The Virtuous Wehrmacht: Crafting the Myth of the German Soldier on the Eastern Front, 1941-1944

By David A. Harrisville

The Virtuous Wehrmacht explores the myth of the German armed forces' innocence during World War II by reconstructing the moral world of German soldiers on the Eastern Front. How did they avoid feelings of guilt about the many atrocities their side committed? David A. Harrisville compellingly demonstrates that this myth of innocence was created during the course of the war itself—and did not arise as a postwar whitewashing of events.

In 1941 three million Wehrmacht troops overran the border between German- and Soviet-occupied Poland, racing toward the USSR in the largest military operation in modern history. Over the next four years, they embarked on a campaign of wanton brutality, murdering countless civilians, systemically starving millions of Soviet prisoners of war, and actively participating in the genocide of Eastern European Jews. After the war, however, German servicemen insisted that they had fought honorably and that their institution had never involved itself in Nazi crimes.

Drawing on more than two thousand letters from German soldiers, contextualized by operational and home front documents, Harrisville shows that this myth was the culmination of long-running efforts by the army to preserve an illusion of respectability in the midst of a criminal operation. The primary authors of this fabrication were ordinary soldiers cultivating a decent self-image and developing moral arguments to explain their behavior by drawing on a constellation of values that long preceded Nazism.

The Virtuous Wehrmacht explains how the army encouraged troops to view themselves as honorable representatives of a civilized nation, not only racially but morally superior to others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781501760068

Book preview

THE VIRTUOUS WEHRMACHT

CRAFTING THE MYTH OF THE GERMAN SOLDIER ON THE EASTERN FRONT, 1941–1944

DAVID A. HARRISVILLE

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

For my father and my grandfather

In the battle against devilry and malice, against hate and the villainy of the world, we know that we are the champions of a just and moral undertaking.

—Soldat und Religion, Mitteilungen für die Truppe, Nr. 254, January 1945, Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv RW 4/1176

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

List of Terms and Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Honorable Self and Villainous Other

2. Rationalizing Atrocities

3. The Crusaders

4. The Liberators

5. Death and Victimhood

Conclusion

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project has received generous support from many sources. A seminar in 2012, under the auspices of the German Historical Institute, introduced me to archival holdings in Germany and the delicate art of deciphering handwriting. A travel grant from the University of Wisconsin–Madison History Department allowed me to conduct preliminary research at the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv in Freiburg. This stay was followed by a fellowship at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, made possible by the George L. Mosse Program in History. During that stay, I was able to gather materials from the Yad Vashem Archives and lay the foundations for the project. Thanks to a 2012–2013 fellowship with the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, led by Karin Goihl, I was able to undertake extensive archival research in Berlin and Freiburg. I then had the opportunity to attend a Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies workshop at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, chaired by Waitman Beorn, Wendy Lower, and Stephen Tyas. This experience broadened my understanding of Holocaust historiography and introduced me to the museum’s extensive collections. After returning to Madison, I began writing this book with support from the UW–Madison History Department, a Mellon-Wisconsin summer fellowship, and a fellowship from the Council for European Studies and the Mellon Foundation. The latter was also made possible by the Graduate School and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education at UW–Madison with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. A seminar at the German Historical Institute gave me the chance, in 2016, to receive extensive feedback from colleagues. Helpful comments on a revised version were provided by the Society for Military History’s Edward M. Coffman Award committee, chaired by Samuel Watson, by whom an earlier manuscript of this book was recognized with an honorable mention in 2017.

Along the way, I have enjoyed the advice and support of numerous fellow scholars. With keen insight and words of encouragement at the right moments, Rudy Koshar helped to nurture this project from its inception, looked over drafts, and offered guidance when I altered my initial plans. Lou Roberts, Laird Boswell, John Hall, and Bill Reese also offered helpful commentary and mentorship. Members of the Digital Humanities Research Network at UW–Madison introduced me to new ways of incorporating digital methods into my work. Waitman Beorn, Gilad Natan, Mark Hornburg, and Nina Janz graciously introduced me to new sources at various points during the project. Everywhere I traveled, I encountered patient archivists, including Gunnar Goehle at the Museumsstiftung Post und Telekommunikation, who took an interest in the project and helped me locate critical materials. Conversations and correspondence with scholars in the United States and Europe have greatly enhanced the quality of my work. Among many others, Dan Diner, Steven Aschheim, Norbert Frei, Thomas Kühne, André Mineau, Oliver Janz, Adam Seipp, Konrad Jarausch, Jeff Rutherford, and David Wildermuth have provided thoughtful feedback and challenged my thinking. Skye Doney graciously looked over the manuscript and provided comments. Special thanks also go to the late Diethelm Prowe who, along with many other wonderful teachers, nurtured my intellectual curiosity and sparked my interest in European history.

I have been fortunate to enjoy the encouragement of friends in Madison and beyond, including Nina Janz, Rachel Gross, Skye Doney, Jessica Plummer, Abby Lewis, and Matt Yokell. My family has also been very supportive throughout the process. My grandfather has always been a model for me of the life of the mind and spent hours correcting my German when I was first learning. My parents—Roy and Mary—and my sister, Kendra, have lent a sympathetic ear during the struggles and triumphs of writing, and my father, himself a long-time scholar from whom I learned the art of writing, provided comments on the final draft.

Finally, I would like to thank Cornell University Press, in particular my editor, Emily Andrew, who took an early interest in the manuscript and provided invaluable advice as she shepherded it through the publication process. I also benefited from the commentary of series editor David Silbey. Alexis Siemon helped me assemble the images and answered my formatting questions. My thanks also go to the three anonymous readers for Cornell who took the time to read through the manuscript and made valuable suggestions.

Animated maps displaying the locations over time of the soldiers studied in this book, which I generated using ArcGIS, will appear on my website: https://www.davidharrisville.com/.

TERMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

Abbreviations for the Administrative Sections (Abteilungen, Abbreviated Abt.) within Each Unit

Introduction

Toward a Moral History of the Wehrmacht in the War of Extermination

On June 22, 1941, more than three million troops of the Wehrmacht—the German military—flooded into the Soviet Union in the largest military operation in modern history.¹ Over the next four years, the war they waged would claim more than twenty-six million Soviet lives and ultimately seal the fate of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.² The conflict on the Eastern Front differed from other modern wars not only in its vast scope but also in the genocidal intentions that propelled it. As Nazi officials and military leaders informed their troops, the purpose of the invasion—code-named Operation Barbarossa—was to exterminate Jewish-Bolshevism and secure Lebensraum, or living space, for the German people, who would rule over what remained of the subhuman Slavic population.

The ordinary men who carried out this mission reacted to their participation in diverse ways. Among them was Heinz Sartorio.³ A twenty-seven-year-old insurance salesman from Berlin, Sartorio operated just behind the lines as a private in a bridge-building unit in the center of the front. An avid reader of Joseph Goebbels’ newspaper Das Reich and, like most soldiers, an admirer of the Führer, Sartorio found himself in harmony with most aspects of the Nazi creed. He largely agreed with Goebbels’ assertion that his Red opponents were animals.⁴ He displayed a distrust of Soviet civilians, paired with a hatred for partisans, whom he portrayed as criminals and vermin.⁵ In a chilling expression of approval for the Final Solution, he wrote his sister Elly that in order to finally bring the world calm and peace, hundreds of thousands of Jews have been executed in the Soviet Union.⁶

In contrast to Sartorio, the twenty-two-year-old Eugen Altrogge, a Catholic from the Rhineland who had entered the Wehrmacht after taking his university entrance exam, shied away from ideological justifications for the war. Transferred to the Eastern Front in early 1942, he found himself deep in the Ukraine with Army Group South as a lieutenant and platoon leader in the 190th Infantry Division. In his correspondence with Hans Albring, a friend and fellow soldier, Altrogge adopted a much more sympathetic posture toward the population, whom he considered in many ways more pious and authentic than the invading Germans. He occasionally questioned the methods and intentions of Germany’s Nazi leaders but rationalized his participation by asserting that the war would free the peoples of Eastern Europe from communist tyranny and save them from the moral vacuum of atheism.

Although their conceptions of the war differed, Sartorio and Altrogge viewed themselves in a similar light—as decent men who belonged to an honorable institution that was ultimately making the world a better place. Sartorio considered himself an involved family man doing a job that needed to be done in order to secure a shining future for the German Volk. While he approved of the ruthless treatment of racial enemies like partisans and Jews, he insisted that the Wehrmacht did its best to spare the non-Jewish civilian population and described its treatment of POWs as nothing short of generous. The whole cultured world has closed ranks in the fight against tyranny and oppression and the final victory can only be on our side, we who fight for freedom and justice, he wrote Elly in 1942, adding that the Germans were clean angels in comparison to the Allies.⁷ While Sartorio’s identity and understanding of the war were heavily colored by his adherence to the Nazi worldview, Altrogge’s self-concept revolved around his Christian faith. He prided himself on his ability to cultivate friendly ties with the locals he encountered and envisioned the Wehrmacht as a force for good that would make life better for Eastern Europeans and restore Christianity’s place in European culture.

The letters of Sartorio and Altrogge numbered among the forty billion conveyed through the German military’s postal service during the war, of which roughly a quarter were written by soldiers.⁸ They reveal the differing strategies each man employed to reconcile himself to participation in a war of unprecedented criminality: one centered on adherence to racial ideology, the other grounded in a more traditional, humanistic conception of morality. Their writings provide insight into how Ostkämpfer (German soldiers on the Eastern Front) viewed themselves and their institution. They also provoke questions regarding how they portrayed the criminal campaign to their readers, including millions of recipients on the home front.

Despite spectacular early victories, the campaign ultimately spelled disaster for the invaders and the Third Reich as a whole. Yet, following the conflict’s end, the Wehrmacht enjoyed a surprisingly positive reputation among the German public. In contrast to organizations like the Gestapo and SS, the regular army was remembered as an institution that had conducted itself chivalrously, avoided participation in Nazi crimes, and kept a healthy distance from the Hitler regime. Its men were viewed as decent fellows and faithful Christians who had made enormous sacrifices in the battle against an unworthy foe. This view, which has come to be known as the myth of the Wehrmacht’s clean hands, quickly came to dominate German memory of the Second World War and the men who fought it.⁹ According to most historians, the myth began in the final moments of the Third Reich when Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who had assumed command of Germany’s armed forces, declared that although they were compelled to lay down their arms, the country’s troops could take comfort in the fact that they fought honorably.¹⁰ Due to a legal technicality, the International Military Tribunal refrained from designating the army a criminal organization during the 1945–1946 Nuremberg Trials, in contrast to the Gestapo and SS, a development that contributed to the perception that the army had largely retained its innocence. A handful of top commanders were convicted in the main trial and eleven others were found guilty of war crimes during the follow-on High Command Trial of 1948–1949. Besides these, few military personnel were ever investigated for wartime atrocities by the Allies or the West German judicial system.¹¹

A whitewashed image of the Wehrmacht would remain entrenched in the public imagination over the following decades, centered on memories of the Eastern Front where the majority of soldiers had served. Veterans and veterans’ associations rarely admitted wrongdoing.¹² Popular and political culture in East and West Germany depicted the Wehrmacht soldier as a long-suffering victim, either of fascism or totalitarianism. In the West, the figure of the veteran became a critical locus of Cold War politics as the new democratic government devoted itself to the re-integration of former POWs held in Soviet captivity and with American support rebuilt its armed forces to serve as a bulwark against communism. To facilitate these projects, politicians—most notably the country’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer—worked to sanitize the Wehrmacht’s image, a move that was actively supported by a vocal group of former generals eager to clear their names. Beyond political considerations, there was little desire among the public to delve into a critical investigation of the army’s past that might uncover unpleasant truths about the country’s fathers, brothers, and sons. Moreover, with fully half of Germany’s male population having served at one point in the Wehrmacht, condemnation of their wartime actions would have amounted to a condemnation of German society as a whole. The written record, meanwhile, was distorted by the fact that in their widely-read memoirs, prominent Wehrmacht generals omitted any mention of crimes and laid blame for the army’s defeats on Hitler’s mismanagement. Their claims were reinforced by early histories of the war on both sides of the Atlantic that portrayed the army as a conventional, apolitical fighting force whose personnel had never truly embraced Nazism.¹³

It was not until the late 1960s that the first cracks began to appear in the myth. Meticulous research on the part of historians like Manfred Messerschmidt indicated that the army had been much more sympathetic to the regime than previously supposed.¹⁴ In 1978, by revealing that the army had deliberately starved to death over three million Soviet POWs, Christian Streit demonstrated that the Wehrmacht had willingly put the Nazis’ racial policy into practice.¹⁵ Over the next decades, scholars made the case that the army’s leaders had agreed with the basic outlines of Hitler’s murderous agenda.¹⁶ They also showed that the Wehrmacht had helped to lay the groundwork for the genocide of Eastern European Jews and willingly cooperated with the SS to this end.¹⁷ In the meantime, Omer Bartov, Stephen Fritz, and others reexamined the motivations of the rank and file in a series of bottom-up histories.¹⁸ Bartov put forth the influential thesis that soldiers had been held together not by social ties but by a shared commitment to the Nazi worldview, the product of relentless indoctrination.

Today, historians recognize the Wehrmacht’s campaign in the East as a Vernichtungskrieg, or war of extermination, waged by officers and men steeped in Nazi thinking who aggressively carried out Hitler’s vision to re-draw the racial map of Europe. Earlier distinctions between the Wehrmacht and the SS have blurred as researchers paint a portrait of an army that played an important supporting role in the Holocaust, committed frequent war crimes in its battles with the Red Army, and pursued a terroristic occupation policy that resulted in the deaths of over fifteen million Soviet civilians.¹⁹ A 1995 traveling exhibition titled The German Army and Genocide brought these findings to the German public. Featuring photographs and written records documenting the Wehrmacht’s murderous conduct, it became the most-visited and longest-running exhibition in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. Sparking intense discussions of the country’s past and the older generation’s entanglement with Nazism, it had a major impact on German public memory, helping to turn the tide against the Wehrmacht myth.²⁰

Although there is now overwhelming evidence that the campaign the German army waged in the Soviet Union was criminal, even genocidal, a close examination of their wartime writings suggests that the men in its ranks did not, in fact, consider themselves criminals.²¹ Like Sartorio and Altrogge, Ostkämpfer typically harbored a much different understanding of themselves, their institution, and the war they were waging. It may seem impossible in hindsight, but many saw themselves as nothing less than upstanding men pursing noble goals. And now the Germans are here and the people can always see for themselves that the Germans are decent, nice guys, private Wilhelm Moldenhauser told his wife as his unit rolled through Ukraine in the fall of 1941.²² Let all of our previous wars be as they may, just or unjust, let them be the machinations of diplomats, one thing however is certain[:] this war against the criminal work of Bolshevism is the battle for a righteous cause, penned Private Franz Siebeler two months later.²³ We must win, because we fight for the more righteous cause, opined then-captain Willy Hagemann in a 1944 letter home.²⁴ Such views were not developed in isolation. Wehrmacht commanders, staff officers, and propagandists consistently encouraged their men to view themselves as honorable warriors and tenaciously defended the army’s image. On the home front, too, journalists, church leaders, and Nazi officials painted a portrait of the Wehrmacht as a virtuous institution that embodied long-held German values.

The yawning gap between our current understanding of the Wehrmacht’s war in the East and the self-perceptions of those who fought it gives rise to the central question of this book: how did men who participated in perhaps the most murderous campaign of the twentieth century maintain this apparent conviction that they were decent, honorable men fighting for a righteous cause against a morally bankrupt enemy? Why didn’t they express remorse for their actions, whether during the conflict or in the years afterward? In more pedestrian terms, how did the bad guys of the Second World War convince themselves they were the good guys and continue to sleep soundly at night?

In order to answer this question, it is first necessary to understand the ideas regarding right and wrong on which soldiers relied as they evaluated their participation. This leads to the second issue that will be examined here: what moral values and value systems were embedded in the Wehrmacht’s wartime culture, and how did they shape its institutional discourse, self-image, and behavior? How did these value systems interact with the racial ideology of the Nazi regime, which exercised a powerful influence throughout the Third Reich?

In seeking to understand the self-conception of the German soldier and the nature of his institution through the lens of moral history, this book approaches the story of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front from a novel angle. Rather than addressing why soldiers fought or what crimes they committed—important questions that have already been the subject of much scholarly attention—it examines how value systems within the German Army came to be deployed to hinder or advance Nazi goals and what the men who participated in the Vernichtungskrieg thought about who they were and what they were doing.²⁵ Such an approach helps to explain how committed Nazis and non-Nazis alike came to willingly accept their part in the crimes of the Third Reich, now that these have been extensively uncovered.

This issue is of particular importance because wars are fought on a moral plane as well as a physical one, and soldiers who believe themselves to be in the right are much more effective at carrying out their orders than those who struggle with the burdens of conscience. It is of course true that in modern military history each side in a conflict has often claimed the moral high ground and soldiers have frequently been convinced that they fought for a righteous cause.²⁶ What makes the Wehrmacht such a compelling subject for the study of morality and violence, however, is the fact that its men accomplished this feat while taking part in a campaign of unprecedented savagery that defied all contemporary ethical standards, including their institution’s own traditional code of honor. Furthermore, they did so during the Second World War, a conflict in which—perhaps more so than for any other contest in the twentieth century—victory depended on rallying soldiers and civilians alike behind a cause perceived as morally worthy.²⁷

In addition to shedding light on the mentalities and identities of ordinary German soldiers, examining the moral history of the war on the Eastern Front adds to our understanding of the nature and behavior of the Wehrmacht as an institution. In particular, it helps to explain why an army that generally adhered to Hitler’s vision sometimes strayed from Nazi orthodoxy. Along the way, this approach offers insight into aspects of the Wehrmacht’s experience that have been largely overlooked, such as the interplay between the front and the home front—including the extent to which the latter were aware of the army’s crimes—religious life, everyday encounters between soldiers and civilians, and practices surrounding death and burial. Beyond the Wehrmacht itself, this book illuminates the relationship between ideology, morality, and identity in the Third Reich, providing insight into how the Nazi state appropriated existing value systems and how Germans oriented their preexisting beliefs toward Nazi goals.²⁸ Finally, it introduces a new interpretation of the origins of the Wehrmacht myth that proved so influential in shaping the country’s collective memory and serves as a useful case study in how perpetrators violate moral boundaries.

Because of their centrality to this study, it is necessary to first explain what is meant by the terms ideology and morality. Ideology is defined here as a framework for understanding the world with an accompanying program for social and political action. For instance, Nazi ideology—a diffuse combination of Social Darwinist thought, völkisch blood and soil traditions, extreme nationalism, and hypermasculine ideals—centered on the belief that life was an existential struggle among distinct, and unequal, races. In practice, Nazism sought to form Germans into an insular racial community, win them land and resources, and promote their biological purity. It also called for the suppression of all threats to the Aryan master race. These included the competing ideologies of communism, liberalism, and capitalism, as well as inferior races, among whom the Jews were considered the most dangerous. Morality may be described as a set of beliefs held by an individual or community prescribing how one should live one’s life by delineating between acceptable (right) and unacceptable (wrong) conduct and endorsing a set of values—specific principles to live by—to which one should aspire.²⁹ Traditional morality, considered here through the context of this book, is defined as the set of ideas about right and wrong that were commonly held among Germans in the first half of the twentieth century. These were never sharply defined but were grounded in Judeo-Christian traditions and Enlightenment humanism and codified in German law and international agreements leading up to Nazi rule. Traditional morality stressed the worth of all human life and the inviolability of property; promoted values like justice, compassion, and selflessness; and condemned actions that caused harm to other human beings.³⁰

The subjects of morality and ideology have recently come to the fore in Third Reich scholarship. In contrast to their academic predecessors, many of today’s historians regard Nazi Germany as a racial state in which the regime’s ideology permeated every facet of society.³¹ Ordinary Germans, so Peter Fritzsche has argued, willingly formed themselves into a Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community) that took care of its own and lashed out at racial outsiders.³² Ideological motives are now frequently cited to explain the behavior of Third Reich perpetrators.³³

As scholars have delved into the role of racial ideology in the Third Reich, there has also been growing interest in the moral dimensions of Nazism. Many historians now argue that the Nazis were not amoral or self-consciously evil. Instead, they constructed their own self-contained ethical system that diverged sharply from Judeo-Christian morality.³⁴ Nazi morality, as Claudia Koonz has termed it, was grounded in the belief that since the Aryan race was biologically superior to its counterparts, any action that helped the Aryans in their struggle for existence was good, while anything that hindered them was evil.³⁵ In order to win the race war, Germans would need to embrace a re-valuation of all values by directing kindness toward fellow members of their racial community, pledging loyalty to Adolf Hitler as the leader of this community, and eliminating all feelings of mercy as they annihilated racial enemies. These enemies were defined primarily by their biological essence rather than their actions.

The scholarship on Nazi morality may be divided into two basic approaches. The first, pioneered by Claudia Koonz, has been to study how the Nazis disseminated their ethic to the population—in her view, with great success.³⁶ Another interpretation, put forward by Raphael Gross, highlights the ways in which the Nazis also redefined, modified, and appropriated existing value systems.³⁷ Both approaches build from the assumption that Nazism was ultimately incompatible with most other value systems and generally portray the reception of Nazi ideas as a top-down process by which the regime imposed its will on the populace.

When it comes to the question of moral values within the Wehrmacht, many scholars now stress that Nazi ideology came to exercise enormous influence not only over how the army operated in the field but how personnel at all levels of the military hierarchy evaluated the legitimacy of their actions. According to this interpretation, other more traditional sources of moral meaning were largely expunged from the army’s culture and replaced with the principles of Nazi morality, whether before or during Barbarossa.³⁸ Some historians have cautioned that ideology was not all-pervasive and that other moral reference points, including nationalism and martial virtues, still lived on in some form.³⁹ Others have pointed out that the army’s actions were also influenced by pragmatic concerns, as officers sometimes set aside ideological purity for the sake of strategic advantage or—in rarer cases—out of an attachment to older principles of soldierly honor.⁴⁰ While these authors have fruitfully uncovered evidence of the persistent influence of such alternative values in the Wehrmacht, they have typically failed to examine these systematically or to clarify their relationship to Nazism, which is still generally recognized as the single most influential value system within the Wehrmacht.⁴¹

Only one scholar, André Mineau, has put forward a comprehensive theory addressing both the role of traditional morality and that of its Nazi counterpart in the context of the Wehrmacht. In many ways, he argues, the former ended up reinforcing the latter and it was their confluence that produced the necessary conditions for the war of extermination. In his words, Traditional morality and the notions attached to it contributed to major Nazi undertakings—especially to Barbarossa.… Ethics as traditional morality ingrained in German culture was supple enough to accept reorientation from, and provide support to ideology. Although he has provided an indispensable framework for understanding the morality–ideology relationship, Mineau has focused his attention primarily on leadership elements in the Wehrmacht rather than the rank and file, who will be the central objects of this book.⁴²

To the extent that they have grappled with the question of how Wehrmacht personnel came to accept their involvement in a criminal enterprise while avoiding any sense of guilt, some researchers have emphasized the role of situational factors, including group dynamics, the compartmentalization of roles, and the pressures of the army’s disciplinary system.⁴³ All of these lessened any sense of personal responsibility and insulated soldiers from cognitive dissonance—the discomfort experienced when one’s actions contradict one’s values.⁴⁴ More often, however, scholars have emphasized the critical role played by Nazi ideology in permitting and affirming barbaric conduct in the Wehrmacht. According to this interpretation, popularized by Omer Bartov, many personnel adopted the Nazi worldview—and the precepts of Nazi morality—to the point where they considered the murder of Jews and Slavs a positive good.⁴⁵ As evidence, scholars have pointed to soldiers’ battlefield conduct and excerpts from their wartime writings as well as the extensive indoctrination to which they were subject in the Third Reich, including within the Wehrmacht itself. An alternate theory, put forward by Hannes Heer, is that a combination of ideology and wartime experiences created a situation in which soldiers became amoral, embracing the belief that their actions fell beyond the realm of good and evil.⁴⁶ Whether they concern the moral fabric of the Wehrmacht as a whole or the self-conception of individual soldiers, what ties most of the aforementioned lines of inquiry together is the assumption that in order to commit mass atrocities, it was first necessary to abandon the basic moral precepts that had guided German society for centuries.

The impact of racial ideology at all levels of the military hierarchy should not be understated. Embraced by the Wehrmacht’s senior leadership and disseminated through an extensive indoctrination program, Nazism enjoyed pride of place as the doctrine around which all servicemen were encouraged to model their thoughts and behavior. Indeed, without ideology Barbarossa—a campaign conceived to destroy Germany’s racial enemies—would have been unthinkable. In contrast to those studies that portray the Wehrmacht of 1941–1944 as an institution in which the Nazi worldview had achieved monopoly status, however, this book argues that a broad array of more traditional value systems still played a major role in its discourse and actions on the Eastern Front. The relationship between Nazi morality and these value systems was complex. In some cases, they hindered the achievement of the regime’s goals. More often, this work ultimately finds, their continued presence would prove more a boon than a detriment to the Nazi cause.

The influence of traditional value systems surfaced in numerous ways. Officers and propagandists emphasized traditional morality in addition to ideology in their wartime rhetoric, including by encouraging their men to view themselves as upstanding warriors, depicting the Soviets as ethically bankrupt, and attempting to convince the enemy population of the invader’s honorable intentions. From time to time, decision-makers took tangible steps that reflected the continued impact of older systems of right and wrong, including by adopting conciliatory occupation policies or devoting resources to religious care within the army’s ranks. In doing so, the Wehrmacht sometimes deviated from the ideological principles it otherwise followed, but by promoting and instrumentalizing a wide variety of value systems, officers up and down the military hierarchy recognized they could better motivate their men, preserve the army’s reputation, and—most importantly, from their point of view—gain a strategic edge. Thus, the continued presence of moral values became a major element in the Wehrmacht’s persistent efforts to demonstrate moral superiority over its Soviet enemies throughout the conflict. These efforts form a key theme of this book, one that has received little scholarly attention to date.

Although they did little to lessen the brutality of the Vernichtungskrieg, the Wehrmacht’s efforts to secure the moral high ground had a variety of important effects. They helped to sanitize the army’s wartime image. They generated confusion among the army’s enemies, who could never be certain if they would be met with terror or civility. Even more importantly, they helped secure the compliance of a broad and diverse body of soldiers: rather than being forced to accept Nazi ideology as the sole legitimate rationale for the invasion and the Wehrmacht’s conduct, army personnel were provided with a wide range of officially sanctioned moral options from which to choose as they made sense of their participation. In the end, traditional value systems not only remained influential in the Wehrmacht alongside ideology; their persistence also made the army an even more terrifying and effective fighting force than it might have been had it insisted on total ideological purity, one capable of masking its intentions, pursuing flexible policies, and fostering the conditions in which its men were able to comfortably continue their willing participation.

As their institution strove to win the moral contest as well as the physical one, soldiers developed their own understanding of the conflict’s moral dimensions and the role they played in it. Like the organization in which they served, they absorbed elements of Nazi ideology to a high degree. Some even fully completed the transition to the new racial morality, finding in it all the justification they required. However, the rank and file did not so easily cast aside all the lessons of an upbringing that had included strong elements of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition the moment they donned the uniform. Many still remained attached to earlier value systems, including traditional nationalism, military virtues, Christian principles, and middle-class norms. Further, although the trauma of their wartime experiences did have a numbing effect, their writings indicate that they typically still recognized when their conduct fell beyond the pale of civilization and did not simply abandon all notions of right and wrong.

To return to the central question of this book, how did the agents of the Vernichtungskrieg hold on to the conviction that they remained upright men championing a just cause? How did they make peace with their role in a war that shocked the civilized world and continue to insist on their innocence even into the postwar period? It will be argued here that it was by relying not only on the framework of Nazi morality but a wide range of traditional moral value systems that troops of all backgrounds and beliefs maintained their sense of personal integrity and continued their willing participation while avoiding feelings of remorse. They relied on these value systems to cultivate and project identities as dutiful family men, selfless comrades, faithful Christians, virtuous heroes, and, ultimately, victims. This decent self-image became part of a larger constellation of self-affirming autobiographical narratives they generated through their wartime writings. Through these narratives, soldiers safeguarded the army’s reputation, justified the Wehrmacht’s crimes, branded the campaign as a worthy mission, and vilified their Soviet opponents. In limited fashion, troops lent an aura of credibility to this self-image on a performative level by putting their words into action—for instance, by handing out candy to children or reopening churches the Soviet regime had shuttered in the effort to demonstrate that they had come as liberators or pious crusaders.

Soldiers’ efforts to maintain a sense of moral legitimacy were bolstered by the work of officers and propagandists who did what they could to ensure that as many troops as possible remained comfortable with their wartime roles. As noted above, these employed the language of traditional morality alongside that of Nazism to present soldiers with a wide variety of officially sanctioned justifications for the war, depictions of the enemy, and self-definitions from which to choose. Recognizing that not all soldiers and citizens would be moved by purely ideological arguments, even Hitler and his top officials sometimes followed a similar course by mixing the rhetoric of Nazi morality with appeals to time-honored values. In the face of such ambiguous messaging from their superiors, soldiers were able to work within both Nazi and alternate value systems to freely choose whatever rationalizations or narratives they personally found most compelling.

Whether they constructed their self-image by adopting officially sanctioned ideas or by devising their own, troops’ ability to find some sense of moral legitimacy had at least two important ramifications. First, while servicemen who preferred ideological justifications naturally encountered little difficulty in making sense of their participation in the campaign, by relying on more traditional concepts even those who were less attached to Nazism were able to embrace their own role wholeheartedly when they might otherwise have struggled to do so. Second, believing themselves to be upright warriors pursuing noble goals made the Third Reich’s uniformed men more effective and more prolific killers, convinced not only of the righteousness of their cause but the horrifying means employed to achieve it.

Efforts to claim the moral high ground, whether by soldiers or the Wehrmacht as a whole, did not merely affect the army’s institutional workings or the inner psychology of the men in its ranks, however. They would also have a profound and lasting influence beyond the battlefields of the Eastern Front, and no more so than on public perceptions in the German homeland. This observation leads to the third and final question of this book: where, and how, did the Wehrmacht myth originate?

The approach taken here offers a new answer, one that provides additional insight into the reasons for the myth’s popularity and lasting influence in German society. The myth, so this book will prove, was not the postwar creation of generals, politicians, and veterans’ associations, as historians have almost universally assumed.⁴⁷ Nor did it constitute a retroactive attempt at whitewashing in the sense that its advocates were presenting the German public with a new and unfamiliar interpretation of the army’s history. Instead, the Wehrmacht myth was first developed and popularized during the war itself. Its chief authors were ordinary soldiers who huddled in bunkers or paused along the march to compose letters to their family and friends in the homeland—some ten billion in all. Through this medium, more powerful than any weapon of the modern battlefield, they fed the public a distorted and self-serving account of their experiences that reflected their own quest for a sense