Stephen Fritz: Frontsoldaten

Everyday life in war, of course, does have its distinctive qualities, from bearing the burden of the permanent expectation of maiming or death to the continual assimilation of suffering and destruction. It represents a life with neither security nor rest, neither emotional peace nor stable relations, where uncertainty is the most notable daily characteristic. For the Landser, each battle touched off complex emotions and often savage desires. In war, then, there is an inescapable underlying intensity that does not exist in peacetime life. In order to build a picture of the soldiers’ everyday life, historians increasingly use letters, diaries, and memoirs—the most reliable human documents available—to discover the common experiences of men at war. Each one who participated fought his own war, but out of the myriad individual perceptions emerge common themes and patterns.

Problems, of course, surround this approach. The typical Landser, for example, rarely had the luxury of a writing table, or the time and solitude in which to record all his thoughts and insights concerning the nature of war. In any case, the great bulk of enlisted men were typically unversed in expressing themselves analytically, so that many firsthand accounts remain sunk in the banalities of humdrum everyday existence, or else speak of intimate matters of personal separation rather than of the character and texture of life at the front. Often, the very soldiers with the most direct experience of battle remain least able to reflect on that experience in writing, whether because of the magnitude of the trauma they suffered or because of the inadequacy of language—or of their ability to use it—to express what it was they saw and experienced. One factor that set the Landser apart from the average GI or Tommy or Ivan, however, was his generally greater descriptive power and higher degree of literacy. Reading through their letters and diaries, one is struck by their remarkable level of intelligence and lucidity. In part this was a consequence of the rigorous German educational system, but it also owed much to the manner in which the Wehrmacht utilized its personnel. Unlike the American army, which until 1944 shunted its most educated men into specialized roles, the Wehrmacht deployed a remarkably high percentage of its manpower as combat troops. 11As a result, even college educated men found themselves in the frontmost ranks. In addition, Nazi doctrine emphasized the notion of a Volksgemeinschaft roughly modeled on the legendary trench socialism of World War I, a national community whose social harmony, unity, and political authority rested on the integration of people from all walks of life, thus transcending class conflict. Since the German army had a high proportion of educated men in the forward lines, men who had the inclination and ability to reflect on their experiences and commit them to paper, the result is a remarkably rich record of life at the front as chronicled in letters, diaries, and memoirs.

Caution must nevertheless be exercised especially in using memoirs, since these, if not based on contemporaneously kept journals, can fall prey to faulty memory or the desire to refine or embroider one’s experiences and thus lose the ring of authenticity. Moreover, since the average Landser’s direct experience was necessarily limited, historians risk assuming a universality where none may exist; to guard against this, they must search as wide a selection of sources as possible while seeking common elements or themes. Then, too, the reality of censorship meant that many Landsers constantly felt the necessity of taking the scissors to their thoughts—not only to avoid transmitting military information—such as troop strengths, dispositions, and activities—but to keep political statements and attitudes circumspect, since critical utterances about the government could lead to the death penalty. “The censor obviously might not see everything that is written,” confirmed one Landser, then admitted, “but believe me, much crap is still written home.” 12

Still, the flood of letters to and from the front (estimated at 40-50 billion total, and in some individual months as many as 500 million) meant that many passed through censorship unopened; and the longer the war continued, the less seriously many Landsers regarded the censor. As two of the leading authorities on German Feldpostbriefe (letters from the field) concluded after studying thousands of such missives, “the mass of soldiers expressed their opinions and views in a surprisingly open and uninhibited fashion.” So despite the problems, much can be gained from a study of letters and diaries, especially if the historian relates these necessarily individual and narrow documents to a wider context. By illustrating the actualities of combat from a personal point of view, the historian can better demonstrate the impact of war in all its dimensions. Such an approach also brings a vivid sense of immediacy and reality to the often impersonal topic of war. Furthermore, it affords insights into the mysteries of individual actions and group dynamics, as well as to psychological and emotional behavior under conditions of extreme stress. Above all, these documents remain personal reminders of the human elements within the gigantic events of World War II. 13

In emphasizing this individual dimension of war, however, the historian needs to avoid engaging in a trite idealization of the “common man” and instead seek to provide an honest and accurate portrait of everyday life at the front. Taken together and used judiciously, letters and diaries can aid in the quest to see the Landser as subject as well as object. Just as important, they provide valuable insight into what remains one of the puzzling ironies of the war: why the average Landser fought so furiously in defense of such a seemingly deplorable regime. No one forced the soldiers to make positive comments about the Nazi regime and the war, so that if some letters have the ring of propagandistic mimicry about them, others reflect a genuine sympathy and support for Hitler and Nazism. An army—and the men within it—cannot be completely separated from the value system that produced it. Indeed, an army tends to reflect the society from which it sprang, so that if the men of the Wehrmacht fought steadfastly in support of Hitler and Nazism, something within the Hitler state must have struck a responsive chord.

As Hegel long ago pointed out, men will fight to defend ideas much more readily than material interests, an insight given renewed validity by an examination of the behavior of the average Landser. From the German perspective, World War II, especially that part of it fought in Russia, was the ultimate ideological war, since at its core it was understood as a war of ideas, with the enemy idea threatening the validity of the National Socialist concepts that a surprisingly large number of Landsers embraced. And the staying power of the average German soldier, his sense of seriousness and purpose—which often went beyond sacrifice, courage, and resolution to fanaticism—depended in large measure on the conviction that National Socialist Germany had redeemed the failures of World War I and had restored, both individually and collectively, a uniquely German sense of identity. The dual tragedy of the Landser, then, lay in the fact that in the name of animosity toward a seemingly alien and threatening enemy idea he committed unspeakable acts of aggression and destruction, at the same time being consumed himself, both physically and spiritually, by the machine of war. “So important is the defense of our ideas, our definitions of ourselves and our societies,” Robin Fox points out, “that we will willingly strive to destroy their perceived enemies and exhibit the highest forms of human courage in so doing.” Ultimately, though, this is the profoundest justification of a study of the common soldier, for as Fox concludes, “It is ideas that make us human after all.” 14