What is particularly interesting is that suggestions to commence “self-sacrificial missions” did not come from the highest levels of German political and military leadership, who otherwise never tired of demanding that soldiers fight until death. While hundreds of thousands of ground troops fell because of Hitler’s command to hold out whatever the costs, the Führer could not bring himself to order the Luftwaffe to approve a suicide mission for dozens of pilots. And the ramming sortie of April 7 wasn’t a kamikaze mission in the narrow sense, since pilots could escape by parachute. Sixty percent of those involved did in fact survive. This was a much higher quotient than applied to submarine crews on the most risky missions.

Another variation of “self-sacrificial missions” was tried out in April 1945. On January 31 of that year, the Red Army had crossed the Oder and established itself on that river’s western banks. The German army had tried but failed to destroy the bridgeheads. The Luftwaffe was told to use any means to achieve this end in order to disrupt the Soviet advance on Berlin. On March 5, the idea was put forward of destroying the bridges over the Oder with a self-sacrificial mission, but first the Luftwaffe tried to accomplish this aim by conventional means. After that, too, failed, the German air force resorted to suicide sorties. Some of the former volunteers were recalled, and others stepped forward of their own free will. On April 17, one day after Soviet troops launched their major assault on Berlin, the first pilots crashed their planes into the bridges over the Oder. From a military standpoint, though, the mission was completely senseless since pontoon bridges could be repaired very quickly.

All in all, Hitler’s ideas of military sacrifice were astonishingly contradictory. He demanded that soldiers fight down to the final bullet and the last man. His orders forbade any retreats or premature surrenders, promoting fanaticism as the key to ultimate victory. Yet even as he thundered that “every bunker, every block of houses in every city and every German village must become a fortress before which either the enemy bled to death or the occupants perished in hand-to-hand combat,”⁶⁴⁵ he also accepted that survivors did exist. In the case of the failed defense of the German stronghold of Metz, he even commissioned a special armband in recognition of those who had taken part. He would have no doubt approved if the veterans of Metz had shot themselves with their final bullets. But he did not enforce his stand-and-die demands, although hundreds of thousands of soldiers who had followed to the letter his commands to hold out had lost their lives. Hitler was indifferent to the number of dead. He considered massive casualties to be part of the destiny of the German people, locked in a struggle for total victory or total defeat. Nonetheless, he shied away from explicitly ordering suicide commandos, just as he didn’t demand poison gas be used as the final stage of a total war.

ITALIAN WEAKLINGS AND RUSSIAN BEASTS

The reference frame of German soldiers firmly anchored the virtues of following orders, doing one’s duty, and fighting bravely to the last, and this ethos made itself apparent throughout the stories soldiers told about their own battle experiences—and even more so when they discussed comrades, enemies, and allies.

With few exceptions, German soldiers in all three military branches had an extremely negative view of Italians. Wehrmacht troops had difficulty understanding Italian behavior, which they perceived as tantamount to an unwillingness to fight. Their commentary was correspondingly dismissive. Italian behavior was a “tragedy.”⁶⁴⁶ “If only those blasted Italians… would do something,” one POW carped.⁶⁴⁷ Other telling excerpts from the protocols: “They have no self-confidence”;⁶⁴⁸ “They’re in a blue funk”;⁶⁴⁹ they “were a frightful lot!”⁶⁵⁰ “The dirty dogs,” groused another German soldier, “give themselves up if they have the slightest trouble!”⁶⁵¹ “They’re so terribly soft,” concurred someone else.⁶⁵² Militarily, Germany’s Italian allies were seen as useless. “You can only consider 130,000 Italians equal to about 10,000 Germans,” reckoned one POW.⁶⁵³ Another joked that every Italian tank carried with it a white flag,⁶⁵⁴ while someone else quipped that “if [our enemies] were only the Italians then the B.D.M. [the League of German Maidens] and the old peasants from the CHIEMSEE would be quite enough.”⁶⁵⁵ German soldiers mocked Benito Mussolini’s pretensions: “The Italians are supposed to be descended from the Romans, but the Romans would have achieved more with spears and shields than they have!”⁶⁵⁶ In short, German soldiers found that Italians “are the worst soldiers we have anywhere in EUROPE.”⁶⁵⁷