Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

For all its difficulty, most Landsers recognized the value of their harsh training. “In the war,” remembered Fritz-Erich Diemke, “we survived… because of this hard training.” Noted Gustav Knickrehm after the war, “The advantage of our armed forces lay in this monstrous training…. You carried out all orders automatically…. You thought about home, about your loved ones, you thought about it all. But you stood erect and shot…. You acted automatically as a soldier. And the thing is, that helped to preserve your life. Any who deny that today are idiots.” Siegfried Knappe concluded of his drill officers that they attempted “to put us under stress similar to a combat situation.” And later, before the French campaign, Knappe pointed to another goal of this constant activity: “We immediately began a vigorous training program… to get the men accustomed to working together. We practiced all day, every day, to try to achieve the cohesiveness necessary to fight.” 26

The link between the harshness of basic training and the group cohesiveness that emerged from it was precisely what allowed the German army to excel. According to one scholar, “The Germans consistently outfought the far more numerous Allied armies that eventually defeated them…. On a man for man basis the German ground soldiers consistently inflicted casualties at about a 50 percent higher rate than they incurred from the opposing British and American troops under all circumstances. This was true when they were attacking and when they were defending, when they had a local numerical superiority and when, as was usually the case, they were outnumbered.” 27

As Martin van Creveld maintained, this superiority was the result neither of Allied inexperience (“Not the least astonishing aspect of the matter is that the Wehrmacht fought equally well in victory and in defeat”) nor of some supposed innate German militarism or character defect: “What comparative studies exist… do not allow the conclusion that Germans [inherently] make better soldiers than Americans.” Indeed, he insisted, “our inference from all this [research] is that Americans, by upbringing, education, and personality make first-class soldier material…. Paradoxically, the same cannot be proven of Germans…. From the available evidence, there is no reason to believe the German national character to be more or less suitable to war than the American one.” 28The differing levels of cohesion and fighting effectiveness, van Creveld sought to demonstrate, lay in such things as organization, doctrine, and—not least—arduous, realistic, and continuous training.

Still, as in any army, there existed a fine line between the hard, necessary training so essential for survival in combat and that harassment, whether petty or sadistic, which Paul Fussell has termed “chickenshit.” To Fussell, chickenshit meant the “petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant ‘paying off of old scores’; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances.” 29On the basis of admittedly impressionistic evidence, it would seem there was less petty, personal harassment of troops in the German army than in the Anglo-American armies. The Wehrmacht made a concerted effort to promote a strong spirit of comradeship between junior officers and their men. Hans Werner Woltersdorf, queried after the war in a prisoner-of-war camp about German performance, “referred to the special leadership principle, which appeared to be completely new to them. The necessary qualification for an officer’s career was not the high school diploma but exemplary ability, the true authority. Everyone who led a unit had to be the best man in his unit as well; not the uniform, not being in command, but example made the leader.” 30Moreover, in a time and place where the total life of the individual was to belong to the party and state, the process of stripping a recruit of individual identity predated his experiences at a training camp, so the process of basic training might have seemed less of a shock.

Even many of the claims of harassment that were made by men in later oral histories could equally be considered evidence of the rugged instruction that better prepared the average German soldier for combat. Johann Eisfeld, for example, remembered as harassment the fact that his company “had to scramble over a scaling wall every morning, with the combat pack on:… helmet, gas mask, …[and] rifle.” Eisfeld also complained that they were given no time to dry their wet clothing and often had to wear the damp uniforms the next day. Similarly, Erich Albertsen griped that during basic training his unit had to “march every day… with a full pack [weighing] twenty-five kilos,” and like Eisfeld, his company also had to clamber over the barracks wall encumbered by these packs. Max Landowski still resented the fact that on Christmas Day 1940 he and other recruits had to tend the horses and clean the stalls; this to him, at a distance of four decades, represented harassment. And finally, Fritz-Erich Diemke, prompted by his interviewer, remembered that his unit of recruits had to march eleven kilometers in a snowstorm, bivouac and pitch tents in the open, spend the night there, and suffer the indignity of cold food. 31All of these cases of alleged Schikane (harassment), however, can equally be seen as examples of the rugged training that prepared the average German soldier well for the rigors of combat. Certainly, enemy attacks hardly came only at the convenience of German soldiers, nor were the Allies necessarily going to allow their adversaries time to warm and dry their uniforms. Night fighting and long, grueling marches were also a common feature of combat. And whether it was Christmas or any other holiday, certain essential duties had to be performed.

Indeed, a number of men recalled their time in the barracks with great equanimity. What stood out to Fritz Harenberg, in retrospect, was not any particular harassment, but something else. “I liked the military period in the barracks better than the Labor Service,” he recalled. And why? “We received very good food. Cutlets… as big as a toilet lid, …salad, potatoes, gravy and everything. And not once a week, many times in a week.” Heinz Rieckmann recalled tough discipline, but “I cannot say it was slave-driving…. I was in an old barracks that had no running water. We had to run down to get it, and it was December… and already cold…. We had to bathe in the wash basin with bare upper bodies in the winter. And we had to go and pick up coffee… and whoever had barracks room duty had to clean and keep the room polished the whole day…. It was a lot of discipline. But I cannot say that it was inhumane.” 32

“Harassment,” puzzled Hermann Blohm. “The training was hard, especially in the infantry. But this influence also… allowed me a certain calm…. I don’t want to say that you were inwardly free. You were still a soldier, a bearer of weapons. But other than that nothing further was demanded of you. How you yourself led your life interested nobody further.” “We were driven hard,” remembered Georg Timm, but “for me the exercises were sport.” And Werner Karstens, forced to do three days of punishment exercises that included marching in full gear while carrying a thirty-pound sandbag, did not recollect even this as harassment. After all, he had earned this penalty by pretending to be a drill sergeant and ordering a group of reservists—all doctors, lawyers, and professors—through a series of drills. In recalling the tale, Karstens beamed with pleasure at the joke he had played on the learned reservists, poking fun at the pretensions and ingrained obedience to authority of these men in a sort of updated version of the Hauptmann von Köpenick, (a popular play of the late 1920s that ridiculed the German mania for obedience to those in authority) while fully admitting that “they had to punish me.” Finally, both Franz Ehlers and Albert Gädtke recalled training officers who had been punished—one by being sent to the front and the other by the cancellation of a furlough—for ordering overstrenuous exercise and mistreating their men. 33