Was the Wehrmacht Steeped in “Eliminationist Antisemitism”?

Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying is a historian’s dream. “The Secret World War II Transcripts of German POWs,” as the subtitle reads, were declassified in recent years by the National Archives of both Great Britain and the United States. Soldaten, written by two prominent Germans—historian  Sonke Neitzel and social psychologist Harald Welzer—and published in English in September 2012 provides the reader with an opportunityto be a fly on the wall of history. It allows her to listen in as imprisoned Wehrmacht soldiers speak with each other. The authors explain that at facilities for German staff officers in Trent Park, London and Fort Hunt, Virginia, among others, POWs were taped in hopes of gleaning intelligence.

However, the reader can’t help but wonder if, even though the technology was young, whether the POWs suspected their conversations were being monitored.To keep that question from tugging at the edge of the reader’s mind through the course of reading Soldaten, it might have been advisable for Neitzel and Welzer to have answered that question at the beginning of the book rather than at the end, as they did. That said, this reviewer is unable to find further fault with Soldaten.

The authors ultimately explain that, even though the Wehrmacht command warned its officers to be discrete in captivity, most of the POWs “forgot all about these warnings and prattled on heedlessly with comrades about their military experiences.” They speculate that the “need to share their thoughts with comrades was greater than the dictates of prudence.”

Also, the POWs may have figured that their commanding officers were unlikely to get wind of their indiscretions or they man have had forebodings about a Third Reich defeat, in which case their loose lips were of no consequence to a ship already sunk. In any event, their nonchalance about being taped is to all our benefits. Unfortunately their indifference to the Third Reich’s atrocities was to no one’s benefit, least of all Jews and the other citizens of Eastern Europe and the Baltics.

On the surface, Soldaten seems to support Daniel Goldhagen’s controversial conclusion in Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust as summer up by Neitzel and Welzer

Today’s conventional wisdom is that Wehrmacht soldiers were part of a gigantic apparatus of annihilation and thus were participants in, if not executioners of, unparalleled mass murder. There is no doubt that the Wehrmacht was involved in criminal acts, from the killing of civilians to the systematic murder of Jewish men, women, and children. … [But most] of the solders are scarcely interested in ideology, politics, world orders, and anything of that nature. They wage war not out of conviction, but because they are soldiers, and fighting is their job.

In fact, the POWs frequently talked shop, especially aircraft, missiles, and explosives. They assessed the equipment with which they’d been supplied and speculated about what the Third Reich might be developing to turn the tide of the war in Germany’s favor. Conspicuously absent fromthe discussionwas why they were fighting. As with most soldiers, they seemed to view such matters as above their pay grade.

But, as with most workers, period, they weren’t afraid to second-guess their superiors’ strategies and tactics. This included mass killing, though, in seeming support of Goldhagen’s ” elimination is  antisemitism” thesis, those POWs taped—except for one!—never objected to it on moral grounds. The following dialogue reveals the tenor of their complaints.

Aue: Perhaps we didn’t always do right in killing Jews in masses in the East.

Schneider: It was undoubtedly a mistake. Well, not so much a mistake as un-diplomatic.

Another POW said of mass killing: “They even filmed it and the films, of course, have got abroad; it always leaks out somehow … Sometime the world will take revenge for that.”

And another: “No telling what’s going to happen to us.”

In other words, many POWs objected to mass killing because it would invite reprisal, including war-crime trials, against Germany. But why did they remaininured to the suffering of noncombatants, especially Jews? The authors cite the Third Reich’s success in establishing a climate of submission and abject obeisance in Germany’s citizens, as well as the military tradition that Germany instituted in the preceding century. Also, the Third Reich

… offered concrete advantages … such as better career opportunities. … It was a new and unfamiliar feeling to belong, inalienably and by law, to an exclusive racial elite, of which others, equally inalienably, could never become part.

For his part, Goldhagen maintained that an “eliminationist anti-Semitism” was central to the German psyche. Neitzel and Welzer agree that depriving Jews of their rights and deporting them was received wisdom tomost Germans. But, at least to the members of the Wehrmacht sampled, killing them wasn’t sine qua non.

In the end, according to Neitzel and Welzer, though, the main reason that POWs failed to object to mass killings on moral grounds is that they accepted the practice as part and parcel of total war. No doubt fancying themselves realists—not to mention macho—they wished to remain credible to their brethren.

I would be remiss if I failed to address another cause, one that the authors no doubt felt was beyond the scope of their investigations: the harsh childrearing practices prevalent in Germany and Austria in the years leading up to the war. But, that’s better explained by the dean of psychohistory, Lloyd deMause, in, by way of introduction, his 2005 speech “The Childhood Origins of the Holocaust.”

In the end Soldatenis not just a book about the Third Reich and the Wehrmacht, but about all warring states and their militaries. The taped POWs sound less different from soldiers in other wars than like them.

It’s currently popular to play the “counterfactual” game. Let’s try one. It wasn’t long after Pearl Harbor that American hostility toward the Japanese reached a fever pitch. Japan conducted war against the Allies with the same pitilessness it did against China. (Of course, the Allies responded in kind with the conventional bombing of more than sixty Tokyo cities and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) You have only to read John Dower’s classic War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War to understand the extent of the enmity of Americans toward Japan.

To continue with our game, recall that the United States built internment camps for 100,000 Japanese-Americans in the United States. At the same time, it attempted to treat Japanese POWs in accordance with the Geneva Convention, in hopes that the Japanese would discontinue torturing Allied POWs and working them, often to their death, in factories, ship yards, and mines. Even though the Japanese failed to reciprocate, the United States would never countenance treating Japanese POWs with wholesale savagery. Nor would US civic and religious groups greet such treatment with anything less than cries of outrage. But, for the sake of argument, imagine that, as the Germans did Jews, the Allies instituted a program for the extermination of Japanese soldiers in POW camps in Australia and New Zealand.

How would Allied soldiers in the Pacific Theater react? Bear in mind that the soldiers of the Wehrmacht weren’t subject to battle atrocities and mistreatment as POWs until they invaded Russia. Nor, arguably, were they motivated by hatred of the Jews, towards whom their feelings might better be described as contempt. Is it such a stretch then to imagine that Allied soldiers, running on far more rage than the Wehrmacht, would raise few objections to the systematic killing of Japanese POWs (as opposed to Japanese civilians)?

In fact, if American and British POW officers were taped instead of tortured for intelligence by the Japanese, their conversations might have mirrored those of Wehrmacht officers taped by the Allies. Rather than question the inhumane policies of their states, their reservations would likely have been confined to how unprofessional the practice was and how it left them open to retribution at the hands of the enemy or in an international court.

Neitzel and Welzerconclude, “In our view, the decisive factor in the atrocities discussed in this book was a general realignment from a civilian to a wartime frame of reference. It is more significant than all issues of worldview, disposition, and ideology.”

In other words—and this is by no means an excuse for the soldiers of the Wehrmacht—their compliance with the Third Reich’s barbaric policies might be less a product of prejudice than of the climate of total war.

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