The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  There is little evidence to suggest that Nazi ideology spread through the army to fill a gap left by the disintegration of military values and the men’s basic loyalty to one another as ‘comrades’. The relative homogeneity of each division in most respects meant that primary group loyalties remained intact within the division for most of the war. It was not so much the disintegration of such loyalties as their persistence, in a mixture of experienced and increasingly cynical and brutalized veterans with a continual and, from early 1943, increasing stream of ideologically deeply

  Nazified younger men that formed the basis for the barbarous conduct of the war by German troops in the east. Even in times of heavy losses, such as the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942, the social cohesion of the 253rd Infantry Division companies was damaged but not destroyed, and with the return of convalescent soldiers and the arrival of fresh recruits it was soon restored.161 These were groups of men bound together by ties of mutual loyalty forged in the heat of battle. Even when, as they increasingly did after Stalingrad, they began to doubt whether victory could ever be attained, they continued to fight out of a sense of comradeship and mutual support in adversity.162 Here they could create emotional bonds in small groups that provided a substitute, at least to some extent, for the families they had left at home, caring for the wounded, decorating their bunkers and living quarters and, like the troops who invested so much emotional capital in the celebration of Christmas at Stalingrad, providing some kind of meaning to life amidst the senselessness of war. Here, in another way perhaps, was the organic national community, the Volksgemeinschaft, in miniature; and correspondingly, all the soldiers’ aggressive masculinity was directed outwards, towards the enemy, and towards a population that, in the east at least, they regarded as racially inferior, indeed as barely human.163

  The men also kept fighting out of sheer fear - fear of what would happen to them if they surrendered to the enemy, fear of their superiors should they show signs of flagging. The armed forces had their own courts-martial, which were freely used by officers in all three services to prosecute offences ranging from the theft of food parcels sent in the field post at one extreme to desertion of the colours at the other. Any of these offences could land the offender before a firing-squad. Numerous prosecutions were brought for the vaguely defined offence of ‘undermining military strength’ (Wehrkraftzersetzung), which could include anything from defeatist utterances to self-mutilation in the hope of being invalided out; and, as in civilian life, criticism of the regime and its leaders was also a criminal offence. By contrast, as we have already seen, there were relatively few prosecutions for offences against the civilian population of occupied areas, such as looting, rape or murder, and shooting captured enemy soldiers instead of taking them prisoner was widely tolerated, especially in the initial stages of Operation Barbarossa. Courts-martial were, therefore, overwhelmingly used as a means of enforcing discipline and the will to fight. Over the whole course of the war, it has been estimated that courts-martial tried the staggering total of 3 million cases, of which some 400,000 were brought against civilians and prisoners of war.164 Of all these cases, no fewer than 30,000 ended in a member of the German armed forces being condemned to death. This compared with a mere forty-eight executed in the German forces during the First World War. Of those 30,000 death sentences, some were commuted, and a few were pronounced in absentia. But the great majority - at least 21,000 according to the most thorough estimate - were carried out. In all other combatant countries with the exception of the Soviet Union, death sentences pronounced by courts-martial during the Second World War can be numbered in hundreds at most, rather than thousands.165

  A prisoner brought before a court-martial was supposed to be tried by three judges. Regulations required the accused to be provided with a defence counsel, but in the heat of the battle such rules were widely disregarded. One participant recalled for example that in a part of the Stalingrad front covered by four army divisions, 364 death sentences were handed out by drumhead courts-martial in the space of just over week, for offences including cowardice, desertion and the theft of food parcels.166 Acting in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief, Hitler issued a set of guidelines that prescribed the most draconian levels of punishment. ‘The death penalty is recommended,’ according to one of the guidelines, ‘if the offender acted out of fear of personal endangerment or if it is necessary in the particular circumstances of the individual case for the maintenance of manly discipline.’167 Military judges by and large shared the view of the civilian judicial apparatus under Nazism that, as one of them declared:

  Whatever serves the people is just . . . In the narrower sense of military law, it follows that ‘whatever serves the armed forces is just’. . . Now it becomes clear why there can be no ‘average soldier’. To be a soldier means to raise the National Socialist conception of honour and soldierly behaviour to a professional ethos.168 This meant, for example, that 6,000 executions were carried out for ‘undermining military strength’. The commonest offence bringing men before the firing-squad was desertion, which led to 15,000 executions. In many cases, the offence in effect amounted to little more than absence without leave (unerlaubte Entfernung). Sentences, following orders issued by the Combined Armed Forces Supreme Command in December 1939 and again in July 1941, were carried out as soon as possible after being passed. ‘The faster a pest in the armed forces (Wehrmachtschädling ) receives the punishment he has earned, the easier it will be to prevent other soldiers from committing the same or similar deeds and the easier it will be to maintain manly discipline among the troops.’169

  IV

  Terrorizing the troops through the draconian application of military justice may well have helped keep them fighting long after they knew the war was lost. But what the regime increasingly required was a military force that fought out of fanatical National Socialist commitment. This was in fact available, in the shape of the Military SS (Waffen-SS ). Its history went back to the early days of the Third Reich, when Hitler had formed an armed personal bodyguard, which later became the so-called ‘Adolf Hitler Personal Flag’ (Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler). Conceived mainly as a ceremonial unit, it was commanded by a rough Bavarian Nazi, Josef (‘Sepp’) Dietrich, whose previous jobs had included working as a petrol-pump attendant, a waiter, a farm labourer and a foreman in a tobacco factory. Born in 1892, he had served in a tank unit, but otherwise had no serious military experience, as army generals repeatedly but vainly pointed out. Soon, however, Dietrich’s boss Heinrich Himmler set up another, larger organization and began recruiting army men to provide the unit with proper military training, which from 1938 was provided to Dietrich’s men as well. By the end of 1939, these various military units of the SS had been joined by groups from the Death’s Head Units formed by Theodor Eicke to provide guards for the concentration camps. The SS forces grew in number from 18,000 on the eve of war to 140,000 in November 1941, including tank regiments and motorized infantry. They were intended from the outset to be an elite, ideologically committed, highly trained, and - unlike the army - unconditionally loyal to Hitler. Senior officers were notably younger than their army counterparts, mostly being born in the 1890s or early 1900s and so in their forties or early fifties at the time of the war. Military SS regiments were given names such as ‘The Reich’, ‘Germany’, ‘The Leader’ and so on. Again unlike the army, the Military SS was an institution not of the German people but of the Germanic race, and its leading figure, Gottlob Berger, a long-time Nazi and First World War veteran who was one of Himmler’s closest intimates, set up recruiting offices in ‘Germanic’ countries like Holland, Denmark, Norway and Flanders, forming the first non-German division (‘Viking’) in the spring of 1941. Further recruits from Eastern European countries followed, as numbers began to take priority over supposed racial affinities. By 1942 the Military SS numbered 236,000 men; in 1943 it exceeded half a million; and in 1944 it was approaching a strength of 600,000, of whom some 369,000 were active in the field.170<
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  Regular army commanders were disparaging of the Military SS, whose commanders they considered lacking in professionalism and over-inclined to sacrifice the lives of their men. Although the SS divisions were placed under their command, the army generals could do little to rein in their fanatical desire for self-sacrifice. When told by Eicke that his men’s lives had counted for nothing in an attack he had just carried out, the army general Erich Hopner, under whose command Eicke had been placed, roundly condemned this attitude: ‘That is the outlook of a butcher.’171 However, the senior generals were not wholly averse to the Military SS spearheading attacks and taking the bulk of the casualties: it preserved the lives of their own men and reduced the strength of a serious rival force. Himmler complained in August 1944 that ‘people of ill-will’ in the army were conspiring to ‘butcher this unwelcome force and get rid of it for some future development’.172 Army commanders also alleged that members of the Military SS were more likely than their own troops to commit massacres of innocent civilians, especially Jews, and carry out other crimes, above all on the Eastern Front. An official army investigation in August 1943 noted that out of eighteen proven cases of rape reported to it, twelve had been committed by members of the Military SS. How accurate such reports were cannot be ascertained. The Military SS tended to provide something of an excuse for regular army commanders wishing to conceal, or pass over, the crimes committed by their own men. On the other hand, even officers from other branches of the SS were known to complain about its brutality. When the commander of the ‘Prince Eugene’ division tried to excuse to a minister of the puppet government in Croatia some atrocities committed by his men as ‘errors’, another SS officer told him: ‘Since you arrived there has unfortunately been one “error” after another.’173 Attempts after 1945 by former Military SS officers to portray their troops as nothing more than ordinary soldiers failed to carry conviction, since there could be no doubt about their elite status or their fanatical ideological commitment. On the other hand, the mass of evidence that has come to light since the early 1990s about the conduct of regular troops on and behind the Eastern Front undermines claims that the Military SS was wholly exceptional in its disregard for the laws and conventions of warfare.

  The undoubted fanaticism of the Military SS, as well as the tendency of military commanders to put its units into the front line, led to heavy losses among its troops. A total of 900,000 Military SS men served in the war, of whom more than a third - 34 per cent - were killed.174 On 15 November 1941 the ‘Death’s Head’ division reported losses of 60 per cent amongst officers and NCOs. Its backbone was gone, a report complained. The general view of the Military SS among the German people was, as the Security Service of the SS reported in March 1942, that it was poorly trained and its men were often ‘recklessly sacrificed’. Its men were thrown into battle because it wanted to show itself better than the army.175 Moreover, parents were beginning to try to stop their sons from enlisting because of the anti-Christian indoctrination to which they would be subjected in the Military SS. ‘Influence of parents and Church negative,’ reported one recruitment centre in February 1943. ‘Parents generally anti-Military SS,’ reported another. In Vienna one man told the recruiting officer: ‘The priest told us that the SS was atheist and if we joined it we should go to hell.’176 Volunteers from Flanders, Denmark, Norway and Holland began to apply to be discharged, complaining of the arrogant and overbearing treatment of foreign recruits by German SS officers. Recruiting officers began to go to Labour Service camps and force young men to ‘volunteer’. Relatives complained about such actions, while Military SS officers soon declared themselves dissatisfied with the results, as many of the new recruits were ‘intellectually sub-standard’ and ‘inclined to insubordination and malingering’. The Military SS was rapidly deteriorating in quality towards the end of the war. But in this, it was doing no more than following the course taken by the regular armed forces themselves.177

  A NEW ‘TIME OF STRUGGLE’

  I

  On 7 November 1942 Albert Speer was travelling with Hitler to Munich on the Leader’s own train. ‘In earlier years,’ Speer recalled, ‘Hitler had made a habit of showing himself at the window of his special train whenever it stopped. Now these encounters with the outside world seemed undesirable to him; instead, the blinds on the station side of the train would be lowered.’ Late that evening, the train was halted in a siding and Hitler and the rest of the Leader’s entourage sat down to dinner. Speer reported what happened next:

  The table was elegantly set with silver cutlery, cut glass, good china and flower arrangements. As we began our ample meal, none of us at first saw that a freight train was stopped on the adjacent track. From the cattle wagon, bedraggled, starved, and in some cases wounded German soldiers, just returning from the east, stared at the diners. With a start, Hitler noticed the sombre scene two metres from his window. Without as much as a gesture of greeting in their direction, he peremptorily ordered his servant to draw the blinds. This, then, in the second half of the war, was how Hitler handled a meeting with ordinary front-line soldiers such as he himself had once been.178

  Hitler, indeed, withdrew increasingly from public view from 1942 onwards. Goebbels and Speer both tried to persuade him to visit bombed-out areas of German cities to boost morale, but without success. 179 There were rumours that he had fallen ill or been wounded. Yet when he did speak, it no longer had the effect it had once been able to produce on popular opinion. A speech broadcast on 21 March 1943, for example - his first public address since Stalingrad - was so brief, and delivered at such speed and in such a dull monotone, that people wondered whether he had been racing to get it finished in case it was interrupted by an air raid, or indeed whether it had been spoken by a stand-in.180

  Even to his intimates, Hitler became less openly friendly. From the autumn of 1943 onwards, Speer thought that lunch with him was ‘an ordeal’. His dog, an Alsatian, was, Speer noted, ‘the only living creature at headquarters who aroused any flicker of human feeling in Hitler’. His distaste for bad news meant that his subordinates played up positive reports and presented insignificant, temporary successes as if they were major victories. He did not visit the front, and had no contact with the harsh realities of the fighting. He always assumed that the divisions marked on the maps he used to direct strategy were up to full strength. Equipped with the latest technology, with telephone and two-way radio, he was able to communicate with the generals on the ground, but the real communication was all one-way; if any generals objected, or tried to bring him back to reality, he would bawl them out and, in some instances, dismiss them. He bullied and browbeat the General Staff officers at his headquarters, and lost his temper when bad news was presented to him. The generals were cowards, he would rage, ‘the training of the General Staff is a school of lying and deception’, the information the army was conveying to it was false, ‘the situation is deliberately being represented as unfavourable - that’s how they want to force me to authorize retreats!’181

  Underneath it all, Hitler was aware that the military situation was deteriorating, but outwardly he always presented a fac¸ade of optimism. His will had triumphed before: it would triumph again. With his concentration of power in military affairs, he now, for the first time in his life, had to work extremely hard, abandoning the casual and chaotic lifestyle of his earlier years as dictator, with its social evenings listening to music, watching old movies or playing with the architectural models created by Speer. Now he spent his time conferring with, or rather arguing with and browbeating, his generals, poring over military maps and thinking out military plans, often down to the last detail. Convinced more than ever of his own infallible genius, he became increasingly consumed by suspicion and distrust of his subordinates, expecially in military matters. No major decisions could be taken without him. Never one to take physical exercise, he relied increasingly on pills and remedies prescribed him by Dr Theo Morell, his personal physician since 1936: over twenty-eight dif
ferent pills a day by the later stages of the war, and so many injections that Göring dubbed Morell ‘The Reich Master of Injections’. Morell controlled Hitler’s diet as well as he could in the face of his patient’s vegetarianism and his liking for foods such as pea soup, which caused him indigestion. Morell was a qualified physician, and no quack, and all the medicines he prescribed Hitler were clinically approved. His bedside manner enabled him to deal effectively with his patient, who relied on him increasingly as the war went on, and indeed he kept Hitler on his feet for virtually the whole time, apart from one bout of illness in early August 1941. But he was unable to deal effectively with Hitler’s physical deterioration under the strain to which he was now subjecting himself. From 1941 onwards electrocardiograms began to show progressive heart disease, probably caused by sclerosis of the coronary arteries. Beginning in the spring of 1943 Hitler suffered from chronic indigestion, with periodic stomach cramps (at least twenty-four bouts by the end of 1944), which may have been made worse by Morell’s treatment. A tremor began in his left hand, becoming markedly worse from the end of 1942, and accompanied by a growing stoop and jerking movements in his left leg. By 1944 he was shuffling rather than walking, and the symptoms of a mild but generally worsening case of Parkinson’s disease were becoming clear for all medically informed observers to note. Even Morell, whose preference was for psychosomatic diagnoses, accepted this early in 1945 and began applying the standard treatment available at the time. More generally, observers began to note how rapidly Hitler was ageing, with his hair turning grey and his appearance no longer that of a vigorous and energetic middle-aged man, but - thanks not least to his Parkinsonism - of an elderly, increasingly debilitated one. Hesitation about revealing this to the outside world may have been an important factor in his growing refusal to appear in public.182