With the exception of the Japanese war in China, the German–Soviet theatre of war witnessed the longest continuous fighting of the war between armies. It also surpassed all of the war’s other conflicts in terms of totality and scale. The army’s initial belief that victory would be achieved quickly was soon punctured by the challenges of the eastern theatre, which had failed to materialize in any of the Germans’ previous campaigns: terrain and climate difficulties that served to magnify each other; increasingly long and tenuous supply lines as covered in chapter 6; and, most importantly, as chapter 1 showed, an opponent that was prepared to fight just as savagely and desperately as the Germans to achieve victory. This chapter will investigate how the German army and men such as the NCO deployed in the Caucasus understood their task in the east, how they viewed the Red Army, and in what ways the army strove to keep its men in the field. This necessitates an examination of the army’s behaviour in the Soviet Union and what drove it to act in such a way.
Immediately after the conclusion of the war, military commentators tried to solve one of the conflict’s great puzzles: how did an out-gunned and out-manned German army manage to hold out for so long against such great odds? The early answers to this question dismissed the importance of ideas in motivating German soldiers; rather, notions of primary group solidarity – fighting for one’s closest comrades – predominated.[2] This focus on professionalism also diverted attention from the army’s participation in the war of annihilation. Instead, German crimes in the Soviet Union were blamed on the SS and other Nazi organizations, while the army was generally portrayed as an apolitical entity that had merely carried out its professional duty by fighting a ‘clean’ war in the east. This view was crafted by numerous former high-ranking German officers who published memoirs of their service, as well as historians sympathetic to their post-war fate.[3] The growing tensions of the Cold War only reinforced this narrative as the United States looked to integrate a rearmed West Germany into the western bloc. It was only from the late 1960s that historians began to uncover the army’s complicity in Hitler’s war of annihilation; by the 1980s it was clear that the army had participated on a massive scale in the Vernichtungskrieg.[4] The primary question asked by historians during the twenty-first century has concerned the ‘why’ instead of the ‘what’. Why did the army as an institution and the soldiers themselves stay in the fight until Germany was completely and utterly defeated, and why did both groups commit war crimes?
Historians have identified several different possible answers to these questions. According to one perspective, ideology served to cement German soldiers to the cause, providing them with the necessary mental and spiritual foundation to sustain the war effort some two years after it was clear the Third Reich would be defeated. This same ideology also served to legitimize ruthless behaviour against enemy combatants and civilians, who were seen as not only racially inferior to the German Herrenmenschen, but who also threatened to destroy Western civilization with their Jewish-Bolshevik ideals.[5] Another approach focuses on the professionalism of the German army and the soldier in carrying out their duty. This view holds that German soldiers of all ranks internalized the military ethos that demanded the fulfilment of their mission of defending the Reich from its enemies.[6] Such a perspective is closely tied with emphases on the patriotism of soldiers determined to fight for their country and family.[7] Finally, the idea of military necessity has also been advanced as an explanation for the army’s conduct on the Eastern front. In its attempt to emerge victorious on the battlefield, the army resorted to whatever practices and policies it viewed as necessary at a given time. By subscribing to this idea, the army alternated between periods of conciliatory and violent, coercive behaviour towards the Soviet civilian population.[8] Any examination of why and how the army – and by extension its soldiers – conducted itself needs to be put into the context of these four approaches and their interconnections.
The German officer had traditionally been responsible for the care of his men and this included their morale and mental state.[9] Based on its experiences of the First World War, however, the army realized that such efforts needed to be intensified within the context of modern, industrialized war. As the war shifted to a total one during the course of 1916, the army leadership recognized that the total mobilization of the nation’s resources for the war effort included the minds of its soldiers.[10] The rationale behind this new emphasis on a soldier’s psyche was spelled out by the commander of the 8th Panzer Division during the course of the truly total war waged during the Second World War.[11]
[…]
The meaning of Military-Ideological Care
As the experiences of the First World War taught, next to the outer totalization of the war within the military and economic respects and in the area of labour mobilization, a so-called inner totalization must also take place to confront war weariness from the start as well as its scattered appearances and the ebbing of the spirit of resistance through instruction, clarification and easing of tension.
This occurs through the mobilization and the arousal or stimulation of all mental-spiritual powers in each man, with the goal to remove any doubts and to support and strengthen his will to resist. Such help is all the more necessary the longer the war lasts and the more that the Russian space and war situation burden the mind and soul of every soldier.
The threatening degeneration of the soldiers into primitive, Russian-like brutes should be worked against through constant clarification of the situation, discussions about the point and goal of this war, explanations about the state leadership’s measures, and action against enemy propaganda, etc. through the spoken word.
As discussed in the chapter on training, preparing the soldiers for the stresses and strains of combat was clearly a priority for the German army as it realized that the quality of the German soldier would have to make good the numerical inferiority of the army.
Following the army’s defeat in the First World War, the Reichswehr continued this process, though the emergence of the Nazi regime in 1933 and the close links forged between Hitler and the defence minister, Werner von Blomberg, led to an increase in specifically National Socialist indoctrination. Such a programme was due in part to the army’s leadership attempt to ensure its relatively privileged position within the Third Reich as one of the two (alongside the Nazi Party) pillars of the National Socialist state and in part to Blomberg’s admiration of Hitler. He initiated a series of policies designed to draw the army closer to the regime, including the adoption of the Aryan paragraph, the oath to Hitler following President Hindenburg’s death, and, most notoriously, the army’s active participation in the elimination of the SA leadership during the Night of Long Knives. As German historian Wilhelm Deist has noted, ‘all this meant that the “adaptation” and “opening” of the Wehrmacht amounted to a process of almost complete ideological assimilation into the National Socialist regime.’[12] This development was certainly not welcomed by the army’s entire leadership, however, and individuals such as Generaloberst Werner von Fritsch and Generaloberst Ludwig Beck strove to maintain the army’s traditional outlook and powers. It was only in 1938 – the year of the Blomberg–Fritsch Crisis – that the regime finally gained the upper hand in its struggle with the army leadership.
2
E.A. Shils, and Morris Janowitz, ‘Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II,’
3
Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies II,
4
Hans-Adolf Jacobson, ‘The Commissar Order and the Mass Execution of Soviet Prisoners of War,’ in Hans Bucheim et al.,
7
Sven Oliver Müller, ‘Nationalism in German War Society 1939-1945,’ in Jörg Echternkamp (ed.)
8
Hürter, ‘Die Wehrmacht vor Leningrad,’
9
Jürgen Förster, ‘Ideological Warfare in Germany, 1919 to 1945’ in Jörg Echternkamp (ed.)
10
Hew Strachan, ‘Ausbildung, Kampfgeist und die zwei Weltkriege,’ in Bruno Thoß and Hans-ErichVolkmann (eds.),