Milieus in the Military: Soldierly Ethos,Nationalism and Conformism Among Workers in the Wehrmacht

In the 1920s the idea of the ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ became a powerful slogan in German political discourse among all parties. ¹ Before the National Socialists changed it into a racist agenda, the notion foremost expressed the goal of overcoming the internal divisions in German society that had evolved during the Imperial era. ² During the last third of the nineteenth century, segmented social milieus with their own cultural and political orientation had emerged in Germany as a result of industrialization, modernization and social pluralization. During the period following, the links between worldviews, attitudes and identities on the one hand and the affiliation to social groups, strata and milieus on the other were therefore particularly close. These socio-cultural milieus dissolved at the latest in the 1960s, when tertiarisation and a post-modern shift in values called forth new social transformations. In the era of the World Wars, milieus and mentalities in this way continued to be dependent on one another. At the same time, these epochs already heralded the end of the milieus as formative social formations. Thus, what kind of significance did a background in certain social milieus possess for the soldiers of the Wehrmacht? Historical research could hardly address this question earlier, since only few appropriate sources were available that could provide information both on the soldiers’ mentalities as well as on their biographies. Recently, however, an extensive body of documents has been discovered that allows for such analysis: the prisoner files from the secret interrogation centre Fort Hunt near Washington, where US intelligence services interrogated and listened in on more than 3000 German POWs from 1942 through 1945. Based on these unique records this article analyses the cases of soldiers from the working class and Catholic social strata in order to understand to what extent class differences continued to play a role within the Wehrmacht. To start with, it is indispensable to consider the historical research on those social milieus from which the soldiers came from when they entered the armed forces of the Nazi state.

According to the influential ‘milieu theory’ by Mario Rainer Lepsius, four ‘politically dominant social milieus’ emerged in Imperial Germany, which remained isolated and immobile until into the late 1920s to such an extent that democracy in Germany failed as a result: the Protestant-liberal, the Protestant-conservative, the Catholic and the social democratic milieus. ³ Historical scholarohrn ultimately rejected the idea of four inflexible milieus as ‘too static and too unhistorical’ because ‘the milieus were more heterogeneous and capable of development than Lepsius supposed’. ⁴ Lepsius’ considerations nevertheless inspired numerous studies on the importance, persistence and erosion of milieus in German society, as a result of which the concept has, with some qualifications, established itself in the historiography. ⁵

With respect to the persistence of these social formations under Nazi rule, research confirmed that, at most, only the Catholic and socialist strata possessed the necessary homogeneity, continuity and cohesion to have maintained their milieus after the break of 1933. ⁶ While the conservative and liberal milieus had long since disintegrated into heterogeneous component parts, both the Catholics and the workers’ movement could feed on their high level of organization and also the internal consensus that had emerged as a reaction to the state discrimination directed against them in Imperial Germany. ⁷ This finding was supported by election and social research, which demonstrated that the Catholic and socialist parties lost relatively speaking the fewest voters to the NSDAP up to the end of the Weimar Republic. ⁸ To what extent these two ‘model milieus’ were able to assert themselves during the ‘Third Reich’ remains, however, disputed, especially as the National Socialist regime with its utopia of a ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ worked towards the destruction of traditional social milieus. ⁹

Since the regional studies of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute of Contemporary History) in Munich, it has been regarded as proven that the Catholic milieu distinguished itself, at least in Bavaria, through its increased resistance potential towards National Socialism. ¹⁰ The degree of cohesion and persistence that the Catholic milieu was able to preserve in the Nazi state continues, however, to be controversially assessed. ¹¹ Critics countered the assumption of a milieu-based resistance by pointing out the ‘remarkable willingness of many Catholics to conform’ and pointed to the disintegrating effects that resulted from the breaking up of the Catholic organizations as well as the appeal of the regime and its successes. ¹² The view of a largely successful sealing-off of the milieu was furthermore countered by the social and regional heterogeneity of German Catholics. ¹³ These sceptical viewpoints are confronted by the state of research, according to which the Catholics in the Nazi state established a ‘supra-regional community of likemindedness’, which despite its internal socioeconomic and lifestyle differences had ‘a common supply of unreflected or barely reflected attitudes and values’ at its disposal, on which the opposition to National Socialism could be built. ¹⁴

Similar dissent prevails in the historiography with regard to the survival of the workers’ milieu during the Nazi era. The socialist myth of an unbroken ability to resist has long since made way for a considerably more critical view. ¹⁵ According to this interpretation, the popularity of National Socialism already announced itself towards the end of the Weimar Republic in the form of considerable voter migration to the NSDAP; after Hitler’s takeover of power, the economic upswing brought about the change ‘from Depression shock to Führer loyalty’. ¹⁶ At the same time, the state pressure and the Gleichschaltung (coordination) of workers’ clubs led during the course of the 1930s to an increasing disintegration of milieu cohesion and a ‘retreat into passivity’, until at the latest during the war years an ‘irreversible breaking up of the established structures’ was reached. ¹⁷ These findings are countered by the view that among workers at least micro-milieus continued to exist, which were at most neutralized by terror and control but not dissolved. In spite of a creeping erosion of traditional structures and a gap in the ‘reproduction chain of socialism’, which resulted from the National Socialist socialization of the younger peer groups, the workers held their distance from the Nazi regime and preserved their cohesion in milieu nuclei to such an extent that after 1945 a rapid reorganization could successfully take place. ¹⁸

In the controversy over the continuity of the socio-moral milieus, the question was thus debated to what extent the social revolutionary levelling trends of the National Socialist regime accelerated the already triggered erosion and in this way unintentionally contributed to the modernization of society. ¹⁹ Alongside organizations such as the Hitler Youth (HJ), the German Labour Front (DAF) or the National Socialist People’s Welfare (NSV), which functioned as agencies of ‘breeding for the “Volksgemeinschaft”’, the historiography also counted the military and the war among those factors that had a socially integrative effect in the Nazi state. According to this view, the traditional social milieus were also undermined by the ‘Second World War with its forced creation of solidarity across milieu boundaries’, the destruction of social-spatial milieu relationships by the air war as well as the call ups to the Reich Labour Service (RAD) and the Wehrmacht. ²⁰ Military service itself had already counted among the ‘cross-class integrating institutions’ in Imperial Germany. ²¹ The Wehrmacht, which was to be moulded into a ‘National Socialist people’s army’ in accordance with the will of the rulers, elevated cross-class comradeship to a general principle in order to realise the ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ in the armed forces. ²² It remains largely unexplained, however, to what extent the Wehrmacht as an institution was successful in bridging existing class differences, or whether a background in particular socio-moral milieus remained relevant during service in the National Socialist military by influencing value systems, patterns of perception and the conduct of the soldiers. ²³

The fact that the question as to how mentalities and milieus were related to one another within the Wehrmacht could not yet be researched in depth is to be explained not least by the idiosyncratic nature of the source material. So far, the available sources have only allowed in individual cases a link to be made between those sensibilities of Wehrmacht soldiers that are capable of reconstruction and their sociocultural imprints, as information about their identity was only available for a tiny minority of authors of diaries and military field post. In the meanwhile, however, a collection of sources has been made available that allows the analysis of connections between perception in war and collective biographies in the Wehrmacht: the files of the American interrogation centre Fort Hunt near Washington, where US military intelligence agencies interned, interrogated and listened in on over 3000 German soldiers between 1942 and 1945. ²⁴ The available records from this secret Interrogation Centre contain both significant ego-documents in the form of eavesdropping transcripts and interrogation reports as well as extensive biographical information on each of the captured Wehrmacht soldiers. The prisoner files from Fort Hunt thus appear to be particularly appropriate for an analysis of the extent to which traditional milieu-specific lines of segregation and cultural interpretation retained their effectiveness in the Wehrmacht or were superimposed by an overarching collective morality.

The Morale Questionnaires from Fort Hunt, a series of political interrogation reports, promise to provide initial answers to these questions. The surveys pursued the aim of eliciting the mood within the German armed forces and ultimately amounted to an opinion poll among the interned Wehrmacht soldiers. On the basis of a standardized question catalogue, the interrogation officers demanded statements from their prisoners on the anticipated outcome of the war, their attitude to Hitler and National Socialism, their image of the Wehrmacht and their wartime enemies and further aspects of their perception of the world. The information value of these political interviews was already regarded among the American intelligence agencies as astoundingly high. ²⁵ The asymmetrical character of the interrogation situation impaired the interrogation results only negligibly, as the majority of the Wehrmacht soldiers showed themselves to be cooperative and happy to provide information. ²⁶ This was particularly the case for the political questionings, as most of the Wehrmacht soldiers did not regard the topics addressed as being ‘strategically important’, so that it seemed to them to be harmless to make statements on the subject matter. Accordingly, the verification of the statements from the interrogations with the help of the eavesdropping transcripts demonstrates as a rule that the soldiers did not conceal their worldview from the interrogation officers during the Morale Interrogations. In the files from Fort Hunt around 730 such Morale Questionnaires have been preserved, which provide an account of interrogations of Reich German and Austrian soldiers. Admittedly, the size of the sample is not representative in a statistical sense. The same applies to the methodology in the selection of those to be interviewed, although the criteria for the selection of the candidates for Fort Hunt were successively expanded in such a way that they ultimately approached a random sample. Nevertheless, the sample from Fort Hunt at least counts among the most extensive contemporary surveys of captive Wehrmacht soldiers available. Moreover, a corrective is provided by a series of additional Opinion Surveys at our disposal from intelligence agencies that conducted interviews with German POWs in the European theatre of war. ²⁷

The loyalty of Wehrmacht soldiers to Hitler was among the most crucial factors that bridged social classes in the German Army, as both the surveys of the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD) in the Allied High Command in Europe (SHAEF) as well as the results of the opinion research in Fort Hunt confirmed. The surveys from PWD from 1944 showed that more than half of all debriefed prisoners of war regularly came out in favour of Hitler. In six smaller samples, which were collected during the first half of 1944 until just before the Normandy landings, the ‘Support of Hitler & Regime’ only twice fell under 50 per cent among a total of 278 respondents and even reached in three samples values of 60 per cent or higher. ²⁸ The available surveys from the PWD from the last two quarters of 1944, which were based on interviews with almost 3000 prisoners of war, showed relatively stable approval values of on average 60 per cent. ²⁹ The surveys in Fort Hunt came to similar conclusions. ³⁰ The first three quarters of 1944, from which most of the available Morale Questionnaires from Fort Hunt originate, namely 672 interviews, lends itself as a period for comparison. During this time period, over 55 per cent of the soldiers who came from territories of the German Reich expressed themselves unreservedly positively about Hitler, while only about 21 per cent revealed completely negative attitudes and about seven per cent of the Wehrmacht soldiers gave indifferent answers. A further nine per cent of the soldiers formulated measured statements, but knew of more positive than negative things to say about Hitler; in reversal, this was the case with almost seven per cent of the prisoners. Including these nuanced statements, which nonetheless demonstrate a trend, the acceptance quota vis-à-vis Hitler among the inmates of Fort Hunt came to significantly more than 60 per cent. The finding that different, independent comparative samples led to similar results compensates for the relatively limited size of the sample of the individual surveys and reinforces the informational value of the results of the debriefings. The PWD analyses, however, provided little information about the identity of the debriefed soldiers or their sociocultural background; only the Morale Questionnaires from Fort Hunt allow us to link the documented statements with the biographies of those examined.

Of the roughly 730 German and Austrian soldiers, for whom Morale Questionnaires were drawn up in Fort Hunt, more than half had served in the army. Almost a quarter came from the navy and almost a fifth from the air force, though the Waffen SS was represented by only a dozen members. With regard to the ranking classes, the lower levels dominated: almost 60 per cent of the Morale Questionnaires were interrogations of the rank and file, while almost a third was from non-commissioned officers and around 10 per cent from junior officers up to the rank of captain. On average, those Wehrmacht soldiers who were subjected in 1944 in Fort Hunt to a military interrogation were in their mid-twenties. The age structure of the respondents to the Morale Questionnaires was thus somewhat younger than the overall population of the German armed forces; the proportion of those born between 1911 and 1929, who bore the main burden of the war, approached very closely the average of the Wehrmacht in this age group. ³¹ More than half were still single; over two-thirds were childless. The majority of the soldiers had a low social status. More than 60 per cent of the soldiers had a profession that can be assigned to the lower classes. ³² Around a quarter belonged to the middle classes, while less than 10 per cent came from the upper class. In confessional terms, Protestants were dominant: approximately half of the soldiers were evangelical, while just under 40 per cent were Catholic.

What link was there between these social parameters and the worldview of the Wehrmacht soldiers? In the question as to where soldiers stood on the matter of the Nazi regime, at most gradual confessional differences were apparent in the Morale Questionnaires from Fort Hunt. Across confessions the regime achieved a narrow majority among those soldiers who came from territories of the German Reich: around 42 per cent of the soldiers expressed themselves unreservedly positively about National Socialism, while a good third expressed themselves decidedly negatively. A further eight per cent submitted more nuanced statements with a positive tendency, while five per cent of those questioned formulated measured responses with a negative intonation. The remaining 10 per cent wanted to comment neither in favour of nor against National Socialism. The weighting of votes within the different denominational communities deviated only marginally from this overall picture. From more than 300 Reich German Protestants, almost 45 per cent came out in favour of National Socialism and a further seven per cent with reservations; it met with outright rejection from around 30 per cent of the soldiers, while a further six per cent saw a few positive features alongside the negative aspects. Among Catholic soldiers, opponents and supporters of the Nazi movement roughly balanced each other out: from around 200 Catholic Reich Germans, 39 per cent openly approved of National Socialism, while 38 per cent opposed it; otherwise, seven and four per cent of the soldiers, respectively, gave measured responses with a positive or negative inclination. Hitler himself came off better with both denominations than his party, again with only marginal confessional differences. More than two thirds of the Protestant Wehrmacht soldiers expressed themselves positively about the ‘Führer’; of the Catholic soldiers almost 60 per cent voted in favour of Hitler. According to the results of the opinion research from Fort Hunt, the Nazi regime tended to have a little less support among Catholic soldiers than among Protestant members of the Wehrmacht. Even in the Catholic camp, though, the opponents of the regime were confronted by just as many who were loyal to the government, so that one can hardly talk of a milieu-based resistance.

Similarly to the confessional differences, socioeconomic dividing lines in the Wehrmacht were evidently to a large extent blurred. In the Morale Questionnaires, more than 300 Reich German Wehrmacht soldiers had their political views recorded who had been trades- or craftsmen in civilian life, for the most part in an industrial framework. Even among these soldiers no above-average resistance towards the Nazi regime emerged. In response to the question as to their attitude towards National Socialism, almost 50 per cent of the workers gave approving responses, while almost 40 per cent responded with rejection. Hitler’s acceptance quota among workers was well above 60 per cent. Both values thus corresponded to a large extent to the overall average for the surveys from Fort Hunt – on the whole then, the workers did not have a more hostile stance towards the Nazi regime than the soldiers from other social strata. As they explained in the Morale Questionnaires, their loyalty towards Hitler and his regime was based to a considerable extent on their participation in the economic upsurge since the National Socialist takeover of power, for which the workers were deeply grateful after they had been particularly badly affected by the preceding Depression. ³³ Many workers thought like the 31-year-old enlisted soldier Otto Breidecker from Mainz, who had benefited from the ‘Nazi economic miracle’ within an armaments work in Saxony: ‘P/W regards Hitler as a great man who has done a lot of good for the German worker, even though it was only by rearming. After years of unemployment the workers didn’t ask where the work came from.’ ³⁴ Even workers who rejected Hitler gave him credit for this: ‘Hitler did do something for Germany socially.’ ³⁵

Although many workers changed direction, the influences of their earlier milieu conditioning nevertheless remained tangible. Most of those workers who spoke out against Nazi rule in the Morale Questionnaires, were admittedly incensed first and foremost in respect of Hitler’s suicidal war policies, the resulting destruction and population loss, the violent internal suppression or simply the failure of the regime. ³⁶ Alongside that, however, a considerable minority of the workers explained their distance to National Socialism directly or indirectly with their membership of a socialist community of likemindedness. A series of workers thus explained their opposition to the regime with reference to their upbringing by a social democratic or communist father. ³⁷ Thus, at least in these cases, the hereditary nature of milieu membership was evidently still valid. ³⁸ Other workers traced their oppositional stance to their earlier commitment as social democrat activists or as communists. ³⁹ The fact that socialist milieu and opposition to National Socialism were interrelated was for these soldiers a matter of course: ‘The largest number of Anti-Nazis are to be found among the working class. Industrial areas are largely anti-regime’, according to a non-commissioned officer from Westphalia. ⁴⁰ A former sailor from Danzig, who had been active as both a social democrat and as a trade unionist was certain: ‘All the harbour workers and seamen around Danzig were anti-Nazi.’ ⁴¹ Similar conditions were supposedly present in Hamburg, where ‘the attitude among harbour workers’ had remained ‘radical and negative towards the Nazis’, as a former foreman and communist was recorded as saying, who was convinced that ‘class conscious workers’ still existed. ⁴² The likewise circulating conviction that barely any workers could be found among members of the NSDAP corresponded with such attitudes. ⁴³

The results of the opinion research from Fort Hunt thus appear to confirm that significant sections of the working class had orientated themselves towards the Nazi regime; at the same time, however, cores of milieu-based resistance evidently continued to exist, at least in the form of identity generating self-conceptualization formulas. The Catholic milieu proved to be just as limited in its immunity against National Socialism; it kept barely more distance to the regime than other social formations. Both findings are supported by the statements of only a few hundred Wehrmacht soldiers. Even these case studies, however, exceed all existing data collections: never were so many personalized statements available by German soldiers on the same topics. The polling findings of the Morale Questionnaires nevertheless require further analysis. The opinion surveys from Fort Hunt yielded an additional finding, however, that was so apparent that it would in all probability not greatly change even in considerably bigger samples. This finding documented a common ground that unified all traditional social milieus: soldiers across the social strata shared a positive image of the Wehrmacht.

There were two sections in the Morale Questionnaires in which the German soldiers were asked about the Wehrmacht itself. The topic block on ‘Soldier Morale’ required statements on the fighting spirit of the troops, the soldiers’ faith in victory, the everyday conditions of service, the relationship between superiors and enlisted men and the quality of the officers. In the section on ‘Fighting Qualities’, the military abilities of the armies fighting in the war were to be assessed and compared. In the opinions on the German ‘soldier morale’, the positive votes had already clearly had the upper hand among the more than 500 Reich German Wehrmacht soldiers who expressed an opinion on this issue: with relatively small confessional differences, almost two thirds of those questioned painted an optimistic picture of morale within the German units. In contrast, less than a third characterized German fighting spirit as low. Almost three quarters of those questioned showed themselves to be more or less satisfied with the ‘Service Conditions’ in the Wehrmacht, which related above all to provisioning with food, weapons and ammunition as well as their treatment by superiors – only about one fifth of the soldiers criticized the living conditions in the Wehrmacht. The quality of the troop officers was judged by around two thirds of the soldiers to be good, despite some reservations in respect of inexperienced younger officers. Only the non-commissioned officers and sergeants, who received approval ratings of over 75 per cent, scored more highly.

Even more unanimous than the praise of personnel and structures within the Wehrmacht was the glorification of German fighting strength – here the soldiers of all political orientations were virtually of the same opinion. Among more than 460 Reich German members of the Wehrmacht, from whom statements on the ‘Fighting Qualities’ of the various warring parties were recorded, there were not even two dozen persons who characterized German abilities as poor; almost half of those even made positive exceptions. In contrast, considerably more than 200 soldiers attributed high military qualities to the German armed forces, while almost 200 further members of the Wehrmacht held that the German troops were the best in the world. The proportion of the interviewees who revealed a positive opinion of the soldierly virtues of the Wehrmacht thus constituted more than 90 per cent. Soldiers who were loyal to the regime and opponents of Hitler were in agreement here: ‘The morale and fighting spirit of the German infantry are incomparable. No other group of soldiers could accomplish what they have done,’ as a 23-year-old non-commissioned officer from Pomerania stressed. ⁴⁴ The admiration for German soldiering implied at the same time an identification with one’s own nation. Even soldiers like the infantryman Wilhelm Scherer, a young Catholic and industrial worker, who rejected Hitler, displayed such self-confidence: ‘The Germans are excellent soldiers.’ ⁴⁵ On this issue, social or confessional differences completely faded into the background; the perception of the Wehrmacht was also largely independent from political orientations. This represented a paramount prerequisite for the ability of the German forces to hold together. The finding of the survey from Fort Hunt testifies to the strong link between primary bonds, which were based on the sense of community within the small units, and secondary cohesion, which consisted in the commitment to the military itself. ⁴⁶ The conformism of the soldiers resulted not only from the influence of primary groups but also related to the Wehrmacht as an institution. Earlier studies have argued that ‘cultural symbols’ such as political convictions or the identification with certain values and norms were only relevant ‘to the extent that these secondary symbols became directly associated with primary gratifications’. ⁴⁷ The records from Fort Hunt confirm that these cultural patterns were indeed strongly intertwined with social dynamics. The soldiers foremost sought to emulate their common values and norms in order to live up to their comrades’ expectations, to maintain their positive self-perceptions and to gain social esteem. All the same the records suggest that military ethos was more than just a functional matter; it rather constituted a highly intentional factor in the soldiers’ mentalities. The Morale Questionnaires demonstrated that the shared pride in the abilities of the Wehrmacht and its martial virtues was deeply rooted throughout German society. It combined to form a collective military morale that vaulted traditional dividing lines in the German armed forces and contributed elementarily to the motivation of the troops. Such complex military cohesion surely didn’t represent an exclusively German phenomenon. Yet comparisons with other nations indicate that soldierly morale in the Wehrmacht was particularly strongly developed. ⁴⁸

The eavesdropping transcripts also available to us prove that the soldiers did not feign their high opinion of the virtues of the Wehrmacht and their pride in the nation, which they expressed so unanimously in the Morale Questionnaires. Only rarely did they announce this so explicitly in their unforced Room Conversations as they did in the political interviews, during which they were directly asked about it. The unspoken premises on which they based as a matter of course their contributions to discussions allowed all the more for a deep insight into their commitment to military and nationalistic values: they told how they had fulfilled tasks and made use of their weapons or reverentially passed on the accomplishments of others. They praised exemplary superiors and criticized officers who did not appear sufficiently gutsy to them. They spoke with esteem of ‘old, experienced fighters’ and ‘real privates’. ⁴⁹ They competed in their expertise on weapons and military equipment, discussed the award of decorations and promotions or argued over which ethnic groups fought bravely and which had been cowardly. They reported how they had demonstrated toughness, overcome exertions and borne combat stress and stressed their identification with the collective. As ‘good Germans’ they rejected sensitive military questions posed by the interrogation officers in order not to commit ‘treason’ against their comrades. They did not close their eyes to impending defeat, though they often viewed it with deep regret. The idealization of soldierly virtues in accordance with this pattern was revealed in the comments of members of the Wehrmacht from all social strata, confessions and age groups.

The fact that the identification with a military set of values also transcended those social strata to whom a more distanced stance towards the Nazi regime in comparison with other social formations had hitherto been attested is proven by a first sample from the Fort Hunt files. The sample constitutes 100 prisoner files on Reich German enlisted men and non-commissioned officers who had worked as trades- or craftsmen and can be assigned to the former socialist or Catholic working class. In civilian life, the majority of them had worked in large towns for mid-sized or large armaments firms following completion of elementary school and an apprenticeship. They were called up at different points in time, so that the length of their service in the Wehrmacht varied between several years and a few months. The prisoner files admittedly do not allow for the reconstruction of the military thinking of the monitored members of the Wehrmacht in every case because the Room Conversations were not subjected to any external control and could not, therefore, guarantee that the perceived roles of the soldiers were even discussed. For the majority of the remaining members of the Wehrmacht, however, whose comments on the military and the war contained value judgements, a more or less extensive identification with their military roles emerged in the eavesdropping transcripts.

Some soldiers articulated this merely in intimations when they discussed, for example, which was ‘the best weapon’, who had been awarded the ‘Iron Cross 1st Class’, what ‘we would have had’ to do in order to defeat the Allies, or when they recounted how they had ignored danger of death during battle, ‘done their duty’ and ‘fought for Germany’. ⁵⁰ The bulk of the members of the Wehrmacht from the available sample made it much clearer during the Room Conversations, however, that military accomplishments and soldierly dispositions had positive connotations for them. Among them was the 36-year-old grenadier and family man Kurt Schönfeld from Protestant Thuringia, who had worked as a cutter in Porta Westfalica for a medium-sized supplier for the aviation industry before being called up to the Wehrmacht in spring 1943. ⁵¹ After several months of training he was deployed in France with the Grenadier Regiment 919 as part of the 709th Infantry Division and was captured on 14 June 1944 during the invasion fighting near Montebourg. Although Schönfeld belonged to the older age groups in the Wehrmacht and was part of a unit that in terms of its structure and history could at best be regarded as third-class, he felt closely tied to his military surroundings. The expectations that he had of his military leaders were fulfilled, he felt, by his superior: ‘We had a good company commander; he was also a good comrade [and] did not get scared when things got going.’ ⁵² While he emphasized the bravery of his company head, he criticized some of the non-commissioned officers, who were allegedly so cowardly that the normal soldiers made advances without them. ⁵³ He expressed appreciation, on the other hand, of a former neighbouring unit, which he praised as a ‘super company’. Just how important it was to this soldier to be part of the Wehrmacht is clear from the fact that he and his cellmates reflected on their career chances while still in captivity in Fort Hunt, as one of the eavesdropping transcripts concluded: ‘Talking about their respective grades – Discussing chances of promotion.’ ⁵⁴ The positive image of the Wehrmacht that Schönfeld conveyed during the Room Conversations also corresponded to the statements that he made during interrogation. In the Morale Questionnaire he again praised his superior and boasted about the German ‘fighting qualities’: ‘P/W has the highest opinion of the German soldier.’ ⁵⁵

The 24-year-old private Michael Schu, an unmarried Catholic from Saarbrücken, also commented approvingly on the military. ⁵⁶ He had been intensively prepared for service in the Wehrmacht: he joined the Hitler Youth in 1933, performed his service in the RAD in 1937 and completed pre-military training with the SA in 1940. Schu had been most recently professionally active as a skilled metalworker for a medium-sized armaments company in Lübeck. At the beginning of 1943, he was finally called up and deployed in the prestigious 3rd Armoured Grenadier Division on the Italian front, where he was captured by American forces at the end of May 1944. His recollections of the fighting, during which he had been wounded and been decorated with the Assault Badge (Sturmabzeichen), were dominated by his admiration for the strength of his own unit: ‘Man, how our tanks slammed in’, as he enthusiastically told one of his fellow prisoners in Fort Hunt. ⁵⁷ He talked proudly about an infantry attack in which he had participated: ‘When we arrived at our destination we let loose against the enemy and we screamed; the enemy thought we were an entire regiment, but we were only 50 privates.’ ⁵⁸ His focus on his superiors appeared to be symptomatic. One morning in Fort Hunt, Schu spoke of little else: ‘The lieutenant was always at the front’, ‘suddenly the lieutenant could not go on’, ‘the lieutenant always came to us’, ‘the lieutenant sent an NCO to us’, ‘he [the lieutenant] gave me a pat on the back’, ‘the lieutenant told us’, ‘our lieutenant had a leg injury’, ‘the lieutenant was a great guy’. Schu also enjoyed the comradeship across the ranks and the cohesion of the unit on the march: ‘I also gladly took part in such marches; no differences, we were all together.’ Schu was so familiar with the standards of the Wehrmacht when it came to performance and promotion that he was surprised at a fellow prisoner who had ‘already [been] in the army for 6 years, he should be a petty officer second class already, I just don’t understand’. ⁵⁹

The orientation towards the rules of the system and the fixation on the superior officers, the proud feeling of belonging to a unit and the idealization of the bravery and military successes – these military morals were particularly prominent among the soldiers from the so-called Hitler Youth generation. In the available sample of Wehrmacht members from the working class, soldierly dispositions were noticeably frequent among the younger age groups, who had often already been drilled in Nazi organizations prior to their military service. The 21-year-old lance corporal Oswald Duda from Hamburg, for example, who had belonged to the Hitler Youth and the National Socialist Motor Corps (NSKK) before being ordered as a mechanic to the ground staff of the air force, stressed emphatically in Fort Hunt ‘that I am a soldier’, and was already looking forward to ‘going out during peacetime in the extra uniform of the air force’, for which he had bought accessories at his own expense. ⁶⁰ For the 22-year-old private and former Hitler Youth boy Paul Dreisbach from the newly-formed 71st Infantry Division, it was important to mention that he ‘would have become an NCO if [he] had not been captured’ and he boasted that near Cassino he had ‘with a group […] pulled out a company of Yanks’. ⁶¹ The 17-year-old paratrooper Hans Eberle from Kempten commented with similar self-confidence on the question of the ‘Fighting Qualities’ that he had been posed shortly before during a Morale Interrogation: ‘They can see it for themselves that the German is the best soldier.’ ⁶² It was for this reason that SS Squad leader Arno Dürner, who was not yet 20 years old but by his own account had already received several decorations, did not want to conceal his membership of the Waffen SS: ‘I said that I was with the SS – I do not have any interest in hiding the fact that I was in one of the best units in Germany.’ ⁶³ To his fellow prisoners, Dürner explained the fact that he remained true to the Nazi regime by pointing to the upbringing of his father: ‘Due[rner] says his father was an early Party member and he was indoctrinated with Nazism from his earliest childhood.’ ⁶⁴

The identity of this generation had not only been constructed by propagandistic self-conceptualization formulas but at the same time possessed an undeniable educational background. As a political and social life context, the ‘National Socialist people’s army’ and the Nazi system appeared to these soldiers to be both a matter of course and non-optional; after all, they had gathered no experiences from any other state forms, as they were simply ‘too young to know what had taken place in Germany before ‘33’. ⁶⁵ Even in the older generation of the Wehrmacht, the view circulated that the loyalty of the Hitler Youth age groups was largely based on their limited experience of life and their one-sided upbringing. ⁶⁶ At the same time, this interpretation constituted a component in the ideas that the soldiers of the Hitler Youth generation themselves used to form their identity, like, for example, the 18-year-old paratrooper Egon Klopp: ‘I was raised as a National Socialist and I remain a National Socialist.’ ⁶⁷ In the framework of their paramilitary education in organizations such as the Hitler Youth or the RAD, the youths had not only been instructed in Nazi ideology but also practised the soldierly disposition at an early age. ⁶⁸

Alongside the generational bearing, the unit membership also determined the way in which the soldierly mentalities of members of the Wehrmacht developed. Tradition, status and the conditions of deployment accounted in the individual branches of the armed forces and formation types in the Wehrmacht for respectively specific military cultures, which were reflected not least in the self-perception of the soldiers. As gratification for frequent, long and dangerous deployments as well as the corresponding ‘glory of arms’, elite formations in particular enjoyed an increased social prestige and cultivated a distinctively special self-awareness. They continued to display their distinguished notion of themselves in Fort Hunt. Here the identification with the military ethos showed itself particularly frequently in the case of members of the Waffen SS, paratroopers, submarine personnel, soldiers from infantry divisions with a long tradition or similarly exposed branches of service such as armoured formations or reconnaissance units. ⁶⁹ The high motivation of their members can only partially be explained by the fact that in some of these elite troops a pre-selection of personnel was already made as a result of their voluntary recruitment basis. A far more vivid effect was brought about by the daily social practice within the units, where corps spirit and soldierly disposition were constantly conveyed and updated, without the soldiers being able to extract themselves from these influences due to their isolated situation and their dependence on the group. As the files from Fort Hunt prove, this was not exclusively but to a particularly high degree the case in those units that regarded themselves as elite: it was here that the success of the military as an entity of socialization in influencing the moulding and stabilization of the relevant personality traits of its members appeared particularly clearly. ⁷⁰ It can be assumed that this process was all the more enduring the earlier the call up took place and the longer the collectivization in the armed forces lasted, while the influences of the earlier civilian environment faded more and more into the background. ⁷¹

Identification with the nation also proved to be a unifying bond, even for soldiers who came from the formerly socialist or Catholic working class. Similarly to the range of opinions that emerged from the Morale Questionnaires, in the available sample the majority of the workers came out in favour of Hitler and Nazi rule or at least declared their solidarity with the fatherland. ⁷² Here was a widely shared consensus from which even those soldiers who had already broken away from Hitler and his regime rarely departed: ‘I am a German and a soldier!’ ⁷³ The claim to be a ‘good German’ constituted a stereotypical self-conceptualization formula that both opponents of the regime and committed National Socialists utilized repeatedly in Fort Hunt. ⁷⁴ The wiretapping operations of the American intelligence services thus confirmed that even the working class had long been deeply penetrated by Nationalism; even National Socialism had found numerous supporters in these social strata. ⁷⁵ There, where they were pronounced, there existed close ties between patriotism, loyalty to the regime and the soldierly disposition; loyalty to National Socialism did not, however, constitute an inalienable prerequisite for the military commitment of the members of the Wehrmacht. Even soldiers who claimed to be ‘no Nazi’ and to be ‘against Hitler’ attached importance even in captivity to portraying themselves as exemplary fighters. ⁷⁶ Patriotism was regarded even by most workers as a virtue and gave them an indispensable meaning to their deployment in the Wehrmacht. References to the National Socialist ‘Volksgemeinschaft’, however, virtually never occurred in the prisoners’ conversations from Fort Hunt. If at all, the soldiers articulated the idea of national unity in a social and political sense, even though its racist implications often appeared to be understood. For the most part their concept of patriotism corresponded to rather traditional nationalistic views than to National Socialist theories.

With the increasing integration of the workers into the nation, the orientation towards the accustomed social milieu disappeared. The focus of many workers on themselves as ‘good Germans’, furthermore, bore witness in another respect to the porosity of the former milieu boundaries. If workers reduced their political identity to being ‘good Germans’, this indicated a lack of commitment to the earlier workers’ parties together with the dissolution of the correlation between socioeconomic status and ideological orientation, which had originally been constitutive for the social milieus. For even distancing oneself from the Nazi regime was explained in the comments of many workers in an exclusively negative way without the criticism of the regime being linked to fixed ideas of political alternatives. ⁷⁷ Furthermore: a noticeably large faction of the working class turned against anything that was political and wore their ideological indifference like a badge – not as a defensive lie during the interrogations but also as a confidentially expressed standpoint during the Room Conversations. They repeatedly asserted that they were ‘non-political’, had ‘never cared about politics’, and did ‘not want to have anything to do with politics’. ⁷⁸ Being ‘non-political’ was not merely a patriotic code for unconditional loyalty to the nation above and beyond all party politics, but was rather representative of the fact that politics was simply less prominent in the lives of many workers. Thus, a 31-year-old lance corporal from Bavaria did not even feel able to take a stance during the interrogation in Fort Hunt on the state form of the Nazi system, as he subsequently told his fellow prisoners: ‘The [interrogation officer] began with the Hitler system etc. I thought, you can kiss my arse. If he starts asking about that, then I’ll let him do the talking. I’ve no idea about systems and I don’t care either.’ ⁷⁹ The apathy of his fellow prisoner led a 27-year-old artillery soldier from Lower Saxony to make tellingly ironic remarks: ‘I know that when you come home and you have your bottle of beer, your work and your family, then all politics is bullshit.’ ⁸⁰

Such material self-sufficiency was not only a result of gratefully accepted socio-political welfare and the de-politicization of everyday working life as a result of the destruction of socialist clubs. It was at the same time an expression of the minimal amount of political activity within the proletarian milieu, which had characterized the working class even before the National Socialist takeover of power. ⁸¹ In contrast to the core of socialist activists, the majority of the former supporters or voters of the workers’ parties exhibited only a superficial politicization, which it was all the easier to alter. ⁸² Conversely, this was also the case for those supporters of the Nazi regime whose loyalty was fed more by their newfound security than by a deep-seated ideological congruence. This is confirmed by the eavesdropping transcripts from Fort Hunt: the numerous Wehrmacht soldiers from working class backgrounds who credibly insisted on being ‘non-political’ personified the minimal impact of the interpretative culture of their social milieu. In the Wehrmacht, the ideological indifference of the workers eased their collectivization as soldiers. The less the soldiers associated their deployment in the National Socialist armed forces with political substance, the easier it was for their working class ethos to be transferred from civilian life to the everyday life of the military. ⁸³ This was an important prerequisite for the functioning of the Wehrmacht, as some contemporaries themselves believed they had observed: ‘The soldier is on the whole not political. He’ll give thought to things but he simply obeys as a result of years of drill. […] Yes, the soldier will continue to do his duty. The army is non-political. It will always follow the leader.’ ⁸⁴

At the same time, criticism of the Nazi system based on typical milieu experiences was indeed articulated among workers in the eavesdropping transcripts from Fort Hunt. The dissatisfaction, however, related above all to conflicts in everyday life including burdensome working conditions, excessive industrial discipline or the control exerted by unpopular National Socialist managers. The dissatisfaction regarding working conditions constituted a potential cause of fundamental dissent, yet a politicization of these everyday disputes did not come about, as the workers did not necessarily associate their criticism with the regime and its ideology. ⁸⁵ More so than in enterprises, where the surveillance apparatus in any case hindered all camaraderie that was not compatible with state doctrine, the sociocultural handing down of political orientations evidently succeeded within the family. Among those Wehrmacht soldiers in Fort Hunt who came from the working class, the effectiveness of family influences articulated itself above all in a noticeably frequent recourse to the political standpoint of their fathers. ⁸⁶ An upbringing by politicized fathers, however, could principally lead in all ideological directions, that is, also to the right-wing. Whether socialist thinking was imparted within working class families, and if so how much, depended first and foremost on the level of political activity of the head of the family, and furthermore on the process of individual adoption by the next generation, which had to take place within a conflict with the attempts at indoctrination on the part of National Socialist socialization authorities.

Nevertheless, in the formerly socialist and Catholic working class core, milieu-based resistance persisted and remained effective even in the Wehrmacht. The interpretative culture of the proletarian milieu, however, was sustained only by a minority among the workers, which fulfilled the precondition of an above-average politicization and an earlier active involvement in socialist organizations. Opposition to National Socialism, disassociation with the nation and the rejection of military morals on the basis of a socialist view of the world – such an attitude was displayed as a rule only by personalities who had been active as members of functionaries in the former workers’ parties and the trade unions. In contrast to the majority of their comrades, who possessed no such background, in Fort Hunt they neither told any war stories about military feats nor characterized themselves as ‘good Germans’. The 43-year-old Hamburg dock worker Max Asmussen, for instance, had belonged to both the Communist Party and a trade union and felt bound to neither the Wehrmacht nor the nation, unlike many other soldiers. Asmussen had admittedly already been called up in 1940, had served in a field gendarmerie unit in three different theatres of war and had managed to become a sergeant; this had evidently been achieved, however, only with considerable reluctance, as he insisted in Fort Hunt: ‘When I was called up, I doubled up with anger because I had to go to war. I hate war.’ ⁸⁷ He vilified the people in charge as ‘crazy dogs’ and ‘gravediggers’, complained about the general discrimination against the working class and lectured on Communism and Karl Marx. ⁸⁸ Hardly nation-conscious, he was also unable to share the fears of his fellow prisoners of a potential occupation and ‘Americanization’ of Germany; on the contrary. ⁸⁹ As a member of the Wehrmacht in occupied France he had moreover frequently considered deserting to the enemy: ‘I said to myself every day “make contact with the Maquis”.’ ⁹⁰

The step that Asmussen ultimately felt to be ‘too dangerous’ and, therefore, refrained from, was taken by the 32-year-old private Josef Ertl from Munich, also an avowed communist: in October 1944, Ertl deserted on the Italian front and surrendered to American troops. Following the National Socialist takeover of power, Ertl had paid for his political disposition with imprisonment in Dachau concentration camp, though he was called up shortly after the war began to work as an armourer with a regular Wehrmacht unit as a result of his technical qualifications. In Fort Hunt Ertl proudly reported having been an ‘anti-Nazi from birth’, endeavoured to give his fellow prisoners an understanding not only of Communism but also of democracy and spoke of Hitler disdainfully as a ‘criminal’ and ‘dumb Schicklgruber’. ⁹¹ He turned, not least, on everything military: ‘Everything of any military nature, even March music, should be destroyed.’ ⁹² Similar views were also revealed by the soldier Kurt Saupe from Chemnitz who, as a communist trade union functionary, had been a typical milieu manager before his commitment earned him imprisonment in a concentration camp and, later, deployment in a penal unit, from which he deserted while in Africa. In American prisoner of war captivity he advocated a long-term occupation of Germany and barked at one fellow prisoner that he should abandon his pride in his uniform. ⁹³ The soldiers with such histories were not forced into the role of left-wing opponents of the regime by the repression of the Nazi state – they rather personified the continuity from the remains of the workers’ movement, which admittedly remained isolated in the Wehrmacht but in the case of individual proletarian soldiers nevertheless continued to constitute important elements of their identity. Opposition to National Socialism and rejection of the war and the military was also articulated in other social strata, but here the connections between milieu-specific socialization, perception of the war and political orientation were particularly pronounced.

Aside from the remaining cores of socio-moral milieus, the erosion of these social formations during the final phase of the Second World War was far advanced, particularly in the Wehrmacht. In about the same proportion as the other social strata, both Catholic soldiers and members of the Wehrmacht from the working class milieu joined that majority, which even in the final year of the war remained loyal to Hitler and his rule – the dividing lines between opponents of the regime and those loyal to Hitler crisscrossed traditional milieu boundaries. Only in the case of those soldiers from the formerly socialist or Catholic working class who exhibited an above-average level of political activity could the ties between a milieu-specific socialization and ideological disposition be maintained. This, however, was only the case for a minority, while most workers evidently possessed an at most superficial political awareness. Alongside a deeply rooted traditional nationalism, this absence of preconditions guaranteed not only conditions conducive to a National Socialist education of the younger age groups but also aided the success of the military collectivisation of the workers within the Wehrmacht, whose high level of competence in integration as an entity of socialization bridged the social milieus in the armed forces of the Nazi state. As can be seen from the unanimous pride in German soldierly virtues, the majority of the soldiers across the social strata identified themselves with the Wehrmacht’s canon of values.

This was the culmination of a long development. Even in Imperial Germany, social militarism had principally proved to be accessible to all classes. ⁹⁴ During the First World War, military ethos was regarded above all as the domain of young, bourgeois academics and had carried comparatively little appeal for the Catholic rural population. ⁹⁵ The workers’ movement, on the other hand, evidently revealed itself to be more receptive to a positive interpretation of the ‘experience of war’: even later communists felt that they belonged to a national ‘warrior caste’ and became ‘enthusiastic militarists’. ⁹⁶ Within the social democratic movement there was alongside a reserved patriotism a pronounced pride in the military ‘accomplishments of the workers’. ⁹⁷ During the Weimar Republic, on the other hand, only the socialist parties had at least in part opposed the discursive romanticising of ‘comradeship at the front’. ⁹⁸ On the other hand, even the left-wing cultivated the military system of values in its mass organizations and militias.

During the militarization push of the interwar years and the soldierly collectivisation within the Wehrmacht, the military ethos achieved even social milieus that had previously distanced themselves from the state, such as the working class and Catholic social strata. ⁹⁹ By no means all workers sought to emulate military heroism but in many cases carried out their military service with the same necessary commitment that they were accustomed to from the work banks of their factories. In Fort Hunt the tales of glorious combat experiences as a topic of conversation in any case ranked behind fantasies about women, mealtime wishes and coping with the current situation. Most workers, however, at least made it clear either explicitly or incidentally that they functioned as part of the military community and had fulfilled their tasks, while only a few could – or wanted to – pride themselves on their non-conformism. Furthermore, an astoundingly high number of workers articulated unequivocally in their war tales the fact that military morals with their key categories of fulfilment of duties, bravery and male toughness constituted for them an ideal that they wanted to conform to. Herein lay the link between primary and secondary cohesion in the armed forces of the Nazi state: the loyalty of the troops fed not only from the solidarity of primary groups but also related to the Wehrmacht as an institution, which conveyed and symbolized those military morals on which the soldiers depended if they wanted to prove themselves in front of their comrades. The secondary cohesion within the armed forces of the Nazi state was based above all on the widely shared identification with the martial virtues of the Wehrmacht, which as meaningful associations even survived the total military defeat within the politics of remembrance. ¹⁰⁰