Ostkrieg

by Stephen G. Fritz

  Complicity of the Wehrmacht and the army leadership in Nazi crimes is, of course, not the same as complicity of average soldiers. This raises the further question of how far typical Landsers participated in these criminal activities. This remains a difficult question to answer with any degree of precision or reliability. In terms of the most serious of these atrocities, the murder of the Jews and the Soviet prisoners of war, it is obvious that, without the logistic and administrative cooperation of the Wehrmacht bureaucracy, mass murder on such a large scale would hardly have been possible. Although the institutional complicity is apparent, it also seems clear that relatively few soldiers took an active part in the shootings of Jews. In general, average Landsers probably cooperated with SS killers more in the Baltic than in Ukraine, for example, but best estimates are that, overall, not more than twenty to thirty thousand Wehrmacht personnel, out of the millions who served on the Ostfront, were active in explicitly aiding the Security Police in the selection, organization, and shooting of Jews and accounted for only around 1 percent of the victims. Much the same could be said with regard to implementation of the Commissar Order or the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war. Without the functional cooperation of the Wehrmacht, these murderous policies could not have been carried out, but relatively few of the active perpetrators were front troops.

  This same formulation would apply as well to the partisan war, where, until 1943, most of the violence stemmed from rear security units. The worst of the crimes with which the Ostheer was associated—the murder of the Jews, the shooting of political officials, the systematic starvation of prisoners of war, the colonial exploitation of food and raw materials, and participation in forced labor roundups—were largely perpetrated by occupation and security units. If the typical Landser was a combat infantryman, then, his point of contact with the native inhabitants of the Soviet Union was more likely to be in the form of the requisitioning of food items than in mass murder. Likely the greatest culpability the average Landser incurred was during the scorched-earth retreat of the autumn of 1943. Given the freedom to destroy, and often operating in areas controlled by partisans, many responded in an orgy of destruction. For the rest, however, SS, party, and Wehrmacht officials scrambled to gain control of the spoils. The Ostheer, as Christian Hartmann noted, was “supposed to conquer the Lebensraum, perhaps even secure it, but not organize it.” By and large, then, the responsibility for the greatest crimes committed by the Wehrmacht accrued to those in the rear areas and in leadership positions. Further, the number of those involved in serious crimes was very small, perhaps only 5 percent of the entire Ostheer. This relatively tiny number admittedly accounted for enormous damage, but it would be false to replace the incorrect view of the “clean” Wehrmacht with an equally erroneous one in which all were criminals.10

  Although not directly involved in criminal activities, the bulk of Landsers were indirectly complicit in that the racial assumptions and norms of the regime infused all thought and activity in the Third Reich, making it relatively easy to justify violence and killing. Not only did they tacitly accept the radical racial and ideological premises of Barbarossa, but their successes on the battlefield also enabled the regime to carry out its murderous plans. As with the issue of criminal complicity, the question of why they fought is complex and multifaceted. For many, of course, it was a straightforward matter of obligation, of being conscripted into the military and sent to fight. Some fought from old-fashioned patriotism and a misguided belief in the German cause. Still others were nationalists who, motivated by a strong sense of grievance, hoped to correct what they saw as the injustices of Versailles, to recover German honor and international preeminence, or to restore the nation’s lost provinces. Many, troubled by the reality of war and fighting to maintain a sense of self, struggled on out of a sense of duty, if not to their country, then to their comrades, whom they were unwilling to abandon in a difficult situation. Pride, honor, and a willingness to sacrifice themselves if necessary also played a role as the focal point became the small group of comrades surrounding oneself. In the last phase of the war, when hundreds of thousands of Germans were dying every month, hope in miracle weapons, fear of Soviet (and Allied) revenge, and harsh, terroristic measures on the part of their own regime sufficed to keep many doing their hard duty as the racial community became fully militarized in the heat of total war.

  Yet others were staunch Nazi supporters who wholeheartedly embraced the anti-Semitism, anti-Bolshevism, and belief in a racial mission in the east promoted by National Socialist ideology. The impetus for mass murder might well have come from the Nazi elite in the SS and the party, but many of those who acted out of conviction understood, in a form of anticipatory obedience, what was expected and required of them and, thus, did not have to be given explicit orders. At the same time, faith in Nazi ideology could induce a more positive emphasis on the new society, the much-heralded Volksgemeinschaft of unity, opportunity, and (not least) material benefits promised by Hitler. The very economic and foreign policy successes of the regime in the 1930s, which led many Germans to support the general thrust of Nazi policy, thus elicited a sense that Hitler really was creating a new society that would redeem the myriad hardships and injustices suffered by Germany in the recent past. Once begun, acceptance of moral compromise became a habit, one not easily changed in the midst of war. Although most Landsers saw themselves as decent fellows, they nonetheless participated in a wantonly cruel war.11

  Much the same was true of average Germans in the Volksgemeinschaft, who often accepted the logic in the system not so much because they were ardent Nazis as because it rewarded them. Not only did significant numbers of professional and business people benefit from the Aryanization of property and the theft of Jewish wealth, but ethnic Germans, for example, were also the recipients of the property of deported Poles and murdered Jews. Similarly, Germans left homeless and destitute by Allied bombing profited from the receipt of plundered Jewish clothing, household possessions, and apartments. Moreover, Germans as a whole enjoyed a relatively high standard of living during the war, including low taxes, in part because of the theft of food, property, and wealth from the occupied territories. The euthanasia program directed resources at “healthy” elements of the population, while few Germans could fail to notice the prevalence of foreign, forced workers in industry and agriculture, a fact that kept the German economy and food production going during war. Germans not only benefited from the suffering of others but also witnessed it in their daily lives without much moral distress. Indeed, the Nazis’ genius seemed to be their ability to combine rational self-interest with a sense that this was just retribution for past inequities in a system that balanced belief in a new society with racism and exploitation to create that New Order.12

  It is, in fact, disconcerting to realize that so many Germans supported the Nazi regime either from mistaken notions of idealism or from crass materialistic motives, but it is also disturbing that the average Landser fought so long and so well on behalf of such a murderous system. This raises yet another, final, question: Could Germany have won? As with the others, this is a complex issue that involves a number of factors that must be considered. In contrast to the generally accepted view, when Germany began World War II, its armaments economy was relatively unprepared, both organizationally and in terms of raw materials. The quick victories in 1939–1940, moreover, promised more than they delivered. Both at Dunkirk and during the Battle of Britain, the Germans lacked the resources to compel the British to negotiate an end to the war, while, in North Africa and the Mediterranean, they were dependent on weak and unreliable allies. All this revealed German weakness, not strength. Great Britain remained in the war, so blitzkrieg had failed, while Western Europe, for all its value industrially, proved a drain on Germany precisely at its weakest and most vulnerable point: foodstuffs and basic raw materials. Once the British secured American aid, the time pressure on Hitler rose significantly. His pact with Stalin had made Germany blockade-proof, at l
east temporarily, but that very dependency opened the Reich to blackmail and pressure from the hated Bolshevik enemy. In any case, war had to come with the Soviet Union sooner or later, for the simple fact that Hitler’s entire ideology, with the central role of Lebensraum in all its racial and economic manifestations, demanded it. Hitler did not, contrary to what many Western historians argue, blunder into war with the Soviet Union, for that constituted the entire purpose of Nazism and was what differentiated Hitler from the run-of-the-mill German nationalists who simply wanted a revision of the Versailles system. The Führer envisioned instead a complete reordering of Europe, for which the destruction of the Soviet Union was the necessary first step. Having decided to break the Gordian knot through an invasion of the Soviet Union rather than driving Great Britain from the war, itself an implicit admission of German weakness, he found that the tyranny of time again asserted itself. He needed a quick victory in the east before American power could assert itself in the west.

  As early as late July 1941, with the unexpectedly fierce Soviet resistance at Smolensk, some in the German leadership worried that the gamble had already failed, but events in early December resulted in the decisive change in the nature of the war. The setback in front of Moscow, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the German declaration of war on the United States all combined to transform what had remained an essentially European struggle into a global war of resources, manpower, and industrial prowess that put Germany at a distinct disadvantage. An additional dimension to the conflict was created by Hitler’s deliberate intention to wage a war of extermination in the Soviet Union. In a terrible irony, the failure to knock Great Britain out of the war, combined with the initial successes in the Soviet Union, had as a consequence the transition of the original intention for a territorial solution to the Nazis’ self-imposed Jewish problem to an exterminationist one. Even as the Ostheer began to struggle against its Soviet opponent, however, the murderous activities of the Einsatzgruppen coalesced with efforts to implement the hunger policy and Generalplan Ost, with the result being a stunning level of violence directed against the occupied peoples of the Soviet Union. Having unleashed a war of annihilation, Hitler now redoubled his efforts to see it through, characteristically perceiving a short window of opportunity for action. If Germany could defeat the Soviet Union in 1942 or at least render it incapable of further resistance, the vast resources of European Russia would be available for use in a global war of attrition against the Anglo-Americans.

  Fleeting, perhaps, as it was, Hitler in 1942 had one last chance to achieve some sort of triumph that might have allowed a stalemated war, at least until the United States developed the atomic bomb. Militarily and economically, then, 1942 was the key year of the war. Hitler, however, in late July squandered whatever slim chances he had for achieving victory militarily in Russia by splitting his already inadequate forces in the vain hope of achieving simultaneously goals that could have been attained only sequentially, if at all. Economically, too, Germany wasted its apparent advantage, finding itself not only being outproduced by the Anglo-Americans, which was perhaps to be expected, but also being overtaken by a truly stupendous effort on the part of the Soviet Union. The Russians ultimately could not sustain this superhuman effort, and, by 1944, the German war economy had pulled even with Soviet production, but by then it was too late, for American output alone swamped the Germans. Unfortunately, 1942 proved decisive in the other war as well: the success of the Ostheer through much of the year provided the opportunity to complete the Final Solution as the Nazis made a concerted effort to kill the Jews in their sphere of influence. The systematic murders of the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union, the often ad hoc killings at the local level in many areas of occupied Europe, and the efforts of Nazi bureaucrats at the RSHA and the Foreign Office to get allies and satellite nations to hand over their Jews merged to produce a crash program of mass murder undertaken under the cover of German military success. By the autumn of 1943, even as the war had turned decisively against the Reich, Himmler could boast that the Jewish problem had largely been solved in the areas under German control and that what remained was primarily a mopping-up operation.13

  That same year, 1943, witnessed an increasing interaction of the various fronts—eastern, Mediterranean, Atlantic, the skies over Germany—that pressured even further the already strained German resources. With Hitler unable or unwilling to mobilize the German people as ruthlessly as Stalin had in the Soviet Union, the German economy became increasingly dependent on forced labor from the east and slave workers from the concentration camps. By 1944, Hitler’s last remaining hope was to defeat the anticipated Anglo-American invasion in the west and then, in a repeat of the scenario of 1940–1941, turn once more to the east. This meant a reversal in the priority of the fronts, with disastrous results. Because of constant, enormous Soviet pressure in the winter of 1943–1944, the Wehrmacht could never transfer sufficiently large forces to the west to ensure the defeat of the Allied invasion, while the Ostheer found itself with insufficient resources to stabilize the front in the east. Like a rubber band stretched too far, German defenses had to break, and they did so spectacularly in the summer of 1944. Even as Anglo-American forces struggled to escape the narrow confines of Normandy, the Soviets launched one of the most successful blitzkrieg operations of the war in Belorussia, a triumph that effectively ended any lingering hopes Hitler might have retained about stalemating the war. Despite the brave talk of miracle weapons and a split in the enemy coalition, the last nine months of the war were more about Hitler’s fanatic determination to prevent another November 1918 than any realistic chance to extricate Germany from its fate. The result, however, was not only a radicalization of the Volksgemeinschaft, as Nazi violence and terror now turned inward, but also the large-scale destruction of German cities and infrastructure as well as the death of millions of people. True to his ideology, Hitler refused to abandon the Darwinistic struggle that he held to be the key to history, nor did he waver racially, insisting in his last testament that the Nazi race laws be upheld, and urging the German people to continue the struggle against the Jewish conspiracy.

  From the outset, the German invasion of the Soviet Union had been an enormous gamble that depended for success primarily on the Soviets reacting to the shock of initial defeat as the French had, by ceasing resistance. Unlike the blitzkrieg campaign against France, however, Barbarossa had no clear Schwerpunkt, nor was it likely that the bulk of the Red Army could be trapped and destroyed in the first weeks of the conflict. Hitler also grossly underestimated the political and economic strength and resilience of the Stalinist system as well as the resources that would be necessary to win in the Soviet Union. Although Richard Overy has made a very cogent argument that Allied success in World War II depended on the cumulative impact of narrow triumphs in a number of key areas, the fact remains that the Germans always had only a very slight chance of triumphing in any of these sectors. Their early success owed as much to their enemies’ weaknesses as to their own strengths, a fact that has tended to obscure the hard reality facing them. In terms of population, available military manpower, and access to key raw materials, Nazi Germany had no clear advantage over Britain and France, let alone when facing a possible coalition of enemies including the United States and the Soviet Union. Hitler was, in fact, a leader with great ambitions to overturn and remake the European political, economic, and social system but whose vehicle of choice was a medium-size European power with few allies of any consequence. This fundamental weakness was revealed as early as 1940. The best chance for Germany to have won the war, if such a possibility existed, was likely a pursuit of the Mediterranean strategy urged on him by naval leaders and some at the OKW. This, however, would have forced Hitler into dependence on weak and unreliable allies (as he well knew), dispersed German strength, and contradicted his own ideology, which stressed the importance of Lebensraum in the east.

  The “right” war, for Hitler, was always the one against the Sovi
et Union, while all the other conflicts were secondary in importance. He meant finally to solve the “German question,” the inability or unwillingness of the British and French to accommodate the Reich in the European balance of power, by establishing German hegemony over Europe, then using a German-dominated Europe to meet the rising threat from the United States. Further, resolving the German question raised the possibility of settling the Jewish question. Nazism had always been fueled by a complex mixture of resentment, fear, and idealism: resentment at those who had supposedly undermined Germany in World War I; fear of the alleged Jewish-Bolshevik threat to destroy the German people; and a utopian vision of a harmonious racial community that would redeem past injustices and suffering. For Hitler, the purpose of a state was to promote and guarantee the existence of the Volksgemeinschaft. To do so required war to conquer the resources necessary to sustain the struggle for national life. Acquiring this Lebensraum, however, opened the possibility of ensuring Germany’s future, not only economically but also racially.