The Wehrmacht Frontsoldaten and Nazi Ideology

Germany’s Common Soldier and Politics in WWII

Sep 25, 2008 Nicholas Efstathiou

Raised in a culture and society controlled and dominated by Nazi ideology regarding race and gender, young Wehrmach soldiers found few faults with the Nazi government.

The average Wehrmacht soldier at the beginning of the Second World War was familiar and comfortable with Nazi racial and gender ideology. This familiarity came about in two ways: through Germany’s extremely racial educational system, according to Reina Pennington in a lecture to Norwich University; and through the upheaval of the legal structure of marriage with the rise of the Nazi Party to power, as Richard Bessel states in his work Nazism and War. Nazi gender ideology regarding German women, then, sought to remove women from the work force, offering financial and legal boons to those women who returned to what the Party saw as the traditional role. For the Nazis, and thus for the Wehrmacht soldier, German women needed to produce and raise strong children for the inevitable race wars which were to ensue.

The Nazi concern and belief that future wars waged would be between Aryan Germans and the Untermenschen of lesser races affected the way in which the Wehrmacht soldier reacted to both the civilians and POWs of these Untermenschen races, as described by Omer Bartov in his book Hitler‘s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich. Soviet POWs are perhaps the best and most distressing example of Nazi racial ideology being brought into play during and after combat.

Since Soviet POWs were part of the Slavic population -- and therefore members of the Untermenschen -- there was no need for the Wehrmacht to treat them with the same consideration they extended to their Western opponents. Oftentimes Soviet POWs, or those members of the Red Army attempting to surrender, were shot out of turn, since, Bartov states, that Wehrmacht soldiers believed that the Soviet soldiers were unfit to live.

Pennington states that Soviet civilians fell into this category as well, with Wehrmacht soldiers feeling free to execute large portions of the population who could interfere with any aspect of military operations. Civilians were to be sacrificed for the needs of the Wehrmacht, regardless of the consequences to the civilians. The soldiers were not above stripping the Untermenschen of items ranging from clothing to food, so long as it furthered the cause of German victory.

The average Wehrmacht soldier, then, had been fully indoctrinated into the racial and gender ideologies of the Nazi Party. This is evidenced not only via the soldier’s views on the Untermenschen in broad racial, terms which translated into the slaughter of enemy combatants and non-combatants alike, but in the individual soldier’s view of gender as well. This gender ideology translated into the idolization of German womanhood, and the demonizing of women of the Untermenschen. Thus the average Wehrmacht soldier’s belief in the validity of Nazi racial and gender ideology would allow him to commit murder and other crimes on a massive scale.

Sources

Bartov, Omer. Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Bessel, Richard. Nazism and War. New York, NY: Modern Library, 2004.

Pennington, Reina. Lecture to the Norwich University Military History Program. 2008.

The copyright of the article The Wehrmacht Frontsoldaten and Nazi Ideology in Military History is owned by Nicholas Efstathiou. Permission to republish The Wehrmacht Frontsoldaten and Nazi Ideology in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Russian Victim of Nazi Racial Ideology

German Troops in Stalingrad

German Troops Securing Supplies

What do you think about this article?

---

NOTE: Because you are not a Suite101 member, your comment will be moderated before it is viewable.

post your comment

What is 0+4?

Comments

Mar 18, 2009 4:38 PM

Guest :

I just have to say i dont agree.
the common german at the time was not diffrent from other europeans.
the political soldier you talk of was the waffen SS. the whermacht soldiers interacted with soviet soldiers on several occations before the war, and they did not se them as "untermench", but as tough enemies.
the reason many whermacht soldiers comitted murder of civilians was simply that they where orderd to do so.
the only soldiers of the whermacht who belived in the german supermacy where a few officers and the soldiers at home.

the german people are NOT an aryen people. they are a mixture of europe and therfore most germans must have thought that aryan supermacy sounded like a bunch of crap.

the german soldiers of world war two where not saints,
but most civillians killed where beacause of partisan and spy activity.
another important factor is the pressure of warfare over time, and even worse, defeat after defeat. this would make anyone a litte crazy, paranoid and light on the trigger.

berlin felt that special spies from the nazi party where needed to hunt down people who talked about hitler, the party and the war in the wrong way. they also imprisoned many thousand for defatism, and many where killed.

I have read several books written by german soldiers. none of them where naziz. more important, they all hated the naziz.
severall of them where SS, and even they did'nt like the naziz.
after a day or two at the front everybody hated hitler.

I im not a nazi, or a neonazi, nor a rasist.
say what ever you want about them, but do not disgrace the soldiers who where forced to fight in the worst conditions imaginable, against a determined eney who don't take any prisoners.
most of them spent time in jail after the war. some for decades.
an entire generation of men killed by politic's.

the allies where also loaded with propaganda, and manny more of them belived in it.
the russians quoted ilja ehrenburg in battle and shouted stalin as they fought.
and the western allies fought them as if all germans where born with horns and a pith-fork.

btw, sorry for my crappy english.

1 Comment: