Robert McNamara once said, “War is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend. Our, judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily.” No one understands this more intently, or experiences this more profoundly, than the warrior on the field of battle, the soldier on the front line. World War II was not unlike any other war in this respect. The ordinary German soldier, the Landser, experienced this conflict as soldiers have experienced combat in other wars, both previous and subsequent. Fighting along the Eastern Front, however, was a much more brutal and violent form of combat than was seen in other arenas of the European Theater. To truly understand the World War II experience, one must study and explore this dimension of the conflagration.
Stephen G. Fritz, professor of German and European studies at East Tennessee State University, looks at the war from the German point of view in his article, “’We are Trying...to Change The Face of the World’—Ideology and Motivation in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front: The View From Below”, printed in the Journal of Military History. He further explores the experiences of the German soldier in his book Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II. Although the book does look at the Wehrmacht as a whole, his primary focus is on the Eastern Front. Fritz examines the experiences and motivations of the soldier on the front lines and the physical, emotional, and psychological hardships that the average Landser endured.
Typically, when dealing with military history, the tendency is to take a top down approach. That is, many scholarly works deal with the overall generalities of war at the operational, command, and logistical level. Historians often overlook the personality of war. What makes Fritz’s work unique, and an important addition to the body of scholarly work on the conflict, is that he looks at things “from below.” Fritz believes that to truly understand war and combat, it is important to study and attempt to understand the experience of the common soldier, the front line troops who fought and died.
History from the top down tends to sanitize war. History often contributes to the romanticization of war and portrays combat in vague and abstract ways, ignoring the brutality and the physical, emotional, and psychological strain that constitutes the basis of everyday life for the soldier on the front. Fritz understands that the verisimilitude of war is actually to be found in “the common swarm life of mankind.” The common soldier has often been overlooked by history. He is at the center of events in war, yet the focus has tended to be at the top, with the soldiers looked upon as an “anonymous crowd that just receives orders.” To truly understand the vagaries of war, one must understand the common experiences of ordinary people. The study of the everyday life of the Landser is a study of the War in the East on its most basic level.
To this end, Fritz relies heavily on personal accounts of soldiers on the front, the voices of the Landsers themselves. He relies not on memoirs or recollections of soldiers long after the war was over, but rather on the words that soldiers wrote while they were there, fighting and dying. The stories, the triumphs and the horrors, that make up the core of Fritz’s work, come from the diaries of the Landsers and the letters that they sent home. Fritz views these letters and personal journals as the most intimate portrayal of the war available. These letters are not clouded by the fog of memory or by self-serving changes in the telling of events. War consists of incalculable individual emotions, experiences, and actions, and Fritz attempts to capture them in their most raw form. However, even in doing so, Fritz maintains a neutral tone. Fritz’s writings are about understanding, not casting blame or making excuses.
In “’We are Trying...to Change the Face of the World’—Ideology and Motivation in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front: The View From Below”, (which is essentially the basis for the eighth chapter of Frontsoldaten), Fritz examines the motivations that drove the typical Landser to fight so tenaciously in the East, committing atrocities along the way and willingly following grievous orders with seeming enthusiasm. Fritz postulates that a combination of factors led to this facet of the War on the Eastern Front. One idea was that a new type of soldier had been bred from the changing model of warfare beginning with the trench warfare of The Great War. This new soldier was able to adapt at will to the ever-changing circumstances of combat and was harder, with a stronger constitution than the warriors of previous generations. He saw warfare in the same way one sees a job in peacetime. He, in essence, became a “day laborer of death.” This new soldier was harder, with a stronger constitution than the warriors of previous generations. He saw not only pain and carnage in war, but also gratification and beauty. Even in the face of devastating losses on the battlefield, this new breed of warrior, this modern Landser, did not suffer despondency, but rather a stubborn sense that he must continue to fight on
A second reason Fritz gives for the Landsers’ determination stemmed from a deep sense of camaraderie and community. In warfare, all social and class distinctions become moot, effectively leveling the odds and making equals of the soldiers on the front. War created unity, a sense of community, and common purpose among the Landsers. It was a sense that they belonged to something and were a part of something greater. When the fighting was at its most brutal, the Landser felt a “sense of responsibility for ones comrades, even if one no longer knew them.” This feeling of responsibility was felt not just for fellow soldiers, but for the people back home as well. Soldiers at the front were keenly aware of the situation in Germany and of the destruction caused by the Allied bombing, and felt that they must also fight for the people on the home front.
Ideology also played a key role in the actions of German soldiers on the front. The average Landser believed to some degree that the Nazi State had “redeemed the failures of World War I and had restored, both individually and collectively, a uniquely German sense of identity.” This belief was an inherent part of the idea of Volksgemeinschaft promoted by the Nazi regime, the idea that a national community existed among the German people that transcended social and class position. Many also believed in the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy. Continuous barrages of propaganda bolstered these beliefs. This propaganda was highly successful because it was spread along the front soldier to soldier, not by officers in the rear. As the prospect of victory became dubious, the Landser on the front tended to look to the propaganda even more for inspiration and morale. Conditions in Russia served to reinforce the Nazi propaganda among the soldiers of the Wehrmacht. Upon entering Russia the soldiers viewed the famine and destruction wrought upon the people by Stalinist policies. Even working class soldiers expressed disgust towards what they saw as disparity and disillusionment among the people in what was supposed to be a workers’ paradise. As such, the typical Landser viewed Russians not as humans, but as animals. In this sense, the average German soldier on the Eastern Front believed that these “vermin” must be destroyed before they spread throughout the rest of Europe.
Fritz continues his examination of the experience of the frontline German soldier in Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II. The book, going further, examines the life of a German soldier on the front as an aggregate experience, examining the totality of the War from the beginning of training and indoctrination until the end of the ordeal. Again, Fritz uses letters and diaries to portray the common bonds of warfare as well as the idea of “combat as a deeply private experience.”
The life of a soldier begins with training. In Germany, this was no different. The Wehrmacht was perhaps the most well trained army of the time. It was this training that helped contribute to their doggedness in action. For future soldiers of the Wehrmacht, this training began in childhood. Young boys first joined the Hitler Youth, and next went to the Labor Service. The next inevitable step was the Wehrmacht. The Wehrmacht used intense degradation ceremonies designed to induce motivation and obedience. This approach was designed to prepare Landsers for situations where routine would save them both physically and mentally. This training produced the ability later to forge fighting units out of fragments of other units and have them operate successfully as a cohesive unit.
Fritz devotes most of the book to the actual combat experiences of the soldiers on the front. He demonstrates through their own words that combat can mean different things to different men. To some, war means chaos, while others find a sense of beauty and freedom on the field of battle. Other common themes are feelings of shock, despair, and of transformation. The book deals with the physical and psychological stresses of war. There are descriptions of the shock of seeing the first dead and feelings of loss of innocence. In the book, Fritz addresses the difference between the cinematic depictions of combat and actual life on the front, often tedious and mind numbing, interjected with intense periods of chaotic violence. To some Landsers, combat, and its associated sights, sounds, and smells, became as normal as everyday life back home. To many, thoughts became impersonal and loneliness began to set in; feelings magnified by the unfathomable magnitude of the war.
Fritz uses the writings of the soldiers themselves to chronicle the sights, sounds, and smells of battle and their emotional and psychological impact. Many Landsers described feeling an intense relationship with death during combat and a sense of being hunted. One Landser described the sensation: “Pitilessly, dangerously romantic, men stalking other men in a perilous contest of chance where only death proved triumphant.” Heavy artillery or aerial bombardment had a devastating psychological effect, and there was a feeling that fate ruled on the battlefield. Also vividly described are the visions of carnage and the effect that it had on the soldiers. Some described seeing the personal effects and mementos of the dead strewn across the battlefield. Others remarked that looking at the torn bodies of the dead, it was hard not to envision oneself in such a fashion. One sight the Landsers found particularly troublesome was the war’s “awful impact on horses.” Wounded horses, thrashing about in pain, would sometimes struggle to hold on to life even through several shots fired by soldiers trying to put them out of their misery. “Horses, ripped apart by shells, their eyes bulging out from empty red sockets,” haunted men’s dreams. The most prevalent feeling, however, was fear. “Fear was the real enemy...fear of death or of cowardice, fear of the conflict within the spirit...a simple fear of showing fear.”
Finally, Fritz demonstrates that even at the end of the war, things were not easy for the Landser. The ones who were lucky were returning to a land that was destroyed and a nation that no longer existed. Often, they had difficulty reassimilating into society. Generally speaking, they believed that they were good men and were unable to fathom why what they had done in war was considered evil. They had only done these things, after all, in service to their country. Many faced depression and disillusionment and lost faith in politics altogether. Countless men were returning home who felt that the years of the war had been lost or stolen from them, and they would never be able to get them back. This was especially true for those who remained in Russian captivity for years after the war. Some had never had a chance to begin a career and felt left behind in the progression of life. Mostly, though, there was an overwhelming feeling of the senselessness of the war.
War is a complicated, brutal, and trying endeavor. War creates complex, often conflicting emotions. Landsers on the Eastern front had the unique condition of being both perpetrators, willingly killing innocents and committing heinous atrocities, as well as victims, suffering physical and psychological traumas and “crushing anxieties of death and killing.” To the average Landser on the front, war was a complex endeavor. It could be brutal and horrific, yet strangely beautiful at the same time. By allowing the participants to tell their own stories, through letters and journals, at the time their emotions were most raw, Fritz demonstrates effectively the complicated and contradictory nature of war and the sentiments it begets. While there are some flaws in his approach, such as the heavy reliance on Guy Sajer’s The Forgotten Soldier, a work that is historically controversial, the end result is a moving and authentic account of the life of the average German soldier on the front lines.
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