How Could This Happen

by Dan McMillan

  Verdun was a historic complex of French fortifications surrounded on three sides by German trenches. Falkenhayn reasoned that the French, in part out of considerations of prestige, would make every sacrifice to hold Verdun. Surrounding the French position with artillery, he would turn Verdun into a killing ground. The German offensive would, as Falkenhayn put it, “compel the French to throw in every man they have. If they do so the forces of France will bleed to death.” Informally, German officers referred to the Verdun battle plan as the “blood pump.”4

  “Operation Judgment,” as Falkenhayn named his offensive, commenced on February 21, 1916, and continued until July 11, with two bursts of later fighting in October and December. Falkenhayn’s plan failed miserably, as it cost the Germans as much as it did the French. Already by the end of June, more than 200,000 men had been killed or wounded on each side, and some 20 million artillery shells had been fired. The surrounding territory had become a wasteland, with entire forests and villages erased and the surface of the earth reduced to a moonscape of overlapping shell holes.5

  As contemporaries recognized, the battles of the Somme and Verdun, both in 1916, inaugurated a new and unprecedented kind of fighting, the “battle of materiel” as the Germans called it. In this war of attrition, in which each side sought to exhaust the other’s supply of young men, armies fired titanic volumes of artillery shells in barrages that could last for days, while machine guns swept battlefields bare of any men who rose up from the trenches that had sheltered them. The men who endured this horrific and pointless fighting were forever altered by it.6

  In their diaries and reminiscences, soldiers spoke of the overwhelming fire as a force of nature, an insuperable obstacle, or a colossal machine crushing every man in its path. In a reference to this awful power, the German veteran Ernst Jünger gave his celebrated war memoir the title In Storms of Steel. Reflecting on one battle, Jünger recalled how he “stared long into the glowing witches’ cauldron, whose visible border was formed by the piercing muzzle flashes of the English machine guns,” and how “the thousand-headed bee swarm of these bullets, which flooded over us,” doomed the attacking German troops. Others called the machine-gun fire “hail” or “steely rain.” Friedrich Bethge recalled how his men assaulted the British trenches, moving closely behind a creeping barrage that crushed the enemy’s position under a “fiery steamroller”; after crossing the first line of British trenches, they ran into a “wall of steel” in the form of the British artillery’s blocking fire.7

  In one battle, Jünger wrote, “from nine to ten [p.m.] the fire reached a crazy intensity. The earth shook, the sky looked like a seething giants’ cauldron. Hundreds of heavy batteries thundered in and around Combles, countless shells crisscrossed howling and hissing over us. Everything was shrouded in thick smoke, ominously lit by colored rocket flares.” Pounding pain rent the soldiers’ heads and ears; they could communicate only in brief, shouted commands. “The capacity for logical thought and the sensation of gravity seemed suspended. One had the feeling of the inescapable and of absolute necessity, as when faced by an eruption of the elements. A non-commissioned officer of the third platoon went raving mad.”8

  The massive fire transformed the battlefield into a nightmarish wasteland of shell craters. Soldiers described the killing fields as “Hell,” an “Inferno,” and a “desert” devoid of all life. The stench of rotting corpses filled every man’s nostrils until it became a familiar part of the background. Bodies lay unburied in the open, while the dirt thrown up by exploding shells buried others, many alive. In late August 1916, Ernst Jünger led his company to a forward German position in the Battle of the Somme, into which the British had continued to pour men and munitions since the failed attack of July 1. The German line, more a shallow groove than a trench, “looked like nothing more than a row of giant craters, filled with shreds of uniforms, weapons, and dead men,” wrote Jünger. “The surrounding terrain was, as far as the eye could see, completely unearthed by heavy shells. Not a single forlorn blade of grass showed itself to the searching gaze. The uprooted battlefield was ghastly. Between the living defenders lay the dead. Digging foxholes, we noticed that the dead were layered in strata. One company after another, hunkered down together during the artillery barrages, had been mown down, their corpses buried by the masses of earth hurled upward by the shells, and the relief troops had taken the place of the dead. Now it was our turn.”9

  Under prolonged artillery fire, men experienced a feeling of utter helplessness and vulnerability. Veteran Otto Germar described lying “for hours, days, for an eternity in a shell crater, occupied with no other thought than: this shell went to the left, that one behind me, this one in front—now, now must it land on me. . . . These thoughts, focused for days on this wretched and pitiable self, were what undermined the nerves, indeed, the strength of mind, bit by bit.” Together with this helplessness came a feeling of the near-certainty of death and the recognition that it could and did strike at any time. Hans Henning Grote recorded in his diary how his unit moved into a fiercely contested sector of the Somme battlefield on August 28, 1916, going “out of the frying pan into the fire.” “Our mission,” he continued, was “to let ourselves be ingloriously shot to pieces.” After summing up a day’s losses, naming many individual deaths, Grote summarized the brutal calculus that determined how long his men would stay in the front line: “But we know, yes, that a monstrous percentage [of men killed] still has to be reached before they release the shattered remnant of my command from this Hell. Don’t think, do your duty!” Grote’s valued comrades had been reduced to an arbitrary percentage, eloquent testimony to the degree to which the war had cheapened human life.10

  Soldiers reacted to such horrors in different ways. Some were simply broken psychologically. Many others, probably the majority, reacted the way we think that any sane person would have to react: with revulsion, with hatred of war, with condemnation of this pointless slaughter of millions. The thirty-seven-year-old painter Ernst Noppe, writing in his diary after the Battle of Longwy in August 1914, summed it up this way: “Ghastly impressions, one cannot describe these disgraceful horrors. The human being is an animal of the lowest kind, merciless.” A Lieutenant Henckel, writing a letter from the Verdun battlefield on March 24, 1916, put the matter with brutal clarity: “This is no longer war, but rather butchery of human beings.”11

  Although many more German veterans became pacifists than warmongers after 1918, nonetheless there was a distinct minority of combat soldiers who came to love the fighting and who gloried in the ways it had transformed them. Among German veterans, Ernst Jünger wrote most eloquently of the thrill of combat and the emotional intensity that came with confronting death. He spoke of gaining a sense of mastery over one’s own emotions and of experiencing a new, crystal-like clarity of wholly dispassionate thought. Describing a new kind of man that emerged from the war, he used such adjectives as “hard,” “coldblooded,” “sober,” “dispassionate,” and “objective.” And these terms were not mere description, but rather an ideal toward which many young men, notably men who were active on the radical nationalist Right of German politics, continually strove. They celebrated their emotional distance from the victims of the right-wing violence of the early 1920s, saw renewed warfare as an objective necessity, and later expressed pride in their ability to take the “tough” decisions that would spell doom for millions of Hitler’s victims. In short, the brutalizing combat of World War I gave birth to a genocidal cohort made up of hundreds or even thousands of men who had enjoyed combat, as well as many from the generation that followed who were too young to have experienced the war’s horrors, but old enough to worship the hardened men who had.12

  Many future perpetrators of the Holocaust surely read Jünger’s popular memoir of combat. During the 1920s, Jünger was the most prominent and respected intellectual among right-wing nationalists in Germany. In his graceful prose, he acknowledged the horror, the death, and the devastation that surrounded him, but
also prized the exhilaration and heightened sensory perception he experienced when death was near. Noting the “thick stench of corpses” that hung over dangerous sectors of the battlefield, he recalled how he and his comrades “ran as a matter of life and death, and as I sensed these fumes while running, I was hardly surprised—it came with the territory.” Jünger found that this odor was “not solely disagreeable; it provoked, closely mixed with the piercing smoke of the explosives, an almost clairvoyant excitement, which only the greatest proximity to death can produce.” Amid this nightmarish run across a corpse-strewn battlefield, he “sensed in these moments no fear, but rather a great and almost demonic lightness.” And combat gave him something else that other veterans welcomed, a calm indifference toward his own death and that of others, an equanimity in the face of mortality that might be regarded as a kind of inner peace.13

  During a day of ferocious fighting in July 1917, in which his company suffered heavy losses, Jünger was hurled back into a shell hole by two bullets, shot through lung and shoulder. He lay unattended for thirteen hours, finally had his wounds bound by a medic, and was carried back to the hospital by stretcher bearers who dropped him several times to take cover from incoming shells. Doctors treated him, and finally he could rest. “In the deathly exhaustion in which I found myself,” he wrote, “an awareness of happiness came over me, a happiness which intensified more and more, and which stayed with me for weeks. I contemplated death, without being troubled by the thought. All of my affairs seemed astonishingly simplified, and with the feeling ‘You’re all right’ I glided into sleep.”14

  Other combat veterans gained their acceptance of death by varied paths and in differing degree. For Hans Henning Grote, desperation seems to have wrought this crucial metamorphosis as he stood in a foxhole full of muddy water, exposed to relentless artillery fire and strafing by British fighter planes: “At one blow a great and deeply shaking indifference won dominion over me,” he wrote. “I could care so little, it would be best if they got me!” Others contemplated the sheer randomness of death and found solace in the equality of chances between men, or in a submission to Fate. Otto Germar’s men were supposed to be relieved from the front line by fresh troops at 4 o’clock in the morning. The relief troops came two hours late, and in the interim, a shell’s explosion buried three men alive. Their comrades dug frantically for them, found them all blue from lack of air, and managed to revive only one. Germar vividly recalled one of the dead, a man who had recently returned from furlough after proposing marriage to his sweetheart, of whom he proudly carried a photograph. But Germar quickly discarded the idea of complaining to the late-arriving relief unit. “Had they come on time, they would have the dead now, and another mother, another bride would have to weep.” He painted an image of death leaping about the battlefield, landing at random, “and thus one stands here in another’s place, one dies here for the other.”15

  The titanic firepower of the new “battle of materiel,” grinding the individual into insignificance, seemed to transform some men, purging each soldier of his inner frailties, making men “hard,” “coldblooded,” “sober,” “dispassionate,” and “objective.” According to the new concept of warfare, the soldier must become as precise, objective, and hardened as the great “machine” of battle, constructed by scientific military planning. He must be reduced to an extension of the artillery, the machine guns, the trench systems, and the logistics which alone could bring victory. “The man no longer employs the machine,” wrote one essayist in 1925, “but rather the machine makes use of the man.” The thunderous and unceasing artillery barrage, as Otto Germar put it, gave “this war its objective, dispassionate character, murderous of heart and nerves.”16

  Veterans wrote of the entire German army being winnowed of weaker elements and becoming hardened. Ferdinand Beingolf, in his aptly named essay “The Horror,” tells how he had to dig graves in a French cemetery at midnight and then bury the cruelly mangled bodies of his comrades, working alone in darkness. “From this kind of burial duty you don’t come back as a momma’s boy, but rather as a broken man—or as a soldier.” Adolf Hitler recalled in Mein Kampf his own metamorphosis from “a young volunteer to an old soldier.” Joining up in the first days of August 1914, he was carried away by the “romanticism of battle,” but this illusion was soon replaced by “the horror.” Enthusiasm “gradually cooled off,” and “the gushing jubilation was suffocated by the fear of death.” He and his comrades now had to fight a battle between “the instinct of self-preservation” and the commandments of duty. “I also was not spared this struggle,” Hitler wrote. “Always, whenever death was on the prowl, an unnamed something within me tried to rebel, presented itself to the weak body as the voice of reason, yet it was only cowardice.”17

  In the winter of 1915–1916, after more than a year in combat, “this struggle within me was decided,” wrote Hitler. “My will had finally become the unchallenged master. If I greeted the first days of battle with laughter and jubilation, now I was calm and resolute. This was what endured. Only now could Fate put me to the ultimate test without my nerves breaking or my wits failing.” “This transformation,” Hitler concluded, “had consummated itself in the whole army. It had come out of the unending battles old and hard, and whoever could not endure the tempest was broken by it.”18

  Ernst Jünger described his first encounter with this new type of hard and coldblooded soldier, who had appeared at night amid a deafening artillery barrage at Combles to lead Jünger and his men to the front line, saying, “He struck me at once as the inhabitant of a foreign and harder world.” Asking their guide about the fighting, Jünger received “a monotone account of crouching for days in shell craters with no connection [to others], of constant attacks, of fields of corpses and maddening thirst, of the pining wounded and of more.” He wrote: “The motionless face framed by the helmet’s steel rim, the monotone voice accompanied by the clamor of the front, made an eerie impression upon us. A mere few days had put upon this messenger, who would lead us into the kingdom of the flames, a stamp that seemed to separate him from us in a way that defied expression.” This ghostly messenger, telling them their fate, said: “If you’re killed, there you lie. No one can help you there. No one knows whether he’ll come back alive. They attack every day, but they’re not getting through. Everyone knows that this is a matter of life and death.” Jünger was moved and inspired by this man’s example. “Nothing was left in his voice but a complete equanimity; it had been burned out of him. With men like these, one can fight.”19

  Only the searing experience of such combat, and the newly forged ideal of the coldblooded soldier who calmly accepted the war’s massive slaughter, can explain how men of Jünger’s generation could later murder innocent millions without remorse or even anxiety. The celebrated “front soldier ideal,” best known to a generation of radical nationalist Germans through Jünger’s writings, inspired Heinrich Himmler’s definition of the ideal SS officer. Born in 1900, Himmler joined the army in the last year of World War I but never made it to the front. He saw himself very much as a failure for having neither seen combat nor achieved officer rank. This “failure” was made all the more bitter by the triumphant return of his brother Gebhard, who emerged from the fighting unscathed and was promoted to lieutenant and decorated for valor with the Iron Cross. Himmler became a classic member of the “war youth generation”—men born too young to fight, but swept up in the nationalist enthusiasm of the war and the radical nationalist politics of the first postwar years. These men were especially ready to glorify warfare because they had not seen its horrors firsthand. Himmler thought of himself as a soldier for his entire adult life, waging permanent and merciless war against the internal and external enemies of Germany, real and imagined, and he imparted the “martial virtues” of veterans like Jünger to the men of his SS.20

  Speaking to high-ranking SS officers in October 1943, Himmler addressed what he and his men called “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”
Although he and his comrades could discuss it frankly among themselves, he said, “we will never speak of it publicly.” Even members of the Nazi Party would not have the stomach to support this necessary policy, Himmler believed. “It is one of those things which are easy to talk about. ‘The Jewish people will be exterminated,’” every party member would say. “‘It’s clear. It’s in our program. Elimination of the Jews, extermination and we’ll do it.’ And then they come along, the worthy eighty million Germans, and each one of them produces his decent Jew. It’s clear the others are swine, but this one is a fine Jew.”

  Himmler found this kind of compassion contemptible. About Germans who would make an exception for some Jews, he said: “Not one of those who talk like that has watched it happening, not one of them has been through it.” Using imagery eerily reminiscent of trench warfare, Himmler observed: “Most of you will know what it means when a hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred or a thousand are lying there. To have stuck it out, and—apart from a few exceptions due to human weakness—to have remained decent, that is what has made us hard. This is a glorious page in our history and one that has never been written and can never be written.” Murdering by the millions did not mean that the men of the SS were brutal or immoral, much less criminal, in Himmler’s view. It did not make them the worst of German society, he thought, but rather the very best, for only they were strong enough and hard enough to carry out this psychologically burdensome task. “All in all,” he concluded, “we can say that we have fulfilled this most difficult duty for the love of our people. And our spirit, our soul, our character has not suffered injury from it.”21

  The ghastly battlefields and massive slaughter of World War I produced a generation of violent and hardened men, men who could accept the deaths of millions as a normal fact of political life. Yet men of many nations fought in the war without becoming murderers. It took the special role of nationalism and anti-Semitism in German politics, and the intensification of both in wartime Germany, to give these men the political convictions that made them so dangerous. It took the polarizing impact of the war on Germany’s already dysfunctional political system, the crushing blow of Germany’s defeat, and the political and economic chaos that followed to make Hitler’s rise to power possible. Only then could the horror of the trenches find its fatal echo a generation later in the death camps and killing fields of the Holocaust.22