Memorial Day 2002

WE TOO WERE SOLDIERS



The last Monday of May is traditionally dedicated to honor and remember America's soldiers who have been killed in the various wars the country has been engaged in. This is good and proper but we should not only remember those who had given their lives, but also those who had to live on with serious and at times massively debilitating injuries. These soldiers who had laid their lives on the line and had been spared the fatal bullet should also be remembered and equally honored.

But there exists among the living another generation who had faced the fury of war and either succumbed to it or emerged in a severely battered state. Not only is this generation of soldiers not honored but it is regarded as, brutes, murderers, and wanton killers especially of Jews. I am talking, of course, of the German Wehrmacht.

When I read the newspapers it is common to find us, and I mean us because I was one of "them," referred to as Nazi soldiers, and the Wehrmacht as the Nazi army. It is true that we served in the German army, and the country had at that time a national-socialist government but it is not true that we, therefore, agreed with Hitler's policies or automatically hated the enemies of the country. Goebbels did his level best to instill this hatred into us but he failed because soldiers, especially the front line troops, don't hate. They are too busy saving their skin. It's "shoot first before you get shot" and every soldier who has ever been in a war will recognize this as a fact of life.

Let me now go back sixty years. At the end of May 1942 I was still in High School but my brother, who is two years older, was already in the Wehrmacht deep inside the Soviet Union and his outfit was on the way to the Caucasus to get at the badly needed oil wells. His job was not to kill Jews or other undesirables but to change the wide track Russian railroad tracks to the usual European ones, which was back breaking work. He was also a kid, drafted as soon as he got out of high school, and not yet nineteen years old. Fortunately he got a bad case of hepatitis in Maikop, at the edge of the Caucasus, which saved his life. He was transported back home and received a desk job after his recovery. By the time his fiftieth high school reunion rolled around in 1991 there was no reunion because he was the only survivor of his class. The vast majority had been in the Sixth army which was wiped out in Stalingrad, and whoever survived tended to be in bad health which did not allow for longevity.

Now fast forward to Vienna 2002. My brother still lives there and earlier this spring there was an exhibit on the Wehrmacht. It was a replay of another one which had toured Germany and Austria some years before and which had painted the entire German army as a "murder machine." The previous exhibit had aroused a great deal of indignation by ex-soldiers of my generation because faked pictures and documents had been used. In the current one some corrections had taken place to avoid the obvious pictorial distortions but the tenor was the same. The "Nazi" soldiers had been evil and such atrocities which had then been committed by them must never be allowed to come to pass again. My brother went to see the exhibit and saw that hordes of school children had been brought by their teachers to this educational display. When some of the kids saw my brother standing there viewing the pictures they came up to him, because of his obvious age, and asked him what thought of it. He then proceeded to tell them of his personal experiences and that they were being indoctrinated with propaganda which bears little relationship to what had actually happened. He was soon confronted with an irate teacher who obviously knew better, having been born several decades after the war had been over, and who thoroughly believed the current party line. She shooed her flock away from this fuddy-duddy who obviously must have been a Nazi. Thus the new generation is being brainwashed in current political correctness just as our generation had been more than half a century earlier.

But I said "we" in the title because I was also one of these "evil ones;" "one of the Nazi beasts" who wanted to destroy Western civilization. The summer of 1942 was spent working on a farm because youngsters had to do productive work, for the final victory, the Endsieg, which was just around the corner. Your opinions were neither asked for nor valued so the smart thing to do was to keep your mouth shut and do what you were told. My army life started in 1943 and I must admit that I even volunteered. Now this surely must have stamped me, in some eyes, as a devoted follower of the Führer. On the contrary, it was Realpolitik. I knew that I would be drafted as soon as I had graduated, because that was a given, but it was also obvious that I would, in all probability, have been assigned to the infantry. This was a fate I wanted to avoid like the plague. I never enjoyed hiking long distances, and for living in muddy foxholes I had no taste either. First I thought I'd volunteer for the Luftwaffe because I had always wanted to learn to fly. But my grandfather, who had been dead already for more than a decade, stood in the way. He had been born a Jew. That made me a Mischling and as such ineligible for this elite outfit. The fact that Goering's second in command, General Milch, was also a Mischling didn't matter because it was Goering's privilege to choose whomever he wanted for whatever he wanted. Goering had also expropriated the phrase "I determine who is a Jew." It had been coined by the former Mayor of Vienna, Lueger. Before becoming mayor Lueger had reveled in antisemitic slogans and when he was confronted by adversaries that he really shouldn't have Jewish friends he uttered that previously mentioned memorable phrase. Lueger had another one which is highly á propos today and I have quoted it in War&Mayhem. Lueger dropped his antisemitism after his election because that was, after all, also Realpolitik.

Since the Luftwaffe was out I was at odds with what to do with myself. Then fate sent me one of my school friends, during a stroll in the city, who said that he was going to volunteer for the Panzer. Now there was an idea. Everybody was enamored with Rommel’s daring and here was another elite outfit for which I might have been eligible. As must be obvious by now, I have nothing whatsoever against elitism, provided the status is earned. For me it is not a dirty word, as for some whom I have had the opportunity to run into in this country, and who accused me of it. So both of us volunteered and were accepted. In the fall of 1944 I was on the front in Hungary where the Russians had come to meet us, but I was spared the battle for Budapest, for reasons that were related in War&Mayhem. Earlier this year I received as a gift John Lukasz's Confessions of an Original Sinner who experienced it from the other side. But the point to be made is that we did not kill any civilians, Jewish or otherwise, and we behaved like soldiers do in all armies, which included even an occasional looting of a watchmaker's store. Looting was strictly forbidden in the Wehrmacht and when caught one could get court-martialed. This happened in fact to my tank commander but after I had already been ordered out.

Now comes the next irony. Not only was I in the Wehrmacht but even in the SA, which obviously might stamp me now, in some eyes, irrevocably as a Nazi. Well to quote the Gershwin opera: "It ain't necessarily so." After the assassination attempt on Hitler in July of 1944 the army was discredited and had to be Nazified. So my Panzer Grenadier Division was stripped of its number and was called instead the Panzer Grenadier Division Feldherrnhalle. We were also given a brown, relatively narrow, armband which proclaimed SA Feldherrnhalle. This we had to stitch onto the lower end of the left sleeve of our uniform jackets. We were also told that the Russians had a head price on the wearers of this band, just as for the Waffen SS. I suppose this was meant to stiffen our will to fight. I wouldn't have been necessary because we were determined to fight anyway. Our division was completely destroyed during the Budapest siege. There were somewhat over 16.000 men in our division when Budapest was encircled and 291 of them were eventually able to break through and make it back to the German lines. Thus more than 98 per cent were either captured or killed. After the war I met two of my comrades. One had lost a leg; the other had shown an enterprising spirit after his capture and had joined the Red Army on its march to Vienna. If the choice is between Siberia and heading where you want to go anyway, the choice is not all that hard.

This brings me to the oft asked question. "But if you weren't a Nazi, then why did you fight for Hitler?" The answer is simple: we didn't fight for Hitler, or the Nazis, we actually wanted to get rid of them. You may not want to believe this but we were also fighting to save Western civilization. The threat had come from the "Asiatic hordes," "the Soviet beasts," and the "Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy" which had dragged the Western world into the war against its own will. At least that was the party line at the time. We who fought in the East had a clear goal. It was to keep the Soviets at bay long enough so that the Americans and Brits could get to Austria and Germany first before the Russians had a chance to get there. What we wanted to avoid at all costs was to live under Soviet occupation and for this we were willing to give our lives. Just as the Russian soldier did not fight for Stalin or communism, but in defense of Holy Mother Russia, so did we defend the Vaterland and not necessarily its regime. On the Western front the ideological situation was more complex because many Austrians did not want to fight the Western Allies. It was simply the wrong war. For us the enemy was not capitalism but communism. If I had been sent to the Western front in the summer of '44 I would have made every effort to throw my rifle away, sneak to the American lines, put up my hands and say "Hi folks, do you need an interpreter?" But why did Germans and other Austrians fight on the Western front when the war was obviously hopelessly lost?

There were two reasons. One was that the army's oath encompassed not only "to defend the country" but also Hitler in person. In those days an oath, even when extracted under duress, was meaningful and a lame excuse that "it depends on what the meaning of is, is" would have been unthinkable. In addition there were Roosevelt's favorite phrase of "unconditional surrender" and the Morgenthau plan which would have destroyed Germany forever. Neither of these facts emanated from Goebbels' brain but was official policy of the Allies at the time. It was these policies which unnecessarily prolonged the war and cost additional millions of lives. Why did FDR promote them? One reason was that he simply hated Germans and he also wanted desperately to please Uncle Joe who might otherwise have made separate arrangements with Germany. The Soviet Union had to be kept in the war to spare American lives and to get rid of Hitler who was regarded as the main menace. We wanted to get rid of Hitler too and had the Western Allies taken the peace feelers of the anti-Hitler group in Germany seriously numerous lives, including those of Jews, would have been saved.

But the problem was not really Hitler and the Nazis in the minds of Western politicians at the time. The problem was the existence of Germany per se. As Vansittart had put it: "Hitler is the symptom, Germany is the disease," to which FDR and his group readily subscribed. To paraphrase Marcus Cato, Germaniam esse delendam, Germany must be annihilated. The fate that had befallen Carthage two thousand years earlier was now to be meted out to the Germans. Nazi or not didn't make a difference! Even Eisenhower succumbed to this doctrine. When the Wehrmacht surrendered in the millions in the spring of '45 the soldiers were no longer treated as prisoners of war but as "disarmed enemy forces." This DEF, rather than POW, status allowed Eisenhower to circumvent the Geneva Convention and to perpetrate a disaster of massive proportions on the soldiers who had thought that the Americans would treat them in a humane fashion. All of us are more than familiar with the horror pictures from the liberated concentration camps, where prisoners had died like flies from starvation and disease. But as yet I have not seen a single documentary about the conditions German soldiers were exposed to in American and French camps between August 1944 and December of 1945. Being a volunteer by nature I avoided this fate and discharged myself with a friend from the Wehrmacht on May 4. We simply threw our gear away and started walking home. Another friend of mine who had sat for six years next to me in school was not so lucky. He had been taken prisoner by the Americans, was then given to the French for more than two years of slave labor before he was eventually discharged. He had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time and had become a number among millions. I have mentioned earlier that at the time of the fiftieth High School reunion my brother was the only one still living. For us, born two years later, the situation was different. We had lost only somewhat over fifty percent of our class rather than one hundred percent. Accidents of where and when you were born, for which no one can be held responsible, do make a difference.

This chapter of WWII is largely unknown in America and we owe it to James Bacque's Other Losses to have brought this tragedy to light. But since WWII was a war of "good versus evil" his book, which exposes evil on the good side, must not become widely known, let alone serve as a basis for a TV documentary. Myths must not be shattered. The same applies to John Sack's Eye for an Eye which documents the behavior of some former Jewish inmates of concentration camps in Poland, when they had become supervisors and guards of imprisoned Germans. Lest I be misunderstood let me make it quite clear that I do not deny that some members of the Wehrmacht had in fact committed war crimes especially in Russia and the Balkans where they were confronted with a guerilla war which is notoriously brutal. "Reprisals" were the norm then and they still are, but these acts do not justify the slander of millions of ordinary soldiers who had served their country in the Wehrmacht, let alone the rest of the civilian population who had lived under the Hitler regime.

Thus when we celebrate this and other Memorial Days we should also remember all the other victims of wars Americans have fought in regardless of nationality. The real enemy all of us face is hate rather than a given nation or regime. Hate will always surface under different names, be it a Hitler or the currently popular ones: Yassir Arafat, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Ladin or any other member of the "axis of evil." What we fail to realize is that hate when met with hate will only generate more hate. While Hitler had to be defeated and Osama, as well as Saddam have to be neutralized, the methods to do so should not exceed the essential minimum to achieve this goal. In our present war on terrorism we are in the process of losing precisely some of those freedoms Americans have fought and died for in the past. For the sake of "security," restrictions are imposed upon our lives which were unimaginable only a few years ago. Surely the goal of all wars past and present should be peace. But if this peace is achieved by hate, and punitive measures, all past and future sacrifices of lives and property will have been in vain. The cycle will merely go on. The names of the adversaries will change but hate, with all its consequences, will persist.
 
 
 
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