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Submitted by: Omer Bartov
100313.2776@CompuServe.COM
What's All the Fuss About?
The most curious aspect of the debate over the Wehrmachtsausstellung in
Germany is that it has all happened before. And yet, whenever some new (or
old) evidence is made public regarding the involvement of the Wehrmacht in
Hitler's policies of conquest, subjugation, and genocide, everyone seems
surprised, shocked, and angry, whether because they "finally" have the
"definitive" proof of the German army's criminality, or because they see
this as "another" conspiracy against the Wehrmacht's shield of honor.
In April 1981 the weekly Der Spiegel carried a review of the recently
published volume, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges: "Ein deutscher
Historiker widerlegt die gaengige These, die Wehrmacht habe mit den
Mordaktionen der Eisatzgruppen in Russland nichts zu tun gehabt. Das Heer
war tief darin verstickt.... Ueber die 'in ihrem Ausmass erschreckende
Integration des Heeres in das Vernichtungsprogramm und die
Vernichtungspolitik Hitlers' hat jetzt der Historiker Helmut Krausnick in
Zusammenarbeit mit seinem Kollegen Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm neue Materialien
vorgelegt. In einem Buch ueber die Geschichte der Eisatzgruppen
korrigieren sie liebgewordene Vorstellungen von der 'Reinheit' der
Wehrmacht."
Nor did this begin with Krausnick and Wilhelm. In 1965 Hans-Adolf Jacobsen
published an important chapter on the implementation of the infamous
Kommissarbefehl. In 1969 Manfred Messerschmidt examined in great detail
the National Socialist indoctrination of the Wehrmacht's troops. In 1978
Christian Streit demonstrated the role of the army in the murder of over
three million Soviet POWs. Following Krausnick's book, my own two studies,
The Eastern Front, 1941-1945 (1985) and Hitler's Army (1991), documented
the involvement of the rank-and-file in the murderous policies of the
Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union.
Each time such a study is published, everyone seems terribly exercised.
After touring Germany for two years and arriving finally in the "capital
of the movement," the exhibit organized by the Hamburger Institut fuer
Sozialforschung elicited the following comments from Theo Sommer of Die
Zeit: "Die Bilder einer Ausstellung erregen Deutschland. Sie raeumen ein
fuer allemal auf mit dem Mythos, dass die Wehrmacht in Hitlers Reich des
Boesen ein unanfechtbarer Hort des Anstands, der Ritterlichkeit und der
Ehrenhaftigkeit geblieben sei."
I doubt that even the recent exhibition will put an end to the debate,
despite its wealth of photographic evidence. There will always be those
who will say that they (or their parents, or their grandparents) had never
had anything to do with all that, had not even seen it, that one should
not generalize, that there were good soldiers and bad in an institution
through whose ranks close to twenty million men served at one time or
another.
What is interesting in this debate is something else. One wonders why the
public reception of Daniel Goldhagen's book in Germany was so positive
(excluding early journalistic criticism which soon adjusted to the public
mood, and scholarly criticism which only demonstrated the gulf between the
historians and the public), while the Wehrmachtsausstellung has created
such a political debate. Let me offer a partial explanation.
Even if Goldhagen insists on speaking about "the Germans" rather than the
Nazis when describing the murder of the Jews, the perpetrators he is
concerned with are members of reserve police battalions or other units
connected with the SS. Not only does he offer all Germans a way out of the
dilemma by saying that after 1949 they became "like us," namely, ceased
being the subjects of an anthropological inquiry and could be recognized
as "normal" human being; he also writes on people who cannot by any
stretch of the imagination be described as objects of admiration and
respect. No one has ever said in Germany that he or she was proud of his
or her father's heroic service in a reserve police battalion. I don't
think that Gerald Feldman would have written that a few of his best
friends are former members of the police and that "we understand one
another perfectly." Policemen, even in Germany, are rarely cult figures.
The Wehrmacht is a wholly different matter. It has remained in people's
minds the last bastion of honor and respect in the Third Reich not because
evidence to the contrary was in short supply, but because it encompassed a
vast portion of the German male population and provided in the postwar
years the young generation that rebuilt both Germanys. To say that the
Wehrmacht was involved in the Holocaust on every level is equivalent to
saying that all Germans were; to admit that the millions of young men who
created the Federal Republic were involved in genocide is to cast doubt on
the very essence of postwar German society. It is, indeed, to say that the
Germans did not become "like us," because so many (though perhaps fewer
and fewer) of them still refuse to accept that between 1939 (or 1941) "we"
fought a just war, and "they" fought an evil one; not that all wars are
evil, but rather that some regimes are so evil that one must annihilate
them even at the cost of terrible destruction to all sides; not that all
soldiers are victims, but rather that some soldiers fight on the side of
evil and become complicit in it, and some fight against evil and are
therefore morally superior, despite the many exceptions on both sides. It
is this recognition that is so difficult to accept in Germany, and one can
hardly expect the current exhibition to make much of a dint on the
public's mind for any sustained period of time. One only wonders when will
we read again that "finally" the myth of the Wehrmacht's "purity of arms"
has been shattered.
Omer Bartov
Rutgers University
bartov@rci.rutgers.edu
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
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