Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

This racist ideological hostility, when mixed with the notion of a preventive war, often produced a strange sense of relief mingled with the notion of performing an indispensable task. “The German people have a great obligation to our Führer,” claimed a corporal in mid-July 1941, “for if these beasts who are our enemies here had come to Germany, murders would have occurred such as the world has never seen before. If uncounted thousands of their own citizens have already been murdered by the Soviets…, how would it have been for the Germans? No newspaper can describe what we have seen. It borders on the unbelievable…. And when one in Germany reads Der Stürmer and sees the pictures, that is only a small example of what we here have seen and what crimes the Jews have committed. Believe me, even the most sensational newspaper reports are only a part of what is happening here.” To Private M.M. the purpose of the war became self-evident once he “realize[d] how it would have been with our women and children if these… Russian hordes had invaded our Fatherland. I have had here the opportunity to see and observe these uncultivated, mongrel people. Thank God that they were thwarted, that they could not plunder and rob our homeland.” Indeed, “a complete destruction [of Bolshevism] is… required,” asserted Corporal W.F. in November 1941, “[for] if these bestial hordes of soldiers were to fall upon Germany all would be gone that is German.” “The battle against these subhumans, who’ve been whipped into a frenzy by the Jews,” claimed Karl Fuchs, “was not only necessary but came in the nick of time. Our Führer has saved Europe from certain chaos. You at home,” he admonished, “must always keep in mind what would have happened if these hordes had overrun our Fatherland. The horror of this is unthinkable.” 20

These were not isolated sentiments. Writing from the front in mid-July 1941, Fred Fallnbigl asserted, “We had been forced into the war against the Soviet Union. For God have mercy on us, had we waited, or had these beasts come to us. For them even the most horrible death is still too good. I am glad that I can be here to put an end to this genocidal system.” Indeed, the fighting was tough, admitted one soldier, but “to those in the homeland we soldiers can only say that Adolf Hitler has saved Germany and thereby the whole of Europe from the Red Army.” Another Landser wondered, “What would have happened to cultural Europe, had these sons of the steppe, poisoned and drunk with a destructive poison, these incited subhumans, invaded our beautiful Germany?” “Every Landser has seen the strange character of Bolshevism,” claimed a soldier in a letter to his mother, “[and] knows what will happen if it comes to Germany.” “Praise God that the German people now has summoned the calmness and strength to give the Führer the tools that he needs in order to protect the West from ruin,” concluded Captain E.P., “for what the Asiatic hordes would not have wrecked would have been annihilated by Jewish hatred and revenge.” This popular sentiment was seconded by Corporal H.H., who stressed, “We must win the war in order not to be delivered over into the revenge of the Jews.” That the initial fear of a vague “Bolshevik-Jewish conspiracy” thus gave way to real concerns about the possibility of Jewish revenge indicates a recognition on the part of average Landsers that horrible atrocities, committed in the name of Nazi ideology, had been visited upon the Jewish population of Eastern Europe. As Corporal H.G. acknowledged, “This is not exactly a struggle of country against country, but rather one between two fundamentally different ideologies.” 21

Not surprisingly, since both Nazi propaganda and ideology hammered at the notion of an identity of interests between Bolsheviks and Jews, some Landsers displayed a murderous anti-Jewish attitude. “The political doctrine of Bolshevism… is but a purely political act of world Jewry,” claimed Wilhelm Prüller. “And just as the Talmud teaches nothing except murder and destruction, so Bolshevism knows but one science: murder and destruction, cruel and barbaric murder.” “Only a Jew can be a Bolshevik,” agreed Paul Lenz, “for this blood-sucker there can be nothing nicer than to be a Bolshevik…. Wherever one spits one finds a Jew.” This allegedly omnipresent, sinister Jewish force was held responsible by Reinhold Mahnke for terrible atrocities against the Lithuanian population: the Jews had supposedly “cut off their feet and hands, tore out their tongues…. They even nailed men and children to walls. Had these criminals come to our country, they would have torn us to pieces and mangled us, that’s clear. But the Lithuanians have taken revenge,” for as Heinrich Sachs noted approvingly “the Jewish question was solved with impressive thoroughness under the enthusiastic applause of the local population.” To Hans Kondruss Russia furnished ample evidence that “a whole people has systematically been reared into subhumanity. This is clearly the most Satanic educational plan of all times, which only Jewish sadism could have constructed and carried through.” Kondruss too observed with satisfaction that the “wrath of the people has… been turned upon this people of criminals.” It will be necessary,″ he asserted, “to scorch out this boil of plague radically, because these ‘animals’ will always constitute a danger… [since their goal] was the brutalization of a whole people in order to use it as an instrument in the war for Judas’s world domination.” 22

Others, too, denounced the Jews. “Overall this country makes a ghastly impression on me,” wrote a soldier from Poland in September 1939. “Beginning with the roads, which were indescribably bad and dusty, then this dump with its many pests, and finally the endless great number of Jews, these disgusting Stürmer-types.” To Lieutenant H.C., the “mass [of Jews] are filthy swine,” a sentiment readily accepted by others. “I long ago recognized the Jewish poison in our people,” claimed Corporal F.K. in mid-August 1942. “How far it might have gone with us, that we see only now in this campaign. We see every day what the Jewish regime has done in Russia, and in view of the facts even the last doubters are likely cured. We must and will be successful in liberating the world from this plague; that’s why the German soldier protects the eastern front, and we will not return before the root of all evil here is torn out and the center of the Jewish-Bolshevik ‘world benefactors’ is destroyed.” 23

Russia thus served as a great ideological proving ground where many Landsers , previously skeptical of Nazi propaganda, confronted what they accepted as the reality of the Jewish-Bolshevik destruction of a whole nation. Some gleefully noted that the Jews were now being shot—were, in a favorite phrase of Hitler’s, being “eradicated root and branch” through the “toughest punishment conceivable.” In Russia “the Eastern Jew now reveals himself in all his brutality,” observed Corporal H.K., himself an avid Stürmer reader, then enthusiastically referred to Hitler’s famous prophecy concerning the fate of the Jews: “As our Führer in his great speech on the outbreak [ sic ] of this struggle of world Jewry predicted: ‘should the Jews once again bring it about that the nations are plunged into a world war, it would be the destruction of their race and not ours.’ Gradually this race is more and more remembering these words…. But all their nagging and all their exertions may no longer alter their fate.” 24

Certainly the average Landser was encouraged in this racist hatred by the Wehrmacht high command. Even before the invasion of Russia, in March 1941, Hitler had informed his generals, “The war against the Soviet Union will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion; the struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness.” Hitler’s words obviously fell on receptive ears. “The most important goal of the campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevik system,” Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, commander of the Sixth Army, wrote in a general order on 10 October 1941, “is the complete smashing of its means of power and the eradication of Asiatic influences in the European cultural sphere…. The soldier in the East is… a carrier of an inexorable racial idea and the avenger of all the bestialities that have been inflicted on the Germans and related peoples. Therefore the soldier must have complete understanding for the necessity of the severe but justified atonement of Jewish subhumanity.” Just over a month later General Erich von Manstein, commander of the Eleventh Army, similarly urged his men to harsh measures: “The German soldier… marches also as the carrier of a racial idea and avenger for all the cruelties that have been inflicted on him and the German people…. The soldier must summon understanding for the necessity of a harsh atonement on Judaism, which is the spiritual carrier of the Bolshevik terror.” In order to execute this “harsh but just atonement,” other commanders urged their troops to be merciless “against the Muscovite-Asiatic flood,” to conduct the campaign against “Jewish Bolshevism” with “unprecedented severity,” as “compassion and weakness” were out of place in this struggle between two “spiritually unbridgeable conceptions.” As General Heinz Guderian wrote in an order in late August 1944, “There is no future… without National Socialism.” 25