At the heart of this book is the German soldier—the Landser—the common soldier. The motivation behind this book was to understand who they were and how they were—in effect, a socio-cultural military history. Scholars and writers have reflected on who they were, why they fought for Hitler, and remained faithful to the bitter end; but the soldiers themselves have remained aloof, distant, and impenetrable. During the war, British military intelligence examined German fighting traits through PoW interrogations.36 US Army intelligence carried the subject into a wider analysis of military methods and innovation.37 After the war, civil-military relations scholars applied the interrogation reports to a ‘cohesion and disintegration’ thesis (1947). The authors identified a ‘primary group’ concept, which claimed to hold the fighting or combat troops together. The article also cited an interrogation report of a captured German NCO about the political opinions of his men—the reply was instructive:
When you ask such a question, I realise well that you have no idea of what makes a soldier fight. The soldiers lie in their holes and are happy if they live through the next day. If we think at all, it’s about the end of the war and then home.38
The timeless words of veterans’ attitudes from all armies. The article was widely read but with a limited appeal. A general perception of the German soldier remained of the well trained and highly disciplined soldier. Nazism had socialised the soldiery, which tightly bound the myths of the Landser during the war. In the postwar age, Germans grappled with the uncomfortable realities of the war. In the 1950s, foreign observations, like that of The Scourge of the Swastika, were directed at German society struggling to come to terms with the war and Nazism.39 From the 1980s, scholarship began to follow an empirical/analytical path, while popular genres embellished uncontested German veterans’ anecdotes which has continued to this day.40 In 1983, a study compared the respective performances of the German Army and US Army during the war.41 Omer Bartov published his research of Hitler’s soldiers, which adapted the ‘primary group’ thesis to German fighting formations.42 I was fortunate to be placed in London at a time when several leading scholars discussed their ideas about common soldiers and war. Following a London University German history seminar in May 1997, there was a discussion with Bartov. He believed there was a shortfall of records, in particular the German NCOs, thereby reducing the prospect for serious research.43 In a subsequent conversation with Joanna Bourke, following a lecture at the Wiener Library, she argued men killing in war, stripped of military identity and political ideology, could be the basis for a comparative study.44 Bourke’s impressions closely matched the acts of men in Białowieźa. However, the resort to public killings by the Germans represented extreme exemplary violence, which placed them in a separate category of Second World War belligerents.45 This basic idea for comparative analysis, however, never entirely disappeared.
The Landser, as portrayed in this book, emerged from scholarly engagements with German colleagues. Following discussions with the late Professor Wilhem Diest and Professor Stig Förster at conferences, a different path of research was set emphasizing the interactions of social class.46 An impression drawn from conversations with German veterans about their impressions of ‘combat’, ‘fire-fights’, and their sense of gratification from memories of being soldiers.47 In lengthy discussions with Professor Jochen Böhler, about German soldiers and their private letters, a richer impression of the Landser emerged. The culmination of the research identified the Luftwaffe soldiers as either reservists (mostly officers with civilian professions) or conscripts (mostly ORs from the lower classes). The only professional soldiers were the senior NCOs (no more than six), and none of their papers has survived. If these men were judged by their careers, they cut a cross-section of Third Reich society: farmhands, industrial workers, clerks, low-skilled technicians, tradesmen, trainees, beat police, and junior civil servants. They were a rag-tag collection of men mustered into small units. They did not represent the cream of the crop, and even Göring held little sway over manpower selection at the point of recruitment. They were poorly organized and were turned into cannon-fodder—even the non de plume ‘the poor bloody infantry’ did not describe their circumstances. They were not particularly well-armed; their first weapons were captured enemy booty from the Great War. Neither unit colours and class identity, nor duty and discipline, explained their motivations. They performed occupation security as dedicated perpetrators, but then gave a reasonable account of themselves as German soldiers in retreat. The fog of war.
Terminology
Some issues remained unresolved. There was evidence of Polish collaboration with the Germans, especially in hunting and as forest guides. Identifying those persons was impossible as Germans reports did not include names. The problem of confused languages was an added complication. German soldiers, usually clerks in headquarters, compiled combat reports that struggled with Polish and Russian names. In Białowieźa, the occupation bureaucracy cast transliterations of Polish and Russian. Today, the only impact of this chaos is to cause confusion to researchers. An example: the Polish town of Hajnówka was translated by the Germans as Gainovka during the Great War, and Hainowka under the Nazis. The Germans translated Białowieźa as Bialowies in both world wars. Pruzhany in Belarus was Pruzhany when it came under Poland before 1939, and Pruzana under German occupation. The GIS maps adopted the German and narrative took the present-day Belarus form. The other prominent towns including Narewka, Topiło, Czolo, and Popielewo, Suchopol, Bialy Lasek, and Kamieniec-Litewski have remained unchanged. The Germans referred to Narewka Mala in their reports and that name is used throughtout the manuscript in accordance with the German records. Many villages disappeared and their names later replicated far beyond the original site. Others cannot be identified on any maps and the reader has to accept that some villages are now lost from record and memory.
Since the war, there have been several changes in the political boundaries of the region adding further confusion to place names. To identify such places, the original name is adopted, but in brackets the present name and nation: for example, Nassawen, East Prussia (Lessistoje: Kaliningrad Oblast). Any faults in translations are of course mine.