Abstract
Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, Soldaten: Protokolle von Kämpfen, Töten und Sterben, Frankfurt, Fischer, 2011; 528 pp.; £18.94 hbk; ISBN 9783100894342
In this fascinating book, Neitzel and Welzer analyse secretly recorded protocols of the discussions among German prisoners of war in Britain (Trent Park) and the United States (Fort Hunt); these pile up to tens of thousands of pages. Accessible only since 1996, the documents allow the authors to ‘literally hear the soldiers talk’ and to ‘see them gesticulate and debate’ (8). The soldiers’ stories will both surprise and instruct readers. The tendency of recent research has been to emphasize Germany’s ‘machinery of destruction’, which in fact caused the deaths of more than fifty million people, civilians as well as soldiers (13). However Neitzel and Welzer argue that Wehrmacht soldiers did not, on the whole, consider themselves as conducting an unprecedented campaign of destruction or even a bitter race war. They did not fight with abstract notions of a ‘Jewish world conspiracy’, ‘bolshevik subhumanity’, or even the ‘National Socialist People’s Community’ in their heads (393). ‘It is time’, the authors contend with dramatic flourish, ‘to put an end to the overestimation of the ideological’ (394). In their view, ‘it is the shift of the frame of reference from a civilian context to that of war that is the decisive factor, more important than any world view, predisposition or ideological indoctrination’, a point Welzer stressed in his earlier ground-breaking study, Täter: Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden (Fischer, Frankfurt, 2006). To bolster their argument about the importance of circumstance and institutional context, the authors offer instructive comparisons to the American wars in Vietnam and Iraq.
According to Neitzel and Welzer, ideology explains the willingness of states to make war but not the readiness of soldiers to take lives or commit war crimes. The business of war is to kill the enemy, and the enemy is defined as those individuals whom soldiers perceive to be dangerous, a distinction that does not stop at the boundaries of gender or age. Indeed, the authors point out, in Vietnam the Viet Cong were defined as those who were both dead and Vietnamese. Although the vast majority of soldiers knew a great many details about the ‘final solution’, Jews were simply not at the center of their thoughts, which concentrated on ‘the next home leave, what one could “requisition”, and where one could have fun’ (119). If soldiers showed little fluency in speaking ‘Nazi’, they were also not apt to apply the older values or moral lessons of their upbringing. Nazis as well as anti-Nazis internalized the norms of war in similar ways; whether one was Protestant or Catholic, Austrian or German, an academic or not made very little difference in explaining the actions of soldiers or in their apprehension of their behavior. Although there were both more and less willing killers, and most soldiers wanted to regard themselves as less willing, the great majority accepted as given the horrifying world of violence. As soldiers traded war stories, they showed very little surprise, although the authors do not consider the degree to which this display of unsentimentality might be performative.
What accounts for the adaptation to and application of extraordinary violence? Neitzel and Welzer discount the notion of brutalization since Luftwaffe pilots and Wehrmacht ‘Landser’ displayed enormous, even gratuitous violence in Poland already in 1939. They even qualify the highly influential hypothesis of group conformity because, in the case of the extraordinary actions against Jews, for example, the distinctions that soldiers made between brutal or correct or passive behavior allowed ‘each participant to find his place in the general context of criminal activity without having to make a moral calculation that he was taking part in something wrong’ (125). In other words, it was precisely the differentiations within the group that facilitated the killing in general. That the killing of Jews was considered extraordinary is confirmed by the widespread fear of the punishment that the Allies would mete out in the event the Germans lost the war. In other less extraordinary situations, however, the need and the will to fortify the coherence of the military unit proved compelling. ‘Total institutions’ such as the military, the authors explain, ‘establish a specific form of socialization in which group norms and group constraints have greater influence on the individual than they would in normal social situations simply because there is no alternative to the reference group of comrades to which one belongs, even if one has not chosen it freely’ (31). Therefore, they argue, moral questions about the behavior of soldiers often miss the mark. Moral judgments come into play ‘when the individual’s sphere of action includes tangible alternatives which are then not chosen’ (34). In the end, what made members of the Wehrmacht such effective and un-self-reflective killers was that, as soldiers, they completely identified with military values: the friend/foe distinctions of war, the duty to perform ‘good work’, the desire to receive recognition for their combat roles (the Germans developed the most elaborate system of military honors among the belligerents in the Second World War), and the willingness to fight to the bitter end. All of this, Neitzel and Welzer emphasize, did not make German soldiers into Nazis; on the contrary, it made them very much like the combatants in all the armies.
And yet, the authors recognize that German military values were profoundly influenced by the post-First World War doctrines of ‘total war’ and hardened and sharpened by the new racial thinking of the National Socialist state. The broad acceptance of racial hierarchies and of the grass-roots practices of exclusion, which worked themselves into everyday life with astonishing speed in the years after 1933, shredded empathy and pity for outsiders. The ability to make hard distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the face of civilians is perhaps not the function of explicit ideological conviction, but it certainly was an ideological or political effect of which German soldiers were conscious. The authors try too hard to show that the battlefield violence was not specifically ‘Nazi’. They do this because they are astonished at the ability of individuals in a wide variety of war conditions to adjust to the conditions of extraordinary violence, to kill civilians as partisans, and to count women and children in the ranks of partisans, all of which has lessons for the present day. However, both Neitzel and Welzer make clear that the murder of Soviet prisoners of war and of Jewish civilians was specifically National Socialist. And although some soldiers took on less active roles, they remained integral parts of what can only be called ‘the machinery of destruction’.
University of Illinois