Panel Participants:

Klaus von Bismarck, from Director of West German Radio, 1961-1976, and President of the Goethe Institute in Munich, 1976-1989.
Hannes Heer, Historian at the Institute for Social Research, Hamburg
Heinrich-Joachim von Moltke, Association of German Soldiers, Bonn
Dr. Jürgen Schreiber, Major General (ret.) and President of the Circle of German Soldiers’ Associations, Bonn.
Dr. Wolfram Wette, Historian, Military History Research Institute, Freiburg and Potsdam

Members of Die Zeit editorial staff:
Dr. Marion Countess Dönhoff, Benedikt Erenz, Dr. Karl-Heinz Janssen, Helmut Schmidt (former Chancellor of West Germany), and Dr. Theo Sommer.

Theo Sommer: Fifty years after the end of the Second World War, it has become indispensable to devote closer attention to the role of the German Wehrmacht in this conflict. There are very different opinions on this topic, ranging from simplistic attempts to whitewash to equally simplistic condemnations. But opinions must be tied to facts and must stand up to them, if they are to persuade.

Benedikt Erenz: It’s rather odd, but public opinion still clings to an old image of the Wehrmacht…that of a hard, but honorable struggle and of inspired generals who were deprived their victory by an insane Hitler; of the German soldier, who knew only little or nothing about the genocide against Jews and Gypsies, the tragic fate of Soviet POWs, or about measures taken against civilian populations in the occupied German-territories. The German soldier, he too was a mere victim—it is an image of a Wehrmacht innocent in the field of battle.
Historians have revised this version of things over the past few years. The results of this research can be summarized in four points:
    1. The German Army was, next to the Party itself, a major pillar of the National Socialist regime. During the 1930s, its leaders promoted Hitler’s militaristic policy massively. The generals were not merely Hitler’s tools, but his active partners.
    2. A war of racial extermination against the Slavic peoples began with the wars in the east—first against Poland, then against the Soviet Union. In these areas, moreover, Wehrmacht soldiers were actively involved in the genocide against Jews and Gypsies.
    3. Approximately 3,000,000 Soviet “died”—i.e., were systematically killed—as POWs in German hands. The Wehrmacht alone bears responsibility for these crimes.
    4. In the summer of 1944 began a war against the German people itself. In contrast to the First World War, the military leadership was unwilling or unable to end a lost struggle. By continuing Hitler’s “total war” until it had accomplished Germany’s near complete destruction, the Wehrmacht revealed itself one last time to be a pillar of the Nazi regime.
    Fifty years after the end of World War II, I think it’s about time we finally discussed the subject of the Wehrmacht openly—especially with to [its successor] the Bundeswehr and its notion of military tradition. The Federal Defense Ministry’s “Tradition Decree” of 20 September 1982 says that “A regime of injustice such as the Third Reich can be no basis for tradition.” The Wehrmacht was part of this unjust regime.

Sommer: A clear statement.

Jürgen Schreiber: Clear, but wrong-headed. You have laid some very angry generalizations on the table. In response, I would like to quote Kurt Ziesel, an author who I’m sure is not especially dear to you: “We continue to ‘overcome‘ a legacy buried fifty years ago in the dark past with the monotony of Tibetan prayer chants and”—here it comes—“with a disregard for subtlety and a post-catastrophic abuse of previous realities.” Now that’s a statement I can support, one hundred percent. Without a doubt, one can and must say that as an objet of moral or legal judgment, “The” Wehrmacht did not exist. That said, I and my organization do not agree with those who speak of the Wehrmacht’s “untarnished shield” and who suggest that only the SS and the Party bosses were at fault. Things just weren’t as simple as that. But I also must take issue with you, Mr. Erenz, because I simply cannot ascribe to any simplistic representation, pro or con.

Wolfram Wette: I would like to talk about a generalized concept of “the” Wehrmacht because, after decades of discussion, I know what they are almost always about: With what degree of complexity must one speak, so that certain people will be satisfied, and how much must one simplify or generalize in order to make a defensible theoretical assertion?
    The following fact highlights the problems involved in analyzing the system of military rule: a total of 19 to 20 million people belonged to the Wehrmacht during the war years. Of these 20 million, only a small fraction belonged to the military elite. By that I mean generals, admirals, General Staff and Admiralty officers. They amounted to 0.3 percent of the total number. These 0.3 percent, however, were the decisive element in the institution as a whole, an institution that was not merely hierarchical, in which the few “up there” decided everything; it was also a total institution in the sense that it tried to embrace the totality of people’s lives. When you consider this stratum of military leaders, it is quite appropriate to generalize about “the” Wehrmacht. In the military’s system of rule, this leading elite had incomparably more responsibility than officers in the middle and lower ranks, let alone the millions of ordinary, conscripted soldiers.

Sommer: Would you deny that officers in these lower ranks perpetrated crimes?

Wette: Certainly not. But it is important to see where the main responsibility lay and to understand that as executive agents, the broad mass of ordinary draftees was active down at the bottom of this hierarchy.

Hannes Heer: I want to respond to the phrase from Kurt Ziesel: “with disregard for subtlety.” Everyone sitting at this table is concerned to arrive at subtle and well-balanced conclusions. But as a necessary condition for this, we must agree on certain facts or we must achieve a kind of consensus before we can proceed to differentiate.
In his exposition, for example, Mr. Erenz referred to the number of murdered Soviet POWs.  In the First World War, the death rate of Russian prisoners of war was 5 percent, but in World War II it was 57 percent. That comes to 3.3 out of 5.7 million Soviet POWs. Of these, 2 million died in the first months [after the German invasion of the USSR]. Not in the factories of Krupp or Mercedes, not in these atrocious work camps inside the Reich. No, they died in the occupied territories.

Sommer: Do you accept this fact as a basis for drawing distinctions?

Schreiber: That is a very terrible thing. I’ll out the question of whether the numbers are accurate. At bottom it’s so unseemly to quarrel over whether it was 3 million or “only” 2.8 million.
    But I do want to note that between 95,000 and 135,000 Germans were taken prisoner at Stalingrad, of whom only 6,000 returned. Put your numbers in context. And because we have very exact numbers, that’s only one example of how things went on the other side.
    Now, I know that the response to such observations is: “you can’t calculate comparisons like that.” On this subject, Ernst Topitsch from Graz has made a very apt remark. He says: “The usual response is an artfully ingenious ban against calculation. This”—and I agree with him—”makes good sense, because the Nazi genocides are excused or justified by the blood-orgies of other peoples.” However, “it is also a moral double standard, when it is used to condemn the Germans to eternal tattling.”
    What about all the hundreds of thousands of victims of terrorist attacks who are once again in the news? What other people has anything approaching the same “enthusiasm” that we have in examining all those things, horrible though they are, but which have happened on all sides? At what point do we say: That, unfortunately, is the way of war?! That’s why were against war, because such things don’t happen without it.

Helmut Schmidt: That’s not quite right, Mr. Schreiber. The Second World War, in comparison to the First, was unbelievably barbaric, on all sides.

Schreiber: True.

Schmidt: And not just on the German side, not just on the Soviet side. On the Anglo-American side as well. It was a barbarization of war, comparable to the Thirty Years’ War [1618-1648].

Heer: The war in the East had a character that was different from the “barbaric” wars of the past—because of the murder of Jews, for example. Until recently, there was a myth that only the Einsatzgruppen of the SD were responsible for the Holocaust [in the Soviet Union]. That how it was defined in the only written order [for genocide], from early 1941: the Reichsführer-SS [Heinrich Himmler] assumes special tasks at the behest of Adolf Hitler. But the practical reality was totally different, and the orders issued at the middle level of the Wehrmacht speak a totally different language.
    The Wehrmacht participated actively in the Holocaust, as the course of its development from June 1941 to the fall of 1943 proves. I will cite only the most important stages:
    The first step was this: Jewish ghettos were established, everywhere, and by local field commanders. Confinement in ghettos meant the loss of all rights, it meant stigmatization with the yellow star, it meant—and these orders indicated this explicitly—the loss of all property and conscription into forced labor.
    Second step: Because the resources of the Einsatzgruppen and the police were too few, and because a civilian administration did not yet exist, the Wehrmacht was employed to “cleanse” the countryside of Jews, as the saying went. That was the Wehrmacht’s special task. The denizens of localities with more than 1,000 inhabitants were sent to ghettos where they were “selected” by the police. In villages under 1,000 inhabitants, the Wehrmacht took care of their “elimination.”
    Step three: The great ghetto massacres begin in October 1941. It was only the first wave. By now, the Einsatzgruppen were stationary units, each had developed its zones and districts of operation. Mobile units were still operating only further east, immediately behind the front. The Wehrmacht was involved in all of these ghetto massacres, either materially—by supplying trucks, gasoline, and ammunition—or in terms of personnel forming a defensive perimeter [around the massacre site]. Sometimes the Wehrmacht was involved directly, by supplying the execution squads.
    Step four: Among all the institutions of German occupation, the Wehrmacht employed the largest number of Jews. For selfish reasons, the Wehrmacht tried to hold onto these so-called “Work-Jews” as long as possible. But their annihilation could not be postponed forever, and from March to October 1943, the Wehrmacht itself was involved in liquidating “Work-Jews.” All this can be learned from military documents, the reports of POWs, and above all from witness testimony given at crimes trials held in West German courts during the 1960s.
    We have to acknowledge this. Only then can one—must one—draw distinctions in individual cases and say, for example: Wolfgang von Ditfurth, Commander of the 403rd Infantry Division, was an honorable man; Großcurth, Staff Officer of the 295th was a noble fellow who tried to do what he could. Then one can ask subtler questions: What age groups were especially fanatical, which age groups were more reserved, because they still possessed a moral code? But first, before one can draw distinctions, one must accept certain facts.

Sommer: Do you accept these facts?

Schreiber: Not necessarily. You assert that there are infinitely many documents and so forth that reveal all this. One would really have to investigate them individually. We are, or I should say that I personally am prepared to recognize that such involvement in, to use a neutral term, “misdeeds” occurred in great number.
    But one has to look at it very closely. For example, one can’t simply assert the grim fact that hundreds of thousands, millions of Russian POWs died. For the most part, they were not murdered, but starved to death, although one can debate which is the more terrible death.

Karl-Heinz Janssen: I want to return to that quote from Kurt Ziesel. He speaks of the “dark past.” Apparently he said that in a state of innocence, rather like the judges at Nürnberg, who back then did not recognize the Wehrmacht and the General Staff as criminal organizations, unlike the SS and others. By now, of course, we know a great deal more. If the Wehrmacht’s participation in genocide had been known back then, I’m convinced that those judges, on the basis of the evidence before them, would have condemned its two branches as criminal organizations.

Sommer: What was one able to know back then? What did one know? What was the attitude that people took? Was a person able to stay “clean,” even knowing that the regime one served was criminal? What went through people’s heads, then and after?

Heinrich-Joachim von Moltke: It is a bit difficult for me to respond. First came to Germany in 1939, at the age of seventeen. I was a native of Berlin, to be sure, but in 1929 my parents emigrated to America. My goal was to join the German Foreign Service. Because I did not want to join the Party, I entered the Wehrmacht, in order to become a military attaché later on.  I chose the Navy. On the strength of my American upbringing and education, I had a rather different attitude toward the “Third Reich” than my comrades did. Back then, I didn’t fight for Hitler or for the “Third Reich” as such. But I was determined to do my part for Germany.
    Whenever I spoke with anyone outside [the military] and asked, what’s going on here with the persecution of Jews and so on, why are you doing this nonsense, the response was always: “Ssshhh, don’t say a word, or you’ll go to Dachau.” That was the limit of my knowledge, because I simply didn’t learn any more. Later, I was responsible for minesweeping near the front; we were real workhorses and were seldom on land. We sailors knew nothing of these things. For us it was a book with seven seals.
    While we’re speaking of “the” Wehrmacht, I’d like to make an exception at least for the Navy in this whole matter, because it was involved neither in the shooting of Jews nor with the expulsion of other peoples nor in anything else, for that matter. On the contrary.

Wette: That’s the state of your knowledge today.

Moltke: No, the state of my knowledge back then, too.

Wette: How was one able to gather such knowledge back then?

Moltke: I learned that nothing happened simply because I was there.

Sommer: In other words, you didn’t experience anything?

Moltke: I learned nothing of German atrocities in the east and such things.

Schmidt: What was your rank at the end of the war?

Moltke: I was a Navy lieutenant.

Schmidt: A lieutenant on active duty?

Moltke: On active duty.

Sommer: I can well imagine that the Navy was in a unique situation and that the same could be said of the Luftwaffe.

Heer: You joined up only in 1941, that in itself is unusual. Nevertheless, people like Heydrich and Canaris came from the Navy, Dönitz of course, too...

Schmidt: Heydrich too?

Heer: Yes, he had been a [naval] officer in Kiel. I name the first two in order to point out that the Navy was one of the politically most active military branches during the Weimar Republic, not least because of the traumatic experience [during the Revolution of 1918-1919] of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils.

Schmidt: The Navy was easily the most nationalistic branch of the old Reichswehr [the German military under the Weimar Republic].

Heer: Hitler knew that the Navy was the most loyal military branch. There are documents that betray a more intimate degree of knowledge than he about any other form of military activity.

Sommer: Be that as it may, what does it have to do with war crimes?

Heer: The whole Baltic coastal zone, for example, was under the Navy’s military administration. The only massacre to have been recorded on film was documented by a Navy seaman, a two-hundred minute film showing the execution of 3,000 Jews near the military harbor in Liepaja, Latvia.

Erenz: Were the perpetrators from the Navy or were they Baltic auxiliaries?

Heer: The first executioners were Navy soldiers. The site was under Naval command. At that point, the commander was Frigate-Captain Kawelmacher. Soldiers were taken to the site in Navy boats and were forced to watch the execution. Scholars at the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem interviewed the amateur filmmaker of 1941 in 1980, one Mr. Wiener.
    I want to say only this about the Luftwaffe: it is well known from many wartime military reports that soldiers attached to the Luftwaffe were counted among the most rabid troops in the so-called Partisan War, in requisitioning and in murder, and they were deployed with that in mind. In 1942 and 1943, the Luftwaffe Infantry Regiment Moscow functioned as a rear-area “fire brigade” for Army Group Center.

Klaus von Bismarck: I was in the army, too. At the beginning of the war, I was called up as a reserve officer, first as adjutant in a mountaineer battalion, then as a regimental adjutant in France. When the Russian campaign began, I was soon made a company commander, then battalion commander and regiment commander. I was wounded three times and only deployed at the front.
    As a battalion adjutant and regimental adjutant, I was entrusted with tasks that were enjoyable. But then began a series of shocks. The first was the “Commissar Decree” [of 6 June 1941, which ordered the Army to execute all Communist commissars in the Red Army]. I formally refused to obey because I could not see, both as a soldier and as a Christian, why the Wehrmacht should shoot people just because they have a different ideology. I refused to obey, along with a few friends.
    The 4th Infantry Regiment was a conservative regiment that was forged in the old, 100,000-man Army of the Weimar era. At first, there weren’t really any Nazis with our unit in Kolberg [where the 4th was stationed]. But I noticed later—from about 1941 on—that the top leadership had succeeded more and more at infecting the Army.

Erenz: A Nazification, in other words?

Bismarck: Yes, a Nazification. In my own regiment there were many reactivated officers who had “suffered through” the Weimar years, that is to say, as once-proud officers that had lived for many years below their social standing. And suddenly the “Führer” had elevated them to their proper estate. These people were willing instruments of Nazi policies.
    Even though these reactivated fellows were not always obvious Nazis, I was still able to observe how the virus spread: specifically, when upstanding patriots and petits-bourgeois suddenly became officers, the felt like members of the master race.
    Once in the Israeli Holocaust Museum [Yad Vashem] I saw a picture of three or four Wehrmacht officers. They were apparently quite experienced in combat, bedecked with the Silver Wound Medal, Assault Medals, and such things. They were young, strong soldiers. This photo showed them publicly humiliating several old Jews somewhere in Poland or Russia. They were cutting their forelocks off with a scissors. For them it was all fun and games. They seemed not the least aware of doing wrong. Blinded by Nazi ideology, they were unable to recognize a human visage in the faces of their victims.

Erenz: There are many photos that show similar scenes.

Bismarck: As I see it today, such troops as the majority of the 4th Infantry Regiment and my beloved mountaineer battalion lived on an island of self-deception. For we really thought that we could preserve our honor in a war that had criminal objectives.
    The only reason why I personally experienced those horrible crimes against the Soviet prisoners of war was because one day I was ordered to report to Field Marshal Busch in Pleskau. That was in 1943. At that time, I saw with my own eyes how the prisoners of war were treated. Corpses were lying about in the snow. I was so appalled that I immediately wrote a report and submitted it to Field Marshal Busch. And he was just as appalled as I was. But then I made the bitter realization that deep down [Busch] felt that he could attempt anything against the power of [SS Chief] Heinrich Himmler, not even within his own army. [Himmler] had already broken his back.

Sommer: Are we talking about prisoners of war that the Army had killed?

Bismarck: I can’t remember any more. All I did was examine the corpses and concluded that the physically exhausted prisoners had been shot at the back of the head. Who could have done that? Of course, it could have been Latvian or Ukrainian SS auxiliaries…or somebody like that. In any case—and this was really important thing for me—the Army was powerless.
    By then I had realized that a criminal, Adolf Hitler, was leading us. Still, most of us continued to serve, in the tradition of Prussian soldiery—myself included, until the bitter end. At the time, I had the feeling that whatever else I did, I could not desert a unit that had been entrusted to me. All the more so, indeed, because since 1943 it had been clear to me that the war was lost. But could not and would not desert them.
    Something Mr. Schreiber said earlier grabbed my attention: “the Wehrmacht’s shield was not untarnished.” I appreciated that. But why can’t you just follow Mr. Heer’s suggestion and say, “Yes indeed, the Wehrmacht committed many, many crimes”? That would unburden [the discussion] greatly. Then we could begin to discuss, here it was like this, there it was like that.

Schreiber: But I did say that, although the word “many” is so problematic. Even if one allows that, say, 5,000 or 10,000 Wehrmacht soldiers—I don’t know the figures—were involved, what in percent out of 17 or 19 million? You can’t say that they constituted “the Wehrmacht.”

Wette: 5,000 to 10,000! Entirely the wrong order of magnitude!

Heer: Mr. Schreiber, at first you are always quick to admit that of course many bad things occurred, but then you go on to say that it was only a few thousand misdeeds, just as they occur in all wars. But the whole point is to assert, for example, that the Wehrmacht, its commands and its soldiers, helped set the Holocaust in motion. That when we speak of 3.3 million prisoners of war who died under the aegis and responsibility of the Wehrmacht, that when we think of the 5 million people who were murdered far away from the scene of battle, in the war against partisans for example—excuse me, but in these cases we simply cannot speak of a “few misdeeds.”
    Mr. Erenz once wrote in Die Zeit that the Wehrmacht was “the greatest terror and murder organization in German history.” He was criticized heavily for that. But when I add up the number of victims—5 million civilians, 1 ½ million Jews, 3 ½ million prisoners of war—the total comes to more people than the SS murdered in Auschwitz and elsewhere.

Erenz: Mr. von Bismarck, you were in France and Russia.

Bismarck: In Poland, too.

Erenz: The war in the East was different from that the West. The war in the East was a war of annihilation that became more and more fanatical…

Bismarck: Ideologically, this part of the war had begun long before. In 1941, it was said that the Commissars must be executed. I rebelled against that and said: No, I won’t obey such an order. Quite a number of [my] friends agreed with my position. And I reported all this to my commanding officer. He received my report with an expressionless face and [afterwards] behaved very properly towards us.
    And it wasn’t just a few [who were involved in the perpetration of genocidal acts]. In this I must disagree with what you said before, Mr. Schreiber.
    It wasn’t just a few who participated in criminal acts; by the end—and I was there until the end—probably a majority of the Wehrmacht had been infected by that unscrupulous Nazi ideology. That’s how I experienced it.

Schmidt: In contrast to Mr. von Moltke and Mr. von Bismarck, I am not descended from Prussian nobility, but from the petit-bourgeoisie of Hamburg. One of my grandfathers was an uneducated dock worker, the other a Jewish merchant in Hamburg. I only learned about my Jewish grandfather in 1933 or 1934, when I wanted to join the Hitler Youth like the other boys. But my parents said, you can’t do that. Then they revealed my ancestry to me. With fake documents we somehow managed to conceal the whole thing throughout the “Third Reich.” But that was only one reason why I couldn’t become a Nazi.
    Another reason was that I was deeply appalled by the Nazis’ “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Munich. Those were my big heroes, in whom I believed with heart and soul, and now they were all supposed to be “degenerate.” That made me realize that the Nazis were all crazy; but I only learned that they were all criminals after the war.

Bismarck: My experience was very similar.

Schmidt: I was drafted in 1937 for two years’ military service. And the other high-school graduates did exactly as I did, since we were all in the same situation, nine privates and one corporal. We had the feeling, “Thank God, at last were part of the only respectable organization left in the ‘Third Reich.’ I didn’t experience any Nazi ideological influences during the last two years of peace, or afterwards for that matter—I remained a soldier until I was taken prisoner in 1945. Over the course of these 8 ½ years I became acquainted with only two generals, neither was a Nazi or a criminal. The one, his name was von Rantzau, spoke with me in private of  “the Browns,”  he didn’t speak of the “the Führer” [as Nazis did], nor did he speak of the “the National Socialists,” but of “the Browns.” I was lucky, with only two interruptions, I belonged [throughout the war] to the same Luftwaffe staff. One was at the beginning of the Russian campaign, when I was sent to join a flak unit with the 1st Panzer Division. As a result, I participated in the attack on Leningrad, the attack on Moscow, and its repulsion in December 1941.
    We heard and knew absolutely nothing about the annihilation of the Jews at that time. By the same token, I had been convinced since the beginning that at the end of this war, Germany would be reduced to rubble and ashes. But even as someone who was subject to the Nuremberg Race Laws, I believed that it was my patriotic duty to fulfill my obligations as a soldier. When I had doubt about for the first time, a private in my flak battery—I was a battery officer, he a young, Catholic theologian—drew my attention to the Letter of Paul to the Romans, which contains the sentence: “Obey the law, for where there is law, there is God.”    Twice in one night he calmed me with these words.
    Then I returned to the Luftwaffe staff unit, and for three or four years my job was to write service instructions for new flak weapons. Here, too, I learned nothing about the destruction of the Jews. I can’t even recall ever seeing a person wearing the Yellow Star.

Sommer: Was the unit stationed in Berlin?

Schmidt: First it was in Berlin, and then after we were bombed out, far out of the city in Bernau. I always had a big mouth, even then, and once, while on some visit to a shooting range on the Baltic coast, I spoke about the government as I would have done back home, with my unit. As a result I was charged [with an offense] and investigated for the crime of undermining military discipline (Wehrkraftzersetzung). The only Nazi I ever knew during the whole time, the Nazi political officer of our unit, did this. But there were two General Staff colonels in our organization who saw to it—this was already November and December 1944—that I was transferred to head a flak unit on the Western front, then transferred from one unit to another. The investigation was always a few steps behind and therefore never got me. And so the war ended, without my knowing about the Nazis’ crimes.

Schreiber: Now I want to say something as a witness of those times. In 1944 I was an officer candidate, and in contrast you, Mr. Schmidt, I went through the full officer training course at Fürstenfeldbruck, I became a Luftwaffe officer. There were virtually no Nazis in our group. Of course, a certain antisemitism crept in now and again. It would be grotesque to assert that we officer candidates were friends of the Jews.
    But despite such antisemitic ideas now and again, it is not as though we were thinking—and this I could swear to in court—‘those people ought to be lined up and shot or sent to the gas chamber.’ We knew nothing about that. And I first hear the word “Auschwitz” after the war—I can swear to that, too.
    Also, the idea that the Luftwaffe was “nazified” is absolutely false. In the officers’ school, we used to joke: “Against whom will we fight the next war? Against the SS!” We could think this because we distinguished between Nazis, whom we really disliked, and ourselves—the presumably patriotically-minded soldiers, as we felt ourselves to be.

Schmidt: I can take it if someone wants to characterize me—one of those 19 million soldiers—as having been a member of a criminal organization. The only thing is that this leads to a double reaction. On the one hand, succeeding generations acquire a skewed impression of German history. I consider that by itself to be very dangerous. I once had a friend, Wolfgang Döhring of the Liberal Party, who died young, in the 1960s. He warned that I should not present German history to young people as just one big criminal file. And he was right. The other reaction is that people feel like they’re being driven into a corner and start defending themselves vehemently. I consider that even more dangerous. Nationalism never dies.
    I want facts to be known and evaluated morally. But you exclude the possibility of succeeding if all you do is insult 19 million veterans or convince the children of 19 million veterans that their parents were the guilty ones—pretending that you yourself are enlightened, morally upright, as if you would have been a resistance fighter, had you been alive at the time! I see them all before, the great resistance fighters among the students in 1968, I see them all before me with their great individual courage.
    That’s my main objection to oversimplification.

Bismarck: Yes, oversimplification doesn’t help us move forward. But there’s something else going on here. You said proudly—as I have done myself, quite often—‘there were no Nazis in our group, we were all decent folks.’ In my regiment, which I commanded at the end, we often spoke openly of “Gröfaz.”  But our arrogance—expressed in Berlin dialect with phrases like “nobody has us,” “we’re a decent lot,” “they should meet us after dark,” and “just give us a little bread and ammo”—such arrogance helped us to downplay Adolf and all that he did with is. Such arrogance contributed to our political blindness.

Schmidt: Quite right. Of course, many, many, many crimes occurred in the Army, the Luftwaffe, even in the Navy. All that has to be put on the table, it must be weighed against other realities that also existed inside Germany and in the military, and evaluated morally. But not with slogans. There is no such thing as a collective conscience—only individual guilt—let alone a collective guilt of all Germans.

Heer: After all we’ve heard now from eye-witnesses about the war, we historians must, despite all emotionality, stand by our colors. There are some who say: We knew nothing at all. I don’t want to be the judge of that, because the point is not to set up some judicial tribunal. I was born in 1941: I grew up with my father’s generation, which is your generation. But I want to invite those who maintain [that they knew of nothing] to forget for a moment their personal memories of a few good and brave comrades and to ask themselves what the Army as an institution did in the East?
    If you examine the records of the military rear echelon, you see that included among the tasks of Military Administration, Bureau 7, were traffic regulation, police measures…and special measures against the Jews. There it is, in black and white. And that’s what I mean by “participation in criminal acts by virtue of structure and command.”  Another example: from the very beginning of the campaign, the Wehrmacht put together lists of medical doctors, identifying the one as “physician,” the other as “apothecary,” but also “Jew” and “Non-Jew.” Why? In the daily reports of the individual field divisions, you can read how many people were “finished” on a given day, in other words, how many people were executed, neatly listed according to the categories (a) “Partisan” and (b) “Jew”. Why do Jews appear in military documents as a special category? Because the Wehrmacht was assigned to destroy them, and to keep a running account [of the killing]. In White Russia alone the Wehrmacht killed around 80,000 Jews.

Schreiber: I find myself asking which units you are talking about. Because all that of course had nothing to do with the fighting troops, that had nothing to do with us soldiers. I would like to know: who put these units together? Did they consist of so-called “Plunder-Teutons,”  I mean Latvian, Lithuanian and other auxiliaries? What kind of fellows were they?

Heer: I’m talking about front-line troops who were temporarily transferred to security divisions and were subsequently reassigned to the front. In short: they were Germans, not Lithuanians or Latvians.

Schreiber: You see, it’s so typical—I’m not making any accusations—that you have investigated the areas behind the front, because so many more crimes were committed there than where we were, the front-line troops. The same thing had already been observed during the initial invasion, that the first wave of combat soldiers were not as despicable as the ones who came after. The combat troops—the people who put their lives on the line, who had to look out for their comrades, left and right—they knew very little about all those things.

Wette: It is always problematic to draw general conclusions from individual experiences. Helmut Schmidt said, “I was lucky.” I think that his choice of words is meaningful, because there’s a whole system of relationships behind it. A soldier on duty in Serbia in 1941 and who had to execute Serbian Jews, day in and day out, that soldier was not lucky.
    Also the members of Reserve Police Battalion 101, who were investigated by the American historian Christopher Browning in his book Ordinary Men, were not lucky. These middle-aged citizens of Hamburg, most of them fathers over forty, workers, artisans from the Hamburg area, were put in Police Battalions and sent to Poland. There they learned, on short notice, what their orders were: to occupy a village, round up the Jews in it, and to execute them all in a nearby forest. All told, this battalion executed over 40,000 Polish Jews and deported an even greater number to the camps. These “ordinary men” were not lucky. One could add endless examples from the Soviet theater of war.
    On the other hand, someone who sat out the war as a baker or shoemaker in the rear echelon had a lot of luck, not to mention those who were active in flak or artillery units, but they were not exposed to the worst things. In any case, the Wehrmacht offered no protection from “bad luck.” On the contrary!
    Having said all that, it is important to recognize that the ratio of the front-line troops of whom you speak, Mr. Schreiber, to rear-echelon soldiers was approximately one to six.

Schmidt: One part front to six parts rear-echelon?

Wette: Yes, that was roughly the ratio at the time.

Heer: And geographically speaking, the rear echelon comprised around 80 percent of the total [area under military administration], whereas the front only made up about 15-20 percent. In other words, you would have to distance yourself from the majority of your comrades by saying that “the crimes” only occurred in the areas behind the front.

Sommer: Many of your friends and acquaintances, Countess Dönhoff, were military officers, many of them also members of the resistance against Hitler. To what extent did the crimes of the Wehrmacht provide an impetus to resist?

Dönhoff: For these friends, resistance began very early, during the Sudetenland crisis in 1938 when Beck challenged the other generals to join him, go to Hitler, and confront him or to resign from office, which they all refused to do.
    I find it all quite understandable that one should try to discover how things really were. But I also think we’ve started off in the completely wrong way, because the reality that you, Bismarck, Schmidt, and others experienced is of course irreconcilable with the picture that we now have from the documents.
    As perhaps the oldest eye-witness here today, I must raise the following question: what exactly made Hitler so attractive, that a nation of poets and philosophers could be seduced by such a supposed idiot and criminal? Answer: it was a fantastic combination of, on the one hand, terror, and on the other hand, success.
    Concerning Hitler’s successes, today it is difficult to imagine how people felt back then, with six million unemployed, with the Rhineland under [foreign military] occupation, and so on. Then along comes this man who says: in three years we will have full employment. It takes a little longer than that, but then the goal was achieved. The Rhineland was liberated from occupation, Austria and the Sudetenland had returned “home to the Reich.”  At that time, politically less-educated or indoctrinated people experienced him as a savior. He was regarded with a kind of religious adoration.
    People like myself, who had seen the danger this man represented, even before 1933 when I was a student, of course I too knew nothing about the Army’s crimes, even though I had such good connections to so many people in key positions. The need to keep things secret was extremely great. For that reason I, like you, Mr. Schreiber, heard the word “Auschwitz” for the first time only after the war.

Sommer: How things actually were, that can be reconstructed. But whether or not it was possible to know about them at the time…

Dönhoff: That’s exactly my point.

Sommer: So for example your deceased friend, Axel von dem Bussche, testified that he was present at an execution of Jews before a mass grave…

Dönhoff: That was his reason for entering the resistance.

Sommer: How many simply did not observe closely enough?

Dönhoff: That actually explains why Hitler could count on so much [popular] approval.

Schmidt: There’s another thing. From the time we began to think consciously, people of my age experienced knew only dictatorship. I learned about democracy for the first time in 1945, as a prisoner of war. [Democracy] must be a really odd thing, that’s what I thought during the war. That’s how we grew up. And there is another very important distinction: Bismarck and you, Countess, and others as well, you moved in elevated social circles…

Dönhoff: That’s not true at all.

Schmidt: What a mean is, there’s no need to be shy about it, you studied overseas, you acquired a certain perspective on things.

Dönhoff: I acquired my perspective at home, and I studied overseas because of them.

Schmidt: Fine, you acquired them at home, in any case you had a broader perspective. My generation and the one after me, the younger generation had no such perspective, we were utterly helpless.

Janssen: I think that the dilemma—really the whole dilemma of the Wehrmacht—lies somewhat deeper. During the Weimar Era, the Reichswehr of General Seekt  saw itself as unpolitical: it was loyal, loyal to President Ebert [a Social Democrat], loyal to President Hindenburg. It was so loyal that, as the Republic entered its last phase, it was prepared to shoot at SA stormtroopers and at the communists, the Red Front militia. But then something very different occurs: The Nazi Party takes power.

Schmidt: And Hitler sacrifices the SA.

Janssen: Yes. By the way, there is a recent dissertation by Immo von Fallois, who shows that in fact it was the Reichswehr that escalated the conflict with the SA [in 1934], so that Hitler might have a strike-force to use against the SA, as General von Fritsch said at the time. The Reichswehr took over all the preparations for eliminating the SA and even supplied the SS with weapons. The actual murders were left to the SS, just as later on the Army let the SS Security Service do its dirty work. It hardly bothered the Reichswehr that its comrades, Generals Schleicher and von Bredow, were killed in the process.
    And now comes something really crucial: as thanks for the fact that Hitler had eliminated the SA and its other competitors, the Army gave an oath of personal allegiance, which every soldier swore. As Blomberg, the War Minister at that time, wrote in his memoirs, the Wehrmacht did this without orders from Hitler, he hadn’t even requested it. One of the officers who had composed the text of the oath, Major Hermann Foertsch, later headed the War Ministry’s “Internal Structure” bureau.

Sommer: Was that same man as the later Inspector General of the Bundeswehr?

Janssen:  No, his brother. In 1950, when the structure of the new Bundeswehr was being devised, there was Hermann Foertsch again, still an expert from “Internal Structure.”

Sommer: Isn’t it necessary to add that not all of the military leaders who subordinated themselves to Hitler after Hindenburg’s death in 1934 automatically approved of all the later crimes, even though Hitler may have been planning them already?

Janssen: That is correct. Of course there was no Holocaust yet. But only four days after taking power, Hitler paid his first visit to the War Ministry and clarified his plans for the Generals. He said: we will make the German people fit to fight again, Marxism will be exterminated. Everyone was happy with that. He said: we will rearm Germany and put the Wehrmacht on a firm footing. And he also explained why: the long-term goal is to gain “living space”  in the East and to Germanize it ruthlessly.
    That the generals knew from the very beginning. In addition, they quickly adopted Nazi symbols [on flags and uniforms] and in 1934 expelled Jews from the Army.

Wette: With or without generalization, we can’t avoid talking about the Wehrmacht as an institution—which is different from talking about the Wehrmacht as a totality. As an institution, the Wehrmacht—represented by the Military High Command and the Army High Command—issued the orders which today we describe as criminal before the attack on the Soviet Union, in the spring of 1941. These included the “Commissar Decree,” the so-called “Barbarossa Decree” and others; the Army’s insane treatment of POWs was also an expression of these commands.
    All these orders, and this is the important thing, were not devised by some bunch of Nazis outside the military, but by officers in the highest military authorities.
    And there is no concrete indication that Hitler authorized them directly. Rather, their inspiration was nothing more than a wide-ranging speech Hitler gave on March 30, 1941, before a large number of generals who subsequently were employed on the eastern front. On their own initiative, officers within the Army General Staff drew the consequences from Hitler’s speech and issued at least four of the decrees which we today describe as criminal.
    In this connection, I want to put a question to you as members of the older generation: What do you do with such information? What do you do with the knowledge that it was the Wehrmacht leadership who issued these criminal decrees, which violated international law and later caused the murder of millions of people?

Schmidt: When I became a member of parliament in 1953, my experiences after the war led me, like other MPs as well, to help prevent the creation of a general staff that was capable of independent action within the new German armed forces, which were forming at that time. Chancellor Adenauer wanted to change the Basic Law  superficially so that he would become commander-in-chief of armed forces, when in fact this meant that the military would govern itself, for no chancellor can really concerns himself with the army. Against Adenauer’s wishes, we drew the consequences: there will be no highest-ranking soldier, there will be no General Staff, instead we named the civilian Minister of Defense as commander-in-chief of the German armed forces.
    That was in 1955, when we drew a conclusion in public law from the what we knew then, knowledge that was still incomplete. We, the parliament, introduced the “Internal Leadership.”  Against the wishes of the officer corps, we introduced the Personnel Investigation Commission, which examined the past of every single officer who wanted to return to active duty.
    Among other things, we also established the two Bundeswehr colleges and pushed through the requirement, against the will of the officer corps, that everyone who wishes to become a career officer must study at the university level for three years, in addition to the War College, just like a civilian student, and earn a degree in one of several fields—he can choose which one—so that each officer acquires a measure of general knowledge. One bad thing about the Reichswehr was that it required no general education; indeed, many in the ruling elites of the Weimar republic had no political education. There was only the authoritarian tradition.

Wette: You have given a political answer, so to speak, to my question about how members of the older generation deal with the knowledge of criminal decrees issued from the highest ranks of the Wehrmacht; you described what consequences we democrats have drawn from that knowledge since 1955. But I want to rephrase the question again this way: how do you deal with this knowledge, when you evaluate the Wehrmacht as an institution?

Schmidt: At 76 years of age, I for my part see no need to reevaluate the Wehrmacht. For me the matter is settled.

Wette: But it doesn’t bother you that we historians continue to reevaluate?

Schmidt: I have nothing against that, and the next generation of historians will reevaluate once again. I just don’t see it as my duty.

Dönhoff: Actually you fulfilled your [historical] duty from 1955 on.

Schmidt: That’s what I think.

Sommer: By drawing the political consequences.

Moltke: Earlier we talked about loyalty. In this connection, I want to raise an idea that gets used quite a lot nowadays: the primacy of politics. The group that held to this idea, 100 percent, was the Wehrmacht. For in a dictatorship the dictator holds primacy of politics. But this primacy of politics had also made a beginning already in the Reichswehr. We can trace it all the way back to Frederick the Great and further.

Sommer: Mr. von Moltke, mustn’t one distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate political authority?

Moltke: It was legitimate, Hitler came to power by legitimate means. That’s the problem.

Schmidt: Not legitimately, but legally. And not even completely legal.

Wette: On the contrary, quite legally!

Moltke: I just wanted to make clear that one can’t simply condemn all the generals wholesale, or even the mid-level leadership. The mid-level leadership, they really couldn’t do anything at all. They got their orders from on high, and if anyone questioned anything, the quick response was always: “so you think you know better than the Führer?”  That ended the possibility of any further discussion.

Wette: You cannot explain the power relationships in during the Nazi period with such an understanding. After all, we’re talking about an alliance of powerful social forces. The Wehrmacht and its leadership was one of these social forces, and it entered an alliance with Hitler.

Schreiber: We’re not talking so much about the institution or about the Wehrmacht as such. People consciously draw the following logical conclusion from many arguments heard these days: if the whole leadership was so rotten, then the whole lot were all bad and criminals. Mr. von Bismarck, you said that you were proud of your unit. My goal is just that we don’t lose sight of the possibility that individual units existed, be it Division XY, Regiment 200 or Regiment 9, to which one can attribute no crimes, which had commanders that tolerated no executions, no atrocities. That we don’t just say: that was nothing more than a criminal institution, that was nothing more than a pillar of the Nazi system. That’s my goal.
    The same goes for individual troop commanders. Whether an army base ought to be named for General Dietl,  we can certainly argue about that.  But nowadays there are voices saying that we should not tolerate naming military bases after members of the former Wehrmacht, and that’s bad. Unfortunately, it has already come to this.

Schmidt: Dietl is a very questionable figure, given what we know about him today. Years ago, when [Bavarian Minister President Franz Josef] Strauss named a military base after him, all that was not known. In this connection, incidentally, I’d like to know, why didn’t the Bundeswehr officers who were invited to participate in this discussion attend?

Sommer: We haven’t received an explanation yet, only the regrets.

Schmidt: Who was invited?

Sommer: The Inspector General [Klaus Naumann].

Janssen: And when he declined the Assistant Inspector General. But he was since transferred.  After that, his successor in office explained—I’m just repeating what the press officers said—that he didn’t feel competent for this theme. The second explanation was that he was unavailable. Then the commander of the Military History Research Division, Brigadier General Roth, was supposed to attend, but he really was prevented from attending today because he had to present a book in Munich. In addition, Major General Olboeter of the Leadership Academy in Hamburg was supposedly prevented from attending. The officers assured me that despite the very best intentions, it was impossible to find any suitable representative of the Bundeswehr. And two officers at the Ministry of Defense who would have attended were not given permission.

Wette: I’d like to express a personal opinion about this case, and I must emphasize that it is personal. We we’re talking about the question of tradition in the military, we’re really talking about the politics of history. When statements about the Wehrmacht are the topic of discussion, we’re dealing with academic freedom, which is covered by Article 5 of the Basic Law. But here we’re dealing a question of historical politics and I suspect that for the Bundeswehr, the difference between Julius Leber—Social Democrat and resistance fighter for whom a barracks in Berlin was recently named—and the 150-percent Nazi Dietl—whose name still graces a barracks in the Bavarian town of Füssen—is so crass that the military does want to allow itself to be drawn into a public debate over the matter. That is my very personal suspicion.

Heer: I cannot conceal my surprise that the keepers of tradition in the Bundeswehr, who concern themselves professionally every day with the history of the Wehrmacht, did not attend [this round-table discussion]. It’s too bad. But I want to come back to something that Mr. Schmidt said a moment ago. If I understand the essence of your argument, it appears to follow a rather old pattern of logic. Specifically, I perceive a pattern of argumentation that was first developed in 1945 by five former generals who were assigned the task of composing a memorandum for the Allied Military Tribunal in Nürnberg—a panel that included generals Brauchitsch, Halder, and von Manstein. One can summarize this 40 to 45-page attempt to describe the Wehrmacht role in the Second World War in three assertions.

a) We were no allies of Hitler’s, nor did we cooperate with him.
b) We knew nothing of the crimes against the Jews, the prisoners of war, and so forth.
c) We certainly weren’t involved in perpetrating those crimes.

You, Mr. Schmidt, did use these arguments explicitly, and it would be wrong to suggest otherwise. But the same pattern of argumentation can be recognized in your remarks. As to the first point, whether or not the Wehrmacht was allied with Hitler: not long ago, Bernhard Kroener developed some theses about what you might call a history of the “mentality” in the Wehrmacht. He divided the officer corps into four generational groups. The first group, whose members had served as staff officers in the First World War, was shaped by values of the German Empire and agreed with Hitler’s publicly propagated goals in foreign and military policy: Germany must be restored to its old greatness, the “dictated peace” of Versailles must be abolished, and so forth. That was a coalition of interests.
The members of the second generational group—front-line officers during the First World War and now serving as staff officers—were shaped by the ideology of Social Darwinism, according to Kroener: survival of the fittest, victory of the more worthy, and for them Germans were the better and racially superior people. Therefore they were at least vulnerable to, if not already infected by the doctrines of National Socialism. These were the active executors of the war of annihilation in the East.
    After them came a generation of officers who had had negative experiences with the Weimar Republic and which was shaped by the values of the inter-war youth movement, and the Hitler Youth generation, which has experienced National Socialism as a success story. We can say that the Wehrmacht became “Nazified” at the latest when these young and mostly unschooled people were shoved into leadership ranks in 1942-1943. The Wehrmacht finally became the “people’s army” about which Hitler had fantasized and which was demanded in the Nazi Party program.
    The second point: we didn’t know anything. Recently I was reading around in Jochen Klepper’s diary from the Second World War. There Klepper writes: “I had amazing discussions with my comrades, humane and deep conversations. But there’s one thing I just can get past: everyone around me is completely convinced that the Jews must be eliminated.” That’s what Klepper says, and he was a conservative.

Schmidt: When was that?

Heer: September 1941, in the Ukraine. He is totally disgusted: Everyone around me—those were men in the lower ranks, simple grunts. Last year in the State Archives in Moscow I discovered some texts written by German prisoners of war in 1943—writings about war crimes on the eastern front. It is appalling, the things that ordinary soldiers did and saw, the acts they committed and the things they knew. I checked these statements against [German] military documents to find out: do the units match up? The places? The time? And everything matched up.
    At the level of the officer corps, the evidence is much easier to find. The “criminal orders” that were issued before the campaign were discussed at innumerable conferences at the staff officers’ level during the early summer of 1941. Thus all knew in advance what was coming to them. And if you then look in the secret field reports to see what happened after the Soviet border was crossed—I’m speaking of reports by staff officers in the German military counter-intelligence—you might think you were reading a copy of Der Stürmer!  Slogans like “The Jew and the Partisan are One” and “The Jew Must Be Eliminated” can be read on every page of these reports.
    Therefore one is forced to conclude: from top to bottom there were certain racist dispositions. This stance hardened under the conditions prevailing at the front, reinforced by at least some knowledge of what the SS and the SD were doing [to Jews]. From the very beginning, everyone knew what was going on.

Schmidt: Now that really is nonsense, to say that everyone knew.

Heer: With the qualifications that Mr. Wette indicated.

Schmidt: If you want to have a serious discussion here, you have to acknowledge that others experiences that were different from the general conclusions you have drawn from your documents. Otherwise you must consider me a liar. In that case I must get up and leave the room.

Heer: I repeat, ‘with the qualifications Mr. Wette indicated’: There were units, there were companies, there were individuals “who were lucky.”

Schmidt: What he says about “luck” is right on, he’s quite correct on that score. But there were many people who were “lucky” in this sense. Myself included. I received a light wound. And they never discovered my Jewish ancestry, in that sense I had fabulously good luck. But you sit there and suggest that I’m making a specious argument based on the opinions of certain former Wehrmacht generals. That really won’t do.

Heer: I’m not claiming that everyone who was on in the worst military sectors—the eastern front or in Serbia—knew everything. But they were witness to at least one of these great crimes—the murder of prisoners of war, as Mr. von Bismarck just described it, or the destruction of Jews by the SD units that were trailing behind the front line. Or through participation in the “anti-partisan war,” they learned how women and children were executed with the justification that they were helping the partisans; they learned how villages were burned to the ground, ostensibly because they were the partisans’ “strongholds.”  Eight hundred villages were torched in White Russia alone. Two million civilians were killed in the so-called “anti-partisan war”—mainly because the soldiers couldn’t get at the real partisans.

Sommer: Surely there must have been people who learned none of these three things. You have to consider that possibility, too.

Erenz: Possibly, yes. But I suspect that very many more, especially those who were not “nazified,” knew at the time that they were not fighting for Nation and Fatherland but were party to enormous crimes motivated by hate and greed. Recently I found a poem by Albrecht Goes, who at the time was a military chaplain on the eastern front, certainly no member of the resistance. It is called “The Vow” and begins like this: “What goal do we strive toward? / Not the Fatherland’s. / Not that for our grandchildren and heirs / We reconquer foreign lands / To burden them anew / With hatreds’ bilious vapors / To burden them anew / With patriotic glitter.”
    Not the greatest lyric, but an excellent document of the times, written in a spotted fever infirmary on the eastern front in the spring of 1943. “Not the Fatherland’s”! Goes wrote down the word “not” with special emphasis. He recognizes the nation’s insanity. And then the phrase about “patriotic glitter”! One would do well to remember this text. I fear that it might come in handy one day.

Bismarck: Do we really know to what extent and in which units such orders as the “Commissar Decree” were actually out? Not in my unit, in any case…

Schmidt: In conversations I learned about the “Commissar Decree” on the eastern front in 1941, but it was never presented to us officially, nor were we ever ordered to carry it out. With hindsight, I believe that we would not have carried it out.

Wette: My colleagues in the Military History Research Institute,  who really have investigated this question intensively, come to the following conclusion: Generally speaking, and with few exceptions, the “Commissar Decree” was carried out.
    And once again, this is a typical case where the truth comes to light very, very slowly. When questions were first posed about the “Commissar Decree,” people said at first that it didn’t exist. Then when the document was discovered, people said, Aha! So it existed! But surely it wasn’t passed on to the divisions in the east. Then copies were found that had been delivered to the divisions. So then people said, OK, but the order wasn’t conveyed [to the individual units]. When it was proven that the order had been passed down the ranks, people said: Surely the order wasn’t carried out. Then documents were produced which proved that progress reports on the killings had been sent up the chain of command. Then, finally, people said: At least we accomplished this, we made it clear to Hitler that he should rescind the “Commissar Decree” because it only hardens the Soviets’ will to resist.
    On this example you can see how hard it has always been to get even a tiny bit closer to the truth.

Schmidt: Please, we mustn’t overlook the fact that the active resistance against Adolf Hitler would have had no chance at all without the help of Wehrmacht officer. Think of Treszckow or Stauffenberg and all the rest!

Janssen: True, but you can also make shocking discoveries studying the military resistance. On July 20, 1944 in Paris—where the military’s attempted coup d’état against Hitler actually succeeded for a while—there was a great hero, General Carl Heinrich von Stülpnagel, who after the plot collapsed tried to commit suicide by shooting himself in the head, lost his eyesight as a result, and who despite it all was put on trial in the People’s Court and executed. But one can also charge this same General von Stülpnagel with active abetting the Holocaust on the eastern front, for he also cooperated closely with the Einsatzgruppe A.
    He belonged to a generation of officers whose most traumatic experience at the end of World War I on the eastern front was to witness fraternization between German soldiers and Bolsheviks from the other side. Long before Hitler came to power, they already possessed an ideologically-laden image of the Enemy. The phrase “Jewish Bolshevism” was absorbed without afterthought into the field commands of Generals von Manstein, von Reichenau, and Hoth. And so it happened that cooperating with the Einsatzgruppen was simply taken for granted.

Bismarck: A moment ago we were discussing the partisans. Once I had a lengthy exchange of letters with the Military History Research Institute in Freiburg about the activities of three German Security Divisions in the enormous region of forests and swamps around Minsk [in White Russia], burning villages, killing women and children. By chance I managed to dig up three officers of one of these divisions. The belonged its intelligence unit.
    I sought them out, these three. Up until three or four years ago, they still believed that the Russians in the forests were all scum and rabble. The would attack the Germans from behind like rabid dogs, they said. These officers were still completely in the thrall of Nazi propaganda. Of course, it is easy to see why the military leadership was in despair, you don’t have to have been a battalion or regiment commander to see that. Every night, the partisans emerged from their forests to blow up the rail lines. And in these vast forests and marshes the Germans never apprehended the partisans.
    But the fact that up until three or four years ago, these officers could say, “we were completely justified. There was an order from Hitler: in this phase it is permitted to act utterly without scruple, even against women and children.” And that they would act exactly the same today, that is what terrified me. How can such blindness persist?
    I only said this: “What did you just say? The partisans were gangsters and riff-raff? And you had no choice but to herd them into barns covered with hay bails, drench them with gasoline, and set them on fire?” I was speechless.

Schreiber: On principle I have to concur with what you’re saying. But what is completely lacking from our discussion is the fact that on the partisans’ side, the partisan war was rather contrary to international law. What I mean is that the things that were done against the partisans—not against women and children, to that extent I’m fully in agreement with you—was basically not illegal.

Sommer: Wasn’t a war of aggression contrary to international law?

Schreiber: That’s a different matter entirely.

Schmidt: Unfortunately, none of the combatant nations took very seriously the Hague Convention on the Law of War.  All sides conducted this barbaric war with disregard for the Geneva Convention  and the Hague Conventions.

Schreiber: Unfortunately, that’s true, for the most part.

Schmidt: And our side was the worst.

Schreiber: Hmm…here I have to mention Yugoslavia. What you say is disproved when you listen to people who were there and who made believable reports on the things that the other side did, like walling in German prisoners by the thousands on the island of Ragusa. It is at least understandable that both sides eventually lost control, especially after a long period of escalation.
    So it does make a difference if out of 50,000 who were executed, bad enough in itself, 25,000 were partisans or women and children or Jews. One must make distinctions.

Wette: Once again, you disregard the fact that there is thorough, scholarly research into all of these questions, in which precise distinctions have been made. Consider for a moment the book by my colleague Christian Streit on the fate of Soviet prisoners of war.  You simply refuse to take cognizance of this research, right down to the present instant!

Sommer: Yesterday evening I spoke with a colleague about the discussion we’re having today. His father was a cavalry captain in the First World War. And he said to me: “We were sitting together one evening back then, on a cold winter’s night in 1945, when the Nuremberg Trials had just begun, and [information about war crimes] was being published for the first time in Germany. My father looked at us and said, very sadly, ‘You consider us all murderers.’”  I think that this quiet accusation coerces us still today. I think that we have also established that today, in this discussion, to the extent that it was a dialogue between generations.
    I am not a military historian, but I am a historian of the Second World War and I have concerned myself with these matters intensively. I believe that it is an established fact that the Wehrmacht committed acts of organized murder and terror. But I also think that it is a fact that not every member of the Wehrmacht was a murderer and a terrorist. We ought to be able to agree to that, at least. There were many murderers and terrorists, too many, but not all were. I can live with a characterization taken from the Bundeswehr’s Tradition Decree: “To some extent, the armed forces under National Socialism became entangled in guilt, but to some extent they were innocently misused.” I think that’s the way it was.

Schmidt: Since we’re concluding now, there’s one more thing I’d like to say. I believe it is an objective fact that the great majority of all Germans—not just members of the Wehrmacht—aided and abetted Hitler’s war…and I mean “to aid and abet” in the sense of criminal law. Soldiers, civil servants, workers, industrial employees, the personnel of railroads and the postal system, almost everyone really, including even the Nazis’ declared enemies and also my half-Jewish father, a civil servant who served in the Home Guard  at the very end of the war. That is my opinion, which I published in a book two years ago.
    But I also want to add another thing. The danger of totalitarian ideologies persists now and into the future. They could rise again: the willingness to believe in this or that doctrine of political salvation, the consciousness of belonging to an entitled élite, as well as the link between idealism and the use of force.
 I believe—and Mr. Heer would not suggest it—that this is not merely the opinion of a man who is twice as old as he is, but an opinion that could ascribe to. Our opinions are not so far apart.

Heer: D’accord. When we talk about the Wehrmacht and about the Second World War, we have to keep the entire century in mind and its massive increase in brutality, which the First World War had caused already [in 1914]. But in this context as well, it is necessary to put the war conducted by the German Wehrmacht into a singular category, especially the period between 1941 and 1945. My wish is not to condemn, but to learn what caused it and how it operated. Perhaps then we will be able to prevent it from happening again.