“We felt like lost souls who had forgotten that men are made for something else, …that love can sometimes occur, that the earth can be productive and used for something other than burying the dead,” Guy Sajer recalled as he and his comrades neared the breaking point. “We were madmen, gesturing and moving without thought or hope…. Lindberg… had collapsed into a kind of stupor…. The Sudeten… had begun to tremble… and to vomit uncontrollably. Madness had invaded our group, and was gaining ground rapidly…. I saw… Hals leap to his machine gun and fire at the sky, which continued to pour down its rain of flame and metal. I also saw the [sergeant]… beat the ground with his clenched fist…. [I] shout[ed] curses and obscenities at the sky. I had reached the edge of the abyss.” At such a moment of extreme nervous exhaustion it was not uncommon, Sajer testified, for men to fall into a “paralytic sleep,” a stupor so great that even the presence of the enemy could not rouse them. “When danger… continues indefinitely, it becomes unbearable…. After hours and then days of danger… one collapses into unbearable madness, and a crisis of nerves is only the beginning. Finally, one vomits and collapses, entirely brutalized and inert, as if death had already won.”42 Worn down by grinding fatigue, their reserves of energy exhausted, many men sank into this zombi-like state; their nerves shut down, and psychologically they withdrew from the battlefield.
Confronted with such overwhelming strain, then, even the toughest men and strongest nerves often disintegrated. Despite the motivation and self-discipline that sprang from the tight-knit nature of the small Kameradschaft, and the generally high level of confidence and cohesion between officers and men, the prolonged stress and dreadful casualties led almost inevitably to a breakdown in these invisible threads of discipline. As internal self-control wavered, Nazi and Wehrmacht officials quickly imposed external, often draconian measures to shore up the fragile shell of discipline. To a degree, Nazi practice reflected German military tradition, for harsh discipline had long been a staple of the Prussian martial heritage. For example, Frederick the Great had stated quite succinctly that “the common soldier must fear his officer more than the enemy.” Still, in World War I the German army, compared to the British and French, had been quite sparing in its use of the ultimate punishment; in fact, between 1914and 1918, German military authorities sentenced only 150 men to death, of whom 48 were actually executed. By contrast, the French handed down roughly 2,000 death sentences and carried out approximately 700, while the British sentenced 3,080 to death and executed 346.43
Hitler, among others, had bitterly criticized this sparing use of harsh punishment, claiming that feeble military justice was a prime cause of the deterioration of the German army at the end of World War I. Hitler, in fact, believed implicitly in the “stab-in-the-back” myth, the notion that Germany had lost World War I because of a collapse of discipline and morale on the home front. Once in power he was determined not only to toughen the army’s code of discipline, but also to reshape civilian justice according to Nazi demands. Hence, military standards came to reflect those of civilian society, as for historical reasons Hitler aimed at creating a tight-knit Volksgemeinschaft, both civilian and military, which would do his bidding without cracking under the pressure of war. German military justice was thus fundamentally altered to create a strong link between the Wehrmacht and the Nazi regime. In place of the relatively lenient system of World War I came a harsh system of discipline at the core of which stood severe punishments for what were deemed “political crimes” against the National Socialist state: desertion and Wehrkraftzersetzung (undermining the fighting spirit of the troops). As the Nazi regime tied the Wehrmacht ideologically tighter to itself, behavior and discipline increasingly became political issues, and the Wehrmacht legal system in World War II proved quite willing to impose draconian punishments. Of the roughly 20,000 German soldiers executed by the end of the war, 75–80 percent had been deemed guilty of these “political” crimes.44
Not surprisingly, the growing harshness of discipline placed another burden on the average Landser. The infamous “punishment battalion,” for example, was widely feared and resented as a virtual death sentence. In his searing and starkly realistic novel Stalingrad, Theodor Plievier described such a unit, placed in a dangerous sector of the Russian front:
It was a good post for the disciplinary battalion. The orders read: “The term of punishment is to be served in the farthermost front line. The punishment shall consist of the most difficult and dangerous work, such as mine clearance, burial of the dead, etc, under enemy fire….
Pay: to be curtailed. Uniform: to hinder desertion, uniform without insignia…. Shelter: less comfortable than that of the other troops. Mail: at discretion of the officer in charge…. Association with other units or civilians is forbidden unless in line of duty. Lighting: none to be supplied. Privileges: will be granted in special cases only by the officer in charge.”
Men sent to such posts were the chaff of the war, their principal “crime” deemed to be undermining the discipline or morale of the troops. “Fear of… the disciplinary battalion,” Guy Sajer confirmed, greatly motivated him and his comrades.45
But the Landser soon learned that the punishment battalion was hardly the only thing to be dreaded. “So the Landser arrived,” wrote one soldier to his wife following the German debacle in Rumania in the summer of 1944, “torn to pieces, filthy, unshaven, completely exhausted and with sore feet, many came without boots, with only cloths wrapped around their feet… and everyone, whether enlisted man or officer, had only salvaged their naked lives.” But, he noted, the physical hardships proved to be the least of their worries: “There were no longer any organized formations, each sought only to save himself…. In Bessarabia we then reached a reporting station where the soldiers learned where they could again find their units. Also, at the crossroads and bridges stood officers who seized individual Landsers and used them to build new battalions…. There were also thousands who fell into bad company in this wild mess and didn’t report… and drifted around for weeks robbing and plundering, for which many were given the death penalty and hanged.” As Sajer confessed, the thought of “being incorporated into an impromptu battalion” struck terror into him, for these units were composed of men “already classified as missing or dead by their original units,” so were “used as unexpected reinforcements whom there was no reason to spare.”46 A Landser caught in this human maelstrom was fortunate indeed to rejoin his old outfit, to escape being cast into one of the Wehrmacht’s hastily organized units or becoming a roaming mercenary likely to end his soldiering days at the end of an army rope.