Review: Wolfram Wette's The Wehrmacht

After the end of World War II, the generals and senior officer corps of the Wehrmacht (German Army) successfully promoted the "clean hands" myth that they had nothing to do with mass murder of Jews and other civilians during the eastern campaign.  These atrocities were the work of the SS and the Nazi Party leadership; the officers and the troops of the Wehrmacht behaved honorably in battle and "kept their hands clean."  The "clean hands" legend persisted for nearly 50 years, and it is this myth that Wolfram Wette, a professor of history at the University of Freiburg,  explodes in his 2006 book The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality (Harvard University, translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider, original German edition Die Wehrmacht: Feindbilder, Vernichtungskrieg, Legenden).  Wette convincingly documents that the military not only shared the virulent anti-Semitism and racism of the Nazi leaders, but actively participated in horrible war crimes, including the Holocaust. 

Professor Wette begins his study with a useful history of anti-Semitic currents in the German military which he traces back to the Bismarck era.  By the time of the invasion of the Soviet Union, the generals had successfully indoctrinated the troops that the enemy were sub-human "Jewish Bolsheviks" who must be combated like a "poisonous parasite":

"...the portrayal of the enemy in strongly anti-Semitic terms prepared millions of soldiers for the possible forms that a future war might take - forms that were in no way connected to with facing the soldiers of enemy nations in battle.  A direct path leads from this material for indoctrinating racial hatred to the orders issued in the spring and summer of 1941 at the highest levels of the German military. The orders given to the GErman forces on the eastern front in fact concerned not just the defeat of the Red Army of the Soviet Union but also the extermination of large groups of noncombatants, who had been declared enemies on the basis of racist and political criteria."

Professsor Wette then documents some of the most egregious crimes of the Wehrmacht, such as its decisive role in the massacre in Babi Yar, where soldiers participated in killing more than 30,000 Jewish victims over a 3-day period, and then, when in retreat two years later dug up and burned the bodies in an effort to hide the crime.  But there is much that Wette leaves out of this section of th book.  Other researchers have documented the role of the Wehrmacht in the death by starvation of 2 million Soviet POWs as well as brutal atrocities in Serbia.  And there is little in the book concerning the Wehrmacht's participation in the Holocaust in providing logistical support in the transport of Jews as well as guarding the death camps. 

More than 11 million German men were active in the Wehrmacht at one time or another during the Nazi period, and Wette cites letters and diaries of soldiers to show that the troops were not simply obeying "orders from above", but rather supported the "mission" set forth by Hitler and his generals.  On the other hand, there was no opportunity to refuse combat duty except through a medical discharge.  Only one group of conscientious objectors - the Jehovah's Witnesses - refused enlistment in the Wehrmacht, and they were summarily executed. 

There were depressingly few instances of enlisted men objecting to, much less refusing, orders to commit crimes against non-combatant civilians.  Wette tells the story of one sergeant, Anton Schmid, who single-handedly saved the lives of 250 Jews and was therefore exectud by his commanders.  Anton Schmid's courage and humanity needs to be widely publicized and celebrated.

The strongest section of The Wehrmacht deals with the postwar construction of the "clean hands" myth and its gradual unraveling, beginning with the work fo Manfred Messerschmidt in the 1980s, and then reaching a climax with the Wehrmacht Exhibition  (1995-1999) where more than 1.2 million Germans were exposed for the first time to photographs and written documents concerning the Wehrmacht's role in the Holocaust and other war crimes.  But the myth of Wehrmacht's "clean hands" lives on even today in right-wing nationalist circles.  Recently, the American political historian Professor Paul Gottfried published a piece claiming that widespread participation by the Wehrmacht was a "leftist lie" meant to demoralize the German people and prevent them from achieving their nationalist destiny. 

Comments

[Zyme]

I wonder what brought about the idea among the war participants that they needed to portrait themselves as having "clean hands", when they had simply followed the course of their times.

I would rather expect that only a minority wanted to spin their background, while the rest simply adapted to the new times with good consciousness. That at least is the impression I got from those participants I knew.

[guy7]

no doubt the public knew, 17 million people murdered, the businesses support and supplying it and all the activity surrounding it, no doubt. just as the SS who threw the xyclon-b in the hatches did not ho into the chambers, so they could say "i never worked in the gas chambers". Knew the crime being committed and even while it was going on, tried to separate themselves from it. It would be hard to be a child or grand child if such a person but trying to cover it up will not help. learn from it do it is not repeated ad we see in the Middle East today. We still see anti-Semitism, hatred if Christians, hatred if Muslims, and many others. the seeds of such atrocities still exist.