Armageddon - Max Hastings [131]
The German Army, with its perverted vision of honour, failed the German people, and the world, by maintaining its loyalty to Hitler. For the rest of their lives, senior soldiers cited their oath of loyalty to Hitler to justify their continued participation in the war. Even after 1945, many German veterans refused to see that a pledge of allegiance to a man who had created an illegal tyranny could possess no conceivable legitimacy. More pragmatically, the Army’s leaders seized upon the Soviet threat to justify fighting on, when any rational analysis demonstrated that the war must be ended at any price. Continued resistance to the Russians made sense only if this was coupled with swift admittance of the Western allies to Germany. The American historian Omer Bartov, in his merciless analysis of the wartime Wehrmacht, argues that its behaviour was dictated by a far closer attachment to Nazi ideology than most of its officers acknowledged, then or later. “Even officers with little reason to be enamoured with Hitler and his regime often shared many of Hitler’s prejudices,” he writes. Bartov argues that many German commanders shared Hitler’s fantasies of conquest and grandeur, racial genocide and Germanic world rule, along with his obsessive loathing of communists and Jews. He overstates his case, but there is something in it.
Hitler’s generals, whether SS officers or old Prussian aristocrats, allowed themselves to lapse into fulfilling their duties in a moral vacuum. They abandoned coherent thought about the future and merely performed the immediate military functions that were so familiar to them. The old cliché about the robotic mentality of the German soldier is ill founded. On the battlefield, the Wehrmacht displayed much greater tactical imagination and energy than its opponents. But Germany’s generals in the last months of the war indeed behaved as automatons, amid the whims and obsessions of their monstrous master. Most turned against Hitler not because they acknowledged that he was evil, but because they realized that he was losing the war.
Many of Germany’s wartime soldiers became brutalized. It is untrue that mass killings were carried out only by members of the SS. On the Eastern Front, the Wehrmacht was often involved in the slaughter of civilians and prisoners. Its men had been subjected throughout their childhood and youth to conditioning of an extraordinary intensity, especially about the sub-human status of Jews and Slavs. The Potsdam Military History Institute’s monumental history of the 1939–45 experience demonstrates conclusively the complicity of the Wehrmacht in the Barbarossa plan, which required the starvation of millions of Ukrainians not as an accident of war but as a specific military objective, to enable the diversion of Ukrainian wheat to feed Germany.
Germany’s soldiers perceived themselves as a vastly more civilized people than their Soviet enemies. In everyday matters such as table manners, so they were. Some Western allied officers, especially after the war, allowed themselves to be deluded by German social courtesy, and sometimes by prisoners’ impressive command of the English language, into respecting German combatants not only as skilful adversaries, but as men not unlike themselves. British fighter pilots, for instance, hastened to embrace Luftwaffe counterparts such as Galland and Knoke as fellow “knights of the air.” Such sentimentality ignored the fact that these men were dedicated Nazis, who had eagerly supported Hitler’s crimes. Likewise, many officers and men of the Wehrmacht were complicit in actions and policies, especially towards partisans, which placed them beyond the pale of civilization, and betrayed the very values they professed to be upholding against the Soviets.
Most of the courageous Germans who had dared to oppose Hitler were now dead or in cells awaiting execution, where their grace and dignity did more to redeem the German people in the eyes of posterity than anything achieved by the Wehrmacht on the battlefield. “A remarkable year