The Rise and Fall of Comradeship: Hitler's Soldiers, Male Bonding and Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century by Thomas Kühne (review)

For those studying the twentieth-century German military, comradeship is a frequent and loaded term. In this innovative book, Thomas Kühne demonstrates that comradeship was one of the central organizing concepts for German society between 1914 and 1945, and remained important long afterward. The topic is huge: the book covers three quarters of a century. It was born out of a fascination with the social cohesion and solidarity of soldiers—comradeship—and complaints on the part of many veterans about its absence in individualistic modern society. The subject and findings of the book thus get to the heart of the perceived gulf between (combat) veterans and civilian society, a major social trope even today. Comradeship, in Kühne's portrayal, was foremost a military concept in twentieth-century Germany. Mainstream German society largely rejects the concept today, but this still shocks veterans: for them, comradeship expresses their humanity as rooted in their service, sacrifice, and altruism.

Kühne defines comradeship as "the close emotional ties of a small group of people, such as soldiers who need to cooperate in order to avert danger or cope with hardships." As opposed to friendship, which can end any time, comradeship "denotes the relationship of people who cooperate, work and live together not by choice but by coercion, by accident, or by fate. … It is this ominous aura of fate and destiny—comradeship as the solidarity of a community of fate—that originated its popularity in Germany's age of total wars" (p. 291).

Utilizing secondary sources, memoirs, selected ego-documents, and interviews, Kühne discusses the history of comradeship in three parts: "The Myth of Comradeship, 1914–1939," "The Practices of Comradeship, 1939–1945," and "The Decline of Comradeship, 1945–1995." In the first part, Kühne shows how comradeship became an important concept in coping with the horror of World War I. Weimar society was full of discourses about comradeship, and the concept often was cast in opposition to modernity and the Republic; yet, it still could include a fairly wide range of society, although the tendency was for the Right to appropriate it.

The Nazi period, and more precisely the war on the Eastern Front, is the real focus. In part two, Kühne shows how the concept of comradeship became more exclusionary and coercive as time went on and the Nazi concept of Volksgemeinschaft (people's community) narrowed. He looks first at the initiation of men into the army and the practices of comradeship as taught and defined by the Wehrmacht. As Kühne describes it, the precise expression of comradeship shifted during the war years, from the euphoric "megalomania" of the soldiers during the first years of the Barbarossa campaign to the more cynical and defensive definition, fatalistic yet resilient, characteristic of the later years. Kühne is careful not to claim that all of the seventeen million men who served in the Wehrmacht accepted the same definition, and is careful to cite instances of those who felt rejected or cut off. He is quite clear that the end result of the German discourse of comradeship was murderous: "The myth of comradeship leveled the ground for a conformist ethics that honored only what served group cohesion and denounced the concept of individual responsibility. The myth of comradeship made German soldiers ready to join in or look the other way when their army waged criminal and even genocidal war" (p. 10).

The final section shows how the notion of comradeship helped veterans cope with imprisonment in POW camps and the return to civilian life. But it also shows how comradeship perpetuated and enforced silence about war crimes, and how veterans groups sought—successfully in the short run, unsuccessfully in the long run—to instrumentalize comradeship in ways similar to those of...