Book Review - The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality
The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality
Written by: Wolfam Wette,
Translated by: Deborah Schneider, Preface by: Peter Fritzsche, Forward byManfred Messerschmitt,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2006,
ISBN: 9780674025776, 391 pp.
Reviewed by: Russell A Hart
Originally published in German in 2002, the appearance of an English translation of this important book is overdue. Wolfram Wette exposes the deeply racist and anti-Semitic character of the modern German military that conditioned it to embrace the genocidal, racial war of extermination that Hitler and National Socialism unleashed on the world during the Second World War. Nazism did not seduce officers and soldiers into genocide, Wette argues; it co-opted willing co-perpetrators who widely shared Nazism’s violent, racist, and anti-communist world view. Published on the heels of the wide ranging German domestic debate in the 1990s on the role of ordinary German soldiers in the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities, Wette continues the scholarly assault on the Cold War myth perpetrated by German generals and soldiers of the ‘clean’, apolitical German military uninvolved in Nazi excesses committed by a minority of Nazi fanatics in the SS, SD, and Einsatzgruppen. This myth has been shattered in the last two decades by scholars such as Omar Bartov, Christopher Browning and Hannes Heer, among others. Wette reinforces their conclusions with a passionately compelling, sometimes even angry, denunciation of the historical and cultural roots of Nazi genocide in the modern German military.
This study begins with an examination of the pervasiveness of anti-Russian, anti-Slavic and anti-Communist sentiments in the Imperial German military that in the wake of Germany’s defeat in the Great War allowed National Socialism to conflate its greatest ideological enemies together as the nonsensical ‘Jewish-Bolshevik menace’. Wette then turns to examine the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in the Imperial German officer corps of the late nineteenth century. Wette emphasises how Jews in particular came to be blamed for the defeat of Imperial Germany in the Great War—the infamous ‘Stab in the Back’ legend—even though they served in the military in proportionate terms and were the most decorated constituency in First World War German society (p. 37). The Freikorps movement that emerged as the empire collapsed, Wette illuminates, was virulently anti-Semitic and the military commanders of the new inter-war Reichswehr eagerly embraced the ‘Stab in the Back’ legend to escape their own culpability for German defeat in the Great War. All of this paved the way for Nazism, which inexorably instilled its violent, racist and anti-Communist world view in the German military. The opposition of senior officers to the atrocities that accompanied the ethnic cleansing of occupied Poland demonstrates that Nazification was not yet complete in 1939, Wette argues. However, the silence that accompanied atrocities in Yugoslavia and the USSR shows that by 1942, Nazism had succeeded in transforming much of the Wehrmacht into a compliant instrument of genocide. For Hitler, ‘Operation Barbarossa’ was a brutal racial-ideological war of extermination and Nazism encouraged German troops to indulge their most savagely inhuman proclivities in dealing with the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik menace’ in a just defence of Western, Christian civilisation.
In the last and most important chapter, Wette demonstrates the concealment and obfuscation of the ‘truth’ of the Wehrmacht’s past in post-Second World War Germany and the embryonic Bundeswehr, a dynamic facilitated by the imperatives of the Western Cold War ideological struggle against Communism. Finally, he documents how the post-war memoirs of German generals fundamentally distorted scholarship on the Wehrmacht and the Second World War for much of the Cold War. Wette’s conclusion that the legend of the Wehrmacht’s ‘clean hands’ now belongs to the past (p. 297) may be true of most young Germans. But many English speakers continue to romanticise and glorify the ‘virtuoso’ performances of great Wehrmacht commanders and soldiers, while dismissing or deemphasising the appalling crimes that characterised the war in the east, as well as the racist, genocidal character of the regime for which they fought.
Criticism of Wette’s study lies in its broad generalisations about German soldiers of the Second World War. True, Wette’s characterisation does not apply to large numbers of them. But it is an accurate portrayal of a significant proportion—enough to propel the Wehrmacht on a brutal and vicious six-year war that left tens of millions dead and maimed across the world. As a study of German military institutional character, it documents the Wehrmacht’s cultural roots that often made it a compliant and willing instrument of Nazism. It also presents a compelling analysis of how after 1945 German soldiers carefully constructed and cultivated a legend of the Wehrmacht’s non-involvement in Nazi war crimes. Much of the rest of what Wette has to say has been said before; but the work’s true value lies in its synthesis of previous scholarship into a coherent analysis of the cultural roots of Nazi genocide in the institutional culture of the modern German military. Moreover, it represents the most extensive and sustained examination of the cultivation of the legend of the Wehrmacht’s innocence of wartime atrocities and the concomitant disintegration of this legend during the last three decades. This translation brings a very important piece of German scholarship to an English speaking audience, though as is often the case, some of its original impact and nuance is lost in translation. Overall, a very thought provoking study that is a must read for anyone interested in the German military of the Second World War as well as how military forces create and distort their own histories to serve their own purposes.
