The 'ordinary' soldiers of the Wehrmacht

It has got me thinking, after so many almost-apologetical posts on the Waffen SS and the 'ordinary' German men who 'fought for their country', not only the philosophical problems of all that, but historical too.

Years ago, when I first joined this forum as a know-it-all brat, I believed in the good-Army/bad-SS myth. People in this forum, thorough reasearch and time got me straight. But, just as I was reading the other day on Robin Lumsden's Himmler's Black Order, the men of the Einsatzkommandos of the East, responsible for over one million murders in 1941 alone, were:

• 34% from the Waffen SS
• 28% from the Wehrmacht
• 22% from the Ordnungpolizei
• 9% from Gestapo
• 4% from Kripo
• 3% from SD

Then, I felt that I should post the links to this excellent documentary, dedicated to the crimes of the German Army:

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI


Regards.

 

I am not sure what you are trying to say? Are you trying to say that the average man of the Heer was just as likely a criminal? I dont think I really like the thread title as how it goes along with the post it sort of feels like a trolling point.

I must say though that that picture is quite distubing. Especially the facial expression of the officer on our left.

On another note: The 28% for the Heer might be including the Einsatzgruppen brigades. Which worked as Army Police, military Police, ethnic cleansing and so on. That should not be confused with the regular Heer units. The Einsatz were attached, not part of them.

My Opinion anyhow.

 

Just a note: Those are nco's not officers.

 

While there is no argument that the German's have committed atrocities, that does not mean that all Germans committed such crimes. Also, I would be interested to see the percentage figures of those who have committed some kind of atrocity compared to the percentage of those who did not.

Every nation who fought in the war committed some sort of atrocity and pretty much due to vengence. It is the way of war. I just do not buy into the idea that every German was evil or even every Waffen SS soldier. One must understand the organization of the Waffen SS to understand what I mean by that. Some of the Waffen SS soldiers were indeed drafted so it was not a volunteer force. Not all Waffen SS soldiers were the stereotype fanatical anti-semtic zealot. To say each one is guilty is just stereotyping and that means we have learned absolutely nothing and are doomed to repeat history.

 

Stereotyping is just too easy, and why it exists. My step-Mother grew up in the Bergen Belsen area (her father was a dairy farmer), and she was only 12 or 13 at the end of the war. Not a nicer person you will ever find, and yet she was a "Nazi" because she joined the youth group for females, and said she enjoyed the companionship in the group.

Her father sold his products to the camps, and he always told her that the reason the things smelled so bad was because it was full of those filthy Russian pigs, and nothing could be less clean. What did she know, she was a pre-teen.

Unless one was there, one cannot judge why anyone did anything under the Nazi regime. Some did what they did because it was something they believed in, some co-operated because it was the "path of least resistance", some joined the "party" because it was required for their own existance, but never really believed in it. Far too complicated an issue to just lable "this or that", or "this and not that".

 

I agree that the Wehr-good/SS-bad formula is too simple to be of any real use. Do wonder what the original source for the stats are though, are they accredited?

 

Friedrich;
Here is a review of a book on that very subject; Hitler's Willing Executioners: A Review
And yes it does seem that many in the regular Wehrmacht were routinely committing atrocities against civilians. Why? Well it seems that the author is citing Central European anti semitism as the cause... Without having read the book I would say that this is not a wholly satisfactory explanation. If the author does not also factor in the overwhelming and mind destroying power of the totalitarian state- coupled with the bloodiest war in the history of the world-he has missed the mark.
I guess I will have to read the book.
JeffinMNUSA

 

Well said. I completely concur with your opinion on this and was about to say something to the matter myself. Reps are on the way.

 

Very well said Ike--I completely agree with every word. I know stories of Americans and British soldiers who ""didn't take prisoners"" shooting surrendering German soldiers for one reason or another and not wanting to bother with having to watch and to feed them-so they simply took care of the problem by shooting them and left them lying where they were shot.

A great case in point-is my ex roommates Father who was in an American Tank Destroyer unit. His Father admitted a few times about not wanting to be "bothered" with taking prisoners-so they didn't. They probably had what they thought were good reasons for not doing so-but they still committed a crime by shooting them out of hand.

 

Well said Clint-I completely agree.

 

I think compounding the problem for the Wehrmacht is that while brutality and criminal activity happens in every army at war time, the command decisions made by the Wehrmacht higher ups encouraged instead of punished those behaviors and that might be a factor as important as the widespread racism or the success of Nazisim in corrupting German society. Remeber, the Barbarossa Decree in May already suspended military jurisprudence in the East so that no military prosecutor is obliged to prosecute a crime as long as the victim was a Russian or Soviet citizen.

 

I don't get the point, what are we attempting to say here ?
That the good-Army/bad-SS is simplistic and that if we look at individual episodes of atrocities we may sometimes find Heer not SS involved?
I think we can all agree on that, the evidence is overwhelming, but we should not "loose sight of the forest for the trees". The point is that the SS was a racist political organisation at it's core while the Heer was a military one and like all military based on discipline, the average level of acceptance of the Nazi hideology and average "mindset" of the two organisations are different and the likelyhood that a Heer unit would commit atrocities was a lot lower than for an SS one and more dependent on the behaviour of the enemy than on a racist attitude that considered enemies as "sub-humans".
When facing the western allies the beheaviour of Heer units was generally acceptable, there were excesses but the same can be said for all armies and as far as I know they were limited if horrible episodes.
On the eastern front, and I suspect the Balkans as well, the general level of brutality was much higher, but again it was common to all combattants, neither the soviets nor partisans were great believers in pampering prisoners or considering civilians "off limits".

 

TOS;
You are absolutely correct in the main-and it is possible that the Red Army was during certain phases even worse than the Wehrmacht. But the Jews were a special case and their extermination was Hitler's pet project and passion. How many brutal roundups of Jewish civilians were carried out by Wehrmacht troops under orders? Quite a few it would seem. How many murders were committed under the "open season on Jews and commissars" order? Much of Axis society was caught up in this perfect storm of ideological insanity, and it is logical to expect that many in the Wehrmacht were also effected.
JeffinMNUSA
PS. And anyone anywhere in Eastern Europe at that time who could be perceived as "an intellectual" had some very poor prospects of survival, cursed as the place was by Hitler and Stalin.
PSS. And the mass murder of civilians in order to break an enemy's will to resist was NOT a strategy unique to the totalitarian powers (ie. Dresden and Hiroshima). It is generally considered a mistake in this day and age.

 

TOS, I believe that we are all in agreement and do not think anyone is saying otherwise.

 

Most of the heer had little to no knowledge of the concentraion camps. Thse who did were appaled by them. Most of the Heer who participated in Jew roundups didn't know where they were going. hitler kept most of it secret so his army wont be demorilized knowing that they were supporting murder of innocents.

 

I saw, over the weekend, the 'WWII In Color: Why We Fight' documentary and I think it is important to share what I saw/heard while watching that show. It focused mainly on the Americans, but also compared them to rest of the Allies and the Axis soldiers.

Something like 68% of American Soldiers were drafted. They did not want to fight in the war (otherwise they would have volunteered) so the Army had to go to great lengths to (basically) brainwash them into becoming killing machines, which is what a soldier is...this is where you get all the propaganda about the Japanese being 'monkeys' and 'subhuman/inferior' etc. If you can convince the solider that the enemy is not a human, they will find it easier to pull the trigger.

One soldiers own words (written in a diary) compared 'dead japanese' to being no better then 'dead pigs' etc - he no longer saw them as being human. Of course, not everyone saw them this way and for many soldiers it became a kill-or-be-killed type of situation.

But again, they were trained to kill, and every ounce of their survival on the front lines became about killing. It was hard for many of them to switch that 'kill instinct' off when the enemy began to surrender to them.

For instance, a German Sniper shoots 5 of your buddies, then comes out with arms raised to surrender - is your first instinct to let him surrender or put a few holes in his body for all the pain, fear, suffering and death he has caused you and your mates? When you're trained to kill, its hard to turn off that 'Kill kill Kill' mentality

A British Soldier wrote a poem (that i do not have access to, remember the name, or anything) that sums it up pretty well. He talks about how he is not there, that the person doing the fighting and the killing is not him. His real self has gone away and is just along for the ride in his body. Think of it like an out-of-body experience - thats what the fighting did to him - it made his sensible side go away.

Your average soldier has been trained to kill and in the heat of combat or its aftermath, can you expect them to do anything but kill? Its the training thats been drilled into their head from Day 1 to kill the enemy.

True, the Germans committed genocide against the Jews, but not every soldier was involved in that. Most were the equivalent of your typical GI, not exactly knowing why they are fighting or believing in it, but doing it because they have no choice.

 

I would like to raise some questions on the non-complicity or ignorance of ordinary German troops of war crimes, as the German Army's guideline on POWs and on treatment of civlians were sufficiently harsh that the control exerted over the soldiers' behavior was very weak. I am not arguing that the average German soldiers were monsters, as there is no way one or the other that any assertion to this or that effect can be possitively proven as a historical fact. What can be said is that war is a brutalizing experience and in the German Army there was effectively little or no "breaks" with which to restrain the soldiers and that would, in my personal judgement at least, amplify the level of brutality with which average German soldiers lashed out at non-combatants and prisoners. The Western Allies had to use a crash course propaganda to convince their soldiers to kill the "evil enemy". By 1941 many German soldiers grew up on the propaganda, and after that year the high attrition rate meant that officers raised on a different social system, the Weimar democracy, would be increasingly rare. Omer Bartov's study on the Heer suggests that the social classes most susceptible to Nationalist Socialist ideology, the lower middle class, also happened to be the ones that supplied the backbone of the German reserve officer pool and as such became the predominant presence of the much decimated German officer corps.

I would also like to ask An Evil Guy how excactly did he arrive to the conclusions that he stated, since this goes against the grain of my experience researching the topic. At least in the case of General Richenau and Hoepener's troops, it seems that the objective of eliminating the Jews in tote was made abundantly clear to the troops, and that those units involved in rounding up Jewish civilians herded the victims all the way from the ghettoes to the killing sites so that there was little doubt as to their knowledge of what exactly was going to happen to the Jews once they were lined up in the ditch yonder. One of the things that was consistent in the historiography and primary documentation of the massacres in the East was that survivors recalled being ruthlessly beaten and terrified by the German troops assigned to herd them; the experience was often compared to being made to run a gauntlet of blows, from boots and riflebutts, while constantly being jeered at by the German soldiers and the barked at by the guard dogs. Looking at the Jaeger Report composed by an Einsatzgruppe, it would appear that such operations would kill upwards to tens of thousands in a matter of days. Could it be maintained within the realm of reasonable doubt that the troops could be ignorant of the killings? I have my doubts.

It is also reliably documented that the Germany Army killed POWs en masse in earnest as soon as the troops crossed the border, as a German Panzer Corps commander, Gen. Lemelsen, issued multiple injuctions and warnings against what he called "senseless killings" and "murder" of Red Army prisoners. Curiously, he also made it clear in his orders that prohibitions of illicit killings does not apply to the Jewish-Bolshevik criminals and partisans of any kind; this imply that the Commissar Order really did include instructions to kill Jews.

I am not arguing that the average German soldiers were somehow less human than an American, British or Canadian. Nor is it the case that all German soldiers was to be tarred by one stroke. But my point is that humans could be manipulated to do many things and to resist a powerful system of indoctrination and social discipline recquire such extraodrinary moral fortitude that perhaps it was too much to ask of flesh and blood. In the case of the German Army, I do not feel the evaluation that the majority were ignorant of such crimes would be justified, nor would the argument that partcipants of war crimes would be anything less than a significant minority.

 

Your post implies that das Heer played a large part in the atrocities and war crimes of the einsatzgruppen and the rest of the SS. History has shown repeatedly this is probably not so. By all accounts the huge majority of the German military, and the people, had no knowledge of what the SS and other Nazi apparatus were up to. The SS was a pureley political force and was virtually Hitler and Himler's own private force, almost entirely seperate from the Army. It was designed this way from the beginning of Hitler's rise to power and as the war went on, their power and functions grew to enormous proportions.

The Germany army was run by a Prussian officer caste with a long tradition and code of honor that would, and did, find the Nazis actions repugnant. Hitler knew this but he also knew he needed the army as a tool to achieve what he wanted. How to achieve Nazi ideals without alienating the old guard, answer, the SS.

Certainly there were many times when SS and regular troops worked on joint operations but this was unusual, for tactical or pragmatic reasons and generally not a matter of policy. Almost all members of the SS were volunteers, and depending on the mission they were often double or triple volunteers (particularly for the Einzatzgruppen, the guards in the concentration camps, and other "special units" who were simply selected fort heir ability as cold blooded, murdering criminals). The truth is that Hitler knew he could not order his Army Generals to undertake SS type missions since the murder of non-combatants went against their code of honor and most would either refuse, resign, or ignore the orders.

The German army was certainly not blameless in the atrocity department but almost always took no part in the deliberate murder of non-combatants. The SS did not announce and in fact, usually went to great lengths to keep their dirty work secret - even though there was no shortage of talk and rumor among the regular troops about the SS were up to, and many regulars actively despised SS troopers, anyone who could do anything about the atrocities was neutralized or simply hamstrung by circumstances.

 

The poster AnEvilGuy's comments are baseless. The truth is that the German Army knew that the Jews were being persecuted. They knew about the roundups. How could they not? The Germans literally emptied large portions of Europe of Jews. How could they miss the the countless trains or the large masses of people being rounded up in villages and cities around gemran occupied europe?

After nearly a decade of virulent Jew bashing and the legalized dehumanization of Jews which culminated in the orgy of violence we call Kristallnacht it is abusrd to suggest that the Germans were not aware of the horrible treatment of the Jews. They may not have known about the particulars of the Holocaust, but they had to have had an inkling. The removel, imprisoning, and murdering of millions is much too large of a project for it not to be known no matter how hard you try.

Hell, the allies knew as early as 42'.

Even if one were to believe what AnEvilGuy wrote, the German army was still guilty of waging a war of aggression and being the instrument by which Hitler could impose his murderous policies upon the rest of Europe. For all their admirable fighting qualities, they deservedly will be reviled. They fought for nothing admirable.

People too often get caught up in the wonderous achievements of the Heer, but forget that they were invading lands and kill people who simply wanted to live in peace. That is something we should never, ever, forget when discussing these things.

 

How so? The Einsatzgruppen were completely dependent upon the Army to supply and billet its units. Their logistics, right of way in using communication lines, jurisdictions, and sometimes their very precense, required the active cooperation of the field Army. As previously noted, the Einsatzgruppe had no manpower to perform liquidation operations alone. They had no more than the bare minimum number of killing experts to do the deed, but everything else that lead to it had to be done by the regular troops, this included directing the traffic of the stream of vicitims to the killing sites, contain the kill zone, and other such pedestrian tasks that would make ignorance difficult, IMHO unless it was willful.

The problem was that the junior ranks of the officerdom was being decimated with such rapidity that their young replacements came from the same social classes with which the Nazis had the greatest success indoctrinating. Also, to the best of my knowledge Hoepner and Richenau were fairly representative of the old guards but they were famous for issuing some of the most infamous and vehement orders to kill innocents. While the Prussian officers as a whole were less likely to be ardent Nazis, that is not the same thing as to say that they did not share the racist world view of the Nationalist Socialist party.

I do not think this can be sustained by evidence, as the Einsatzgruppen's modus operandi is meticulously documented in Rhode's Masters of Death and partcipation of regular Army units were both prevalent and a matter of routine procedure. Though the latter's participation as a rule stopped right at the point of pulling the triger, their preparatory work was absolutely crucial.

This is true to an extent. The Commissar Order to kill political officers, suspected Jews and communists though were emphatically not contested. Economic Staff East (a joint OKH/OKW committee) that drew the plans for post-war administration predict that their policies would led to the starvation of "tens of millions" of "redundant" persons, and the OKH was also largely responsible the starvation or lethal exhaustion of millions of Red Army POWs, who were sometimes ordered to march hundreds of miles to open air camps with rations inadequate to sustain a working man in fair weather.