It is no doubt true that medals were sometimes handed out for political reasons alone, but those were exceptional cases. In general, there is no evidence for the frequent claim that members of the Waffen SS were more often decorated than others. “Abuse” was far more common within the Wehrmacht, where accolades were sometimes handed out for nonexistent achievements. For example, during Germany’s campaign against Norway, the Luftwaffe awarded Knight’s Crosses to five bomber pilots who had fictitiously claimed to have sunk enemy ships.⁷²¹ The veracity of airmen’s often grotesquely exaggerated claims could have been easily checked against navy radio surveillance. But for obvious reasons, the Luftwaffe leadership did not want to diminish the air force’s prestige in the interest of the truth.⁷²²

The German navy was equally prone to willful credulity when it came to kill reports by submarine commanders. Some officers were notorious for exaggerated tonnages sunk and still received medals. Part of common navy parlance was the expression “Schepke tonnage”—a reference to the fact that commander Joachim Schepke routinely overestimated the tonnage of the ships he had sunk. Rolf Thomsen was another commander whose reports were absurdly optimistic, and he received the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves for his efforts. On two patrols, for example, he claimed to have sunk a destroyer, two corvettes, six freighters, and an escort carrier. There was only proof of one of these vessels having been truly sunk. Late in the war, when there were few triumphs to cheer, the navy leadership was eager to believe positive reports from their commanding officers.⁷²³ Although no one could reconstruct whether or not Thomsen was intentionally lying, many people believed he was an empty boaster—a reputation that dogged him even as a navy officer after World War II for the Federal Republic of Germany.

Inflated reports by German navy men, however, paled in comparison to those of Enzo Grossi, an Italian submarine commander, who claimed to have sunk two American battleships in the southern Atlantic in 1942 and who was awarded the Gold Medal for Bravery by Mussolini and the Knight’s Cross by Hitler. Nazi newsreels repeatedly featured the courageous commander peering bare-chested through his periscope.⁷²⁴ After the war, it emerged that Grossi hadn’t sunk any ships at all. Right-wing circles in Italy refused to accept this, spreading a conspiracy theory that the Americans had constructed replicas of the two battleships Grossi had destroyed in an attempt to cover up their losses. Grossi’s medal for bravery was revoked posthumously.⁷²⁵

All in all, Wehrmacht soldiers accepted the system of incentives created by the political and military leadership with very little criticism and integrated it into their personal frames of reference. The surveillance protocols show that the lure of medals and other decorations was an excellent motivational tool. The only griping centered around whether specific accolades had indeed been awarded fairly and whether superior officers were applying award criteria consistently. Bearers of the Knight’s Cross who put on too many airs were jokingly referred to as “tin collars,”⁷²⁶ and there was minor criticism about the design of certain medals. “The Knight’s Cross set with diamonds is a frightful thing,” complained one Luftwaffe lieutenant. “You give diamonds to a woman but not to a fighter pilot.”⁷²⁷ The preponderance of decorations also came in for sarcasm. “It’s only the Captains of the BERLIN river steamers who have no special decoration,” scoffed one submarine officer in November 1940.⁷²⁸ Jokes about Göring were particularly popular, especially after he became the sole recipient of the special “Grand Cross of the Iron Cross” in July 1940. On February 1, 1945, First Lieutenant Hartigs of Luftwaffe Fighter Wing 26 asked ironically: “Don’t you know the ‘mammoth cross’? At the end of this war, in which we shall be victorious, GÖRING is going to get the Mammoth Cross of the Grand Cross with Diamonds on an S.P. mounting.”⁷²⁹

ITALIANS AND JAPANESE