At the beginning of World War II, German soldiers were far less prone to see the conflict as senseless. Quick German victories were followed by relatively long periods of respite, and Wehrmacht soldiers thought that they would personally benefit from Germany’s war of conquest.⁸⁹² But by fall 1941, when success stories became rarer and long, drawn-out battles increasingly taxed German troops, “worldview” rationales and motivations declined in importance. The predominant feeling among soldiers was that they had been abandoned to a monotonous endeavor which had little to do with their own lives, although their own survival depended on it. There is not one sociological study of World War II that fails to emphasize the relatively minor role played by ideology and abstract convictions in the daily practice of war. Group dynamics, technology, space, and time set the parameters that mattered to soldiers and allowed them to orient themselves. Given the dominance of the here-and-now, the only difference between what soldiers did and what people in modern societies always do, when confronted with a task that they are supposed to carry out, was the fact that the former entailed life or death. If you work for an energy, insurance, or chemical company, “capitalism” as such does not help you perform your job, and if you’re a policeman handing out a speeding ticket or a court bailiff repossessing a flat-screen television from a debtor, you don’t think that you are upholding the values of freedom and democracy. You’re only carrying out a duty you have been charged with. Soldiers do their jobs in war using violence. That’s all that distinguishes their actions from those of other workers, employees, and government officials. The results of soldiers’ work are also different: casualties and destruction.

MILITARY VALUES

The immediate social environment, the modern work ethic, and fascination with technology may indeed yield something like a “universal soldier.” At the same time, different perspectives exist on war and violence, and we can identify nationally specific elements in the formation of military frames of reference. For the Wehrmacht in World War II, these elements included concepts of honor, toughness, and sacrifice to a degree that no longer applies within today’s German military.⁸⁹³ Even World War I did not see such an extreme emphasis on the idea of being duty-bound.⁸⁹⁴ Although the dividing lines may be blurry, Wilhelmine Germany, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and today’s Federal Republic all featured different sets of military values.

The differences are even greater in the international arena, as our brief comparison of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan showed. The central values for Wehrmacht soldiers were bravery, obedience, devotion to duty, and emotional hardness. Those were the key factors determining how soldiers perceived and evaluated their own behavior.⁸⁹⁵ This frame of reference, already in place during peacetime, remained remarkably stable throughout World War II.

But even though soldiers began with this core set of values, they arrived at differing views on the ultimate sense of the war. A committed Nazi saw things differently than a former communist, and the same was true for a fifty-two-year-old general and a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant. Their basic understanding of the military, though, remained the same, and in battle it was irrelevant how soldiers’ individual values had been formed, as long as they stuck to the core virtues as a guide for their interpretations and actions. Men like Axel von dem Bussche and Otto-Ernst Remer, both highly decorated battalion commanders, hardly differed in terms of their military ethos, even though the former was a major figure within the German resistance, and the latter was responsible for smashing the anti-Nazi opposition in Berlin.

The consequences that emerged from this positively charged canon of values were far-reaching. Few people seriously questioned either the Wehrmacht or the war itself, even if they believed Germany was heading for defeat or were outraged by atrocities. The idea that a soldier had to do his duty under all circumstances was so firmly anchored in soldiers’ frame of reference that it could only be shaken by the immediate prospect of death or complete military defeat. The imperative to act according to military norms only ended when the Wehrmacht order collapsed and soldiers could no longer see any sense in sacrificing their lives for a lost cause. Self-sacrifice for its own sake was never a part of the classic military canon of values, and the Nazi leadership had little success over the course of the war in radicalizing soldiers’ attitudes.