Professionalism and conservative nationalism were joined by material interest in keeping the generals in line. As in other countries, so too in Nazi Germany, a range of new honours and medals was established to reward bravery in combat during the war, and successful field commanders were rapidly promoted, twelve of them to the rank of Field Marshal after the victory in the west in 1940. Hitler never completely trusted the army, and saw such promotions as a means of binding senior officers to his will even if they disapproved of Nazi ideology. Rapid promotion made little difference, however, to the essentially aristocratic make-up of the senior levels of the officer corps.
At the divisional level, the more junior members of the officer corps showed some of the same characteristics, but there were also differences too, largely stemming from the fact that they mostly came from younger age-groups. In the 253rd Infantry Division, for instance, which has been the subject of an exhaustive statistical analysis, only 9 per cent of the officers were born before 1900, and 8 per cent in the years 1900- 1909; fully 65 per cent were born in the years 1910-19, the remaining 19 per cent belonging to the post-1919 generation. The Protestant domination of the military elite was reflected in the fact that 57 per cent of the officers in the division described themselves as Protestants and only 26 per cent as Catholics, in sharp contrast to the religious affiliation of the troops they commanded, where Catholics were in a majority; the influence of Nazism came through strongly in the fact that 12 per cent of the officers described themselves as ‘Deists’, the vague, non-confessional term preferred by the regime. The divisional officers came overwhelmingly from the educated and professional middle or upper-middle class and had already served in the army for some years, in many cases going back to the Weimar Republic. 43 per cent were members of a Nazi organization of one kind or another. They were more likely to be decorated for bravery than the men were, and they had better career prospects, assuming they survived: nearly half of them achieved battalion command during the war, or rose even higher, and even the most junior could expect to be promoted to the rank of Captain or Major. This meant, however, that they were far more likely than their men to be transferred to another division or other duties.
For the great mass of ordinary soldiers the institutional setting in which they lived and fought was surprisingly stable for most of the war years. Roughly half of all German forces at any one time were not engaged in combat duties; either they were in reserve or on security work in occupied areas behind the front or employed in any one of a huge variety of administrative, supply, support or other ancillary tasks. For every tank regiment, for example, there had to be not only men who drove the tanks but also men who repaired them, supplied them with petrol and ammunition, transported them to and from the front, and kept track of where they were. In addition, there were always considerable numbers of troops who were undergoing training, or convalescing after being invalided out with wounds or illnesses of one kind or another. Of the other half, engaged on active combat duty, some 80 per cent served in infantry divisions, which might be regarded therefore as the typical combat unit of the armed forces. From the outbreak of the war to the invasion of the Soviet Union, the army underwent a lengthy initial period of expansion, training and organization, during which military losses, at around 130,000 dead or missing, were relatively low, amounting indeed to only 2.5 per cent of total German military losses during the war. New divisions were continually being formed by mixing experienced troops from existing divisions with fresh recruits, thus ensuring a high degree of continuity. From ninety infantry divisions at the beginning of the war, the army grew to contain some 175 in June 1941. The troops mostly took part in actual combat only intermittently, in short-lived lightning wars such as the invasion of Poland, the western campaigns of 1940 and the Balkan victories of the following year. All this meant that they remained relatively cohesive and a sense of stability underpinned the loyalty of the ‘comrades’ in each unit to one another.
This picture of relative stability changed dramatically with the heavy losses that began to hit the army following the invasion of the Soviet Union. The military administration tried to mitigate the disruptive effects of these losses in a variety of ways, for example by ensuring that new recruits came from the same part of Germany as the troops in the units they joined, and that men who had recovered from their wounds were sent back to their old regiments, so that the social and cultural composition of each regiment remained relatively homogeneous, thus (it was thought) improving its cohesion and its fighting power. The insistence of the armed forces on thorough training continued to ensure that troops went into battle as effective fighting men. Despite this, mounting losses meant that many regiments were unable to bring themselves back up to full strength, and some indeed ceased to exist as effective fighting units altogether. Morale also began to suffer with the series of major defeats that began with Stalingrad. However, up to the late summer of 1944, it is clear that the German armed forces remained relatively intact in their organization, structure and recruitment patterns. Defeat came not through their disorganization or inefficiency but through the military and economic superiority of the Red Army (or, in North Africa and Italy, and later Normandy, the British and the Americans).
Who were the men who fought in these infantry divisions? The soldiers and NCOs of the 253rd Infantry Division ranged widely in age. 19 per cent were born between 1901 and 1910 and had experienced the Weimar years as adults; 68 per cent were born between 1911 and 1920 and thus, like the remaining 11 per cent who were born between 1921 and 1926, had been wholly or partially socialized and educated under the Third Reich. What is striking despite the steadily declining average age of the soldiers over the course of the war is the dominance of the generation born shortly before or during the First World War. In other words, the character, behaviour and morale of this, as in all probability of other infantry divisions too, were shaped by a dominant cohort of men who were in their mid-to-late twenties.151 As might be expected from this age structure, the majority of the troops – 68 per cent at the start of the war, 60 per cent towards the end – were unmarried. Many of the older troops already had children, and the divisional command tended to hold them back from the front as a result, sending the younger men without family ties of this kind into the most dangerous situations. Similarly, marriage and fatherhood may well have proved restraining factors in the behaviour of the older soldiers when it came to dealing with the civilian populations, especially women and children, of the conquered territories.
59 per cent of the soldiers in the division who were born after the end of the First World War had belonged to a Nazi organization. 69 per cent of those born from 1916 to 1919 had been members of the Reich Labour Service. 83 per cent of those born in 1913- 17 had already been serving in the armed forces before 1939. The proportion of those born in 1910-20 who had gone through one of these institutions by the time the war broke out averaged 75 per cent; indeed, 43 per cent had gone through more than one. These were precisely the age-groups that formed the core of the division for the greater part of the war. As the war went on, moreover, the army itself intensified the political indoctrination to which it subjected its officers and NCOs and through them its ordinary troops. The idea of an unpolitical army, so loudly and insistently proclaimed under the Weimar Republic, had long ceased to exist. By the time the war broke out, the armed forces regarded enlistment and training in their ranks as the final and highest stage in a process of ideological education that had begun long before. The soldier was trained not just to be a fighter but also to be a full member of the racial community of Germans, even, according to some training guidelines, a new kind of man. All officers were required to learn and convince themselves of the correctness of the National Socialist world-view. A flood of books, pamphlets and manuals was published to assist them in mastering this task. In many of these works, officers were informed about the world conspiracy of the Jews against Germany and told that the Jew was the most dangerous and deadly of all the enemies they were going to have to fight. Arrangements were put in place to ensure the continued ‘spiritual conduct of war’ in the spirit of National Socialism. Intensive ideological training added to the indoctrination the men had already received from school, from the Hitler Youth, and from Goebbels’s mass media. It was hardly surprising that many of the men went into battle against the soldiers of the Red Army describing them as ‘subhumans who’ve been whipped into frenzy by the Jews’.
Particularly after the army’s sense of invincibility began to wear thin, from December 1941 and then, far more dramatically, after Stalingrad, senior commanders redoubled their efforts to convince the soldiers that they were fighting for a worthy cause. The German officer, Hitler declared in 1943, had to be a political officer. Especially when things were going badly, it was vital that officers draw deep from their well of National Socialist convictions to remind themselves of what it was all about. On 22 December 1943 Hitler ordered the creation of a team to co-ordinate ‘National Socialist Leadership in the Armed Forces’. The measure, as he told Goebbels and a few others privately early the following month, was to ensure that all the troops inhabited the same mental world, one where they would possess the ‘fanatical will’ to fight for the Nazi cause to the end. The provision of Nazi political education officers was centralized and extended. Similar measures were taken in the navy and the air force. In effect, the Nazis were introducing into the German armed forces a kind of parallel to the political commissars who were so important in the Red Army. Their role was inculcated at numerous special political education courses held behind the front, and discussed in conferences organized by the army. Increasingly, as time went on and defeat followed defeat, officers’ orders and commands became more National Socialist in content, in an attempt to inspire the men to ever more fanatical resistance to an overwhelmingly powerful enemy. Of course, this still left a considerable number of officers and men indifferent, or even hostile, to Nazi ideology, depending on their age, their circumstances and their pre-existing beliefs. Yet overall, there can be little doubt that political education and indoctrination did have an effect on the troops, and played a role in pushing them to fight to the end.
Some indeed kept fighting out of antisemitic commitment. Propaganda and indoctrination had instilled in them the firm belief that, as a soldier working in the Leader’s military messenger service on the Eastern Front wrote on 1 March 1942, ‘This is a matter of two great world-views. Either us or the Jews.’ This belief kept some going when German victory began to look in doubt. ‘It surely cannot be,’ wrote one army man stationed in southern France at the end of May 1942, ‘that the Jews will win and rule.’ Mingled with such incredulity was an ever-stronger dose of fear. If Germany was defeated, wrote another soldier in August 1944, ‘the Jews will then fall on us and exterminate everything that is German, there will be a cruel and terrible slaughter.’ Yet Nazi ideology played little or no role in the commitment of many others. Why, for example, did a man like Wilm Hosenfeld carry on serving in the army, when he hated Nazism so much? It was not only Eastern Europeans and Jews whom the regime he served were persecuting and murdering, but also, he realized in December 1943, Germans themselves. Coming from rural Hesse, Hosenfeld had perhaps not realized the extent of the Nazis’ maltreatment of their internal opponents in the 1930s. A conversation with his new assistant, a former Communist whose health had been broken by repeated torture in the cells of the Gestapo, stripped him of this last illusion. It was clear, wrote Hosenfeld, that the men who led the regime approved of such behaviour: Now it becomes clear to me why they can only carry on working through force and lies, and why lies have to be the protection for their whole system . . . Ever more violent acts have to follow, war is only the logical continuation of their policy. Now the entire [German] people, who did not exterminate this ulcer at the appropriate moment, must perish. These rogues are sacrificing us all . . . The atrocities here in the east, in Poland, Yugoslavia and Russia, are only continuing in a straight line the process that began with their political opponents in Germany … And we idiots believed they could bring us a better future. Every person who approved of this system even to the smallest degree has to be ashamed today of having done so.
