Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

This motif of family or community encompassed an important ideological dimension as well and in its various ramifications also set the Landser apart from the GI. The Wehrmacht not only stressed the notion of comradeship but did so in a consciously ideological manner: the Frontgemeinschaft was to be the kernel from which would grow the Volksgemeinschaft, the much vaunted national community of unity, belonging, and purpose promised by the Nazis. Because this promise of a new society proved attractive to many Germans, the Landser was more self-consciously ideological than has normally been supposed. From their letters and diaries, in fact, one gets the feeling that many German soldiers carried into battle a sense of building a new society, a world of new content and new form corresponding to the Nazi vision of national community. The seemingly innocuous notion of loyalty to one’s comrades and country thus disguised a hard ideological core. The Landser generally had a clearer sense of his own purpose, of what the war was about, than did the GI, who at times seemed deliberately to deny that there was any point other than to survive and go home. Paul Fussell, in fact, has claimed that the typical American or British soldier operated in an “ideological vacuum” and had little if any idea of what the war was about or what purpose he played in the whole sordid affair. 7Although Fussell overstated his argument—by failing to recognize the extent to which American soldiers, after the disillusionment of World War I, consciously played down any notion of idealism for fear of looking naive; or that when the GI said he was fighting merely to get home he was ascribing an inherently positive value, one that he considered self-evident, to his democratic way of life—it is nonetheless true that the Landser was markedly more ideological than his American or British counterpart.

In important ways, however, theirs was a perverted idealism, one that aimed at creating a new world yet seethed with revenge against the old, one that sought a conflict-free internal community but held Germany’s alleged enemies guilty of a vast conspiracy to destroy that community. The result, especially on the eastern front, was a vicious and brutal racial war. As Manfred Messerschmidt has pointed out, the destruction of the Jews (and, one might add, other so-called racial enemies of Germany) existed as the ultimate goal of the ideological war against Russia, an aim largely shared by the Wehrmacht authorities themselves. 8As letters and diaries indicate, however, it was not only the officer corps that carried Nazi beliefs into combat but the rank and file as well. In part, this resulted from Nazi manipulation and exploitation of pre-existing beliefs. A large proportion of Landsers, after all, had grown to adulthood surrounded by the myths of World War I: with Germany seemingly threatened by an implacable ring of enemies as in 1914, the struggle against this encirclement was seen by many as vital to the nation’s survival, especially given the memories of the Allied blockade that had strangled Germany and led to so many civilian deaths. Added to this brew was the lingering notion of social Darwinism that communities, like individuals, were engaged in a constant struggle for survival, as well as a simmering resentment that resource-poor Germany had been cheated not only by nature but in the race for colonies. As a result, National Socialist ideas such as Lebensraum (living space) resonated among average soldiers who believed that Germany needed new territory to secure its future in a world full of predatory nations. After all, similar notions, such as the Mitteleuropa concept popularized by respectable intellectuals in the years prior to World War I, had been floating around for years.

Not surprisingly, then, the Landser generally applauded and embraced the nationalistic language of the Nazis and their promise to redeem the failures of the Great War and to end the humiliations of the hated Versailles system. But loyalty to the Nazi idea went beyond mere jingoism. Equally alluring were National Socialist promises to end the chronic internal fragmentation and class conflict that had plagued the Weimar experiment in democracy, to open education and careers to talent rather than social background. Again, such a view corresponded to the legend of the egalitarian Frontgemeinschaft of the trenches, where a bullet knew no classes and where one advanced on merit rather than social connections. The notion of Volksgemeinschaft attracted adherents among the Landsers because the Nazi regime seemed to be serious about its implementation. However imperfectly, during the 1930s the Nazis achieved enough in creating the outlines of a new society to convince many ordinary soldiers—in particular, young men and those from a working-class background—that the promise of social and economic integration was real.

In creating this often surprisingly intense loyalty to the German national community, the Nazis also laid the foundations for an equally fervent hatred and disdain for those outside the Volksgemeinschaft. Here again, National Socialist propaganda was able to manipulate prevailing stereotypes or popular beliefs. The notion of a rising threat from Russia, from the “Asiatic hordes” to the east, had taken hold in the popular mind in the anxious years before the outbreak of the First World War, and the Bolshevik revolution and its attendant cruelties did nothing to diminish the sense of menace. Any reasonably diligent newspaper reader in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s would have been well informed—certainly more so than one in London or New York—of the various atrocities, especially those of Stalin, visited on the unfortunate population of the Soviet Union by the Bolsheviks. And although most recent studies indicate that Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda fell far short of creating an active hatred of the Jews among average Germans, it nonetheless served to isolate the Jews within German society and, at the very minimum, to make those average Germans largely uninterested in the fate of their fellow citizens. 9If not actually incited to mass murder by Nazi propaganda, Landsers remained indifferent to the fate of the Jews, which allowed those running the destructive machinery to get on with their grisly business free from outside interference.

As a consequence, although the ordinary Landser saw himself as a decent fellow, the Nazi vision of a racially determined Volksgemeinschaft achieved a certain reality on the eastern front as ideology and experience became mutually reinforcing. In soldiers’ letters and diaries one finds hardly any real disagreement with the Nazi view of the enemy as Untermenschen (subhumans) who deserved their harsh fate, no protest at the special treatment meted out to the Jews. Since the citizens of the Soviet Union fit Nazi racial stereotypes, the Soviet system was deemed by Hitler a part of the so-called “Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy,” and the country itself seemed so backward, brutal, and threatening to the average German soldier that race, ideology, and personal experience all converged to produce a unique kind of horror. Ideology, the objective condition of daily life in Russia, and the chaos and hardships of the eastern war all combined to produce a mind-set of hatred, so that the Landser came to see himself as fighting to protect the German community from “Asiatic-Jewish” influences out to destroy the Reich. The Wehrmacht made assiduous efforts to convince the Landser that he was sacrificing himself for the highest and most profound purpose, was in fact a crusader on a mission to benefit the German Volk and that in such a struggle for existence everything was permissible. In a very real sense, then, especially on the eastern front, the Landser “lived” the National Socialist Weltanschauung (world view), which gave him an amazing resilience and stubborn determination but also led him in its name to commit barbaric atrocities against an enemy deemed subhuman.