Prologue: A Brief History of the Wehrmacht

The men featured in this book served a war machine that accomplished some of the most successful feats in military history. Yet, to understand fully what these soldiers experienced, the history of the Wehrmacht must first be briefly explored.

In 1933, when Hitler took power, the German army numbered 100,000 men. In 1935, Hitler reintroduced the draft and did away with the Versailles Treaty, which was signed by the Allies at the end of World War I and restricted Germany’s military. Many throughout the country praised Hitler’s move and supported his desire for a stronger military. By 1945, nearly 18 million had gone through the ranks of Germany’s military forces and they had devastated most of Europe.¹

Hitler achieved amazing diplomatic successes using the Wehrmacht by remilitarizing the Rhineland in 1936 and integrating Austria and the Sudetenland into Germany in 1938 without war, a “triumph without bloodshed.” He marched into these regions and declared them part of the German nation without firing a shot. Such achievements provided Hitler with “almost legendary standing” amongst the population. General Alfred Jodl, chief of military operations and Hitler’s principal military advisor, said, “The genius of the Führer and his determination not to shun even a world war have again achieved victory without the use of force. One hopes that the incredulous, the weak, and the doubters have been converted, and will remain so.”² The Wehrmacht fell under the spell of the Austrian private.

In the end, Hitler wanted to use his military the traditional way—by killing the enemy. His armed forces had grown from 100,000 in 1935 to 3.7 million in 1939.³ And in 1939, his military started a major campaign of violence and destruction.

On 1 September 1939, Hitler triggered World War II by invading Poland. A few weeks into the campaign, Hitler sensed that he soon would achieve victory and exclaimed to an excited crowd at Danzig that “Almighty God” had blessed “our arms” with success. Poland would fall by the end of September. After securing his eastern border by defeating Poland, he turned his attention toward the west and attacked Norway and Denmark on 9 April 1940 and quickly occupied them. One month later on 10 May, Hitler invaded the Low Countries and France, conquering them in a few weeks. Although outnumbered and using inferior tanks, the Germans defeated the Allies in only a few weeks because the Allies depended on a World War I strategy of positional warfare that proved wholly inadequate to meet the new Blitzkrieg method of attack. General Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the Armed Forces High Command, declared Hitler in June the greatest military commander ever.⁴

The German population celebrated this quick and unexpected victory over the Allies in the west. Hitler’s success made German officers more trusting of him and less critical of Nazism. Achieving such victories allowed Hitler to reach the apex of his popularity. “It has been suggested that at the peak of his popularity nine Germans in ten were ‘Hitler supporters, Führer believers.’”⁵ Clearly, many were drunk with the success of the Nazis.

Once securing his western border, Hitler paid hardly any attention to conquering England, thinking it would pose little threat to his next campaign against his arch foe, Stalin. Yes, he allowed his Luftwaffe to engage in a large air battle over the skies of Great Britain, but Hitler’s true focus zoomed in on Russia.

The Soviet Union represented for Hitler “his object of conquest, the capstone of his efforts to establish the Third Reich as a racist Continental empire.” This was indeed Hitler’s main enemy. As he wrote in Mein Kampf, leaders of Russia “are common blood-stained criminals” and “are the scum of humanity.” “The fight against Jewish world Bolshevization requires a clear attitude toward Soviet Russia. You cannot drive out the Devil with Beelzebub.” He believed that 80 percent of the Soviet leaders were Jews, that they threatened to destroy civilization, and that he must act against this “pathetic country” quickly before it attacked Germany. He also believed that the Soviet military offered no real threat, saying that its “Armed Forces are like a headless colossus with feet of clay.”⁶

images — Hitler reviews his victorious troops in the streets of Warsaw on 5 October 1939. This photograph was taken by the German military. (Photo credit: U.S. National Archives)

And many Germans indeed believed Russia threatened their way of life and Western culture.⁷ Countless Mischlinge related that although they did not agree with Hitler’s racial policies, they definitely felt that the world should rise up and defeat the Communists.

In order to protect his southern flank before invading Russia and to bail out Mussolini from his disastrous campaign against the Greeks, Hitler invaded Yugoslavia and Greece in May 1941. After successfully defeating these two countries, he launched the largest invasion in world history when he attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Over 4 million men, mostly German but also soldiers of countries allied with Germany, including Hungary, Finland, Italy, and Romania, poured across the Soviet Union’s eastern border. The front spanned 1,500 miles and, after a few months of conflict, extended in depth to over 600 miles. Although most soldiers who “broke into Russia in June 1941” did so without “enthusiasm,” the previous years of success gave them “a quiet confidence in victory.”⁸ Hitler would once again, they felt, lead them to triumph.

By this time, the Germans had become accustomed to one victory after the other. Even church leaders got behind Hitler with this invasion and praised him. Protestant clerics sent Hitler the following telegram on 30 June 1941:

You, my Führer, have banished the Bolshevik menace from our own land, and now summon our nation, and the nations of Europe, to a decisive passage of arms against the mortal enemy of all order and all western-Christian civilization. The German nation, including all its Christian members, thanks you for this deed. The German Protestant Church accompanies you in all its prayers, and is with our incomparable soldiery who are now using mighty blows to eradicate the source of this pestilence, so that a new order will arise under your leadership.⁹

And sure enough, Hitler dealt the Soviet Union in 1941 one mighty “blow” after the other and many felt Russia would quickly collapse.

Only a few months into the campaign, after taking over most of western Russia and millions of Russian prisoners, Hitler’s conquest seemed complete. Chief of the army’s General Staff, Franz Halder, “noted in his diary that: ‘the Russian campaign had been won in the space of two weeks.’”¹⁰ This was an exaggeration on Halder’s part, but the Wehrmacht accomplishments seemed to indicate that Russia would soon fall to its knees. The little country of Germany had taken over the equivalent geographic area of half the United States.

Hitler conducted the war against Russia without any regard to international law or ethics. General Halder observed that “the thing that most impressed me about Hitler was the complete absence of any ethical or moral obligation.” And in keeping with his obsession with the Jewish danger, Hitler said in January 1942, still thinking Russia was defeated, “The war will not end as the Jews imagine it will, namely with the up-rooting of the Aryans, but the result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews.” A few months later, Goebbels wrote in his diary, “The prophecy which the Fuehrer made about [the Jews] . . . is beginning to come true in a most terrible manner. One must not be sentimental in these matters. If we did not fight the Jews, they would destroy us. It’s a life-and-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus.” Then in September 1942, Hitler repeated himself, saying, “I said that if Jewry started this war in order to overcome the Aryan people, then it would not be the Aryans but the Jews who would be exterminated. The Jews laughed at my prophecies. I doubt if they are laughing now.”¹¹ Hitler’s military aims included this program of extermination. With this knowledge, the Mischlinge’s service is even more tragic.

In addition to Hitler’s conquest of Europe, he conquered lands in Africa. His Afrika Korps in 1941 and early 1942 under Field Marshal Erwin Rommel wreaked havoc with the British forces in Libya. Hitler had sent his forces there to once again rescue Mussolini’s forces from defeat. It appeared that Hitler would soon rule all of Europe and even parts of northern Africa. A few German generals believed in July 1941 that the “war was as good as over.” As historian Michael Geyer wrote, by late fall 1941, “Everybody agreed that the war was virtually won, and so it was, at least in the eyes of almost all—and not just German—observers.” Hitler also conducted this war to implement his plan for a reordered world. “National Socialist war was war for the sake of social reconstruction through the destruction of conquered societies.”¹² In other words, Hitler truly believed he was transforming the world for the better by killing the people he deemed inferior and destroying nations he thought weak.

Yet, Hitler’s military glory was short-lived. His armies quickly got bogged down in the heavy fall rains and winter cold of Mother Russia.¹³ The Nazis encountered their first major loss of territory outside of Moscow in December 1941. Even though they had some local successes during the summer and fall of 1942 with the attack on Stalingrad, the tide turned decisively against the Germans. The supplies the Soviet Union received from the United States, the tenacity and overwhelming numbers of the Russian fighting machine, and the brutal winter of 1941–1942 all started to spell disaster for Germany by 1943. The defeat at Stalingrad in the winter of 1943 “shocked” the German nation. It marked the beginning of the end for Hitler.¹⁴ As Winston Churchill said in 1944, “It was the Russians who ‘tore out the guts of the German Army.’”¹⁵

In the summer of 1944, the Russians pushed the Germans back to the borders of the Reich, and the United States and Britain launched one of the largest amphibious landings in history at Normandy on 6 June. Although the Allies had split Germany in half and decimated its army and navy, it was only in April 1945 when its leader, Hitler, committed suicide that Germany surrendered.

The men described in this book took part in almost every campaign during World War II in the European, Atlantic, and African theaters of operation. Many experienced combat for several months straight, if not for years on end. Their stories illuminate the difficult situation they found themselves in, serving a nation hostile to them as racially inferior beings. Several did so while serving in units deployed more widely and in constant combat than any other modern armed force has experienced. “For the Landser, combat consisted of a thousand small battles, a daily struggle for existence amid terrible confusion, fear, and suffering. Combat meant fighting in small groups, in sinister blackness or in cold, lonely bunkers, in crowded houses from room to room, on windswept steppes against steel monsters, with each unit and each man—confused men with a need for one another—fighting for their lives, longing to escape their fate, leaving a trail of torn, mutilated, and dead flesh in their wake.”¹⁶

It was against this backdrop that the Mischlinge found themselves serving a nation that was conducting a nightmarish policy of “racial” extermination beyond these men’s control or understanding. Half-Jew Richard Reiss said that having served, he felt “guilty, but logically I had no other choice. But I now think I did something I shouldn’t have done . . . We were just not allowed to think under Hitler.” There can be a “hermetically sealed” quality about studying war and the Third Reich at a distance, without feeling any of war’s discomforts or any of the fear of living under a totalitarian state. Another German soldier, Guy Sajer, wrote,

Too many people learn about war with no inconvenience to themselves. They read about Verdun or Stalingrad without comprehension, sitting in a comfortable armchair, with their feet beside the fire, preparing to go about their business the next day, as usual. One should really read such accounts under compulsion, in discomfort, considering oneself fortunate not to be describing the events in a letter home, writing from a hole in the mud. One should read about war in the worst circumstances, when everything is going badly, remembering that the torments of peace are trivial and not worth any white hairs. Nothing is really serious in the tranquility of peace; only an idiot could be really disturbed by a question of salary. One should read about war standing up, late at night, when one is tired, as I am writing about it now, at dawn, while my asthma attack wears off. And even now, in my sleepless exhaustion, how gentle and easy peace seems.¹⁷

Although Sajer’s request for a reader to undergo war’s discomfort is unrealistic, perhaps it will help the reader understand that what these men suffered and lived through goes well beyond what most experience in life. These men underwent such pain and anguish that few today can comprehend their mindset and behavior.

Often we can explain away what we see in movies as make-believe, but the decisions and death that surrounded these men in war were real and full of tragedy and pain. “The Landser lived in a complex world, one both physically unstable and emotionally chaotic.”¹⁸ For most, it represented the high-water mark of their lives, even though death threatened them from many sides. It seems that war makes one appreciate life more for having experienced that time of extreme hardship, compared with the “normal” life which, for a combat veteran, can seem so mundane and superficial. Through exploring the dramatic lives of several Mischlinge and Jews in Hitler’s Wehrmacht, this book not only describes the many aspects of Nazi racial doctrine and practice, but also brings to life what it was like to serve in one of the most deadly war machines of all times controlled by one of the most evil men of history.