Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

Other Landsers confirmed this sense of fighting for a new Germany under Hitler. Writing in April 1940, Corporal E.N. declared that “as long as we front soldiers have Adolf Hitler, there will be loyalty, bravery, and justice for his people. I believe that the best days… are just coming,” because “there will be a day on which the people will have their freedom, peace, and equality returned to them.” For many, faith like this meant that no conditions were placed on their loyalty to Hitler. “Now, where the Fatherland has called us,” Wilhelm Rubino exclaimed in a letter to his mother, “I belong life and death to the Führer, and you should not despair if the worst should happen to me.” “As with me,” Grupe later confessed, “all Landsers were deeply bound by oath, orders, obedience, and—this still counted for many—by the unshakable belief in Hitler’s final victory.” 53

In fact, the July 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler seemed actually to bind many Landsers tighter to the Führer and the Nazi regime. “We here in foreign lands really know what a good leader we Germans have” claimed one soldier. Another declared simply, “Now we will be more determined than ever to prove to the others why we German soldiers fight.” Private K.K. “greatly welcomed” a Nazification of the army, for an ideological organization “will be better than that previously implemented.” Reacting to the assassination attempt, Private B.P. wrote indignantly, “Thank God that Providence allowed our Führer to continue his task of the salvation of Europe, and our holiest duty is now to cling to him even more strongly, in order to make good what the few criminals… did without regard for the [welfare of] the entire nation.” Lieutenant K.N. thought it “unspeakably tragic that the enemy nations will see symptoms of disunity, where before they perhaps supposed only a unanimous solidity.” Corporal C.B. emphasized that unity came from loyalty to Hitler: “I know very well that an unrestrained trust and a strong unshakable belief in our Führer is necessary to overcome this momentarily difficult period,” he wrote in August 1944. “Belief gives us the strength to bear all the hard and difficult misfortune…. My belief in the Führer and victory is unshakeable…. The Führer has always kept his word.” To Corporal A.K., Adolf Hitler was “the man who will bring a New Order to Europe and above all also the freedom of all the peoples. How the nation rejoiced… that the beloved Führer lived…. His death would have been a bad blow to the freedom of the peoples.” “These bandits tried to destroy that for which millions are ready to risk their lives,” exclaimed Lieutenant H.W.M. indignantly. “It is a good feeling to know that a November 1918 cannot be repeated.” 54

November 1918 represented to many Germans an example of a nation defeated because of internal disunity. Such a happenstance was not likely to recur, according to Reinhard Pagenkopf in his last letter in February 1945, not least because “like all soldiers, I have become something else. Perhaps our belief in many things is also shaken…. But the best and greatest, I think, we have nonetheless saved, and that can no longer be taken from us, because it has grown too deeply with us…, a certainty that no one can take from us… : ‘the Reich must yet remain with us!’” “I have found out that culture is only in its smallest part a matter of reason,” mused Reinhard Goes in November 1941. “Rather, above all [it is] a matter of the heart, soul, genuine feeling, belief… [in] Germany…, the homeland toward which I have a great obligation.” To the end, this powerful, profound, almost mystical sense of defending not only Germany but a valuable idea remained strong in many soldiers. Reflecting on the world situation in September 1944, Lieutenant K. asserted, “History is today showing a picture that one could term the bankruptcy of the West. What Nietzsche proclaimed a dead world is today hard reality…. What is spirit? A function of the material…! What is culture? The realization of the liberal idea…! What the English and Americans win with their blood passes over days later to Bolshevism In this chaos… stands Germany…. We are the last bastion, with us stands and falls all that German blood has created over the centuries.” As Lieutenant H.H. put it with powerful brevity, “A tangible conception of a country is the only thing that matters.” Indeed, insisted Private F.S., “The German people as the bearer of the creative heritage will not go under!” 55

Even after the war, unrepentant soldiers such as Hans Werner Woltersdorf clung to the “tried and tested nationalism of the community,” taking pride in the “National Socialist idealism [that] redeemed us” after the humiliation of World War I. “My generation was brought up to believe that no sacrifice was too great for the [ Volksgemeinschaft ]” remembered Ulrich Luebke. “The philosophy we were taught was that Germany must live even if we had to die for it.” “We believed in a new community, free from class conflict, united in brotherhood under the self-chosen Führer, powerful…, national and socialist,” agreed Friedrich Grupe, and many people of his generation thought that Hitler, too, believed in this ideal and was doing much to realize it. “The Nazis had set out to impose a new order on the disquieting complexities and social upheavals that the modernization of the twenties had brought with it,” suggested Detlev Peukert, and “as they promised, to bring harmony.” After the war, Peukert noted, “the mood of Wirtschaftswunder [economic miracle] and take-off now profited from the very destruction of tradition and recasting… brought about by the Third Reich.” 56

As their letters and diaries illustrated, many Landsers indeed wanted a life different from the one they had lived before, a life based on something similar to the sense of community they felt in the army (though without the killing and fear) a life of men bound together in a common endeavor who frankly embraced each other as equals. With modern models and mythic images borrowed from the trenches of the Great War, the Nazis set out to substitute harmony and a feeling of community for the intense upheavals produced by war and economic modernization. “The intention of the movement was to create a new type of human being from whom would spring a new morality, a new social system, and eventually a new international order,” Modris Eksteins has noted. “National Socialism was more than a political movement…; it was a desire to create mankind anew.” Indeed, Hitler aimed at nothing less than a reorganization of traditional society and the creation of a Volksgemeinschaft of social integration where class conflict had vanished. Stripped of its ideological overtones, the Nazi vision of modernization without internal conflict and a political community that provided both security and opportunity seemed not unattractive, for as Peukert observed, “The National Socialists’ pervasive intervention in society had meant that it was impossible in 1945 simply to resurrect the conditions of 1932…. For most people, the opportunities for integration which in the thirties had been promised but not always delivered, were now realized. Volkswagen, Volkseigenheim, Volksempfänger, a car, a home, and a radio (and later a television) set of one’s own; these symbols shed the ideological overtones of the Nazi era.” 57To many Germans it was, and remained, so potent a vision of the future that they willingly overlooked its racist and anti-Semitic ideological essence. Nazi efforts to create a new order and new man were real and, as the example of many Landsers showed, could inspire a fierce loyalty and devotion. In the quest for the Utopian, however, both the ideal and those average soldiers who fought to realize it were perverted by Hitler’s racism and sucked into a sea of evil.