III
The Red Army’s background is best understood in the context of disconnects: between the party and the military, and among the major combat arms. The German army of 1943 is best understood in terms of synergies: among army, party, and society and within the army’s fighting components.
The Nazi Party has been compared by scholars with almost every possible human organization, even medieval feudalism. The one adjective that cannot be applied is “patriarchal.” Change and progress were the movement’s flywheels. Nazi nostalgia found its essential expression in domestic kitsch. It had no place in military matters. Hitler’s initially enthusiastic wooing of the soldiers was based on his intention of using them first to consolidate his hold over both the Nazi Party and the German people, then as the standard-bearers of territorial and ideological expansion until they could safely be replaced by the SS. National Socialist views of war differed in important, arguably essential, respects from those of the Reichswehr. But on such subjects as anti-Marxism, anti- pacifism, and hostility to the Versailles Treaty, the military’s values were not incongruent with those avowed by Nazi theorists and propagandists.
The armed forces and the Nazis also shared a common commitment to the future rather than a vision of the past. General Hans von Seeckt during the Great War had established a reputation as one of the army’s most brilliant staff officers. He became head of the Reichswehr high command in the newly established Weimar Republic. From the beginning, he challenged the concept of mass that had permeated military thinking since the Napoleonic Wars, instead insisting on the principle of pursuing quick, decisive victories by offensive action.
Boldness was Seeckt’s first rule; flexibility was his second. The Treaty of Versailles, however, specified the structure of the Reichswehr in detail: a force of one hundred thousand, but, forbidden tanks, aircraft, and medium or heavy artillery, it badly needed force multipliers. Versailles did authorize each Reichswehr division a motor- transport battalion, and Seeckt saw their vehicles as an increasingly valuable supplement to the conventional combat arms. Beginning in the early 1930s, war games focused on not merely the combination but the integration of mobility and striking power—quality enhanced by technology. In 1934, the first “experimental armored division” was authorized. The next year Hitler reintroduced conscription and officially initiated rearmament. In return, the armed forces gave the Nazis a free hand in Germany’s “reconstructuring.”
This decision reflected neither simplemindedness nor moral blindness. The Reichswehr understood, better than any army in the world, that total war and industrial war had generated new styles of combat and new methods of leadership. The officer no longer stood above his unit but functioned as an integral part of it. The patriarchal/hegemonic approach of the “old” Prussian/German army, parenting youthful conscripts and initiating them into adult society, was giving way to a collegial/affective pattern, emphasizing cooperation and consensus in mission performance. “Mass man” must give way to “extraordinary man”—the combination of fighter and technician who understood combat as both a skilled craft and an inner experience.
The soldiers were confident that once Germany’s young men changed their brown shirts and Hitler Youth uniforms for army field gray, their socialization away from National Socialism would be relatively easy. The army knew well how to cultivate them from its own resources. The new Wehrmacht had new facilities. Leave policies were generous. Food was well cooked and ample. Uniforms looked smart and actually fit—no small matters to young men on pass seeking to make quick impressions.
The conscripts were motivated, alert, and physically fit. Thanks to the eighteen months of compulsory labor service required of all seventeen-year-olds since 1935, they required a minimum of socializing into barracks life and were more than casually acquainted with the elements of close-order drill. Officers and noncommissioned officers were expected to bond with their men, leading by example on a daily basis.
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. But military service had for over a century been a major rite of passage for males in Prussia/Germany. The army’s demands had generally been understood as not beyond the capacities of an ordinarily fit, well-adjusted young man. That military service had been restricted during the Weimar years gave it a certain forbidden appeal. And a near standard response of older generations across the republic’s social and political spectrum to anything smacking of late-adolescent malaise or rebellion was that what the little punks needed was some shaping up in uniform.
Recruit processing differed significantly 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. Initial training in all branches can best be compared to a combination of the U.S. Army’s basic training with its advanced infantry training, informed by the Marine Corps’s mantra of “every man a rifleman.” That reflected the belief that infantry warfare’s moral and physical demands were the greatest. A soldier who could not meet them was less than an effective soldier no matter his level of technical proficiency. Misunderstandings and mistakes in combat were to be expected. Overcoming them depended more on character than intellect. And character in the context of combat meant, above all, will.
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 the means to develop the reflexive coordination of mind and body. Troops trained day or night, at immediate notice, in all weather, under conditions including no rations. Combat conditions were simulated through the extensive use of live ammunition. Casualties were necessary reminders of the dangers of carelessness and stupidity.
A persistent mythology continues to depict 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 has memorably dubbed “Wehrmacht penis envy.” Soldiers and scholars inside and outside Germany have consistently cited “comradeship” to explain the “fighting power” the Reich’s opponents found so impressive.
Particularly in the context of the Russian front, the concept of comradeship has been described as an increasingly artificial construction, based on Nazi ideology, generated by material demodernization and consistent high casualty rates that destroyed “primary groups” that depended on long-standing relationships. Small relational groups based on affinity, proximity, and experience were above all survival mechanisms. A man physically or emotionally alone in Russia was a casualty waiting to happen. The ad hoc, constantly renewed and reconstructed communities resulting from heavy losses were held together by the old hands—sometimes of no more than a few days’ standing—who set the tone and sustained by the newcomers not only seeking but needing to belong in order to survive physically and mentally.
“Good” was in fact frequently defined as any behavior that strengthened the fragile, fungible, ad hoc community against external or internal challenges. But however deep ran their brutalization, the ground forces, army and Waffen SS alike, never degenerated collectively into what Martin van Creveld called “the wild horde.” Lawless and disorganized, committed to destruction for destruction’s sake, self-referencing to the point of solipsism, the horde can neither give nor inspire the trust necessary for the kind of fighting power the Germans demonstrated to the end.
Comradeship helped them to remain soldiers, not warriors or killers. And after 1945, for German veterans comradeship became the war’s central justifying experience. 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 to come to terms morally and emotionally with war’s inhuman face—and to come to terms with the nature of the regime one’s sacrifices had sustained.
If the Soviets saw war as a science, the Germans interpreted it as an art. Though requiring basic craft skills, war defied reduction to rules and principles. Its mastery demanded study and reflection but depended ultimately on two virtually untranslatable concepts:
