The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality (review)

Leading German military historian Wolfram Wette has written the equivalent of an extended lawyer’s brief arguing for a fundamental revision of the popular conception of the role of the German army during World War II. To a reader acquainted with the latest research on the Wehrmacht, Wette’s book seems more a summing up than a disclosure of new evidence. But for the more general reader, his arguments will provide a powerful corrective to the outdated view that Wehrmacht leaders were dragged unwillingly into complicity in Nazi-mandated crimes. His aim, though, is not to show how the leaders of the Wehrmacht became entangled in Nazi crimes, but rather to demonstrate that military leaders and nationalist (eventually National Socialist) circles shared perceptions and political views long before Hitler’s rise to power; that, in fact, there was a genuine ideological solidarity between Wehrmacht leaders and the Nazis. Moreover, he ventures into the more controversial area of the attitudes and actions of the Landser—the average German soldier—to explore the gray area of constraint, compulsion, and ideological motivation. Finally, Wette examines the way in which, after the war, former army officers managed to shape the popular perception of the military, leading to the creation of the myth of the “clean” Wehrmacht.

Since the Nazi ideological war was focused in large part against the Soviet Union, Wette needs to show a continuity in thinking from the Imperial period into the Nazi era in order to sustain his first premise. He acknowledges that late nineteenth-century perceptions of Russia among the German military elite were a mixed bag, with some generals regarding Russia as vaguely mysterious and exotic, and others seeing in the vast land to the east only Asiatic backwardness and inferiority. The factors that shaped a more clearly racist attitude among the generals appear to have emerged during World War I: chief among them were the experience gained from and possibilities raised by territorial conquest in Russia and the rise of the “Jewish-Bolshevik” threat following the Russian revolution.

This latter event constituted a key ingredient in the simmering ideological brew of interwar Europe. As Wette ably demonstrates, the sense of an existential political threat emanating from the USSR accelerated the evolution of antisemitism in military circles, moving it from a traditional social prejudice to an attitude marked by pseudo-scientific racialist notions. In this process, of course, the military elite mirrored large segments of German society—which is precisely Wette’s point: even before the Nazi takeover, key elements in Germany perceived a growing threat from an alleged “Jewish-Bolshevik” conspiracy active both within and outside Germany. The “stab-in-the-back myth” was just that, but this did not stop large numbers of Germans from believing it or acting on it. Wette is particularly strong in his analysis of events in the immediate post–World War I period, during which Clausewitz was turned upside down and peace became a continuation of the war by other means. The German military—both ex-officers and former front-line soldiers, found themselves deeply implicated in the violence and terror of this period, including political assassinations. Nazi leaders, on coming to power, had little difficulty winning over the military elite to their ideological viewpoint; former officers’ and soldiers’ views were already largely in tune with the main tenets of Nazi ideology. By 1939, army leaders had instituted antisemitic indoctrination within the Wehrmacht.

In the subsequent war of extermination in the USSR, Wehrmacht leaders emerged as willing participants rather than as reluctant observers who acquiesced grudgingly in Nazi-inspired war crimes. In terms of the two key aims of the war in Russia—territorial exploitation and ethnic cleansing—the military elite appeared substantially to share Hitler’s lethal vision, in that they cooperated extensively with the murderous Einsatzgruppen. Wehrmacht leaders, far from trying to restrain the soldiers under their command, urged them on to greater ideological fanaticism. This tendency is illustrated by numerous recorded exhortations—most famously...