Rearmament without the Myth of the Clean Wehrmacht

[Orcbuster]

I mean the clean wehrmacht myth was never a thing in the countries they occupied and most of the founders of NATO had been occupied. In Norway for example germans in general were absolutely hated in the immediate post war period and for a long time after. I imagine it was much the same for Belgium, Netherlands, France and Denmark. It was a big deal and controversy when the bundeswehr were allowed to participate in joint exercises in Norway for example for the first time in the 80s and that brought out a LOT of old anger. It didn't really die until the nazi generation and the generation that fought them started to fade out.

In the end the clean wehrmacht myth is irrelevant. NATO needed the germans and there was never really any other option than to let them in.

 

[Quintuplicate]

While very true, and something that has been discussed at length in other threads, it might be best to move any discussion of Japanese War Crimes, and the way it pales in comparison to how successive German governments have handled their legacy to a different thread lest it derail the current issue under discussion.

As the creator of the thread, I don't mind.

 

[CalBear]

As the creator of the thread, I don't mind.

Okay boys and girls, children of all ages, Japanese War Crimes achievement unlocked.

 

[CalBear]

Or committing suicide in their bunkers, for that matter.

Yep. Iwabuchi Sanji, the naval officer who defied Yamashita's orders to make Manila an Open City (and was the CO of the Kirishima when the Washington tore here to pieces of the Guadalcanal in 1942) would have been a real candidate to dance Danny Deever. He committed suicide (NOT Seppuku, he ate his sidearm, honor achievement not unlocked) once it became clear his idiotic decision to fight it out was failed.

 

[Belisarius II]

Okay boys and girls, children of all ages, Japanese War Crimes achievement unlocked.

Ok. The point I was making is that many countries have gone though periods of moral collapse, and come back into the "light". Germany at least suffered total defeat, and a national cleansing process, where crimes were punished, and amends were made. Many other countries never went though such a process, and some even have the same government in charge today. If those countries can be trusted, or at least hoped to act responsible with armed forces, then Germany can to.

 

[Jürgen]

I mean the clean wehrmacht myth was never a thing in the countries they occupied and most of the founders of NATO had been occupied. In Norway for example germans in general were absolutely hated in the immediate post war period and for a long time after. I imagine it was much the same for Belgium, Netherlands, France and Denmark. It was a big deal and controversy when the bundeswehr were allowed to participate in joint exercises in Norway for example for the first time in the 80s and that brought out a LOT of old anger. It didn't really die until the nazi generation and the generation that fought them started to fade out.

In the end the clean wehrmacht myth is irrelevant. NATO needed the germans and there was never really any other option than to let them in.

Yes the clean Wehrmacht seems pretty much a American thing, Germans knew it wasn’t clean, the rest of continental NATO knew it wasn’t clean. But continental Europe also knew that it was necessary to move on, when you‘re dealing with ruined cities, large number of refugees, rationing, you’re too busy to obsess over the past even the near past. Everyone was still very furious at the Germans which sometimes boiled over into the political rhetoric and sometimes some less than excellent customer service to the German visitors, but in general people tried their best to move on for both economic reasons, but also because people would prefer not to deal with a Red Army occupation.

 

[Hugh Third of Five]

At what point did not preventing a War Crime from being carried out become complicity in War Crimes? When allowing illegal orders to be carried out become as bad as following illegal orders?

These days, if you know an order to be illegal, you’re meant to do all you can to prevent it being carried out. “We were only following orders” is no longer a valid excuse. Is that a post-Nuremberg thing?

At the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal it was established that officers are responsible if they don't prevent the men under them from committing war crimes. Not sure about regular soldiers being legally complicit for not preventing them though.

Have you read about the relatively recent research carried out based on recorded conversations between German prisoners of war? It's pretty clear that rape by German soldiers in the East was widespread and not only in Brothels. Given the level of crimes commited I tend to lean towards believing that a large part of the "clean" Wehrmacht just did not have the opportunity to commit them, not that they would not.

As others have said, even without a Clean Wehrmacht myth, the Bundeswehr will come into existence. There might be more vetting of officers and a larger allied involvement though.

It is really disturbing how even an already appalling record of behavior can simply get worse.

Jesus wept!

Secrets of the Dead had a good episode about this.

Secrets of the Dead | Bugging Hitler’s Soldiers | Season 12 | Episode 2 | PBS

Watch the full episode of Secrets of the Dead: Bugging Hitler’s Soldiers

www.pbs.org

 

[Post]

So if someone on the Left rightly hates Fascism, and is so offended by the thought Nazi Germany had anything to do with Socialism you need to think again, it did.

Usually the comparison of the nazi's to socialism is brought up (or at least seems to be) to discredit the left.
As several users have demonstrated, fascism also has component of capitalism. So you might as well compare it to that. Someone to the right of the political spectrum would be just as uncomfortable as someone to the left is. So I think it's better to be careful with such comparisons.

 

[Belisarius II]

Usually the comparison of the nazi's to socialism is brought up (or at least seems to be) to discredit the left.
As several users have demonstrated, fascism also has component of capitalism. So you might as well compare it to that. Someone to the right of the political spectrum would be just as uncomfortable as someone to the left is. So I think it's better to be careful with such comparisons.

Being compared to Nazism, or Socialism usually has little to do with economic theory. People on the Left usually throw that insult when they want to accuse someone of disrespecting the rights of people. People on the Right usually throw the Socialist charge when someone want's to create or expand a Social Welfare benefit. Most of the time the charges are just hyper partisan nonsense. Most people who use those words in political debate have no idea what they mean.

I once had a discussion with a guy on the Left who thought Conservatives were like Fascists. When I asked him to define Fascism he got lost. So I went over with him what most Conservatives believe. Faith in God, religious liberty, right to life, respect for the family, individual responsibility, economic liberty, small government, Federalism, low taxes, free trade, free markets, and the promotion of human rights. Then we went over what Fascism believes. Man belongs to the State, there is no God, the State is the source of morality, all individual rights are subordinate to the State, unlimited government, everything is under the control of the State, and the State is above the law.

After going over these general ideas he no longer thought that. Now one can disagree on some of these issues, and to the degree of these Rights, but to say Conservatism is interchangeable with Fascism is nonsense. Discussing what's happened to the so called Conservative Movement today has to be taken to current political chat board.

 

[Post]

After going over these general ideas he no longer thought that. Now one can disagree on some of these issues, and to the degree of these Rights, but to say Conservatism is interchangeable with Fascism is nonsense.

So is suggesting socialism is interchangable with fascism.

 

[Captain Homicide]

Snip

From your research what percentage of the Heer during WW2 (particularly in the last 2 years) would you classify as true believers in Nazism?

I’d say at least a third though it’s likely more.

 

[CalBear]

From your research what percentage of the Heer during WW2 (particularly in the last 2 years) would you classify as true believers in Nazism?

I’d say at least a third though it’s likely more.

True Believers? No more than a third overall, The number shift based on the age group. The younger troops, who had spend their teen and even some pre-teen years in the Hitler Youth tended to be much more in indoctrinated and more pure in their beliefs, as would be expected, while their uncles, older brothers and even fathers, were a lot more skeptical of the whole belief system, although they might strongly support the government because "it's the economy, stupid" is a real thing and the Nazis manipulated the economy to look a lot better than it really was. That would actually apply outside of the Heer, or even the Wehrmacht, to the general population.

The question then becomes what percentage of True Believers could make the leap from "yellow star wearing bum" and boycotting a business or even verbal abuse, to the "throw this five year old kid off the bridge" stage. Way too many did, that is pretty obvious, but I've never run across any study that touches on just what the percentage is. The post-war studies are, IMO, pretty useless, only the hardest of hard core are going to look a WAllied interrogator, or West German researcher in the eye and admit that they believed that throwing them off the bridges was a good idea and it's a shame that there weren't enough bridges. Most of the people who were that far through the Looking Glass wound up in the Waffen SS as volunteers.

 

[Belisarius II]

So is suggesting socialism is interchangable with fascism.

No I'm not suggesting that. When I was talking about Fascism I was saying Fascist States had command economies, like Socialist States do, but allowed private ownership of the means of production. Socialism has so many forms you have to talk about many different situations. Modern European countries have Democratic systems, with degrees of Socialist economic policies, such as welfare benefits, and economic regulations. China is an anti Democratic Socialist State. Japan is Democratic, practices a lot of State economic planning, but has few welfare benefits. The United States is Democratic, has some welfare benefits, but does little State economic planning. On the whole today China is probable closest to being run like a Fascist State. All powerful 1 Party State, no human rights, command economy, but allows some businesses to be privately owned. In short it's just complicated.

 

[Marmeladenbrot]

The West de-Nazified effectively. The USSR did it in a way that they thought was quite efficient (they were wrong, BTW, at least based on the relative strength of the AfD in what once was the GDR/DDU).

Uhm, no, the West didn't de-Nazified effectively. That's a Myth.
And the rise of the AfD have many reasons, but the De-Nazification in the Soviet Zone isn't one of them.

 

[Quintuplicate]

Since everyone here is going off-topic, does anyone know a place where you can get US and German military personnel statistics for World War II?

 

[Captain Homicide]

German military personnel statistics for World War II?

These are good sources.

 

[AJE]

I think the key question isn't were all Germans bad, clearly they weren't. What happened to Germany wasn't that the people were bad, it's that evil was allowed to reign, and impose it's values on society. Germany isn't the only country this has happened to, and it won't be the last. In Gibbon's Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire he talks about how when the Romans had virtuous emperors a sort of cycle of virtue spread though government, and down to the people. But when the emperor was a corrupt madman a cycle of the worst behavior spread downward.

It's timeless lesson, as old has mankind. History is the story of crimes, and follies, and the only thing we can do is try to learn from them, do better, and move on. The Germans after all aren't morally worse then other human beings. After those most responsible for the crimes of the Nazis were punished the Germans needed to absorb their lessons, and move on.

The concept that "clearly all Germans weren't bad" or "Germans aren't morally worse than other human beings" is similar to the Clean Wehrmacht myth though, as pointed out in comments:

Spoiler: 8 quoted comments

The more people at the time of the new Bundeswehr's creation were reminded of the German Army's criminal history, the harder it would have been to support it. Blaming everything on Hitler, and the SS came in handy, but it was a lie. The American People had little understanding of the conduct of the German Army, but the people of occupied Europe knew the truth.

And burned towns, shot, and hanged hundreds of thousands of civilian hostages, helped deport millions of Jews to their deaths, and millions of civilians to slave labor in Germany. The record of the crimes of the Wehrmacht is hard to understate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_of_the_Wehrmacht
Carrying out such policies as the Night & Fog Order, the Commissar Order, and the Commando Order were all criminal, even by German Law. In the war in the East few had clean hands.


Typical of the German Army propaganda was the following passage from a pamphlet issued in June 1941:


German Army propaganda often gave extracts in newsletters concerning the missions for German troops in the East:"It is necessary to eliminate the red sub-humans, along with their Kremlin dictators. German people will have a great task to perform the most in its history, and the world will hear more about that this task will be completed till the end.[27]

As a result of this sort of propaganda, the majority of the Wehrmacht Heer officers and soldiers tended to regard the war in Nazi terms, seeing their Soviet opponents as so much sub-human trash deserving to be trampled upon.[12] One German soldier wrote home to his father on 4 August 1941 that:


In 1945 millions of German Soldiers acted as if they had woken from a 12 year bad dream. Everyone was desperate to escape, moral, and legal responsibility by pointing to someone else. Pointing up, and saying "We only followed orders", was the most popular defense. "It was war, and terrible things happen in war." was another. When you dehumanize others any act of cruelty, and sadism is possible. The Racist, and lawless mindset of the Wehrmacht leadership trickled down to the rank & file soldier, making unlimited evil possible, and destroyed the humanity of millions of normal human beings. The moral destruction of Germany was one of Hitler's greatest crimes.

I guess we are talking about a question of degrees. The kind of pillaging your talking about, that was carried out by the Allies wasn't systematic, and happened when they first moved in. Civilians in Populated Allied rear areas weren't starving, the local economy was actually encouraged to keep working, and self government restarted. The British People were never occupied, except the Channel Islands, and never starved, but their diet was pretty lean. For the Germans everything, and everyone was for the taking, the whole time they were there, and all justice was summary. True Luftwaffe mechanics, (the Blackbirds) didn't engage in many war crimes, but the field service divisions did, and not just the elite Panzer Divisions. Luftwaffe infantry divisions engaged heavily in anti partisan operations in the East, hanging large numbers of women & children.

If we're talking about looting, and stealing no one was a bigger thief then Herman Goering. But then the whole leadership from Hitler on down, with few exception thought it was their right of conquest to steal artworks. Before the war in Germany anything of course owned by a Jew was for the taking, or at the least at a big markdown. During the war what would Jews need with property after they were deed?

So I would never accuse you of making apologies for these war crimes, but I think your underestimating just how widespread these activities went. Especially in the East it's hard to find many units of the Army, Luftwaffe, and certainly the SS who didn't commit war crimes. These crimes happened because the leadership encouraged it. I'm sure you know from many psychological studies how hard it is for an individual to keep to his moral principles when authority is pressuring them to do things they know are wrong. The power of group think can create a lynch mob mentality, where all reason, and morality go out the window. Germans are no less moral then other human beings, but in the Nazi Period humanity was tested, and found wanting.

Have you read about the relatively recent research carried out based on recorded conversations between German prisoners of war? It's pretty clear that rape by German soldiers in the East was widespread and not only in Brothels. Given the level of crimes commited I tend to lean towards believing that a large part of the "clean" Wehrmacht just did not have the opportunity to commit them, not that they would not.

As others have said, even without a Clean Wehrmacht myth, the Bundeswehr will come into existence. There might be more vetting of officers and a larger allied involvement though.

I remember watching a short interview with Simon Wiesenthal. He was telling how in the 60s, during a conference in Italy about the Holocaust, an old widow asked him if he only searched for those who killed jews or also other ethnicities. Wiesenthal answered "I search every criminal". So, the widow recounted how her husband was killed in a massacre that Wiesenthal never heard of, the Cephalonia Massacre.
The massacre was the nearly obliteration of the Italian 33rd Infantry Division Acqui. After the 8 september Armistice, a small firefight happened between German ships and an Italian artillery battery. What followed was a battle that lasted seven days. After the Italian soldiers surrendered after running out of munitions, the now prisoners were executed and the survivors loaded on ships to be deported in Germany. Those ships were then sunk by the allies. In numbers, 1315 Italian soldiers died in battle, 5155 were executed and about 3000 drowned; around 200 survivors spent the rest of the war doing forced labors.
When Wiesenthal tried to open an investigation about the massacre at the Dortmund's attorney , he clashed with a wall. Then he undestood that it was not the SS who committed the crime, but the Wehrmacht. And "the Wehrmacht was a sacred thing".
The Wehrmacht committed other massacres in the Aegean territories: Kos (102 officers and a veterinarian) and Rhodes (90 execution + 5800 prisoners drowned).

I think the Germans truly needed to feel separated from their recent past. Giving all responsibility to the SS was the quickest way to exorcise the collective fault of all the crimes committed during the war. The SS, with all their hateful actions and thinking, were just the perfect scapegoat. Giving the Wehrmacht their share of guilt probably felt to tiring, socially and spiritually speaking. Once people felt confortable in this construct, the "clean Wehrmacht" truly became a myth, one that nobody wanted to dissolve.
Only after many decades, when the war started to become "abstract" (when fewer and fewer people that lived it remained) the myth was seriously challenged in Germany.

The problem is roughly half of all men between the ages of 15 and 40 served in the German armed forces during WW2 (a pretty mind boggling figure). This means that even say 20 years later a huge chunk of the population served in the armed forces during WW2. But also an even larger chunk of the population's father, husband, son, brother, uncle, nephew, etc served in the German armed forces.

So yeah imagine wondering if your much loved relative was guilty of mass murder, or even how would you'd feel if you had been part of an organisation that was responsible for deliberate mass murder, geocide etc. And I don't even mean in the divorced dropping bombs on cities but actually shooting naked people in the back of the head over a pit of bodies way. Not too pleasant. Lots of cultural reasons to load it all on the SS and pretend the ordinary soldiers were either blameless or under 24 hour threat of SS firing squad if they baulked at anything.

It's comparatively easy to distance yourself from the Nazis and take a hard position against their beliefs, because the actually active identifiable baddie nazis were usually someone else or at the very least you could usually point to some Nazi group worse than you. Much harder to do that with an organisation that so many were involved in.



On a larger scale and outside of Germany, we wanted to know how to fight Russians, and the boys with most experience of doing that were the Germany 1941-45 army. So we developed a relationship with them and naturally they wanted us to know how it really was just the nasty old SS who did everything, because frankly pretty soon we didn't care because we had more pressing concerns, (which also required an active and effective West German army). The corollary of that was we weren't doing that with the Russian soldiers, because Russia was now our shared enemy with Germany and so we got a very lopsided side of the story.

So unless the Heer en masse literally goes on door to door killing their own families, not much


EDIT: Excellent post by Adelkman

One group of people who never bought the Wehrmacht/Nazi distinction was the GI's, as Bill Mauldin explained in Up Front, p. 50:

View attachment 587163

It depends on the time period. The Germans up through the early-60s were quite happy embrace it because, as had been observed here the bulk of the people who were in charge and made up the preponderance of society either were in the Wehrmacht or had direct family members who had been in the Wehrmacht. Plus, it dovetailed nicely with the desire for a “Year Zero”, to wipe the slate clean and let other elements of German society to try and piggy back on it with their own “Clean X” mythos.

The house of cards only really started to come under attack in the mid-60s, as the first generation who had no memory of the war or the deprivations immediately following it started to come of age and began to do what all young adults tend to do and question the commonly held beliefs of their parents. The result was that German academia actually wound up leading the pack in demolishing the myth during the 70s, with the historiographical shift spreading westward during the 80s partly as a result of that research.

It got a BIG boost in the 90s since the collapse of the USSR meant not only did researchers get access to Soviet records, but also German ones the Soviets had captured but then squirreled away without letting historians see them for reasons of their own (the Soviet/Russian relationship with the holocaust being it’s own bag of worms).

The common theme in these myths is an attempt to disconnect from the atrocities by isolating them to some particular group ("It was just the Nazis/SS/etc.") and keeping some group of Germans "clean" to allow the view that there were Germans that weren't bad during that time. Those Germans would presumably be used as a model and postwar Germany as a whole would be like that to regain dignity and respect. But breaking the myth leaves a reality after all those beliefs are dispelled- that there were no such "clean" Germans and all of them were criminals accountable for Nazi Germany's actions.

 

[Belisarius II]

The concept that "clearly all Germans weren't bad" or "Germans aren't morally worse than other human beings" is similar to the Clean Wehrmacht myth though, as pointed out in comments:
The common theme in these myths is an attempt to disconnect from the atrocities by isolating them to some particular group ("It was just the Nazis/SS/etc.") and keeping some group of Germans "clean" to allow the view that there were Germans that weren't bad during that time. Those Germans would presumably be used as a model and postwar Germany as a whole would be like that to regain dignity and respect. But breaking the myth leaves a reality after all those beliefs are dispelled- that there were no such "clean" Germans and all of them were criminals accountable for Nazi Germany's actions.

AJE: I don't think people are making the point you think they are. Speaking for myself my point was these horrendous crimes were wide spread, and not isolated. I was trying to give some explanation for how so many people could become so morally lost. Each individual human being is responsible for what they do, and not all members of the German armed forces committed crimes. It sounds like you are suggesting some type of collective guilt for an entire generation of Germans. I leave those kind of judgements in God's hands. "Not one of these - not one of this evil generation - shall see the good land that I swore to give to your ancestors" (Deut. 1:35).

And so what are we as human beings left to do? Are we all responsible as individuals for what our countries do? In Lincoln's 2nd inaugural he said "Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." That would seem to be supporting collective guilt, but he finished by saying. "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

I could go on with quotes about grace, but I'll spare everyone that, but I will say an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. We can't condemn everyone, without condemning ourselves. There were good people in Germany in the Nazi period, and that was a very hard time to be good, any light stands out in the darkness. For Germany to have a future people needed to have positive examples. What was necessary was for the Germans was to rise from the ashes of defeat, and learn something from it. Like Lincoln talking about the wealth of the bondsman's toil being suck, Germany was a smashed country in 1945, with starving people, and millions dead. Today Germany is a much better country, and society, so there was repentance, and goodness in the Germans.

 

[Peg Leg Pom]

Yes the clean Wehrmacht seems pretty much a American thing, Germans knew it wasn’t clean, the rest of continental NATO knew it wasn’t clean. But continental Europe also knew that it was necessary to move on, when you‘re dealing with ruined cities, large number of refugees, rationing, you’re too busy to obsess over the past even the near past. Everyone was still very furious at the Germans which sometimes boiled over into the political rhetoric and sometimes some less than excellent customer service to the German visitors, but in general people tried their best to move on for both economic reasons, but also because people would prefer not to deal with a Red Army occupation.

I think that as much as myth holds in Britain, (which isn't much) it's down to the North African Campaign which was as close as WWII came to a clean war.

 

[Raferty]

One thing that I always found undermining of the Clean Wehrmacht myth was that, even if we acknowledge the ideological proclivities of the Nazis (Lebensraum, Volksgemeinschaft, arbeit und brot) and the Prussian Officer Corps (tradition, monarchy, militarism) were not perfect matches, we know that on the question of Operation Barbarossa, there was no disagreement over the war crimes to come

Officers like Von Bock and Hoepner, typical examples of non-Nazis in the officer corps, were just as adamant and bloodthirsty regarding exterminating Jews and Commissars, as the most hardcore Nazi believer was. The interests of the two clearly coincided. The aesthetics may have been different but in practice, where some of the worst of the German war crimes occurred, there was little friction

So maybe they didn't all agree on, say, burning French towns to the ground and massacring the inhabitants. In practice, it still happened. But even those who'd later turn on Hitler still for their own reasons were enthusiastic about things like the Commissary Order

Clean hands at that level, hard to find