In Stahlgewittern

The Death of Prince Wilhelm of Prussia

2010-09-16T21:52:00.002-05:00

The Death of Prince Wilhelm of Prussia

Prince Wilhelm of Prussia (1906-1940) was the eldest son of Crown Prince Wilhelm, heir to the throne of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Prince was an Oberleutnant (First Lieutenant) in Infanterie-Regiment 1, the senior regiment in 1.Infanterie-Division. It seems likely that he served with his unit in the invasion of Poland in 1939, although there is no confirmation of this in the original sources currently-available to me. In any event, there is no doubt that he served during the invasion of France, because we know that he was killed in action there. His date of death, from wounds received in combat three days before, is recorded as May 26, 1940.

In 1933 the Prince had married the Countess Dorothea von Salviati. Because of the morganatic nature of the marriage, the Kaiser had demanded that Prince Wilhelm renounce all claims and rights to the Crown of Prussia. The Prince had agreed to this, but appears later to have reasoned that his renunciation was void or voidable, in view of the political situation within Germany. If the Prince had survived his wounds, his marriage might ultimately have embroiled him in a much more significant and dangerous situation. The Countess was the sister of Count Hans-Viktor von Salviati, a famous horseman who subsequently joined the conspiracy against the Nazi regime. Count von Salviati was shot in the aftermath of the failed attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life of July 20, 1944.[1]

Although Prince Wilhelm appears not to have been active, as far as we know, in any anti-Hitler coalition within Germany, he nevertheless figured prominently in various plans for a post-putsch German government. During the so-called “Oster Conspiracy” of 1938, ultimately foiled by the subsequent Munich Agreement in settlement of the Sudeten crisis, the conspirators were in accord that the German government following the overthrow of the Nazis should include a restoration of the monarchy. In this regard, their primary choice to take the throne was Prince Wilhelm, since they respected him as “a very upright, sincere and courageous soldier”.[2] The Prince was particularly well liked by members of the resistance movement for numerous reasons. He was, in fact, a brave soldier with long-standing ties to the Army, his politics were liberal, he was favorably disposed toward democracy, and perhaps most importantly, he had no personal ambition. It was also believed that Prince Wilhelm lacked certain undesirable character traits of his grandfather.[3]

Prince Wilhelm earlier had been in the eye of a political storm, though not one of his own making. In 1926 Generaloberst (Colonel General) Hans von Seeckt, then Commander in Chief of the Reichswehr, invited Prince Wilhelm to take part in the Army’s autumn maneuvers. Seeckt did so on his own initiative, without first consulting with German President Paul von Hindenburg. Such a breach of etiquette and, as von Hindenburg viewed it, the proper chain of command, would in itself probably have been likely to cause von Seeckt a good deal of embarrassing political trouble. The fact, however, that von Seeckt’s gaff involved a prominent member of the former ruling house, thereby perhaps promoting the idea that the Army was anti-democratic, proved fatal to the General’s career.[4]

In the end, the conspirators were slow to act, and when war broke out in September 1939 the Prince seems to have became convinced either that the putsch would never take place, or that if it did, it would not include the restoration of the monarchy. It may be more likely that he simply considered it his patriotic duty to fulfill his military obligation. In any event, the Prince fulfilled his duty to the utmost. His body was returned to Germany, and in early June the public funeral was held at Potsdam. To the dismay of Hitler, an estimated 50,000 people were reported to have been in attendance. This display of continued attachment to the monarchy by the German people moved the Fuehrer to forbid any member of the former German ruling houses to serve in the armed forces of the Reich.[5]

The balance of this brief article is divided into four distinct parts. Part I is a short history of the order of battle of 1.Infanterie-Division. Part II is a narrative of the circumstances surrounding Prince Wilhelm’s death, based upon the original divisional Gefechtsbericht (combat report) for the period May 22-29, 1940, a document that is nine single-spaced typed pages long in its original form (NARA T-315, Roll 1, Frames 167-175). Part III is a report setting forth the identities of the officers holding essential staff positions in 1.Infanterie-Division, as well as for each of its subordinate units bearing the number “1”, for the duration of the war. Part IV is a Brief Selected Glossary of some of the German terms used in the Gefechtsbericht.

On October 1, 1934, 1.Infanterie-Division was created in Koenigsberg, Prussia. To camouflage the existence of the division, in order to avoid the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles, it was initially identified as Artilleriefuehrer I. On October 15, 1935, the division was officially designated under its proper title.

In constituting 1.Infanterie-Division, an effort was made to conform it to the then-applicable standards for an infantry division in the German Army. Accordingly, at the core of the division were three infantry regiments (1, 22, and 43) and an artillery regiment (1). Infanterie-Regiment 1 was the senior regiment in the division, having originated on January 1, 1921 as 1. (Pruessen) Infanterie-Regiment. On October 1, 1934, it was redesignated as Infanterie-Regiment Koenigsberg, and a year later, on October 15, 1935, as Infanterie-Regiment 1. Infanterie-Regiment 22 came into being on October 1, 1934 under the title Infanterie-Regiment Gumbinnen, eventually acquiring the formal title Infanterie-Regiment 22 on October 15, 1935. Only slightly younger was the third regiment, Infanterie-Regiment 43, having formed on October 15, 1935 as Friedensstandort Insterburg, III. Tilsit. Each of these regiments lost its third battalion in May 1942, as the result of a general consolidation of force in the Army following the losses sustained in Operation Barbarossa. In October 1942, the regiments were redesignated as Grenadier-Regiment 1, 22 and 43 respectively. Grenadier-Regiment 22 was again redesignated in November 1942, this time as Fuesilier-Regiment 22. This change was occasioned by the fact that the regiment had been designated as the “Traditions-Regiment” for the former Fuesilier-Regiment Graf Roon (Ostpruessen) Nr. 33 of the so-called “Old Army”, namely the Army as it existed before Germany became subject to the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles.^{^[6]}

Artillerie-Regiment 1 formed on January 1, 1921 as 1. (Preussen) Artillerie-Regiment. On October 1, 1934, it became Artillerie-Regiment Koenigsberg, and on October 15, 1935, Artillerie-Regiment 1. Artillerie-Regiment 1 was somewhat unique in that its order of battle formally included an additional heavy battalion, I/Artillerie-Regiment 37, so that it had 12 batteries, rather than the traditional 9 batteries. The remaining combat elements of 1.Infanterie-Division were Aufklaerungs Abteilung 1 (Reconnaissance Battalion 1), Panzerjaeger Abteilung 1 (Anti-tank Battalion 1), and Pionier Abteilung 1 (Engineer Battalion 1).^{^[7]}

1.Infanterie-Division was mobilized on August 17, 1939 as part of the first wave (1. Welle) of German divisions activated for the campaign in Poland.^{^[8]} In January 1940, the division relocated to the Wuppertal, where its units were quartered at various villages and towns in the district.^{^[9]} It participated in the invasion of France in 1940, and in the summer of 1941 invaded the Soviet Union as part of Army Group North. It spent the rest of the war fighting in Russia, and was defending Prussian soil at war’s end.

At 1500 hours on May 22, 1940, 1.Infanterie-Division (1.I.D.) was placed under the control of VIII.Armeekorps and received an order to prepare to cross the river Mons to advance on the city of Valenciennes. The divisional commander, Generalmajor Kleffel, immediately went to the VIII.AK headquarters to obtain a clearer picture of the local situation. In the meantime, Oberstleutnant Freiherr von Strachwitz, the Ia for VIII.AK, came to 1.I.D. and delivered an order that it should move into the gap between 4.Armee and 6.Armee because the enemy was seeking to break through that gap and create an encirclement.

The regiments were alarmed with the order to prepare to move toward Mons. But just before the first elements got going, an officer from VIII.AK delivered a verbal order that the division should advance generally toward Bavay and get on the left of 269.I.D. (under XXVII.Armeekorps) to force a crossing over the “Kanal de l’Lessaut”. Objective: create an obstacle to the enemy’s effort to break through to create a bridgehead, and if possible create bridgeheads to attack in a westerly direction.

Following its receipt of this verbal order, 1.I.D. was split into two columns: on the right, reinforced I.R.22, and on the left the main column, consisting of reinforced I.R.1 in front, and reinforced I.R.43 behind. Meanwhile, the vorausabteilung, in two parts, had reached Givry (the Aufklaerungs Abteilung) and Mons/Sars le Bruyere (Pz.Jaeg.Abt.1). As Pz.Jaeg.Abt.1 continued onward it received strong MG fire from the southwest; however, it reached Bavay at 2300 hours on May 22. Meanwhile, around 2030 hours on May 22, the main column received strong bracketing artillery fire on the Givry/Bavay road, southwest of Givry. As a result, the March group of reinforced I.R.1 temporarily halted in order to swing to the west. The March group of I.R.43 halted according to orders.

Shortly before 2300 hours on May 22 the vorausabteilung of I.R.22 (III./22) was engaged in a hard fight south of Blaregnies. Observation, as well as reports from prisoners, revealed that a strong section of the French 43 Division and the “Festungsbrigade Maubeuge” had joined together and concealed themselves in the area around Queve le Petit and le Grand to attempt a nighttime breakthrough to the west/northwest. I.R.1 and I.R.43 were holding their ground near Givry. The objective of the division now became to attack toward Quevy le Grand, Quevy le Petit, and westwards to encircle the enemy from the north with I.R.1, I.R.43, and the mass of the divisional artillery. I.R.22 would set up a defensive front east and north of Blaregnies.

I.R.1 opened its attack at 0600 hours on May 23. At the same time VIII.AK advised the division of a possible French counterattack from northwest of Valenciennes in a southwesterly direction. 1.I.D. then quickly reached the canal south of Valenciennes with its advance guard. A reconnaissance unit of the 3.Panzer-Division from le Quesney reached the canal shortly thereafter. The attack of I.R.1 destroyed the enemy by 1200 hours. Over a thousand prisoners were taken and about the same numbers of enemy soldiers were killed in this battle.

In the early afternoon of May 23 the division, less the reinforced I.R.1, arrived in the area of Bavay. The divisional vorausabteilung secured the area and reconnoitered in the canal area southwest of Valenciennes. The reconnaissance showed that all of the bridges were blown, on the canal banks were strong enemy positions, outposts on the south banks, and on the side occupied by the Germans, part of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, making an excellent impression. The division commander then ordered an attack in the area of the canal south of Valenciennes with reinforced I.R.22 (including II./I.R.1, but less II./22).

As the date of Prince Wilhelm’s wounding was May 23, 1940, and since he was an officer in I.R.1, it would seem that he most likely received the wounds from which he later died during his regiment’s attacks of the morning or afternoon of the date in question.

At 2200 hours on May 23, or after the wounding of Prince Wilhelm occurred, an order from VIII.AK arrived. The order directed 1.I.D. to form on the right of 8.Infanterie-Division (8.I.D). and deliver an attack in a northwesterly direction early on May 24 to create a bridgehead over the canal. 8.I.D. was to begin its attack at 0600 hours. VIII.AK provided the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler and M.G. Bataillon 1 to support the attack along the line Wargnies/Crugies and north of Estreux. 1.I.D.’s position was on the canal on both sides of Trith and in front of the main French defensive line, which had in its rear a strong force in an advanced bunker line. The most forward enemy force was connected by telephone cable to the main French defensive line and could observe all movement of the 1.I.D.

The attack of 8.I.D. was supposed to begin at 0600 on May 24; however, 1.I.D. instead received a signal that 8.I.D.’s assault would be delayed 90 minutes, and that 1.I.D. should begin its attack at 0830, or one hour later than that of 8.I.D. Thus, after a concentration of artillery fire between 0830 and 0845 hours, infantry and sections of the 1.I.D.’s Pi.Batl.1 made a crossing, held up however by such heavy machine gun, mortar and rifle fire from barricaded houses on the opposite shore and on the right flank, that the first attack wave was shot down in the middle of the canal. Only two platoons on the right flank made it, clinging to the north shore after stopping a counterattack.

At about 1100 hours on May 24, the commander of I.R.22 (reinforced) reported that the successful continuation of the attack could only be promised after reconnaissance and the subduing of each resistance nest according to a well-prepared plan; adequate preparation for the assault would require about four hours.

After these events, the attack across the canal was called off, and both 1.I.D. and 8.I.D. received new orders that took them elsewhere. In any case, insofar as Prince Wilhelm is concerned, the further actions of 1.I.D. are irrelevant.

Here are the details of the loss report of 1.I.D. for the period May 23 to May 27, 1940:

In this table officers are denoted in parentheses.

Datum Gefallen Verwundet Vermisst Kranke

23.5.40 22 (6) 106 (3) 3 3

24.5.40 70 (2) 163 (4) 13 1

25.5.40 65 (2) 263 (10) 51 3

26.5.40 73 287 (12) 20 1

27.5.40 4 11 (1)

Totals 234 (10) 830 (30) 87 12

Gefallen:

Lt. Graf zu Dohna Stab 1.Div.

Lt. Schmidt I.R.22

Lt. Oellmann I.R.22

Lt. Karusseit I.R.43

Lt. Warkentin I.R.43

Lt. Imhoff I.R.43

Lt. Bouchee Pi.Batl.1

Lt. Reining Pz.Jaeg.Abt.1

Lt. Sydow Pz.Jaeg.Abt.1

Ob.Arzt Dr. Kuehn San.Kp. 2/1

Verwundet:

Major Schulte-Heuthaus I.R.1[10]

Major Wisetzki “

Hptm. Kemsat “

Hptm. Jordan “

Oblt. Prinz Wilhelm v.Pr.(+)” (in hand): gestorben im ----- lazarett Nivelles

Oblt. Goldenbaum “

Oblt. Pallat “

Lt. Heinemann “

Lt. Beel “

Lt. Zerwer “

Lt. Reschke “

Lt. Weiss “

Oblt. Tolsdorf I.R.22

Lt. Kerbstat “

Lt. Geilenberg “

Lt. Lenz “

Major v.Basse I.R.43

Hptm. de la Motte “

Oblt. Alm “

Oblt. v.Ruthendorf “

Oblt. Kinder “

Ob.Mus.Mstr. Michalowski “

Lt. Domnick “

Lt. Schroeder “

Lt. Weller “

Lt. Schmidtke “

Lt. Canders “

Lt. Kunterwald “

Hptm. Zehe A.R.1

Oblt. Hermersdorfer Pi.Batl.1

Oblt. Hurtig “

III

Stellenbesetzung for 1.Infanterie-Division,

1933-1945[11]

Kommandeur 1.Infanterie-Division

GMaj Kuechler, Georg v. 01.10.34 (KC ‘39, OL ’43)

GLt Schroth, Walther 01.04.35 (KC ’41, died in accident ’44)

GMaj Kortzfleisch, Joachim v. 01.01.38 (KC ’40, KIA [?] ’45)

GMaj Kleffel, Philipp 15.04.40 (KC ’42)

GMaj Altrichter, Dr.phil. Friedrich 11.07.41 mFb

GLt Kleffel, Philipp 04.09.41

GMaj Grase, Martin 17.01.42 (KC ’41, OL ’43)

GMaj Krosigk, Ernst-Anton v. 01.07.43 (bis 1.9.43 mFb) (KC ’44, OL ’45)

Ob. Baurmeister, Hans-Joachim 10.05.44 mstFb

GMaj Krosigk, Ernst-Anton v. 08.06.44

GLt Schittnig, Hans 06.10.44

GLt Thadden, Henning v. 03.03.45 KIA

Ia 1.Infanterie-Division

Obstlt. Steffler, Johannes 26.08.39

Maj. Pantenius, Peter 01.08.40

Maj. Richter, Werner 10.12.42

Maj. Frank, Hilmar 10.12.43

Maj. Schreiber, Hellmuth 1.45-?

Ib. 1.Infanterie-Division

Hptm. Mueller, Christian 25.08.39

Maj. Kluge, Guenther v. 04.12.40

Maj. Bussmann, Heinrich 11.01.41

Maj. Klie 3.42 ?

Hptm. Frank 05.09.42

Maj. Reeder, v. 01.07.43

Hptm. Baur, Sven-Hugo 10.05.44

Maj. Kuschel, Hans 25.12.44

Maj. Lomoth 1.45 ?

Ic. 1.Infanterie-Division

Maj. Brunn, Joachim v. 26.08.39

Hptm. Danckworth, Rudolf 15.08.40

Maj. Danckworth, Rudolf 30.11.40 nicht wirksam *

Hptm. Lenz, Gottfried 01.12.43

Oblt. Schelsky, Dr. 25.11.44

Maj. Ipsen 1.45 ?

Oblt. Grossmann v. 15.03.45 mWb

* I take the authors’ use of nicht wirksam to mean that the appointment was not effective; this doesn’t seem to make sense, so perhaps someone can clarify this usage.

IIa 1.Infanterie-Division

Obstlt. Schmidmann, Horst 22.09.39

Hptm. Koller 17.03.41

Maj. Le Tanneux v. Saint-Paul 05.05.43

Maj. Scholz, Werner 20.04.44

Hptm. d.R. Lenz 1.45 ?

Divisions-Arzt 1.Infanterie-Division

ObstArzt. Forster, Dr. 01.07.37

ObstArzt. Rehber, Dr. Heinz 25.09.39

ObstArzt. Fremd, Dr. -13.09.43 *

ObstArzt. Schulz, Dr. Johannes 13.09.43

* It is unclear to me why the authors use this format.

Kommandeur Feld-Ersatz-Bataillon 1

Maj. Sichart v. Sichartshofen -01.03.44 (KC ’44, KIA ’45)

Hptm. d.R. Brauer 01.03.44

Hptm. Penkwitt 01.06.44

Oblt. Muenzer, Berthold 01.02.45

Kommandeur Infanterie/Grenadier-Regiment 1

Ob. Ott, Eugen 01.01.35 (KC ’42)

Ob. Weiss, Walter 01.01.38 (KC ’41, OL ’44)

Obstlt. Hippler, Bruno 01.08.39 mFb

Ob. Grase, Martin 01.03.40

Ob. Proek, Louis v. 27.12.41

Obstlt. Kutzbach 00.01.44 KIA

Maj. Trautmann, v. 10.11.43, -20.1.44 mFb

Ob. Keussler, v. 27.01.44

Ob. Baurmeister, Hans-Joachim 01.04.44 mFb

Maj. Feudenthaler, Anton 5.44

Maj. Joeres 01.01.45 mFb

Maj. Weissenberg 00.02.45 verwundet

Kommandeur Artillerie-Regiment 1

Ob. Hansen, Christian 01.10.33 (KC ’41)

Ob. Boettcher, Karl 06.10.36

Ob. Weikinn, Bruno 01.04.39

Ob. Muehlmann -02.11.39

Obstlt. Kossack, Walter 02.11.39

Ob. Richtmann 01.06.40

Ob. Weikinn, Bruno 01.10.40

Obstlt. Bockamp, Dipl.Ing. 04.01.43 mFb

Ob. Nagel 15.03.43

Maj. Neubecker, Heinz 1.44 ?

Ob. Drieshen 15.05.44

Obstlt. Pasternack 1.45, 3.45

Brief Selected Glossary

Ia=Operations Officer (sometimes referred to as “Chief of Staff”).

Ib=Quartermaster.

Ic=Intelligence Officer.

IIa=Division Adjutant.

III./22= abbreviation for “III.Bataillon/Infanterie-Regiment 22”, or “3rd Battalion, Infantry Regiment 22”.

AK=abbreviation for “Armeekorps”.

A.R.1=abbreviation for “Artillerie-Regiment 1”.

Armee=Army, a command organization generally responsible for 2-3 Armeekorps.

Armeekorps=Army Corps, a command organization generally responsible for 2-3 divisions.

Aufklaerungs Abteilung=reconnaissance detachment or battalion. Unlike the Vorausabteilung, the Aufklaerungs Abteilung was not an ad hoc unit, but was instead a fairly standard part of any division’s order of battle.

Divisions-Arzt=Division Chief Surgeon.

Feld-Ersatz-Bataillon 1=Field Replacement Battalion 1.

Gefechtsbericht=combat report.

Graf=Count.

I.D.=abbreviation for “Infanterie-Division”.

I.R.=abbreviation for “Infanterie-Regiment”, one of the constituent parts of an “Infanterie-Division”.

KC=Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross.

Kommandeur=Commanding Officer.

Kradschtz. Btl=Abbreviation for “Kradschuetzen-Bataillon”, or “Motorcycle Battalion”.

March group=a “March group” is generally referred to as a “March Battalion”, the latter being a unit that ideally remains in the environs of the parent division’s “home town” in order to recruit and train replacements for soldiers who have become casualties. As the war continued, these units were in many cases in the field rather than at the division’s “home town”.

M.G. Bataillon 1= Abbreviation for “Machinengewehr Bataillon 1”, or “Machinegun Battalion 1”.

Lt.=Leutnant (Second Lieutenant).

Major=Major.

NARA=National Archives and Records Administration, the place or organization in the U.S. which holds copies of all German military (and other) records captured near the end of the Second World War.

Oblt.=Oberleutnant (First Lieutenant).

Obstlt.=Lieutenant Colonel.

Obst.-Oberst (Colonel)

OL=Oak Leaves to Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross

Pi.Batl.1=abbreviation for “Pionier Bataillon 1”, or “Combat Engineer Battalion 1”.

Prinz=Prince.

Pz.Jaeg.Abt.1=Panzerjaeger Abteilung 1. This was the tankhunter battalion or detachment of 1.Infanterie-Division. Like the Aufklaerungs Abteilung, the Panzerjaeger Abteilung was a standard formation within just about every German division.

Stellenbesetzung=might be translated as “occupational position”; generally refers to a list of staff positions and their occupants at various times.

Vorausabteilung=might be translated as “advance detachment”, usually an ad hoc unit, comprised of soldiers from a variety of specialties within a division or one of its parts, e.g., combat engineers, infantry, artillery, etc., the purpose of which was to maintain contact with the enemy and report on its dispositions and intentions, but which also had the capability of attacking the enemy to exploit an advantage, or defending itself, as the particular situation might dictate.

[1] See, John H. Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics 1918-1945 (New York, NY, St. Martin’s Press, 1964), 503, n.6.

[2] Terry Parssinen, The Oster Conspiracy of 1938 (New York, NY, Harper Collins Publishers, 2003), 132.

[3] Peter Hoffman, The History of the German Resistance 1933-1945 (Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1977), 91.

[4] John H. Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics 1918-1945 (New York, NY, St. Martin’s Press, 1964), 152.

[5] Ibid, 505; Anton Gill, An Honorable Defeat: A History of German Resistance to Hitler, 1933-1945 Wheeler-Bennett suggests that in addition to forbidding further service by members of the former ruling houses, Hitler’s order required those actually serving to resign their commissions, or leave the ranks, and to spend the rest of the war serving in civilian capacities. In this connection, I would simply note that when Claus, Graf von Stauffenberg was wounded in Africa in the spring of 1943, he was shortly thereafter evacuated to hospital in Munich. There he shared a room with Leutnant Prince Johannes Loewenstein, also recovering from wounds recently received. See, Peter Hoffmann, Stauffenberg A Family History 1905-1944 (New York, NY, Cambridge University Press), 1995. (New York, NY, Henry Holt and Company, 1994), 157.

[6] Georg Tessin, Verbaende und Truppen der deutschen Wehrmacht und Waffen SS im Zweiten Weltkrieg 1939-1945 (Osnabrueck, Germany, Biblio Verlag, 1973), v.1, 20-21.

[7] Ibid. Nick Terry and Larry Cole, The German Army Order of Battle (Milton Keynes, U.K., The Military Press, 2001), v.VI, 16-19.

[8] During the Polish campaign, 1.Infanterie-Division fought an engagement at a place called Gora Kamienska. Frames 13-15 contain a didactic memorandum of that engagement written by Generalleutnant Joachim von Kortzfleisch, who commanded the division in Poland.

[9] Frames 17-19.

[10] KC 23.1.42 as Obstlt. Kdr. Kradschtz. Btl. 25

[11] Guenter Wegmann & Christian Zweng, Die Dienststellen, Kommandobehoerden und Truppenteile des Heeres 15.10.1935-8.5.1945, Band 1, Nr. 1-10 (Osnabrueck, Germany, Biblio Verlag, 1998), 17-19, 36.

Book Review

2010-09-12T22:45:00.000-05:00

Book Review

Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics

By Frederic Spotts

Who was he, then? A homicidal maniac, a gentle artist, a brutal artist, a tyrant, a weak dictator, a would-be Roman emperor, an artist-politician, a supreme actor, a revolutionary, a reactionary? He was each of them. Above all, he was a catastrophe. But that, as Thomas Mann said, is no reason not to find him interesting, as a character and as an event.[1]

There are people who are distressed by the continued fascination that Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich hold for countless people throughout the world. Indeed, in an interesting twist of the collective guilt mania that grips many in academe, to have an abiding interest in these subjects is tantamount to an admission that one is a neo-Nazi, and that but for societal and cultural restraints, one would be giving expression wantonly to one’s anti-Semitic and sociopathic impulses. The fact is that Hitler and the Third Reich compel interest for a myriad reasons having nothing to do with a desire to wear jackboots and a black uniform, and thus attired to give vent to a general desire to commit mayhem upon the persons of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and other “undesirables”.

In the case of Adolf Hitler, Frederic Spots’ Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics provides us with a provocative study of the Fuehrer as artist, thereby giving us a compelling perspective on why the Austrian dictator remains a captivating subject. Spotts grips the reader’s attention from the very start, introducing his topic with a photograph (one that I had never seen before) of Hitler literally on the edge of his seat, staring intently from near ground level at a very large architect’s model of Linz, the Fuehrer’s adopted home town, “as it will look after being transformed into the culture centre of Europe.”[2] The photograph, Spotts tells us, was taken on February 13, 1945, in the bowels of the Fuehrerbunker, beneath the Reich chancellery in Berlin. Even in extremis, Hitler fretted over the details of the city plans, apparently oblivious to the fact that they would never be brought to reality.

Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics is a study of Adolf Hitler that focuses upon “his aesthetic nature”. Spotts recounts the story of Albert Speer’s secretary, who testified later that shortly after the beginning of the Second World War, she had overheard Hitler state that “We must end this war quickly. We don’t want war; we want to build.” It is Spott’s thesis that this statement of Hitler’s was not a falsehood, but a half-truth.

He [Hitler] wanted both war and art. Once he had won his war and established an Aryan state that was a dominant world power, he intended to devote himself to the creation of cultural monuments that would change the face of Germany and immortalize him. Destruction was to be the way to construction.[3]

For Adolf Hitler, as with countless other art aficionados, classical art and architecture represented the bar against which all other art and architecture must be measured. In the dictator’s view, the high period of classical Greek civilization was more beautiful than anything manifested in the modern world, and the reign of Caesar Augustus the zenith of western civilization. Hitler’s passion for the classical period was manifested in early 1941when Benito Mussolini called upon his Axis partner to aid the Italian army in the Balkans following its embarrassing failure to subdue the Albanians. The commitment of German troops to this fight involved combat against the Greek army, a fact that nearly made the Fuehrer despondent, and he confided to Joseph Goebbels that Germany would not be in such a position but for Britain’s military intervention.[4]

The appearance of Adolf Hitler on the German political scene in the 1920’s was a classic case---perhaps the classic case---of the hour producing the man. As Spotts points out quite elegantly, much of Hitler’s appeal lay in the promise he offered to produce order, security and protection from modernity, and when he spoke on this subject, he did so not only from his own heart, but to the hearts of many others, both within and without Germany. On the particular subject of artistic expression, Hitler saw himself as the savior of western civilization itself, and as Fuehrer and first artist in the land, he urged other artists to inspire the public by making their work more accessible. The difficulty was that the art which Hitler wanted to be readily available to the public was the art that he liked. In the modern world, neither the public nor the artists themselves could be relied upon to share the Fuehrer’s artistic tastes.[5]

It is probably no coincidence that the first of Hitler’s artistic talents treated by Spotts is that of public speaking. The author characterizes the dictator’s speeches as “the most potent expression of [Hitler’s] artistic talents and the key to his rise to power.” As with every aspect of his political career, Hitler left absolutely nothing to chance with respect to his public speaking engagements. He carefully orchestrated every aspect of his delivery---facial expression, posture, gestures---practicing them by the hour until he was satisfied about their potential for positive impact on his audience. The most important of his speaking talents, however, was his evidently innate ability to sense the emotional mood of his audience, to connect with that mood, and to mesmerize his audience through that connection. Hitler was his own speechwriter and choreographer, and his goal was always to create an emotional impact, rather than deal with concrete issues.[6]

Once Hitler attained power, and at least until the coming of war in the fall of 1939, he was so concerned with anything and everything with a public profile that it was difficult for insiders to know whether the Fuehrer’s involvement defined a particular thing as work or pleasure, official or personal, pastime or governing.[7] Cultural matters interested Hitler most, and in order to control those matters he inaugurated a Reich Culture Chamber in November 1933. Membership was obligatory for every artist in the Reich, but in fact the overwhelming majority of artists and other professionals in the field, such as critics, writers and academics, wanted to be associated with the new political order, for obvious reasons.[8]

It was not a bad thing to be an artist in the Third Reich. Adolf Hitler was never happier than when he was in the company of artists; as one of his hangers-on remembered, it was only during such interludes that his “inapproachability was destroyed.” It is often said that Hitler did not like to smile, at least in part because he felt embarrassed in some way about the appearance of his teeth. And indeed it is difficult to find a photograph of the dictator smiling, yet the Spotts book has at least two such images, in one of which Hitler is positively beaming.[9] In each of those images the Fuehrer is in a social situation with a number of fellow artists. Hitler subsidized individual artists and art institutions with funds from the fortune he had amassed since becoming Reich Chancellor. The Fuehrer appropriated for himself alone the legal right to confer such things as titles, honors, and honorary professorships, all of which he freely bestowed on favored painters, actors and musicians. The dictator was even capable of laying aside his rabid anti-Semitism when it came to artists; in addition to other Jewish artists, Hitler protected high-profile Jews, such as Gustav Mahler and Max Reinhardt. He also forgave criminal conduct engaged in by artists, including even political crimes like homosexuality. And perhaps most remarkably, artists were the only persons whom Adolf Hitler exempted from military service. According to the evidence sifted by Spotts, Hitler’s minions maintained a list of at least 20,000 artists who were off-limits for both conscription and volunteering for service, with more individuals being continuously added. Hitler would not acquiesce in calls from Goebbels and Speer to dispense with his protection of artists even after the disaster at Stalingrad and the subsequent commitment to harness the entire German population and economy for “total war”.[10]

Finally, there was the curious case of Adolf Hitler and “modern art”. Hitler considered any and all artistic movements whose beginnings occurred after 1910 to be “modern art”. According to Spotts, Hitler despised modern art because it was “thought-provoking, unconventional, uncomfortable, shocking, abstract, pessimistic, distorted, cynical, enigmatic, disorderly, freakish.” And for a man whose towering fits of rage are the stuff of legend, the most spectacular exhibitions of anger were provoked by “modern art”. In 1937, the Fuehrer was the master of ceremonies at the public opening of the House of German Art, one of the very first cultural projects commissioned by him after his accession to power. Hitler delivered the keynote address, and both its tenor and his manner of delivery left his audience in no doubt as to the depth of his dislike for modern art. Raul Rave, the then-acting director of the Berlin National Gallery, was present for Hitler’s address. He observed that “his manner of speaking became… agitated, to a degree that had never been heard even in a political tirade….he foamed with rage as though out of his mind, his mouth slavering, so that even his entourage stared at him in horror.” Ironically, however, the dictator was very slow to move against the object of his wrath. In 1933, he sacked the director of the Kronprinzen-Palais, a branch of the National Gallery, and ordered all modern art to be removed from display---but preserved where the public could not see them, rather than destroyed. Nevertheless, the museum continued to discretely exhibit modernist work, and to pursue the acquisition of further such works. Hitler even visited the display a year later, and though he winced at their appearance, he said and did nothing about them. And in 1935, he visited Dresden and toured a local exhibit entitled “Images of Decadence in Art”. According to Spotts, “he found the show such an exemplary display of Modernist horrors that he ordered it to tour the country.” Two years later, Hitler finally ordered the removal of all modernist works from museums in Germany.[11]

Frederick Spotts’ Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics is a tour de force in both conception and execution. My recollection is that Hitler considered himself to be, above all other things, an artist. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics makes clear that the Fuehrer never made a more accurate statement in his life. For me, however, the Spotts book raises an issue which is not actually articulated by its author, but which is nevertheless inherently present in such a study. How is it that a man like Hitler succeeds? For slice it however you like, but the fact is that Adolf Hitler was a dilettante, not merely with respect to matters of art, but with regard to everything---everything, that is, except the will to power and a conviction that certain people and things must be eradicated without trace. How is it that such a man, bereft of any meaningful talent or education, could rise to such a position of power. The answer is not, as some would no doubt assert, that Germans are genetically “programmed” to seek out and subject themselves to political and social domination by such a one as Adolf Hitler. And the question is relevant not simply to politicians, but to business people, professionals, and others as well. I confess that the question bewilders me.

There is one other, much less significant, question raised by the Spotts book. The front inside flap of the dust cover includes text that begins “The twelve years of Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich…has (sic) been extensively documented.” Here I refer not to what appears to me to be a grammatical error, but to the error in the spelling of Hitler’s first name. Adolf Hitler was not an actor of French descent. Why is it that apparently educated people persist in spelling his name (and incorrectly at that) as though he were one?

[1] Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (The Overlook Press, New York, NY, 2003), 401.

[2] Ibid, xi.

[3] Ibid, xii.

[4] Ibid, 21.

[5] Ibid, 23, 27-29.

[6] Ibid, 44-50.

[7] Ibid, 73.

[8] Ibid, 77-78.

[9] Ibid, 83-84.

[10] Ibid, 80-87.

[11] Ibid, 150-166.

Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics

By Frederic Spotts

Published in 2003 by The Overlook Press, New York, N.Y., ISBN No. 1-58567-345-5

The Hitler Salute----A Book Review

2010-08-31T20:20:00.000-05:00

BOOK REVIEW

The Hitler Salute

By Tilman Allert

Tilman Allert ‘s The Hitler Salute, published in 2008, is brief (the text is exactly 100 pages in length), and the work of a sociologist rather than an historian. Nevertheless, Allert’s book, published while the author was professor of sociology and social psychology at the University of Frankfurt, should be on the short list of anyone whose interest in the Third Reich is more than casual.

The nature of Professor Allert’s academic training and interest is reflected in the first chapter of The Hitler Salute, in which the author addresses the role of everyday gestures---in this instance, the forms of greeting and address used when individuals encounter each other---in creating mutual understanding among the members of a society. According to Allert, social greetings reflect the way in which the participants see themselves and their relationship to each other and to society at large. In the Third Reich, the Nazis succeeded from almost the moment of their accession to power in politicizing and homogenizing even the common social greeting, by officially substituting for it the Hitler salute. The National Socialist German Students’ League, for example, promulgated rules for social interaction in no uncertain terms.

The German greeting (i.e. the Hitler salute) must become second nature to you. Discard your Gruess Gott, Auf Widersehen, Guten Tag, Servus….All who wish to avoid the suspicion of consciously obstructionist behavior will use the Hitler salute.

By statutory mandate, Germans were required “without prompting” to greet the playing or singing of the Horst Wessel Lied, salute swastika flags and passing police and Wehrmacht officers, and acknowledge the consecrated sites of the Nazi movement, by raising their arms and intoning a fervent “Heil Hitler”. It is Allert’s thesis that what he calls the “collapse of morals” that characterized Germany during the Nazi time resulted from “a loss of personal sovereignty and the ability to shape one’s own existence” One of the important elements in this “collapse” was the legal and societal compulsion to utilize the Hitler salute instead of other traditional greetings.

Allert demonstrates that prior to the Nazi seizure of power and the ensuing gleichschaltung (elimination of opposition) of German society, there was nothing like a common German greeting. Instead, Germans encountered and acknowledged each other using a variety of vernacular expressions associated with geographically different and culturally distinct regions of the country. German fascism, however, was nothing if not intolerant of cultural diversity. Within seven months of Hitler’s elevation to the post of Reichskanzler his governmental minions issued an interministerial decree requiring that the Hitler salute be used as a matter of course during the performance of official state business. This mandate was extended within a matter of a few months to public encounters of all sorts, irrespective of whether anyone involved in the encounter was an employee of the state. The intrusion extended still further, to the extent that the German people were legally required to use the phrase “Heil Hitler” in written correspondence of all kinds, personal or otherwise, as well as in more formal things such as commercial contracts. Moreover, the legal requirements had teeth----from the very first year of Nazi control, those who refused to employ the Hitler salute in person, or utilize “Heil Hitler” in written correspondence or documents, were subject to prosecution in specially dedicated courts, and if found guilty, made liable for fines or imprisonment in a concentration camp.

Professor Allert makes the point that the Nazis knew exactly what they were about when they required Germans to use the “German Greeting” and all that went with it in everyday discourse. In January 1935, for example, the Reich Interior Ministry promulgated a memorandum on the subject, in which it began by observing that the new laws requiring the use of the Hitler salute

“have created a highly personal and insoluble bond of loyalty between the German civil service and the Fuehrer and Reich chancellor (emphasis added)….[we] therefore order that civil servants and other employees henceforth use the German greeting while performing their duties and in their place of employment by raising their right hands…and clearly articulating the words ‘Heil Hitler’. And [we] expect from civil servants and other public employees that they use the same form of greeting at other times as well”.

The Nazi urge to collective conformity extended to “the most routine and utilitarian communications”, such as receipts for services, standard business letters, account statements, and business forms of all types, requiring them to end with a standard formula, namely “Heil Hitler”. Metal signs affirming the “German Greeting” appeared everywhere on lamp posts and telephone poles. Even elementary and secondary schools reinforced the new way of beginning interpersonal contact. At the beginning and ending of each school period, children were required to proclaim the words “Heil Hitler”. Indeed, the very first thing encountered by new first graders was the lesson in their primers on the proper manner of greeting strangers, illustrated with pictures of rapturous crowds lining the streets and giving the “Hitler salute.” Laws requiring the use of the “German Greeting” did not emanate only from the Reich government itself. For example, the department of education and cultural affairs of the state of Wuerttemberg stiffened a decree of the Reichminister of Interior issued July 24, 1933, to avoid allowing the “German Greeting” to become merely perfunctory:

“[It] is hereby ordered that pupils in all schools rise from their seats and offer a raised-arm greeting at the beginning and end of every school day as well as with every change of instructor between periods. During lessons, pupils are required to greet any adult who enters the classroom in the same fashion. Teachers are required to return the greeting. Individual pupils who encounter fellow pupils inside the school building or on school grounds are also required to use the Hitler greeting”.

Yet, the introduction of a mandatory style of greeting, and the extension of that concept to every facet of everyday life, was intended by the Nazis to do much more than simply bind their subjects more closely to the Party and its regime. As Professor Allert points out, the use in German culture of the term "Heil” in a greeting expresses a desire for the continued physical integrity and general well being of the person being greeted. But when the name of Hitler is made a part the greeting, there is an ambiguity created, namely whether the greeter is wishing the good health of the Fuehrer, or that of the person being greeted. Either situation is absurd, since in the former the Fuehrer is absent, while in the latter the power to heal is ascribed to Hitler, a claim that not even the dictator would have made for himself. In Professor Allert’s view, these contradictions can only be resolved if the use of the Hitler salute and uttering of the phrase “Heil Hitler” are understood not as a greeting, but as an oath of allegiance made by all Germans, whether in or out of uniform. Allert argues that this interpretation of the “German Greeting” is supported by the several roles that it played, including reminding Germans of their common purpose, as embodied in the Fuehrer, and as a mutual pledge of loyalty to the community that Hitler and the Nazis had created.

The “German Greeting” was not merely a method of compelling individual inclusion in the Nazi community, but was a means by which others might be excluded from that community as well. It goes without saying that Jews were forbidden to use the “German Greeting”, although interestingly this did not occur until 1937. But as early as 1933, the Reich began to persecute anyone who refused to perform the Hitler salute. In one case, Carlo Schmid was denied promotion at the University of Tuebigen in 1933 after being observed on many occasions responding to the Hitler salute by tipping his hat. Schmid survived the Nazi time to become a Social Democratic member of the post-war Bundestag. A more extreme example cited by Allert is that of the Protestant clergyman Paul Schneider. The Nazis initially imprisoned Schneider at Buchenwald because he refused to use the Hitler salute during confirmation instruction. Schneider had also preached in favor of resistance to Hitler, denounced the racial state, and refused to salute the swastika flag on the Fuehrer’s birthday. He died in 1939, succumbing to the effects of poisoning, torture and beating.

As has previously been mentioned, it is Allert’s thesis that what he calls the “collapse of morals” that characterized Germany during the Nazi time resulted from “a loss of personal sovereignty and the ability to shape one’s own existence”. This came about, in part, because of the Reich’s assiduous imposition of the “German Greeting” on the German people, which in turn fostered a culture of distance and distrust. Perhaps just as important, according to Allert, is the fact that this phenomenon occurred in a country in which the prevailing religious systems had long inculcated the populace with a world view that devalued responsibility for the present. In Germany, both Catholicism and Protestantism, argues Allert, distinguished between the imperfections of this life and future redemption, and saw the present primarily as a time of testing. For Protestants, the present is largely irrelevant, because salvation emanates from the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, rendering such things as good works entirely meaningless. On the other hand, Catholics may “confront the present unreflectively”, knowing that their salvation is assured so long as they faithfully abide by received religious precepts and inherited customs.

According to Allert, the Hitler salute and all it stood for distorted normal human interaction in the Third Reich, alienated persons, families and groups from each other, and fostered a culture of distrust. When these tendencies became intertwined with racism and a religious heritage that made responsibility for the present superfluous, the descent of Germans into the realm of the unimaginable was greatly enabled.

For those who may be interested, my own reaction to Professor Allert’s The Hitler Salute is what is generally referred to as “mixed”. It is likely that my judgment about the book is somewhat skewed by the fact that I am an historian and not a sociologist, with the result that some parts of Allert’s work are not as accessible to me as they might or should be. And, of course, my focus naturally has been on the historical aspects of the work. But these are my own issues to address, and have nothing whatever to do with the book or its author. From the historian’s point of view, I found very compelling Allert’s insights into the conscious way in which the Nazis consolidated their power, in this instance by legislating collective conformity in a way that would drive home to all Germans the importance of Nazism and the Fuehrer to their lives repeatedly throughout an ordinary day. And Allert succeeds in a subtle manner in demonstrating how something as apparently innocuous as a form of greeting can be used to manipulate the political and moral norms of a culture.

It seems to me, however, that Allert’s most important success with The Hitler Salute, again from the point of view of an historian, is that he makes clear that the use of the Hitler salute in everyday human interaction, as well as the ubiquitous appearance of the phrase “Heil Hitler” on every imaginable document from the Nazi time, were both mandated by law from the very beginning of the Third Reich, and that failure to obey the law in this respect could have the direst of consequences. In the United States for the last sixty-five years the movies, television, the print media, and, yea, even the writers and publishers of history textbooks have continuously and consistently portrayed Germans in such manner that the word “German” is synonymous with the word “Nazi”. One aspect of this portrayal has been to characterize Germans as ready and willing to give the Hitler salute and shout “Heil Hitler” at every opportunity, and to make clear that they did so voluntarily and genuinely, so as to confirm the veracity of the notion that every German was a Nazi. If it does nothing else, The Hitler Salute illustrates clearly that this characterization of Germans is inaccurate.

My principal criticism of The Hitler Salute (and it should not be taken as detracting from the value of the work to the field of modern German history) is that its author appears to endorse the idea that there was a “collapse of morals” in Nazi Germany, and that the German people as a whole should be implicated in the horrors of the Holocaust and the Second World War. This position is an untenable one for a multitude of reasons, but in this instance it is necessary only to consider Allert’s own focus on the legal aspects of the use of the Hitler salute and the phrase “Heil Hitler” by ordinary Germans.

According to Allert, two of the most significant things that the Nazis did almost immediately upon their accession to power were to compel Germans, under pain of imprisonment, (a) to employ the Nazi salute in place of all other greetings, and to do so in all social settings, and (b) to require the use of the phrase “Heil Hitler” in all official and non-official documents of every description. Allert also seems to make clear that the Nazis were not shy about enforcing these laws, a fact that most assuredly would have been made crystal clear by the Nazi-controlled press. If all of this is true, how can it reasonably be argued that there was a “collapse of morals” among the German people in general during the Third Reich?

Implicit in the phrase “collapse of morals” is the notion that the individuals involved voluntarily abandoned the moral precepts which most Western cultures embrace. Thus it is generally argued that Germans in general knew that the Holocaust was going on (or alternatively that German soldiers in the field, and particularly in the East, knew that Russian civilians, Russian POWs, and Jews, among others, were being murdered or allowed to die in very large numbers) and did nothing to stop these things, thereby establishing their individual guilt, and the guilt of Germans in general, as complicit in these deaths. If the ordinary German knew (as they most assuredly did know) that the Nazi state had reached down and touched themselves and their families personally (i.e. not in theory, but in reality) by compelling them to introduce themselves by giving the Nazi salute and shouting “Heil Hitler”, and further knew that the Nazi state had reached down and touched their children personally by requiring them to do the same thing in school, and yet further knew that failure to act in accordance with these rules carried with it the risk of being separated, perhaps forever, from their spouse and children, then how can we call the decision of our ordinary German to comply with the law a voluntary abandonment of morality? During the 1960’s and 1970’s there were literally millions of Americans who decried the immorality, real or perceived, of the Vietnam War. Yet in this much more tolerant society, how many of these avowedly moral people went out and laid down in front of busloads of new recruits being taken to basic training? If by any standard the Vietnam War was indeed an immoral one, does the failure of those who were morally opposed to the war to take steps to put an end to it render such people, and by extension, all Americans, morally bankrupt?

The Hitler Salute
By Tilman Allert
Metropolitan Press
Henry Holt and Company, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
2008
ISBN: 13: 978-0-8050-8178-7
ISBN: 10: 0-8050-8178-X

Book Review Copyright 2010
Thomas E. Nutter

De Germanophobia III

2010-08-09T09:49:00.000-05:00

<i>To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable:

Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.
The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: “God, I thank you that I am not like other men---robbers, evildoers, adulterers---or even like this tax collector.
I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.”
But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
And Jesus said:
“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”
Luke 18:
9-14

In 2002 there came to light allegations that the late Stephen Ambrose had plagiarized certain portions of the body of work he had published on the subject of the Second World War. At the time, I was (and had been for several years) following discussions on H-War, an academically-oriented website dedicated to the study of military history. Owing to the success of Professor Ambrose’s work, I began to follow this discussion with some interest. At some point, the focus of the discussion moved from the topic of whether Ambrose was a plagiarist to the various implications of the title of his then most recent work, CITIZEN SOLDIERS. In due course, the discussion gravitated to the question whether (as Ambrose had supposed) the United States Army of the Second World War was morally superior to the armies of the Axis powers, if for no other reason than that its “citizen soldiers” were the product of a western liberal democratic society and culture. At this point, I joined the discussion, arguing a point of view that contrasted with the one advocated by Ambrose.

The paragraphs which follow constitute the exchange of posts on this subject that then ensued. For clarity of distinction, I have labeled the posts in question, all of which appeared on H-War in late February and early March 2002. I have made only slight edits to the first of these posts (one of my own). There are no edits to the remaining posts.

A.

[The] recent post on the topic of "citizen soldiers" raises an
interesting point about the Ambrosesque approach to the writing of military
history. Of course, I think the short answer to [the question whether there were material substantive] differences between the American army in WWII and its counterparts
around the world is that there were none, except to the extent that the
general economies of the underlying states might differ. It would be safe
to say, it seems to me, that in the mass wars of the twentieth century, all
armies were composed of citizen soldiers, except during times of peace when
the armed forces are traditionally sliced to the bone.

I recently stumbled upon an interesting German website
that illustrates this well.
It recounts the fates of a goodly number of the male inhabitants of a town
called Riedlingsdorf during the Second World War. It includes some
interesting charts, and brief studies of a few individual men. 97 men from
this town were killed, having birth dates from 1891-1926. 58 of these were
killed either in Russia proper, or in some other portion of the eastern
front. 17 each were killed in '42 and '43, 24 in '44 and 18 in '45. It is
really quite remarkable how many had family names in common with one
another, in a manner similar to the fictional Ryan family in the Spielberg
film, and the real life Sullivan family. The website even includes the
house numbers of the deceased, where available, suggesting that this was
quite a small town. It is also interesting to note that while all of the
details on the list are incomplete, as to the persons on whom there is
complete information, not a single officer is listed. Most were private
soldiers, with a smattering of noncoms. It would be interesting to know
more about these men, just as we are able to know more about our own
fathers and other male relatives.

Does all of this have a point? Yes. The notion that warfare in the
twentieth century was a morality play, extending down to the level of the
individual soldier, is absurd. Ambrose and his adherents know this; hence,
their desire to distinguish Americans from the rest of the pack by
characterizing them with the laudatory rubric "citizen soldiers". This is
not to say that Americans and their British, French, Chinese and Russian
allies were not fighting for a just cause (or at least one perhaps with
less to condemn it than Fascism and Nazism, though with regard to Stalin's
Russia this is a difficult case to make), or that they were not brave, hard
fighting, long-suffering and worthy of our admiration, praise and memory.

My study is lined with my growing collection of pictures of American
soldiers, sailors and airmen in their graduating classes from specialty
schools and even basic training during the war years---I know none of these
men, but revere all of them. At the same time, I recognize that each and
every one of them was human, in the same way that Germans, Japanese and
Italians of the same generation were human---all with the same fears about
war, plans and dreams for the future, families, as well as an equal measure
of greed, lust, indifference, wantonness, and inclination to
violence---that is, all of the stuff that makes humans human.

In short, there are plenty of good reasons to hold our American (and other
Allied) soldiers of the World War II era in high regard, and to be thankful
every day for their sacrifice. It is not necessary, however, to
characterize them as something they were not---somehow different from the
men on the other side. In mass armies, everyone is subject to the draft,
whether they like it or not. When they wind up on the sharp end of things,
they all fight for the same things---survival, both of themselves and the
small group to which they belong. To suggest, as Ambrose does, that on 6
June 1944 the men of Second Ranger Battalion were thinking of God and
Country in the midst of that hail of gunfire is ridiculous, just as it
would be nonsense to consider that the men of 352 Infantry Division were
thinking fondly of Fuehrer and Fatherland at the same moment.

Tom Nutter

B.

The point made that all mass armies of World War II were citizen armies is
undoubtedly correct. That, however, does not make all citizen soldiers
alike, as some suggest. According to its own spring 1942 accounting, the
German army on the Eastern Front had, in the first seven months of
fighting, killed or let die ten thousand prisoners per day, seven days a
week, for seven months, for a total of two million, one hundred thousand.
I would be interested to learn of any other citizen army with a similar
record.

Gerhard Weinberg

C.

In my original post on this subject, I made two points, namely (1) that all
modern mass armies are composed of "citizen soldiers"; and (2) that because
all modern mass armies have this in common, they also share a common
humanity, derived from the simple fact that no matter what their
nationality, the troops that make up such mass armies are human.

My view has been challenged on the ground that the German Army of World War
II vintage is distinguished from its fellow combatants by its record of
criminal barbarity. The specific example given is the participation of
that army in the active murder or malevolent negligent homicide of hundreds
of thousands of Russian POWs during the first seven months of 1942.

Unless I misunderstand the argument just referred to (and I willingly stand
to be corrected by its author if I misstate it), it is essentially that the
German Army of World War II is distinguished from those of its fellow
combatants by its total lack of humanity. If this is indeed the argument
being made, then I should like to raise certain questions about it.

In the first place, it seems to me that it is fallacious to reason that
because such crimes (and many others like them) were undoubtedly committed
by some members of the German Army, it follows that each soldier in that
army was therefore not human, and thus not the moral equivalent of the
soldiers in those armies which fought against the German Army. I do not
have an exact figure, but I believe that it is generally accepted that the
total number of men who served in the German armed forces during World War
II is in the neighborhood of 10,000,000. If the argument in question be
accepted, then each and every one of these 10,000,000 was a murderous
criminal, and therefore lacking in the humanity undoubtedly possessed by
the soldiers, seamen and airmen of Germany's enemies.

I should not like to be part of a legal system that accepts this line of
reasoning. For if such reasoning were generally applied, as it logically
should be, this would mean that a single act of criminal barbarity by a
single member of any "citizen army" (for example, the U.S. Army, the
British Army or the French Army) in the Second World War would result in
the ascribing of guilt for that crime to each and every member of that army
as well. This should be so, of course, unless there is something more than
mere logic at work, such as, for example, the introduction of some wholly
arbitrary considerations, such as the imposition of a threshold number of
criminal acts before the guilt of the perpetrators is imputed to all of
their brothers in arms; a determination that a criminal act "counts" if
committed against one class of victims, but does not "count" if committed
against members of another class; or a decision that a criminal act
"counts" if committed by a member of one class of perpetrators (say, for
example, German soldiers), but does not "count" if done by a member of
another such class (e.g., British soldiers).

Fortunately, the Anglo-American system of jurisprudence provides elaborate
procedural and evidentiary safeguards against such a notion of collective
guilt, requiring proof beyond a reasonable doubt that an individual
defendant has committed the crime with which he has been charged. I think
it is safe to state beyond peradventure that there is no evidence whatever
that each and every man of the 10,000,000 who served in the German armed
forces was guilty of crimes against humanity. Yet, this is the very
argument made by a number of historians whose works are widely accepted as
truth. The works of Omer Bartov, for example, contend that all German
soldiers were Nazis, the inference to be drawn being that they were all
thus inhuman murderers. The same argument, applied to ALL Germans, is made
by Daniel Goldhagen.

What is particularly disturbing is that this sort of reasoning pervades the
historiography of the Second World War. At a recent conference, I
witnessed an example of this fact at a session devoted to the German armed
forces. Among the presenters was a young historian who produced a slide
show composed of photographs taken by German soldiers during their service
in eastern Europe. One particular image, and the young historian's
treatment of it, sticks in my memory, and is indicative of the tone of the
presentation. The photograph depicted two German soldiers with their backs
turned to the camera; in the center of the picture was a dwarf, at which
the two soldiers were gazing. The dwarf was looking back at the soldiers.
Since the soldiers were turned totally away from the camera, neither their
faces nor anything distinguishing about their uniforms could be discerned.
Yet, the young historian asserted not only that the dwarf in the center of
the picture was a Jew (how this was known to be fact was unclear) but that
one could tell from the POSTURE of the two soldiers that these men were
anti-Semitic racists. I do not recollect that any other evidence (for
example, a letter or other writing from one of the soldiers clearly
associated with the incident, and providing not only the identities of the
soldiers, but corroborating evidence of the date, time and place of the
photograph) supporting these assertions was submitted by the young
historian. Nevertheless, the audience was urged to (and apparently did)
accept the photograph as proof of what it was supposed to represent.

The moderator of this presentation endorsed this and the other photographs
offered up by the young historian as telling evidence of German racism.
The moderator also made a number of assertions. One of these was that of
all the combatants in World War II, ONLY Germans took photographs of dead
people. As if to prove this point, the moderator recounted how a relative
of his had been present at either Nagasaki or Hiroshima after the atomic
bombs were dropped, and had refrained from photographing any of the charred
remains of Japanese victims of these attacks. This, of course, was offered
up as a contrast to the barbaric customs of the Germans.

Several questions came to my mind as I witnessed this. First, it is
obviously not true that ONLY German soldiers took pictures of dead people.
There are plentiful examples of photographs of dead German soldiers quite
obviously taken by Allied cameramen, since included in such photographs are
images of Allied soldiers, illustrating that the locale was then in control
of the Allies. What arguments would be conjured up in defense of these
Allied cameramen, IF the general principle is that the photographing of the
dead is only a peculiarly German characteristic? In my own youth, I lived
down the street from an American infantry veteran of the Second World War
and his family. He showed me many pictures of dead German soldiers taken
by him and his U.S. Army buddies. Was he tainted by his connection with
these pictures, or protected by his status as an American?

Yet again, on the internet is a website for one of the Ruhr cities (I
forget which one). The website contains photographs taken in German cities
during the _Bombenkrieg_. One of the photographs depicts the interior of a
bomb shelter after a severe fire bombing. The shelter, of course, is
filled with corpses of every description, one of which is the skeleton of a
"Golden Pheasant" in his party uniform, Nazi armband prominently displayed.
Would this photograph be judged "OK", even though it depicts corpses, and
was obviously taken by a German, since it includes the corpse of a Nazi
functionary, who obviously got what he deserved? (I note in passing that
the photographer, unless an "official" one, which is probably not likely
under the circumstances, would have been subject, according to my
understanding, to a severe penalty for taking such a photograph).

Another point made by the moderator was that he had examined much
correspondence from German soldiers to family and friends back home, and
that such correspondence often included gruesome photographs of war dead,
as well as pictures of victims of German atrocities. This assertion is
consistent with the moderator's general view that the Germans were
something less than human. Unfortunately, however, it also raises
important questions. For example, both Bartov and Stephen Fritz also rely
upon correspondence from German soldiers to the "folks back home" as
evidence of German barbarity and inhumanity. Yet, Fritz points out that
the number of letters to and from German soldiers during World War II
totaled between 40 and 50 BILLION. Are we to believe that the moderator,
as well as Bartov and Fritz, have reviewed even an infinitesimal fraction
of these letters? Moreover, in examining these letters and propounding
them as evidence of German barbarity, which ones did these scholars select?
Does the "evidence" include those letters in which German soldiers
described their day to day routines on occupation duty or in training? The
ones in which they complained about their treatment at the hands of
officers and noncoms? Those in which they described the cold or hot or
damp or dry living conditions, the lousy army food, the tedium of their
duties? Those in which they inquired about the health and safety of their
mothers and fathers, brothers in service, wives and children, the effects
of the Allied bombing on their homes? Where they asked about the condition
of their farms, shops, places of work? In which they wondered how long the
war would last, or what they would do when it was over? Or, are we to
believe that since these were German soldiers writing, they never wrote
about such mundane topics, but only about those which illustrate them to be
arrogant, conquering, murdering barbarians?

One other point about the conference in question is worth mentioning. The
moderator was at some pains to point out that following the attempt on
Hitler's life on 20 July 1944, all of the army group commands received two
teletype messages, one from the conspirators, claiming that Hitler had been
killed and that the allegiance of the highest ranking German generals was
needed in order to assure the overthrow of the regime, and another from
Hitler, denying that he was dead, and likewise ordering that the same
generals continue to adhere to his orders. The generals, of course, heeded
the orders from Hitler. The moderator urged that this was probative
evidence of the total corruption of "the German officer corps."

The moderator's condemnation of "the German officer corps" (a condemnation
shared by many military historians) is yet another example of rather shaky
reasoning. The collective term "the German officer corps" includes, in its
broadest sense, not only Reichmarshal Goering and the most recently
commissioned Leutnant, but everyone in between, no matter who they might
be. Each and every one of them is thereby condemned. Among them is the
subaltern killed on 1 September 1939, as well as the one commissioned on 20
April 1945 who surrendered or was killed two weeks later. Neither of these
men is likely to have partaken in the crimes of which "the German officer
corps" is accused. Nor is the young naval officer killed on his first tour
of duty in a submarine; the army officer commissioned in 1940, sent to
North Africa, and killed there; the fighter pilot shot out of the sky on
his first operational flight in 1944 over Germany; or the infantry officer
posted to his unit in any of a dozen places, only to die in his first
action. Nor is there any evidence that each and every other officer in the
Wehrmacht, or even in the Waffen SS, was guilty of war crimes or crimes
against humanity.

Obviously, there were German officers, of both exalted and relatively
insignificant rank, who either ordered the commission of war crimes or
crimes against humanity, or tolerated the commission of such crimes. Such
men are justly due condemnation and punishment, as are those who did the
actual killing. No one, however, can reasonably argue that such criminals
constituted even a majority of the German officer corps. Some were indeed
criminals; most, however, were not. Like the officers in every other army
in the Second World War, they were human, caught up in a war not of their
making, and called upon to perform the duties of their position.

It is time, I submit, that military historians free themselves from the
effects of wartime propaganda, as well as from their own professional
agendas, and begin to look at the participants in the Second World War from
a more balanced perspective. If not checked, the tendency to do otherwise
will continue to undermine their ability to reach meaningful conclusions
about that war.

Best to all.

Tom Nutter

D.

As the author of the reference to the German military's own accounting in
early 1942 of their having murdered or let die ten thousand Soviet POWs per
day, seven days a week, for seven months, it does seem to me that this is
fundamentally different from terrible incidents that unfortunately occur in
wartime and examples of which can be pulled out of the records of all
armies. Not every one of the approximately three million German soldiers
then on the Eastern Front directly participated in this slaughter, but it
would interest me to know how a single one of them could avoid knowing in
general what was going on in front of their eyes. And this, it should be
noted, does not include the mass slaughter of Jewish civilians going on at
the same time. Those who did this were not recruited on the moon and did
not carry out their activities on some other planet.

I entrely agree that guilt is individual, not collective, but there is a
point where a difference in quantity becomes a difference in quality. A
youngster authorized by parents to acquire a gerbil, hamster, white mouse,
or guinea pig, who comes home with an elephant or hippo, is not likely to
get very far with the argument that it too has two eyes, four legs, a tail,
and is surely a mammal.

As for German field marshals who explained to their troops that the mass
killing of one, two, and three year old children was "gerechte Suehne",
just punishment, while secretly accepting huge bribes from their beloved
Fuehrer, there is surely something a bit different here, too.

Gerhard Weinberg

E.

Tom Nutter inverts the argument [Mon, 4 Mar 2002 09:28:45 -0600]. He
maintains that since it is possible to state that there are exceptions to
the inhumanity and criminality of the World War II German Army, we must
grant it a collective presumption of innocence. We are not, however, in a
criminal court, in which individual stands in jeopardy of the loss of
liberty, property, and perhaps even his or her life, but in the court of
moral judgment. The sheer extent, indeed enormity, of the crimes in
question, make a presumption of ignorance highly questionable.

Mr. Nutter would ask us to believe that there was nothing aberrational
about individuals who joined, whether as volunteers or conscripts, an
institution amidst public expressions of race hatred and conquest, to
believe that German soldiers of WWII were unaware of the murderous ideology
of their state in spite of the widespread promulgation of the "commissar
order" directing the extermination of far more than commissars, that they,
as German citizens, were not aware of the system of slave labor, in short,
to presume that the soldiers and officers of the Wehrmacht were NOT aware
of the general thrust of Hitler's war. Frankly, such a proposition seems
somewhat bewildering.

To be sure, the statistical evidence he cites is far from conclusive, at
least as cited. That having been said, the sheer volume of correspondence
is not immune to statistical sampling and analysis. Until such sampling
and analysis has been conducted, however, the thesis that letters home
support the presumption of general racism and cruelty on the part of the
Wehrmacht holds the field, however.

All this does not, however, make the Wehrmacht any less "citizen soldiers."
It merely means that the WWII German military represented accurately the
society from which it sprang.

Wade Markel

Some brief comments on context are worth mentioning at this point. It will be seen that the author of sections B and D was Gerhard Weinberg. Weinberg is currently William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a world-renowned teacher, author and lecturer on Nazi Germany and the Second World War. The list of his publications on these topics is a long one, and there can be no doubt as to the quality of his scholarship.
It is, nonetheless, legitimate to question the level of his impartiality with respect to his chosen field of historical research. An historian is expected to possess sufficient emotional detachment from his or her subject matter to facilitate an attitude of objectivity toward the sources and the conclusions drawn from them. This does not mean that the historian should lack enthusiasm and commitment to the chosen field of study. It does mean, however, that the historian should have the ability to treat the subject matter with equanimity and reason.
The reader will observe that in section C I discuss the events that I observed at a conference of historians, and in particular the activities of the moderator of a session on the German armed forces in the Second World War. The conference in question was the 1999 annual meeting of the Society for Military History, held on that occasion on the campus of the Pennsylvania State University at State College, Pennsylvania from April 15 to April 18. The moderator of the session on the German armed forces was Gerhard Weinberg. My recollection (and it is possible that this recollection is erroneous) is that in the original version of my post on the conference (section C), I identified Weinberg by name as the moderator, and that my identification of him was “scrubbed” by the then editor of the discussion board, Mark Parillo. This sort of thing was common for Parillo, who regularly declined to publish my posts without comment. But insofar as Weinberg is concerned, it was irrelevant whether he was identified by name or as “the moderator”, since the Professor well knew which conference session and which “moderator” had been described in my post. Weinberg’s failure to acknowledge his role at the session in question is noteworthy.
If there be questions about the impartiality of Gerhard Weinberg in treating the subject of the German Army in the Second World War, there can be none with regard to the attitude of Wade Markel on that same topic. In 2002, Wade Markel was a serving Major in the United States Army; he later rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, and is now employed by the Rand Corporation. The reader will note that in this “affair of the ‘citizen soldier’”, Markel is content with Weinberg’s reliance upon a smattering of letters home from German soldiers in the East to support the claim that all Germans of that period were (and perhaps their descendents still are?) racist murderers, when the total of such letters is reputed to number in the billions. That same reader, however, will find that in discussing the subject of Trevor N. Dupuy’s analysis of the relative fighting power of combatant armies during the Second World War, Markel was adamant that Dupuy’s methodology was not sufficiently sophisticated to withstand scrutiny.

2010-05-29T14:46:00.002-05:00

De Germanophobia II

If in smoldering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues---

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro Patria mori.

Wilfred Owen

Dulce et decorum est

In academe, as in many so many other areas of human endeavor, timing is everything. So it has been with Omer Bartov, the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History and Professor of History and Professor of German Studies (this is not a typographical error) at Brown University, and arguably the progenitor of the current state of Germanophobia in the fields of military and German history.

In 1985, Bartov published The Eastern Front, 1941-1945, German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare, an earlier version of which he had submitted as his DPhill thesis at St Antony’s College, Oxford University.[1] The Eastern Front was the tide in Bartov’s life; he took it at its flood, and it has led him on to fortune.

Within a relatively short period of time after the publication of The Eastern Front, there occurred a signal event in modern history, the collapse of the Soviet Union. From this event flowed others of great political and cultural import, including the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact, the political liberalization of Eastern Europe, and the reunification of Germany. One consequence of these developments that was of critical significance for both Bartov and The Eastern Front was the diminished likelihood that the Red Army and its erstwhile brothers in arms would burst through the Fulda Gap on their way to Calais. Germany and its Bundeswehr, which for the previous forty-five years had constituted pivotal elements in the defense of the West against the violent expansion of communism, now ceased to have preeminent positions in the strategic thinking of NATO and its member nations.

Prior to its collapse, the ideological and military threat posed by the Soviet Union and the Red Army, along with their Warsaw Pact “allies”, dominated the approach taken toward the Second World War by many historians. This meant that the role of the German Army in the Nazi-Soviet war, for example, often was considered in an ideological context. Earl F. Ziemke’s Stalingrad to Berlin: The German Defeat in the East was a seminal work in its field, and looked at its subject through the lens of the Cold War.[2] In Stalingrad to Berlin, little focus is placed upon the subject of German atrocities. In the Conclusion to his work, Ziemke remarks:

The Soviet contribution to the victory in Europe was important but not overwhelming. Soviet postwar claims notwithstanding, the war in no sense demonstrated the superiority of Marxist theory….The war was a true test of strength between ideologies only in that the Soviet regime evinced greater adaptability in identifying itself with Russian nationalism….Likewise, Soviet strategy in World War II was by no means a convincing display of ideological superiority….Nevertheless, the German defeat was an outstanding victory for Marxism in that it broke the quarantine in Europe which had for a generation confined communism as a system of government within the boundaries of the Soviet Union.[3]

Other works on the subject of the German Army in the Second World War had a didactic approach, with a focus on benefiting from the experience of the German Army in fighting the Red Army. An example of this genre is Standing Fast: German Defensive Doctrine on the Russian Front During World War II, by Timothy A. Wray.[4] Wray’s first words on his topic illustrate its focus on the anticipated ground war in central Europe:

Correctly foreseeing the nature of a future war is the most critical problem confronting military leaders in peacetime. Effective investments in training, equipment, and weaponry depend on the accuracy with which leaders can, in effect, predict the future. To aid them in their predictions, strategists often attempt to isolate relevant lessons from recent wars to guide them in their decision making….Of particular interest to modern readers is the fact that so many of the problems faced by German armies are analogous to problems confronting NATO forces today. In the defense, the German Army on the Eastern Front was hamstrung by a number of political and territorial imperatives that restricted strategic flexibility….The Red Army battled by the Germans in World War II bears a strong resemblance to the current Soviet Army (and its Warsaw Pact siblings) in doctrine, command style, and strategic philosophy.[5]

Even in works devoted to subjects that include a sharp focus on German atrocities in the East, those created prior to the fall of the Iron Curtain display an attitude toward German soldiers that would be received with scorn in the academe of the early twenty-first century.[6] In one of the foremost treatments of the Waffen SS, Soldiers of Destruction. The SS Death’s Head Division, 1933-1945, Charles W. Sydnor, Jr. approached the subject of Totenkopf criminality with the following observation, to wit, “To begin with, the fact that officers and men from the Totenkopfdivision ordered and committed criminal actions is indisputable”.[7] Sydnor is quite plain about his assessment of the doctrine of collective guilt when applied to the German soldier of Second World War vintage:

This book was not written to glorify what [Totenkopf veterans] experienced, nor was it conceived as an effort to condemn all of them as individuals for belonging to an institution whose creation and development they did not control. Many of these SS soldiers, both officers and enlisted men, served with SSTK [SS Totenkopfdivision] because they were drafted into the Waffen SS. Some were transferred to the division from other armed SS formations, or were assigned to Totenkopf from the SS Junkerschulen. Throughout the war, others were sent to SSTK from Waffen SS replacement battalions. Still others volunteered for service in the Waffen SS and fought with the Totenkopfdivision from motives that quite simply may have been patriotic. To suggest that all these men were sadists, criminals, or fanatics who wantonly committed atrocities would be as ludicrous as the attempts by apologists for the Waffen SS to prove that the armed SS was not really a part of the SS.[8]

In its turn, the reduced strategic significance of Germany meant that any tendency among historians toward conciliation respecting that country and its citizens very quickly began to recede. To render it in the vernacular, the political and cultural reordering of the world after 1990 enabled academics with axes to grind about Germany and Germans to “take the gloves off”. Although it was published five years before the events in question, Omer Bartov’s The Eastern Front, 1941-1945, German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare led the way in reorienting the manner in which historians viewed the Second World War and the role of the German Army in it. Indeed, it is not too much to state that The Eastern Front represented a watershed in the historiography of twentieth century Germany.

An analysis of The Eastern Front properly begins with its title. In calling his work The Eastern Front, 1941-1945, German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare, Omer Bartov clearly intended to convey to his readers, and the public in general, the message that all German soldiers who participated in the fighting on the eastern Front, and ultimately in the Second World War in general, were “barbarians”.[9] One need look no further than the very first sentence of the Introduction to the first edition of The Eastern Front, wherein Bartov reveals at one and the same time the underlying assumption of and the conclusion reached in the book:

The main question posed by this study is what were the causes of the barbarization of German troops on the Eastern Front during the Second World War?[10]

More importantly, though perhaps more subtly, Bartov’s choice of a title was intended to deliver the message that before 1939, the conduct of war had matured to such a state that it might reasonably be characterized as “civil”, but that this admirable tendency in human affairs had been well and truly reversed by and through the activities of the German armed forces in the Second World War. The obvious response to Bartov’s suggestion that the acts of barbarity of some German soldiers in the Second World War changed the quality of “barbarism” of warfare is quite simply that such an idea is palpable nonsense. The reason that societies and cultures around the globe and throughout the ages have deprecated warfare is that it is in its essence barbaric. For millennia the term “warfare” has been synonymous with “barbaric”, whether practiced by highly developed civilizations, or by Stone Age clans. Notwithstanding Bartov’s claims, warfare was always barbaric before the period 1939-1945, and has remained so ever since.

Republican Rome, for example, may reasonably be described, along with Greece, as the most sophisticated and well developed culture of its age. It was, nevertheless, ruthless and ferocious in its prosecution of war, regularly perpetrating acts which would qualify as barbaric under any modern definition. Examples of Roman acts of barbaric savagery in warfare are likely innumerable, but perhaps one such example will suffice. In 209 B.C., during the Second Punic War, Publius Cornelius Scipio, Africanus Major, a renowned warrior and later vanquisher of Hannibal at Zama, attacked New Carthage. The Roman historian Polybius later recounted how Scipio Africanus directed his men

according to the Roman custom, against the people in the city, telling them to kill everyone they met and to spare no one, and not to start looting until they received their order. The purpose of this custom is to strike terror. Accordingly one can see in cities captured by the Romans not only human beings who have been slaughtered, but even dogs sliced in two and the limbs of other animals cut off. On this occasion the amount of such slaughter was very great.[11] (Emphasis added)

The Byzantine Emperor Basil II, who ruled between 976-1035 A.D., fought a series of brutal wars with the Bulgars over control of Greece and Macedonia. In addition to being vicious, these conflicts involved great risk to both sides, with Basil prevailing only after eighteen years of seesaw battles. The incident that is said to have ultimately allowed Basil to prevail over Czar Samuel of the Bulgars occurred after the early eleventh century battle of Balathista, at which Basil destroyed the Bulgar army and returned Macedonia to the Byzantine Empire. In the aftermath of the battle, Basil ordered his soldiers to blind the 15,000 surviving Bulgar prisoners, leaving each one-hundredth man with one eye in order that he might be able to lead another ninety-nine back to his Czar to illustrate the ferocity of the Byzantine foe. Czar Samuel is supposed to have died of shock at the appearance of his blinded men.[12]

Between 1618-1648, the so-called Thirty-Years War raged over much of what subsequently became German territory. In part because of the devastation caused by the conflict, figures regarding the loss of human life are regarded as inconclusive. Nevertheless, it is estimated that the war caused between 175,000 and 325,000 battle deaths, and perhaps more than 10,000,000 civilian deaths, all of this in an age without the “benefits” of modern industrialized warfare, such as rifled artillery, automatic weapons, aerial bombs, land mines, and poison gas.[13]

Of course, one could go on forever in this vein, but such activity should be needless to any but those of the meanest intelligence, given the absurdity of Bartov’s position on the question of barbarism in warfare. And his notion that somehow warfare had become less barbaric in the twentieth century is equally preposterous. The literally millions of crosses that populate the fields of Europe are mute testimony to the carnage wrought by war in the twentieth century. A century that spawned events like those of July 1, 1916, a single day on which the British Army took 60,000 casualties---a number that is in itself arguably insignificant when placed in the context of the losses suffered in the First World War as a whole---cannot be said to be any less “barbaric” than any of the centuries of recorded history that preceded it. Bartov, in fact, need have looked no farther back in time than 1937 to find evidence that the specter of rapine, murder and mayhem at the hands of soldiers was alive, well and abroad in the world. In December of that year, a Japanese army captured the city of Nanking, the former capital city of China under Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang regime. Japanese troops then began to hunt down and kill former Nationalist soldiers and other males of military age. The Japanese soldiers then directed their violence to the civilian population. In the course of roughly two weeks time they beheaded, shot, stabbed, buried and burned alive a quarter million Chinese, including 20,000 women who had been raped in the bargain.[14]

The assumptions underlying The Eastern Front---that all German soldiers who took part in the Second World War were barbarians, and that their alleged barbarism marked a turn away from a more civilized approach to warfare---are without any foundation whatever, thereby undercutting from the very start the core of Bartov’s position. Bartov, however, has anticipated this situation and has prepared an answer to it, namely that there is a “fundamental difference between the barbarization of the German Army in the East and the brutal behavior of other armies in other wars.”[15] It seems to me that one might quite reasonably ask what it is about the German Army that sets its war crimes apart from those of others. This is a question with which we will deal in a later entry.

[1] Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941-1945, German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare (New York, NY, Palgrave, 2nd Edition, 2001).

[2] Earl F. Ziemke, Stalingrad to Berlin: The German Defeat in the East (Washington, D.C., Center for Military History, 1968).

[3] Ibid. 503-504.

[4] Major Timothy A. Wray, Standing Fast: German Defensive Doctrine on the Russian Front During World War II (Fort Leavenworth, KS, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Combat Studies Institute, 1986).

[5] Ibid. vii-ix.

[6] For the sake of clarity, except when quoted directly from another source, when used in this document, the phrase “German atrocities” and like phrases are adopted for the sake of convenience only. Such phrases do not assume, suggest, or imply any of the following: (a) that all atrocities that occurred in Europe during the Second World War were committed by or under the auspices of Germans or the German armed forces; (b) that all units in the Wehrmacht or Waffen SS committed atrocities; (c) that all German nationals and/or ethnic Germans committed atrocities; or (d) that in instances where units of the Wehrmacht and/or Waffen SS committed atrocities, those atrocities were committed by German nationals and/or ethnic Germans.

[7] Charles W. Sydnor, Jr., Soldiers of Destruction. The SS Death’s Head Division, 1933-1945 (Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1977), 320.

[8] Ibid. 343.

[9] So that there is clarity regarding terminology, the term barbarian and its derivatives have the following meanings, as set forth in Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, (New York, NY, dilithium Press, Ltd., 1989): barbarian, barbaric, barbarous ----pertaining to uncivilized people; barbarism----a barbarous or uncivilized state or condition; barbarity----brutal or inhuman conduct; cruelty; barbarize----to make barbarous; brutalize; corrupt; to become barbarous; lapse into barbarism.

[10] Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1.

[11] William V. Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome 327-70 BC (New York, NY, Oxford University Press Inc., 1979), 51. Scipio Africanus’s victory at Zama ended the Second Punic War. In 146 B.C., his adopted grandson, Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, Africanus Minor, terminated the Third Punic War in a week-long battle that razed Carthage once and for all. Although the city’s 50,000 inhabitants escaped slaughter, the Romans subjected them to equal barbarity by selling them into slavery.

[12] Lawrence D. Higgins, “Byzantine Empire”, in Franklin D. Margiotta, ed. , Brassey’s Encyclopedia of Military History and Biography (Washington, D.C., Brassey’s, Inc., 1994), 138-150.

[13] Curt Johnson, “Thirty Years War”, Brassey’s Encyclopedia, 980-986.

[14] Michael E. Haskew, ed., The World War II Desk Reference (HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., New York, NY, 2004), 418. An earlier source, Norman Polmar et al, World War II America at War 1941-1945 (Random House, New York, NY, 1991), 572, sets the figure of Chinese dead at 50,000; the figure given in both Robert Goralski, World War II Almanac: 1931-1945 (Bonanza Books, New York, NY, 1981), 60 and Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms (Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 1994), 322 is “over 200,000 civilians”. Elizabeth-Anne Wheal, et al, A Dictionary of the Second World War (Peter Bedrick Books, Inc., 1990), 322 concurs with Haskew’s figure of 250,000 civilians killed.

[15] Bartov, The Eastern Front, 6.

De Germanophobia I

2009-12-27T12:25:00.000-06:00

The phrase “Ivory Tower”, when used with reference to academe, always aroused in me, at least in my youth, a notion of independence and objectivity. Scholars, I believed, sought after truth, and while in general they may have belonged to one political persuasion or another, their politics did not bleed over into their art. And, indeed, I believe that this perception was an accurate one during the mid-1960’s, when I was an undergraduate. At that time, a preeminent scholar in German history, William Sheridan Allen, left the faculty at the University of Missouri to teach at Wayne State University. Professor Allen’s departure was perceived by both the faculty and students at MU to have resulted from the unwillingness of the university curators and administration to tolerate his liberal politics. Even the most conservative faculty members decried the circumstances that led to the departure of Professor Allen, because (as one of them confided to me) his politics never influenced either his teaching or his scholarship.

Times have changed, and so has the Ivory Tower. Objectivity in scholarship is certainly not dead, as the works of scholars like Dennis Showalter, David M. Glantz, and Claudia Koontz clearly demonstrate. But for various reasons, the concept of objectivity is no longer a beacon that guides the efforts of all researchers and teachers. Consider, for example, Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany, authored by Frank Biess, Associate Professor of Modern German History at the University of California, San Diego.[1] The dustcover of Homecomings touts what the publisher conceives as the most temporally relevant and marketable aspects of the book:

Historian Frank Biess traces the origins of the postwar period to the last years of the war, when ordinary Germans began to face the prospect of impending defeat. He then demonstrates parallel East and West German efforts to overcome the German loss by transforming returning POWs into ideal post-totalitarian or antifascist citizens. By exploring returnees’ troubled adjustment to the more private spheres of the workplace and the family, the book stresses the limitations of these East and West German attempts to move beyond the war.

Whether this is an accurate description of Homecomings is a decision that each individual reader of the book should make. What is obvious, however, is that the book’s author did not approach his subject with any sense of objectivity. This is made patently clear in the Introduction to Homecomings, wherein Professor Biess reluctantly acknowledges that Germans in general and returning German POWs in particular, some of whom spent ten years in Soviet captivity, suffered dire physical and emotional privations in the wake of the Second World War. Professor Biess admonishes the reader, however, to steel his or her heart against any sense of sympathy for Germans:

…this book addresses the morally and methodologically difficult problem of German suffering in the aftermath of World War II. It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that the violence that Germans had to endure during the final stages of the war was a direct consequence of the unprecedented violence that Germans had previously inflicted all over the European continent. Any moral equation between German losses and German violence is misleading and necessarily obscures the relationship between cause and effect. German violence was the cause and the precondition for violence against Germans, even if the German targets of violence were not always identical with those responsible for German violence. [2] (Emphasis added)

Could the point of view that Professor Biess brought to his topic be any clearer? Violence perpetrated by Germans against others renders perfectly justifiable violence perpetrated by others against Germans, “even if the German targets of violence were not always identical with those responsible for German violence”. Germans, from the smallest infant to the most elderly man or woman, got what they deserved.

For Professor Biess, all Germans got what they deserved by way of suffering because all German soldiers were participants in genocide. To hammer this home, Professor Biess adopts and uses extensively throughout his book the phrase “Hitler’s army”, one invented by Omer Bartov to convey to readers the notion that the German Army, and everyone in it, operated from a Nazi perspective in all things.[3] Thus, while Professor Biess is compelled to acknowledge, because of the currently incomplete nature of the record so far unearthed by historians, that not every German soldier has yet been shown to have been a perpetrator of genocide,

…Still, the quest for nuance…should not distract us from the basic historical fact: the soldiers of the Wehrmacht were deeply implicated in a genocidal project that brought unspeakable suffering and irretrievable losses to millions of Europeans.[4] (Emphasis added)

German soldiers who served on the Eastern front are a priori war criminals for Professor Biess, because they “had assumed a more prominent role in the racial war of annihilation”. Such men, according to Professor Biess, “were likely to have witnessed, if not participated themselves in, German genocidal warfare.”[5] How Professor Biess, or anyone else for that matter, knows that an individual German soldier witnessed or participated in “genocidal warfare” is unclear.[6] If, by some inconceivable stupidity, the reader of Homecomings does not “get it” regarding Professor Biess’s point of view, the author reiterates it more succinctly:

This book does not intend to complement a history of postfascism that focused on Germans as perpetrators with a postwar history that emphasizes German suffering. [7]

With regard to the particular subjects of Homecomings, namely, the returning former Soviet POWs, Professor Biess is equally clear:

It is important to emphasize… that, in contrast to the German treatment of Soviet POWs, the mass death of German POWs in Soviet captivity was not the result of a deliberate Soviet policy of mass killing or even of passive negligence…In general, Soviet authorities were primarily interested in enlisting German POWs for the enormous task of postwar reconstruction, not in letting them die…Deaths of German POWs in Soviet captivity appear to have been largely the result of bureaucratic inefficiencies and corruption, an extremely bad harvest in 1946, and inadequate medical resources.[8]

In his otherwise excellent book The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West [9], Niall Ferguson discusses at some length the matter of Allied bombing of Germany during the Second World War, and the resultant indiscriminate slaughter of civilians that it wrought. He points out that it was the fact that Allied bomber crews, high above the cities and humans they were destroying, could do so in part because it was possible “to pulverize a city without looking into the eyes of those civilians being invisibly consigned to hell below.” The bomber crews, however, operated from the best of motives, i.e. to defeat Nazi Germany and end the war. This distinguished them from SS men at camps like Belzec, who were motivated by hatred for their victims. Such racial hatred, says Ferguson, “was absent from the thoughts of Allied airmen”. This ridiculous argument is the same one employed by Professor Biess in excusing the death of German soldiers in Soviet captivity between 1945 and 1955. German civilians killed in the indiscriminate bombing of their cities were just as dead as the victims of the SS in Belzec and elsewhere. German soldiers who died at the hands of the Soviets after the end of hostilities were just as dead as the millions of Soviet POWs murdered or allowed to die through neglect while in German captivity between 1941 and 1945. And for each dead person, whether civilian, or military, German, British, Soviet, or otherwise, as well as the families of such victims, it mattered not how many died at whose hands.

For Professor Biess and his ilk, what matters is not that human beings suffer and die, but who those suffering and dying human beings are. In his calculation, it is the Germans, rather than Jews or Slavs, who are untermenschen, and the value of their lives (if there be any) may be disregarded with impunity.

[1] Frank Biess, Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2006).

[2] Ibid. 6.

[3] My admittedly unscientific calculation reveals the usage of the phrase “Hitler’s army” by Professor Biess on pages 36, 43, 63, 68, 75, 94, 106, 116, 126, 136, 148, 214, and 225.

[4] Biess, Homecomings, 4.

[5] Ibid. 160.

[6] From whence comes the notion that witnessing (i.e., knowing about) a crime is in itself a criminal act? Suppose, for example, that one witnesses a bank robbery. Under what system of jurisprudence does a witness to that robbery become an accomplice? Without actually investigating this question, I venture to say that no system of jurisprudence so providing would be recognized as a reasonable one by anyone in western culture. For decades before the American Civil War, northerners knew that the crime of slavery was being perpetrated in the American south. Where in the historical literature of the American Civil War are northerners pilloried for knowing about slavery in their own country? More importantly, where in the historical literature of the American Civil War is this question even asked?

[7] Biess, Homecomings, 9.

[8] Ibid. 4-5.

[9] Niall Ferguson, The War of the World Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (London, U.K., Penguin Books Ltd, 2006), 571.

2009-11-29T22:10:00.000-06:00

CRUSADER

According to the dust jacket of my copy of War of Annihilation,[1] its author Geoffrey P. Megargee is “an applied research scholar at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.”[2] Megargee obtained his doctorate in military history from the Mecca of military history, The Ohio State University. He is also the author of Inside Hitler’s High Command,[3] a volume which received the 2001 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for Military History. More elsewhere about both Inside Hitler’s High Command and War of Annihilation in due course.

The essential fact that must be appreciated by the reader of Megargee’s works in the area of German military history is that the author is passionate and opinionated about both his subject matter and the works---and character---of others who write, or have written, about it. In order to have some perspective on this phenomenon, it is useful to consider some of the incidents in which Megargee has indulged his passion, many of which are a matter of public record. One of those incidents took place in the pages of The Journal of Military History, the principal publication of the Society for Military History.

In Volume 66, Number 3 of the Journal, published in July, 2002, there appeared a review of the then recently released Barbarossa: Hitler’s Invasion of Russia, 1941,[4] by David M. Glantz. If there is such a thing as a “preeminent scholar”, then Colonel Glantz is certainly one, his subject being the titanic struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1945. The review was written by Russel H.S. Stolfi, Professor Emeritus at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. Both Glantz and Stolfi are well known to scholars and others with an interest in the Russo-German war, the former for the unmatched contribution to the field that he has made over the last several decades, and the latter for his interesting thesis that victory in that war was within the grasp of the German Army in the summer of 1941. Barbarossa: Hitler’s Invasion of Russia, 1941 is only one of a plethora of works authored by Colonel Glantz (to say nothing of the myriad original documents from the Soviet perspective that he has self-published). Professor Stolfi’s principal works are Hitler’s Panzers East: World War II Reinterpreted,[5] in which he first disseminated his thesis, and the more recent German Panzers on the Offensive,[6] on the same subject.

Professor Stolfi’s critique of Barbarossa: Hitler’s Invasion of Russia, 1941 is brief and to the point. Simply put, Stolfi contends that what he characterizes as the thesis of Barbarossa---viz., that a “combination of Red organizing capabilities and Russian stubborn resistance…was responsible on its own merits for slowing and containing Operation Barbarossa” is wide of the mark, and that his (Stolfi’s) thesis---that the dithering wrong-headedness of Adolf Hitler in deciding not to focus on the seizure of Moscow, at a time when the capture of that prize was well within the capabilities of his soldiers---adequately explains the failure of the German Army to end the war in 1941.[7] In developing his criticism of Barbarossa, Professor Stolfi denigrates neither Colonel Glantz nor his work---indeed, the opposite is true---but simply argues that, in his opinion, the historical record supports his interpretation rather than that of the author of Barbarossa.

The effect upon Megargee of Professor Stolfi’s critique of Barbarossa: Hitler’s Invasion of Russia, 1941 was something akin to that aroused in the bull which has seen a red flag waved before its eyes. “Readers of this journal”, thundered Megargee, “would be well advised to seek another opinion” of Barbarossa than the one offered by Stolfi.[8] After admitting that he had not read the book in question, Megargee nevertheless “insist[s] that the work deserves a more informed, careful review”, since the one proffered by Stolfi does “an injustice to both the book’s author and this journal’s readers.”[9] Megargee paraphrases the thesis postulated by Professor Stolfi---in both the review of Barbarossa and Hitler’s Panzers East---as “if Hitler had only listened to his generals and driven on to Moscow in August 1941, instead of diverting forces into the Ukraine, Germany would have won the campaign and the war.”[10]

Megargee argues that “Stolfi’s analysis, like that of the Germans at the time, gives short shrift to the strategic and operational realities of 1941”[11] (emphasis added). If one correctly understands Megargee’s view of “the Germans” in general, and specifically of the German officer corps of Second World War vintage, to say that a scholar’s analytical powers are “like” those of “the Germans” is to say that those powers are either nonexistent, or of the meanest possible sort.“The key question,” Megargee continues, “‘What if the Soviets don’t give up?’ is one that the Wehrmacht’s leaders never answered, or even addressed.”[12] Nor, according to Megargee, did Stolfi. Stolfi’s conclusions with regard to German chances for victory are based upon “unrealistically generous estimates of German strengths and capabilities, especially in logistical terms; upon estimates of Soviet capabilities that he draws form a one-sided reading of contemporary German sources; and upon sweeping assumptions concerning Soviet military actions and long-term economic and political power.”[13] Most importantly, from Megargee’s point of view, Stolfi gives “no attention at all” to the “complex interaction of the Germans’ barbaric occupation policies with Soviet resistance.”[14] Megargee then goes on with his own speculation, stating that even if what he describes as the Stolfi thesis were true “the fact remains that, helped along by German barbarism and hubris, Stalin’s regime would have maintained its grip on power and kept fighting, and the Germans would have been stuck in the east just as firmly as actually happened.”[15]

Stolfi, according to Megargee, did nothing in his review of Barbarossa other than promote “his own counterfactual challenge to the ‘conventional wisdom’”.[16] Thus, “if Glantz really claims that Soviet resistance at Smolensk caused Hitler to direct his forces into the Ukraine, that contention deserves careful analysis. Stolfi provides neither an examination of Glantz’s sources nor any comparison with the most important secondary works on the campaign, such as those by John Erickson or the Military History Research Institute in Potsdam. The end result is a review which presents neither an accurate alternative version of events nor a sound critique of Glantz’s analysis.”[17]

Professor Stolfi responded to Megargee’s complaints in a letter printed in the Journal in juxtaposition to that of his critic.[18] Stolfi’s letter speaks for itself, and does not require comment here. The comments of Megargee, however, are worthy of some consideration. The most obvious line of inquiry suggested by Megargee’s letter is that prompted by his admission that he had not read Glantz’s Barbarossa: Hitler’s Invasion of Russia, 1941 before dashing off his letter defending it to the Journal. How, for example, if he had not read Barbarossa, could Megargee assert that Stolfi’s review of it was careless and ill-informed? Put another way, if Stolfi read Barbarossa, and Megargee did not, which of them, commenting on the book, was more likely to utter a careless and ill-informed opinion about it? One is reminded of Steve Martin’s satirical jibe at those who “criticize things [they] don’t know about”. Lack of knowledge about Barbarossa, however, did not deter Megargee from commenting authoritatively about it. Again, in a situation in which Professor Stolfi clearly had read Barbarossa, and by his own admission Megargee had not, upon what possible basis could Megargee have concluded that Stolfi’s review of the book did “an injustice to both the book’s author and this journal’s readers.” Lastly, regardless of whether or not Megargee read Glantz’s Barbarossa before defending it, if Megargee did not do so, how in the world could he meaningfully opine that Stolfi’s review of the book was not “a sound critique of Glantz’s analysis”?

Is there substance to Megargee’s assertion that Stolfi’s thesis results from, among things, “estimates of Soviet capabilities that he draws form a one-sided reading of contemporary German sources”? In looking at this question, it is worth pointing out that Megargee’s use of the term “contemporary” in this context is a bit confusing, since it is unclear whether the “contemporary” German sources to which he refers were “contemporary” with the events of 1941-1945 discussed in Stolfi’s work, or “contemporary” with the publication of the post-war memoirs of some former German generals. For the purposes of this commentary, however, we may assume that Megargee referred not to authentic wartime German documents, but to the postwar memoirs of German officers. This is a safe assumption under the circumstances, since Megargee’s writings demonstrate a clear animus on his part toward the postwar works of any German officer who served under Hitler. In this case, the German officers involved, and their respective works, were principally Colonel General Franz Halder, The Halder War Diary 1939-1942,[19] Colonel General Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader,[20] Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories, Major General Friedrich von Mellenthin, Panzer Battles, and General of Artillery Walter Warlimont, Inside Hitler’s Headquarters 1939-1945.[21] Then again, when Megargee states that Stolfi’s thesis is based in part of a “one sided reading” of German sources, does he mean that Stolfi was “one sided” in his reading (how does one read “one sidedly”?), or that the authors he read were “one-sided” in their writing?

As to Megargee’s suggestion that Stolfi relied upon the postwar works of German officers to the exclusion of legitimate wartime historical documents, we may observe that Hitler’s Panzers East contains 261 footnotes. One hundred forty-six (56%) of those footnotes are based on captured German documents in the possession of the National Archives and/or the Halder Diary, while only 5 rely solely upon the works of Guderian or his compatriots. Should there be any question whether the Halder Diary is in the same source category as the microfilm records of German field commands, it should be noted that Megargee himself relies upon it extensively, and treats it as a primary historical source document in both War of Annihilation and Inside Hitler’s Headquarters, notwithstanding his evident loathing for its author.

What of Megargee’s charge that Stolfi’s thesis in Hitler’s Panzers East relies in part on “unrealistically generous estimates of German strengths and capabilities, especially in logistical terms”? Part IV of Hitler’s Panzers East, entitled “German Tank Losses, Casualties, and Logistics”, is the portion of Stolfi’s work that deals with German strengths and capabilities relative to the ability of Army Group Center to capture Moscow in August/September, 1941. Stolfi argues that the German Army had correctly estimated the number of casualties that it would incur during the first two months of the campaign, and were thoroughly prepared to deal with those casualties, which in the event turned out to be 18,000 less than the budgeted 275,000 figure. In addition, in late August, 1941, the German panzer forces still had in operating condition 65% of the tanks with which they began Barbarossa. According to Stolfi’s calculations, therefore, the eight divisions of Panzer Group Guderian that would carry the burden of capturing Moscow and ending the war were operating at 65% of their tank strength, and 80% of their personnel strength (when compared to the figures with which they began the war against the Soviet Union), which in Stolfi’s opinion made the likelihood of a successful effort to capture the Soviet capitol well within the realm of possibility.

Stolfi’s discussion of the condition of the primary assault force for the German advance on Moscow occurs in Chapter 10 of Hitler’s Panzers East, which is supported by 24 footnotes. Leaving aside those references which rely on secondary sources, 16 (64%) of the 24 footnotes supporting Chapter 10 are to primary source documents, namely captured German Army records residing in the U.S. National Archives and/or the Halder Diary. The numbers provided in those original primary source documents are not estimates, generous or otherwise, but actual figures reported by units in the field, to whom it was important to know the true status of their weapons and the men who wielded them.

The remaining portion of Part IV of Hitler’s Panzers East is Chapter 11, entitled “German Logistics: Could the Germans Support an Advance into the Moscow-Gorki Space in the Summer of 1941?”, in which Stolfi takes up the matter of logistics. As in the previous chapter, Chapter 11 is founded on the premise that the German Army could and would have defeated the Soviet Union within the 6 to 10 weeks upon which all of its planning was based. From Stolfi’s point of view, it was irrelevant that preparations were not made for fighting in winter, since it was reasonably anticipated that by the onset of winter the Soviet Union would be no more. On the other hand, Stolfi argues that German logistical planning was well up to the mark when considered in the context of the scheme upon which the offensive was based. The necessary food, fuel, ammunition, medical supplies, and other necessities would be provided by delivery over a rail system repaired and converted to European gauge by the Army’s railway engineer troops, deposited at previously selected railheads, and moved to the troops in the field from the railhead by the fleets of trucks organized by the Army for that task. Of the 19 footnotes upon which Chapter 11 is based, 14 (73%) are to original source documents. Megargee’s charge that Stolfi’s thesis is based on “unrealistically generous estimates of German strengths and capabilities, especially in logistical terms” is therefore incorrect.

Another ground cited by Megargee to support his claim that the Stolfi thesis is fallacious is that in formulating it, Stolfi made “sweeping assumptions concerning Soviet military actions and long-term economic and political power.” Since Megargee does not identify the “sweeping assumptions” allegedly made by Stolfi, the reader is left to his/her own devices in determining exactly what those assumptions might have been. This is not as easy a task as it might seem, given the fact that Stolfi has as his focus the capabilities of the German Army to achieve victory in the summer of 1941, rather than the ability of the Soviet Union to avoid defeat. About the closest the reader can come to divining Stolfi’s fatal “sweeping assumptions” is the following:

“With the…fall of Moscow on 31 August 1941, one must consider that the Soviet government could have lost its capability to mobilize the peasants and would have disintegrated politically. Strong anticommunist currents survived in Russia, which could have combined to end the war in late autumn 1941 with mass support of a peasantry unwilling any longer to be shot either by Soviet commissar or German combat soldier. Then, the campaign could have ended with ‘negotiations’ between a Russian government and the National Socialists, while the German army advanced eastward against a small, rump Communist government and forces loyal to it. Regarding the potential for collapse of the Communist government, these possibilities are summed up effectively in the words of a Russian prisoner in July 1941 to his captors: ‘Where have you been: we have been waiting for you for 23 years.’”[22]

It would not be stretching credulity to say that the point of view offered by Stolfi in the language just quoted is not based on mere “sweeping assumptions” about the future political, economic and military capabilities of the Soviet Union. There were indeed “strong anticommunist currents” still surviving in Russia in 1941, in spite of the Regime’s ruthless efforts to stamp them out. One need look no further for evidence of this phenomenon than the well-publicized positive reaction of the Ukrainians toward those whom they perceived as their liberators from the Stalinist yoke, or the steadfast willingness of the Vlasov Army to fight on the side of the Third Reich until the bitter end for both of them. And Megargee’s speculation about the future conduct of a post-collapse Soviet Union is just that----speculation----and thus no better than the different future contemplated by Stolfi.

The dust cover of Geoffrey Megargee’s War of Annihilation, with which this review began, is a fitting place to end it as well. The common thread in the words of praise for Megargee’s work quoted from Williamson Murray, Christopher Browning, Gerhard Weinberg and Dennis Showalter---eminent scholars all in the field of military history---is that Megargee’s work has broken new scholarly ground by integrating the tactical successes of the German army in Operation Barbarossa with the genocidal activities of some of its members. And it is the absence of this line of “analysis” in Stolfi’s work that is really at the crux of Megargee’s outrage with it. Megargee’s view is that Stolfi pays “no attention at all” to the “complex interaction of the Germans’ barbaric occupation policies with Soviet resistance.” Stolfi, it would seem, cannot be faulted for this if, as Megargee’s colleagues suggest, the latter was the progenitor of this thesis. But although Megargee willingly accepts these accolades---and why would he not, considering the benefits accruing to him therefrom---the fact is that it is nonsense to contend that Megargee broke new scholarly ground by associating the genocidal activities of the Nazi regime with its military successes. The thesis that mass murder---and in particular, mass murder in eastern Europe---was integral to the Nazi war machine has been a staple in the field of military history for at least four decades, since the publication of Alexander Dallin’s German Rule in Russia and Alan Clark’s Barbarossa. It would be more correct to say that Megargee’s stature among his peers has more to do with the alignment of his work with the rank Germanophobia that pervades academe than it does with the alleged novelty of his approach to the subject matter. If there be any novelty in Megargee’s work, it is his conjoining of “every German a war criminal” with “German military prowess is a myth”. Professor Stolfi’s crime is his failure to make Megargee’s thesis his own.

[1] Geoffrey P. Megargee, War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006).

[2] What is an “applied research scholar”? Someone who applied to be a research scholar? A scholar who applies research to something? As with all other aspects of western culture, Academe is not immune from the intrusion of Newspeak.

[3] Geoffrey P. Megargee, Inside Hitler’s Headquarters (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2000).

[4] David M. Glantz, Barbarossa: Hitler’s Invasion of Russia, 1941 (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2001).

[5] R.H.S. Stolfi, Hitler’s Panzers East: World War II Reinterpreted (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

[6] R.H.S. Stolfi, German Panzers on the Offensive: Russian Front*North Africa 1941-1942 (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Military History, 2003).

[7] R.H.S. Stolfi, “Review: Barbarossa: Hitler’s Invasion of Russia, 1941, by David M. Glantz”, The Journal of Military History, v.66, no. 3, July, 2002, 888-889.

[8] Geoffrey P. Megargee, “Letter to the Editor”, The Journal of Military History, v.67, no. 1, January, 2003, 329.

[9] Ibid. 330.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid. 331.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid. 331-334.

[19] Charles Burdick, ed., The Halder War Diary 1939-1942 (Novato, CA, Presidio Press, 1988).

[20] Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader (New York, NY, E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., N.D.).

[21] Walter Warlimont, Inside Hitler’s Headquarters 1939-1945 (Novato, CA, Presidio Press, 1964).

[22] Stolfi, Hitler’s Panzers East, 198.

The Heresy of Trevor N. Dupuy

2009-10-06T13:53:00.000-05:00

Some who read this blog may be aware of an historiographical essay that I published in 2004 on Military History Online (www.militaryhistoryonline.com) entitled "Mythos Revisited: American Historians and German Fighting Power in the Second World War". The essay is an analysis of the literature on the subject of the United States Army in the Second World War, and in particular a recent genre of works espousing the view that the combat effectiveness of the US Army has been generally denigrated by prominent military historians, who unfairly and invidiously compare it to the German Army in that same conflict. One of the historians targeted by the critics is the late Trevor N. Dupuy, a former Colonel in the US Army and a prolific student and writer on the subject of military history.

The work that landed Colonel Dupuy in the soup with the critics is one that he published in 1979 entitled "Numbers, Predictions & War" ("NPW"). NPW is a complex work, better understood by a careful reading of it. The particular hot button touched on by Colonel Dupuy is, broadly speaking, his finding that the combat effectiveness of the German Army of World War II vintage was superior to that of the United States Army. To say that Colonel Dupuy's conclusions on this point have enraged his critics would be to substantially understate the case. In that regard, it is important to note that while his critics have excoriated both Dupuy's method and his findings, NONE of them (at least, insofar as I am aware) has done the only thing that would lend any credence to their complaints, viz., engage in the same research that Dupuy conducted, and place their findings in juxtaposition to those of Dupuy in order to clearly refute his research and its conclusions. One wonders why the critics have not done this.

"Mythos Revisited" itself has generated a good deal of controversy over the years, and occasionally there come to my attention forum discussion strings that touch upon either it or, more likely, its subject matter. On those occasions I often look at the discussion or discussions involved to see what views are being expressed on the historiographical issues with which "Mythos Revisited" deals. I had occasion to do that yesterday, and found that one of the discussion participants had described Dupuy's work in NPW as "crap". If I recall correctly, the person who pronounced Dupuy's work "crap" based his opinion on calculations he himself had done with some portion of Dupuy's analytical system, with results that, in his opinion, clearly showed Dupuy's work to be flawed, and therefore "crap".

As far as I am aware, the person who identified Dupuy's work as "crap" has never written or published anything that would qualify as a detailed analysis of any issue in the field of military history. There are indeed theories or trains of thought in the field of military history that sink to the level of "crap", but the work of Dupuy in NPW is manifestly not one of them----unless, of course, you are one of his critics. On the other hand, there are propositions in the works of Dupuy's critics that do indeed sink to that level. Some of them are as follows:

!. The "parameters" used by Dupuy in analyzing ground combat---such things as the availability of ammunition and fuel, the effects of weapons and morale, the quantities of troops available, to name just a few----did not exist "as such during the period when the battles being analyzed were being fought", rendering those "parameters" "artificial and ex post facto at best, irrelevant at worst". Keith Bonn, WHEN THE ODDS WERE EVEN (Novato, CA, Presidio Press, 1994), 7-8.

2. 6.SS Gebirgs-Division "Nord", which fought American troops in Operation "Nordwind", was composed of "previously undefeated SS mountain troops." Ibid., 211-213.

3. "Historians and military analysts have put too much emphasis on the [U.S.] Army's mobility, believing that the use of tracked and wheeled vehicles gave the army a degree of mobility that was inappropriate for the heavy fighting in Europe. Trucks did give the army operational mobility, but motorized movement had no influence on the battlefield....in reality, the army's means of logistical and operational mobility had no direct influence on combat." Michael D.Doubler, CLOSING WITH THE ENEMY: HOW GIs FOUGHT THE WAR IN EUROPE, 1944-1945 (Lawrence, KS., University of Kansas Press, 1994), 286-287.

4. The flawed American personnel replacement system, a serious problem that had to be overcome by the US Army in order to defeat Germany, extracted a price in blood from the American soldier "from Italy to Normandy, across France, along the West Wall, through the Ardennes, and into Germany”...."The individual replacement system had its flaws, but these flaws stemmed from poor administration of the system rather than an inherent flaw in the concept. Given the determination to limit the number of divisions mobilized, the decision to keep them at full strength through the infusion of individual replacements was the correct one." Peter R.Mansoor. THE GI OFFENSIVE IN EUROPE: THE TRIUMPH OF AMERICAN INFANTRY DIVISIONS, 1944-1945 (Lawrence, KS. University Press of Kansas, 1999), 255.

While the foregoing are examples of strained logic, simple inaccuracy, and contradiction, they do not seem to fall to the level of intellectual dishonesty. The same cannot be said of the work of General John Sloan Brown, whose DRAFTEE DIVISION: THE 88TH INFANTRY DIVISION IN WORLD WAR II (Novato, CA. Presidio Press, 1998) was evidently viewed favorably enough to entitle him to hold the position of Chief of Military History, U.S. Army Center of Military History between 1998 and 2005.

Brown's chief target in DRAFTEE DIVISION is Trevor N. Dupuy. There is neither sufficient time nor space to treat Brown's juvenile criticism of Dupuy here. It is far more important to bring to light the slight of hand by which he, at one and the same time, damns Dupuy and his work, and illustrates the fighting prowess of the 88th Infantry Division (by the way, for those of you who will now begin to scream that I am unpatriotic, take note of the fact that I do not disagree with Brown's evaluation of the 88th).

In his “Appendix 2 The Mythos of Wehrmacht Superiority: Colonel Dupuy Reconsidered”, Brown makes the following comments about NPW:

"Colonel Dupuy’s comparison of German and American units emerged from an analysis of seventy-eight selected engagements during 1943 and 1944. His historical data seems valid; one would be hard put to fault the careful and exhaustive enumeration of troops, weapons, and circumstances. Unfortunately, the sample itself is misleading. It scrambles together different types of units, disproportionately overrepresents panzer and panzer grenadier divisions, and features the American as the attacker in almost all cases." Brown, DRAFTEE DIVISION, 169 (emphasis added)

"Thus the American army at large is, in effect, compared with the best of the German Army…Another disproportion does even more damage to Colonel Dupuy’s analysis than his selection of divisions. Of the thirty-nine engagements pitting American and German divisions against each other, the American is the attacker thirty-six times. This introduces the question of whether anything in Dupuy’s analysis favors the defender. The answer is yes." (emphasis added) Brown, DRAFTEE DIVISION, 170.

"It seems no accident that Numbers, Prediction and War labels one of its subchapters “Fudge Factors”…."(emphasis added) Brown, DRAFTEE DIVISION, 172.

Now consider the following from "Draftee Division". First, in discussing the 88th Infantry Division’s “baptism of fire” in Italy during March and April 1944, Brown states that “[A]n overall evaluation of the 88th’s performance during its first two months in Italy would be favorable….” Brown, DRAFTEE DIVISION, 84.

Second, in evaluating the performance of the 88th Infantry Division during the first three days of Operation Diadem, Brown concludes the following:
"An overall assessment of the 88th’s first three days in its first big offensive must give the division high marks. In bitter, confused fighting the draftees penetrated some of the sturdiest defenses of the Gustav Line. Indeed, a recent and respected quantitative study identifies the 88th as Diadem’s highest-performing Allied division." (emphasis added) Brown, DRAFTEE DIVISION, 123.

Third, in discussing the circumstances under which the 88th Infantry Division was not among those selected to take part in the “race on Rome” in the spring of 1944, Brown avers that “[B]y 28 May the 88th Infantry Division numbered among the high achievers of the Allied Armies in Italy.” Brown, DRAFTEE DIVISION, 135.

Considering Brown’s denigration of Dupuy’s analysis and conclusions as set forth in his Appendix 2, those who are inclined to be Brown’s adherents might be surprised to learn that in each of the three instances noted above, the authority (“a recent and respected quantitative study”) cited by Brown for the statement is “Trevor N. Dupuy, Numbers, Prediction, and War” (London: MacDonald and James, 1979), 106.” And a review of page 106 of Numbers, Predictions & War discloses that the specific source relied upon by Brown is a table of data compiled by Dupuy based upon the very analysis that Brown condemns as “misleading”. Evidently, General Brown thought that no one would ever check his footnotes.

General Brown, then, is more than happy to rely upon Dupuy’s data, analysis and conclusions when they show that the 88th Infantry Division’s performance in its “baptism of fire” was “favorable”, that it received “high marks” and was adjudged the “highest-performing Allied division” for its actions during the first three days of Operation Diadem, and that it was reckoned to be “among the highest achievers of the Allied armies in Italy.” Yet General Brown rejects the selfsame data, analysis and conclusions when they lead to the judgment that the German Army generally performed better in combat than its American counterpart. Does an historian who takes such liberty with the results of historical research warrant the trust of his readers?

There is indeed "crap" in the historical literature of the U.S. Army in the Second World War, but not where some people think it is.

THE NAZI CONSCIENCE

2009-09-07T13:15:00.000-05:00

BOOK REVIEW
The Nazi Conscience

By Claudia Koonz

“’The Nazi conscience’ is not an oxymoron. Although it may be repugnant to conceive of mass murderers acting in accordance with an ethos that they believed vindicated their crimes, the historical record of the Third Reich suggests that indeed this was often the case. The popularizers of anti-Semitism and the planners of genocide followed a coherent set of severe ethical maxims derived from broad philosophical concepts….they denied the existence of either a divinely inspired moral law or an innate ethical imperative….they denied the existence of universal moral values and instead promoted moral maxims they saw as appropriate to their Aryan community. Unlike the early twentieth-century moral philosophers who saw cultural relativism as an argument for tolerance, Nazi theorists drew the opposite conclusion. Assuming that cultural diversity breeds antagonism, they asserted the superiority of their own communitarian values above all others.”

Claudia Koonz is Professor of History at Duke University. Her additional publications include, with Renate Bridenthal and Susan Stuard, Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston, MA, Houghton Mifflin, 1987), Mothers in the Fatherland, Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York, NY, St. Martin’s Press, 1987), and several journal articles that deal generally with gender and race issues in the history of Nazi Germany.

Professor Koonz teaches within the Program in Women’s Studies at Duke University, and much of what she has written has its focus on this area of scholarship. In writing The Nazi Conscience, however, she has eschewed a focus on gender issues in favor of a broader consideration of the place occupied by what might be termed “cultural ethics” within the Nazi weltanschauung. More particularly, Professor Koonz examines the way in which the Nazi movement facilitated “the incursion of a secular, ethnic faith into an area of human life traditionally assigned to religion: the formation of a conscience.” Her investigation of this issue is fascinating, and her conclusions and their implications are compelling.

Professor Koonz first draws our attention to the fact that all of the world’s major cultures share a recognition that it is in the common interest of both the individual and society to embrace what is often called “the Golden Rule”, namely that one should treat others as one wants or expects others to treat oneself. While the Golden Rule is a noble concept, Koonz points out that it is often very difficult to determine which “others” are worthy of equal treatment, and which are not. The default position for reconciling this problem is that unworthy “others” are those whom we can identify as not belonging to our community. The concept of “otherness”, then, carries with it an inherently negative connotation. Nowhere is this more patently clear than in the area of religious belief, where the unworthy “others”---those who are not Catholic, or not Christian, or not Orthodox, to name but a few---are readily identified as the unsaved by the members of a particular “belief community”. Outside the religious context, especially where ethnic and political considerations are paramount, decisions about which persons or groups are worthy of fair and equitable treatment, and which are not, are often made on the basis of what might be described as a secular religion---what Koonz calls “ethnic nationalism” or “ethnic virtue”---and with the same sort of self righteous passion that informs religious decisions.

Professor Koonz suggests that the “Nazi conscience” was defined by a concept of ethnic virtue founded upon four assumptions shared by National Socialists and their kindred spirits. Koonz argues that when the Party succeeded in causing these assumptions to be sufficiently internalized by the recipients of the Nazi message, they brought about the inexorable expulsion of “Germans stigmatized as alien from their fellow citizens’ universe of moral obligation”. Among these shared assumptions, the first was that the life of a Volk is like that of an organism, complete with stages of life, including birth, expansion, decline and death. The fear of Nazis and others like them was that the Volk, like other western cultures, was in decline, indeed, on the slippery slope to extinction, and that it would be replaced by a “barbarian” culture. For the Nazis, such an unthinkable event could only be thwarted by individual sacrifice and collective effort.

The second assumption shared by Nazis was that, as with every other cultural community, the Volk possessed unique values that were appropriate to its nature and to the environment within which it had evolved. But whereas some contemporary social scientists sought to utilize the distinctions between differing community values as a call for tolerance, the Nazis saw such differences as a means for demonstrating the superiority of the Volk over other ethnic or cultural groups.

The third assumption of the Nazis followed logically, they contended, from the first and the second. When threatened with extinction by an inferior or “barbarian” cultural group, a morally superior community, such as the Volk, possesses the right, and indeed the obligation, to use aggressive violence to defend itself, and if necessary to exterminate, the “lower”, “inferior”, or “barbarian” civilization that threatens its existence. That such thinking was not limited to Nazis is elegantly demonstrated by Koonz with the following quotation:

"The nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them…The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they should die than live like the miserable wretches that they are."

The author of this revealing quotation was L. Frank Baum, an American journalist who, if recognized at all by Americans, is identified not with the virtual extermination of the Native American, but as the creator of the Wizard of Oz, a work which, in its celluloid form, evokes an entirely different America, in which the only thing exterminated is a wicked witch.

The final assumption embraced by the Nazis and their associates is likewise a logical sequitur of its predecessors. In order to fulfill its obligation to defend itself, a government that reflects the “ethnic virtue” of its subjects has the right to annul the legal protections of those of its citizens whom that government defines as “other”.

For Koonz, the principal question to be addressed concerning the “Nazi conscience” is the “process by which racial beliefs came to shape the outlook of the ordinary Germans on whose cooperation Nazi policies depended” (emphasis added). Her method for confronting this issue is to consider the three principal ways in which the Nazis popularized their concept of “ethnic virtue”. The first of these was the Party’s promotion of Adolf Hitler as a “preacher of communitarian morality among members of the Volk”. Secondly, the Nazi Party, using a group of willing academics that included such luminaries as the philosopher Martin Heidegger, the theologian Gerhard Kittel, and the political theorist Carl Schmitt, launched a public relations campaign designed to “rebrand” Jews as pariahs. Finally, the Party worked to create a consensus about racial aims and strategies among the bureaucrats who would be charged with formulating and administering Germany’s racial policies.

It is remarkable that such a rabidly racist person as Adolf Hitler was capable of realizing that the populace upon which his ultimate success depended did not share his opinions about race, and that overt efforts to persuade them otherwise would be counterproductive. Yet, as Professor Koonz makes clear, Hitler did appreciate the reality of the problem, and had done so since the beginning of his political career. As the Fuehrer had expressed it in Mein Kampf, “the ethnic state must perform the most gigantic educational task [i.e., the transformation of fundamental social values]. And some day this will seem to be a greater deed than the most victorious wars”.

Indeed, Hitler himself took the lead in restraint, thereby sending a message to his minions that could not have been misinterpreted. As Koonz points out, there were only three occasions between April, 1933 and September, 1939, in which Hitler publicly gave vent to his “phobic racial hatred”. In connection with the 1935 Nuremberg Rally, Hitler delivered a speech to the Reichstag in which he laid out the groundwork supporting legislation directed at depriving citizens of Jewish extraction of their legal status within Germany. Two years later, once again as part of the Nuremberg Rally festivities, and before his honored guest Benito Mussolini, the Fuehrer denounced “the Jewish-Bolshevik contagion” and called upon other western leaders to join Germany in confronting the “Jewish-Bolshevist, international league of criminals”. And finally, while celebrating the sixth anniversary of his rule, Hitler announced his prediction that, in the event of another world war, extermination would be the fate of the Jews. Yet Hitler did not refrain from giving voice to his hatred of Jews, but instead did so more subtly, as by describing unpopular ideas as “Jewish”, saying that the concept of “women’s emancipation” was the product of “the Jewish intellect”, and observing that because of their fear and loathing of the Third Reich, Jews were likely to “wage a battle for life and death” in order to bring it to destruction. Instead of focusing upon the racial danger, Hitler spoke to the issue of moral decay.

The Party rank and file followed their Fuehrer’s example. When they addressed general audiences (i.e., those largely composed of the public at large, instead of the Party faithful), devoted Nazis toned down their racism, emphasizing instead the need for ethnic fundamentalism. Emphasis upon the spiritual qualities of the Volk, rather than on biology and race, characterized the themes favored by Nazi speakers. National Socialism, they said, “is nothing more than the greatest celebration of life.” In print as well, the Party made “the Jewish question” into only one of a mass of other important matters. In The Nazi Primer, a 1938 translation of a Hitler Jugend textbook, only 3 of the volume’s 256 pages were devoted to Jews. The aim of the Party’s campaign was to persuade the public that the exclusion of Jews from German society and culture was a mere byproduct of ethnic fundamentalism, not its primary purpose.

The process described by Koonz went farther than the mere soft-pedalling of racism by Hitler and Party workers. At the Fuehrer’s direction, the Party set out to systematically meet “the most gigantic educational task” of transforming the fundamental social values of Germans. The person chosen to lead this drive toward ethical transformation was a physician named Walter Gross. At the age of 29 in 1933, Gross was appointed to head the National Socialist Office for Enlightenment on Population Policy and Racial Welfare. For the next dozen years, Gross “infused public culture with knowledge about the supposedly superior Volk and the undesirable ‘others’, by which he meant Jews, the ‘genetically damaged’, African Germans, gypsies, homosexuals, and ‘asocial’ elements (sex criminals, hoboes, and others)”.

In September, 1933, within a few short months after his appointment, Gross was invited to speak at the Nazi Party Rally at Nuremberg. On the evening before the commencement of the Rally, Adolf Hitler read the prepared text of each speaker. The Fuehrer approved Gross’s sermon on ethnic morality. Across the national radio net, Gross railed against the financial and cultural costs of maintaining “unworthy” beings at state expense, generally against the “liberal experiment” that had nearly extinguished a healthy Volk, but not about the threat posed by world Jewry.

The Party did more than simply “lead from the top” to mislead German Jews and their gentile countrymen into perceiving the Nazi regime as benign, or to “rebrand” Jews as “others” not worthy of the Volk through the efforts of Gross, his agency, and intellectual elites. The Party also made use of the bureaucracy, now under its complete control, and the instrument through which Germans interacted with their government, to create a social atmosphere hostile to Jews (as well as homosexuals, Gypsies, and others). How to successfully use that instrument to achieve the desired purpose was not self evident. The question confronting German bureaucrats at all levels of government was how to make life intolerable for Jews in ways that met the expectations of the zealously anti-Semitic within the Party, without at the same time alienating ordinary citizens. During the period 1933-1935, Party bureaucrats wrote hundreds of memoranda and conducted dozens of meetings in which possible answers to this question were debated. The result was the institution of a bureaucratic persecution that, while having the appearance of reason and benignity, turned out to be more pernicious than pogroms. Not only did its calculated façade mislead its victims into believing that the situation was less malign than it was, but its policies, backed by the power of the state, were far more thorough than sporadic violence.

It is in her effort to grapple with the process by which ordinary Germans were brought to view the world through racist lenses that Professor Koonz shines. There is, first of all, the “elephant in the room” that forms the framework of the author’s study, namely the fact that Hitler and the Nazi party were compelled to find a way to reform the attitudes of most Germans about race in the first place. If Koonz had done nothing else in this work, she still would have made an important contribution to the study of the Nazi phenomenon by highlighting this point. The popular assumption in the United States, encouraged by the media, film and academe, is that Germans are and always have been racially prejudiced toward Jews. If that were the case, however, the Fuehrer and his followers, among other things, would not have toned down their anti-Semitic language in order to avoid a popular backlash. Professor Koonz’s comments on the tendency to generalize about the Germans and their modern history are well worth bearing in mind by anyone who studies this field.

"As tempting as it might be to generalize about “ordinary” Germans’ attitudes toward Jews, any generalization distorts a complex reality. Aside from a hardcore minority of fervent Jew-haters, Germans reacted negatively to what they perceived as unsanctioned violence, but they came to accept measures with an aura of legality. When citizens, whether or not they supported Nazism, ignored one or another anti-Semitic measure, they may have acted out of empathy with Jews or out of defiance against laws that restricted their consumer choices. Although it is wise to remain agnostic on the topic of motivation, it seems clear that Germans were neither brainwashed nor terrorized. Rather, they conformed to regulations of which they approved and circumvented those they disliked. The memoirs of Jewish Germans who emigrated attest to the existence of both violent anti-Semites who drove them out and loyal friends whose civil courage enabled them to escape alive."

Finally, the broad conclusion that Professor Koonz reaches, as expressed in the ultimate paragraph of her work, is more meaningful in September, 2009, than it was when she wrote it six years earlier. Such is the mark of all good historical thought.

"In an age of what critics call moral meltdown, when conventional codes governing private morality relax, the struggle between “good and evil” migrates to the political front. Political leaders who appear to embody the communitarian virtues of a bygone age purport to stand as beacons of moral rectitude in a sea of sin. Although they incite hatred against anyone they deem to be ethnic outsiders---whether sexual degenerates, pacifists, defenders of human rights, or simply misfits---their devoted constituencies share a fear of moral and physical pollution so profound it transcends partisan politics. Long after the demise of Nazism, ethnic fundamentalism continues to draw its power from the vision of an exclusive community of “us” without “them”. "

The Nazi Conscience
By Claudia Koonz
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2003
ISBN: 0-674-01172-4 (alk. Paper) 362 pages
Book Review Copyright 2009

Thomas E. Nutter

The Last Kaiser Reconsidered

2009-08-06T21:47:00.000-05:00

Clark, Christopher: Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Essex: Pearson Education Limited 2000
ISBN: 0-582-24560-5 (cloth); 0-582-24559-1 (paper)
xvi +271pp. Notes, bibliography and index
Reviewed by: Thomas E. Nutter
The Last Kaiser Reconsidered

The Kaiserreich, and particularly the reign of Wilhelm II, continues to provoke strong interest among historians of Germany. This has been manifested in the last decade by the publication of a number of impressive works on the subject by John C.G. Rohl, Lamar Cecil, Roderick R. McLean, Volker Berghahn, James Retallack and others. Lest we think, however, that this wealth of scholarship has provided conclusive answers to all of the issues presented by this complex period of German history, we have Christopher Clark’s fine Kaiser Wilhelm II to remind us that difficult questions still remain.

Clark’s work, part of the Profiles in Power series, is a testament to the value that such series may represent for both professional and student alike. As Clark notes, the guidelines of this particular series required him to focus upon “the character and extent of the Kaiser’s power, his political goals and his success in achieving them, and the mechanisms by which he projected authority and exercised influence.” Clark avoids the issue of “personal rule” and makes no pretense of having made new discoveries in the primary sources, admitting that his is a work of synthesis and interpretation. His purpose, given these parameters, is to ask (and suggest an answer to) the question as to whether and to what extent it made a difference that Wilhelm II occupied the German throne between 1888 and 1918.

Clark achieves his goal admirably. In a work whose subject is power, Clark begins with an examination of the power relationships in Wilhelm’s unique family. Clark characterizes the division of power between Wilhelm’s father, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, and his grandfather, Kaiser Wilhelm I (“a figure of almost mythical reputation with the gravitas and whiskers of a biblical patriarch”) as the single most influential fact of Wilhelm’s early life. He illustrates the pernicious effect upon Wilhelm’s development created by his grandfather’s ability and willingness to interfere in the child’s education, among other things. This regrettable state of affairs was exacerbated by the political tensions that had riven the Hohenzollern court since the early 1850’s, namely the struggle between the western-oriented progressives and the more reactionary pro-Russian faction. The resolution of this controversy by the ascendancy of Otto von Bismarck in 1862 affected the Crown Prince and his family profoundly. The animus of the Prussian minister-president for Friedrich Wilhelm and Crown Princess Victoria isolated them and their children politically and socially, with the result that Wilhelm’s education and general upbringing became a bone of contention between his parents, on the one hand, and his grandfather and Bismarck, on the other. Considering Wilhelm’s later irresolution in circumstances where stouter resolve might have better served both him and Germany, Clark reasonably asks whether it might not have been better for one or the other of these competing factions to have prevailed unequivocally.

Eventually Wilhelm learned to adapt to and exploit for his own purposes the atmosphere of conflict that surrounded him. As he matured, he elected increasingly to side with his grandfather’s apparently stronger faction, much to the chagrin of his parents. He widened the rift so created by marrying Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderberg-Augustenburg, a woman whose politics proved to epitomize those of Friedrich Wilhelm’s most ardent opponents; and by adopting as his most trusted confidant General Count Alfred von Waldersee, quartermaster-general of the Prussian army and deputy chief of the general staff, and a man who “was the personification of everything Wilhelm’s parents most detested.”

In the end, Wilhelm seemed to have backed the right horse, since Bismarck and the conservatives remained the premier force in German politics, surviving intact and in power following the deaths of both Wilhelm I and Friedrich Wilhelm (Kaiser Friedrich III). Clark suggests, however, that Wilhelm’s success in this regard was illusory; while he had learned well how to successfully play the power game, he knew not what to do with the power once it became his.

One of Clark’s most significant contributions in this work is his explication of the Imperial constitution and Wilhelm II’s relationship to it. The author refers to the “extreme Federalism” of the constitution of 1871, observing that it reduced the Kaiser to the status of one prince among others, without a claim to dominion over the territory of the Reich. There was, in addition, the curious dualism of parallel imperial and Prussian state governments, in which the imperial chancellor was also the Prussian prime minister, responsible to both the imperial Reichstag and the Prussian Landtag. With responsibility also came a substantial quantity of political control in both the Reich and Prussia, and between 1871 and 1890 that control was in the hands of the formidable Otto von Bismarck. As Clark observes, Bismarck’s power and control had its source not merely in his political offices, but also in the status and reputation acquired from his role in unification, domestic and foreign policy, and relationship with the Kaiser. That relationship, of course, was a difficult one, characterized by conflict over issues such as labor policy, imperial administration, and Wilhelm’s reliance upon personal advisors other than the chancellor. This conflict led to Bismarck’s forced resignation in March 1890.

In the roughly two years since ascending the throne, Wilhelm had changed that office from a passive to an active source of power, and in so doing had removed one of the principal obstacles to the exercise of power from the throne. Clark argues that Wilhelm achieved this by emulating, as much as he was able, the political acumen and ruthlessness of the first chancellor. After Bismarck’s departure, Wilhelm had the unenviable task of governing without him. The 1890’s were marked by the advent of a new political paradigm in Germany, the more staid politics of the former era giving way to a far more factional model in Which both the right and left became more vocal and contentious. Clark argues that Wilhelm responded to this situation by seeking to enlarge the middle ground in German politics and place the throne within it. For the Kaiser, the political center comprised patriotic Germans accepting of technology and opposed to socialism. Wilhelm’s efforts to galvanize this group involved mediation of conflicts, persuading conservatives and moderates to take common cause against “agreed enemies of the social order”, and aligning the monarchy in support of important national projects. But the Kaiser’s initiatives came to naught, Clark contends, because of weakness of character. He was unable to use his power effectively in part because his apparently innate rudeness, indiscretion and lack of objectivity alienated friend and foe alike. Moreover, he lacked discipline and was emotionally erratic. Unable to govern with his ministers, he now came into conflict with both the provincial and imperial legislatures. His unsuccessful efforts to sponsor unpopular legislation in these venues had the additional deleterious effect of inciting public opinion against him.

The Kaiser’s imperial career wanted guidance, and found it in the person of Bernhard von Buelow, Wilhelm’s imperial state secretary for foreign affairs from 1897 and chancellor from 1900 until 1909. Clark qualifies the view that the advent of von Buelow brought about a system of “institutionalized personal rule“ in which the key departments of the Reich government were dominated by Wilhelm’s hand-picked functionaries, thereby avoiding more clumsy interference in governmental affairs by the Kaiser. It is the author’s view that even before he became a government minister, and indeed throughout his tenure, von Buelow intended to and did manipulate Wilhelm. He did this chiefly by controlling the Prussian and Reich ministries, thereby depriving the Kaiser of the opportunity to scheme against him in conjunction with other ministers. Moreover, until 1903 von Buelow managed to convince Wilhelm that the latter, rather than his chief minister, was in control and responsible for the monarchy’s record of success both at home and abroad.

In 1905-6, however, the relationship between the two men began to unravel. The first clash between them occurred over the so-called “Treaty of Bjorko”, one of mutual defense negotiated by Wilhelm with his cousin Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Von Buelow refused to execute the agreement; his threat to resign over the incident forced Wilhelm to renounce it. In the ensuing months the Kaiser began to purposefully reassert his authority over the appointment of ministers, and to actively undermine the course of conciliation that von Buelow had adopted toward the Catholic Centre Party. In Clark’s view, Wilhelm’s uprising against von Buelow during these years demonstrates that, far from being a merely symbolic ruler with little means to exercise political power, the Kaiser possessed the ability to create mischief, if nothing else, by virtue of his ability to make imperial administrative appointments. Nevertheless, Clark maintains, Wilhelm undercut his own influence by his failure to articulate a consistent national political program.

With the coming of Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg to the chancellorship in July 1909, the monarchy began to take on a different political aspect. Wilhelm knew Bethmann well and respected him, and saw in him something of a political ally against the imperial legislature. In point of fact, Clark contends, these facts did not particularly favor the Kaiser and certainly did not facilitate his “personal rule” in the Reich. Like his predecessor, Bethmann asserted his position as president of the Prussian state ministry to remove ministers with whom he differed or in whom he lacked confidence and replace them with men to whom he was more sympathetically inclined. In all of this, Wilhelm took little meaningful role. As a result, Bethmann was able to effectively undercut one of the Kaiser’s last remaining levers of power, namely his capacity to select imperial administrators of his own choosing. Clark makes the point that this “marginalization” of Wilhelm from domestic politics had the effect of enhancing the importance of the Kaiser’s Kommandogewalt, his extra-parliamentary power to command his military subordinates, the most significant remaining facet of his sovereignty. This was reflected in Wilhelm’s handling of the Zabern affair, the effect of which was to place him squarely against the tide of liberal feeling in the Reich. In any case, the first fourteen years of the new century saw the advent of aggressive political blocs that rendered more and more ineffectual the power and influence of the monarchy in the legislatures.

Clark spends an entire chapter on the subject of Wilhelm and popular opinion, and it is time well spent. The author rejects the traditional view that Wilhelm’s often unfortunate attempts to court the public stemmed from a narcissistic personality disorder. He sees it,
instead, as an eminently reasonable approach for the Kaiser to take in view of his own regard for the power of the press, made evident, as he saw it, by its often irreverent tone since the end of the Bismarckian era. While Wilhelm may have acted rationally, this does not mean he did so reasonably, and Clark assigns to him the responsibility for this. Indeed,
Clark maintains that Wilhelm damaged his reputation much more by what he said than by what he did. This was due to his inherent inability to express himself in the “sober, measured diction” expected of him. The manifestations of this unfortunate trait were both numerous and egregious. His Bremerhaven speech in 1900 on the embarkation of the German contingent for China during the Boxer rebellion identified Germans with the Hun despoilers of the Roman Empire. The publication in 1908 by the London Daily Telegraph of an interview given by him that was perceived as discrediting both the Kaiser and the German nation led to public outrage and open, virulent criticism of him in the Reichstag. In spite of these gaffes, however, or perhaps because of them, Clark points out that Wilhelm continued to enjoy widespread popularity among the humbler orders of German society, a situation changed only by the events of the First World War.

Wilhelm is perhaps most well known as an actor on the nternational stage, both before and during the Great War. The author presents the question whether the Kaiser succeeded in placing himself in charge of German foreign policy, an aspiration of his since long before his accession. Clark’s answer is equivocal. While Wilhelm’s profile in foreign relations was a high one, his real significance was marginal, as demonstrated by, for example, his inability to secure the renewal of the Reinsurance Treaty after Bismarck’s departure, notwithstanding his strong personal bias in favor of renewal. Clark identifies Wilhelm’s principal deficiency as his total lack of a coherent policy position in the area of foreign affairs. As a result his chief ministers were able to manipulate Wilhelm for their own purposes. The one area in which Wilhelm was able to exert substantial influence was in the decision to expand and modernize the German Navy, and embark upon a naval race with Great Britain. In this connection, the author presents a somewhat unique view of Wilhelm’s role in the affair of the “Kruger telegram”, pointing out that he was not alone in favoring German military intervention in the Transvaal, and that the sending of the telegram was the result of a true consensus, rather than an attempt to control a Kaiser out of touch with reality. Clark’s significant contribution in this regard is to suggest that, while the telegram offended Queen Victoria and outraged the British government and press, “there is no reason why this response should be the touchstone for our own
judgments.” He goes on to remark upon the “perplexing tendency” of the literature on the subject to “accept implicitly the notion that British colonial expansion and British perceptions of British rights constituted a ’natural order’, in the light of which German objections appeared to be wanton provocations.” This bespeaks an openness of mind that would be
pleasant to see reflected in the work of other scholars of German history.

Perhaps equally controversial is Clark’s view on the Kaiser’srole in Germany’s pre-war isolation. While he concedes that Wilhelm’s attempts at intervention may have made the lives of his foreign ministers difficult, he attributes Germany’s encirclement to the confusion and
irresolution of the German foreign policy establishment, whose origins lay not with Wilhelm, but with Bismarck. What of Wilhelm’s role in the coming of the Great War? On this question, Clark emphasizes the critical necessity of considering the Kaiser’s speech and action in context.On this basis, he rejects the view that Wilhelm’s commitment to Austria in particular, and his power as sovereign in general, were fatal for Germany. Instead, Clark argues that the record supports the conclusion that Wilhelm’s commitment to Austria was not uncritical, and that in fact his willingness to proffer German support depended upon his assessment
of the rectitude of Austria’s cause and his understanding of the risks involved. Indeed, the evidence he marshals in support of this argument, for example with regard to Wilhelm’s words and deeds in connection with the Bosnian crisis of 1908 and the First Balkan War of 1912, amply support his thesis, showing as they do a Kaiser wary of international conflict. So also with Wilhelm’s actions in the prewar crisis. The record presented by Clark runs decidedly counter to the notion that Wilhelm was in the camp of those who saw in Austria’s confrontation with Serbia an opportunity to initiate war and thereby gain an advantage. The Kaiser portrayed here is one who consistently urged caution as the key to German policy, abjured the idea of a preventive war, and generally warned all who would listen against war. Clark’s point here is that, while historians and others have often characterized Wilhelm’s pacific utterances as hypocritical “camouflage for a fundamentally belligerent diplomacy”, in fact his private remarks to all and sundry, German or otherwise, were consistent with a conciliatory posture. With regard to the July crisis of 1914, Clark contrasts the “Blank Cheque” episode with Wilhelm’s attempts, on July 28, to defuse tensions based on the Serbian response to the Austrian ultimatum of two days earlier. The Kaiser told his secretary of state for foreign affairs, Gottlieb von Jagow, that Serbia’s response amounted to a “capitulation of the most humiliating kind”, and ordered him to inform the Austrians that there was no longer any cause for war and that Wilhelm would
mediate for peace. These instructions, however, were not followed, providing further evidence of the Kaiser’s isolation from the center of power. When war itself came, Wilhelm continued to be marginalized, although not without significant influence. Clark argues effectively that things would not have been the same without him; his power of appointment kept Falkenhayn in office, and Wilhelm delayed the advent of unlimited submarine warfare because of his support for Bethmann’s policy of restraint.

Christopher Clark’s Kaiser Wilhelm II is well written, carefully reasoned and provocative. It occupies a valuable place in the recent literature on this important period in German history.

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Time Marches On

2008-04-03T20:04:00.000-05:00

Several weeks ago, German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Israel. During that visit, the Israeli government permitted her to speak before the Knesset. Although many members of the legislature seem to have welcomed Chancellor Merkel's visit and her speech, others are reported to have boycotted the event. The obvious reason for members to absent themselves from the occasion was Merkel's Germanness. Ideed, some of those who boycotted Chancellor Merkel's speech were quite open about this; one of their number is reputed to have stated that he (or she) would not attend because "German was the last language my parents heard before they perished", or words to that effect.

Today (April 3, 2008), the BBC reported on the activities of a group of renegade Israeli settlers who have taken possession of land owned by Palestinian Arabs in the Gaza Strip. Not even the Israeli government (which recently announced plans to foster a settlement of hundreds of Israeli families on other land whose ownership is in dispute) will tolerate this particular incident, since apparently it recognizes a claim of ownership asserted by a Palestinian Arab woman. Israeli troops ousted a group of the renegade settlers by force---to no avail, since other renegades simply took the places of those who had been evicted. A group of what the BBC called "leftists" then challenged the renegade settlers by camping out on the same ground. The renegades won the day, driving out the "leftists" and taking command of the field. "This is our land," said one of the renegade settlers, "God gave it to us, just like it says in the Bible. The Arabs have never owned this land, and they never will".

Yesterday (April 2, 2008) National Public Radio aired a story about the activities of a special team of American soldiers in Afghanistan. It seems that several weeks ago, members of a U.S. Army Special Forces unit conducted a night operation in a certain village. During that operation, the aim of which was to eliminate some known terrorist operatives, the American troops killed several innocent civilians, including a mother of six children. The inhabitants of the village were naturally outraged. In order to assuage the anger of the villagers, and hopefully prevent the inevitable anti-American backlash that such an incident is likely to provoke, a special team of American soldiers went to the village to meet with its elders and convey to them the sorrow and regret that the Americans all felt. In addition, the Americans tendered to surviving relatives $2000.00 for each person killed in the raid.

NATO concluded a meeting in Bucharest today. The meeting was supposed to be about putting Ukraine, among others, in position to join NATO. The conference concluded without success on this point. There were, however, other items of interest to be had there. For example, its NATO partners are leaning heavily on Germany to send a contingent of troops to Afghanistan. The troops would be used in combat, unlike other German soldiers currently in the country. There is strong opposition to this idea in Germany itself, and it remains to be seen whether what the rest of NATO wants will be undertaken by the Germans.

During her speech in the Knesset, Chancellor Merkel announced that all Germans were ashamed of the role of their country in the Holocaust. How can Angela Merkel, who (if I remember correctly) was not yet born until after 1945, feel shame for deeds committed by her countrymen, deeds committed long before she first saw the light of day? Are there Britons who are ashamed that their country's soldiers tied human beings to the ends of cannon---and fired the cannon to blow those human beings to pieces---in order to assert English dominance after the Indian Mutiny? Should there be? Are there white Americans who go about flagillating themselves for the crime of black slavery that other Americans committed one hundred and fifty or two hundred years ago? Should there be? How does one feel guilt for a crime one did not commit? Is this not akin to being punished for a crime one did not commit?

The Bombing of Ethics

2008-03-06T20:57:00.000-06:00

BOOK REVIEW

Among the Dead Cities
The History and Moral Legacy
Of the WWII Bombing of Civilians
In Germany and Japan

By A. C. Grayling

Walker & Company, 104 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10011
2006
ISBN-10: 0-8027-1471-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-8027-1471-8

Book Review Copyright 2008 Thomas E. Nutter

A.C. Grayling is Professor of Philosophy at Birbeck College, University of London. He is a prolific author, principally on subjects in the field of philosophy, but on some other subjects as well. According to the brief biography of him on the book’s dustcover, he writes also for the Economist and the Financial Times, and his affiliations include the World Economic Forum and the civil rights organization June Fourth.

Among certain people who read or read of this work, Grayling’s area of academic expertise and his connections with human interest organizations will count against him. This is for the reason that the thesis of Among the Dead Cities is that the Allied bombing of Germany, and the American bombing of Japan during World War II, constitute war crimes for which the perpetrators have never been brought to book. Here it should be made clear that the term “Allied”, when used by Grayling with reference to the bombing of Germany, means principally “British”, since Royal Air Force (RAF) Bomber Command, under the command of Arthur Harris, pursued a policy of indiscriminate area bombing of German cities whose avowed purpose was not merely the destruction of German war industries, but also (perhaps even primarily) the destruction of the enemy’s will to resist through terror. In Grayling’s view the United States Army Air Force (USAAF), which followed a policy of precision bombing against Germany until very late in the war, managed for the most part to avoid the taint of war crimes against that enemy. Its war against Japan, however, was another story. There, in Grayling’s view, the USAAF also engaged in war crimes, first in a fire-bombing assault on Japanese cites, and then as the instrument of nuclear war against civilian population centers.

Grayling leaves until his final chapter, entitled Judgement, comments indicative of his point of view on his topic that might have been better placed in his Introduction, if for no other reason than to defuse the ire that his analysis is certain to engender in those who take a more sanguine view of the topic at hand. In discussing his decision to eschew the use of German language treatments of the experiences of Germans under the bombs, Grayling states that:

…I have deliberately avoided drawing on such recent publications as Jorg Friedrich’s Der Brand and Brandstatten, or the collection edited by Volker Hage, Hamburg 1943: Literarische Zeugnisse zum Feuerstrum, or Christoph Kucklick’s Feuersturm: Der Bombenkrieg gegen Deutschland. These books invite their German readers to set alongside the national sense of guilt for the Nazi era a second thought, which is that hundreds of thousands of Germans suffered in the war years from the area-bombing attacks, which not only killed over 300,000 people but did immense damage to the built fabric and cultural heritage of Germany….These books seem to me to be legitimate and now timely contributions to the process of discussion required for putting the Second World War into proper proportion. I neither expect nor wish that this will change anything on the question of Nazi war crimes and crimes against humanity, which so weigh against the Germany of the time that nothing can excuse or abate what happened in it, or in its name. The point is not to make up a balance sheet, and by entering into it the sufferings of Germans under area bombing, thereby to diminish the culpability of Nazism. This is what neo-Nazis try illegitimately to do. (emphasis added)

On the penultimate page of his work, Grayling addresses the “why” of its writing, expanding upon the notion that it “should now be time for a mature and dispassionate acceptance” of the fact that the use of area bombing by the Allies in the Second World War raises (or ought to raise) moral concerns:

Getting the record straight is all that can be done now. But it is far from little. Speaking from the point of view of an inheritor of the triumph of morally better forces over worse in the epic conflict of 1939-1945, I think it places on even firmer footing our just condemnation of the atrocities of Nazism in particular and Axis aggression in general, because we do not pretend to have clean hands ourselves. What we can claim is that they were far cleaner than those of the people who plunged the world into war and carried out gross crimes under its cover, and that the explanation---not the excuse---for why we allowed our own hands to get dirty at all is because of what we had to clean up. (emphasis added)

In coming to grips with the question of the morality of Allied bombing during World War II, Grayling’s method is to consider “what actually happened in the bombing war; what was known, thought, intended and hoped by those who carried it out; and what effect it had.” Grayling explores the first of these matters---the historical reality of the bombing war---by studying the history of the Allied air campaigns against Germany and Japan, including the reality of its effects on the bombed.

The development of the bombing war, as Grayling characterizes it, was determined by the interaction of technology, personality and circumstance. The British employed Bomber Command almost immediately upon the commencement of hostilities, but it did so with strict orders against the bombing of civilian targets. The Chamberlain government anticipated that the Germans would resort to the bombing of English cities, and indeed had taken precautions designed to limit civilian casualties, but did not want to give the Germans an excuse to fulfill British expectations. The restrained British policy also resulted from lack of preparedness, not with regard to the training of its bomber crews, but with respect to the weapons those crews had to weald. The Hampdens and Whitleys with which Bomber Command began the war were woefully inadequate for the tasks assigned to them, and their inadequacies were made worse by deficiencies in British navigation and bomb-aiming technology. It was these shortcomings in Bomber Command, along with the political and military need to strike at the enemy’s capacity to make war, that initially drove Bomber Command toward night area bombing.

Circumstances also played a significant role in the development of British bombing policy. On 14 May 1940, during the course of the Western campaign, the Luftwaffe bombed the city of Rotterdam. While this attack resulted from error and not intent, nevertheless it moved the British War Cabinet, now led by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, toward a recognition that the Germans would indeed resort to bombing civilian centers of population. The very next night the War Cabinet for the first time authorized bombing east of the Rhine. Three months later German fliers again erred, this time (on 24 August 1940) bombing London as a result of a navigational error. Once again the British struck back immediately, sending 81 bombers to Berlin on 25 August 1940. Finally, on the night of 14 November 1940, the Luftwaffe struck with intent and force in an all night raid on the city of Coventry. Even though the Coventry bombing occurred during the Blitz of London, Grayling points out that it was perceived as an “occasion of singular importance in the history of air warfare” because the intent of the attackers was to obliterate the city.

Grayling submits that personality was of special significance in driving the development of British bombing policy. On 25 October 1940 Churchill appointed Sir Charles Portal as his Chief of Air Staff. Portal, according to Grayling, was an ardent champion of the notion that civilian population centers were proper targets for air forces during wartime. This was made manifest on 9 July 1941 when Portal’s Air Staff issued a directive to Bomber Command in which that force’s primary aims were defined as dislocating the German transportation system and “destroying the morale of the civil population as a whole and of the industrial workers in particular.” It was this directive, according to Grayling, that made “the area bombing campaign…explicit and deliberate policy.” Notwithstanding the enunciation of this policy, however, its implementation was hindered by the fact that Bomber Command was under the charge of Sir Richard Peirse, whose leadership skills were considerably less than spectacular. In early November, 1941 this situation began to change as a result of one particularly disastrous raid on Berlin. This event, which entailed the loss of over 12 percent of the nearly 400 aircraft employed, ended Peirse’s career with Bomber Command. His successor, Arthur Harris, took over the reins of Bomber Command on 22 February 1942. The partnership of Portal and Harris was to bring to fruition the concept of area bombing and all that it entailed.

Harris had in mind a Bomber Command force capable of regularly laying on 1000-bomber raids on German cities. He could occasionally come close to the intended number of aircraft---in May 1942 900 RAF bombers struck Cologne---but this was only accomplished by pressing into service every available aircraft. Moreover, navigation and bomb-aiming technology remained less than sufficient for Harris’s purpose. But the advent of 1943 saw a turning point in the bombing war. Of great importance, of course, was the mandate issued by Allied leadership at the Casablanca Conference in the form of Operation Pointblank. Pointblank was the Bomber Command policy of targeting German civilians writ large, a clear message that Portal and Harris had carried the day. Of equal importance was the fact that the weapons necessary to carry Pointblank forward----Lancasters and Halifaxes---began to come into service in great numbers. And they would now be guided to their targets by a well-trained Pathfinder force, aircrews devoted solely to finding targets at night and marking them for the following bomber stream.

By the summer of 1943 Bomber Command was in a position to routinely mount 900-1000 bomber raids on German cities. The arrival on the scene of Harris’s mighty weapon was heralded by Operation Gomorrah, a series of very large air raids over several nights on the city of Hamburg. The capstone of Operation Gomorrah was a man-made firestorm that consumed Hamburg and everyone who had the misfortune to be there. Apart from the physical destruction of the city, the effect of the attack on its inhabitants was frightful and horrifying. This was exactly what Portal and Harris had intended, but the incredible irony was that instead of weakening German morale, the carnage had the opposite effect, stimulating in the German population an enhanced and resolute willingness to endure and survive. And rather than encourage among German civilians a desire to rid themselves of the Nazi regime, the new, more lethal and catastrophic bombing war wedded the German population more closely to its leadership.

The destructive success enjoyed by Bomber Command in Operation Gomorrah convinced Harris, if he needed convincing, that he now had at his disposal the means with which to single-handedly win the war for the Allies. He determined to demonstrate this by initiating what he called the “Battle of Berlin” in November, 1943. Harris told Churchill that Bomber Command would wreck Germany’s capital city “from end to end”, with the intended result of bringing the Nazi regime to its knees. The Battle of Berlin raged until March, 1944 and ended not in the collapse of the German will to resist, but in defeat for Bomber Command. In part this was due to the inability of the U.S. Eighth Air Force to enhance the effectiveness of Bomber Command’s efforts by hammering Berlin during the daylight hours. The failure of the Americans to compound Bomber Command’s destructive power stemmed not from a lack of resolve or bravery, but from the fact that at this stage of the war the Luftwaffe and German ground defenses remained forces with which to be reckoned.

At the heart of Grayling’s indictment of area bombing are two arguments. The first of these is that the international community, and Great Britain in particular, had long recognized that the targeting per se of civilian populations was an unacceptable method of war-making. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, an International Military Commission, hosted by the Russian Imperial Cabinet, in the St. Petersburg Declaration of 1868 had agreed to forbid the use of specified projectiles, among them exploding or incendiary bullets. In the words of the Declaration:

The Contracting or Acceding Parties reserve to themselves to come hereafter to an understanding whenever a precise proposition shall be drawn up in view of future improvements which science may effect in the armament of troops, in order to maintain the principles which they have established, and to conciliate the necessities of war with the laws of humanity. (emphasis added)

At an international peace conference held at The Hague in 1899, sponsored by Czar Nicholas II and Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, the participants sought to establish a framework for lasting international peace, as embodied in a Declaration known as Hague IV. This Declaration, which quoted and relied upon the principles set forth in the St. Petersburg Declaration of 1868, included the so-called “Martens Clause”, named for the Russian international law theorist Fedor Fedorovich Martens, the driving force behind the conference. The Martens Clause states:

Until a more complete code of the laws of war is issued, the High Contracting Parties think it right to declare that in cases not included in the Regulations adopted by them, populations and belligerents remain under the protection and empire of the principles of international law, as they result from the usages established between civilized nations, from the laws of humanity and the requirements of the public conscience. (emphasis added)

In a manner consistent with these antecedents, and in an effort to provide rules for air warfare---the “future improvements…in the armament of troops” foreseen in the St. Petersburg Declaration of 1868---the then major world powers, namely, the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy and Japan, met in The Hague between December, 1922 and February 1923. The result of this meeting was a set of articles drawn up but never executed by the participants. These articles are essential to Grayling’s argument because they illustrate, from his point of view, that a well before the onset of the Second World War, its future participants well recognized the dangers that air warfare would hold for civilian populations. Among other things, the articles in question provide that “Aerial bombardment for the purpose of terrorizing the civilian population, of destroying or damaging private property not of a military character, or of injuring non-combatants, is prohibited”, that “Aerial bombardment is legitimate only when directed at a military objective”, and that “In bombardment by aircraft all necessary steps must be taken by the commander to spare as far as possible buildings dedicated to public worship, art, science, or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospital ships, hospitals, and other places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided such buildings, objects or places are not at the time used for military purposes.”

The fact that an international legal regime to “manage” the nature of air warfare was not brought to fruition before the Second World War is not, in Grayling’s view, of great significance. On the contrary, what is important is the fact that these efforts nonetheless worked their way into the consciousness of Great Britain’s political leadership, so that before and during the war the consequences of modern aerial warfare for civilians were fully appreciated by them. For example, in the House of Commons on June 21, 1938, then Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain pronounced that:

It is against international law to bomb civilians as such and to make deliberate attacks upon civilian populations. That is undoubtedly a violation of international law. In the second place, targets which are aimed at from the air must be legitimate military objectives and must be capable of identification. In the third place, reasonable care must be taken in attacking these military objectives so that by carelessness a civilian population in the neighborhood is not bombed.

Even Chamberlain’s successor, Winston Churchill, a man not particularly renowned for his sympathies toward “the Hun”, was so overwhelmed by the images of destruction wrought by the RAF over Hamburg in 1943 as to be moved to declare rhetorically “Are we animals? Are we taking this too far?”

The point of Grayling’s first argument is that, in view of the long history of international concern for the welfare of civilian populations and the trappings of civilization, and the clear recognition, by at least the 1920’s, that modern air warfare could and probably would justify that concern in ways so terrifying as to hardly bear thinking about, Allied leaders recognized with absolute clarity that by prosecuting the air war against the Axis, “they would kill many, among them the elderly and children, and would destroy many structures, schools, hospitals, libraries, houses, etc., and uncountable valuable things.” His second argument is that the policy of area bombing was not necessary for Allied victory in the Second World War.

The foremost proponent of area bombing, of course, was its chief practitioner, Arthur Harris. Indeed, it was Harris’s view that precision bombing, as practiced by the Americans, was a “panacea” that would never lead to the destruction of the German capacity to wage war. In this, Harris has been defended vigorously by a number of historians, including among others Richard Overy in his Why the Allies Won. In that work, Overy has opined that “bombing mattered most in defeating the Reich”, because it had (1) kept the Luftwaffe and thousands of 88mm and heavier guns from being used on the Eastern and Western fronts to support the efforts of Germany’s ground forces, and (2) at least by January, 1945, destroyed Germany’s capacity to continue the war. Grayling’s counter to Overy’s position is that (1) precision bombing would also have compelled the Luftwaffe and Germany’s air defense batteries to remain within the Reich to defend its industries, and (2) it was not area bombing that destroyed the ability of Germany to wage war, but the application of the Allies’ air weapons against Germany’s oil resources and transportation system that spelled the Reich’s doom.

There can be little doubt that Grayling holds the upper hand in his dispute with Overy and others over the relative efficacy of area versus precision bombing. RAF Bomber Command conducted its campaign against Germany almost entirely at night. In so doing, it confronted primarily the ground defenses deployed by the enemy, in the form of thousands of high caliber anti-aircraft guns and supporting searchlight units. The Luftwaffe fighter forces arrayed against Bomber Command were relatively few. This was for two reasons, namely (1) the majority of Luftwaffe single-engined fighter units were occupied by day in combating the vast bomber fleets employed by the USAAF, and (2) there were but few remaining German aircraft---principally dual-engined aircraft equipped with rudimentary radar arrays---capable of meaningfully engaging Bomber Command in the darkness. In contrast, the USAAF---for much of the war, in the form of the Eighth Air Force---encountered not only the self-same ground defenses that fought Bomber Command, but also the vast majority of German single-engined fighter aircraft, whose job it was to defend the Reich against air attack. In fact, the American air offensive in 1944-1945 had two purposes that it pursued simultaneously---the destruction of German industry by precision bombing, and the destruction of the Luftwaffe. This latter aim the USAAF achieved not simply by laying waste the factories that produced Germany’s fighter aircraft, but also by purposefully forcing the Luftwaffe to give battle under circumstances that could only result in its defeat through attrition. Against the multitude of P-47s, P-38s and P-51s deployed by the USAAF, and their excellently trained and highly aggressive pilots, the Luftwaffe could not long endure.

Grayling is also correct in his evaluation of the relative effects of area and precision bombing on the capacity of Germany to continue waging war. It is well known that in spite of the Allied air campaign, German industrial production was on the increase well into 1944. Two things reversed this trend. The first was the concentration of Allied air power against the German oil supply system. In this effort, both the USAAF and Bomber Command gave the highest priority, to the chagrin and in spite of the resistance of Arthur Harris. The second was the belated onslaught by the Allied air forces against the German transportation system, particularly its railroad infrastructure. This latter campaign was undertaken after the Allies had invaded Western Europe, and came about only because they quite accidentally discovered that the pre-invasion targeting of the French railways had brought about its paralysis. Armed with this knowledge, the Allies applied the same scheme against the German Reichsbahn, with identical results.

Among the Dead Cities is a provocative book, one that should fuel debate on a subject long taboo in England and the United States. It should be read by anyone who sees the ambiguity inherent in the application of air warfare against enemy civilian populations, and more especially by those who see no such ambiguity.