2. SWEAT SAVES BLOOD
July 18, 1942. I arrive at the Chemnitz barracks, a huge oval building, entirely white. I am much impressed, with a mixture of admiration and fear.” So Guy Sajer began his chronicle of life in the Wehrmacht, life at war. “We live with an intensity I have never before experienced,” he continued. “I have a brand-new uniform… [and] am very proud of my appearance…. I learn some military songs, which I warble with an atrocious French accent. The other soldiers laugh. They are destined to be my first comrades in this place…. The combat course is the most severe physical challenge I have ever experienced. I am exhausted, and several times fall asleep over my food. But I feel marvelous, filled with a sense of joy which I can’t understand after so much fear and apprehension. On the 15th of September we leave Chemnitz and march twenty-five miles to Dresden, where we board a train for the east…. Russia means the war, of which, as yet, I know nothing.”1
Sajer’s recollections capture well the jumbled feelings of trepidation, exhilaration, and excitement with which many Landsers went off to the training centers of the Wehrmacht. The average soldier felt anxiety about separation from his family and friends, about being removed from his familiar surroundings, about whether he would measure up, about what was to come. But at the same time there lurked the thrill of a new adventure, of being part of a mighty organization, of forming sturdy bonds of camaraderie, and of stepping into the unknown. For most, this appeared to be a rite of passage, an initiation into a new life. “I felt,” remembered Siegfried Knappe of the bus trip to his training center, “as if we were rolling out of my childhood and into a new adult world.” In December 1942 a Landser echoed that sensation in a letter to his mother from training camp: “The first sharp bullets whistled over our heads and out of boys we became men.”2
For the nearly twenty million men who passed through the Wehrmacht during World War II, the first encounter with a soldier’s existence came at the induction center where they were examined, classified, and assigned to duty. Compared to those of the U.S. Army, the German army’s methods of classification and assignment seemed unscientific and crude. The great majority of recruits took neither a written nor a mechanical test but underwent only a physical examination. During this examination, however, the review officers carried on conversations with the recruits designed to provide them a picture of each man’s general character, and, if necessary, to allow them to weed out any who were obviously mentally deficient. Since the Wehrmacht concerned itself more with character—such emotional and temperamental qualities as will power, mental stamina, courage, loyalty, independence, and obedience—than with aptitude, its procedures aimed less at establishing intellectual or mechanical abilities than at discerning a recruit’s personality, behavior patterns, demeanor, and ability to cope.3
Although Martin Pöppel claimed that “a great show was made of these [psychological tests], but they were actually quite simple,” Alfred Wessel, who originally hoped to join a Luftwaffe unit, recalled them in much greater detail. “We had to do exercises, we had to do calculations, write essays and take dictation,” he remembered. “And then the most interesting was that they took us by bus through [Osnabrück], and then into a house. Then we were led all through the house and into the cellar, from the cellar by elevator up to a loft, and from one room to another…. Then we went again by elevator to the cellar. And then we were asked questions. That was in the cellar in a dark room, no windows…. ‘You are now here, there is the compass. In your opinion in what direction does St. Peter’s Church lie? And where have you seen this and that,’ and so on.” Totally unprepared for this, Wessel and his cohorts had to act, and react, as quickly and as well as they could. That proved to be the point of the exercise, for the review officers were less interested in the answers to these questions than in the attributes displayed by the men when confronted with the need to make quick decisions in a confusing and disorienting atmosphere.4
For the Landser the process of basic training marked the first step on the journey of being transformed from civilian to soldier. It was a difficult step for most, with many assaulted by pangs of homesickness, loneliness, and bewilderment. It involves a considerable mental and psychological strain to be ripped from one’s family and deposited in a situation where one’s identity and sense of importance are subject to new conditions. “The clock shows ten,” Rudolf Halbey wrote in his diary from a troop training center in November 1942. “Early tomorrow morning at this time mother will leave again…. How strange, this last get-together! Sad and dreamlike. I will remain strong. Tears come to mother anew. I take her in my arms, she kisses me and whispers in a tear-choked voice: ‘If prayers can help, oh, then everything will be all right.’ I take hold of her loving, concerned, workworn hands…. No words. A last kiss, and I am outside in the clear, cold November night.”5 The overwrought sentiments of a nineteen-year-old, perhaps, but an honest depiction of the wrenching emotions that many young recruits experienced as they left home for the first time and journeyed into the unknown. For Halbey, as for so many others, the unknown meant death: he lived as a soldier not quite a year before falling in Russia in October 1943.
Basic training, although harsh, was a means to an end. Its purpose was not to punish men but to acquaint them with such things as weapons handling, tactics, and discipline, as well as to instill certain group values, loyalties, and a spirit of camaraderie. It aimed ultimately at control and motivation on the battlefield. Training also served to hone the instincts and skills of the new recruits, to condition reflexes, to provide the security of a learned routine in moments of crisis, and, not least, to inculcate the habit of obedience—a singular virtue when the soldier encountered the numbing shock and paralysis of battle. Ideally, training also promoted group pride as it bound men together into cohesive units, and as it persuaded them that they actually were soldiers, an integral part of a powerful organization. As Richard Holmes has pointed out, a large part of a soldier’s behavior on the battlefield, and thus the cohesion and fighting effectiveness of the army to which he belongs, will depend on training. And few armies were more effectively trained than the Wehrmacht. The remarkable cohesion and fighting performance of the German army, its ability time and again to cobble units together out of broken fragments and use them effectively, owed much to the extensive, realistic, and continual training given the Landser.6
All wars are fought by boys, for it is only the young who have the physical stamina and sense of invulnerability necessary to endure the rigors of combat. And here the Wehrmacht had a decided advantage, for by the time war broke out, many young Germans had already undergone considerable military-style training in the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend, or HJ) and the National Labor Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst, or RAD). “Shortly after the Nazis came to power,” Martin Pöppel remembered, “I transferred from the Catholic boy scouts’ organization… to the Hitler Youth and was accepted into its Jungvolk section [for boys aged ten to fourteen]…. A year later I was made a patrol leader…. Then whilst I was with the… compulsory Labor Service at Donauwörth, I saw an article in an illustrated magazine about the new paratroops…. That was for me…. A bit of spirit, something out of the ordinary.” In similar fashion, Alfons Heck recollected the paramilitary nature of the Hitler Youth, with its camplike atmosphere during important events such as the Nuremberg Rallies, its emphasis on loyalty and obedience, the summer training in military skills, and the stress on eliminating class distinctions and building group loyalty and cohesion.7