A touring photographic exhibition is at last telling the truth about Hitler’s reluctant army. And some Germans don’t like it, reports STEPHEN PLAICE
THE honourable German soldier coerced and corrupted by the Nazis has become one of the century’s most powerful icons, an everyman for an age mired in moral ambivalence. It has been perpetuated in hundreds of films and novels, from Sam Peckinpah’s Cross Of Iron, to Stalingrad, The Desert Fox and even The Great Escape.
We all know the scenarios – the decent regular officer looking on helplessly as he witnesses the brutalities of the SS, the humane prison-camp commandant driven over the edge by the Gestapo. The ordinary soldier’s dilemma has even been turned into a comic clich: witness the comic-book Krautery of ‘Allo, ‘Allo – “I vas only obeying orders!”
Military historians, too, have been anxious to put distance between the activities of the Wehrmacht and those of Hitler’s Praetorian guard. This division of culpability is a reassuring myth that both the victorious Allies and the defeated Germans have found convenient. Now an exhibition, The War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941-44, has completely shattered that image.
The exhibition has been touring German cities for nearly two years, and the evidence has been snowballing all the time, as more ex-servicemen and their families contribute letters and photos hidden for half a century.
Now that it has reached Mnich in the conservative heartland of Bavaria, the exhibition has sparked a huge political row that has already spilled on to the streets in violent demonstrations and arrests.
The exhibition charges the Wehrmacht with major war crimes, and it is difficult to see how they can be denied. Shocking photographs from the Eastern Front show the mass execution of Jews, gypsies, prisoners of war and so-called partisans by soldiers from regular units. They leave no doubt about the zeal and enthusiasm with which the army pursued systematic extermination in Serbia, Russia and the Ukraine, with hardly a Gestapo car or an SS insignia in sight.
But the main thrust of the evidence is that it nails the lie that ordinary Germans knew nothing of the Holocaust. The letters on display, written mostly by low-ranking soldiers to their families and girlfriends, prove public knowledge and tacit support for the slaughter of the enemies of the Reich.
The tone is often missionary. The soldiers write of the need to rid the world of “subhumanity”, of putting the Jews out of their “wretched misery”, of a “sanitisation programme” for the white race, to which the English and Americans are “traitors”.
The Wehrmacht’s High Command seems to have done little to control the flow of this casual information. It’s clear from these letters that many of the soldiers revelled in their gruesome work. As one soldier chattily puts it in 1942 after going on a sightseeing tour of concentration camps around Auschwitz: “It really is good to get out and see the world …”
One of the official photographers in the “partisan” war in Serbia, Gerhard Gronefeld, has contributed to the exhibition. He was with the army when it conducted executions at Pancevo, near Belgrade. Gronefeld, who subsequently became a nature photographer for Life magazine, kept his photographs of Wehrmacht firing squads buried in his garden in case the Russians discovered them.
While admitting army complicity in the slaughter, Germany’s defence ministry still resists wholesale condemnation of its wartime troops. The official line is that the bulk of the blame lies with Nazi agencies, particularly the SD, the ruthless security service of the SS. The army has always made much of the resistance of a small group of its officers, which culminated in the unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1944. Hitler himself regarded the army as the “second pillar” of the Reich, after the Party. These pictures make it much more difficult for army apologists to claim it was merely coerced into helping him.
But what is also disturbing about these revelations is the apparent cover-up in the immediate post-war period. The compilers of the exhibition found army records had been systematically weeded of incriminating material. Some regimental files may well have been destroyed during the bombing, but it is hard to believe that the Wehrmacht had time to destroy all the incriminating evidence during the collapse of the Reich. Was there Allied complicity in the cover- up?
The Allies had good reason to exempt the Wehrmacht and its officers from the war trials. In the same way that the judiciary, clergy and medical profession were not taken to task about their involvement in National Socialism in case the infrastructure of the country fell apart, so the integrity of the army needed to be preserved. “Denazification” was token at best. It was this period that spawned the image of the “honourable” German soldier compromised by evil Nazis.
In Erfurt the exhibition panels were sprayed with the word “lies”. In Regensburg the mayor boycotted the opening because the image it gives of the Wehrmacht “does not appeal to me”. But the critics have been unable to challenge the authenticity of the photographs and letters. And so the attacks have become personal.
Conservative Bavarians may not want to remember the war or the Holocaust. But since the exhibition opened in February they have been prepared to take to the streets and cenotaphs for the honour of Germany.
After instructions by the defence ministry to counteract the negative image of the German army, the centre-right leader in Munich, Peter Gauweiler, boycotted the show’s opening ceremony and held his own ceremony of remembrance at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. His ceremony was well attended and some carried white roses, symbol of the resistance movement during the Third Reich.
For the exhibition’s organisers and their hosts, the Social Democratic city council, German honour now means coming clean – exposing the full horror of the atrocities perpetrated by previous generations. But Mayor Christian Ude and his colleagues expected trouble. No posters were put up for fear of defacement, and the opening ceremony had to be moved at the last minute.
Nevertheless, Ude was the star of the show, earning enthusiastic applause. He insisted the exhibition was not a blanket condemnation of the Wehrmacht, nor an attempt to undermine the modern army. But he pulled no punches. His generation should not feel morally superior, he said. They should count themselves lucky they never had to face the stark choice of their fathers and grandfathers – serve in a totalitarian state or be eliminated themselves.