The protocols show that the Nazis by and large were not the SD and RWA leaning personalities commonly depicted who felt they were fighting a war for racial purity and the need to dominate those around them. There are few more clean cut examples of an ethnic extermination based on the tenets of an ideology, national socialism in this case. While it would be expected to find that the British and American intelligence protocols would be loaded with dialog between Nazi true believers who saw themselves as fighting for Aryan civilization and fighting because they saw themselves as racially superior to those they dominated, this was not the case. There were ideological warriors within the ranks of the Wermacht but these were actually in the minority.
One Nazi POW named Volker (Soldaten 232) rants to his cellmate about how the Jews offer up human sacrifices in their synagogues as well as raping and torturing their Christian victims. Volker goes on to explain how he relished in crushing synagogues and murdering Jews. “We shot them mercilessly. There certainly will have been some innocent ones amongst them, but there were some guilty ones too. It doesn’t matter how much good you do, if you’ve got Jewish blood, that’s enough” (Soldaten 233). Volker is a true believer who bought every propaganda line fed to him by the Nazi regime and more than likely made up a few on his own volition to justify his crimes. He is an ideological warrior who expresses a desire to exterminate the Jews and a lust for the violence needed to make this into a reality. Volker is also a true believer, defined as someone who, “may suspend their individual judgment and follow the leader in blind obedience” (Gupta 111). Indeed, Volker is simply reciting Hitler Youth propaganda in the above passage.
Frame of Reference: War
While ideological Nazis like Volker did exist, they were in the minority. Far more often what is found in the intelligence protocols is that the German soldiers experienced a profound psychological shift from a peace time frame of reference to a war time frame of reference. A contemporary example of this dynamic can be found in modern America, a nation that is both at peace and at war at the same time. In December of 2012, Adam Lanza raided Sandy Hook elementary school and murdered twenty children. In response to this President Obama held a press conference where he spoke of, “overwhelming grief” and said of the children, “they had their entire lives ahead of them…” (President Obama Makes a Statement on the Shooting in Newtown, Connecticut). While wiping away tears, President Obama remarked that, “…these children are our children.” However, there has been no such press event for the children killed in Pakistan by the Predator drone strikes which the President has authorized since he took office. A review done by Columbia Law School finds that at a minimum dozens upon dozens of civilians have been murdered by the drone program, including children. It is estimated that drone strikes murder 36 civilians for every terrorist killed (Miles). We have yet to see Obama hold a press conference for these children, proclaim them to be our children, or make a political call to action to reform counter-terrorism strategy and policy. This demonstrates how powerful a wartime frame of reference is. While a school shooting in America is considered a tragedy, a bombing in Pakistan or Yemen is rationalized into being considered as business as usual.
War opens new venues in which behavior that would normally be seen as completely unacceptable simply becomes common place and, “Actions that would be considered deviant and in need of explanation and justification in the normal circumstances of everyday civilian life become normal, conformist forms of behavior” (Soldaten 19). In these circumstances, war fighting is an occupation, the soldier fights and sees himself as a worker like those on an assembly line. The soldier is placed into a wartime frame of reference and collateral damage, or even murder can be rationalized away by saying that such things happen in war or romanticized as the burden that the soldier must carry for the good of society.
As Neitzel states, “The success with which German society was militarized was less about getting all German men to support the war than about producing a framework within which they shared or at least did not question military value systems” (Soldaten 35).
Group Dynamics
In the context of mass murder, the role of the group and peer pressure cannot be underestimated. When speaking of soldiers in battle, it is the practical matters of war which force soldiers to work together and act as one. In order to accomplish their mission, the individual must become a part of the group, “forfeiting autonomy in the process. He also receives something in return: security, dependability, support, and recognition” (Soldaten 22) and “the ideology of the collective offers comfort through belonging to a group” (Gupta 32). By working and living together as a group, soldiers become more like each other and less like the civilians in their home town and their own families. The shared experiences of soldiering and of war place the soldier in a new and different social context. “In the Third Reich, unlike in Wilhelmine Germany, officers and everyday soldiers were supposed to meld into a single fighting community” (Soldaten 40).
Where the line is between the ideological warrior and the soldier responding to peer pressure of other group dynamics is difficult if not impossible to discern. The intelligence protocols begin to give us a better idea though. From the transcripts is does seem clear that many soldiers placed themselves outside of the events as unconcerned observers rather than participants.
While the Third Reich’s propagandists glorified the German people and the war, there is also the counterweight, “the other side of the often-benevolent ‘us’ is the malevolent ‘them’” (Gupta 15). This group antagonism is stoked by cultural norms, in the myth making of films and books but also by “conscious and unconscious policies of governments, political elites, and cultural icons” (Gupta 15) which sets people down the road to collective madness, a madness in which even mass murder can be justified when the humanity of “them” is denied.
Again, the line between ideology and group dynamics is almost impossible to pin down. Also, one must consider group or collective ideology that was projected and interpreted and grafted into individual ideology. Whatever the case, it is clear that many German soldiers acquiesced to if not submitted themselves to Nazi ideology. If they didn’t swallow it in whole, they certainly felt themselves to be detached observers and did not fight against it. Group dynamics cannot be fully explained unless we understand the dual identities which people carry within them, the group and the individual identity. However, it seems unlikely that group pressures overrode the individual decision making process but rather informed it and acted as an additional input into those decisions. As one scholar puts it, in war you have “…a case of individual action in collective states of emergency” (Soldaten 32).
In more ways that one, Nazi Germany was primed for the formation of collective identities with an already strong civil society and a population that was disenfranchised in the wake of defeat in World War I and the collapse of the Weimar Republic. The need for the collective had become very strong.
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