The Germans and the East

Comrades, Enemies, Victims

209 Comrades,฀Enemies,฀Victims The฀Prussian/German฀Army฀and฀the฀Ostvölker ◆฀฀฀Dennis฀Showalter฀฀฀◆ Recent writing on Nazi Germany stresses public and institutional acceptance of the Reich’s racist ideology and involvement in even the worst of its genocidal crimes. The motivating power of Nazi principles in military contexts has been demonstrated comprehensively by Omer Bartov.1 So much, indeed, has been done to establish Wehrmacht complicity in National Socialism’s genocidal policies in Eastern Europe that the roles of the SS and the Einsatzgruppen run a certain risk of marginalization. But while demolishing the “clean shield” myths of the immediate postwar years, the weight of contemporary analysis stresses the armed forces’ Nazification by a mixture of generalized sympathy for National Socialist ideology and the mass mobilization that brought into uniform ever larger numbers of potential, if not necessarily eager, executioners.2 This pattern applies above all to Eastern Europe, where centuries of cultural influence and political rule generated prejudices sharpened by the First World War and honed to a genocidal edge under National Socialism.3 It is not necessary to deny that approach to suggest another dimension. Germany’s military, the army in particular, had developed over the preceding two centuries an institutional culture of ethnic stereotypes, reflecting internal experiences and judgments that during and after the Great War served to structure and process defeat and its consequences. The purpose of this chapter is to outline the nature of that culture, and the passage of those it objectified from comrades, through enemies, to victims. I. The link between war and ethnicity in the Western world can be traced at least to the Greek city states, and their system of locally raised, homogeneous hoplite contin- 210 ◆ DENNIS SHOWALTER gents. Beginning with the Alexandrian era, identity also came to be associated with behavior rather than birth. A cohort of Roman auxiliary troops, for example, might specialize as slingers or light cavalry, with its official ethnic identity as “Batavian” or “Iberian” gradually becoming nominal as its ranks refilled from wherever it might be stationed. During the Middle Ages and the early modern period, contingents were distinguished more by particular skills than by cultural or linguistic identity.4 In the eighteenth century, French and British regiments often had regional designations alongsid their numerical ones, but the designation was seldom anything but nominal.5 Sweden’s introduction of locally based conscription provided an alternative, as regiments identified with the province from which they drew the bulk of their manpower, and socialized “outsiders” into the territorial system.6 Prussia’s cantonal system also served to develop provincial identities in the army’s infantry and cavalry regiments, though the higher proportion of “foreigners” and long-service men in Prussia’s peacetime ranks tended to make that identity regimental as opposed to local .7 Of more significance was the emergence in the course of the eighteenth century of a certain “pecking order,” by which men from some parts of the kingdom were considered better soldiers than those from others. That hierarchy reflected to a degree the relative length of time a particular region had been part of the Prussian kingdom. Regiments recruited in Silesia, annexed by Prussia in 1740, were initially regarded as less effective than formations from the “old provinces.” Even more crucial was the personal judgment of Frederick the Great—a judgment that as often as not depended on performance at maneuvers as opposed to combat and, once rendered, was seldom revised. For purposes of this paper the important point is that the regiments raised, and the soldiers recruited, from the Polish territories incorporated after 1773 were incorporated into the existing matrix. There is no significant indication that Poles were regarded as inherently less effective or reliable than the rest of the army. Polish units were assigned to “counterinsurgency” operations in Poland and former Poland during the 1790s on a basis of availability; no significant distinctions in either employment can be established from the records.8 The Prussian army’s matrix began to change with the introduction of the Conscription Law of 1815. It institutionalized the principle of universal manhood suffrage, and in consequence transformed the active army into a training cadre for annual classes of conscripts. That development in turn required a revolution in training methods. Since the days of Frederick William I, the army’s norm had been the accession of relatively small numbers of recruits at any one...