The Wehrmacht was careful to protect the prestige of their accolades by clearly defining when they should be awarded and introducing rules to ensure that they reflected true achievement and service. With the massive number of Iron Crosses handed out, it was hardly possible to prevent abuse, yet the transparency of the accolade system during World War II still made it much more widely accepted than the system in place in World War I. The Wehrmacht also did its best to commend soldiers as quickly as possible. Dönitz was not averse to awarding Knight’s Crosses over the radio if a submarine captain reported achieving a particularly significant victory. Nazi propaganda constantly featured the bearers of awards for extraordinary bravery, and Goebbels made a handful of them into full-fledged media stars.⁷⁹ Significantly, in designing such medals, the military downplayed the swastika symbol. The exception was the German Cross (Gold Class), which led conservatives, in the words of one commentary, “to feel less than enthusiastic… about the presumptuous National Socialist emblem.”⁸⁰

The symbolism of and policies with which awards were bestowed were designed to create a sense of social acknowledgment, and this anchored military values deep within soldiers’ frames of reference. As we will see, the normative models that resulted influenced how German men perceived the world and, in the majority of cases, how they acted as well. But those models didn’t necessarily transfer to Nazi ideology; indeed, emphasis on ideology seems to have engendered resistance. As historian Ralph Winkle determined in conjunction with World War I, only in a minority of cases did individual pride at receiving an accolade lead to an acceptance of the political leadership’s concurrent and comprehensive expectations concerning individual behavior.⁸¹

Against the backdrop of a social culture of categorical inequality and a Wehrmacht culture emphasizing the military values of hardness and bravery, we can reconstruct the contours of the typical soldier’s frame of reference as he went to war. Significantly, the central values of this orientation remained stable throughout the war, even as soldiers’ appraisals of the military leadership and the National Socialist system changed markedly. The military reference frame also obtained across individual differences of politics, “philosophy,” and character. In terms of their high estimation of the military values just sketched out, out-and-out National Socialists did not differ from committed anti-Nazis, which is why the two groups didn’t behave differently during the war itself. The main differences, as we will discuss later, occurred chiefly between Wehrmacht soldiers and the Waffen SS.

Fighting, Killing, and Dying

GUNNING PEOPLE DOWN

They say that war brutalizes, that soldiers are turned into beasts by the experience of violence, by being confronted with mutilated bodies and dead comrades or, in the case of a campaign of annihilation, with masses of murdered men, women, and children. Even the Wehrmacht and the SS were concerned that constant exposure to extreme violence, be it as witnesses or perpetrators, would damage soldiers’ “manly discipline” and lead them to engage in unconstrained, unregulated brutality—at the cost of the efficiency needed for both World War II and mass exterminations.⁸³ The idea of war brutalizing soldiers plays a central role in social-psychological research on violence.⁸⁴ Scholars assume that extremely violent experiences change the way people evaluate their worlds and make them more prone to violent acts of their own. Autobiographies and war fiction reinforce the impression that over time, soldiers become brutal as they themselves are exposed to increasing brutality.

But the words of the Luftwaffe first lieutenant cited above suggest that this notion may be misleading. The brutalization hypothesis excludes the possibility that violent behavior can be something attractive for which one “itches,” and it presumes, with no real proof, that people need to be somehow pre-trained to commit acts of extreme violence. Perhaps all that is needed is a weapon or an airplane, some adrenaline, the feeling of having power in areas where one normally has none, and a social framework in which killing is permissible, even desirable.