Work was to begin in a mere two days.57
Exploitative behavior extended to almost every aspect of the Wehrmacht’s advance through the Soviet Union, with profound implications for the survival of anyone in the area of German occupation. Moreover, these conditions were created by the average rank and file German soldiers of the Ostheer, not a select few. Their behavior adversely impacted on untold numbers of Soviet civilians, reducing them to the barest means of subsistence and often resulting in their deaths. The mortality rate is impossible to calculate, but the demands made by average German soldiers on the Soviet population were staggering. In addition to the aspects already discussed, German soldiers requisitioned local medical facilities and medicines, plundered factories for equipment and tools, seized vital farming machinery for the army’s use, burned any settlements thought useful to partisans and typically showed little or no regard for the well-being of civilians caught up in the fighting.58 Such actions may not have immediately resulted in the deaths of the victims, nor might their deaths have even been the intention of the soldiers, but the result nevertheless stemmed from the actions of German troops in the east. The point here is not to equate these deaths with the much discussed direct criminality of the Wehrmacht—involving acts of outright murder and execution—but rather to acknowledge that a deadly, indirect criminality involving a much larger percentage of the Ostheer also existed. Indeed, if we take into account all forms of criminality—from the plundering of Soviet homes and the exploitation of local resources to rape and sexual slavery—it would be reasonable to conclude that a substantial majority of the 10 million Wehrmacht soldiers deployed at one time or another in the German-Soviet War were involved or complicit in criminal conduct.
In order to understand the indirect criminality of the Ostheer, it is important not only to take account of what the soldiers did but also how it was possible for them to do it. Hannes Heer has described it as a process of how “amorality became normality.”59 Warfare on the eastern front constituted a process of brutalization, which resulted from a transformative event in which men experienced first shock and then a process of renormalization. Importantly, German soldiers on the eastern front were not simply engaging in warfare but in a systematic war of extermination in which not only the rules of civil society were being repudiated but also the basic codex of armed conflict. The brutalizing effect of their experiences, and often their own actions, initially induced a sense of shock, brought on by a loss of orientation, the duration of which varied from soldier to soldier. Men wrote home of becoming “a different person,” of being forced to “completely readjust” and of experiencing “inner change.” Another wrote that he had been forced to “throw overboard several principles held in the past,” while others spoke of a new “split consciousness.” The shock, however, soon passed, as the daily exposure to unparalleled violence became, out of necessity, normalized.60
In identifying this process, Heer was able to point to German soldiers’ descriptions of themselves as having become “hard,” “indifferent,” and “heartless.”61 One soldier wrote: “It’s like growing a shell around you that’s almost impenetrable. But what happens inside this shell? You become part of a mass, a component of a relentless whole which sucks you up and squeezes you into a mould. You become gross and insensible. You cease to be yourself.” Another man simply reflected: “I have forgotten myself.”62 William Lubbeck observed: “Over time, war hardens your heart and leads you to do brutal things that you could never have imagined yourself doing in civilian life.”63 Likewise, Willy Peter Reese wrote of developing an “armour of apathy” that he used to protect himself “against terror, horror, fear, and madness, which saved me from suffering and screaming.” Yet Reese noted that this same apathy “crushed any tender stirring within me, snapped off the shoots of hope, faith, and love of my fellow men, and turned my heart to stone.”64 Accordingly, the renormalization process was a coping mechanism aimed at dealing with the shocking brutality of the war in the east, yet the price was a radical desensitization toward violence, allowing for indirect actions of blatant criminality to pass for normality.
Whatever the extent of the Wehrmacht’s culture of violence and the acceptance of amorality within its ranks, there were of course those who considered the behavior of the majority as, at the very least, problematic and perhaps even criminal. How are we to understand their position and why did they not act on their good conscience? Thomas Kühne’s work on comradeship within the German army suggested that shame culture dominated the Wehrmacht. According to Kühne, in shame culture the adoptive norms of a soldier’s community takes on the highest form of moral authority, surpassing any others that may have preceded it. Shame culture is grounded in the fear of exclusion, exposure, and disgrace, which the community imposes on any individual who does not submit to its rules. The controlling gaze of the majority reaffirms and rewards positive behavior toward the community and its social mores, but its shaming culture is what defines it, ensuring a negative consequence for any member who departs from its norms. It teaches one to conform, to be inconspicuous, to participate, and to be content in doing so. The reward for German soldiers on the eastern front was the safety and acceptance of the unit, which was a vital and irreplaceable form of emotional support.65 Comradeship was as sacrosanct as family, protecting its members as fiercely as it opposed outsiders,66 but this also created a daunting barrier to anyone seeking to oppose the amoral behavior that the majority endorsed and practiced.
While there was an internal pressure to conform within the soldiers’ units, there was also a dominant perception of an external environment characterized as lawless territories in which harsh measures were not only regarded as permissible, but indeed as an absolute necessity. In establishing “law” according to their own system of “order,” however, the soldiers often ignored their own role as aggressor in precipitating this anarchic state of affairs.67 The organized and disciplined staging of executions of partisans, offering a feeble guise of legality to what were often nothing other than summary reprisals,68 contrasted starkly with the stories of chaos and disorder in the occupied areas that circulated among the soldiers at the front. Beyond any racial prejudice against Slavs, horror stories of partisans (real and imagined) quickly led to a siege mentality that fed a profound distrust of the Soviet population and transformed the soldier-civilian relationship. German troops in every instance became enforcers of law and order—whatever they decided that to be and however much that differed between individual soldiers. It was a system open to flagrant abuse, and, while the murderous consequences of this autonomy have formed the basis of most studies, it must also be acknowledged that such an environment also fostered a ubiquitous culture of secondary criminality, supporting all manner of nonlethal, but no less criminal, corruption and abuse of power by the soldiers.
If internal and environmental pressures helped facilitate this behavior, one must also acknowledge institutional power, which, although diminishing individual agency to some extent, forms an important framework for how soldiers understood and experienced the war in the east. The German army was overwhelmingly conscripted; volunteers are estimated at numbering only about 10 percent, meaning that the army’s induction and training programs had to transform “average men” into battle-ready soldiers.69 The advantage the German army enjoyed was that their recruits had already spent years in paramilitary organizations such as the Hitler Youth or the Reich Labor Service. Yet even these could not always prepare the men for the fearsome demands of German military training, which built a first-rate fighting force but, as Stephan Fritz has observed, “aimed ultimately at control and motivation on the battlefield.”70 Likewise, British historian Richard Holmes has argued: “There is a direct link between the harshness of basic training and the cohesiveness of the group which emerges from it.”71 The German army exhibited powerful cohesion, high levels of motivation and strict control, which was forged in battle even before the invasion of the Soviet Union. Such strong institutional culture proved extremely resilient, especially when confronted with a land and people that were perceived as foreign, dangerous, and inferior. As German historian Wolfram Wette has noted, the brutalization of the German military institution led among the men, “to the dramatic loss of a feeling of individual responsibility and personal guilt, as well as the deformation of their sense of humanity and justice.”72
If the army’s institutional culture perverted individual responsibility in the east, it was reinforced by Nazi racial ideology, but also impacted by what Jeff Rutherford has termed “military necessity.” In essence, Rutherford’s study has shown that the German army was willing to do whatever was necessary to preserve its combat efficiency and emerge victorious on the battlefield. This is the first theory to explain the otherwise contradictory behavior in German army policy, where the same unit could initially act with relative benevolence toward an occupied population and later display utter ruthlessness. The essential ingredient, according to Rutherford, could not simply be ideology, but rather the perceived needs of the unit or the men themselves.73 Accordingly, military necessity is not a rigid concept, any more than indirect criminality is. In both cases there are gray areas, degrees of complicity, and blurred lines. Yet the troops were clearly capable of enacting whatever was necessary to ensure their own needs came first and, in the process, any concern for the local population was often absent.
Not only was there a willingness on the part of German soldiers on the eastern front to perpetrate acts that indirectly led to enormous suffering and high mortality rates, there was also a clear enthusiasm for lending their support to more immediate acts of murder, namely as spectators at massacres (and other atrocities). This passive acceptance of the killing process among the soldiers gave legitimacy to the murders, while providing another forum for soldiers to participate indirectly in the war of annihilation. Christian Hartmann has correctly concluded that the number of “members of the Wehrmacht, who articulated their disquiet about the Holocaust, or even resisted it,” was “even smaller” than the size of the group directly involved in implementing the genocide of Jews. He adds, however: “This means that we are dealing here with a broad, apparently indifferent middle section.”74 Yet to what extent was the broad middle section really indifferent? There is a legitimate school of thought that regards those who photographed and filmed the mistreatment, degradation, and murder of Jews as active participants in those atrocities, and the act of taking photographs and making films as “a distinct form of violence,” in the words of Gerhard Paul.75 The perpetrators engaged in an interaction with the photographers and cameramen “by presenting them the humiliated and naked victims like trophies.” They orchestrated executions, beatings, and other abuse not just in front of the camera but also for the camera.76
This conception of culpability has been extended to include bystanders, thus encompassing a vastly greater proportion of regular German troops than the inclusion of photographers and cameramen already does. As Harald Welzer notes in respect to massacres carried out in the German-occupied east, “spectators are not passive: their presence and obvious interest constitute a framework of social confirmation surrounding the shooting operations. And even the individual spectator can reassure himself, through the simple presence of other spectators, of the legitimacy of his curiosity.”77 Thus, what we have here is a case of mutual reinforcement, for shooter and observer alike, to the effect that what each of them does is acceptable.
To the average observer, however, the onus of moral responsibility (to the extent that such a concept was even considered) lay exclusively with the shooters and even decades after the war few appear to have accepted any degree of personal accountability in spite of acknowledging having been present at executions carried out by the Wehrmacht.78 Once again, in the mind of the average German soldier, his own role in the crime, and the passive support he lent to it, passed guilt free. Accordingly, attendance at executions was typically high and was treated as a form of officially sanctioned entertainment; a spectacle at which to marvel as well as relish the feeling that justice was being served. Indeed, the photographic evidence suggests that numerous observers enjoyed themselves enough to pose smiling for their comrades’ photos.79 Such “execution tourism”—resulting in a “pornography of death”80—not only made the Landser an accessory to the crimes he witnessed, but provided an unmistakable lesson in the German disregard for the value of Soviet life and the widely accepted consequences for actions deemed to constitute resistance to the German occupation.
Criminality for German soldiers on the eastern front was thus a series of gradations, not a black and white distinction between onerous guilt and virtuous innocence. The culpability of the soldiers varied from direct complicity in acts of mass murder to a more qualified—but often no less deadly—set of actions, which indirectly led to widespread death throughout the occupied Soviet territories. Most German soldiers already fell into these categories, but of the remaining men there was typically a passive acceptance—and thus condoning—of their comrades and their criminal behavior, which offered support and reinforcement to the whole system of violence. A photograph found on the body of a dead German soldier showed a group of company commanders sitting behind a large sign that read: “The Russian must die, so that we [can] live” (Der Russe muß sterben, damit wir leben).81 While not every member of the Ostheer can be condemned as a war criminal, it is at the same time unlikely that many could claim to be entirely innocent.
***
If the majority of German soldiers serving on the eastern front were involved in some form of criminal behavior, does this mean that the mass were also Nazis? In his exceptional study Kameraden, Felix Römer presents his evaluation of the interrogation reports, morale questionnaires, and bugged room conversations of several thousand Wehrmacht soldiers in US captivity at Fort Hunt, Virginia—the largest and most substantial collection of personal testimonials of German soldiers in World War II yet known.82 The more than three thousand prisoners were predominantly ordinary German and Austrian soldiers: more than one in two of them was an enlisted man; almost every third was an NCO; and approximately every sixth an officer, although generally only from the subaltern ranks up to captain.83 They thus constituted a representative segment of the Wehrmacht. Römer convincingly demonstrates how ideology played at most a subordinated role in the consciousness of most members of the Wehrmacht.84 This does not mean that political ideas and National Socialist beliefs did not have any influence on the soldiers. Römer’s analysis reveals that nationalism, militarism, and loyalty to Hitler were part of the basic mental configuration of the majority of the ordinary soldiers, and the virtues and interpretative models by which they were guided were in part impregnated by National Socialism. Beyond such basic convictions, however, most of them thought in political terms in less complex categories, without deeper theoretical foundations. For the mass of them, it was above all success and failure that ultimately counted in the assessment of politics and the actions of the state.85 Ideological convictions counted among the basic certainties that were commonly taken for granted by the soldiers. The largely internalized nationalism and militarism of the vast majority of the soldiers established a fundamental loyalty to the state that was more deep-rooted than the frequently superficial political opinions. In contrast to the oft vague ideas that the soldiers had of National Socialist ideology, these elementary convictions were deeply grounded, long-term cultivated mentalities that were so self-evident as to be scarcely pondered or questioned, least of all when at the front.86
This absence of overt ideology in the transcripts led Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, in their bestselling book Soldiers: Soldaten: Protokolle vom Kämpfen, Töten und Sterben (On Fighting, Killing and Dying) to excessively play down or even dismiss the potency of convictions and ideas in accounting for the enormity of German deeds and the nonchalance of so many perpetrators and witnesses documented in the transcripts, and to prematurely conclude: “These soldiers are no ‘ideological warriors,’ but rather in most cases wholly unpolitical.”87 Although Neitzel and Welzer deserve credit for bringing to the debate a range of additional factors more common to soldiers and military culture generally, Johannes Hürter is right to warn against generalizations: “If the same soldierly patterns of behaviour really always manifest themselves in the specific area of war, even in the perpetration of crimes, then the war of the Wehrmacht loses its special character, even in its worst excesses on the eastern front.”88
Illustrative of Felix Römer’s findings, on the other hand, are the results of the US opinion polls conducted over the course of 1944 among the Wehrmacht soldiers held captive at Fort Hunt. There was approval for the person of Adolf Hitler among almost 64 percent of those interrogated by the Americans. Among the soldiers born in or after 1923, that is, those who were ten years or younger at the time of the Nazi takeover of power, the rate of approval for Hitler was more than 74 percent. Thus, three out of four members of the youngest generation—who were aged between seventeen and twenty-two in the final year of World War II—continued to hold faith with Hitler, even at this late stage of the war.89 These findings complement the results of a survey of 1,400 Austrian former members of the Wehrmacht conducted after the war.90 Asked to name the four most important aims of the Wehrmacht, 78.4 percent of those surveyed said “more living space,” 62.1 percent the “struggle against Bolshevism,” 41.6 percent the “struggle against world Jewry,” and 36.3 percent “racial purity.” These percentages—citing not just a selection but the four main objectives of the Wehrmacht in the eyes of those surveyed—demonstrate that its members by no means perceived the Wehrmacht as a purely military apparatus free of ideology. On the contrary, the Wehrmacht was for its troops an instrument of the National Socialist regime that not only strove to accomplish its military but also its ideological and political objectives, such as the “struggle against world Jewry” and “racial purity.” Asked for their personal opinion, 26.4 percent of the former soldiers surveyed stated that “the Jews” had been the main culprits of the outbreak of World War II. As the political scientist Walter Manoschek rightly points out, given that antisemitic attitudes were something of a taboo in the postwar period, also in Austria, it seems plausible that this percentage might have been considerably higher at the time when those surveyed were still members of the Wehrmacht.91
The fact that it was possible even for soldiers who were critical of National Socialism to commit war crimes and other atrocities is demonstrated by the example of the aforementioned Willy Peter Reese. The following excerpt is from a poem he composed in 1942:
Murdered the Jews,
marched to Russia
as a roaring horde,
oppressed the people,
fought in blood,
led by a clown,
we are the envoys
of what’s known everywhere
and wade in blood.
We carry the flags
of the Aryan ancestors:
they suit us.92
At the same time, however, he describes how his unit shot Soviet prisoners of war, murdered civilians, burned down villages, looted homes, and forced captive Russian women to dance naked. In September 1943, after his unit had laid waste to villages and killed people on the retreat, he wrote: “I crack under this guilt—and hit the sauce!”93
In seeking to achieve a fuller understanding of the nature of the war Nazi Germany waged against the Soviet Union and its peoples, we would be better served by not confining our conception of criminal conduct to a small selection of the most heinous crimes. Widening our gaze should not lead us to draw the conclusion, however, that the majority of regular soldiers fighting on the eastern front were die-hard Nazis. Nor should we conclude that the majority of these men committed criminal acts eagerly, or even willingly. What a broader gaze will reveal, however, is that the war of annihilation in the East was not just Hitler’s war or that of the Wehrmacht High Command, but also of the ordinary German and Austrian soldiers.
ALEX J. KAY is Visiting Lecturer at the University of Potsdam and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. From 2014 to 2016, he was Senior Academic Project Coordinator at the Institute of Contemporary History Munich–Berlin. Dr. Kay is the author of Exploitation, Resettlement, Mass Murder: Political and Economic Planning for German Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union, 1940–1941 (2006) and The Making of an SS Killer: The Life of Colonel Alfred Filbert, 1905–1990 (2016, German ed. 2017), and co-editor of Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization (2012).
DAVID STAHEL is Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australia. His publications include Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East (2009), Kiev 1941 (2012), Operation Typhoon (2013), and The Battle for Moscow (2015). His most recent book was shortlisted for the British Army Military Book of the Year (2016).
1. Christian Hartmann, Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg. Front und militärisches Hinterland 1941/42 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2009), 802.
2. Dieter Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht. Deutsche Militärbesatzung und einheimische Bevölkerung in der Sowjetunion 1941–1944 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008), 348–349.
3. Hartmann, Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg, 12–13 and 16n29.
4. John Barber and Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front 1941–1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II (London: Longman, 1991), 40–41; Hartmann, Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg, 790.
5. Alex J. Kay, “Ausbeutung, Umsiedlung, Massenmord. NS-Zukunftspläne für den Osten: Hungerplan und Generalplan Ost,” in Ökumenische Friedensdekade 2012. Predigthilfe und Materialien für die Gemeinde, ed. Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste (September 2012), 44–50, here 44.
6. “Gegen Kritik immun,” Interview by Gerhard Spörl and Klaus Wiegrefe in Der Spiegel, 23/1999 (June 1999), 60 and 62, here 62.
7. Klaus Wiegrefe, “Abrechnung mit Hitlers Generälen,” Spiegel Online, November 27, 2001.
8. Christian Hartmann, “Verbrecherischer Krieg—verbrecherische Wehrmacht? Überlegungen zur Struktur des deutschen Ostheeres 1941–1944,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 52, no. 1 (January 2004): 1–76, here 71; Hartmann, Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg, 12–13.
9. Stephen G. Fritz, Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 482.
10. Jeff Rutherford, Review of Stephen G. Fritz, Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East, in German History 30, no. 3 (September 2012): 476–478.
11. See Hartmann, Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg. The other complexes examined by Hartmann are the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war, the genocide against Soviet Jews and the implementation of the Commissar Order. See also his earlier “Verbrecherischer Krieg—verbrecherische Wehrmacht?.”
12. See the relevant provisions in the Hague Convention (II) on the Laws and Customs of War on Land, 1899, and the Hague Convention (IV) on War on Land and its Annexed Regulations, 1907: James Brown Scott, ed., The Hague Conventions and Declarations of 1899 and 1907 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1915).
13. Harald Welzer, Täter. Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2005), 199.
14. Waitman Wade Beorn, Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 167.
15. See, for example, “Gegen Kritik immun,” interview by Gerhard Spörl and Klaus Wiegrefe in Der Spiegel, 23/1999 (June 1999), 60 and 62, here 62.
16. On this see the interview with the historian Hannes Heer and the social psychologist Harald Welzer. “Ein Erlebnis absoluter Macht,” DIE ZEIT Geschichte no. 2 (2011): 88–94, here 94.
17. Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht, 132; examples in Hans-Heinrich Nolte, “Vergewaltigungen durch Deutsche im Rußlandfeldzug,” Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte 10, no. 1 (spring 2009): 113–133.
18. Wendy Lower, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 232, n. 104.
19. See Regina Mühlhäuser, Eroberungen. Sexuelle Gewalttaten und intime Beziehungen deutscher Soldaten in der Sowjetunion, 1941–1945 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2010). See also the discussion in Beorn, Marching into Darkness, 164–173, and Chapter 9 in this volume.
20. Mühlhäuser, Eroberungen, esp. 74 and 144. See also Alex J. Kay, Review of Regina Mühlhäuser, Eroberungen. Sexuelle Gewalttaten und intime Beziehungen deutscher Soldaten in der Sowjetunion, 1941–1945, in sehepunkte. Rezensionsjournal für die Geschichtswissenschaften 11, no. 11 (November 15, 2011), http://www.sehepunkte.de/2011/11/19814.html (last accessed on May 8, 2017).
21. See Felix Römer, “‘Im alten Deutschland wäre solcher Befehl nicht möglich gewesen.’ Rezeption, Adaption und Umsetzung des Kriegsgerichtsbarkeitserlasses im Ostheer 1941/42,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 56, no. 1 (January 2008): 53–99, here 86.
22. For the text of the so-called Jurisdiction Decree Barbarossa, see Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg im Breisgau, RW 4/v. 577, fols. 72–75, “Erlass über die Ausübung der Kriegsgerichtsbarkeit im Gebiet ‘Barbarossa’ und über besondere Massnahmen der Truppe,” May 13, 1941, here fol. 75: “schwere Taten, die auf geschlechtlicher Hemmungslosigkeit beruhen.” The decree was reproduced as Nuremberg document 050–C in: International Military Tribunal, ed., Der Prozess gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher vor dem Internationalen Militärgerichtshof, Nürnberg, 14. November 1945—1. Oktober 1946, vol. 34 (Nuremberg: Sekretariat des Gerichtshofs, 1949), 252–255.
23. Hartmann, “Verbrecherischer Krieg—verbrecherische Wehrmacht?,” 54.
24. Römer,“‘Im alten Deutschland’,” 54.
25. Felix Römer, “The Wehrmacht in the War of Ideologies: The Army and Hiter’s Criminal Orders on the Eastern Front,” in Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization, ed. Alex J. Kay, Jeff Rutherford, and David Stahel (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012), 73–100, here 76.
26. Birgit Beck, “Sexual Violence and its Prosecution by Courts Martial of the Wehrmacht,” in A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937–1945, ed. Roger Chickering, Stig Förster, and Bernd Greiner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 320–322 and 326–327.
27. Mühlhäuser, Eroberungen, 214–239 (quotes: 214).
28. Mühlhäuser, Eroberungen, 224–225.
29. Werner Adamczyk, Feuer! An Artilleryman’s Life on the Eastern Front (Wilmington, NC: Broadfoot, 1992), 199–200.
30. William Lubbeck with David B. Hurt, At Leningrad’s Gates: The Story of a Soldier with Army Group North (Philadelphia, PA: Casemate, 2006), 113.
31. Quoted in Theo J. Schulte, “The German Army and National Socialist Occupation Policies in the Occupied Areas of the Soviet Union 1941–1943” (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 1987), 182: “In größeren Orten hat sich an vielen Stellen ein heimlicher, völlig unkontrollierter Bordellbetrieb entwickelt.”
32. Ernst Klink, “Die militärische Konzeption des Krieges gegen die Sowjetunion,” in Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, ed. Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, vol. 4: Der Angriff auf die Sowjetunion (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1983), 257–258.
33. Konrad H. Jarausch and Klaus Jochen Arnold, eds., “Das stille Sterben” Feldpostbriefe von Konrad Jarausch aus Polen und Russland 1939–1942 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2008), 311 (entry for September 16, 1941).
34. Franz A. P. Frisch, in association with Wilbur D. Jones, Jr., Condemned to Live: A Panzer Artilleryman’s Five-Front War (Shippensburg, PA: White Mane, 2000), 95.
35. Helmut Pabst, The Outermost Frontier: A German Soldier in the Russian Campaign (London: William Kimber, 1957), 18–19 and 39.
36. Willy Peter Reese, Mir selber seltsam fremd: Die Unmenschlichkeit des Krieges. Russland 1941–1944, ed. Stefan Schmitz (Munich: Claasen, 2003), 57.
37. Reese, Mir selber seltsam fremd, 62.
38. As cited in: Michael Jones, The Retreat: Hitler’s First Defeat (London: John Murray, 2009), 76–77.
39. See examples in: Jeff Rutherford, Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front: The German Infantry’s War, 1941–1944 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Jeff Rutherford, “The Radicalization of German Occupation Policies: Wirtschaftsstab Ost and the 121st Infantry Division in Pavlovsk, 1941,” in Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization, ed. Alex J. Kay, Jeff Rutherford, and David Stahel (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012), 130–154; Norbert Kunz, “Das Beispiel Charkow: Eine Stadtbevölkerung als Opfer der deutschen Hungerstrategie 1941/42,” in Verbrechen der Wehrmacht. Bilanz einer Debatte, ed. Christian Hartmann, Johannes Hürter, and Ulrike Jureit (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005), 136–144.
40. Diary entry recorded on March 30, 1942 in the village of Burtsevo. The diary remains unpublished and was made available by the family to Oleg Beyda. We are grateful to Oleg for passing on this excerpt to us.
41. Frisch, in association with Jones, Jr., Condemned to Live, 94.
42. Helmut Günther, Hot Motors, Cold Feet: A Memoir of Service with the Motorcycle Battalion of SS-Division “Reich” 1940–1941 (Winnipeg: J. J. Fedorowicz, 2004), 189.
43. Reese, Mir selber seltsam fremd, 63–64.
44. Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspoltik in Weißrußland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999), 955.
45. Walter Tilemann, Ich, das Soldatenkind (Munich: Knaur TB, 2005), 152.
46. Henry Metelmann, Through Hell for Hitler (Havertown: Casemate, 2005), 35.
47. H. C. Robbins Landon and Sebastian Leitner, eds., Diary of a German Soldier (London: Coward McCann, 1963), 108 (entry for September 26, 1941).
48. Quoted in Felix Römer, Kameraden. Die Wehrmacht von innen (Munich: Piper, 2012), 427.
49. Siegfried Knappe with Ted Brusaw, Soldat: Reflections of a German Soldier, 1936–1949 (New York: Dell Publishing, 1992), 230.
50. Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht, 305–319; Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 449–501.
51. Nicholas Terry, “‘Do not burden one’s own army and its hinterland with unneeded mouths!’ The Fate of the Soviet Civilian Population Behind the ‘Panther Line’ in Eastern Belorussia, October 1943–June 1944,” in Kriegführung und Hunger 1939–1945. Zum Verhältnis von militärischen, wirtschaftlichen und politischen Interessen, ed. Christoph Dieckmann and Babette Quinkert (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015), 185–209, here 190.
52. Reinhard Otto, Rolf Keller, and Jens Nagel, “Sowjetische Kriegsgefangene in deutschem Gewahrsam 1941–1945. Zahlen und Dimensionen,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 56, no. 4 (October 2008), 557–602, here 562; Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht, 212–215.
53. Martin Humburg, Das Gesicht des Krieges. Feldpostbriefe von Wehrmachtssoldaten aus der Sowjetunion 1941–1944 (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1998), 143 (entry for November 22, 1943).
54. Humburg, Das Gesicht des Krieges, 165 (entry for November 22, 1941).
55. Laurie R. Cohen, Smolensk under the Nazis: Everyday life in Occupied Russia (Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2013), 73.
56. Birgit Beck, “Rape. The Military Trails of Sexual Crimes Committed by Soldiers in the Wehrmacht, 1939–1944,” in Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Karen Hageman and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 267.
57. Norbert Müller, ed., Okkupation, Raub, Vernichtung. Dokumente zur Besatzungspolitik der faschistischen Wehrmacht auf sowjetischem Territorium 1941 bis 1944 ([East] Berlin: Militärverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1980), 321–322, “Anforderung von 100 000 Arbeitskräften zum Stellungsbau durch das Oberkommando der Heeresgruppe Mitte” (Doc. 133), dated July 8, 1944.
58. On the treatment of Soviet civilians in combat see: Adrian E. Wettstein, “Urban Warfare Doctrine on the Eastern Front,” in Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization, ed. Alex J. Kay, Jeff Rutherford, and David Stahel (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012), 45–72, here 56 and 64.
59. Hannes Heer, “How Amorality Became Normality: Reflections on the Mentality of German Soldiers on the Eastern Front,” in War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II 1941–1944, ed. Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006), 329–344.
60. All above quotations taken from: Heer, “How Amorality Became Normality,” 331–332.
61. Heer, “How Amorality Became Normality,” 331–332. See also Klaus Latzel, Deutsche Soldaten—nationalsozialistischer Kreig? Kriegserlebnis—Kriegserfahrung 1939–1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1996), 315–316.
62. Heer, “How Amorality Became Normality,” 332.
63. Lubbeck with Hurt, At Leningrad’s Gates, 112.
64. Reese, Mir selber seltsam fremd, 182: “Der Panzer der Fühllosigkeit, mit dem ich mich gegen Schrecken, Grauen, Angst und Wahnsinn gewappnet, der mich nicht mehr leiden und aufschreien ließ, erdrückte die zarten Regungen im Innern, knickte die Keime von Hoffnung, Glauben und Menschenliebe und verwandelte das Herz in Stein.”
65. Thomas Kühne, “Male Bonding and Shame Culture: Hitler’s Soldiers and the Moral Basis of Genocidal Warfare,” in Ordinary People as Mass Murderers: Perpetrators in Comparative Perspectives, ed. Olaf Jensen and Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 55–77, here 62; Thomas Kühne, Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community, 1918–1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 29. For similar findings regarding Reserve Police Battalion 101 see Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (London: Penguin Books, 2001 [1992]).
66. Thomas Kühne, “Comradeship: Gender Confusion and Gender Order in the German Military, 1918–1945,” in Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Karen Hagemann and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2002), 233–254, here 245.
67. Historians Jörg Baberowski and Klaus Jochen Arnold have both presented this as an explanation for German crimes in the east and erroneously suggested that external factors supposedly beyond individual soldiers’ control account for the Wehrmacht’s war of annihilation. See Jörg Baberowski, “Kriege in staatsfernen Räumen: Rußland und die Sowjetunion 1905–1950,” in Formen des Krieges. Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Dietrich Beyrau, Michael Hochgeschwender, and Dieter Langewiesche (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007), 291–309; Klaus Jochen Arnold, Die Wehrmacht und die Besatzungspolitik in den besetzten Gebieten der Sowjetunion. Kriegführung und Radikalisierung im “Unternehmen Barbarossa” (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2005). In response to this see Alex J. Kay, “A ‘War in a Region beyond State Control’? The German-Soviet War, 1941–1944,” War in History 18, no. 1 (January 2011): 109–122.
68. Theo J. Schulte, “The German Soldier in Occupied Russia,” in A Time to Kill: The Soldier’s Experience of War in the West 1939–1945, ed. Paul Addison and Angus Calder (London: Pimlico, 1997), 274–283, here 278.
69. Wolfram Wette, Die Wehrmacht. Feindbilder, Vernichtungskrieg, Legenden (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2002), 158.
70. Stephen G. Fritz, Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky), 13.
71. Richard Holmes, Firing Line (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985), 47.
72. Wette, Die Wehrmacht, 158–159.
73. Rutherford, Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 7.
74. Hartmann, Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg, 661.
75. Gerhard Paul, “Lemberg ’41. Bilder der Gewalt—Bilder als Gewalt—Gewalt an Bildern,” in Naziverbrechen. Täter, Taten, Bewältigungsversuche, ed. Martin Cüppers, Jürgen Matthäus, and Andrej Angrick (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2013), 191–212, here 205–208 (quote: 205). See also Petra Bopp, “Images of Violence in Wehrmacht Soldiers’ Private Photo Albums,” in Violence and Visibility in Modern History, ed. Jürgen Martschukat and Silvan Niedermeier (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 181–197; Bernd Hüppauf, “Emptying the Gaze: Framing Violence through the Viewfinder,” in War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II 1941–1944, ed. Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006), 345–377.
76. Paul, “Lemberg ’41,” 207.
77. Welzer, Täter, 205–206. See also Paul, “Lemberg ’41,” 205–206, citing the example of sexual voyeurism as a form of approval of what is taking place.
78. See the many personal testimonies in the documentary film directed by Ruth Beckermann, Jenseits des Krieges (Austria: Josef Aichholzer Filmproduktion, 1996).
79. Hannes Heer, ed., Vernichtungskrieg, Verbrechen der Wehrmacht, 1941–1944. Ausstellungskatalog (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1996). See also the discussion in Michael Verhoeven’s documentary film Der unbekannte Soldat (Germany: Studiocanal, 2007).
80. Schulte, “The German Soldier in Occupied Russia,” 275. On “execution tourism” see also Römer, Kameraden, 399–402.
81. As cited in Karel C. Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger. Soviet Propaganda during World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 123.
82. See Römer, Kameraden, 21–25.
83. Römer, Kameraden, 41–42.
84. On this see Römer, Kameraden, Chapter III, “Ideologie” (60–110), esp. 64, 70, 73–74, and 110.
85. Such a pragmatic rationale is also highlighted in Rutherford, Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front.
86. See Römer, Kameraden, Chapter III, “Ideologie” (60–110), esp. 64, 70, 73–74, and 110. See also the discussion of ideological indoctrination in Browning, Ordinary Men, 176–184.
87. Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, Soldaten. Protokolle vom Kämpfen, Töten und Sterben (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2011), esp. 14–15, 17, and 393: “Diese Soldaten sind keine “Weltanschauungskrieger”, sondern meist völlig unpolitisch” (393).
88. Johannes Hürter, “Vorwort,” in Felix Römer, Kameraden. Die Wehrmacht von innen (Munich: Piper, 2012), 9–15, here 12–13. See also the points made in MacGregor Knox, Review of Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, Soldaten. Protokolle vom Kämpfen, Töten und Sterben, in sehepunkte. Rezensionsjournal für die Geschichtswissenschaften 12, no. 3 (March 15, 2012), http://www.sehepunkte.de/2012/03/19936.html (last accessed on May 8, 2017).
89. See Römer, Kameraden, 81–82.
90. On this and the following see Walter Manoschek, “‘Wo der Partisan ist, ist der Jude, und wo der Jude ist, ist der Partisan.’ Die Wehrmacht und die Shoah,” in Täter der Shoah. Fanatische Nationalsozialisten oder ganz normale Deutsche?, ed. Gerhard Paul (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002), 167–185, here 177–178. The results of the survey can be found in Josef Schwarz, Christian W. Haerpfer, Peter Malina, and Gustav Spann, “Österreicher im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Bewußtseinsstand von österreichischen Soldaten in der deutschen Wehrmacht 1938–1945” (unpublished final report for the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research, Vienna, 1993).
91. Manoschek, “‘Wo der Partisan ist, ist der Jude’,” 178.
92. Reese, Mir selber seltsam fremd, 242–243: “Die Juden ermordet, / als brüllende Horde / nach Rußland marschiert, / die Menschen geknebelt, / im Blute gesäbelt, / vom Clowne geführt, / sind wir die Gesandten / des allwärts Bekannten / und waten in Blut. / Wir tragen die Fahnen / der arischen Ahnen: / sie stehen uns gut.”
93. Ibid., 9: “Ich breche unter dieser Schuld zusammen—und saufe!”