Hitler's Panzers

by Dennis Showalter

  On January 30, 1936, Beck recommended motorizing four infantry divisions. It was quick, it was cheap, and it was doable in the contexts of industrial production and manpower procurement. Beck described motorized divisions as necessary for rapid- approach marches and surprise movements, to provide mobile reserves for the high command, and as a counter to aerial interdiction of rail transport. Significant as well was the French army’s 1935 decision to motorize no fewer than seven of its first-line divisions. Armies resemble the fashion industry in their susceptibility to trends, and health aficionados in their quest for symmetry.

  The Lutz/Guderian pressure persisted, and the heritage of fifteen years’ worth of theoretical consideration on the prospects of large-scale mobile war remained active. In May the General Staff described motorized divisions as having the same capacity as their standard counterparts, but with an added capacity for rapid movement and maneuver. Suitable as mobile reserves, presumably for defensive purposes, motorized divisions could also be concentrated in mobile armies, presumably for offensives at the operational level in combination with the light and panzer divisions.

  Like the light divisions, the new motorized divisions received their own corps headquarters. They also kept their original branch color: white. Otherwise, they were not exactly given a lot of thought. Four standard infantry divisions simply turned in their horses for trucks, motorcycles, and a dozen armored cars. They did have one tactical advantage over their French counterparts. For mobility, the French division’s infantry depended heavily on a Groupement of trucks attached for each move. The German trucks were organic down to company/platoon level—a major difference in flexibility even if the trucks were essentially road-bound and highly vulnerable even to small-arms fire.

  IV

  THE SOLDIERS WERE confident that once Germany’s young men changed their brown shirts and Hitler Youth uniforms for army Feldgrau, their socialization away from National Socialism would be relatively easy. The relevant virtues the Nazis preached—comradeship, self-sacrifice, courage, community—had been borrowed from the army’s ethos. The army knew well how to cultivate them from its own resources. The new Wehrmacht had new facilities. Barracks with showers and athletic fields, plenty of windows, and amåple space between bunks were a seven days’ wonder to fathers and uncles who had served under the Empire. Leave policies were generous, and applied without regard for rank. Food was well cooked and ample. In the field, officers and men not only ate from the same kitchens; they used the same latrines. Uniforms looked smart and actually fit the wearers—no small matters to young men on pass needing to make quick impressions.

  As the army expanded, its conscripts were motivated, alert, and physically fit to degrees inconceivable in all but the best formations of the Kaiser’s day. The fact that military service had been restricted gave it a certain appeal of the transgressive, the forbidden, something generally attractive to adolescent males. Thanks to the eighteen months of compulsory labor service required of all seventeen-year-olds since 1935, the new recruits required a minimum of socializing into barracks life, and were more than casually acquainted with the elements of close-order drill.

  The army was still the army, and NCOs had lost none of their historic set of tools, official and unofficial, to “motivate” recalcitrants and make them examples for the rest. Even more than in the Reichswehr, however, officers and noncommissioned officers were expected to bond with their men, leading by example on a daily basis. One anecdote may stand for many experiences. A squad of recruits was at rifle practice. The platoon commander asked who was the best shot among them and offered a challenge: “Beat my score and you can have an early furlough.” At the end of three rounds, the private won by a single point—by grace of a lieutenant who knew how to lose without making it obvious. When the wheels came off in a combat situation, such officers seldom had to order “Follow me!”

  German army discipline by British or American standards allowed harshness as a norm, and as the war went on, it escalated to large-scale draconic brutality quite apart from any alleged “Nazification.” Military service, however, had for more than a century been a major rite of passage for males in Prussia/Germany. That aspect not merely survived under the Weimar Republic, it acquired something like mythic status—again, in good part because service was so limited. Contemporary conscripts in France, Belgium, and Poland, to say nothing of the Soviet Union, were likely to have a substantially different perspective. An easy rite of passage is a contradiction in terms, but under Prussian kings and German emperors, the army’s demands had generally been understood as not beyond the capacities of an ordinarily fit, ordinarily well- adjusted twenty-year-old. Exceptions were just that. And in the Weimar years, a near-standard response of older generations across the social and political spectrum to anything smacking of late-adolescent malaise or rebellion was along the lines that what the little punks needed was some shaping up in uniform.

  That mentality arguably echoed another facet of late-Weimar public opinion involving a closed institution: a growing obsession with crime, and a corresponding attack on the prison system as a rest cure for criminals. The latter criticism grew more vitriolic, especially on the Right, as the depression imposed greater hardships on ordinary citizens. By the time the Nazis took power, demands for stricter treatment of prisoners, and especially rigorous policies toward “incorrigibles,” were firmly in place. The Nazis were pleased to oblige.

  The recruits who began occupying the new barracks and filling the ranks of new units when conscription was formally reintroduced in 1936 thus found themselves in a comprehensive environment supporting compliance, cooperation, and participation. At this stage the more extreme ramifications of both army discipline and Nazi ideology were usually fringe manifestations, affecting the kinds of outsiders usually generated by male bonding groups. And the armored force benefited disproportionately from the new military order. Service in the panzers was a particular plus for those young men who may not have been part of a motorized society but who were nevertheless eager for the opportunity. Anticipating one’s draft notice gave some freedom to choose one’s branch of service. The prewar armored force never lacked for volunteers.

  Most of the sixteen weeks of basic training was done in the traditional fashion: by units, with recruits arriving at the depot in time-honored fashion. Their initial processing, however, differed to a significant degree from both pre-1914 practice and the patterns in contemporary conscript armies. While not ignoring experience, aptitude, education, and even social class, the German sorting and screening system paid close attention to what later generations would call personality profiles. Determination, presence of mind, and situational awareness were the qualities most valued, not only with an eye toward prospective candidates for NCO stripes and officers’ commissions—both vital for a rapidly expanding army—but as the foundation of an effective soldier.

  German initial training was much more than simple hut-two-three-four. It can be compared to a combination of the US army’s basic training and its Advanced Infantry Training, informed by the Marine Corps mantra of “every man a rifleman.” This reflected an understanding gleaned from the trenches of the Western Front: The infantry is the army. It takes the highest percentage of casualties. Its moral and physical demands are the greatest. A soldier who cannot meet them is less than an effective soldier no matter his level of technical proficiency.

  When new soldiers were formally sworn in, it was often in the presence of a flag, or a weapon symbolizing branch of service; in the panzer regiments, a tank. From there they moved into a mix of specialized instruction and field training. The former was the easiest. Crewmen were chosen for particular positions according to abilities demonstrated early in training. By 1940, the standard tank crew was five men: commander, gunner, loader, driver, and radioman. There was some cross-training, but tankers were expected to emphasize development of specialized skills: the crew was a team, a community, with everyone sharing everyday tasks of repair and housekeepi
ng.

  The fact that relatively few recruits were familiar with motor vehicles of any kind was in some respects an advantage. They had no inappropriate civilian habits to unlearn when it came to driving. They developed impressive skill at maintenance; one of the unremarked qualities of the armored force was an ability to keep its vehicles running at company levels through most of the war. Gunnery training was excellent, and as muzzle velocities and ranges increased, was supported by some of the war’s best optical equipment. German tank marksmanship was formidable from 1939 to 1945, a fact affirmed by any enemy who faced it.

  Technical proficiency was only one side of the coin. Training at all stages emphasized direct, small-unit cooperation among tanks, infantry, engineers, and antitank gunners. Truppenführung, the army’s basic doctrinal manual, was published in 1933-34 as Heeresdienstvorschriften (Army Regulations) 300. Its introduction described war as subjecting the soldier to “the most severe tests of his spiritual and physical endurance.” Combat involved an unlimited variety of situations, changing frequently and suddenly and impossible to predict or calculate in advance. It also involved the independent will of the enemy. Misunderstandings and mistakes were to be expected. Overcoming them depended more on character than intellect. And character in the context of combat meant, above all, will.

  That principle held good for all ranks, general to private. The days of Kadavergehorsamkeit (corpselike obedience) were long past—if indeed they ever existed. The question of nature versus nurture did not significantly engage the Wehrmacht. Long before Leni Riefenstahl celebrated Hitler’s version of the concept, the armed forces acted on the principle that a soldier’s will was essentially a product of cultivation. Drill was presented as a means to develop the reflex coordination of mind and body. In contrast to the practices in most Western armies, conscript or volunteer, troops trained day or night, at immediate notice, in all weather, under conditions including no rations. Combat conditions were simulated as closely as possible through the extensive use of live ammunition. An indelible part of German military lore was the “massacre of the innocents” in 1914, which described thousands of German youths, so badly trained that many could not even load a rifle, being shot down by British regulars they could not see. “Never again!” was the motto of the senior NCOs, who even before the war constantly reiterated that the minor hardships and vague risks of training were nothing compared to the reality of the front lines.

  Casualties in training, while not exactly processed as routine, were nevertheless accepted as necessary, not least as a reminder of the dangers of carelessness and stupidity. During World War I, the German army had to grapple with the problems posed by fatalism. The belief that death was essentially random was logical enough in trench warfare. It also diminished situational alertness. The Reichswehr and then the Wehrmacht sought, in contrast, to inculcate both the belief that situations could be mastered and the skills to master them. Acquiring those skills, it should be noted, involved the systematic application of intellect. The modern German soldier was not conceived in the semi-mystical image of the Great War “front fighter,” as depicted by Ernst Jünger—transcending the challenge of industrial war by moral force. His was a synergy of warrior and technician—not the will keeping the intellect, but the two acting in a dialectic of combat to manifest the “character” described in Truppenführung. The combination of faith and works was as formidable in a military context as in a spiritual one.

  In the course of the war, an army fighting under increasingly desperate situations would turn voluntarily to National Socialism as a motivator. In prewar years, the case was somewhat the reverse, in accordance with a tradition, dating to the Second Empire and continuing in the Reichswehr, of keeping “party politics” out of the barracks. The generals’ initial concern that the new Wehrmacht would be swamped by successive intakes of committed National Socialists proved exaggerated. In part that reflected the movement’s relatively short existence as a major social and political force. Four or five years were, as a rule, sufficient to put no more than a Nazi patina on existing viewpoints and values. At this stage, moreover, many of the values and qualities the army sought to cultivate were more or less congruent with both some elements of National Socialism and some attitudes at least accepted, if not affirmed, in German society at large.

  In those contexts neither the army’s everyday routines nor the fundamental values and intentions underlying them were likely to be challenged in principle on any more than an individual basis. That reflected as well the Wehrmacht’s fundamental homogenization. Unlike its Imperial predecessor, it had no identifiable minorities: no Poles, no Alsatians, no Jews. The system of regionalized recruiting and replacement, sustained whenever possible throughout the war, put men with similar backgrounds and accents together, at least as the core of a particular unit. This meant that, as a general consequence, a soldier was less likely to be singled out as “the hillbilly,” “the guy from Brooklyn,” or as any other member of the “all- American squad” of war-movie mythology. A man had to single himself out, whether by attitude or behavior. Apart from any “pack instinct” allegedly hard-wired into male biology, the consequences were usually sufficiently unpleasant that a committed teenage Nazi was as likely to curb his enthusiasm for Hitler’s New Order as a sloven was likely to “learn to keep his rifle and himself just so.”

  V

  ONE OF THE more interesting phenomena since 1945 has been the development in the West, the US in particular, of a mythology depicting the German army of World War II as a “clean-shield” force fighting first successfully and then heroically against heavy odds, simultaneously doing its best to avoid “contamination” by National Socialism—a “band of brothers” united by an unbreakable comradeship. That concept of comradeship is arguably the strongest emotional taproot of what John Mearsheimer memorably dubbed “Wehrmacht penis envy.” Soldiers and scholars outside Germany have consistently cited “comradeship” as a major explanation of the “fighting power” the Reich’s opponents found so impressive. In American interpretations, German comradeship also serves as a counter to the flaws of a replacement/rotation system that during World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, was based on individual assignments. One under-analyzed reason for the relatively high morale sustained by US ground forces in Iraq seems to have been the adoption of unit rotation.

  After 1945, for German veterans, comradeship became the war’s central justifying experience—in good part by default. Few were willing to admit they had fought for Hitler and his Reich. The concept of defending home and loved ones was balanced, and increasingly overbalanced, by overwhelming evidence that the war had been Germany’s war from start to finish. What remained were half-processed memories nurtured over an evening glass of beer, or at the occasional regimental reunion: memories of mutual caring, emotional commitment, and sacrifice for others. Traditionally considered to be feminine virtues, these human aspects of comradeship made it possible for the soldier to come to terms morally and emotionally with war’s inhuman face—the destruction and the killing—and to come to terms as well with the nature of the regime his sacrifices had sustained.

  Comradeship as understood in modern armed forces can be traced to the Revolutionary/Napoleonic era. It owes something to the extension of medieval ideals of chivalry to the common soldier in a context of general war. In the American Civil War, both sides presented themselves as fighting “for cause and comrades.” During World War I, the concept of “frontline comradeship” or “comradeship of the trenches” emerged—particularly in Germany—as a means of distinguishing those who had been “out there” from others whose war had been fought in the rear echelons, or at home in the factories and on the farms.

  Soldiers of all countries, especially those recruited and organized on a regional basis, bonded naturally as a response to the unfamiliar horrors of the trenches. Frontline routines generated small relational groups based on affinity, proximity, and experience. These were, above all, survival mechanisms: a man phy
sically or emotionally alone on the Western Front was a dead man, or a shell-shock case waiting to happen. The German groups developed affective as well as instrumental functions. More than their French or British equivalents, they functioned as surrogate families. Nurturing functions that civil society assigned to women were assumed by “men supporting men.” The case of Adolf Hitler indicated that these “trench families” could make room as well for eccentric cousins.

  Thomas Kuehne interprets comradeship as a major source of the large-scale participation of “ordinary men” in what became the ordinary crimes of the Third Reich. Neither ideology nor fear motivated that behavior. Nor was it a primary consequence of war’s brutalizing effect. Instead, Kuehne argues convincingly, German soldiers longed for Gemeinschaft, the spiritual community described since the Enlightenment in glowing terms by intellectuals, Romantics, and not least politicians. Soldiers sought direct, personal Gemeinschaft even more in the context of Nazi promises that turned to dross as the bombs fell and the casualty lists grew.

  The ad hoc, constantly renewed and reconstructed communities resulting from constant heavy losses were in part held together by the few old hands who set the tone and passed on the traditions. Newcomers not only seeking but needing to belong in order to survive physically and mentally sought out and affirmed the collective’s values. “Good” was defined as anything that strengthened the community. Kuehne asserts that in order to be accepted as a man among men, soldiers were ultimately willing to participate in activities forbidden by religion, by civil law, and even by the army itself. The highest prestige was enjoyed by the most open denier of norms—any norms. Doubts, scruples, and inhibitions were experienced before and after the collective behavior that affirmed the group against external challenges—and usually experienced privately.