Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (33 page)

The situation was different for navy men. Their wartime
frame of reference was formed by one not insignificant additional point: the knowledge that they were undeniably
inferior to the gigantic British Royal Navy, which was six times the size of the German navy at the start of the war. Despite some successes, German sailors had to acknowledge that other branches of the German military, and not the navy, would have to prevail if final victory was to be achieved. The perspective of submarine crews who had been taken prisoner was thus more pessimistic than that of Luftwaffe pilots. For instance, the chief engineer of
U-32, First Lieutenant
Anton Thimm, already arrived at the conclusion in November 1940: “The English can hold out under existing conditions for years; you only need to look at the shops, and in a large city at that. The U-Boat arm will not accomplish that (break them) nor airmen either. Time is on the side of the English and we cannot afford to give them time.”
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First Lieutenant
Hans Jenisch, the U-boat’s commander and a bearer of the Knight’s Cross, even opined that the U-boat was outmoded as a weapon. That drew protest from another U-boat commander,
Wilfried Prelberg, who couldn’t believe he was hearing such pessimism from one of his peers. Jenisch’s outlook is all the more remarkable because he was a very successful captain whose crew had survived, almost to a man, the sinking of their vessel. And he was not alone in his views. “The U-boat arm is finished,” a first mate said with a sigh in June 1941. “Absolutely finished.”
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Others
were critical of
Germany’s strategy for bringing Britain to its knees: “We shall never defeat the English through the blockade.”
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And others still predicted a long war, which “will be very bad for us.”
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Radio operator
Willi Dietrich of
U-32 was already speculating by November 1940: “Just think of what would happen if we lost the war!”
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There was little change in these attitudes over the course of 1942, although naturally there were some optimists who felt
victory was at hand in Russia and believed Germany would then launch a successful offensive against Britain. The first officer of the watch of U-32, First Lieutenant
Egon Rudolph, painted the following scenario in late 1941:

Rudolph was a fanatic Nazi, anti-Semite, and Anglophobe. The vehemence of his language was unusual, and he was in the minority of those who remained optimistic at this juncture in the war. Whereas, when cross-examined, most navy POWs claimed they were counting on German victory, they were much more cautious and skeptical when conversing with one another.
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A first mate from
U-111, for instance, predicted: “If the war in the east isn’t over by the end of this year, we shall probably lose it.”
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And in March 1942, a navy man named
Josef Przyklenk confessed to horror when he thought of the future:

It’s interesting here that Przyklenk admits to telling British interrogators something different from what he actually believes. This is another example of dissonance between what soldiers were supposed to and wanted to think and reality. Przyklenk’s response to the dilemma is simply not to think too hard about the situation.

Yet even when
German navy men willfully avoided thinking about larger strategic questions, focusing instead on their own concrete experiences of naval warfare, some came to negative conclusions.
Karl Wedekind was one of the few survivors when his vessel was sunk during a battle with an Allied convoy. In December 1941, he concluded: “The U-boat warfare is in the cart, the U-boats can do nothing.”
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And even in March 1942, a comparatively good month for German forces,
Heinz Weszling expressed unmistakable frustration: “Submarine warfare is a damnable business, U-boat men could tell you some stories! As far as I’m concerned they can scrap the whole lot of U-boats.”
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Most army soldiers lost their confidence in final
victory after the massive German defeats during the winter of 1942–43.
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Still, the majority believed that the war would now drag on and end in stalemate.
Private Faust concluded: “That was a terrific blow! It’s impossible to estimate the proportions of this fiasco.”
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And
First Sergeant Schreiber predicted: “If we don’t finish the Russians off next year, then we shall be done for. I’m convinced of that. Just think of all the Americans are producing.”
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In the months that followed, news of victories and defeats caused the mood among POWs to rise and fall, but the general tendency remained the same. Thoughts of defeat began to crop up more often and led to impassioned discussions among the inmates. On March 22, 1943, two bomber pilots, both first lieutenants, debated Germany’s prospects in the war:

Holzapfel and Fried had been detained for two weeks together in
Latimer House and got along well. Both were experienced pilots who swapped detailed stories about the sorties they had flown over England, and Holzapfel put up with a lot of skeptical remarks from Fried. But Fried crossed the line for him when he cast doubt upon the possibility of ultimate
German
victory. In Holzapfel’s world, that was unthinkable. The consequences of defeat were all too apparent and gruesome to contemplate.

Aside from some hopeless optimists, who still talked about Germany invading England in summer 1943,
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most of the soldiers simply considered total defeat impossible. German euphoria at early Blitzkrieg successes and conviction in their own innate superiority blocked acknowledgment of the course the war was actually taking. Expectations and reality were diverging ever more from one another, creating cognitive dissonance. For that reason, soldiers’ estimations of the situation were increasingly colored by wishful thinking, for example, the hope that the German “leadership” would put things right.

One day, when a
Sergeant Kratz, a bomber aircraft mechanic from a Do 217, was flipping through an English
newspaper, he was taken aback by a map showing troop movement on the Eastern Front. “So far I’ve always believed that the retreat was a tactical one,” he said. His bunkmate
Lelewel answered: “The best thing is not to worry. It doesn’t help at all.”
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Lelewel’s response was telling. What good was the insight that the war was being lost? The POWs themselves were part of this war. They had invested their energy, imagination, and hopes in it, had risked their own lives, and, in most cases, lost comrades for it. What option did they have other than to pursue it to the bitter end? It is rare for people to retrospectively question decisions and experiences that are made under situations of duress and hardship. Moreover, people tend to justify things done with ambivalent feelings so as to preserve their own self-image. Therefore, subjectively, it often seems more sensible to repeat an action than to question it by pursuing a corrective. Once a person has overcome his doubts and scruples, the rule of “
path dependency” dictates that he will overcome them again a second, third, and fourth time in similar situations. For this reason, it seemed anything but helpful to soldiers to reflect on the senselessness of their own endeavors.

The enthusiasm of men who had been engaged for years in a fruitless battle against English air defenses emerged strikingly in a conversation between three pilots who had been
shot down in one of
Germany’s last
bombing raids on London, the so-called
Baby Blitz. Lieutenant Hubertus Schymczyk recalled how the offensive was announced, and in so doing, everything suddenly seemed as it was in the good old days:

Most Luftwaffe pilots were mentally incapable of forming a halfway objective picture of the war. It is astonishing that the heavy losses they suffered in their battle with the
RAF, be it in France or the
Mediterranean, did not make a more negative impression—although those who engaged in some reflection and were prepared to draw conclusions from the information at their disposal sometimes did see things with crystal clarity. One of them was
Wilfried von Müller-Rienzburg, a thirty-eight-year-old Viennese Luftwaffe officer, who declared: “We can’t win the war unless a miracle happens. Only a few complete idiots still believe we can. It is only a question of a few months before we come to grief. In the spring we shall be fighting on four fronts and then, of course, we haven’t got a hope. We’ve lost
this
war.”
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Navy POWs were even more pessimistic than their army or navy comrades in the period between Stalingrad and the
Allied landing at Normandy. In their immediate social environment, there had been practically no success stories since spring 1943, and the tide turned irrevocably in the Battle of the North
Atlantic in May 1943. The German navy had become almost insignificant militarily, and crews’ views of the future were correspondingly bleak. “It’s a dog’s life nowadays,” twenty-one-year-old sailor
Horst Minnieur complained on November 27, 1943. “It would be best to sink the boat in harbour. Going to sea in a U-boat is nothing but suicide.”
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Another comrade seconded that thought. “It’s a horrible business, going to sea nowadays.”
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And
nineteen-year-old
Fritz Schwenninger added, “What the U-boat has to go through today is only comparable with S
TALINGRAD
.”
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Two sailors who had been lucky enough to escape the
sinking of the battleship
Scharnhorst
questioned whether it was worth carrying on given the disastrous course of the war:

Navy Commander in Chief
Karl Dönitz tried with all the means at his disposal to combat such pessimism and skepticism. In an ordinance prohibiting “compulsive criticism and complaint” in September 1943, he called for an end to the doomsaying. From now on, the grand admiral commanded, there would only be “fighting, working and keeping silent.”
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Joseph Goebbels was impressed by this emphasis on
morale. In his diary, he noted that, thanks to his “iron hardness,” Dönitz appeared to be succeeding in turning around the naval campaign and ending the crisis. Dönitz, Goebbels wrote, was cleaning out the old, worn-out officer corps, overcoming the “provocative resignation in the face of wartime developments,” and offering new ideas for continuing the submarine campaign. But macho appeals and motivational speeches by the leadership made little headway against the far more persuasive force of navy men’s own experience. More and more sailors believed Germany would lose the war—45 percent, according to a British survey of POWs carried out in fall 1943.
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Historian
Rafael Zagovec has pointed out that similar results emerged from a survey of German army soldiers in
Tunisia in April 1943. The Allies were indeed startled that German soldiers seemed to have lost most of their
confidence in final victory and belief in their own cause. That survey found that a majority were “sick and tired” and disinterested in broader questions.
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At the time, American military experts could hardly explain why their enemies continued to fight.

Of course, not all German soldiers looked toward the future with such desperation. With the reentrenchment of the fronts in late 1943,
morale and confidence rose, and the Nazi and Wehrmacht leadership did their best to bolster the revival. The measures included the creation of the
National Socialist Leading Officers, Nazi officials charged with political
propaganda, on December 22, 1943. These “brave leaders of national defense,” in
Hitler’s words, were charged with getting soldiers to believe in
final victory, even if they did not know how it was going to be achieved.
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It isn’t po
ssible to reconstruct whether this initiative had any success, but if so, it probably wasn’t all that great. While references to propaganda slogans do occur regularly in the surveillance protocols, and some POWs seem to have internalized them, there was no change in the general downward spiral of morale.