Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

Among others who found it difficult to adjust to the post-Nazi world was Hans Woltersdorf, who could see no point in discussing the reasons behind the war with his American captor: “His country isn’t surrounded by a dozen hostile neighbors; it isn’t in danger and hasn’t been attacked. He fought… for an ideal that was different from our understanding of a nation, a people…. He came from an America that hadn’t developed organically.” Even after the war Woltersdorf spoke positively of “the tried and tested nationalism of the community” and referred contemptuously to de-Nazification and reeducation as “merely the revenge that could be expected” from the victors. In a prisoner-of-war camp Woltersdorf exclaimed to his interrogator, “Until now I was only a soldier, I never bothered with Nazi propaganda or with politics…. But here I am, locked up with nothing but Nazis, …and I’m beginning to be interested, …and I must confess to you that these Nazis are thoroughly decent fellows If I wasn’t a Nazi before, then I’m becoming one now.” 7

This cannot be dismissed as mere bravado, for Woltersdorf highly esteemed the “National Socialist idealism [by which we] redeemed ourselves from an economic grave,” as well as the “economic, social, and ethical achievements” of the Nazi regime. To him, the postwar world represented nothing so much as anarchy and chaos. “All our former values of fatherland, comradeship and chivalry, discipline and duty, achievement and order, had been condemned; for they were the roots of those evils from which tyranny, oppression, and crime had grown,” he wrote bitterly. “The logical conclusion of the postwar generation was that… if former ideals of obedience, discipline, and order were the causes of the chaos, then the opposite must also have the opposite effect. And so they opposed every system of order, while the ever-new ideal of freedom affected primarily the lower instincts and found fulfillment in beat, bed, and hash” 8(rock music, free love, and drugs).

If Pöppel was stubborn and Woltersdorf remained defiant, many others were simply puzzled as they tried to come to grips with what had happened, and their all-too-human frailties of judgment and foresight. With the end fast approaching, many true believers began to have their doubts. “Many of us have long ago fallen at the front,” noted Friedrich Grupe in March 1945, “still in firm belief in our Führer and in the justice of his actions.” Yet despite the brave words and the declaration “We will never capitulate,” Grupe clearly was troubled. “I am struggling to get a grip on myself,” he admitted in late March. “It is clear to me that each death in the final phase of this conflict, every further destruction, is totally irresponsible.” Not surprisingly, then, upon hearing of the final surrender, Grupe exclaimed, “Naturally it is clear that in these hours and days, for myself and for millions, a world has foundered, an ideology collapsed, that it has now become a certainty: everything that we did in this war, for which millions upon millions died, was the consequence of power and megalomania!” Even with this realization, though, Grupe shrank from the final recognition: “But with the fatalism of a soldier I now simply push such insights away, for within me there is no room for self-destructive thoughts. The important thing is that the dying has come to an end.” 9

Fifty years after the outbreak of the war, Grupe still refused to acknowledge fully his flash of insight in March 1945, remarking that the war made him a political abstinent, explaining that he and his generation had embraced Hitler because of political inexperience, hunger, and misery, and stressing the idealism of his feelings by eschewing opportunism as a motive. But Grupe betrayed an attachment to his earlier ideals, for although paying obeisance to democracy and a spirit of European community, he nonetheless admitted, “Even with all the thoroughgoing changes in me, and certainly in all the surviving members of the war generation, one thing remains the same: the love for the fatherland, if also free of the once so excessive nationalism.” Grupe, indeed, sounded much like Woltersdorf when he lamented, “The misuse of our feelings that were uttered in words like ‘comradeship,’ ‘fatherland,’ and ‘homeland’ led to a total devaluation. In many cases, materialism, egoism, and indifference replaced the onetime youthful exuberance of emotions. Instead of praying to a ‘Führer,’ it appears as if the successor generation now worships new gods: money and ‘status.’ The striving after affluence can make one cold and inconsiderate.” 10Despite all the horrors inflicted on Germany and the world because of Nazi-induced and -inflamed passions, Grupe still found it difficult at the end of his reflections to discard the old ideals, nor did he appear to see the incongruity of admonitions about the dangers of materialism coming from a person who had been a willing and enthusiastic supporter of Nazi idealism.

Ensconced in a Russian labor camp and not destined to be freed until 1949, Siegfried Knappe also grappled with the larger meaning of the war and his participation in it. “Losing the war… preyed on my mind,” he acknowledged. “Being captured had always been a real possibility, …but surrendering our country?… I felt stunned now, almost as if I were in someone else’s bad dream. The war had shattered my life and left only a deep void…. It was a feeling of deep desperation.” Nor was Knappe able to shake this gloom or the inclination to brood, to seek the sense in what appeared so hopeless, since he now no longer had a nation to return to. “I spent much of those first three weeks [in captivity] going over Germany’s experience of the previous six years. Where had we gone so wrong?” he pondered. “I felt that Germany’s claim to the Rhineland, the Sudetenland, and the Polish Corridor had been justified…. Hitler annexed Austria as a result of a plebiscite by the Austrian people. I felt that our invasion of France had been justified because France had declared war on us.” Still, a glimmer of comprehension began to creep into Knappe’s reflections:

It was only now beginning to dawn on me that our treatment of other nations had been arrogant, that the only justification we had felt necessary was our own…. I had unquestioningly accepted the brutal philosophy that might makes right; the arrogance of our national behavior had not even occurred to me at the time…. What had begun, at least in our minds, as an effort to correct the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles had escalated far beyond anything that any of us could have imagined. In retrospect, I realized that I, and countless others like me, had helped Hitler start and fight a world war of conquest that had left tens of millions of people dead and destroyed our own country. I wondered now whether I would ever have questioned these things if we had won the war. I had to conclude that it was unlikely. This was a lesson taught by defeat, not by victory. 11

Eventually, however, Knappe, like Grupe, turned away from a full embrace of his understanding. In contemplating the evidence of death camps and the attempt to exterminate a whole people, Knappe could only profess, “We had thought of our participation in the war as noble and honorable…. I was sickened by this news. I finally decided that my inability to come to terms with it was going to chip away at my mental and emotional strength… so I filed the issue away in a dark corner of my mind…. I had to accept the fact that it happened… but I did not have to like it or discuss it.” For Knappe, as for many of his contemporaries, guilt was seen as objective, not subjective. “I could not escape my share of the guilt, because without us Hitler could not have done the horrible things he had done,” he was quick to admit, but then came the all-important qualifier, “but as a human being, I felt no guilt, because I had no part in or knowledge of the things he had done.” 12