{"product_id":"soldiers-isbn-9780307948335","title":"Soldiers","description":"\u003cp\u003eOn a visit to the British National Archive in 2001, Sönke Neitzel made a remarkable discovery: reams of covertly recorded, meticulously transcribed conversations among German POWs during World War II that recently had been declassified. Neitzel would later find another collection of transcriptions, twice as extensive, in the National Archive in Washington, D.C. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese discoveries, published in book form for the first time, would provide a unique and profoundly important window into the true mentality of the soldiers in the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the German navy, and the military in general—almost all of whom had insisted on their own honorable behavior during the war. Collaborating with renowned social psychologist Harald Welzer, Neitzel examines these conversations—and the casual, pitiless brutality omnipresent in them—to create a powerful narrative of wartime experience.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e[Originally published as \u003ci\u003eSoldaten\u003c\/i\u003e.]\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003ePraise for Sonke Neitzel and Harald Welzer's \u003ci\u003eSoldiers\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An essential documentary record; seldom has surveillance been put to such important use.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Invaluable. . . . Historians often dream of being able to eavesdrop on history, but few can hope to obtain such spectacularly direct access as that presented in this major addition to the literature on the Second World War. . . . The transcripts of conversations between German prisoners of war, secretly recorded by the British and American intelligence services, offer a vivid and at times surprising insight into the mentality of the German military. . . . [\u003ci\u003eSoldaten\u003c\/i\u003e] presents an unprecedented source for understanding the ability to massacre.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Observer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“These extraordinary bugged conversations reveal through the eyes of German soldiers with stark clarity and candor the often brutal reality of the Second World War, providing remarkable insight into the mentality and behavior of the Wehrmacht.” \u003cbr\u003e—Sir Ian Kershaw, author of \u003ci\u003eHitler: A Biography\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“The myth that Nazi-era German armed forces [were] not involved in war crimes persisted for decades after the war. Now two German researchers have destroyed it once and for all. . . . The material [Neitzel and Welzer] have uncovered in British and American archives is nothing short of sensational. . . .[\u003ci\u003eSoldaten\u003c\/i\u003e] has the potential to change our view of the war.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eDer Spiegel\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A trove of transcripts of bugged recordings providing specific, startling evidence that German soldiers in World War II were not just following orders. . . . Unique—and essential to any understanding of German \u003ci\u003ementalités\u003c\/i\u003e in the Hitler era.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A remarkable archive of the testimony of German prisoners-of-war.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Telegraph\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This should be required reading for all those who believe that wars could be done cleanly.” \u003cbr\u003e—Martin Meier, \u003ci\u003eNeues Deutschland\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A significant contribution on the mental history of the Wehrmacht . . . The authors have written an incredibly readable book.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eDie Zeit\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An equally fascinating and shocking book about the everyday madness of the Nazi war of extermination, which once again confirms Hannah Arendt’s thesis about the ‘banality of evil’ . . . A scholarly sensation.” \u003cbr\u003e—Goethe Institut\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSonke Neitzel is a professor of International History at the London School of Economics. He has previously taught modern history at the University of Glasgow, University of Mainz and has also held posts at the universities of Karlsruhe, Bern, and Saarbrucken. He is currently editor of the journal \u003ci\u003eGerman History in the Twentieth Century\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHarald Welzer is head of the Center for Interdisciplinary Memory Research at the KWI Essen. He teaches social psychology at the universities of Hanover and Witten-Herdecke.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eExcerpted from the Hardcover Edition\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat the Soldiers Discussed\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I heard of a case of two  fifteen-year-old boys. They were wearing uniform and were firing away  with the rest. But they were taken prisoners. A corporal in hospital  told me that. They were wearing soldiers’ uniform, so what could one do.  And I myself have seen that there are twelve-year-old boys in the  Russian Army, in the band, for instance, wearing uniform. We once  (captured) a Russian military band and they played wonderfully. It was  almost too much for you. There was such depth of feeling and yearning in  their music; it conjured up pictures of the vastness of Russia. It was  terrific, it thrilled me through and through. It was a military band. To  get back to the story, the two boys were told to get back westward and  to keep on the road. If they tried to run into the woods at the first  bend of the road they would get a bullet in them. And they were scarcely  out of sight when they slunk off the road, and in a flash they had  disappeared. A large detachment was immediately sent to look for them,  but they couldn’t find them. And then they caught the two boys. Those  were the two. (Our people) behaved well and didn’t kill them there and  then, they took them before the C.C. [concentration camp] again. Now it  was clear that they’d done for themselves. They were made to dig their  own graves, two pits, and then one of them was shot. He didn’t fall into  the grave, he fell forwards over it. The other was told to push the  first one into the pit before he was shot himself. And he did so,  smiling—a boy of fifteen! There’s fanaticism and idealism for you”!2\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis  story, as told by Staff Sergeant Schmid on June 20, 1942, typifies how  the soldiers talk in the protocols. As in all everyday conversations,  the speaker repeatedly changes the subject, following a chain of  associations. In the middle, when Schmid is talking about music, it  occurs to him how much he enjoys Russian music, whereupon he briefly  describes it before continuing his narrative. Schmid’s anecdote begins  harmlessly enough, but turns truly horrific at the end with the  execution of the two young Russian soldiers. The narrator reports that  not only were the two youths murdered, they were made to dig their own  graves. The execution runs into a complication, and that leads to the  eventual moral of the story. The young soldier about to be killed proves  “fanatic” or “idealistic,” eliciting the staff sergeant’s admiration.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt  first glance what we have here is a spectacular combination of  topics—war, enemy soldiers, youths, music, Russian expanses, crimes  against humanity, and admiration for one’s adversary—that don’t seem to  cohere. Yet they are narrated in a single breath. That is the first  thing we need to recognize. The stories we will be examining in this  book deviate from what we expect. They were not intended to be well  rounded, consistent, or logical. They were told to create excitement,  elicit interest, or provide space and opportunity for the interlocutor  to add commentary or stories of his own. In this respect, as is true for  all everyday conversations, the soldiers’ stories tend to jump around  in interesting ways. They are full of ruptures and sidebar narratives,  and they aim to establish consensus and agreement. People do not  converse solely in order to exchange information but to create a  relationship with one another, establishing commonalities and assuring  themselves that they are experiencing one and the same world. The  soldier’s world is that of war. That is what makes their conversations  seem so extraordinary to readers today. For the soldiers themselves,  they were perfectly normal.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe brutality, harshness, and absence  of emotion of war are omnipresent, and that is what is so disturbing  for us reading the dialogues today, more than sixty years after the  fact. Involuntarily, we can only shake our heads in dismay and frequent  incomprehension. Yet in order to understand the world of these soldiers,  and not just our own world, we need to get beyond such moral reactions.  The matter-of-factness with which extreme acts of brutality are related  shows that killing and the worst sorts of violence were part of the  narrator’s and audience’s everyday reality. The POWs discussed such  topics for hours on end. But they also conversed about airplanes, bombs,  radar devices, cities, landscapes, and women:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMüller: When I was  at Kharkiv the whole place had been destroyed, except the centre of the  town. It was a delightful town, a delightful memory! Everyone spoke a  little German—they’d learnt it at school. At Taganrog, too, there were  splendid cinemas and wonderful cafés on the beach. We did a lot of  flying near the junction of the Don and the Donetz. . . . It’s beautiful  country; I travelled everywhere in a lorry. Everywhere we saw women  doing compulsory labour service.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFaust: How frightful!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMüller:  They were employed on road-making—extraordinarily lovely girls; we  drove past, simply pulled them into the armoured car, raped them and  threw them out again. And did they curse!3\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMale conversations are  like this. The two soldiers protocolled here, a Luftwaffe lance  corporal and a sergeant, at times describe the Russian campaign like  tourists, telling of “delightful” towns and memories. Then, suddenly,  the story becomes about the spontaneous rape of female forced laborers.  The sergeant relates this like a minor, ancillary anecdote, before  continuing to describe his “trip.” This example illustrates the  parameters of what can be said and what is expected in the secretly  monitored conversations. None of the violence related goes against his  interlocutor’s expectations. Stories about shooting, raping, and robbing  are commonplace within the war stories. Rarely do they occasion  analysis, moral objections, or disagreements. As brutal as they may be,  the conversations proceed harmoniously. The soldiers understand one  another. They share the same world and swap perspectives on the events  that occupy their minds and the things that they’ve seen and done. They  narrate and interpret these things in historically, culturally, and  situatively specific frameworks of reference.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOur aim in this  book is to reconstruct and describe these frameworks in order to  understand what the soldiers’ world was like, how they saw themselves  and their enemies, what they thought about Adolf Hitler and Nazism, and  why they continued fighting, even when the war seemed already lost. We  want to examine what was “National Socialist” about these reference  frameworks and to determine whether the largely jovial men in the POW  camps were indeed “ideological warriors” who set out in a “war of  annihilation” to commit racist crimes and stage massacres. To what  extent do these men conform to the category, popularized by Daniel  Goldhagen in the 1990s, of “willing executioners”? Or, alternatively, do  they more greatly resemble the more differentiated, morally ambiguous  picture of Wehrmacht soldiers that has emerged from the popular  historical exhibits by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and  countless historical examinations? Today’s conventional wisdom is that  Wehrmacht soldiers were part of a gigantic apparatus of annihilation and  thus were participants in, if not executioners of, unparalleled mass  murder. There is no doubt that the Wehrmacht was involved in criminal  acts, from the killing of civilians to the systematic murder of Jewish  men, women, and children. But that tells us nothing about how individual  soldiers were involved in such criminality, or about the relationship  they themselves had toward their deeds—whether they committed crimes  willingly, grudgingly, or not at all. The material here gives detailed  information about the relationships between individuals and their  actions and challenges our common assumptions about “the Wehrmacht.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne  fact needs to be acknowledged. Whatever they may encounter, human  beings are never unbiased. Instead, they perceive everything through  specific filters. Every culture, historical epoch, or economic system—in  short every form of existence—influences the patterns of perception and  interpretation and thus steers how individuals perceive and interpret  experiences and events. The surveillance protocols reflect, in real  time, how German soldiers saw and commonly understood World War II. We  will show that their observations and conversations are not what we  would usually imagine—in part because they, unlike we today, did not  know how the war would end and what would become of the Third Reich and  its Führer. The soldiers’ future, both real and imaginary, is our past,  but for them it was an unfinished book. Most of the soldiers are  scarcely interested in ideology, politics, world orders, and anything of  that nature. They wage war not out of conviction, but because they are  soldiers, and fighting is their job.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMany of them are  anti-Semites, but that is not identical with being “Nazis.” Nor does  anti-Semitism have anything to do with willingness to kill. A  substantial number of the soldiers hate “the Jews” but are shocked at  the mass executions by firing squads. Some are clear “anti-Nazis” but  support the anti-Jewish policies of Hitler’s regime. Quite a few are  scandalized at hundreds of thousands of Russian POWs being allowed to  starve to death, but do not hesitate to shoot POWs themselves if it  seems too time-consuming or dangerous to guard or transport them. Some  complain that Germans are too “humane” and then tell in the same breath  and in great detail how they mowed down entire villages. Many  conversations feature a lot of boasting and chest-puffing, but this goes  well beyond today’s males’ bragging about themselves or their cars.  Soldiers frequently seek to rack up points with tales of extreme  violence, of the women they raped, the planes they shot down, or the  merchant ships they sank. On occasion, we were able to determine that  such stories were untrue and intended to make an impression, even by  relating, for instance, how they sank a ship that was transporting  children. That is beyond the pale today, but the parameters of what  could be and was said then were different from what obtains today, as  are the things which they hoped would elicit admiration and respect.  Acts of violence, back then, belonged to that category. Most of the  soldiers’ stories may initially seem contradictory, but only if we  assume that people act in accordance with their “attitudes,” and that  those attitudes are closely connected with ideologies, theories, and  grand convictions.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn reality, people act as they think is  expected of them. Such perceived expectations have a lot less to do with  abstract “views of the world” than with concrete places, purposes, and  functions—and above all with the groups of which individual people are a  part.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo understand and explain why German soldiers waged war  for five years with a ferocity still unparalleled today, causing an  eruption of violence that claimed 50 million lives and decimated an  entire continent, we have to see the war, their war, through their eyes.  The following chapters will be concerned in detail with the factors  that influenced and determined the soldiers’ perspective, their frames  of reference. Readers who are not interested in Nazi and military frames  of reference and are more curious about the soldiers’ narratives and  discussions about violence, technology, extermination, women, or the  Führer should proceed directly to page 44. After we have given a  detailed account of the soldiers’ views on fighting, killing, and dying,  we will compare war as waged by the Wehrmacht with other wars, thereby  elucidating what was specifically “National Socialist” about World War  II. This much we can reveal in advance: the results of this examination  will often be unexpected.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSeeing the War with Soldiers’ Eyes: Analyzing Frames of Reference\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHuman  beings are not Pavlovian dogs. They don’t react with conditioned  reflexes to predetermined stimuli. Between stimulus and reaction,  something highly specialized happens which epitomizes human  consciousness and which distinguishes our species from all other forms  of life. Humans interpret what they perceive and on the basis of  interpretation draw conclusions, make up their minds, and decide what to  do. Belying Marxist theory, human beings never act on the basis of  objective conditions; nor do they act, as disciples of rational choice  theory long wanted us to believe, solely with an eye toward cost-benefit  calculations. Waging war is neither the only logical result of  cost-benefit analysis nor a necessary consequence of objective  circumstances. A physical body will always fall according to the laws of  gravity and never otherwise, but whatever human beings do they could  always have done differently. Nor do magic entities such as  “mentalities” make people behave a certain way, although psychological  structures no doubt influence what human beings do. Mentalities precede  but do not determine decisions. Even if people’s perceptions and actions  are bound up with social, cultural, hierarchical, and biological or  anthropological circumstances, human beings always enjoy a certain  freedom of interpretation and action. But the ability to interpret and  decide presupposes orientation and knowledge of what one is dealing with  and what consequences a decision can have. And a frame of reference is  what provides orientation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrames of reference vary drastically  according to historical periods and cultures. Orthodox Muslims, for  instance, categorize suitable and unsuitable sexual behavior within a  completely different framework from that of secular inhabitants of  Western society. Nonetheless, no member of either group is able to  interpret what he sees outside references not of his own choice or  making. They influence, guide, and even steer his perceptions and  interpretations. That is not to say that transgressions of a preexisting  frame of reference do not occur in special situations. It is possible  to observe or think something new. But this is relatively seldom the  case. Frames of reference guarantee economy of action so that most of  what happens can be sorted within a familiar matrix. That makes things  easier. People called upon to act don’t need to start from the very  beginning with the question: what is actually going on here? In the vast  majority of cases, the answers to this question are preprogrammed and  accessible, saved in a corpus of cultural orientation and knowledge.  Most everyday tasks are taken care of by routines, habits, and  certainties, and that saves individual human beings a colossal amount of  work.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThus when we want to explain human behavior, we first must  reconstruct the frame of reference in which given human beings  operated, including which factors structured their perception and  suggested certain conclusions. Merely analyzing objective circumstances  is inadequate. Nor do mentalities explain why someone did a specific  thing, especially in cases where members of a group whose minds were all  formed the same way arrive at entirely different conclusions and  decisions. This is the systemic limit upon theories about ideological  wars and totalitarian regimes. The question always remains: how are  “world views” and “ideologies” translated into individual perceptions  and interpretations and how do they affect individual behavior? In order  to understand those things, we analyze frames of reference as a way of  reconstructing the perceptions and interpretations of people in specific  historical situations, here German soldiers during World War II.Originally published as Soldaten","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303198937317,"sku":"NP9780307948335","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307948335.jpg?v=1767736884","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/soldiers-isbn-9780307948335","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}