Discursive Construction of History: The Wehrmacht's War of Annihilation

The Discursive Construction of History Remembering the Wehrmacht’s War of Annihilation

Edited by

Hannes Heer, Walter Manoschek, Alexander Pollak and Ruth Wodak

The Discursive Construction of History

Also by Hannes Heer VOM VERSCHWINDEN DER TÄTER: Der Vernichtungskrieg fand statt, aber keiner war dabei (2004) ‘HITLER WAR’S!’: Die Befreiung der Deutschen von ihrer Vergangenheit (2005)

Also by Walter Manoschek OPFER DER NS-MILITÄRJUSTIZ: Urteilspraxis – Strafvollzug – Entschädigungspolitik in Österreich (editor, 2003) ‘SERBIEN IST JUDENFREI’: Militärische Besatzungspolitik und Judenvernichtung in Serbien 1941/42 (1995)

Also by Alexander Pollak DIE WEHRMACHTSLEGENDE IN ÖSTERREICH: Das Bild der Wehrmacht im Spiegel der österreichischen Presse nach 1945 (2002)

Also by Ruth Wodak A NEW AGENDA IN (CRITICAL) DISCOURSE ANALYSIS (with Paul Chilton, 2005) RE/READING THE PAST (with J. R. Martin, 2003) CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS: Theory and Interdisciplinarity (edited with Gilbert Weiss, 2003)

The Discursive Construction of History Remembering the Wehrmacht’s War of Annihilation

Edited by

Hannes Heer Independent Historian and Writer, Hamburg

Walter Manoschek University of Vienna

Alexander Pollak European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Vienna

and

Ruth Wodak Lancaster University

Translated from the German by Steven Fligelstone

© Hannes Heer, Walter Manoschek, Alexander Pollak, Ruth Wodak 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in German under the title WIE GESCHICHTE GEMACHT WIRD by Czernin Verlag in 2003. © Czernin Verlag. This edition has been translated and published under licence from Czernin Verlag. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–01323–0 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–01323–6 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wie Geschichte gemacht wird. English The discursive construction of history : remembering the Wehrmacht’s war of annihilation / edited by Hannes Heer … [et al.] ; translated from the German by Steven Fligelstone. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-10: 0–230–01323–6 (hbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978–0–230–01323–0 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. World war, 1939–1945 – Atrocities. 2. Germany – Armed Forces – History – World War, 1939–1945. 3. Collective memory. I. Heer, Hannes. II. Title. D804.G3W5413 2007 940.54
050943––dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents List of Illustrations

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Notes on Contributors

viii

Preface with Acknowledgements

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Preface to the First Edition: ‘How history is made’ – The Origins and Aims of the Project Ruth Wodak Introduction: Collective Memory, National Narratives and the Politics of the Past Hannes Heer and Ruth Wodak

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1

Part I The Wehrmacht and the Second World War in the Memory of the War Generation 1 The Crimes of the Wehrmacht in the Second World War Walter Manoschek

17

2 The Holocaust as Recounted in Wehrmacht Soldiers’ Letters from the Front Walter Manoschek

27

3 The Attitudes and Beliefs of Austrian Soldiers in the German Wehrmacht 1938–45 Walter Manoschek

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4 ‘That is what is so terrible – that millions of soldiers were there, yet today they all claim they never saw a thing’ Hannes Heer

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Part II The Wehrmacht in Collective Memory after 1945 5 Defining the Victims of Nazism Günther Sandner and Walter Manoschek 6 The Myth of the ‘Untainted Wehrmacht’ Alexander Pollak v

99 132

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Contents

7 ‘The appalling toll in Austrian lives …’ Sabine Loitfellner

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8 All that Remains of the Second World War Alexander Pollak

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Part III Reaction to the Wehrmacht Exhibitions 9 Crime Scene: Wehrmacht Exhibition Alexander Pollak and Ruth Wodak

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10 The Head of Medusa Hannes Heer

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11 Interpreting the ‘War of Annihilation’ Heidemarie Uhl

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Glossary

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Print Media

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Notes

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References

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Index

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List of Illustrations 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 9.1 9.2 9.3

9.4 9.5

Stalingrad graveyard A dead soldier on the ground Cold and hungry Wehrmacht soldiers Column of prisoners captured by the Soviet Army Detectives Ballauf and Schenk looking at WWII photographs From left to right: Inspector Ballauf, exhibition curator Anne Klee and Inspector Schenk From left to right: the academic director of the Wehrmacht exhibition, Tillman Koning, Anne Klee and Inspector Ballauf Detective Schenk and Uncle Richard Detectives Ballauf and Schenk looking for the scene of the Koning family tragedy

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201 201 202 202 208 211

214 221 224

Notes on Contributors Hannes Heer lives and works in Hamburg as a historian, writer and exhibition producer. From 1993 to 2000, he worked at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, where he was director of the first Wehrmacht Exhibition. He has numerous publications on National Socialism, the Wehrmacht and postwar recollection, most recently: Vom Verschwinden der Täter. Der Vernichtungskrieg fand statt, aber keiner war dabei (2004) and ‘Hitler war’s!’ Die Befreiung der Deutschen von ihrer Vergangenheit (2005). Sabine Loitfellner is a historian and Research Fellow at the Austrian Research Center for Post-War Trials (FStN). She also works in the field of art restitution with the Holocaust Victims’ Information and Support Centre of the Jewish Community in Vienna. Her recent publications include: ‘Arisierung’ von Mobilien. Vermögensentzug während der NS-Zeit sowie Rückstellungen und Entschädigungen seit 1945 in Österreich (Anderl et al., 2004), ‘Holocaustprozesse wegen Massenerschießungen und Verbrechen in Lagern im Osten vor österreichischen Geschworenengerichten. Annäherung an ein unerforschtes Thema’ (Holpfer and Loitfellner, 2006) and ‘Auschwitz-Verfahren in Österreich. Hintergründe und Ursachen eines Scheiterns’ (2006). Walter Manoschek is Professor of Political Science and head of the Department of Government at the University of Vienna. His research and publications focus on the ‘politics of the past’, the political system of National Socialism and Holocaust studies. Publications include: Opfer der NS-Militärjustiz. Urteilspraxis – Strafvollzug – Entschädigungspolitik in Österreich (editor, 2003) and ‘Serbien ist judenfrei’. Militärische Besatzungspolitik und Judenvernichtung in Serbien 1941/42 (1995). Alexander Pollak is Research Manager at the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) and Lecturer in the Department of Government at the University of Vienna. He is the author and co-editor of several books, reports and papers on the politics of memory, racism, anti-Semitism and Critical Discourse Analysis, including Die Wehrmachtslegende in Österreich. Das Bild der Wehrmacht im Spiegel der österreichischen Presse nach 1945 (2002) and In einer Wehrmachtsausstellung. Erfahrungen mit Geschichtsvermittlung (Höllwart et al., 2004). Günther Sandner is Principal investigator of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF)-supported research project ‘Democratisation of Knowledge. Otto Neurath’s Project in the Context of Different Scientific Cultures: Austria, Germany and England’. Currently, he holds a grant from the Humboldt Foundation and is conducting his research in Berlin. His recent publications viii

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include: Engagierte Wissenschaft. Austromarxistische Kulturstudien und die Anfänge der britischen Cultural Studies (2006) and ‘Nations without Nationalism: The Austro-Marxist Discourse on Multiculturalism’ (2005). Heidemarie Uhl is a historian and Fellow of the research programme ‘Sites of commemoration’ at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. She has published extensively on the history of memory and commemoration in post-war Austria, including: Steinernes Bewusstsein II. Die öffentliche Repräsentation staatlicher und nationaler Identität Österreichs in seinen Denkmälern (in press). Ruth Wodak holds a Chair in Discourse Studies at Lancaster University, having previously worked at the University of Vienna; in1996 she won the Wittgenstein Prize for elite researchers in Austria; she has held several visiting professorships (Stanford, Georgetown, Minneapolis, Uppsala, UEA) and will hold the Kerstin Hesselgren Chair of the Swedish Parliament in 2008–09. She is co-editor of the Journal of Language and Politics and Critical Discourse Studies. Recent books include: A New Agenda in (Critical) Discourse Analysis (Wodak and Chilton, 2005), Re/Reading the Past (Martin and Wodak, 2003), Critical Discourse Analysis: Theory and Interdisciplinarity (Weiss and Wodak, 2003), Discourse and Discrimination (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001), The Discursive Construction of National Identity (Wodak et al., 1999), Gender and Discourse (1997) and Disorders of Discourse (1996).

Preface with Acknowledgements The touring exhibition ‘War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941 to 1944’, which was shown in Austria and Germany from 1995 to 1999, provoked more animated political and social debate than any previous exhibition dealing with contemporary history. With the opening of a new exhibition, which ran from 2001 to 2003, the original exhibition itself became an object of interest in debates about matters of historical interpretation and strategies for dealing with the past. The exhibition, and the discourses it gave rise to, provide us with the opportunity to analyse the emergence and subsequent deconstruction of the historical myth of the ‘untainted Wehrmacht’ and, more generally, to study the conflict between dominant hegemonic and marginalized interpretations of history in post-Nazi Austrian and German society. History is not a finished account. Historical narratives are the subject of open-ended discourses which cannot be terminated by supposedly definitive interpretations of events. These discourses are an integral part of the social struggle for cultural hegemony. The struggle over the interpretation of the past is particularly contentious when it relates to the Wehrmacht – and its crimes – because the Wehrmacht was made up of ‘normal individuals’ from the male populations of Austria and Germany. The authors analyse these conflicts on the basis of numerous different diachronic and synchronic debates, thereby gaining an insight into why it is that more than 60 years after the end of the war, in both the successor states, National Socialism continues to be the most sensitive and contentious of memories, and why closure remains a distant prospect. Many colleagues have supported us during this project, commenting critically on our work, providing advice or cooperating over a long period. We would like specifically to thank Aleida Assmann, Ruth Beckermann, Gertraud Benke, Hubertus Czernin, Helmut Gaisbauer, Tony Judt, Waltraud Kannonier-Finster, Christina Kleiser, Andras Kovács, Ursula Lengauer, Sabine Loitfellner, Anna Mirfattahi, Richard Mitten, Peter Nausner, Anton Pelinka, Gabriele Rosenthal, Günther Sandner, Andrea Schaller, Georg Schönfeld, Frank Stern, Heidemarie Uhl, Theo van Leeuwen, Harald Welzer, Gilbert Weiss, Meinrad Ziegler, Andrea Zwölfer, and Steven Fligelstone, who undertook the English translation with skill and meticulousness. We also thank the Austrian Fund for the Advancement of Scientific Research (FWF); the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Culture (bm:bwk); the Culture Department of Vienna City Council; and the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, for their financial support. Finally, we are x

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grateful to the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF), and the producers of Tatort, for permitting us to use images from their drama and documentary programmes. Hannes Heer, Walter Manoschek, Alexander Pollak and Ruth Wodak

Preface to the First Edition: ‘How history is made’ – The Origins and Aims of the Project

Breakfasts played a large part in the conceptualization and instigation of this project. In July 1997 I had a late breakfast with Walter Manoschek at the Prater in Vienna, in a typical ‘Beisel’ bar overlooking the Krieau racecourse. We discussed Ruth Beckermann’s film ‘East of War’, which had made a lasting impression on me, and decided to set up a research project. The aim would be to analyse the debates prompted by the exhibition ‘War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941 to 1944’,1 as a case study of how societies come to terms with traumatic experiences in their past. A second breakfast, on a Sunday in December 1999, actually failed to materialize. There had been plans to open the Wehrmacht Exhibition in New York, but the exhibition was cancelled by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research because of publicly aired doubts about the validity of some of the photographs (see Chapter 10, ‘The Head of Medusa’, by Hannes Heer). Despite this, a symposium scheduled to coincide with the opening of the exhibition did take place in New York – and featured some outstanding presentations.2 One plenary lecture which deeply impressed me was given by Saul Friedländer who, on the basis of meticulous research, was able to provide a detailed account of how approximately 80 Jewish children were murdered by the Wehrmacht in a Ukrainian village (see Bartov, 2002). Friedländer’s talk was factual and sober, and yet the audience was captivated. Following the talk, there appeared to be no doubt in the mind of anyone present about the need – notwithstanding the presence of a few wrongly captioned photographs in the exhibition – to examine and discuss the role of the Wehrmacht during the Holocaust in more detail. For me as project coordinator and principal investigator, however, it was during the course of that evening that the shape of the research project crystallized in my mind. The next day I was invited to that second breakfast, but I declined. Right then, I did not wish to speak with anyone – I just needed to get away from it all and think things over. Besides the historically oriented research, it now seemed necessary directly to consider the discourses occurring in the context of the exhibition, that is to say, to document, classify and analyse ‘the debates about the exhibitions’. In light of the intervening events, the title of the study had changed too: instead of ‘Confronting a Taboo’, we decided to call it ‘The Discursive Construction of History’, or less formally, ‘How History is Made’. When people xii

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experience history, they begin immediately to transform it in their memory. Academic, political and media elites collaborate in particular ways over the interpretation and reinterpretation of the past. Different narratives are put forward which are motivated by particular interests. Ultimately, certain interpretations of history become established – which we refer to as specific hegemonic ‘national narratives’. From the moment the exhibition first opened in 1995, there were huge conflicts surrounding it. The exhibition ‘War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941 to 1944’ should be seen as a powerful social intervention in respect of the national historical narratives persisting in Austria and Germany since the end of the Second World War in 1945. Through its principled challenge to, and critique of, the widely accepted portrayal of an apolitical Wehrmacht, untainted by involvement in war crimes, and the collective innocence of the Wehrmacht’s soldiers, the exhibition cast lasting doubt on what, for many people in Austria and Germany, had been a basic matter of consensus about the Nazi past. In so doing – and in keeping with its aim to shed light on the past – it met with both approval and fierce resistance. Large parts of the ruling political class, the media, and the so-called ‘heritage associations’3 continue to struggle to maintain the historical image of the ‘untainted Wehrmacht’. Because of the allegation that some (very few) pictures were falsified, the exhibition was closed in 1999 and made the subject of an official enquiry by an international commission of historians. Its report did indeed find fault with the unverified adoption – in one or two cases – of picture captions from the original archives; but the exhibition organizers were cleared of the charge of falsification. Nonetheless, instead of a corrected version of the original exhibition, a completely new exhibition opened in November 2001. This came to Vienna in April 2002. Once again, tempers flared. However, there was absolutely no question of reinstating the received ‘knowledge’ that had previously prevailed. The weight of evidence for the participation of the Wehrmacht in the War of Annihilation can no longer be challenged – except by those who, due to ideological indoctrination or personal defensiveness, will not or cannot accept the evidence. The history of the two exhibitions has thus become a perfect example of the conflict-laden, discursive construction of historical narratives and interpretations, and an illustration of the processes involved in coming to terms with the past – an antagonistic struggle for the hegemonic narrative. Our project focused on three main themes. From differing interdisciplinary perspectives, it sought to shed light on the process of dealing with the past, with particular reference to the role of the Wehrmacht and its soldiers in the Second World War: 1. What national narratives concerning the Wehrmacht exist(ed) in postwar Germany and Austria, and how do (and did) these narratives change

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over time? In order to observe changes in the process of dealing with the past, we carried out longitudinal studies of three different data sets, in relation to the historical constructions they contain: (1) debates in the Austrian parliament and cabinet (see Chapter 5, ‘Defining the Victims of Nazism’, by Walter Manoschek and Günther Sandner); (2) discourses about the past in the print media and documentary films (see Chapter 5, ‘The Myth of the “Untainted Wehrmacht”’, and Chapter 8, ‘All that Remains of the Second World War’, by Alexander Pollak); and (3) the portrayal of the Wehrmacht in school books (see Chapter 7, ‘The appalling toll in Austrian lives …’, by Sabine Loitfellner). Through the contrastive study of different public spheres – politics, the media, and school education – it is possible to identify for each set of actors different ways of handling, interpreting and constructing the past. Contradictions between the various public spheres, or indeed conflicts within an institution, are thus brought to light. They show that policies for dealing with the past should not be seen as an expression of linear continuity or homogenous opinion. 2. Memory and commemoration are individually and collectively determined. They are constituted in part on the basis of debates which take place in public and private domains. For this reason we wanted not only to draw ‘official’ arbiters of collective memory – for example, politics and the school – into the study, but also to investigate the war generation’s individual recollections of the Second World War and of the conduct of the Wehrmacht. Our sources for this are (1) letters home from soldiers on the Eastern Front (see Chapter 2, ‘The Holocaust as Recounted in Wehrmacht Soldiers’ Letters from the Front, by Walter Manoschek); (2) the anonymous responses to a questionnaire survey carried out in the 1980s amongst veterans of the Wehrmacht (see Chapter 3, ‘The Attitudes and Beliefs of Austrian Soldiers in the German Wehrmacht, 1938–45’, by Walter Manoschek:); and (3) the reminiscences, filmed in Vienna, of visitors to the first Wehrmacht Exhibition (see Chapter 4, ‘That is what is so terrible …’, by Hannes Heer). 3. Finally we sought to pursue the issue of the immediate reception and subsequent treatment of the Wehrmacht Exhibitions in the Austrian and German media during the period from 1995 to 2002 (see Chapter 10, ‘The Head of Medusa’, by Hannes Heer; and Chapter 11, ‘Interpreting the “War of Annihilation”’, by Heidemarie Uhl). Of particular interest was the question of why, and in what form, the topic was taken up by the entertainment industry. We therefore analysed an episode of the German crime series Tatort (Crime Scene) which used the Wehrmacht Exhibition as its central location (see Chapter 9, ‘Crime Scene: Wehrmacht Exhibition’, by Alexander Pollak and Ruth Wodak). The project’s three focal points served to bring us closer to the central question: how do democratic and pluralistic societies deal with traumatic past

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experiences and grave breaches of universal values? There are a number of options available, including: individual silence, collective taboo, the rewriting of history, war tribunals, attempts at reconciliation, and (self-)critical public debate. The choice in each case is not accidental, but depends rather on situational and societal factors. As these are invariably highly complex, the need for an interdisciplinary approach to the subject is self-evident. This is true in terms of both theory and methodology. We therefore decided on the discourse-historical approach, combining political science, semiotics, cultural studies, prejudice research, discourse analysis and historical research (see the introduction to this volume, ‘Collective Memory, National Narratives and the Politics of the Past’, by Hannes Heer and Ruth Wodak). Time and again we hear calls for a line to be drawn under past events: why bother continuing to talk about history, and personal accounts of events that lie more than 50 years in the past? Why pose uncomfortable questions, thereby breaking the silence, in order to discuss ‘blame, guilt, crimes, justification and reconciliation’? The plea to draw a line is, however, a denial of the continuing presence of the Nazi past. It ignores the fact that social structures attest to continuities between the present and the Nazi period, and that many perpetrators, as well as victims, are still alive. Neither are the descendants of the war generation uninfluenced by the events. In this context, scholarship inevitably gravitates towards politics and the business of dealing with the past, and academic credentials are used to legitimize one position or the other. This means that in the final analysis, researchers, too, might play an active role in the discursive construction of historical interpretations. Alternatively, however, academic research can be exploited to this end. By no means is it our intention to blame or exonerate in any general way, that is, to make sweeping judgments and pronounce all-or-nothing verdicts. We are far more interested in the many shades of grey that exist between extreme interpretations, with the analysis of reasons why conflicts occur and then persist, with the faltering recollections of events and the contradictions which they contain, and with attempts – both failed and successful – by societies to engage in a critical examination of their particular pasts. The criteria of ‘failure’ and ‘success’ – referred to above – cannot be applied categorically. Rather, they are a matter of negotiation which takes place in the context of the prevailing state of knowledge and continual changes of perspective. Insights about the past undergo change, and new sources give rise to new interpretations; new methods and theories are developed, implying new interpretations or leading to the re-evaluation of existing ones. Thus we speak of ‘success’ or ‘failure’ only when, in the case of the former, rational discussions are possible, and in the case of the latter, when new knowledge and research are dismissed out of hand. Describing and explaining such complex phenomena demands a high degree of sophistication, but at the same

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time, the willingness to ‘tell it like it is’, according to the state of knowledge at any particular point in time. The social sciences should serve, in my view, to critically reflect social processes and social phenomena. Without the past, the present and the future can be neither understood nor predicted. Hence, we explicitly adopt a position in one very definite respect: our interest lies in looking at what had previously been unchallenged and taken for granted, and subjecting it to critical reflection and analysis in order to understand and explain it. The label ‘critical’ does not in any way imply viewing something ‘negatively’. On the contrary, ‘critical’ implies systematically investigating complex phenomena from all angles, and not taking traditional interpretations for granted: thereby providing new answers – and posing new questions. Ruth Wodak

Introduction: Collective Memory, National Narratives and the Politics of the Past – the Discursive Construction of History Hannes Heer and Ruth Wodak

‘History’, claimed Leopold von Ranke in the mid-nineteenth century, ‘is reality itself.’ On the contrary, contended Theodor Lessing, who was murdered by the Nazis, ‘History is always a conscious reflection of life, but it is not life itself.’ Elaborating on this process of reflection, Lessing added, ‘When we place value judgements on events which are inherently valueless, unfathomable or of boundless dimensions, all according to how we find ourselves and our individual or group prejudices confirmed or repudiated by them, we come to the so-called historical aspect … so the basis of all history is post-hoc rationalization, regardless of what on earth may actually have occurred’ (Lessing, 1983, pp. 13, 23f.). It was not Ranke, but Lessing who formulated what is now a matter of general consensus: history as a retrospectively composed and meaningendowed narrative is always construction and fictionalization. Historical phenomena resulting from social processes arise amongst contradictions and conflict; these determine which events from the past will become carriers of consensual values and ideals, and which therefore have value as objects in collective memory. The processes involved in this retrospective attribution of meaning, and the kinds of struggle which govern them, are the concern of this introduction. We must state clearly at the outset that our approach does not in any way equate ‘material reality’ with ‘discourse’. Rather, we are concerned to explore relationships between facts, that is to say, the interpretation of events and of collective, as well as individual, experience of reality. Historical interpretations thus consist of narratives about events from different perspectives. These perspectives, consciously or otherwise, are always influenced by vested interests. 1

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Memory and experience The historicity of humans is an ontological given. Historical consciousness does not arise from one’s knowledge of history, but refers rather to the human being’s ingrained awareness of the ‘existence of history’. Historical consciousness, according to Reinhart Koselleck, arises in the polarity between ‘experiential space’ and the ‘horizon of expectation’. Experiential space signifies the total legacy of the past to which an individual or group has access, whilst the horizon of expectation refers to a particular manner of being, namely the anticipation of a particular future filled with hopes and fears, plans and visions (Koselleck, 1979). This polarity develops and is realized in the living present of a particular culture. Present, in this context, means the mediation of the very recent past and the immediate future, whereas culture ‘denotes a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and attitude towards life’ (Geertz, 1973, p. 89). Historical consciousness thus develops in a continuous process, starting from the horizon of expectation, and acting upon the reservoir of past experience. This encounter generates ‘subject matter’ for the construction of meaning associated with the present, which functions as a guide to action. Koselleck’s concept is supported and enhanced by theoretical findings in neurobiology and cognitive science (according to Gerhard Roth and Siegfried J. Schmidt, amongst others) and by the social constructivist approaches of Thomas Luckmann and Erving Goffman, which are concerned with the interdependency between perception, knowledge and social action. Memory, according to Siegfried J. Schmidt, is no longer regarded as a localized store, but rather as a highly active system of connected cortical, sensory and motor processes (Schmidt, 1994). In this context, the repetition of specific stimulus patterns is seen as a significant structuring factor in perception, and as a basic element in learning processes. The brain, or – more specifically – the visual system, responds ‘with heightened awareness to structures and sequences of events which have shown themselves to be coherent and ordered in earlier experience’ (Roth, 1991, p. 147). Insofar as what is perceived is substantially determined by what has been perceived in the past, memory and perception are inextricably linked. A significant role is played by schemata produced in the brain as ‘transient functional patterns’ (Iran-Nejad, 1980, quoted in Schmidt 1994, p. 245). Recalling Gregory Bateson, Goffman characterized the process of recognition by claiming that the individual recognition response implies ‘one or more frameworks or schemata of interpretation’. He terms the concept introduced for definition purposes a ‘frame’, or, more precisely, ‘the primary framework’, because it renders ‘what would otherwise be a meaningless aspect of the scene into something that is meaningful’ (Goffman, 1975, p. 21). In

Introduction

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combination, ‘the primary frameworks of a particular social group constitute a central element of its culture’ (Goffman, 1975, p. 27). Luckmann sought to determine the genesis of such ‘frames’ more precisely. The starting point of his analysis is the view that novel conscious processes have no ‘meaning’ to begin with: ‘This emerges only when the ego retrospectively turns to its experiences and places them in a context which transcends the simple novelty of the original experience. Meaning therefore arises out of the conscious relationship between what has just happened, and something else’ (Luckmann, 1986, p. 197). This ‘something else’ can be either earlier concrete experiences, or distilled, organized and more ‘abstract’ experiential schemata derived from such experiences; for example, rules, behavioural heuristics and moral maxims. In order for events to have ‘meaning’, or to be capable of acquiring meaning, they must already have acquired ‘form’ in human perception. ‘The contours of any experience always emerge pre-reflexively, in the automatic logging of an experiential kernel as typical of one kind of experience rather than another’ (Luckmann, 1986, p. 198). This complex experiential apparatus renders meaningful action possible. Experiences are always embedded in social and discursive practices and help to perpetuate them, as Luckmann concludes: Intersubjectively shared experiential schemata, building on elemental categorizations of reality, and capable of being superimposed onto different action schemata, thereby form a fundamental layer of socially accredited, action-guiding knowledge. They are linguistically ‘codified’ and form ‘objective’ building blocks of ‘solutions to problems’. […] New ‘solutions to problems’ find their place, through linguistic objectification, in the readily available ‘pre-existing’ semantic inventory of a society. (Luckmann, 1986, p. 199) A similar approach is proposed from a discourse analytic perspective. Teun van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model rests on the assumption of cognitive schemata which mediate between ‘society’ and ‘language’ (see, for example, Reisigl and Wodak, 2001; Van Dijk 1984, 1998, 2003). Van Dijk assumes that every linguistic perception and every value judgement can be traced back to a filtering by means of cognitive schemata. Perceptions are assimilated, understood and remembered according to these schemata. These change in accordance with previous collective and subjective experiences. A link can be made here with prejudice research. Schemata and event models determine how experiences are assimilated, for example, according to internalized prejudices.1 This means, to over-simplify, that a speaker with anti-Semitic inclinations will interpret even positive experiences with Jews negatively – on the basis of ingrained and internalized experiences and schemata (event models). Stereotypes, prejudices and attitudes, as well as the influence of

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The Discursive Construction of History

ideologies, can be explained through the internalization of cognitive schemata and event models. Because such cognitive models are subconscious and function automatically, it is almost impossible to change entrenched opinions. Cognitive and emotional schemata, once ‘acquired’ and reinforced through socialization, can only be prised open with the greatest of difficulty.

Collective memory The fact that people do not recollect independently, but only with the help of the recollections of others, and that people grow up surrounded by objects, gestures, utterances, images, architecture and landscapes imbued with mysterious pasts that transcend and precede their individual experience, led Maurice Halbwachs to claim the existence of a ‘collective memory’: ‘Every individual memory represents a “vantage point” into the collective memory’ (Halbwachs, 1967, p. 31). Provided that collective memory is not seen as a strict analogue of individual memory, but is applied as an ‘operational’ term, one could envisage as the repositories of such a collective memory – in Husserl’s sense – ‘personalities of a higher order’, such as groups, cultures or nations. These are not personalities in any concrete sense, but in terms of ‘attribution’, that is to say, by means of a process of retrospective construction using analogies and metaphors. Subject to this caveat, Ricoeur allows collective memory to assume the attributes of individual memory: recollections that provide continuity and confer identity. Collective memory can then be viewed ‘as a collection of the traces of defining events for the historical development of a particular group’, furnished with the capacity ‘to revive such shared memories on the occasion of particular rites, festivals, and public holidays’ (Ricoeur, 1997, pp. 438f.). With this (re)construction of ‘traces’, as with the periodic re-visualizing of the past which they represent, a process takes place which is analogous to what occurs in individual memory: ‘At the moment at which a group looks back on its past, it almost certainly feels that it has remained constant, and it becomes conscious of its enduring identity’ (Halbwachs, 1967, p. 74). Nowadays, empirical studies are available which deal with the function and the functioning of such group memories.2 These studies show how collective memory exists as the sum of ‘real’ group memories and how groups preserve their stability and construct their identity by integrating positive memories and rejecting negative ones. Angela Keppler has studied ‘recollective communication’ in contemporary families: ‘For families, it emerges, the same is true in a limited context as is true for cultures in a much more extended setting: without rituals for recollecting its own past, the family could not establish an authoritative sense of its present’ (Keppler, 2001, p. 138). Herald Welzer, through his research on National Socialism and the war in family conversations, has shown how, by means of the ‘cumulative heroization’ of one’s own relations, a stabilizing ‘good history’ of one’s family emerges. A narrative is constructed which establishes itself as a self-contained parallel

Introduction

5

universe alongside, and in contradiction to, the commonly accepted image of National Socialism (Welzer, 2001b, p. 72). Hannes Heer, by drawing on such disparate sources as readers’ letters and visitors’ book entries, was able to demonstrate how groups of former soldiers either affiliated themselves delusionally with a community of fallen comrades, or distinguished themselves as ‘we, the respectable ones’, as distinct from ‘the others’ responsible for war crimes – the SS, party bosses, formations at the rear, partisans, AngloAmerican terror bombers, and so on (Heer, 1999a, pp. 127ff.).

National narratives and the politics of the past All these texts concerned with recollection, signal, insofar as they constitute the writing of history, a rift between the spheres of individual and collective memory. Ricoeur has characterized this rift on three levels: 1. Memory archived in the form of texts, photographs and physical remnants is no longer experienced or visualized memory, but has freed itself from its ‘lifetime’ dependency. 2. Instead of producing identity in a process of communicative self-definition, their interpretation follows the principles of science – seeking causes and motives, and changing according to the current state of knowledge. 3. As the seminal, macro-historically oriented narratives of Ranke, Burckhardt and Braudel show, historical narrative combines knowledge of facts with an attempt at analysis and interpretation. (Ricoeur, 1997, pp. 440f.) This can all be summed up in a yet more radical distinction: the function of writing history is not the ‘re-enactment of past experience’ (Collingwood, 1993, pp. 282ff.); rather, history can be defined as the absence of the past, as an ‘incision, through which a society defines itself by marking itself off from its other, its past’ (de Certeau, 1973, p. 174). The capacity, detached from collective memory, to exert a critical influence on ‘experiential space’ (Koselleck) as a record of the past, is something that historiography shares with other institutions. The latter may be less explicitly concerned with historical sources, but they are involved in history as the outcome of struggles for hegemony between differing interests – for example, in jurisprudence, governments and parliaments, as well as mediating authorities such as education systems and the mass media. These all act from the vantage point of the present and with a view to the future; legitimized by the ‘expectation horizon’ (Koselleck) and using particular ‘value judgements’ (Lessing), they practice Geschichtspolitik, the functionalization of history for political ends. ‘In pluralist societies, Geschichtspolitik is always being practised, because political elites […] shape and define the ensemble of basic ideas, norms, values and symbols that lend substance to a political grouping. Geschichtspolitik is therefore […] a field of action and policy in which different

6

The Discursive Construction of History

political actors load the past with their particular interests and wrestle for public approval’ (Wolfrum, 1999, p. 58). This kind of activity in relation to history – by way of qualifying Wolfrum – is not peculiar to modern democracies, but pertained and pertains to the existence of all nation states. In order to appreciate this, it is useful to consider the concept introduced by Nietzsche of ‘active forgetting’, which he regarded as an indispensable aspect of the ‘normal way’ of dealing with the past. In the ‘Second Untimely Meditation’ he puts it thus: ‘Forgetting is part of all action.’ And elsewhere, even more pointedly: ‘The unhistorical and the historical are equally necessary for the health of an individual, a people or a culture’ (Nietzsche, 1945, vol. 1, pp. 212, 214). Forgetting here does not mean the flight from the past or an unconscious act of repression, but something intentional and creative. Elsewhere, Nietzsche distinguishes ‘active forgetting’ even more clearly from recollective memory when he refers to it as ‘the memory of the will’ (Nietzsche, 1954, vol. 1, p. 800). Thus we can see the common characteristic of the aforementioned agents of historiography, jurisprudence, executive power and legislation: they are all authorities in matters of selecting, excluding and assigning importance to specific pasts. Hegel drew attention to a further notion. Asked about the generators of history, he named ‘unhappiness’ as the most important. ‘The history of the world is not the domain of happiness. Periods of happiness are empty pages within it, because they are periods of harmony, when the antithesis is absent.’ He added, ‘In the history of the world, we only talk about those nations that become states’ (Hegel, 1961, pp. 71, 86). Misfortunes in the life of nations take the form of wars and civil wars, or they may be natural disasters and epidemics. But, to supplement Hegel, there are also great victories and successful revolutions, pre-eminent statesmen and heroic military leaders. These constitute the ‘golden ages’ of economic prosperity and cultural splendour, which are etched into collective memory.Times of good fortune and periods of misfortune have in common that they constitute events or epochs which function as historical cut-off points, which oblige one to talk of a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ (Cavalli, 1997, p. 457). Amid the ups and downs of such events and epochs, people and nations become states, and they gain, according to Hegel, a collective identity.3 The term ‘identity’ demands closer examination. Jürgen Straub has traced the term back to its origins in individual psychology. A person has an identity, according to Straub, when that person can orientate himself or herself in physical, social and moral space, experiences conscious awareness of the coherence and distinctiveness of the self, and is capable, on the basis of these givens, of acting autonomously. Identity is not something which a person possesses now and forever […] but which everyone must take care of, and which in crises, in the face of threatened or actual ‘identity

Introduction

7

loss’, will always reassert itself. ‘Identity work or construction’, as this mental activity is sometimes known, is for us a completely and utterly self-evident matter, albeit one that is socio-culturally determined. It is a culture- and society-specific process, through which subjectivity is formed. In other words, it lends one’s relationship to the self and to the world a specific structure or form. (Straub, 1998, p. 87) Applying the term to groups is only legitimate if, first of all, one treats the group not as a ‘biophysical entity’, but rather as a ‘symbolic construct’ and, second, one uses the term not ‘normatively’, but ‘reconstructively’ (Straub, 1998, p. 96). Regarding the latter, Jan Assmann provides the following definition: ‘By a collective or we-identity, we mean the image that a group builds up of itself and with which its members identify. Collective identity is a matter of identification on the part of the participating individuals. It does not exist “in itself”, but only ever to the extent that specific individuals subscribe to it. It is as strong – or as weak – as it is alive in the thoughts and actions of the group members, and able to motivate their thoughts and actions’ (Assmann, 1997, p. 132). Bernhard Giesen has augmented this definition with three important qualifications: he points out that identity in the sense of self-identification is not only realized in the ‘name’ of the collective, but also in its history – in the narrative that it produces; second, identity does not only exist in texts, but can also be located in ‘action and communicative patterns’; and, finally, identity is formed by inclusion and exclusion, that is, through the definition of insiders and outsiders. This process should not be understood merely as an action on the part of the defining collective, but also as a process which – contrary to Assmann’s assumption – must be recognized and legitimized by third parties (Giesen, 1991, 1999, 2002). Societies, as systems of competing and mutually supportive groups, provide the raw material for (collective) identity formation by virtue of their multi-layered, mostly dissonant, discourses. This raw material acquires form through ‘agents of memoria’ (Sandner, 2001, p. 11). These may be societal interest groups – communities defined by shared experiences, victim groups, groups of perpetrators, political parties, media – as well as direct or indirect agents of the state, such as governments, parliaments, and judicial, scientific and educational institutions. These ‘institutions of the state’ have an often neglected significance, particularly insofar as they are empowered, by means of legislation, to produce settlements between victors and the vanquished, to judge previous injustices according to the laws of today, and to ensure that, besides the perpetrators, the voices of the victims are also listened to and taken into account. They are in a real sense the responsible political agents for dealing with the past – Vergangenheitspolitik. Vergangenheitspolitik, as defined very concretely by Petra Bock and Edgar Wolfrum, is concerned with the question ‘how, after overthrowing a dictatorial

8

The Discursive Construction of History

or authoritarian regime, do you come to terms with its immediate human and material legacy’(Bock and Wolfrum, 1999, pp. 8f.). The goal of Vergangenheitspolitik, according to this definition, is to make sense of the national past. Its task is to ensure, historical ‘ruptures’ notwithstanding, continuity in the collective self-image, integration of the most important social groups and the projection of an acceptable image to the outside world. This act of ‘making sense’ does not take place instantly or by consensus, but is an enduring and conflict-ridden affair. It is not ordained, but results from communicative processes, struggles for hegemony and debate. Its end-product will be a historical account around which a consensus can be constructed, a history which can serve as a unifying national narrative.

‘How history is made’ – narratives about the War of Annihilation and the Greater German Wehrmacht National narratives generally possess a smoothing and mitigating character, a ‘both … and’ or a ‘not only … but also’ structure, which only acquires validity over time – provided that no other recipe for consensus is devised. Such a ‘fable’ is reconstructed out of the past, Carl E. Schorske argued, ‘by relating detailed facts to general ideas and general ideas to detailed facts, without allowing a completely fair treatment to any side, but by weaving it as a report, according to the needs of the time, into an integrated life’ (quoted in Roth, 1998, p. 168). The tendency described here is true only until the epoch-ending events of the War of Annihilation and the Holocaust. From this juncture, the official construction of history in Europe and Israel can no longer be distinguished, in terms of the relationship between the general and the particular, from policies aimed at dealing with the past. All Geschichtspolitik is now necessarily Vergangenheitspolitik. That is to say, all politicization of history is now directly concerned with the question of ‘coming to terms’ with the past. Far transcending the scope of previous conflicts over values and disputes over interpretation, the construction of history has now become both the setting for, and the product of, processes normally encountered only in individual psychology as the phenomena of ‘denial’, ‘repression’ and ‘splitting’. Their common language is that of silence (Rauschenbach, 1992, pp. 38ff.). However, this silence can assume eloquent forms. Saul Friedländer’s surmise that Vergangenheitspolitik is obliged to construct ‘common memory’ in order to avoid ‘deep memory’ (Friedländer, 1992, p. 41) is confirmed graphically by the case of the national narratives in Austria and Germany after the Second World War. In Austria, after just a short time, the idea was quickly established, and promulgated by politicians, ‘that the events of National Socialism were inflicted on Austrian history entirely from outside’ – that the Austrian nation

Introduction

9

had been a ‘victim of deception and of the War’ (Botz, 1996a; Ziegler and Kannonier-Finster, 1997). In relation to the Wehrmacht, this explanatory process entailed the construction of a kind of legend which would make this victimhood paradigm compatible with the self-image and self-assessment of the soldiers. The construction of such a legend was only possible, according to Walter Manoschek, on the basis of a concerted effort to ‘depoliticize, de-ideologize and de-criminalize the Wehrmacht in memory’ (Manoschek, 1999, p. 90). This threefold lie can be read in school books, appears throughout the articles of the War Victims Benefits Act (KOVG) and can be observed in parliamentary debates. It is also found in the Austrian press, in the TV-mediated narrative concerning the battle and loss of life at Stalingrad, and is captured, last but not least, by a questionnaire survey which reveals what a generation of soldiers has to relate – when they are ‘amongst themselves’. Policies for dealing with the past in Germany led to a more clearly structured sequence of phases, which can be described as follows (Assmann and Frevert, 1999, pp. 140ff.; Frei, 1996; Rüsen, 2001, pp. 278ff.; Heer, 2005): in the initial phase, National Socialism was treated virtually as though it had never happened; it was nullified and excised from German history as though ‘perpetrated by others’. A second phase began with the protest movement of the so-called 1968 generation, which gained its identity by, amongst other things, incorporating the Nazi era into ‘real time’ and conducting a withering, morally driven critical analysis of this part of German history. The third phase could be characterized as appropriation and historicization. Opportunities arose, by virtue of genealogical relationships to the perpetrators, to explore and analyse, for the first time, various forms of recollection and dialogue; however, the recollection remained partial: it was oriented towards the perpetrators of the Holocaust and continued to overlook the events of the War of Annihilation in the East. The Wehrmacht exhibition owed its explosive impact to precisely this division. Ute Frevert draws attention to how the exhibition tore down the ‘invisible but nonetheless clear boundary between public and private recollections of the Third Reich’. Whilst crimes committed in the name of the state may have been, according to Frevert, officially and publicly acknowledged: The individual, autobiographical perspective occupied memory niches which were not opened up by this mode of interpretation, and in which no crimes were recorded […]. Consequently the Wehrmacht Exhibition, precisely because of its ‘private’ exhibits, touched on feelings, solidarities and inter-generational ‘pacts’, some of which had until now been supported, and others left undisturbed, by the manifestations of collective memory. […] In contrast to the debates about the Holocaust Memorial, which barely spilled outside the circles of professional custodians of memory, [the exhibition] led once again to an ‘intimizing’ of the debate

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The Discursive Construction of History

about National Socialism which had first occurred in connection with the TV-series ‘Holocaust’ in 1978–79. (Assmann and Frevert, 1999, pp. 279ff.) The war narrative of a generation of ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers had originally derived its legitimacy from three topoi4: 1. The ‘Red Army soldier’ as a perfidious ‘Asiatic beast’. 2. The ‘Partisan’ as evidence for the crimes of ‘others’. 3. The ‘Jew’ as ‘manipulator and beneficiary of events’. It was in this form that narratives about the War of Annihilation and about the genocide infiltrated German families. After the war, ‘Jew-baiting’ became taboo and largely disappeared, at least from the German public sphere. In Austria, anti-Semitic rhetoric was disguised in a variety of ways (Wodak, 2003). The two other topoi, however, did enter into the national narrative: the War of Annihilation as a justified conflict with Communism/Stalinism – Nolte’s ‘European Civil War’ – and the perpetrators as victims of the crimes of others – ‘Partisans’, ‘terror bombers’, Allied prison camps, the National Socialist ‘invasion’ of Austria, and so on (Heer, 2004).

Narrative and discourse In the discourse-historical approach, social actors and publics involved in finding ways of dealing with the past are identified and analysed in a differentiated manner. This approach was developed and further refined in the course of research into media reporting about Slovenians in Carinthia (Menz, Lalouschek and Dressler, 1989); a study of post-war anti-Semitism (Wodak et al., 1990); an analysis of media debates on the Nazi period in the context of Austria’s ‘Year of Commemoration 1988’ (Wodak et al., 1994); a study of discrimination against Romanian refugees in the press following the fall of Communism in 1989 (Matouschek, Wodak and Januschek, 1995); research on the discursive construction of national identities (Wodak et al., 1999); and lastly, in the comprehensive theoretical overview of discourse and discrimination by Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak (2001). Our definitions of ‘discourse’ and ‘text’ derive inter alia from theoretical ideas informed by the discourse theory of Michel Foucault (see Jäger, 2001; Wodak, 1996).5 In line with recent work in Critical Discourse Analysis (for an overview, see Reisigl and Wodak, 2001), we begin by assuming that discourse is ‘social practice’, and that speaking and writing always represent, produce and reproduce attitudes, beliefs, opinions and ideologies.6 Furthermore, and more specifically, we distinguish between ‘discourse’ and ‘text’, following Jay Lemke’s definition (1995, pp. 7ff.): When I speak about discourse in general, I will usually mean the social activity of making meanings with language and other symbolic systems

Introduction

11

in some particular kind of situation or setting. […] On each occasion when the particular meaning characteristic of these discourses is being made, a specific text is produced. Discourses, as social actions more or less governed by social habits, produce texts that will in some ways be alike in their meanings. […] When we want to focus on the specifics of an event or occasion, we speak of the text; when we want to look at patterns, commonality, relationships that embrace different texts and occasions, we can speak of discourses. By analysing discourses and texts we glean information about collectively shared immanent ideologies and attitudes. The socio-cognitive model of Teun van Dijk (see also above) represents an important theoretical starting point for our approach. Van Dijk describes how the attitudes and ideologies of groups are produced discursively, stored in schemata and mental models, and subsequently reproduced.7 Michael Billig also introduces a concept that is relevant to the analysis of political discourse: he argues (Billig et al., 1988) that ‘ideological dilemmas’ are manifested and revealed in utterances and texts, and that, above all, everyday interactions and discursive practices almost necessarily contain contradictions and inconsistencies, reflecting ambivalence on the part of the speaker or writer. However, planned texts, such as speeches, rarely display ‘ideological dilemmas’ because the careful production of a text ultimately tends to avoid such contradictions. If tensions nonetheless do arise, then precisely such inconsistencies help us to make inferences about subconscious processes. Texts must therefore be scrutinized for inconsistencies of logic, argumentation, form and content, which serve as indicators of underlying attitudes, beliefs, opinions and ideologies. Discourses are defined both in terms of topic and genre and are realized in individual texts. Every text refers diachronically and synchronically to other texts; this historical dimension is referred to as ‘intertextuality’. Intertextuality thus corresponds to the way in which a text relates to other texts that are ‘outside it, yet in some way brought into it’ (Fairclough, 2003, p. 40). Interdiscursivity, on the other hand, corresponds to the way in which discourses about particular topics sit alongside, overlap or intersect with one another within a particular heterogeneous text (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001, p. 37). Politics is not, of course, confined to speeches by politicians. Politicians plan consciously what, in the context of everyday interaction, occurs for the most part subconsciously and automatically, namely: where, how, with whom, in what manner and to what effect something is said or written, that is, a particular speech act is performed. The genre – written or spoken text, speech, TV debate or memo – implies specific argumentational strategies, registers and conversational styles; that is why people speak differently in the pub to how they would speak in Parliament. In this study, we investigate ways in which particular arguments are realized in different public arenas and genres, and how they are transformed and transferred (recontextualized) from one public arena to another.

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The Discursive Construction of History

‘Recontextualization’, as a theoretical construct, explains how social and discursive practices (must) evolve and change systematically, when social conventions and normative rules apply (see Bernstein, 1996; Iedema, 1997; Muntigl, Weiss and Wodak, 2000). Representing social practices (including discursive practices) thus involves recontextualizing them, ‘appropriating’ their elements into the context of another social practice (Fairclough, 2003, p. 32; Wodak 2000b, p. 77). Recontextualization is also synonymous, for example, with decision-making, particularly in organizational contexts where discursive practices are characterized by their transformation of the ‘here and now’ into the ‘there and then’ (Iedema, 2003, p. 21). As Van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999, p. 6) explain: ‘Recontextualization always involves transformation and what exactly gets transformed depends on the interests, goals and values of the context into which the practice is recontextualized.’ Van Leeuwen and Wodak distinguish between four main transformations involved in recontextualization: the rearrangement of elements (e.g., rearranging the order of activities); the deletion of elements; the addition of elements such as purposes or justifications; and the substitution of elements. These transformations play a major role when analysing the discursive construction of narratives of the past, as will become evident throughout this volume. An overview of the most important topoi employed in dealing with the past (Vergangenheitspolitik) provides the framework for our empirical investigation. As we are concerned with conflicts, which inevitably surface when we deal with experiences of traumatic pasts, we must anticipate a range of strategies of legitimization and justification (see van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999; Reisigl, 2002). Ostensibly unrelated institutions and genres, such as cabinet, parliament, school, pub, TV, press, exhibition and film are connected via the process of discursive recontextualization. It thus becomes clear why the ‘context’ of a linguistic utterance is not merely an ‘objective’ description and categorization of the of the setting in which it occurs, but needs to be analysed as an essential counterpart to the text. Context is subjectively perceived, filtered through schemata and interpreted on the basis of experience. Van Dijk most recently uses the term ‘context models’ for this phenomenon and process (see van Dijk, 2003; Wodak and Weiss, 2004). Moreover, we assume that multiple discursive strands constitute a complex and intricate web of links, a nexus between official debates, media reports, school books, films, whodunits and individual interviews, by applying relevant topoi and recontextualizing them. We draw on a variety of empirical and theoretical approaches in order to understand and interpret all these differing discourses and public spheres, and relate them to one another; hence, this multidisciplinary approach takes account of historical perspectives, socio-psychological and discourse theory, as well as approaches drawn

Introduction

13

from media studies, political science and prejudice research. This synopsis is necessarily eclectic, leading to a multi-methodological approach. On the other hand, every fragment of theoretical assumption must be explicitly justified, challenged and related to the main research questions posed at the outset (see Titscher et al., 2000; Wodak and Meyer, 2001).

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Part I The Wehrmacht and the Second World War in the Memory of the War Generation

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1 The Crimes of the Wehrmacht in the Second World War Walter Manoschek

1.1 Criminal orders As part of the planning for the invasion of the Soviet Union, work also began on devising orders relating to the conduct of the war and ensuing occupation in the East. In March 1941, Hitler had already informed 200 generals and staff officers of the units who were to be sent to the Eastern Front that this war would be ‘a struggle between two world ideologies’, to be conducted beyond the realms of established codes of martial or international law.1 The first results were the notorious ‘criminal orders’ contained in the following directives: 1. ‘Decree on Military Jurisdiction in the Area “Barbarossa”’, issued 13 May 1941 (Barbarossa Decree).2 2. ‘Guidelines for the Conduct of Troops in Russia’, issued 19 May 1941 (Ueberschär, 1999, p. 41). 3. ‘Guidelines for the Treatment of Political Commissars’, issued 6 June 1941 (Ueberschär, 1999, p. 41). 4. ‘Orders Concerning the Deployment of the Security Police and the Security Service within Military Formations’, issued 28 April 1941 (Müller, 1980, pp. 42f.). 5. Various orders relating to the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war, issued from June to December 1941 (see Streit, 2001). As the issuing dates of these orders show, the scope of the violent measures proposed was not a consequence of escalation in the conflict, but was in fact laid down in the spring of 1941 – months before the planned invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June – by the Chief of the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW), Wilhelm Keitel. This scope was systematically increased from the summer of 1941 onwards. 1.1.1 The ‘Barbarossa Decree’ In breach of all international conventions, the ‘Barbarossa Decree’ removed the civilian population in the Soviet Union’s territory from the jurisdiction 17

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Wehrmacht and WWII in the War Generation’s Memory

of the martial law courts. The troops themselves were now to act as judge, jury and executioner: they should ‘defend themselves mercilessly against any threat whatsoever from the enemy civilian population’. Irregular combatants were to be shot immediately, whether in combat or in flight. Irregulars were defined as including unarmed volunteers (‘agitators’, ‘leafleteers’ and ‘arsonists’) as well as civilians merely suspected of participating in such activities. There was no longer any necessity to prosecute members of the Wehrmacht for acts against enemy civilians – even if the act itself was a military crime. Court-martial proceedings were to be initiated only ‘when necessary for the maintenance of discipline or the safety of the troops’.3 This de facto declaration of war against the civilian population culminated in the command issued by the OKW on 16 December 1942: ‘Troops are therefore entitled and obliged to use any means whatsoever in this struggle – even against women and children – where this is the only way to ensure success. […] No German engaged in counter-insurgency activity may be subject to disciplinary or court-martial proceedings on account of his conduct in the struggle against insurgent groups or their sympathizers.’4 The removal of the war, on the orders of the Wehrmacht leadership, from normal military legal constraints was reflected in corresponding casualty figures, a few of which are mentioned here by way of example: ●

●

●

In the rear military area of Belorussia, during the first nine months of the campaign – when the Partisan movement was still taking shape – 63,257 ‘Partisans’ were killed. The low number of German losses – 638 dead and 1355 wounded – demonstrates that most of these ‘Partisans’ were civilians, and did not die in combat. Things were no different in the part of Belorussia that was under civilian administration: by November 1941, out of 10,940 people captured, 10,431 had been shot dead (cf. Heer, 1995c, p. 109). In the Ukraine, the High Command of the Sixth Army distinguished between ‘actual Partisans’ and ‘vagabond elements’. Their fate, however, was identical: ‘Along with the actual Partisans, [the Army] eliminated many elements prowling the countryside without identity papers, concealing their role as agents and intelligence operatives of the Partisans. In the course of this action, several thousands in the Army zone were publicly hanged or shot.’5 Even in Serbia, where de jure the ‘Barbarossa Decree’ was not in force, in practice it was applied there too: in the course of their campaign against Partisans in the autumn of 1941, Wehrmacht units shot dead between 20,000 and 30,000 civilians – their own losses amounted to 160 dead and 278 wounded (Manoschek, 1995, p. 166).

The death tolls alone, from three different theatres of war in the year 1941, make it clear that these were neither matters of military combat in any true

Crimes of the Wehrmacht in WWII 19

sense against the Partisans, nor simply excesses committed by individual Wehrmacht units. 1.1.2 Guidelines for the conduct of troops in Russia On the day of the invasion of the Soviet Union, the ‘Guidelines for the Conduct of Troops in Russia’ had already revealed to soldiers of the Eastern Army the character of the civilian opposition groups: ‘Bolshevism is the deadly enemy of the National Socialist German people. This corrosive Weltanschauung – and those who support it – are what Germany’s struggle is against. This struggle demands a ruthless and strenuous crackdown on Bolshevik agitators, irregulars, saboteurs and Jews, and the complete elimination of both active and passive resistance. The Asiatic soldiers, in particular, are inscrutable, unpredictable, underhand and unfeeling’ (quoted in Wette, 1999, p. 50). These terms could be arbitrarily applied to the population as required. For the 20th Infantry Division for example, men who did not yield to the recruitment of forced labour were regarded as ‘saboteurs’ and shot (Müller, 1995, p. 93). It was in this vein that Wehrmacht chiefs and divisional commanders formulated their guidelines for the ‘establishment of law and order’. The Wehrmacht commander in Ostland,6 Major General Walter Braeder, drew up the following list: ‘Law and order are endangered by: (a) Bolshevik soldiers and agents (Partisans), whether dispersed or strategically placed in woods and isolated locations; (b) Communist and other radical elements; (c) Jews and those friendly to Jews’ (quoted in Heer, 1995b, p. 66). ‘The Jew is therefore to be viewed without exception as identical to the Partisan’, was a formula familiar to the troops.7 In September 1941 the High Command of the 17th Army provided an even more precise definition of groups to be regarded as suspected Partisans: ‘Jews of either sex and of any age’ (quoted in Hilberg, 1996, p. 28). 1.1.3 The ‘Commissar Order’ The ‘Commissar Order’, issued on 6 June 1941, envisaged the on-the-spot shooting by troops of any captured political commissars of the Red Army. Although the enforcement of this order was strenuously denied by the Wehrmacht after the war, it is now clear that ‘the Commissar Order was carried out within all armies and tank groups, by at least 80 per cent of the army corps and at least half the divisions’ (quoted in Förster, 2001, p. 146). Political commissars were presented to Wehrmacht troops as an image of the enemy into which anti-communist and anti-Semitic projections were seamlessly merged. The bulletin ‘Information for Troops’, June 1941, stated, for example: ‘What Bolsheviks are, is clear to anyone who has once taken a look into the face of one of these red commissars. […] It would be an insult to animals to describe as animal-like the features of these people, a large percentage of whom are Jewish. They are the embodiment of the infernal,

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Wehrmacht and WWII in the War Generation’s Memory

people mutated into a crazed hatred of all that is noble in humanity. In the form of these commissars, we are witnessing the uprising of the subhuman against noble blood’ (quoted in Messerschmidt, 1969, pp. 326f.). Surviving letters from soldiers at the front demonstrate that the ‘Commissar Order’ was carried out right from the first days of the Russian campaign: on 24 June 1941 the junior officer Heinz H. of the 6th Infantry Division reported home: ‘Yesterday the first Russian captives turned up with a captured commissar. The latter is sure to be shot. In that respect the laws are hard and just.’ And the soldier Herman K. knew, too, at the time of the push towards Moscow in mid-July 1941, about the fate of captured political commissars: ‘We get nearer and nearer to Moscow. Everywhere the same picture of destruction. […] The people are living in abject misery, and nothing else that has been written about Russia is exaggerated: every commissar who is taken prisoner or who gets snatched is shot immediately.’8 1.1.4 Orders concerning the Security Police (Sipo) and the Security Service (SD) The regulations governing the deployment of the Security Police and the Security Service within military formations, decreed by OKW Chief, Wilhelm Keitel, in March 1941, meant that the Einsatzgruppen and the stationary units of the Security Police and the Security Service were empowered to assume executive responsibility for measures affecting the civilian population. In black and white terms, this meant that the notorious organizations controlled by Heinrich Himmler were authorized to carry out their programme of murder of the Jewish population throughout the field of military operations. With this accommodation between the military and the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, ‘the framework for a state-sponsored war of annihilation against “Jewish Bolshevism” was already in place’ (Förster, 2001, p. 140). On the basis of this accommodation, the Einsatzgruppen were able to murder more than a million Jews with the acquiescence of the Wehrmacht. 1.1.5 Orders relating to the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war Whereas captured political commissars of the Red Army were shot immediately, far in excess of half the total 5.5 million Soviet prisoners of war also died, as a result of malnourishment, disease and shooting. In total, 3.3 million died in German captivity – between the summer of 1941 and the spring of 1942 alone, the total was more than 2 million (Streit, 1999, p. 160). Responsibility for transport, accommodation, provisions and the care of prisoners of war lay with the Wehrmacht. The OKW had ruled that ‘the Bolshevik soldier has forfeited any entitlement to be treated as an honourable soldier, or in accordance with the Geneva Convention.’9 The Wehrmacht was thus applying a principle laid down by the Chief of Staff General Halder in March 1941: the Communist is ‘not a comrade to begin with, and is not a comrade at any time thereafter’.10

Crimes of the Wehrmacht in WWII 21

Prisoners’ food rations lay below minimum subsistence levels. Transports to the camps were often survived by no more than 10 per cent of prisoners. The Quartermaster General of the Military, General Eduard Wagner, decreed: ‘Non-working prisoners of war … shall starve’, while the High Command of the Sixth Army issued orders ‘to shoot all work-shy prisoners of war’ (see Streit, 2001, pp. 181–3). The policy of population decimation encompassed not only Soviet prisoners, but also the civilian population. In order to guarantee supplies to the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union, as well as to the Volksgemeinschaft at home, the occupied areas were plundered extensively. Moreover, the policy of allowing people to starve and driving out the local population was intended to create space for the settlement policies being pursued. Responsibility for the implementation of these measures lay with the Wirtschaftsstab Ost. Here, the respective tasks of the Reich ministries and the economic departments of the Wehrmacht came under central coordination. The ramifications of the policy were summarized by Wirtschaftsstab Ost as follows: ‘Many tens of millions of people’ would ‘become superfluous’ and ‘either die or emigrate to Siberia’ (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, 2002, p. 14).

1.2 The Wehrmacht and the murder of Jews In the occupied areas of the East, the mass murder of Jews was no secret. While the mobile Einsatzgruppen and stationary command units of the Security Police and the Security Service were the primary agents responsible for the liquidation of Jews, the Wehrmacht played its part within the framework of its military remit. The war against the Soviet Union had a twofold objective: over and above conventional war aims, the war in the East was an opportunity for the Nazis to undertake the ‘racial cleansing’ of Europe. In various ways, the Wehrmacht served both to link these objectives and provide the institutional apparatus through which to carry them out. Under the cloak of combating Partisans, the Einsatzgruppen, the Police and the SD carried on their efforts to exterminate ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ in the East. In so doing, they received assistance from the Wehrmacht in a variety of ways: the Wehrmacht placed vehicles and fuel at their disposal, labelled and registered Jews, and handed over ‘for further action’ the many Jews, Partisans and other suspicious civilians routinely arrested by army patrols. Senior commanders appealed in their orders to troops for understanding for ‘the necessity for the hard, but just, redress to be exacted from the Jewish subhumanity’. In isolated cases, troops even took part in mass executions carried out by special task forces. In the ‘Encyclopedia of National Socialism’, Gerd R. Ueberschär offers this summary: More recent historical research, undertaken in the 1980s and 1990s, on the basis of witness statements, trial records, forces’ letters, personal

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journals as well as other documents, leads us to be certain, rather than merely to suspect, that Wehrmacht units took direct part in many massacres carried out as part of the programme of extermination of European Jews, and in other war crimes, especially during the war in the East and in the conquered and occupied regions of Eastern, Southern and SouthEastern Europe, and that it waged in these areas a ruthless war of destruction, such that the Wehrmacht must be seen ultimately as an ‘accomplice to Evil’ and ‘iron-willed guarantor’, and not as the would-be non-political wing of the Nazi state. (Ueberschär, 1997, pp. 106f.) 1.2.1 The participation of the Wehrmacht in the genocide of Jews In the previously cited ‘Guidelines for the Conduct of Troops in Russia’, of which 800,000 copies were printed and distributed to every company (Wette, 1999, p. 50), more than 3 million soldiers of the Eastern Army were informed before the day of the invasion of the Soviet Union that war was also to be waged against the Jewish population. The racism of the National Socialists removed the need for restraint in the war in the East and led to its characterization as a social Darwinist struggle for survival by the ‘Master Race’ against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’. The Commander-in-Chief of the Sixth Army, General Field Marshal von Reichenau had, in his order concerning the ‘Conduct of Troops in the East’, issued in October 1941, laid down the war aims and the code of conduct in a paradigmatic fashion: The essential aim of the campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevik system is the complete defeat of its instruments of power and the eradication of Asiatic influence in the European cultural sphere. This gives rise to tasks for the troops which go beyond what is conventional for the onedimensional soldier. The soldier in the East is not only a fighter according to the rules of war, but is also the standard-bearer of an inexorable völkisch ideal and the avenger for all the bestialities that have been inflicted on the Germanic peoples. Therefore the soldier must have complete understanding for the necessity of the hard, but just, redress to be exacted from the Jewish sub-humanity. This has the further purpose of nipping in the bud revolt in the ranks of the Wehrmacht, which experience shows is invariably instigated by Jews. […] Far from any future political considerations, the soldier has two obligations to fulfil: 1. The complete destruction of Bolshevik heresy, of the Soviet state and of its army; 2. The merciless destruction of alien malice and barbarity and thereby the security of the Wehrmacht in Russia.

Crimes of the Wehrmacht in WWII 23

Only thus will we fulfil our historical mission to free the German people from the Asiatic-Jewish threat once and for all. (quoted in Ueberschär and Wette, 1999, pp. 258f.) The Reichenau order was treated by the Wehrmacht leadership as a ‘model order’ and relayed to numerous commanders. Further orders of a similar nature were relayed to troops by other commanders. On occasion the Reichenau order was transmitted to troops in the form of a transcript with explanatory notes (for examples, see Ueberschär and Wette, 1999, pp. 287–91). Thus, for example, the order issued by the commander of the 11th Army, General von Manstein on 20 November 1941 stated: ‘The Jew is the middle man between the enemy at the rear and the as yet unquelled remnants of the Red Wehrmacht and the Red leadership. […] The soldier must summon understanding for the necessity for the hard redress against the Jews, the spiritual bearers of Bolshevik terror’ (quoted in Ueberschär and Wette, 1999, pp. 289f.). Both Reichenau and Manstein emphasized the dual character of the war being waged by Wehrmacht troops in the East. In their orders there is the clear expression of the intertwining of the normal events of war and the National Socialist racial struggle. With the ideological construction of Jews as ‘middlemen’ between the Red Army and the political leaders, and the equation ‘Jew
Partisan’, the murder of Jews was declared to be a measure of defence and security caused by the war, and transformed into an integral part of the events of war. The Partisan war also provided the Wehrmacht with the opportunity to put into effect the racial ideological aims of the war in the East. In part, the extermination of Jews took place under the mantle of the war against Partisans, in which the Wehrmacht, Einsatzgruppen and police units cooperated closely. Thus, for example, the rear area commander of the Army Group Centre, General von Schenckendorff, in September 1941 initiated a joint training action in Mogilev involving the SS and Einsatzgruppe B. Its aim was to engender adherence to the doctrine: ‘Where there is a Partisan, there is a Jew, and where there is a Jew, there is a Partisan’ (quoted in Krausnick and Wilhelm, 1981, pp. 217f.). 1.2.2 The equation ‘Jew
Partisan’ led to corresponding victim numbers ●

During the short period of military administration in East Galicia in June and July 1941, the military administration in many districts also presided over ‘the Jewish Question’. The massacres by police and SS troops, to which at least 7000 Jews had fallen victim by July 1941, contributed, from the perspective of the Wehrmacht leadership, to the securing of the hinterland. Following the discovery of the NKVD massacres of political prisoners and German prisoners of war, ‘the army leadership was prepared

24

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●

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Wehrmacht and WWII in the War Generation’s Memory

to tolerate, if not actually initiate, harder measures against the Jews’ (Pohl, 1996, p. 72). Army Group South: on the orders of the commander of rear military zone 553, some 20,000 Jews were murdered up to the summer of 1942 in ‘cleansing operations’ (Schulte, 1995, p. 331). Military occupation of Serbia in the autumn of 1941: the murder of all adult male Jews (some 6000) by Wehrmacht firing squads as ‘hostages’ for Partisan aggression. The internment of surviving Jewish women and children in a concentration camp near Belgrade was justified by the Army High Command 12 by the claim that these had all been ‘proven intelligence agents of the rebel forces’.11 A few months later they were gassed by the SD in a converted lorry (see Manoschek, 1995, pp. 169–84). Soviet Union 1941–42: the Army Group South was assisted by units of the Sixth Army of the Army Group Centre, together with Police, Waffen-SS and Einsatzgruppen in rounding up and murdering Jews in the cities of Lutsk, Zhytomyr and Kiev (Boll and Safrian, 1995). In the case of the Army Group Centre there were massacres of the Jewish population from day one: in Bialystok, as early as 27 June 1941, members of Police Battalion 309 (subordinated to the 221st Security Division) shot dead large numbers of Jews in the open street, before driving hundreds of Jewish men, women and children into a synagogue, which they then set on fire. The commander of the 221st Security Division ‘saw cause for complaint only when the shootings began to take place in the park surrounding his recently procured official residence’ (Longerich, 1998, p. 347). In Minsk, in July 1941, sections of the 354th Infantry Regiment, the Military Police (Feldgendarmerie), and the Secret Military Police (Geheime Feldpolizei) together with special units under the Commander of Security Police in Warsaw, shot dead thousands of Jews from the combined Minsk prisoner-of-war and civilian camp (Gerlach, 1999a, pp. 506–9). Following Himmler’s order to ‘treat Jews for the most part as looters’, the SS-Cavalry Brigade, subordinated to the commander of the Army Group Centre rear area, General von Schenckendorff, reported, in September 1941, that 14,178 ‘looters’ had been shot (Heer, 1999b, p. 70). Einsatzgruppe A estimated that, by December 1941, the Army Group Centre had ‘shot dead approximately 19,000 Partisans and criminals, that is to say, mostly Jews’ (quoted in Richter, 1999, p. 847). In the part of Belorussia that was subject to military rule, the Wehrmacht’s own local and field commanders ordered that Jews be registered and distinguished by the wearing of the Yellow Star. They prompted the establishment of ghettos and prescribed forced labour for Jews (Heer, 1995b, pp. 59f.). These were not local initiatives, however. The official notices were stamped with ‘The Commander-in-Chief of the German Army’ and were distributed throughout the divisions responsible to the commander of the 9th Army, General Adolf Strauß, the commander of Panzer Group 3,

Crimes of the Wehrmacht in WWII 25

General Hermann Hoth, and the commander of the 4th Army, General Field Marshal Günther von Kluge (Gerlach, 1999b, p. 99). In the part of Belorussia under civilian administration – the ‘Generalkommissariat Weißruthenien’ – because sufficient SD and police personnel were not yet available, the Wehrmacht itself assumed partial responsibility for the extermination of Jews in the countryside and the decimation of the Jewish ghettos. By the end of 1941, the 707th Infantry Division, which was operating in the region, together with its subordinate units, had murdered at least 10,000, but probably nearer 20,000 Jews (Gerlach, 1999a, pp. 617–19). Gerlach concludes that in Belorussia, more than half the civilians and POWs murdered were killed by Wehrmacht units (Gerlach, 1999a, p. 1151) – among them the Belorussian Jews. These instances provide illustrations of the many forms of Wehrmacht involvement in the process of annihilating Jews. The anti-Jewish measures followed from orders issued by regional military and troop commanders, mostly on the basis of a security policy rationale.12 The examples provided demonstrate that the Wehrmacht leadership in the occupied territories chose to exploit security considerations as the prime operational motive for murdering Jews. The Wehrmacht needed a military pretext to legitimize the murdering of Jews: with the suspension of civil and military legal frameworks in the Eastern occupation zone, and in the Partisan war, there were no regulatory constraints in place to prevent such a course of action. Doubtless the institutional regulatory framework within which Wehrmacht soldiers operated was fundamental in determining the latter’s specific actions. This being the case, the question was whether the military elite defined Jews as an enemy group, against which to wage war. As previously mentioned, in the ‘Guidelines for the Conduct of Troops in Russia’, the three million soldiers of the Eastern Army were informed that the struggle was also to be directed against the Jews. The Barbarossa Decree removed the requirement to court martial Wehrmacht soldiers for criminal acts against civilians and pre-emptively amnestied crimes by soldiers against Soviet citizens in or out of uniform. Thus every soldier gained – as noted already in June 1941 by the designated commander of the Army Group Centre, Fedor von Bock – the right to shoot anyone ‘that he regards as an irregular – or purports to regard as such – from in front or from behind’.13 The equating of Jews with Partisans represented a potential carte blanche to murder Jews. It was the final determining step that made it possible for every soldier and officer in the East to extend to Jews the scope of his absolute power over life and death. Raul Hilberg summarizes the situation in the following way: In the final analysis the Wehrmacht took part in the genocide of Jews, like every other power structure in the Third Reich: whether by ‘Aryanizing’ Jewish businesses in France or by managing Jewish forced labour in the

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East; whether by killing Jews on their own account or by providing various forms of support to the Security Police as they annihilated the Jews. One SS Special Unit soldier summed up his experience with the Wehrmacht in a short sentence: ‘Wehrmacht has a pleasingly good attitude against the Jews’. (Hilberg, 1996, p. 35)

2 The Holocaust as Recounted in Wehrmacht Soldiers’ Letters from the Front Walter Manoschek

2.1 Introduction While overall orders were issued from the Wehrmacht headquarters in Berlin, regional commanders were responsible for adapting these orders to the situations they faced locally. The occupation authorities had considerable room for manoeuvre and scope for improvisation. The primary task of the Wehrmacht was to bring about and maintain order and security in the occupied territories. This ‘pacification’ of the hinterlands became the overriding objective following the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, in order that war in the East could be waged with the expectation of victory. After the failure of the Blitzkrieg from the winter of 1941 to 1942, and the commencement of Partisan activity, security and consolidation assumed the highest priority. They were preconditions for the replenishment of personnel and equipment, the provision of supplies, the maintenance of the military infrastructure and, not least, the morale of the troops. However, the participation of the Wehrmacht in the genocide of Jews was not causally related to the escalation in the brutality of the war in the East, nor to the mobilization of Partisan forces. The failure of the Blitzkrieg, on the other hand, did create more favourable conditions for the implementation of the murder programme. Following Stalin’s call for a Partisan war in July 1941, Hitler immediately realized how such a war could be exploited: ‘This Partisan war does have its advantages: it provides us with the opportunity to wipe out anyone who opposes us’ (quoted in Manoschek, 1995, p. 185). For individual Wehrmacht commanders, there existed at least the possibility of not involving units under their command directly in the murder programme directed against Jews. This would not have prevented the genocide from taking place, but it would have complicated its implementation. Regional studies show that the majority of commanders failed to exercise this option (see Gerlach, 1999b). The evidence of cooperation between Wehrmacht, Police 27

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and SS in the murdering of Jews, both at senior staff level and on the ground, is overwhelming. Proven also beyond doubt is the fact that Wehrmacht units carried out murder campaigns independently.1 It is nonetheless difficult to determine the exact range and scale of the involvement of Wehrmacht soldiers in the Holocaust. One significant reason for this is the systematic destruction by the Wehrmacht of records of the relevant events.2 Moreover, only in a few exceptional cases were criminal proceedings ever brought against former Wehrmacht personnel for murdering Jews – whether in Austria or in either of the German republics. This resulted in the failure to produce historically relevant sources which could have yielded more precise information about the degree of participation by soldiers in the Holocaust (Streim, 1995). Yet the previously researched participation of Wehrmacht units in the murder of Jews allows one to conclude, at the very least, that resistance amongst the men had not been great enough to prevent the direct participation of the Wehrmacht in acts of murder. The commission conducting the enquiry into the exhibition ‘War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944’ states in its final report that ‘neither a majority, nor even a substantial proportion, of the soldiers’ condemned the murdering of Jews (Bartov et al., 2000, p. 48). A broad anti-Semitic consensus amongst ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers has already been demonstrated in studies by Omar Bartov (see Bartov, 1985, 1989, 1995a, 1995b). This finding is confirmed by an evaluation of attitudes towards Jews expressed in letters from the front (Manoschek, 1997) and also borne out by a questionnaire survey of 1400 former Austrian members of the Wehrmacht, 26.4 per cent of whom expressed the opinion that ‘the Jews’ had been the main group responsible for the outbreak of the Second World War.3 The participation of Wehrmacht soldiers in the murder of Jews is clear, but their perceptions and their interpretations of events remain, on the contrary, largely unexplored. Nonetheless, it is possible to lay down some markers as a guide for research. One starting point is the question of the societal knowledge on which soldiers relied in order to orientate themselves. More concretely: what antiSemitic prejudices and what pre-formulated anti-Semitic stereotypes did they bring from their home environment into the war, which they could then use as a frame of reference in analysing the situation they encountered in the war in the East? In Germany, the National Socialist system was established in 1933, meaning that a large proportion of German soldiery was socialized into a social order based on the principle of racial anti-Semitism.4 In Austria, National Socialism only came to power in 1938, but anti-Semitism was already a marked feature of Austrian political culture before the ‘Anschluss’ (Pauley, 1993). The resulting anti-Semitic disposition of a large proportion of the soldiers was available as psychological (raw) material for future decision-making: ‘They are immediately fed with the newly experienced

The Holocaust in Letters from the Front 29

reality of war – both the macro-world of war as distinct from freedom, and the micro-world of everyday life at the front in a war of annihilation. This situation activates pre-existing dispositional potential, accentuating it into the behavioural templates that are crucial for action’ (Heer, 1999d, p. 100). Mentality is thus behavioural potential that can be activated or deactivated. Orders and propaganda were, in the context of war, the two elements which converted existing mentality into action. The contextualization of the murdering of Jews as a military requirement and, specifically, as a necessity based on security considerations, served as a necessary pragmatic construct with which to legitimize anti-Semitic mentality and its murderous realization within the realm of the Wehrmacht. * * * As a means of gaining an insight into anti-Semitic patterns of thought and interpretation amongst Wehrmacht soldiers, the analysis of their private records of the war suggests itself. Letters from the front and diary entries are the sources which – in the absence of empirical enquiry – give ‘authentic’ expression to the political consciousness of the soldiers: ‘Letters from the front … are distinguished above all by their potential capacity to answer questions relating to the realms of experience, behaviour, feelings and interpretations of the world. Although letters may be individual sources in the first instance, they can also point to shared perceptual structures and behavioural and interpretative patterns’ (Latzel, 1998, p. 24). The following analysis of images of Jews contained in letters from Wehrmacht soldiers draws upon the source corpus of the so-called ‘Sterz Collection’. This collection comprises some 25,000 letters from the front. Of these approximately 25,000 letters, however, only around 120 (0.5 per cent) contain statements about Jews. If one takes into account, moreover, that roughly 6 billion items of post were sent during the Second World War (Latzel, 1998, p. 27), then any inductive conclusions regarding a total of some 18 million Wehrmacht soldiers would be methodologically unsound.5 This lack of generalizability and the limited usefulness of these primary data for a quantitative analysis should not detract from their high hermeneutical or interpretational potential. With this kind of source material, we are dealing with written vestiges which reflect in a fragmentary way the conscious thoughts, the mentality and the knowledge of Wehrmacht soldiers, as well as actual acts of participation on their part in the murdering of Jews. Despite these limitations, the source corpus analysed in this chapter does satisfy the ‘truth criteria’ of qualitative research, such as consistency, that is, internal logic, conclusiveness and freedom from contradiction, and correspondence, that is, the possibility of mapping statements to events in the real world.6 The connection between discursive utterances and extra-linguistic reality, which is of central importance to research in political science, is

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implicitly present throughout the letters from the front. In most cases, it is possible to identify directly the correspondence between the written notes and real events. The letter extracts included in the study encompass the period from 1941 to 1945. They can be divided into two categories: (a) the ‘murdering of Jews’, whereby a distinction is made between ‘acts of excess’ and organized murder as part of the everyday life of the occupation forces; and (b) the ‘revenge and fear fantasies of the perpetrators’.

2.2 The murdering of Jews The whole of Russia was a weapons arsenal. But everything is built without any real planning, haphazardly and with no style. From everything emanates the horribly chaotic and grotesque face of Jewry. I didn’t believe that until I came here. But now I understand it and think it is completely true; there is only one thing good enough for the Jews, annihilation. […] And I reminded myself that the entire leadership of all the institutions were Jews. So their guilt is simply huge, the organized suffering incomprehensible, and their murdering diabolical. It can only be avenged through their annihilation. Until now I have rejected this idea as immoral. But now, after seeing this Soviet paradise for myself, I can think of no other solution. In this Eastern Jewry lives the scum of all criminality, and I am conscious of the uniqueness of our mission.7 This letter – to re-emphasize the point – is not quoted with the intention of suggesting a collective attitude on the part of Wehrmacht soldiers towards the extermination of Jews. But the letter is nonetheless of fundamental importance to the analysis in a different respect. It was composed in December 1942, at a point where the defeat of the Sixth Army – and with it the decisive turning point of the war – was sealed. Now, a year and a half after the start of the war against the Soviet Union, Eduard E. becomes conscious of the ‘uniqueness of our mission’ – the annihilation of the Jews. Understanding on the part of the troops for ‘the need for revenge against the Jews’, which General Erich von Manstein had already demanded from his soldiers in October 1941, was decoded by Eduard E. in the actionguiding precept: the guilt of the Jews ‘can only be avenged through their annihilation’. It is unlikely that there is a causal connection between Manstein’s order of October 1941 and these passages from Sergeant Eduard E.’s letter of December 1942. Rather, E. is reflecting the personal reasoning that led him to recognize that the Jews must be annihilated. The text also illustrates that the topic did exist and that the annihilation of Jews did form part of the ‘events of war’ in the East. E. had ‘until now … rejected this idea as immoral’, but could now think of ‘no other solution’.

The Holocaust in Letters from the Front 31

Similar conclusions had already been arrived at by other soldiers in the period leading up to the invasion of the Soviet Union. Private Wilhelm H., for example, reported in a letter about some table talk: ‘As I still sat eating dinner, people talked about the Jewish question in the General Government and elsewhere in the world; I find it very interesting, listening to such conversations. To my astonishment everyone agreed in the end that the Jews must disappear from the world altogether. […] The Jews should all be kicked out, or done away with – then things would soon look different in the world.’8 That which had the appearance of delusional fantasy in May 1941, became reality just a month later. On the day that the Soviet Union was invaded, the systematic murder of Jews was ushered in. 2.2.1 Acts of excess The catalysts for the first massacres of Jews were the mass murders carried out in Galician, West Ukrainian and Baltic prisons by the Soviet secret service, the NKVD, during the chaotic eastward retreat. From the first day of the invasion of the Soviet Union, the NKVD began liquidating political prisoners in the Soviet-occupied areas of East Poland, insofar as they could not be evacuated. The victims were predominantly Ukrainian nationalists, followed by Poles and also Jews. According to present-day estimates, the NKVD murdered between 20,000 and 30,000 of the approximately 50,000 political prisoners held in East Poland in late June 1941.9 Even before the arrival of Wehrmacht troops along with Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen, the local population had already begun pogroms against Jewish citizens and then continued with them under the tolerant gaze of the Wehrmacht. In at least 60 East Polish localities, there were pogroms and other acts of violence against Jews (Musial, 2000, p. 172). The NKVD had provided inhabitants of Soviet border regions with a macabre, but thoroughly welcome, reason to set in motion on their own initiative the pogroms already planned by Heydrich.10 German propaganda used this ‘stroke of luck’ accordingly: until the end of August 1941 newsreels back home showed disturbing pictures and reports of NKVD massacres and the detention (but not, as it happens, the killing) of the Jews who were identified as being responsible. In the occupied areas – both East and West – the National Socialists exploited the NKVD crimes. In the newly occupied areas of the East, propaganda also ran at full tilt: with films, posters, pamphlets and fliers in German, Ukrainian, Polish and Russian, National Socialism was portrayed as the saviour and deliverer from ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ (see Musial, 2000). The barbarity of the NKVD affected the arriving Wehrmacht troops as a spark affects a tinderbox. Subjective perceptions of reality reinforced preexisting anti-Semitic prejudices. During these weeks, thousands of soldiers visited prisons and other locations where mass-graves containing NKVD victims had been discovered, and for which the local population and Ukrainian Nationalists blamed the resident Jews. Commanding officers had

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no objections to the visits to the murder scenes. On the contrary, the leader of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Mountain Division called on his soldiers to see for themselves the prisons in Lvov, ‘in order to appreciate the necessity for the struggle against that “Jewish-Communist criminal mob”, the Red Army’ (quoted in Ogorreck, 1996, p. 144). The propaganda image of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ melded increasingly with the soldiers’ own perceptions. Many believed they were seeing what they had been expecting to see: Adolf and I march against our great enemy Russia. In this way, one of my wishes is being fulfilled, as I always wanted to come to this blasphemous country. […] Here one can witness Jewish, Bolshevik barbarity, but to a degree I had hardly thought possible. Yesterday we made our way through a larger town [Lvov] past a prison. Even from afar it stank eerily of corpses. As we approached, it became hard to bear. Inside lay 8000 dead captured civilians, beaten to death and lynched, not shot, a bloodbath that the Bolsheviks carried out shortly before they withdrew. In another town quite similar cases, maybe even more atrocious.11 Ukrainian militia who, with the approval of the Wehrmacht, carried out order maintenance functions in Lvov, drove the Jews to the prisons, where they had to bury the prisoners murdered by the NKVD. Wehrmacht units secured the prisons whilst the Ukrainians acted as execution commandos, beating and murdering the Jews. Hannes Heer believes that German officers exercised the commanding authority (Heer, 2001). On the day when Private Ferdinand B. wrote about the NKVD victims in Lvov, Commandos 5 and 6 of Einsatzgruppe C, by way of retribution, set about the murder of at least 3500 Lvov Jews.12 The Vienna SS sergeant major13 Felix Landau, who took part in these mass shootings – he had been decorated with the Blood Order of the NSDAP because of his participation in the failed putsch against the Austrian chancellor Dollfuß in June 1934 – noted in his journal that even Wehrmacht soldiers had spontaneously joined in this massacre: Lvov, 5 July 1941: We drive to the citadel. There we saw things that, for sure, not many people have ever seen before. At the entrance to the citadel stand soldiers with whopping great coshes hitting out at whatever they can. At the entrance the Jews are pushing to get out, so there are rows of Jews lying on top of each other like pigs and whimpering like I don’t what, and time and again the Jews who get up scurry away with blood pouring out of them. We stay there and look to see who is in charge of the troop. ‘No one.’ Someone has set the Jews free. Anger and hatred are now being directed towards the Jews. Nothing against it, only they shouldn’t let the Jews run around in that state. Later we hear from the soldiers standing there that they have just visited comrades – airmen – in

The Holocaust in Letters from the Front 33

a military hospital here in Lvov and seen how brutally they had been knocked about. […] That was the reason they acted like that, completely understandable.14 At first, neither the town commandant in Lvov, General Karl Wintergerst, nor the superior Wehrmacht authorities, acted to stop the pogroms. Quite to the contrary, the staff of Field Army Command 17 had suggested to the RSHA (Reich Security Main Office) that they take advantage of the antiJewish forces at large for the purpose of pogrom-like excesses. This suggestion on the part of the military met with such a positive reaction in Berlin that all Einsatzgruppen were encouraged by means of suitable orders to adopt such an approach (see Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, 2002, p. 94). The equation ‘Jew equals Bolshevik System’, as promulgated through National Socialist propaganda, permeated the perception of soldiers in the East: It is simply impossible to describe what we have experienced. The most satanic and criminal system of all time is the Jewish system in this ‘Soviet paradise’ – it is a paradise for Jews. We have witnessed the racial murders in Lvov and Zloczow, and myself down to the last detail in Tarnopol and some other places – indescribable. Because I speak fluent Russian (although at my own request I am not officially engaged as an interpreter), I have been able to make precise observations: the leaders of all these crimes were Jews, in Tarnopol especially Jewish doctors, surgeons who were downright dissecting people during the race murders. I will never forget the people’s anger. There we managed to stop most of them – we arrived too quickly!! – despite having had this object lesson, we – my men and I – are thankful for the STÜRMER.15 For we are interested in how the Jewish question is slowly dawning on the world outside Germany.16 The description by Lieutenant K. of ‘Jewish racial murder’ in Tarnopol is reminiscent of legends about Jewish ritual murder in the Middle Ages. It also stands in marked contradiction to surviving, detailed, Einsatzgruppe dispatches. As in Lvov, the NKVD, before its withdrawal from Tarnopol, had liquidated hundreds of political prisoners and mutilated and murdered ten captured Wehrmacht soldiers.17 Following the arrival of the Wehrmacht troops, some 20 Jews, amongst others, were lynched on the streets by Wehrmacht soldiers and Ukrainians. Of the Jews drafted in to exhume the NKVD victims, 180 were killed in the prison courtyard and in the street. A further 127 Jews were executed by SD Special Unit 4b.18,19 The overwhelming majority of the Jewish victims in Tarnopol, however, were attributable to the passing Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS troops, who ‘killed in total some 600 Jews and set their houses on fire’.20 The Einsatzgruppe on hand accredited the Wehrmacht with ‘a pleasingly good attitude against the Jews’.21

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Wehrmacht and WWII in the War Generation’s Memory

A letter by a Viennese Wehrmacht soldier, a copy of which has been preserved, described the course of this murder operation: Tarnopol, 6 July 1941: Dearest Parents! I have just come from laying out comrades of the air and mountain troops captured by the Russians. I cannot find the words to describe it. The comrades are shackled, ears, tongues, noses and sexual organs are cut off, that’s how we found them in the cellar of the Tarnopol courthouse and apart from that, we found 2000 Ukrainians and ethnic Germans messed about with in the same way. This is Russia and the Jews, the workers’ paradise. If there is still a communist left in Vienna today, he should be put to death immediately, but not shot. […] So far we have dispatched approximately 1000 Jews to kingdom come, but that is far too few for what they have done. The Ukrainians have said that the Jews had all the leading positions, and had a real party with the Soviets over the executions of the Germans and the Ukrainians. I ask you, dear parents, let people know, and father should too in the local branch. Should any doubts remain, we will bring back photos. Then there won’t be any doubt. All good wishes, your son Franzl. (quoted in Boll and Safrian, 1995, pp. 270f.) In Belorussian Lutsk, too, the Soviets, prior to their withdrawal, had murdered some 2800 Ukrainians and ten Wehrmacht soldiers (Sandkühler, 1996, p. 115). And following the same pattern as in Lvov and Tarnopol, in Lutsk, too, Jews were murdered in retaliation: ‘In the old citadel today [2 July 1941] 1000 Jews will be shot. This is a reprisal measure for the 2800 Ukrainians killed under the Bolsheviks. For that 5600 Russians will now lose their lives.’22 Major Sch. does not mention that the executions of the Jews also involved the participation of a platoon of infantrymen who had requested permission to join in the shooting.23 The Bessarabian capital, Kishinev, was taken by the Wehrmacht and by Romanian troops on 16 July 1941. Here, too, the NKVD had murdered thousands of political prisoners before withdrawing. Private Eugen M. describes the events from memory: It was around 20 July [1941]. My company received orders to secure the advance past the capital of Bessarabia, Kishinev. So we were there around the town for four days. A picture presented itself there, that one seldom sees. Kishinev is situated somewhat on an incline with beautiful avenues. Two-thirds of the inhabitants were Jews. What the war didn’t destroy, the Jews set fire to. At the station there were still whole trains standing full of half-starved people. They wanted to carry the people off to Siberia, but there they had no luck, as we had already blown up the platforms. In the town itself Jews and commissars had already murdered more than 3000 civilians. Some of them were then burned; other corpses still lay in the

The Holocaust in Letters from the Front 35

cellars. As we left, the town was occupied by Romanians. They then shot all the Jews.24 The Romanians had indeed, after erecting a ghetto in Kishinev, systematically murdered the inmates in the autumn of 1941, some 16,000 people in total (Grossman and Ehrenburg, 1994). The murders of Jews to which Private Eugen M. referred were not, however, carried out by Romanians, but by members of Special Commando 11a of Einsatzgruppe D. On 17 July 1941 the Sonderkommando had arrived in Kishinev under the command of the SS major Paul Zapp. They immediately began erecting a ghetto and instigated enquiries into arson, an attack on an ambulance and forbidden light signals to aircraft of the Soviet Air Force: 551 Jews were shot in punishment for these offences (see Burleigh, 2000, p. 722). The spontaneous participation of soldiers in pogroms was rooted in the need to avenge crimes allegedly committed by Jews against Ukrainians. Representative of this mindset is the letter by a soldier on 7 July 1941: ‘And it’s also the Jews who were leading the atrocities against Ukrainians. And many a German soldier fell victim to the back-stabbing of these filthy beggars. We Germans therefore have no reason to treat these creatures with respect. For us right now they are worth less than a dog. For us soldiers that goes without saying.’25 And with pride at the realization of Hitler’s prophecy, Private Herbert S. asserts: A whole chapter in itself is the way in which the Jewish question is now being solved with an impressive thoroughness, and to the enthusiastic applause of the local population. Just as the Führer said before the outbreak of war: ‘If ever again the Jews should succeed in baiting the nations of Europe into a senseless war, that will mean the end of this race in Europe!’ The Jews should have known that the Führer is accustomed to mean what he says and now they have to take the consequences. These are hard in the extreme, but necessary if peace and harmony between nations are to return at last.26 The acts of excess by Wehrmacht soldiers in response to their comrades’ murders at the hands of the NKVD were by no means a case of random killing: for these atrocities committed by the Soviet secret service, Jews were deliberately held accountable and beaten to death and shot by way of retribution. The regional Wehrmacht commanders reacted to the pogroms in different ways: in Lithuanian Kovno, where, in the first days of July 1941, thousands of Jews were murdered in broad daylight by German Police and Lithuanian protection groups, the responsible commander-in-chief of Army Group North, General Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb, noted in his diary, ‘We have no influence over these actions. All we can do is keep our distance.’27

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Wehrmacht and WWII in the War Generation’s Memory

Where the pogroms in Galician towns were concerned, the Wehrmacht exercised commanding authority on the ground: Wehrmacht units secured the sites of the pogroms and stepped in – if at all – only after some days to quell the murderous excesses of the Ukrainians. This is roughly how it was in the Galician town of Zloczow. After the town commandant had ordered that all Jews aged six or over wear white arm bands with a blue star of David, and German soldiers, together with Ukrainians, had plundered Jewish dwellings, the Ukrainian militia and the Waffen-SS division ‘Wiking’ instigated in the citadel a pogrom that lasted for three days and claimed hundreds of victims. Only after the arrival in Zloczow of a general staff officer of the 295th Infantry Division, Lieutenant Colonel Groscurth, did the massacre end. He ordered the town commandant, Colonel Korfes, to stop the pogrom and restore order (on the massacre of Jews in Zloczow, see Boll, 2002). A propaganda company present in the vicinity later justified the massacre: ‘The surviving Ukrainians showed the Jews their atrocities, showed them those they had murdered, and then punished them as this bunch of sub-humans deserves, hard but justly.’28 According to the account of a member of an Einsatzkommando29 stationed in Drohobych, Felix Landau, the local town commandant placed the Jews under the protection of the Wehrmacht. Evidently without great success: from 11 July, members of the Einsatzgruppe in Drohobych systematically shot hundreds of Jews.30 * * * The actions of Wehrmacht commanders in relation to the pogroms in June and July 1941 ranged from issuing orders to take the initiative, via passive support, to half-hearted intervention. All the areas mentioned so far were under military administration. As those responsible for the safety of the civilian population, it would have fallen to the acting officers and commanders to intervene to prevent these crimes, and to call the perpetrators to account under the provisions of martial law. In his comprehensive study of the persecution of Jews in East Galicia, Dieter Pohl concludes that the Wehrmacht did not fulfil this obligation: Only the military administration was institutionally in any sort of position to pursue ‘Jewish policy’ throughout the whole of East Galicia. The civilian administration was practically non-existent and the security police could intervene only selectively. One should not underestimate the comprehensive power that that the military administration enjoyed during this phase [Summer 1941]. It alone ruled all aspects of the occupation, and under the terms of the administration directives, and in many cases also at their own request, that included dealing with the ‘Jewish question’. Only mass executions were delegated to the Einsatzgruppen. (Pohl, 1996, p. 71)

The Holocaust in Letters from the Front 37

The NKVD murders provided an ideal situational motivation to convert into actions the pre-existing anti-Semitic mentalities amongst the troops and the negative stereotype of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ propagated by the Wehrmacht leadership and commanding officers. It is important to keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of soldiers did not actively take part in the pogroms, but assumed the role of spectator: ‘It is nonetheless certain that a considerable number of soldiers generally considered the pogroms and the persecution of Jews to be justified.’31 2.2.2 The murder of Jews as an everyday event under occupation The murdering of Jews, which began as an act of excess, within a short time became part of everyday life under occupation in the East. Captain Hermann G., who on 15 July 1941 could still write that ‘we nearly had to make use of the firearms’,32 had already got down to it two days later: Nothing new here. […] The whole place is crawling with Jews. They are all being roped in to work here. Some have to sweep the roads, others have to do repairs. The girls have to wash and darn, and the boys have to clean boots. Since the day before yesterday they are all wearing the yellow patch. To get that through though we had to set an example, because the senior Jewish elder had said there was no real hurry. When his attitude didn’t change following a second appeal, we had to shoot him. Since then, they have been getting a move on. The rest of the population, Poles and White Russians, are well behaved. With them, you just have to seek out the active Communists and render them harmless.33 With laconic matter-of-factness he notes down the scheme according to which different sections of the population were approved for potential murder: in the case of Poles and Belorussians, only the active Communists, whilst for Jews there are no restrictions. Differentiation on the basis of whether one was part of the Jewish population or not is also found in other letters. Private Max F. describes the living conditions in Latvia: The people here live so simply, that we can just hardly imagine it. From the State they received a large piece of land and some cattle, and from that they had to live. When the harvest came in, the local mayor would come and collect the harvest for the State. The people were never paid money. That was the collective economy that the Russians had such high hopes of. It will be different in future. Thousands of farmers can be settled here. But first and foremost we have to eliminate the Jews.34 Behind the front, in the rear military areas, the Wehrmacht set up field command headquarters. Field judicial inspector Franz A. tersely and

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Wehrmacht and WWII in the War Generation’s Memory

precisely reported the nature of their task: ‘Once we, as the rear military area, have cleansed the region of Partisans, Jews and other vermin, we advance further and the civilian administration follows us in to undertake the reconstruction.’35 What ‘cleansing of Jews and other vermin’ meant in concrete terms is described retrospectively by customs official Hans B.: My office was situated at first in Zvyagel, formerly Novohrad-Volynskyy. Yet as the fortress at Kiev was taken by our troops [on 19 September 1941], we advanced further. The tasks that lay ahead of us sometimes needed to be taken very seriously. But the first thing that we had to do was get rid of the Jews. We would help comrades in the SD to cleanse the place of the Jewish plague. This work was quickly completed, though it wasn’t that easy. The order to comrades in the SD had been to destroy these pigs for ever, and that takes nerves, particularly because there were so many of them. But just the fact of the order enables you to get over it easily, and this work is, after all, a contribution to the great victory.36 Work, duty, orders, contribution to the victory were from now on the terms through which the murdering of Jews came to be identified as a hard but necessary routine task, an integral part of the daily routine of war and occupation. The fulfilment of this obligation created the need for cooperation between comrades from different departments. Just a few days after the capture of Kiev on 19 September 1941, referred to above by Hans B., there followed what was up to this point the largest massacre of Jews (for more information on what follows, see Boll and Safrian, 1995). At a meeting of the town commandant Eberhard with members of the SD, the Police, and the secret field police, as well as officers of defence and engineer units, on 27 September 1941, the plans for the massacre were discussed. Propaganda Company 637 produced a poster calling for all Jews living in Kiev to appear, on pain of death, at a specified location in the city on 29 September. From this spot, long columns of Jewish men, women and children made their way on the morning of 29 September to a ravine outside the town called Babi Yar. In the course of 29 and 30 September, members of the SD Special Commando 4a, the Russia-South Police Regiment, the Waffen-SS Battalion z.b.V (for special duties) and the Police Reserve Battalion 9, killed a total of 33,771 Jewish men, women and children. On 30 September Wehrmacht sappers blew up the edges of the ravine, in order to level the mass graves.37 Private Ludwig B., stationed in Kiev, justified the shooting operation as follows: ‘In Kiev, for example, one mine explodes after another. The city burns for eight days, and it’s all being done by the Jews. In response the Jews aged 14 to 60 were shot, and the wives of the Jews will now be shot too, otherwise there will never be an end to it.’38

The Holocaust in Letters from the Front 39

In the autumn of 1941, when the Wehrmacht’s certainty of military victory was at its peak, massacres of Jews in the East reached a first pinnacle. At this time, in the so-called ‘Regional Commissariat Ostland’ (the western part of Belorussia), the 707th Infantry Division took over responsibility for the murdering of Jews on the flat lands and for the decimation of Jewish ghettos.39 The CO of the 12th Company of Infantry Regiment 727, 707th Infantry Division, Lieutenant Colonel J. K. reported to his brother: ‘We are now diligently on the hunt. Every day several Jewish Partisans discover this the hard way. It’s getting wilder here by the day. A dangerous mob. […] We are really sorting out this mob. It would be right up your street.’40 The soldier Xaver M. of Regiment 747, 707th Infantry Division saw the murder by his division of well over 10,000 Jews as a deed of salvation: ‘I don’t believe the Jews in this part of the world will be needing any more prayer-houses soon, for reasons I have already explained to you. For these barbaric creatures it’s the only proper solution, though.’41 Partisan activity as a rationale for annihilating Jews crops up – in contrast to the dispatches of the Einsatzgruppen42 – only rarely in soldiers’ letters during the year 1941: ‘In a procession of prisoners recently you could see a number of gunwomen, then seven Jews hanging from a gallows, after 14 of them dropped in behind by parachute for sabotage purposes.’43 As the battle against Partisans became a real factor in the East in 1942, the number of Jews murdered scaled new heights: Dear Kathi, on 17 October [1942] we came back to Minsk. […] We are often away for days on end, day and night in the forest and also in the villages. We have to creep around because of the Partisans – there are still plenty of them, they blow up the railway tracks – terrible – the vehicle columns and soldiers out on their own. They are equipped with all kinds of guns so there is often real gunfire, we have to set whole villages alight, often someone dies, I am always hard at work with my vehicle day and night on the move and often so dangerous. Dear Kathi, the Partisans are mostly Russian officers and commissars – some only dropped in by parachute a few weeks ago and destroy anything that moves, there are women amongst them that are so sly. The ones we catch alive are beaten black and blue and then strung up all through the streets of Minsk, they don’t deserve any better. Dear Kathi, we have one more task, we are under the control of the police who are always here with us. We must now also shoot all the Jews in a radius of 150 km, all of them, even the women and children. I do feel sorry for the children though, got some at home after all. Here in Minsk there are 37,000 Jews, in the past week we have knocked off 14,000 and we’ll get the rest in the next few days. What kind of family man has to do something like that? You can imagine when we meet when I’m on leave there will be plenty to talk about.44

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Wehrmacht and WWII in the War Generation’s Memory

Some letters reflect a murderous hatred of Jews. NCO Franz K. saw the soldiers on the Eastern Front as the instrument and guarantors of a messianic rescue mission: What the Jewish regime has done in Russia we see on a daily basis, and even the last doubting Thomas ought to be cured here by the facts that are staring us in the face. We must, and will, succeed in freeing the world from this plague, the German soldier on the Eastern Front will guarantee that, and we don’t want to come home until the root of all evil is ripped out here and the nerve centre of the Jewish Bolshevist ‘saviour of the world’ is destroyed. May our wishes be granted very soon, because only then can we be happily reunited, in the knowledge that we are free from Jewish influence from within and from without.45 After the first wave of Jews was murdered in the East in the summer of 1941, the surviving Jewish population was interned in ghettos. In addition, Jewish forced labour camps were constructed for the Wehrmacht, the SS and private enterprise. From the autumn of 1941 onwards, inmates of both the ghettos and the forced labour camps were systematically murdered in pursuit of the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’. The letters of the wartime administrator Heinrich K., which he composed between April and September 1942, give a partial, but thoroughly authentic insight into the events. Heinrich K. was stationed during this period alternately in Belorussian Baranavichy and in Galician Brest. Having just arrived in Baranavichy, he wrote down his first impressions: ‘The Jews, even the women and girls, can only move in columns, accompanied by the Lithuanian police, out of the ghetto onto the street and to work. Heaps of them are shot because people want to be rid of them and accuse them of being in league with the Partisans in the surrounding area.’46 A few days later, he described the fears of the Jews: ‘In the stable two Jews have been cutting wood for 7 months and from time to time they ask whether they too will soon be shot. For in our little town, out of about 8000 Jews, 2007, including many women and children, have recently been shot dead on the orders of the District Commissar, a 52-year old party official.’47 On arriving in Brest, Heinrich K. described the physical condition of the Jews set to work on road construction: ‘It is even worse with the Jews. Some of them simply collapse from hunger when working on urgent road repairs. No shooting or beating is going to help there.’48 Heinrich K. also described the mass shooting of Jews which had taken place in Bereza Kartuska: ‘In Bereza Kartuska, where I stopped for lunch, they had shot 1300 Jews just the day before. They were taken to a pit outside the town. There, the men, women and children had to undress completely and were shot in the neck. The clothes were disinfected and reused. I am convinced that if the war carries on any longer, they will have to process the

The Holocaust in Letters from the Front 41

Jews into sausage meat and feed it to the Russian POWs or the skilled Jewish workers.’49 Soon afterwards, Heinrich K. was himself to witness a mass killing of Jews. After returning to Baranavichy, he wrote on 23 September 1942, ‘At the moment we are also affected by a new action against the Jews. I’ll spare you the details, but today I saw things during a walk through the quarter in question.’50 Heinrich K.’s use of the imprecise term, ‘new action against the Jews’, may well have been an allusion to a process that he had not previously seen: the murdering of Jews in mobile gas chambers. Between 22 September and 2 October 1942, 6000 Jews from Baranavichy were killed, some choking to death in gas vans and others being shot three kilometres south of the town (see Gerlach, 1999a, p. 703). In the year 1943, when the majority of Jews in the occupied Eastern territories had already been murdered, the liquidation of the so-called Restghettos51 reached its climax. By 1944, the Jewish population in the East had been all but wiped out. Now, one just stumbled upon vestiges of the annihilation: ‘This place used to have many Jews, recently we had bad luck, we were camouflaging some weaponry (planting trees) and we hit on some corpses covered with earth. Yes, you can experience all sorts of things, but you can’t shake us old soldiers.’52 It was an open secret that the vanished Jews had been killed: ‘Where I have landed, I have already written to you about. We are accommodated in a former Jewish old people’s home, which was liquidated, like the rest of the Jewish apparatus [sic] in this country, when the German Army marched in.’53 * * * The extermination, spanning three years, of the Jewish population in Poland and the Soviet Union took place on the initiative of the Greater German occupiers. The perpetrators were – to varying degrees – all the German authorities, ranging from the political organs of Himmler and Heydrich (Einsatzgruppen, Gestapo, Police, SD, Security Police and Waffen-SS), through the civil administration to the Wehrmacht. In the countries occupied by the Axis partners, Greater Germany’s allies to some extent took the business of the annihilation of the Jews into their own hands – for example, in the Romanian-occupied areas of the Southern Soviet Union. In full view of the Wehrmacht, the Romanians had already begun murdering Jews in 1941: ‘Here even the Jewish question is being dealt with somewhat differently than at home. The Romanians round up all the Jews and shoot them, regardless of whether they are men, women or children – for it used to be the other way round.’54 By ‘somewhat differently’, the lance corporal apparently means that right from the start, the Romanians also killed Jewish women and children, whereas only in the course of the summer of 1941 did the Greater German

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Wehrmacht and WWII in the War Generation’s Memory

occupiers switch to carrying out the systematic murder of Jewish women and children.55 2.2.3 The murder of Jews in other occupied countries In contrast to the Nazi policy of war and annihilation in the East, the war and occupations in Western countries did not have the combined function of military domination and extermination of the Jews. The bulk of Jews in Western Europe were not murdered by military units on the ground, but were transported to concentration camps in the East and gassed there. Nonetheless, even in these countries Jews were taken ‘hostage’ by the Wehrmacht and – in France, for example – shot to ‘atone’ for attacks by the Resistance. That the Jewish victims had nothing to do with the resistance movement was obvious, but this had no bearing on their killing. Earlier, non-Jewish ‘hostages’ had been shot in Paris. However, this measure had met with horror, not only in France but also abroad. The military commander of France, General Otto von Stülpnagel, therefore decided in November 1941 to switch to killing Jews instead. A lance corporal of the military police commented thus: ‘In Paris 100 Jews were shot dead due to a renewed attack, and many were shipped to Russia to do forced labour, and they had to pay a fine of a billion gold francs. Well, in such a cosmopolitan city you get all sorts of criminal riffraff wandering about.’56 Because of transportation problems, the planned deportation of the first 500 Jews from France to the East could not at first be carried out (Herbert, 1998b, p. 190). In due course, the Jews from France were deported to Auschwitz and gassed. That the gassing plant of Auschwitz-Birkenau was no ‘terra incognita’ is clear from a letter written by the soldier Sigbert M. Like so many other soldiers in the Wehrmacht, and other occupation personnel, during his rail transfer to the Eastern Front, he waited at the Auschwitz railway junction for his onward journey, and observed events at the Auschwitz concentration camp: ‘Up here you see so many prison camps, that do building work and various other things. About 7000–8000 Jews arrive here – in Auschwitz, that is – every week, and after a short time they die a “hero’s death”. It is good to have the chance to see what goes on in the world.’57 It is virtually unknown that from March 1944 onwards, more than 20,000 Wehrmacht soldiers served as guards at concentration camps. Thus the Wehrmacht, in the final year of the war, supplied more than half the total concentration camp security personnel (see Perz, 1996).

2.3 Revenge and fear fantasies of the perpetrators There is a striking correspondence between the perceptions and mentality of the letter writers and, on the one hand, the line that National Socialist antiJewish propaganda was taking at the time, and, on the other hand, the actual

The Holocaust in Letters from the Front 43

course of the annihilation of Jews during the triumphal phase of ‘certain victory’. Put another way, the anti-Jewish thought patterns of the soldiers are structured in line with the propaganda and the orders and directives of their commanding officers and with their interpretation of events that they themselves had experienced. Whether the anti-Jewish attitudes – which are reflected in all the letters with varying intensity – were also translated into concrete individual acts (of murder) against Jews, was dependent on particular situational factors. Even in the case of those who did not commit murder themselves, there is invariably evidence of implicit, and in most cases also explicit, approval of the murdering of Jews. Amidst the prospect of military defeat following Stalingrad, by early 1943 the impulse to annihilate, fuelled by feelings of omnipotence, began to be increasingly intermingled with revenge and punishment fantasies. The potential consequences that the mass crimes could lead to in the event of defeat – a topos which is completely absent from the letters prior to 1942 – feature more and more prominently. In a vague and hedged way, they are already hinted at in a letter in March 1942 from the soldier W. Sch. after Blitzkrieg euphoria had ended and the USA had entered the war: ‘We are up to our necks in this war. I doubt whether we have reached the half-way stage yet. Just think though, America has seen us off once already. Well, that’s what happens when you have Jews, like we’ve always said. Now they reap the rewards and we are the dumb ones. Let’s see how it all ends up.’58 Three days before the Battle of Stalingrad ended, Cavalry Captain K. H. enumerated what he considered to be the four biggest mistakes in the Eastern policy of the occupiers: ‘The first mistake was that we didn’t look after the Russian prisoners in 1941. We probably wouldn’t have needed to fight in 1942 – the Russian soldiers would have come over to our side. The second mistake was the mistreatment of the peasants and their interests. […] The black-marketeering throughout the entire East is a further crime that will cause problems in the long term, and the fourth is the “solution of the Jewish question”.’59 In search of explanations for the course the war was taking, Corporal A. N. comes to the question of the Jews: ‘Where would England be now if the USA had stayed neutral? I think the war would already be over. But it must really be the Jews behind everyone who is out to destroy us, so they can rule over a world in ruins. And that must not happen, come what may.’60 In order to help the National Socialists attain victory in their mission, from now on, the dear Lord would have to help: This war must not be lost under any circumstances! What would happen then? For a start, Germany would no longer exist after losing a war. And the Führer must know that for sure. We can only ask again that the dear Lord bless our Führer and our weaponry. We just can’t have the Jews

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Wehrmacht and WWII in the War Generation’s Memory

winning and taking over. The English and the Americans are the biggest traitors to the white race and Germanic culture. They know perfectly well what it’s all about. And with the help of the Russians they want to finish us off as competition. And maybe they don’t even realize themselves that they are only helping the Jews.61 Omnipotence fantasies gave way to disillusionment. Lance Corporal H. H. urged keeping to the essential aim of the war: The time for fanaticism and intolerance of other viewpoints is past, and we are gradually starting to think more clearly and soberly. If we want to win the war, then we have to become more sensible and can no longer go on repelling the whole world so pig-headedly. You’ll have noticed yourself at the parades how differently they talk to the way they did three years ago. It’s true we must win the war so as not to be subject to the revenge of the Jews, but dreams of ruling the world are over.62 The revenge of the Jews would mean the demise of Germany: ‘Our beautiful Germany must never go under, no matter how many lives we have to sacrifice, and even though it is very sad for families to lose their loved ones. But there really is nothing that can be done about it, it just has to be done, because we cannot and must not lose this war, or else we Germans will be irretrievably lost. The Jews would then get stuck in and extinguish everything that is German. There would be a horrible, brutal cull.’63 Private K. B. tried to take precautions to evade the feared revenge of the Jews: Mami, I would like to tell you something, but don’t laugh. You already know that the whole thing is now on a knife-edge. Now it is a question of the outcome and I have the feeling that the knife is about to break. The war is nearing its end, but not for us I don’t think. You know of course that the Jews will take bloody revenge – mainly against people in the Party. Unfortunately I was one of those who wore the Party uniform. I regret that now of course. Can I ask you please to get rid of the uniform, no matter where, even if you have to burn it. I’m already having sleepless nights because of it.64 Sometimes doubts as to the final victory were fought off with anti-Jewish projections: ‘On no account can we succumb to fatigue or become weak, it would be the end of us, and Judah would have managed to achieve what he’s been after for a long time. If we carry on in this spirit, our efforts will be rewarded with success.’65 Conspiracy theories, revenge fantasies and unrealistic dreams of victory merged into one another: We are firmly convinced that the damage inflicted by the accursed traitors will soon be repaired. Then the worst will have been endured and it will

The Holocaust in Letters from the Front 45

be full steam ahead to victory. You see how these pigs want to rob us of everything at the last minute. We know that these crooks are all Freemasons, which means they are all devoted to, or rather enslaved by, International Jewry. Pity I couldn’t join in the action against these rogues. It would have been a pleasure to see the smoke coming from my machine pistol.66 Battle fatigue became infused with resigned visions of the future: ‘Well, let’s hope that the war will be over soon, that the slaughter stops and new life blossoms out of the ruins. But if we lose this war we will be finished for decades, just because of the Jewish reprisals.’67 The latest National Socialist propaganda triggered imaginary scenes of God’s court: ‘We keep hearing on the radio the whole time how the enemy is planning to deal with the Germans when the war is over. Up to half the German population is to be used for forced labour. For us in West Germany it may actually be good to be occupied by the Western powers. The Jews will definitely be looking for revenge, and I am actually of the opinion that they will recognize their enemies again. Looking at the whole thing, it seems as if God’s judgement may yet await us.’68 Although the climax of the mass exterminations was reached with the gassing of some 400,000 Hungarian Jews in the summer of 1944, a residue of Jews remained living in the concentration camps – predominantly Jews who had been marched to camps within the Reich itself from abandoned concentration and extermination camps in the East. As mentioned above, from March 1944 more than 20,000 Wehrmacht soldiers were deployed as concentration camp guards. An air force auxiliary from Dormettingen gave a detailed description of events at one of these camps in November 1944. The letter is reproduced in full because it is distinctive in a number of ways: However there are other psychological burdens, of a rather heavy kind. For example, the Jewish problem, the stark reality of which is being laid before our eyes. Here, because of the reconstruction of the airfield, as well as the various works of the OT69 devoted to extracting shale oil, thousands of Jews are being housed in mud and mire at the big concentration camps. In one medium-sized barracks, there are 700 Jews sleeping in a single room, who were transferred from Eastern Europe. As daily provisions they receive two slices of brown bread, 15 grams of fat and a thin soup. The clothing, of course, is also seriously deficient. By profession they are university professors, doctors, book-binders, painters, writers, bakers and civil servants – but here they have to perform the heaviest manual labour: digging deep shafts, laying sewage channels, felling trees, and other things too. Of course, to get the most out of them, Jew minders have to follow them round with a carbine, whack them a few times if they go slow, or if they are more than 3 metres away, shoot them dead. And we

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Wehrmacht and WWII in the War Generation’s Memory

have to fill these posts. To steer the right path between sympathy, charity and duty is very, very difficult. At first I avoided this job. But now I volunteer for it all the more often, so that I can afford these ‘insulted and humiliated’ people some relief. It is forbidden, of course, and I am always being pulled up about it, but I think this way is better than how the SS surveillance at the camp carry on, hitting them nearly every day till they bleed. Every day about 30 succumb naturally and 20 commit suicide. To battle against so much misery is something you can barely manage alone, but a deep prayer picks me up again. Believe me, I have learned to pray even harder here than I did for my confirmation. To find God, you have to be really in the shit, and you can’t do that in your confirmation suit.70 Up to now no attempt has been made to conduct any immanent interpretation of the letter texts. But at this point the principle will be breached. The reason is that this is the first and only example of sympathy being expressed for Jews in any of the soldiers’ letters analysed in this study. Confined within the register of National Socialist language (‘Jewish problem’), the author describes his ambivalent feelings as a ‘Jew minder’, torn between the fulfilment of his duties and Christian pity. He identifies in concrete terms the options for action that are open to him: to act like the SS guards, or do what he can to secure the survival of the ‘insulted and humiliated’. He gives expression to the feelings that he experiences in the face of this misery and to his desperation over having to fight against it alone. He takes on personal responsibility and makes his own decision. In a system in which – as the other letters would indicate – the ‘normalization of the condition of the absence of morality’ (Heer, 1998a) was the rule, this letter marks a deviation from the norm. The letter shows that the theoretical postulate, that in every situation some room for manoeuvre exists and can be realized, is borne out by reality. To recognize this room for manoeuvre already marks a conscious departure from the normal system of rules. Actually to exploit such room for manoeuvre indicates a break with the racist value system of National Socialism, something which is not observed in the other letters, whether in practice or merely as an intention. It is to the anonymous author of this letter that this chapter is dedicated. * * * Finally, the method of hermeneutic and immanent textual analysis is also applied to a letter from Corporal Heinrich V. His letter from October 1944 has the character of a personal memoir, written for posterity, rather like those produced by the Wehrmacht generals (see further Gerlach, 1995). This letter, too, is quoted extensively: Greater still than the fear now felt in the face of the massed ranks of liberated labourers – we used to boast that there were 12 million – is the fear

The Holocaust in Letters from the Front 47

of Jews and Poles. Now, at the moment where one’s own life is imperilled, the burden of the injustices committed weighs heavily and clearly on one’s mind. The treatment of Jews and Poles – in the former case already before the war, and in both cases during it – was not only a calamitous political error, but a human injustice that weighed ever more heavily on the national conscience of the German people. This is the source of the deep misgivings with which even a simple man with a vestige of healthy common sense looks upon our claims of a ‘just war’ and a ‘sacred cause’. ‘When they are set free, they will have scores to settle’, ‘We did go over the top, it became inhumane’. Words to this effect are being heard these days from Party comrades who, a year or two ago, would have completely rejected any such sentiment. But in this respect the German people, despite ten years of indoctrination and all evidence to the contrary, has remained, as far as the vast majority are concerned, a morally sensitive people! It required the satanic art of persuasion, and an elaborate system of mass intoxication and national fomentation to sweep it along to do what it has done, or tolerated, and in which now, shuddering, at the moment of misfortune, it sees its own reflection. The instinct for human right and wrong is still deeply rooted. The Germans, since time immemorial, and to an unusual degree, have always been a people who rely on their conscience to guide them, and whose conscience serves as a yardstick against which to measure reality. We can look to Luther and to a good many others. Even Bismarck’s policies were constantly held to account before the judge’s bench of his own conscience, as well as that of the nation, religion and the body politic. With regard to this point, there is a need to re-educate the Germany people at the deepest level.71 National pathos underlies the language of this letter. The author is aiming at the moral exculpation of the German people. The crimes against Jews and Poles are invoked in order to point out the ‘moral sensitivity’ of the German people and its ‘burdened national conscience’. The text reads like a grandiloquent rehearsal for the ‘explanatory’ refrain of the post-war period, which – albeit stripped of its national pathos – has survived into the present day in the successor states to the Greater German Reich as the dependable and hegemonic interpretation of the National Socialist past: the vast majority of the people are ‘to an unusual degree … a people who rely on their conscience to guide them’ and, despite everything, have remained ‘morally sensitive’. At worst, they succumbed to the ‘satanic art of persuasion’ and to ‘national fomentation’, which was able to ‘sweep it along’. At any rate, they are not to be held responsible for the crimes that took place. There is a notable absence of any sense of personal involvement on the part of the writer in the National Socialist mass crimes to which he refers. Barely seven months later, on 3 May 1945, Heinrich V. once more confides his personal feelings, this time to his diary. The diary appears not to have

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been intended for a future – notional – public audience: ‘I was with our office cadet this evening. His wife works for the Security Service [SD] in the Protectorate – emigration department. She was involved in the expulsion of thousands of Prague Jews. She talked about the enormous Jewish camp Theresienstadt, north of Prague, which is still holding 30,000 Jews. Well hopefully they will blow it up – Germany! German women!’ He closes with the cryptic sentence: ‘Nothing is better able to distance people from their own humanity, than participation in crimes committed.’72 The wish of Heinrich V. that the Theresienstadt ghetto should be blown up remained unfulfilled. By the time the last concentration camp guard had fled the Theresienstadt ghetto on 5 May 1945 (Poloncarz, 1997, p. 319), out of the total of 141,000 Jews confined, 23,000 had survived.73

2.4 Conclusion The results of Holocaust research in recent years show not only that the National Socialist policy towards Jews engaged the whole of Greater German society at the level of propaganda and ideology, but also that the practical realization of the policy had involved all the institutions of the political system. The more detailed the research, the more clearly it emerges that the pool of perpetrators was substantially larger than was assumed over a long period, and that not only the amorphous SS, but also other institutions of the Nazi state – particularly the Wehrmacht – were involved in the genocide of the Jewish population. The synthesis of previously unconnected strands of research and the pursuit of systematic enquiry into events and processes, both on the battlefield and at the scenes of mass murder, lead to a better understanding of those events and processes, and of how they are linked. It emerges clearly that the radicalizing impulses emanated primarily from the periphery and not from the centre. The Wehrmacht control centres provided the legal framework (for example, the so-called ‘criminal orders’), which the Wehrmacht commanding officers then implemented in accordance with the actual situations in which they found themselves. Thus they enjoyed considerable scope for discretion, which in practice depended on the power relations that prevailed locally on the ground. On the other hand, it can be seen that with respect to the murdering of Jews, only minor importance can be attached to the formal institutional demarcation lines and rivalries between the various occupation authorities: ‘Rather, where the “Final Solution” was concerned, particularly amongst the East European colonial administrations, there was a high level of teamwork involving very different authorities and organizations’ (Pohl, 1997, p. 10; see also Manoschek, 1995). The note by the head of the Army General Staff (OKH), General Franz Halder, in the run-up to the invasion of the Soviet Union, could serve as a

The Holocaust in Letters from the Front 49

motto for the relationship between the Wehrmacht control centres, the regional Wehrmacht commanders and the troops: ‘The Führer must make dispositions consistent with feelings amongst the troops. The campaign will be very different from the battle in the West. In the East severity now is kinder for the future.’74 This sought-after consistency is to be understood as a dynamic process, which developed though the pre-existing mentalities and racist beliefs of individual soldiers, group dynamic processes, situational events, propaganda and orders. The aim of this study was neither to distinguish these factors nor to rank them. On the other hand, the material analysed from the corpus of letters from the front does warrant the assertion that the degree of compliance on the part of the Wehrmacht soldiers with the National Socialist policy of systematically murdering Jews ranged anywhere between passive acceptance and active participation.

3 The Attitudes and Beliefs of Austrian Soldiers in the German Wehrmacht 1938–45: Analysis of the Questionnaire Survey ‘Austrians in the Second World War’ Walter Manoschek

3.1 Introduction The questionnaire survey ‘Austrians in the Second World War’, conducted by Josef Schwarz in 1982 (Schwarz, Haerpfer, Malina and Spann 1993),1 has provided researchers with a unique corpus of empirical data concerning the conscious thoughts, opinions and beliefs of Austrians in the Wehrmacht (and in some cases in the Waffen-SS).2 The standardized questionnaire, designed by Josef Schwarz, comprised 45 main items and 111 sub-items, dealing with the most important ‘basic National Socialist values’ as well as military values and the aims of the Wehrmacht and of its former soldiers. The target group consisted of those born between 1915 and 1925 (inclusive). The addresses of former Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers were obtained from address list publishers. In all, the questionnaire was mailed to 10,575 people across all Austrian federal states (Wilk, 1975). The response rate was 15 per cent (c.1400 responses). The eventual sample comprised 1119 people, representing 12.4 per cent of the population. The usual international standard for response rates is around 5 per cent of the population. Thus, with a response rate of more than 12 per cent, the representativeness of this sample far exceeds the international norm (Haerpfer, 1993, p. 21). The questionnaires were evaluated empirically by means of a quantitative analysis carried out by Christian W. Haerpfer (Institute for Conflict Research) in 1993 on behalf of the Viennese Institute for Contemporary History. 50

Attitudes and Beliefs of Former Austrian Soldiers

51

3.2 Methodology The opinion data obtained through the questionnaire were subjected to univariate, bivariate and multivariate analyses. These analytical procedures proved particularly successful at enabling hypotheses to be generated concerning the nature of dependencies between individual variables (see Achen, 1983). Univariate analysis is the simplest method of statistical evaluation. It apportions the individual variables according to the absolute and percentage frequencies of their occurrence. This analytical procedure gives an overview of the frequency of occurrence of the individual variables. For example: the year of birth 1904 was recorded by two people (0.2 per cent of respondents), three people (0.3 per cent) gave 1905 as their year of birth, and so on. In a bivariate statistical analysis the relationship between any two variables is measured. Thus one of the two variables is seen to cause the relationship (independent variable), while the ‘dependent variable’ is assumed to be the one that is governed by the putative effect of the independent variable. For example: Did you enjoy being a soldier? (independent variable) Yes No Don’t know

38.0 % 42.5 % 12.2 %

The holding of different military ranks is defined as the dependent variable: Enjoyed being soldier / ordinary soldier: Yes No

26% 59%

Enjoyed being soldier / officer: Yes No

65% 26%

The figures are open to various interpretations; for example, that Wehrmacht members who enjoyed being soldiers climbed to higher ranks, or that soldiers of higher rank enjoyed being soldiers for ideological or other reasons. The method of multivariate analysis (multiple linear regression) makes it possible to determine how strong an influence different variables have on a response.3 In this context, one response is defined as the dependent variable requiring explanation (Y
‘enjoyed being a soldier’). Subsequently, independent explanatory variables X (there can be from two to several dozen variables)

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are sought in order to explain the dependent variable Y. The independent variables are ranked according to the relative strength of their causal influence on the dependent variable Y by means of the coefficient
(standardized regression coefficient). The value of
ranges from ‘1’ to ‘1’. A coefficient of ‘0’ indicates that there is no relationship whatsoever, whilst a value of ‘1’ shows that there is a perfect positive relationship and a value of ‘1’ a perfect negative relationship between the variables X and Y. ●

● ●

values of
between 0.00 and 0.10 represent a weak relationship between X and Y; values of
between 0.10 and 0.20 point to a strong relationship; values of
between 0.20 and 0.40 indicate a very strong relationship between the independent variable X and the dependent variable Y.

In the example, the response ‘enjoyed being a soldier’ is defined as the dependent variable Y. The variable X with the greatest causal influence on Y is the response ‘was a soldier out of political conviction’. The value of
is 0.48, signalling a very strong positive relationship between X and Y. Conversely, there is a significant negative relationship between the response ‘enjoyed being soldier’ and those who claimed, as Wehrmacht soldiers, to have had no political aims (

0.17). In other words, those who had no political agenda were to a large extent not glad to be soldiers.

3.3 Political background In Austria, neither the Wehrmacht as an institution, nor the community of more than 1.2 million Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers were, for many years, the object of scholarly research. This is all the more surprising considering that the Wehrmacht was the largest institution under the Nazi regime. With a total of 18 million members, it constituted a representative cross-section of the German and Austrian (male) populations. The claim to victimhood which had effectively been government policy from the beginning of the Second Republic, placed the Austrian Wehrmacht, as the numerically largest group, at the head of the Austrian hierarchy of victims (see Sabine Loitfellner’s chapter: ‘The appalling toll in Austrian lives …’, this volume). In the Austrian independence declaration of 27 April 1945, Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers were already being designated as a group which National Socialism had exploited, and which had never positively identified with the war or its aims. According to this official government interpretation of events, Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers ‘were forced into service in the German war machine, just like those in the other occupied areas’.4 The Wehrmacht’s attitude to ‘Hitler’s war’ had been ‘one of rejection from the outset’5 and, moreover, the Austrians in the Wehrmacht had been ‘treated harshly and unfairly’.6

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53

The myth of the ‘untainted’ Wehrmacht served as a central construct with which to underpin both the historical-narrative-turned-state-doctrine of being the victim of National Socialism (the institutionalized, patriotic, official state memory) and the socio-psychological need for authentic memory (the collective, plebiscitary, internal memory). In Germany, the Western Allies’ policy of re-education depended primarily on the notions that (1) German society was not identical with ‘the Nazis’ and (2) the Second World War was Hitler’s War (Domansky 1997, p. 246).7 This policy proved to be easily compatible with the Federal German construction of the myth of a supposedly apolitical Wehrmacht, which had allegedly maintained a distance from the regime’s crimes, and especially from the Holocaust (Naumann, 1998, p. 9). In Austria, the Wehrmacht myth developed in a somewhat more complicated way. In order to be able to integrate former members of the Wehrmacht into the ‘community of Austrian victims’, a specifically Austrian way of remembering the war developed. So as not to clash fundamentally with either the victim paradigm laid down by the state, or the Wehrmacht generation’s own self-image, several conditions had to be met. First, it was necessary to depoliticize, de-ideologize and decriminalize the Wehrmacht officially, and in individual and collective memory. The fact that the General Staff and the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW) had not, for technical legal reasons, been classed as criminal at the main Nuremberg war crimes tribunal in 1946 registered in the public construction of events as a collective acquittal for the entire Wehrmacht – despite the fact that the Nuremberg judgement described the accused military officers as a ‘disgrace to the honourable profession’ of the soldier, who had ‘participated in all these crimes, or sat silent and acquiescent’.8 Closely connected to the process of decriminalization are claims of a noble fight by an apolitical Wehrmacht, aloof from the racial extermination ideology of the Nazi regime, which had led a purely military campaign according to the international laws of war. This myth is corroborated by erstwhile enemies, cited as though they were objective and reliable chief witnesses: ‘Reputable American, English and French military historians give the German Wehrmacht glowing reports in respect of their discipline, their willingness for self-sacrifice and their observance of the Hague Convention land war provisions and the Geneva Convention.’9 Drawing on this utterly specious interpretation of the Nuremberg Judgment and the selective use of scholarly research findings, Austrian Wehrmacht veterans created the myth of the ‘untainted’ Wehrmacht. Like their former German comrades, they opted for a strategy of exculpation and denial. They sought to cast a positive light on secondary virtues such as effort, resolve and comradeship that they had learned through the war, and to integrate these into the system of norms in post-war civil society.10

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The Austrians, however, had an additional problem to overcome. In Germany, there persists to this day the idea of the betrayed soldier, who ‘with his limited understanding of the situation, was convinced that he was doing his duty for the Fatherland’.11 The German Wehrmacht soldiers, as a whole, are ‘credited’ with having been politically naive or easily led, and ultimately made victims themselves by the war and its consequences. For reasons associated with the politics of memory, Austrian Wehrmacht veterans could not avail themselves of the exculpatory narrative of soldiers seduced and deceived into fighting in good faith for the ‘Fatherland’. These former Wehrmacht soldiers faced the task of having to eliminate not only the National Socialist dimension, but also the German nationalist element from the memory of the Wehrmacht. The solution lay in terminological revisionism: the term Vaterland (Fatherland) was replaced by Heimat (Homeland). The struggle – in retrospect – was neither for the Führer, nor for the aims of National Socialism or a Greater German Empire, but for an obscure, imaginary ‘Homeland’, a term which could be endowed, according to requirements, with attributes derived from various systems of norms and values, such as family, region, religion or Western Europe. As ‘defenders of the Homeland’ they could also lay claim to the status of ‘Heroes of the Homeland’.12 The Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), which never felt bound by the state claim to victimhood, is the party which has since its creation given political representation to this popular mode of recollection. An example of this is provided by an agenda-setting speech by former FPÖ leader Jörg Haider, calling for a ‘Third Republic’, in which he assumes the role of grailkeeper for the war generation: ‘We will not accept, moreover … that we should now be forbidden to use the term “hero” to refer to the fallen!’ (Haider, 1996) Besides the Freedom Party, since the late 1940s, the ‘Austrian League of Comrades’(ÖKB) has cultivated the memory of a depoliticized and decriminalized Wehrmacht. As a mass organization, which today still boasts some 250,000 members (of whom about two-thirds belong to the post-war generation), this veterans’ organization has for decades enjoyed a monopoly of interpretation in relation to the Wehrmacht, and acts as an institutional transmitter of generational memories of the war. According to its own definition, the aim of the ÖKB is ‘the creation of a positive image of the soldiers in the Second World War’.13 The place of ritual commemoration is the local war memorial (see Gärtner, 1996). Through ceremonial commemorative acts, the historical image of the ‘Heroes of the Homeland’ is periodically reinforced by politicians and blessed by the clergy. The ubiquitous provincial war memorials have evolved ‘to some extent into the standard form of collective memory’ (Uhl, 1994, p. 153). Parallel to this, there exists a ‘state memory’ of the Wehrmacht, which is strongly oriented towards the claim to victimhood. The separate identification of the Austrian component of the Wehrmacht, and the attempt at a

Attitudes and Beliefs of Former Austrian Soldiers

55

retrospective dissociation of Austrians from the ranks of the Greater German Wehrmacht, were part of a targeted strategy on the part of early post-war governments to bring Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers into the national victim community. The aim of this strategy was to declare the Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers collectively to be victims or even opponents of Nazism. It relied on the historical fact that the Austrian state did not wage any war, and therefore could not be held legally responsible for the Second World War. The narratives of those who participated in the war are tailored to the central elements of Austrian myth-making – serving to depoliticize, de-ideologize, and decriminalize. In this way, they stabilize myths and reproduce and confirm images about their wartime past which are accepted by both society and family. Narrative behaviour is always determined in part by what is socially permissible and acceptable. On the basis of interviews with former Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers who had been in Soviet captivity, Ela Hornung developed a narrator typology. With the exception of the ‘critical narrator’, all the other types share the characteristic that in their narratives they resort to the central strategy of depoliticizing, de-ideologizing and decriminalizing the Wehrmacht. The ‘Officer’ type, whose high-level depictions of troop movements, events at the front, and problems with supplies, practically turn into a narrative told from the perspective of a bird’s eye view of the battlefield. Many of these ‘officers’ use exculpatory formulae such as: ‘Hitler betrayed us’ or ‘the Wehrmacht was actually always against Hitler’. Then there is the ‘Adventurer’ type, referring to those who only talk about the war in the form of male erotic adventure, heroic tales and travel stories. ‘Travel’ is one of the cultural technologies that make it possible to tell stories about war at all. The ‘Amateur Historian’ type comprises those who talk only about fine geographical, military and historical details, and who are thoroughly familiar with the words of the wartime leaders from books they have read since the war. Or the ‘Technical Expert’ type: those who express enthusiasm for innovations in the machinery of war, but who gloss over their own participation under National Socialism in the development of these weapons systems. The ‘Critical Narrator’ type is represented by those who are most likely to talk about the dark and painful side of the war, that is, those who have constructed their lives, whether in terms of political or religious attitudes, or through a ‘change of course’, in such a way that they feel able to accept critical portrayals of the war. (Hornung, 1996, p. 203) The first four types outlined above share the tendency to airbrush out the political, ideological, criminal character of the war and their own role in it.

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Their narrative framework is defined by societal and family taboos, and there is an avoidance of any subject which could lead to conflict with society’s accepted image of the Wehrmacht or with their own, and their family’s, chosen self-image. In family dialogue, ‘reawakened memories of the father concerning his life as a soldier, or indeed fantasies about it, and questions about a family’s history, can be extremely threatening if they call into question the morality and humanity of the father, and consequently relationships with the father, feelings towards him and his own affections’ (Rosenthal, 1998, p. 117). To banish this danger, narratives which reveal a negative image of participants in the war are excised from memory through the inter-generational transmission process that takes place in the form of family conversation. Across generations a ‘new text’ is jointly produced, which is ‘distorted’ at crucial points (Schneider, Stillke and Leineweber, 1996, p. 198). This censoring intervention relies on a ‘convergence pact’ which arises out of the urge on the part of the narrator to report on his wartime experiences – and the desire on the part of the listener for a non-incriminating account. This compromise between desire and defensiveness can go so far that when war participants have negative recollections which family members are unable to place within the context of a non-incriminating version of events, these recollections are reinterpreted by way of a ‘cumulative heroization’ of the subject (Welzer, 2001b; Heer and Wodak’s introduction to this volume). Personal answers to questions concerning individual war experiences, ideological dispositions, and political attitudes during the war are therefore subject to both societal and family-internal (self-)censorship. The standardized questionnaire guarantees the anonymity of the respondent, allowing social and familial taboos and circumspection to be dispensed with. The questionnaire thus offers the opportunity to express even those predispositions, opinions and attitudes which are governed by taboo in the public and family spheres, or at least regarded as inappropriate. In terms of the present project’s particular interest in subjective memory construction on the part of Austrian members of the Wehrmacht, the response data gives information about the following issues: ●

●

●

whether, and to what extent, the official historical image of Austrian Wehrmacht veterans as victims of National Socialism coincides with the views of the war participants themselves; whether the core elements of the National Socialist world view can also be attributed to the Wehrmacht and if so, whether they have entered into the consciousness of the soldiers; whether anti-Semitic propaganda stereotypes helped to determine the political orientation of war participants.

The present analysis of the response data therefore focuses on those questions which measure the conscious beliefs of former Wehrmacht soldiers in

Attitudes and Beliefs of Former Austrian Soldiers

57

relation to these issues. The secondary analysis is based on the statistical results of the data analysis carried out by the Institute for Conflict Research (Schwarz et al., 1993). Yet even in an anonymous and standardized form, questions about the conscious thoughts and beliefs of former Wehrmacht soldiers address a sensitive subject. Therefore in order to avoid possible rejection and refusal, the questionnaire deliberately did not broach such issues as resistance, desertion or the involvement of the Wehrmacht in war crimes, nor any potential personal participation, or shared responsibility on the part of the respondent (Spann, 1993, p. 23). This self-imposed censorship was due to the plausible fear that questions of this kind would have drastically reduced the questionnaire return rate (Malina, 1993, p. 123). Despite this consciously adopted limitation on the topic areas addressed, the questions go far beyond matters seen as unproblematic – for example, structural data regarding divisional attachment, place of deployment, length of military service, imprisonment and so on. The principal interest of the investigation was ‘the political and ideological ideas impressed upon those who took part in the war, and the question of the extent to which these were later revised or passed on intact’ (Spann, 1993, p. 24). Although the data, on account of the fluid, reconstructive character of every recollection, do not always allow a clear separation to be drawn between a person’s conscious beliefs during the war, and their beliefs at the time of the survey, it is possible, with the help of applied statistical methodology, to determine to a great extent the attitudes and beliefs of former Austrian servicemen during the time of the war.

3.4 Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers: victims of National Socialism or defenders of the Greater German Fatherland? In order to assess the convergence (or lack of it) between, on the one hand, the attitudes and beliefs of Austrian Wehrmacht veterans, and on the other hand, the state’s official historical narrative (according to which the Wehrmacht veterans are all victims of National Socialism) the following questions were asked: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Were you a volunteer? Which soldierly principles were most important to you at the time? Did you like being a soldier? What were you personally fighting for at the time? Did you personally fight for Germany as your Fatherland? Was there a difference during combat service between soldiers from the Ostmark and the Reich Germans?14 7. Were you a soldier out of political conviction, blind faith or lack of awareness?

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3.4.1 ‘Were you a volunteer?’ Altogether 26.7 per cent of those questioned had enrolled voluntarily with the Wehrmacht (Waffen-SS: 85 per cent). There is a notably high percentage of volunteers amongst NCOs (32 per cent) and those of officer rank (55 per cent), compared to only 11 per cent of ordinary soldiers. The multivariate analysis shows that the volunteer group comprises soldiers with political convictions and motives. There is a very high positive relationship between being a volunteer and being a convinced National Socialist (

0.25) and a clear relationship with the opinion that the Second World War was necessary because of an existential threat to the German people (

0.15). Voluntary enrolment with the Wehrmacht depended on the respondents’ political stance and on the conviction that they would be fighting a just war for Greater Germany. They were neither ‘seduced’ nor ‘press-ganged’ into joining the Wehrmacht. They were a group convinced by the National Socialist system and its ideological and military aims. 3.4.2 ‘Which soldierly principles were most important to you at the time (fulfilment of duty, ultimate victory, oath, soldier’s honour, struggle for Greater Germany)?’ The responses indicate a high degree of both political and soldierly identification with the Wehrmacht and its aims. Whilst individual soldierly virtues (gutsiness, shining example, willingness for self-sacrifice) received only comparatively low scores of between 14.9 per cent and 19.4 per cent, the scores for expressions of collective identity (fulfilment of duty, oath to the Führer and the flag, German soldier’s honour) ranged from 40.1 per cent to a peak of 69.3 per cent. Between these lie response options categorized as soldierly principles but tending much more strongly in the direction of political identification: ‘securing the final victory’ (34.4 per cent) and ‘struggle for Greater Germany’ (34.8 per cent). In particular, the principle identified by more than a third as being the most important at the time, the ‘struggle for Greater Germany’, corroborates the number of Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers who fought for the aims of a ‘Greater German Empire’ in the interests of National Socialism. A breakdown of scores for the two last-named principles for officers and men confirms that officers, to a significantly greater extent than ordinary soldiers, cited political motives for fighting as their most important soldierly principles: 51 per cent of officers (ordinary soldiers: 26 per cent) identified ‘securing the final victory’ and 47 per cent (ordinary soldiers: 32 per cent) the ‘struggle for Greater Germany’ as the soldierly principles of greatest importance to them. Scores for the officers are only slightly exceeded by the members of Waffen-SS (‘securing the final victory’: 54 per cent and ‘struggle for Greater Germany’: 51 per cent). Because officers, with 84 per cent, also scored highest on the question about ‘loyal fulfilment of duty’ (servicemen: 65 per cent), the sub-group of

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Austrian officers, both for political reasons and through the internalization of secondary military virtues, was the segment of the Wehrmacht most loyally devoted to the National Socialist system. 3.4.3 Did you like being a soldier? There were 38.3 per cent positive responses to this question, whereas 42.5 per cent responded negatively (Waffen-SS control group, yes: 72 per cent; no: 21 per cent). The multivariate analysis shows clearly that those who enjoyed being soldiers identified strongly with National Socialism. They were Wehrmacht soldiers out of political conviction (

0.48) or blind faith (

0.35). The volunteers (

0.39) were recruited primarily from this group. It was both their political and personal goal, to be realized by joining Wehrmacht, to fight for Greater Germany (

0.19 in either case). They perceived the World War as a necessity for Greater Germany and identified positively with it (

0.23). Here too there is a significant difference according to rank: the higher the rank, the more one enjoyed being a soldier. Whilst only 26 per cent of ordinary servicemen enjoyed being soldiers, the score for NCOs rises to 42 per cent, and for full officers to 65 per cent. If the results of the multivariate analysis are taken into account, they confirm that here too, positive attitudes towards the war, the Wehrmacht and the ideology of National Socialism rise in linear relation to rank. 3.4.4 What were you personally fighting for at the time? For this question no response options were provided (multiple responses were possible, but were not taken up to any statistically relevant degree). By grouping the data according to ‘personal reasons for fighting’ (survival, safe homecoming, social betterment) and ‘political, patriotic and soldierly reasons for fighting’ (fulfilment of duty, for Greater Germany, to secure victory), we find that the ‘political and patriotic’ predominate: 23.7 per cent said ‘survival and return home’, 25.5 per cent gave the three aforementioned ‘political and patriotic reasons for fighting’. However, if we add to this category those who gave ‘Homeland/ Fatherland’ as a reason, the proportion rises to 38.3 per cent. The non-specific terms ‘Homeland’ and ‘Fatherland’ were used frequently after 1945 as legitimizing terms for an undeclared and socially taboo sympathy with the war aims of National Socialism, and should not be understood as the nonpolitical concepts intended by the original researchers. Given this, the evaluation of ‘personal reasons for fighting’ results in a dominance of political motives, which in this case, too, increases markedly in relation to Wehrmacht rank. 3.4.5 Did you personally fight for Germany as your Fatherland? An absolute majority (58.6 per cent) answered ‘yes’ to the question, whilst 23.9 per cent answered ‘no’. This clearly indicates that a majority of Austrian

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participants in the war regarded themselves as belonging to the Greater German Reich. This was not merely a matter of formal acknowledgement, but also a personal motive for fighting the enemy. That the ‘yes’ responses, at 82 per cent, are significantly higher for Waffen-SS members than for Wehrmacht soldiers as a whole is as unsurprising as the positive correlation between identification with Greater Germany and Wehrmacht rank (soldiers: 48 per cent vs. officers: 75 per cent). The bivariate data analysis shows clearly that loyalty to one’s sworn oath should not to be regarded primarily as a non-political military virtue. It correlates strongly with nationalist commitment to Germany as the Fatherland: 69 per cent of those who felt bound by their soldier’s oath right to the end of the war fought for a German Fatherland, whereas only 18 per cent of the of those who were ‘true to their oath’ said they had not personally fought for Germany as their Fatherland. Conversely, a strikingly high proportion of soldiers who did not identify with the soldier’s oath to the very end also denied any commitment to Germany as the Fatherland (45 per cent). The multivariate analysis yields information about how significantly identification with Germany as the Fatherland correlates with other political attitudes. A particularly strong correlation exists amongst all attitudes that point to a positive stance towards National Socialism and a commitment to expressions of collective identity (soldier’s honour, fulfilment of duty, oath). It thus becomes clear that personal commitment to National Socialist Germany as the Fatherland is closely associated with a cluster of ideological, political and soldierly motives which serve as a measure of sympathy with National Socialism and its aims. The highest correlation with ‘fighting personally for Germany as the Fatherland’ exists amongst those who stated that they had been soldiers out of political conviction or political belief (

0.55) and those who saw the Second World War as a necessity (

0.23) or supported it because of the ‘existential threat to the German people’ (

0.19). ‘Yes’ responses to basic soldierly principles such as ‘German soldier’s honour’ (

0.17) and ‘loyal fulfilment of duty’ (

0.16) also correlate strongly with commitment to the German Fatherland. The results obtained from the bivariate and multivariate analyses indicate that those Austrian Wehrmacht members who led a ‘personal struggle for Germany as the Fatherland’ (58.6 per cent) identified to a great extent with the ideological, political and military aims of National Socialism. These are not people who see themselves as victims of National Socialism. Rather, they are people who have been, at least during the war, avowed advocates and supporters of the system, who declared their support openly. 3.4.6 Was there a difference during combat service between soldiers from the Ostmark and the Reich Germans? In order to determine the degree of national homogeneity within the Greater German defence community, one question asks about differences

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during combat service between soldiers from the ‘Ostmark’ (Austria’s designation as a province within Nazi Greater Germany) and the ‘Reich Germans’ (those from Germany as constituted before the Nazis came to power). According to 75.1 per cent of respondents, there was no difference, whilst 14.7 per cent said their were differences.15 This general question encompasses psychological as well as political and soldierly disposition. The supposed contrast between ‘Ostmarkers’ and Reich Germans, often referred to in Austria after the end of the war, is not supported by the data. It appears rather to be one of those constructs intended to reinforce an Austrian identity in the Second Republic and corroborate, for the benefit of foreigners, the Austrian claim to victimhood. 3.4.7 Were you a soldier out of political conviction, blind faith or lack of awareness? Conviction Blind faith Lack of awareness No answer

16.0 % 32.0 % 41.1 % 10.7 %

This question about the political mindset of Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers reveals a total of almost 50 per cent who were soldiers out of political conviction or simply out of blind faith in National Socialism. 41.1 per cent denied any political motivation, although the term ‘lack of awareness’ is open to various interpretations and is therefore excluded from the analysis. Those who consciously opposed National Socialism are most likely to be found amongst the 10.7 per cent who did not answer this question. Here, too, we find that that a firmly held National Socialist world view increases in linear relation to Wehrmacht rank: amongst the ordinary servicemen 12 per cent stated that they were soldiers out of political conviction. The figures for NCOs and officers are 21 per cent and 34 per cent, respectively. The figure for officers is not significantly lower than for Waffen-SS members, of whom 37 per cent responded that they joined the Waffen-SS out of political conviction. The multivariate analysis reveals a strong positive relationship between, on the one hand, those who were soldiers out of political conviction and, on the other hand, those responses which also correlated positively with the question concerning the ‘struggle for the German Fatherland’, and which suggest an adherence to National Socialism: volunteer (

0.26); political aim: ‘struggle for Greater Germany’ (

0.23); ‘World War was a necessity’ (

0.19); basic soldierly principle: ‘struggle for Greater Germany (

0.15); ‘war was necessary in view of existential threat to German people’ (

0.14). This group possessed a clearly defined National Socialist view of the world. It fought for the aims of National Socialist Greater Germany and was convinced by the core elements of National Socialism.

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For the 32 per cent who declared ‘blind faith’ as their political attitude, there is a stronger correlation with virtuous soldierly attributes such as ‘loyal fulfilment of one’s duty’ and ‘German soldier’s honour’ (

0.14 in both cases). However, the ‘right of the German people to more land’ as a legitimate reason for war (

0.12), ‘securing the final victory’ (

0.09) and the antiSemitic conviction that Jews were principally to blame for the war (

0.09) also correlate positively with a political outlook based on ‘blind faith’. The multivariate analysis shows the group to be not so much ideologically focused National Socialists as authoritarian characters who served National Socialism out of duty, obedience and soldierly conviction. They agreed in some respects with the political and ideological goals of National Socialism, but did not share with their politically motivated compatriots the chauvinistic nationalist aims of Greater Germany. 3.4.8 Conclusions The purpose of evaluating the seven questions was to test empirically whether or not the government’s policy of integrating Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers into the overall Austrian victim group has any parallel in the conscious beliefs of the former Wehrmacht soldiers themselves. The results show: (a) that government-inspired historical images of Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers which serve to legitimize their victim status deviate significantly from the responses given anonymously by Austrian veterans in a nonofficial setting. The analysis of the questions yields a clear and revealing picture of the attitudes and motives of the Wehrmacht soldiers. (b) The primary data on mode of entry into the Wehrmacht already show that more than a quarter of the respondents joined the Wehrmacht voluntarily. More detailed analysis shows clearly that National Socialist convictions acted as a key motivation to enrol voluntarily. (c) A question concerning the most important soldierly principles revealed a predominance of secondary military virtues (oath, soldier’s honour, duty fulfilment). The multivariate analysis shows, however, that this cluster should not be assumed to consist of non-political secondary virtues, as it correlates significantly with ideological motives, and in particular with the ‘personal struggle for Germany as the Fatherland’. Of significance are the percentages which indicate an identification with military and political goals: In each case slightly more than one-third gave as one of the most important soldierly principles either ‘securing the final victory’ or the ‘fight for Greater Germany’. This question too demonstrates that, in the context of positive attitudes toward service in the Wehrmacht, there is a strong overlap between, on the one hand, soldierly, and other hand, political and ideological motives. (d) Those who reported having enjoyed being in the Wehrmacht (38.3 per cent) display a high level of National Socialist-conformant attitudes. The

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multivariate analysis allows us to conclude that they acted at the time as convinced National Socialists, supported the war, and concurred with the National Socialist war aims – and in so doing, constitute a remarkably large ‘hard core’. (e) A question as to whether soldiers were involved in a personal struggle for Germany as the Fatherland emerged as particularly significant: 58.6 per cent answered ‘yes’ to this question, whilst 23.9 per cent answered ‘no’. This provides evidence that the national self-perception of the majority of the Austrian war participants was not merely as formal, but as convinced members of the Greater German Reich and the German Volksgemeinschaft. The commitment, at the time, to Germany as the Fatherland, is also very closely associated with a positive attitude towards National Socialism and its goals. Given the results of the question concerning political convictions and belief in National Socialism (here too, around 50 per cent had stated that they were soldiers out of political conviction or faith in National Socialism), between 50 and 60 per cent of Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers appear to have had an explicitly positive attitude towards National Socialism. In summary, the analysed data suggest that: ●

●

The majority of the Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers did not serve in spite of their political attitudes, but because of them. The majority of the Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers cite the ‘struggle for Germany as the Fatherland’ as a personal motivation. This reveals the post-war term ‘Heimat’ (Homeland) to be a depoliticized substitute term for National Socialist Greater Germany.

3.5 Core elements of the Nazi world view within the Wehrmacht and in the mindsets of Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers The term ‘untainted Wehrmacht’ suggests that the Wehrmacht as an institution – far removed from the National Socialist world view and the consequent war aims – led a war exclusively oriented towards military aims and requirements. In the myth creation surrounding the Wehrmacht, a clear dividing line is drawn between, on the one hand, the political leadership, its ideology, its objectives and its paramilitary instruments (Waffen-SS, Einsatzgruppen, Police), and on the other hand, the Wehrmacht, as an ideologyfree military apparatus, maintaining a healthy distance from the Nazi regime. The Wehrmacht, for its part, led a ‘normal’ war on the basis of the established laws of war.

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3.5.1 What were the most important aims of the German Wehrmacht? Responses to this question provide insight into whether former Wehrmacht soldiers perceived the Wehrmacht as a purely military institution, or as a military organization whose goals were geared towards, or in harmony with, Nazi ideology. The eight response options provided – of which respondents were asked to choose the four most important – referred not to military aspects, but exclusively to the most important core elements of National Socialist ideology and policy, which were used to justify and legitimize the war from a National Socialist perspective. The response options were: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

‘Racial purity’ ‘The struggle against world Jewry’ ‘The struggle against Bolshevism’ ‘Mastery of Europe’ ‘More living space’ ‘More mineral oil and cereals’ ‘For new colonies’ ‘For world domination’

The options encompass objectives along the following dimensions: ● ● ● ●

Imperialistic: world domination, colonies, mineral oil and cereals Nationalistic [völkisch]: more living space, mastery of Europe Global vision [Weltanschauung]: struggle against Bolshevism Racist and anti-Semitic: racial purity, struggle against world Jewry

It is striking that only three out a total of 1119 people failed to answer this question. The four most frequently cited war aims, in ranking order, are: ‘more living space’ (78.4 per cent); ‘the struggle against Bolshevism’ (62.1 per cent); ‘mastery of Europe’ (49.0 per cent); and ‘the struggle against world Jewry’ (41.6 per cent). The ‘imperialist objectives’ are at the bottom of the scale. On their own, they do not represent the essential character of the Nazi regime, being instead the traditional objectives of war and domination of major imperialist powers. The most frequently named Wehrmacht goals are the nationalistic völkisch ones: the creation of more Lebensraum [living space] for the Greater German Volksgemeinschaft (78.4 per cent) and ‘mastery of Europe’ (49.0 per cent). The ‘struggle against Bolshevism’ was chosen by 62.1 per cent as one of the most important Wehrmacht aims. Völkisch and Weltanschauung objectives were by far the most frequently selected. Both types of objective are clearly associated with the Nazi word view and provide evidence that – in the opinion

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of the respondents – the Wehrmacht was waging an ideologically motivated and guided war. That the aims of the Wehrmacht are seen as closely linked to Nazi ideology is underlined by the scores for the racist and anti-Semitic war aims: 41.6 per cent included the ‘struggle against world Jewry’ and 36.3 per cent ‘racial purity’ as being amongst most important aims of the Wehrmacht. The percentages show that the former soldiers did not perceive the Wehrmacht to be an ideology-free military institution. For them, the Wehrmacht was a military instrument of the regime, responsible for pursuing not only the military, but also the ideological and political goals of National Socialism. The frequent selection of ‘living space’, ‘racial purity’, and so on, could be interpreted at first sight as a simple statement about the aims of the Wehrmacht leadership. It is not possible to infer from these responses any personal identification on the part of respondents with any of the aims. The multivariate analysis, however, reveals a significant positive relationship between the ‘Wehrmacht aim: living space’ and the personal conviction that the Second World War was a necessity (

0.22). The ‘right to living space’ was one of the most clearly formulated ideological and political aims of the Nazi leadership, and an integral component of the Nazi world view. This study shows that according to the views of former soldiers, these aims were shared not only by the Wehrmacht leadership, but by a significant proportion of the respondents themselves. Moreover, at least 22.8 per cent of those questioned regarded the necessity of ‘creating living space’ as a legitimate reason for the Third Reich to cause the outbreak of the Second World War. 3.5.2 Conclusions The high scores for the anti-Semitic and racist objectives represent a marked deviation from the line of argument which has served universally to define the Wehrmacht’s positive image since 1945, and which is promoted in public discourse by Wehrmacht veterans’ organizations. Their arguments are aimed at extricating the Wehrmacht from the context of the Holocaust and the racist annihilation policies, portraying it instead as an ideology-free apolitical organization oriented exclusively towards military objectives. Very nearly 100 per cent of the former Wehrmacht soldiers selected core elements of National Socialism as the most important aims of the Wehrmacht. The opportunity to leave the question unanswered was not taken up. For the respondents there was no doubt that – even in ideological and political respects – the Wehrmacht was a part of the National Socialist system, and that there was extensive ideological identification between the Nazi leadership and the Wehrmacht during the war period.

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3.6 Anti-Semitic and racist mentalities amongst Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers The response option ‘Wehrmacht aim: racial purity’ displays a strong relationship with basic racist and anti-Semitic attitudes. Those who saw world war as a necessity because ‘the Jews threatened the German race’ (8.9 per cent of respondents) correlate with ‘Wehrmacht aim: racial purity’ with a
-value of 0.14, whilst those who identified Jews as being primarily responsible for the war (26.4 per cent of respondents) correlate with a
-value of 0.12. A significant correlation also exists between the statement ‘World war was necessary because the Germans are a superior race’ (to which 6.6. per cent of respondents said ‘yes’) and ‘Wehrmacht aim: racial purity’ (

0.09). Equally clear is the positive correlation between groups with anti-Semitic and racist convictions and those choosing the response ‘Wehrmacht aim: ‘struggle against world Jewry’. An interesting finding is that the attitudes of those who named imperialistic, völkisch or Weltanschauung objectives as the most important aims of the Wehrmacht correlated relatively weakly, or even negatively, with anti-Semitic convictions. From this we can conclude that there was a close connection between ‘racial biological’ and anti-Semitic attitudes, which was relatively independent of the imperialistic, völkisch and Weltanschauung attitudinal factors. One could even speak of a ‘racial biological/anti-Semitic syndrome’. 3.6.1 Who in your personal opinion was primarily to blame for the outbreak of the Second World War? The options available were: England, France, the Jews, Poland, USA, Russia and Germany, with the respondents asked to select the three they considered most blameworthy. Germany was named by 66.3 per cent as being amongst the most blameworthy, followed by England (47.7 per cent) the USA (29.8 per cent) and ‘the Jews’ (26.4 per cent). In other words, more than a quarter of former Wehrmacht soldiers counted ‘the Jews’ amongst the three parties most to blame for the Second World War. It should be noted that here too, the officers – with 35 per cent in agreement – are only slightly behind the Waffen-SS (36 per cent) and that the percentage for those with academic qualifications is higher (30 per cent) than for those with no ‘Matura’ qualification16 (25 per cent). 3.6.2 If the Second World War was a necessity, why do you think this was so? Although elsewhere only 19 per cent answered ‘yes’ to the question of whether war was necessary, approximately 38 per cent of respondents elected to state reasons why this was the case. Of the seven response options, which all referred to National Socialist propaganda stereotypes, respondents were asked to choose four.

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Two response options contained anti-Semitic rationales: ●

●

15.4 per cent agreed that war was necessary ‘because world Jewry hated the German people’; 8.9 per cent agreed that it was ‘because the Germans as a nation were threatened by the Jews’.

Not surprisingly, thereby is a positive correlation between the variable ‘because the Germans as a nation were threatened by the Jews’ and the independent variable ‘world war was a necessity’ (

0.10). An even stronger correlation exists with the variable ‘Jews are most to blame for the outbreak of war’ (

0.13). The data also point to the fact that anti-Semitic mentality correlates with the degree of political conviction on the part of the soldier: thus the response ‘political attitude: conviction’ correlates positively with the explanation that war was necessary ‘because world Jewry hated the German people’ (

0.07). Even between those who stated, ‘political attitude: blind faith’ and those who gave the response, ‘primarily to blame for the world war: the Jews’, there is a positive relationship, with a
-value of 0.09. On the other hand, there is, if anything, a negative correlation between anti-Semitic stereotypes and the group that stated, ‘political attitude: lack of awareness’. This group correlates with the response, ‘primarily to blame for the world war: the Jews’ (

0.01) and with the response, ‘necessity of war: because world Jewry hated the German people’ (

0.08). 3.6.3 Conclusions It emerges that at the time of the war, more than a quarter of all respondents (26.4 per cent) considered at the conscious, cognitive level that ‘the Jews’ were amongst those most to blame for the Second World War. It is therefore an obvious conclusion that those respondents also identified with the struggle against this ‘number one enemy’. Some 15.4 per cent stated that they saw the Second World War as necessary ‘because world Jewry hated the German people’, and 8.9 per cent held the conviction that ‘the Germans as a nation were threatened by the Jews’. 3.7

Summary

The study confirms empirically, for the first time, that the official historical image of the victim group comprising Austrian Wehrmacht veterans is inconsistent with the personal recollections of the individuals concerned, and that there are divergences on key points. More than a quarter of the soldiers had joined the Wehrmacht voluntarily, with National Socialist attitudes being a decisive reason for joining. Almost 60 per cent stated that they had personally ‘fought for Germany as the Fatherland’ and approximately one-third, in each case, said they had fought ‘to secure the final victory’ and

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engaged in a ‘struggle for Greater Germany’. The results provide evidence that only a minority of Austrian soldiers in the Wehrmacht felt themselves to be soldiers in a foreign army. The majority saw themselves as part of the ‘Greater German’ Wehrmacht and did not stand in opposition to National Socialism. The results of the study also provide evidence that the former soldiers most probably make a connection between the objectives of the Wehrmacht and the völkisch and racist goals of the Nazi regime. The ‘struggle for living space’, the ‘fight against Bolshevism’, ‘mastery of Europe’, the ‘struggle against world Jewry’ and the ‘battle for racial purity’ were cited by virtually all respondents as the essential war aims of the Wehrmacht. According to these responses, the core elements of National Socialist ideology (living space, anti-Bolshevism, anti-Semitism, ‘biological’ racism) were in line with the war aims of the Wehrmacht. For the first time, empirical data are available which demonstrate that the Wehrmacht was not seen, from the perspective of its (Austrian) soldiers, as an apolitical military organization, but rather as an institution which harboured exactly the same ideas about the enemy as the official Nazi regime. The question about individual anti-Semitic and racist beliefs, attitudes and mentalities during the war period produced surprising results: more than a quarter identified ‘the Jews’ as those most to blame for the war. Some 9 per cent saw the war as a necessity because ‘the Jews threatened the German race’ and more than 15 per cent because ‘world Jewry hated the German people’. The results indicate that a qualified minority of Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers agreed with the Nazis’ anti-Semitic stereotypes. Whilst the aims ascribed to it effectively define the Wehrmacht as, amongst other things, a military instrument of the Nazi regime in ‘the struggle against the Jews’, at the same time more than a quarter of the respondents admitted holding the – anti-Semitic – belief during the war that the Jews had been the most to blame for the outbreak of the World War. Seen from this perspective, the Jews, as those responsible for the war, constituted an enemy that had to be dealt with. The anti-Semitic beliefs and actions documented in Wehrmacht soldiers’ letters from the front (Manoschek, 1997) are supported empirically by these results (see also Chapter 2 in this volume). Anti-Semitic mentalities, understood as a system of opinions, attitudes and values, lend structure to the behaviour and actions of individuals and groups – they do not cause them, however. In sum, this study of Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers provides evidence that they identified with the Wehrmacht, with the ‘German Fatherland’, and with the ideological aspects of National Socialism to a significantly higher degree than was apparent from the official, hegemonic, historical narratives produced after 1945. Furthermore, it shows that soldiers perceived the Wehrmacht as an organization whose aims were in complete alignment with

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the specifically National Socialist, racist aims of the Nazi regime. And not least, it reveals that the attitudes of a considerable proportion of soldiers were influenced by the anti-Semitic state ideology of National Socialism and by Wehrmacht propaganda, through which the Wehrmacht elite ‘exposed the man in the street to anti-Jewish, anti-Bolshevik and anti-Slavic stereotypes, together with the case for a war of annihilation’ (Wette, 2002, p. 103). The Wehrmacht leadership made no bones about the fact that the war in the East was to be waged as a struggle against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ (see also Chapter 1 in this volume).17 The responsibility of senior figures in the Wehrmacht for the War of Annihilation is as undisputed, historically speaking, as the participation of the Wehrmacht in the Holocaust. It has remained unclear, on the other hand, whether ordinary soldiers were conscious of these Wehrmacht objectives, and to what extent they identified with them. The results of this investigation demonstrate clearly that more than 40 per cent of the soldiers confirm that they knew about the racial aims of the Wehrmacht, and that more than a quarter of respondents believed that they saw in the Jews the group most responsible for the outbreak of World War. In this study, questions about individuals’ knowledge of, and participation in, the Wehrmacht’s crimes were excluded. It was confined to an investigation of anti-Semitic attitudes and the potential to act. Whether these translated into concrete actions is a question that was not asked, and which therefore remains unanswered. The results do, however, support the conclusion drawn by Raul Hilberg, that for the annihilation of Jews to take place, ‘a general willingness to take part must have existed beforehand, which could be called upon when the time came’ (Hilberg, 1996, p. 23).

4 ‘That is what is so terrible – that millions of soldiers were there, yet today they all claim they never saw a thing’: War and the Nazi Period, as Recalled by Visitors to the Wehrmacht Exhibition in Vienna, 1995 Hannes Heer

This chapter focuses on 150 interviews recorded on video by Ruth Beckermann and her cameraman, Peter Roehsler, in October 1995, when the touring exhibition ‘War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944’ was staged in Vienna. Two hundred people were interviewed or recorded in conversation. The video capture took place in the exhibition rooms, usually directly following a visit. The selection of visitors was fairly spontaneous, but was linked to age. Of interest were older people, over the age of 60, of whom it could reasonably be assumed that they had consciously experienced war and the Nazi period for themselves. Interviews with the children and grandchildren of this generation were less frequent. Ruth Beckermann edited the interviews into a film lasting 113 minutes, which was shown under the title ‘East of War’1 at all the major international film festivals, receiving numerous awards. The film became a permanent feature of the exhibition’s accompanying programme at subsequent venues. In 1998, a book edited by Ruth Beckermann was published, in which extracts from 20 interviews were reproduced, and in which Beckermann provided information about her rationale and working methods (see Beckermann, 1998, pp. 17–26; see also Wodak, 2001b). The systematic questioning of contemporary witnesses from the Nazi period, the so-called ‘first generation’, only began to take place very belatedly in 70

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Germany. At first, the experiences of surviving victims were the main focus of interest (see Bar-On, 1998; see also Rosenthal and Bar-On, 1992). Only in the early 1990s, prompted, amongst other things, by the Claude Lanzmann film ‘Shoah’, did the perpetrators become a focus for research. The handing down of recollections by perpetrators to succeeding generations – the children and grandchildren who constitute, respectively, the second and third generations – attracted particular interest from the outset (see Bar-On, 1993; Bohleber, 1990; Rosenthal, 1987, 1990, 1997b; Schneider, Stillke and Leineweber, 1996; Stierlin, 1988; Welzer, Moller and Tschuggnall, 2002). The passionate debate about Daniel Goldhagen’s book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, and the controversy surrounding the exhibition ‘War of Annihilation – Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944’, intensified this preoccupation with the subject. In 1995, a research group led by Gabriele Rosenthal interviewed visitors to the exhibition in Berlin, Potsdam and Stuttgart, on behalf of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. This followed on from early work on the subject of the Wehrmacht (Schröder, 1985 and 1992) and placed the focus, for the first time, on the War of Annihilation and its crimes. The analysis of these interviews, supplemented by other forms of recollection (e.g., entries in the visitors’ books, or letters to the press about the exhibition) has demonstrated the complex character of the process of reinterpreting war experiences, and has shown how difficult it can be to decipher this ‘witness code’ in each individual case (see Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, 1998b; Hauer, 1997; Heer, 1998b and 1999a; Hornung, 1996; Rosenthal, 1995). The interviews by Ruth Beckermann were conducted for a film, rather than for research purposes. The style of questioning was oriented towards this primary end. The film aimed to document the immediate shocking impact of the exhibition and, through provocative and persistent questioning, to penetrate more deeply the potentially porous layers of memory: ‘Where were you during the war? What did you see of the things on display here?’ It is only with some difficulty that this ‘raw’ style of questioning can be integrated into the somewhat refined modern methodology of oral history and the intricate theoretical framework of ‘biographical research’ (FischerRosenthal and Alheit, 1995). Nevertheless, it is still appropriate to subject the material thus gathered to a scholarly analysis,2 as this may help to answer the following questions: 1. 2. 3. 4.

What did those alive at the time know about the crimes? How do they remember these crimes? What was their attitude to the crimes at the time? How do they view their experiences today?

In order to ensure an appropriate analysis of the material, the interviewees were grouped according to age. Our classification takes into account the differing range of experience, the consequent differences in proximity to the

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events described and also the age-related capacity to be aware of, and make sense of, the events in question. In what follows, the narrative accounts are analysed on the basis of four age groups.3 1. Those who were of an age to have experienced the war as children or as youths, and themselves become witnesses to crimes in the homeland, or heard about crimes at the front through the accounts of family members (born 1929–35). 2. Those who were of an age to have been exposed to a National Socialist education at school, in the Hitler Youth (HJ) and with the Reich Labour Service (RAD),4 and to have entered military service during the final phase of the war (born 1925–28). 3. Those who were of an age to have grown up in the First Austrian Republic, witnessed the ‘Anschluss’, and experienced the ‘success story’ of the Nazi regime. As young men, they would have served on all fronts from the onset of the war (born 1920–24). 4. Those who were of an age to have developed a political outlook before the triumph of National Socialism, and to have entered the war as adults (born 1915–19).

4.1 War children (1929–35) The 25 members of this age group interviewed at the exhibition experienced the Nazi period as children or as adolescents. They encountered National Socialism in school as a highly divisive explanatory model of the world. Outside school, it appeared either to offer the fascinating prospect of a fulfilled youth, or to be a system of repression and terror directed against supposed enemies. By no later than the defeat at Stalingrad, almost all of them had experienced the dangers of the war, whether by virtue of the fate of serving family members, air raids or the turmoil of occupation.5 In school they were indoctrinated in various ways: against the ‘sub-human Slavs’ (72, 84),6 against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ and in favour of gaining ‘living space [Lebensraum] in the East’ (76) and by glamorizing ‘German greatness’ and the ‘Führer’ (76, 90b, 99). They witnessed the fate of the Jews, as the terror in the streets (22, 90a) and the removal of neighbours, class mates and their families (6, 76, 90b) became commonplace. They gleaned nothing about the fate of those who had suddenly disappeared from adults (6), but ‘it was clear that something was going on’ (90b). Some reported that they knew of the existence of concentration camps (74a, 90a), whilst some had also seen the death marches of the remaining survivors and their terrible conclusion (74b, 82). Many bore witness to the dreadful plight of the forced labourers – their fears, their hunger, the escape attempts and the mass shootings (74a, 74b, 82, 99). For some, the war became threatening only when the first bombs fell (90a, 90b), whilst for others this was already the case, on account

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of the fate of family members drafted into the Wehrmacht – whether as a result of their death (20, 76, 82, 90a, 90b), or on account of their stories, in which the dangers, but also the crimes, regularly cropped up (6, 82, 84, 90a). Sometimes even silence was revealing (90a), or else the radio helped to decipher dark insinuations (90b). The brother of one interviewee had deserted (74a). There are no reports of heroic deeds by family members at the front. Shootings of Jews had been portrayed ‘as a necessity’ (84). Similarly, the war against the Partisans was portrayed as simply a defensive measure – ‘we had to defend ourselves’ (20, and similarly 34b, 126). Many recalled the time of occupation by Soviet troops (22, 28, 34a, 72, 76, 82, 99) with almost half telling of positive experiences (28, 72, 99). Only very few testified that they knew nothing about the persecution of Jews and other war crimes (11, 29a, 29b, 126). The period had been an unquestionably positive time for just two of the interviewees – primarily because of their experience in the Hitler Youth (28, 126). It is not possible, on the basis of the material available, to provide a definitive answer to the question, ‘To what extent did the parental home play a role in determining the manner in which events were perceived?’ Four of the interviewees mentioned that the attitude in their parental home had been one of opposition to the system – whether from a socialist standpoint or as supporters of the former Christian Social Party – and saw this as having shaped their own attitude to National Socialism (25, 76, 82, 90a). One visitor openly admits that his father was a Nazi and that he had been strongly influenced by him (28). In the case of a further interviewee, the data leads one to infer a similar political outlook on the part of his father (126). It is striking that when parents adopted a deliberately neutral and protective attitude, this was experienced by the children as painful and oppressive. They recall an ‘atmosphere of concealment’ (74a), or that ‘somewhere along the line, you encountered a wall of silence’ (90b). One could be forgiven for thinking that the grown-ups ‘were all wearing blinkers’ (6). The end of the war was certainly greeted with relief (76, 90b), but some regretted the absence of a genuine break with – that is to say, an open and public debate about – National Socialism. ‘We just hushed it up, and then hushed it up some more’ (6). ‘It was supposed to be a fresh start, but we just didn’t speak about it. Neither side had anything to say’ (74b, and, in a similar vein, 74a). For two of the interviewees, this twofold act of suppression – both during the Nazi period, and after the war – had led to political activism, even at the cost of estrangement from the family (74a, 90b). This unease is also evident with many others in this age group. It is manifested in the largely positive response to the exhibition, for example: ‘This is history, and it really happened. We really weren’t told at the time about what was going on’ (11), ‘I am glad that this is being done – that people keep trying to explain it’ (28), ‘Somehow, it is almost too late to try and shed light on all this’ (126).

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Only four of the interviewees were resolutely against the exhibition. They accused it of showing only crimes committed by the Wehrmacht, and not by others (34a, 34b, 49). One woman feared that her loyalty to her family could be shattered if she accepted as truth the things on display: ‘I am afraid that I will start to believe that my uncles were murderers. That is what I am most afraid of’ (20). Both uncles fell in 1942–43 at Stalingrad and the father, about whose military service nothing is said, also died in the war. In this case, it would appear that a strong identification with the dead men is exerting a lasting influence: an emotional legacy of her childhood, from which the woman has been unable to move on. Something similar holds true for an interviewee who lost his brother. The latter was reportedly shot by Czech Partisans at an unknown location at the end of war (34b). The surviving brother saw it as his task to find out what happened, so he came to the exhibition in the hope of finding a clue in the photos about his brother’s death.7 His protestations were directed against any disparagement of his brother – ‘Partisans, they were a bad bunch’. His wife, too, argued from the perspective of a victim: ‘I did experience the war – towards the end. They [the people behind the exhibition] should have been there and taken part, and seen what the Russians got up to. If a woman defended herself – she was as good as dead. She didn’t even get shot – they’d just use a knife …’ (34b). It is not clear whether the woman had been raped, or threatened with rape, by Soviet soldiers as a young girl, or whether she merely witnessed such menacing scenes. However, there is certainly no doubt that she had been marked by the traumatic events. The final critic had no dead in the family to lament, nor did he claim to have been a victim himself (49). All the same, the interview was pure ‘justificatory dialogue’:8 ‘He was in Italy for most of the time, and then he was in American captivity. And came back quite late – not until 1948.’ Why did he remain in captivity for so long? ‘Well, he was not actually in a prison camp – he was in an American general’s family home, more or less as a housemaid, responsible for doing the shopping and taking the children to school. And if the wife wanted to take a trip in the car, or go and visit someone … he was just there to do whatever they wanted.’ The many qualifying clichés and particles used by the speaker during this conversation – ‘most of the time’, ‘quite late’, ‘not actually’, ‘more or less’ – betray the fact that he knows more than he is prepared to reveal. It could be that the father, described by the son as a lance corporal with the German Wehrmacht, was not really with the Wehrmacht at all, but actually served with one of the murder squads of the Security Service (SD) or the police. The

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absence of any attempt at justification based on the day-to-day events of war, as proffered by many former soldiers, supports this assumption, as does the son’s plea to show understanding for his father’s generation and their enthusiasm for the Nazis, given the conditions prevailing at the time. Whatever may be hidden between the lines of his account, there can be no doubt that the son believed he had been charged by his father with the task of defending him against any slur on his reputation: ‘He died in 1991 at a relatively old age, but still too early for me, I’m afraid. I don’t think he would have been too happy with this exhibition either. I’ve probably got that from him.’ The stories of two interviewees, however, differed radically from those described above. These were two Jewish women, one of whom was able to flee to the United States after her parents had been murdered in Yugoslavia, while the other survived Theresienstadt and Auschwitz (72a, 72b).

4.2 The ‘last reserve’ (1925–28) Most of the 35 interviewees in this age group were young enough to attend National Socialist schools. All the men did a stint in the Hitler Youth. Some of those interviewed mentioned that before they came to serve in the Wehrmacht, they had spent time with the Reich Labour Service (RAD) in Yugoslavia and Poland (23, 73, 83a, 65). For all of them, the call-up to the Wehrmacht came only after the defeat at Stalingrad. Some entered military service in 1943. The majority, however, experienced only the final phase of the war, that is, from mid-1944 onwards. Their areas of deployment were Romania and the Baltics (73), Czechoslovakia (37, 120), Hungary (5), Yugoslavia (93a), Italy (101) and the most frequently mentioned, the Western Front (68a, 68b, 73, 87, 93b, 101, 103, 105, 117, 129, 141). Two of the interviewees were drafted into the Navy, and gave Denmark and Istria, respectively, as the regions in which they had served (20, 136). The youngest members of this cohort did not get to serve at the front: either they were still in training (33, 39a, 46) or they were engaged in the building of fortifications and tank traps (107, 131). One was called up to the Volkssturm9 (50), whilst two were able to take advantage of the chaos of the collapse, and avoid the call-up by going to ground in Vienna (123, 132). Of the five female interviewees, one went to school in Vienna, and then to agricultural college in Germany (89), another served as a Luftwaffe auxiliary in Vienna (83b), whilst a third attended the midwifery college there (128). Two young women witnessed the Partisan war in Yugoslavia – one whilst serving with the War Auxiliary Service10 (93a) and the other whilst employed as a kindergarten worker to promote the ‘Germanization’ of the indigenous population (49). The majority reported that they had already witnessed crimes against Jews before the war, predominantly in Vienna (50, 65, 83a, 87, 103, 105, 120, 125, 129, 141). One young woman, as part of her training to be a kindergarten

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worker, had been introduced in Vienna to the theory and practice of euthanasia (49). The existence of concentration camps was known about from hearsay (33, 83a, 103, 129) or through personal contact with detainees (33, 65, 112). Some gave eyewitness accounts of the death marches of concentration camp inmates at the end of the war (120), whilst others were possibly directly involved, by virtue of being with the Volkssturm (50). Two interviewees witnessed directly the extermination of Jews (23, 101). Another reported how older comrades in Poland had cut the beards from Jews (112), and yet another talked about a camp in Poland where shootings and cremations took place. Whether this was an extermination camp is not clear (83a). Columns of Jews required for forced labour in occupied Ukraine were recalled by one of the interviewees (115), whereas another had seen such things during the war in Vienna (141). Shootings of POWs and civilian prisoners were known to some from hearsay (87, 105), whilst others had witnessed these for themselves (87). A brutal scene was described by a veteran of the RAD in Poland: comrades had attacked civilians with their spades because they hadn’t greeted the Germans (23). The horrors of the Partisan war feature prominently in the accounts, nearly always in connection with Yugoslavia. A woman who, as a young girl, was sent to Yugoslavia with the Auxiliary Service, became a witness to the Partisan war (93b): ‘In Krainburg,11 ten people was … ten people were hanged every day, in front of the hotel where I used to eat. Every day. Every day! Because in those days, if a German soldier – or anyone else – was shot, they went and rounded up ten or twenty people. That’s how it was. Definitely, I was 16 or 17 years old.’ Her husband had to hand over Partisans or suspected Partisans to the SD, and had even watched as they were simply ‘bumped off’ (93a). Another woman arranged to be transferred because she could not cope with the terror of the occupation, which meant breaking off any kind of contact with the civilian population (49). One of the interviewees was unable to forget the ‘hunters’ pride’ with which members of a ‘probationary company’12 showed off photos of hanged Partisans (120). Another refused to answer because he felt ‘too emotional’, but did say, in response to a question about whether he had witnessed crimes similar to those portrayed in the exhibition, ‘I knew some things, but not like that. Some of it was scary enough, though’ (73). Another had known from comrades that ‘people were shot for no reason’ (37). A detailed description of this ‘war behind the front’ was provided by a former sailor – every time his ship was sunk in the Adriatic Sea, he was detailed to so-called ‘Partisan operations’ in Istria, in which ‘thousands of people, innocent people, were killed’ (136). He made a point of placing himself so close to events that he risked implicating himself as a perpetrator. Most of the tasks, which were always carried out jointly by the Navy, the Army, the Police and the SD, were associated with the rounding up of slave labourers for transportation to Germany. Convicted Partisans, and mere suspects, were hung from telegraph poles, shot dead and then tipped into

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the sea from lorries or boats. Sometimes these measures took place in retaliation for acts of sabotage, but they were also directed against innocent civilians. The interviewee described vividly the charged atmosphere created by the military leadership, who constantly issued propaganda about alleged atrocities. He also described the unrestrained violence on the part of ordinary soldiers, who were liable to vent their aggression at any time in brutal attacks on the civilian population – sometimes solely for their personal enrichment or amusement. Even at the time, the interviewee had adopted a detached attitude to the events – this was the only way that he could view the crimes as crimes and retain them in his memory. This contrasted with the behaviour of two former comrades, who, at the time of the exhibition, still resorted unquestioningly to the kinds of argument used at the time: ‘We were the ones being killed’ (79a), the others were ‘the murderers’ (115). Many of those questioned did not, of course, at the age of 16 or 17, experience the events of war at such close quarters that they could have been witnesses. At best, they had known about the crimes from the accounts of former comrades (141) and – based on these – they endorsed the message of the exhibition (37, 39a). Others had not even come into contact with this source of information. They only knew of measures taken by the security forces against their own men, or of the maltreatment by the Americans of those in captivity (68a, 68b). For the majority of the interviewees, it is striking that their experiences at the front, however short-lived, affected them for the rest of their lives. They spoke emphatically about a ‘frightful, sad time’ (132, 123), ‘character-forming’ experiences (93b, 65) and something that is ‘lodged very firmly in the memory’, such as this image of a Jew in the house next door: ‘There was one who apparently couldn’t get away. He just sat in his window on the third floor, and drank alcohol until he fell out’ (37). One woman, who was required to work in a uniform factory in Vienna, became emotional as she recalled a particularly spiteful case of ‘Aryanization’, ‘I don’t like thinking back to it, it boils up inside me’ (97). Feelings of this kind also manifested themselves in the clear rejection of all war (23, 33, 68b, 93a, 113) or, perhaps, in the clear denunciation of any attempt to play down the crimes, or seek to offset them against those of the other belligerent nations (33, 103, 105, 112, 123, 132). It was noticeable that some of the interviewees had clear moral positions which may well have been attributable to the milieu in which they grew up – for example, a social democratic parental home, a left-wing working-class background, or parents who were anti-Nazi or humanistic in outlook. Two of this cohort of interviewees, who came from anti-Nazi parental homes, were already opponents of the regime at the time in question. One of them, when serving as an anti-aircraft auxiliary,13 had formed a resistance group, for which he was convicted (83a). The other had been strongly influenced by his membership of a Catholic youth group, and by the reports of

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his Jesuit padre, who had spent two and a half years at the Dachau concentration camp (87). A third described the revulsion he had felt at the mistreatment of a suspected Partisan, and recalled that he had considered desertion (136). Others acquired such insight only after the war. They are unable, to this day, to come to terms with the images of concentration camps (23), or how, as young people, they had been inculcated with a total lack of critical awareness or independence of mind (49), not to mention how their own perceptions were distorted by propaganda about ‘Jewish parasites’ and ‘Gypsy scum’ (123, 37, 132). Another manifestation of this critical preoccupation with the period, and one’s own role in it, can be seen in reflections on the question of how such barbarism could have come about – for example, through the corrupting influence of power (33, 136) or the lure of propaganda (136). Despite such thoroughly critical voices, it is quite striking that a number of interviewees make excuses for what happened – the people were living under a dictatorship (33), they were forced into military service and had no choice but to obey (68a, 69b, 73, 115), they had been ‘very young’ at the time (93a), it wasn’t the ordinary soldier who was responsible, but the military leadership (79a) and it was the Germans who were to blame, not the Austrians (89). Two of the interviewees who put forward such arguments attacked the exhibition for being too sweeping, and even defamatory (79a, 115). Both men had seen long active service at the front, either in the East or in the South East, relative to the norm for their age group. Their reaction of aggressive defensiveness was therefore more akin to that of members of the age group of Landser (soldiers). One woman reacted equally bitterly (89): she sought to justify what had happened and appealed openly for understanding for anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. During the war she had trained in Germany, and had subsequently held a leading position in the National Socialist League of German Girls (BDM).14 One of those interviewed was a Jew. He was able to flee to England in 1939, and in 1945 returned to Vienna as a soldier of the British Army. His attempt to repossess his murdered parents’ apartment failed due to the audacity of the new owner and the Austrian judicial system (67).

4.3 The soldiers (1920–24) Of the 44 men, 32 had seen action in the Soviet Union, six of them having previously served in Poland, with a further five being deployed either beforehand or later in Yugoslavia. Three interviewees experienced the war only in France, two others in both Poland and France. Three were members of the Africa Corps, and then transferred to Italy, Greece and France. Two served only in Italy, whilst two more said nothing about where they had served during the war. One of the interviewees had been drafted into arms production, and four women experienced the war only from the perspective of the so-called ‘home front’. Even from this brief outline, it can be deduced that

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for this age group, much more than the two previous groups, the Wehrmacht Exhibition represented a re-encounter with a dramatic stage of their lives – the war against the Soviet Union and the war in Yugoslavia. It also confronted them with a critical interpretation of those years. Four of the interviewees mentioned the Commissar Order and its implementation by the Wehrmacht (7, 69, 75, 96). Eight recalled the criminal treatment of the Soviet prisoners of war – for example, that they had often been shot dead immediately upon capture (66, 78, 92, 96), exposed to the most brutal treatment in the prison camps (75, 92, 96) or murdered during transportation (4, 66, 78, 85). The conduct of the occupiers towards the civilian population was depicted as being similarly brutal. Civilians were condemned to die from starvation or illness (66, 91). The most trivial offence, or the slightest hint of suspicion, led to their murder (66, 70) or killing on supposedly military grounds (66, 78). The Partisan war features prominently in the recollections: some merely dropped hints about it, or knew about it only from hearsay (66, 104, 119, 121, 130) – a sign of the taboo that evidently still surrounds it. Three could recall people being hanged (38, 70, 79), one spoke about an act of retribution, in which his own unit had shot dead the culprits or suspected culprits (7). The persecution and murdering of Jews also featured prominently in the accounts: some still remember the build-up in Austria (8, 9, 85, 106), but for most, the events in the occupied territories in the East were more dramatic – and therefore more memorable. Jews were beaten (75, 106), humiliated and taunted (66, 85, 96, 106, 137), driven into ghettos (4, 85), forced into labour (4, 14), rounded up and deported (79, 85), and – both separately and en masse – they were shot dead and suffocated in gas vans15 (7, 66, 69, 77, 85, 91, 92, 96, 130). The Wehrmacht are not held responsible for these crimes, only the Police, the SS and the SD, and also local collaborators. Only one interviewee considered it possible that there may have been some Wehrmacht involvement in the first mass shootings in Riga (69). Otherwise, Wehrmacht soldiers enter the frame as participants only where forced labour, acts of humiliation, beatings and deportations of Jews are concerned. Where shootings are concerned, they were mere onlookers. Even for those who did not serve on the Eastern Front, or in Yugoslavia, the exhibition triggered memories. One interviewee recalled the ‘dissolution’ of a camp holding Soviet prisoners of war when the SS retreated from Finland (114). Another told how his panzer unit had incinerated a town in France, and recalled that in many battles, no prisoners were taken (119). The widow of a paratrooper recalled that her husband, together with his comrades, had annihilated a village and all its inhabitants (26). There are numerous recollections of crimes that took place in Poland: prisoners were shot (66), the population was harassed (137), the SS forced Jews to do degrading jobs and cut off the men’s beards (137) and the first mass shootings of Jews took place (66, 85). A woman recalled seeing some photos brought home by soldiers

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on leave, which documented the sexually brutal treatment of Polish women by German soldiers, and knew about the lot of the Jews and the forced labourers in Austria (97). Two men, who had served on the ‘home front’ in Germany and Austria respectively, saw concentration camp detainees clearing debris after bombing raids (127) or worked with them in an armaments factory (138). Others also admitted having heard about concentration camps (66, 98, 114). Sixteen of those interviewed claimed not to have seen any crimes whatsoever. It is notable that more than half of them served in the Soviet Union (3, 8, 15, 95a, 98, 100, 108, 133, 134). These ‘deniers’ thus placed themselves squarely at odds with the majority, who gave very convincing, and sometimes very precise, accounts of criminal acts. The accounts reveal four kinds of reaction on the part of former soldiers to what they experienced at the front (cf. Heer, 1999d): 1. Dissociation from the crimes during, or even before the war, which sometimes led as far as resistance and desertion. 2. Enduring unease and attempts to make sense of the events and one’s own part in them. 3. Confirmation of the crimes, combined with denial of any personal involvement. 4. Justification of the crimes on military, political or moral grounds.

4.3.1 Dissociation Dissociation may be manifested in the role of ‘grimly determined observer’ of events. No detail of the criminal activity is overlooked, place and time are noted and those responsible identified. A sergeant who served with the ground staff of the Luftwaffe, and took part in every campaign, witnessed in Poland how a Wehrmacht officer ordered 30 prisoners to be shot, and then murdered the Jews who had been forced to bury them. Serving as a radio operator in the attack on Stalingrad, he witnessed how the Luftwaffe deliberately attacked the civilian population, who were waiting at the dockside to board ferries to cross the Volga River. Soviet pilots who had made emergency landings were likewise immediately shot dead, as were Red Army soldiers who tried to surrender to the Germans with their hands raised. Civilians were hanged for the slightest transgression – for example, if hunger drove them to take a bag of flour from a mill. Prisoners of war were transported, in temperatures of minus ten degrees, in open trucks, where they were allowed to perish. ‘Yes, we have talked enough,’ he said, ending the conversation, ‘or else all sorts of things will start coming back to me’ (66). Similarly detailed are the recollections of an individual who was stateless at the time, having been expelled from college in Vienna in 1941, because he expressed doubts to his fellow students about the final victory (85). Forced to work for a German

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firm in occupied Poland, he became witness to the start of the extermination of Jews in the ghettos of Kraków and Lvov. Wehrmacht soldiers had jeered as Jews were herded through the streets of Lvov. Interrupted by frequent fits of crying, he recalled the mass murder taking place every day. When detailed to serve with the Wehrmacht, he witnessed the inhumane treatment of prisoners of war, along with the atrocities of the German anti-Partisan warfare: ‘One of my best friends, who was at the front about 20 km away from where I was – while I saw these operations against the Partisans, he claimed … even he says to this day, that he never saw anything. That is what is so terrible – that millions of soldiers were there, yet today they all claim they never saw a thing. […] But at the time, there was so much incitement to hatred that the Wehrmacht soldiers, to a large extent, were convinced that their actions were legitimate. Because they didn’t want to open their eyes.’ If a person does not think of his actions as criminal, then neither can he remember them as crimes (Heer, 1998a, pp. 132ff.). For those who witnessed these crimes, not to mention the general blindness to them, the only decision open to them was to refuse to join the execution squads or take part in the beatings (4, 66, 85). But that was not the end of the matter: the daily scenes of barbarity, the unavoidable graphic images and the sympathy they felt for the victims meant that looking back after the war merely prolonged the torment. One possible remedy was to destroy any photos – the very evidence of the crimes: ‘I found it so awful. I didn’t want to be reminded of it’ (66). Disassociation may also be manifested in revulsion, and in the repudiation of what one did, or was obliged to witness, for example: being greeted by Jews in the street, and not being allowed to return the greeting (106), evicting women and children from their houses in temperatures of 20 to 30 degrees below zero, and then setting light to their houses (78), or witnessing how a fellow soldier – a student of theology – forced his way into an already complete firing squad because he considered the delinquents to be ‘sub-human’ (7) or, at home, learning that a colleague had pushed out his Jewish boss, who had rescued and supported him personally during the time of mass unemployment, and then appropriated the business (97). Repudiation can lead ultimately to a refusal to take part in the war, and thus to desertion from the Wehrmacht. In Russia, some merely contemplated the idea (38, 92), whilst in Italy, others actually did so (77, 91). Three of this group came from socialist families, one of them having previously started a resistance group (91). 4.3.2 Enduring unease A further reaction is one of enduring unease. The former soldiers replay in their mind images of the horror for which they were responsible at the time. One interviewee had witnessed, near the border between Finland and the Soviet Union, how the SS had ‘liquidated’ an entire prisoner-of-war camp: ‘When I

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think about it now, that we stood and watched it. … That was really one of the most barbaric things that I witnessed. […] Back then we saw it all differently. […] It was also a time … a hard time, as we used to say, where it somehow just wasn’t “the done thing” to have feelings about these things’ (114). Another ex-soldier tried to think of alternatives for the actions taken at the time, and came up with nothing apart from the then prevalent legitimization that Stalin was the greater evil, and that under such circumstances, it was possible to ally oneself with Hitler (92). This attitude may also be manifested in the direct acknowledgement that this was not a normal war, with the usual excesses, but rather, a unique war, thanks to the Wehrmacht and ‘the atrocities committed’. However, as a mere soldier, one could do nothing about it (70), or one may admit candidly, ‘We began the war … and the others just defended themselves, that goes without saying,’ only then to point, in mitigation, to the pressure to obey orders and one’s responsibility to the leadership (96). One visitor, who served as a staff officer during the war in the East, acknowledges, whilst looking at the exhibition displays (36): ‘Even as an old soldier, one is appalled by the crimes documented here now.’ Did you know what was going on at the time? ‘Well, certainly we knew a little bit, a bit more than we cared to admit. But the extent of the atrocities wasn’t known about in all sectors of the front.’ Clearly, the acknowledgement that a crime has taken place, supplemented by mitigating information, does not amount to an admission of personal responsibility. Yet, for some, this balancing act proved too difficult. A former paratrooper, together with his unit, had annihilated a French village and all its inhabitants at Christmas in 1943. Every Christmas, his wife recalled, he would drink excessively. His inner peace was further disturbed by the fact that one 22-year-old student had refused to take part in the massacre, and was consequently shot on the spot. The man had first told his wife about the crime in August 1958. From then on, he could no longer deal with it. ‘My husband was a good man at heart, and he just couldn’t come to terms with it. On Christmas Eve, he killed himself’ (26). The shame in this case was so great, that it was not possible to reach a ‘settlement’ based on a common understanding of the past, allowing the husband and wife to continue to live together in mutual respect and esteem. These troubled individuals were continually at odds with themselves, and the exhibition evidently exacerbated their inner turmoil. But in relation to the acknowledgement of what happened, the justification always plays a secondary role. It is never the core statement, as it is for the next group.

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4.3.3 Acknowledgement of crimes combined with denial of personal involvement The majority of the interviewees do admit that the crimes took place, but deny knowing about them, witnessing them or taking part in them. In order to be able to do this, they have created a personal narrative – whether during the war, or only afterwards – which essentially comprises some or all of the following nine arguments. At the same time, the frequency of their use shows a clear hierarchy: 1. I was always at the front, always a combat soldier, whereas the crimes were committed behind me, in the rearward areas (3, 8, 15, 38, 40, 75, 78, 79, 96, 98, 100, 108, 130, 133). 2. I was forced to enter the Wehrmacht, and thereafter I was subject to a rigid command system, with draconian penalties (3, 78, 95a, 96, 100, 104, 119, 130, 134). 3. Responsibility for the shooting of prisoners and Partisans, and the mass murder of Jews, lay with special units of the SS and SD, the Police and local collaborators (7, 40, 75, 96, 98, 130, 140). 4. As an Austrian, one is a born anti-Nazi, or, at least, innately anywhere on the scale between phlegmatic and lovable, and therefore one is incapable of committing such crimes (66, 75, 96, 98, 100, 133). 5. The enemy also committed crimes, which we were reacting to (40, 75, 95a, 100, 108, 119, 140). 6. We were victims ourselves – on account of our injuries, the deaths of comrades, the persecution of our own people or the terror inflicted by the victors on those in captivity (78, 95a, 97, 100, 108). 7. I was just a simple foot-soldier, in no position to have a clear view of events, let alone have any influence over them (15, 70, 96, 100). 8. I had no interest in politics and was driven only by the overwhelming desire to make it through somehow (79, 104, 130). 9. I had a positive relationship with Jews, prisoners of war and civilians, and helped wherever I could (79, 96, 108, 140). The arguments occur mostly in combination with one another. The following combinations emerge as ‘ideal’ in the sense that they are those most frequently employed: ● ●

front/rear
compulsion/orders
crimes by special units front/rear
compulsion/orders
either Austrians are different or crimes of the enemy.

As firmly ingrained as this defensive wall appears to be, on close scrutiny, cracks and fissures do become very apparent. These are indicative of unresolved

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inner processes and pain, which are not healed, but merely ‘blocked off’ or, at best, suppressed (Heer, 1999c).16 In the case of one group of interviewees, this phenomenon is revealed by emotions that are still aroused by the memory of a particular crime, even after 50 years. Examples of this are: when the incineration of villages during the retreat from Moscow was described as ‘a burden’ (78) and the shooting of a deserting comrade, just before the end of the war, as ‘extremely troubling’ (104), or when the apparent beating to death of Jews is referred to as an experience ‘that actually really shocked me, I was just 20 at the time’ (75). The memories are still fluid like lava – the heat of the emotion means that, in most cases, it is still impossible to articulate the memory in words: ‘There were often appalling scenes. You just can’t describe it. Horrendous’ (119). A second group, notable for claiming that, during four years of war, they had never witnessed a single crime on the part of the Wehrmacht, found itself getting caught up in contradictions as a result. One infantryman, who, when asked what he knew about the murdering of Jews, responded by claiming that he had never seen a Jew, either at home or at the front, then let slip, ‘Well, we just … bit by bit, we … every soldier heard the odd thing, but …’ (108). Similarly, a member of the predominantly Austrian 44th Infantry Division explained, ‘We were purely a fighting troop’, but then hinted at quite different experiences (100): ‘I did not witness any atrocities in my unit. We did hear things, that something had happened here or there, but … Well, nothing special, you know, nothing … so I didn’t know anything that I could …’ And what did you see of the persecution of Jews in the East? ‘Nothing, we didn’t know anything about that.’ But in the villages, where … ‘Wherever we went, either there were no people or … it was always near the front, where we went.’ A third type of faltering self-justification can be characterized as ‘talking whilst biting one’s tongue’ (Heer, 1998b, pp. 242ff.). For example, someone who grew up in the milieu of the workers’ movement and held clear views about National Socialism, started to stammer when he was asked about his own possible crimes in Yugoslavia. When asked how operations against the Partisans had been conducted, he responded (98): ‘For example, one of them got fired at during the night, you know, at the crack of dawn. That’s when the operation was. They came to the village and it was empty. They hardly got anyone there. They had all gone, as if they’d been blown away.’

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What did you do then, after the attack? ‘Back to the unit.’ But you can see all around us here that people’s houses were set on fire. ‘Yes, where the resistance … where the resistance was especially strong, perhaps, but that wasn’t really our … I mean, I was … I was there, for example, that was in a … how can I put it? … a special deployment unit. I wasn’t always there. We had recruits coming in. We were the cadre for newly deployed recruits. Young people came to us, and then, if …’ 4.3.4 Denial of the criminal nature of the perpetrated acts A further, distinct, small group has seen everything that was on display in the exhibition, but denies the criminal nature of the acts portrayed. These can be justified militarily, politically or even morally: for example, the war had been a pre-emptive war, a crusade to rescue Europe from the threat of Bolshevism; or the war against the Partisans – armed combatants who operated outside the law – was only fought in the interests of self-protection. Hitler had risen to power because of the ‘Disgraceful’ Versailles Treaty, and received support, from 1933 onwards, from Western countries and even Jewish bankers. Ultimately, it was war criminals like Churchill, Bomber Harris, Stalin or the United States (responsible for Hiroshima) who should be in the dock (19, 95a). Two other interviewees went beyond even such justificatory rhetoric. They argued in the language of National Socialism, and were not afraid to discuss openly the issue at its core, namely the murderous hatred of Jews. A career officer from the Sudetenland claimed that in the East he had only known Jews as wood-luggers for the Wehrmacht, and as skilled watch-makers for his people (14) (see Benke and Wodak, 2003). As combat troops, one had no time for anything else. Then, however, he conceded frankly that there was, of course, ‘a latent anti-Semitism’. After the First World War, numerous Jews had come to Vienna to do something with their lives. And as a ‘highly intelligent people’ and thanks to their own ‘stalwart’ efforts, they had managed it too: ‘The legal profession was 80 per cent Jewish, and for the chief physicians in the hospitals the figure was 90 per cent. You can’t blame them for naturally favouring their own people, but it does of course give rise to certain emotions on the other side.’ The second such interviewee, an officer who had taken part in the entire Russian campaign, serving at the end with the mountain infantry, denied having seen Jews murdered, or taken part in any way (110): ‘Only the Ukrainians were … very bitter towards their commissars and the heads of the collective farms, a lot of whom were Jews, and so … well many Ukrainians, in particular … came over to our side.’ Having postulated, on the part of the Ukrainians Jews, a share of the responsibility for their own downfall, the officer then applies the same argument to

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the Jews of Vienna: they had, he claims, unduly ratcheted up the level of competition in the business world. It was for this reason that he had, at the time, expressly endorsed the persecution of the ‘conniving Jews’ and the ‘Jewish dealers’. He could clearly remember his attitude as synagogues burned: ‘It didn’t upset us. […] Yes, they should emigrate, they should get out.’ Advancing through Poland, he came across Jews again, for whom specific rows of houses had been allocated in the villages: ‘That really gave us the horrors.’ The reason: small Jewish boys had offered, for a small payment, to supply their sisters to the soldiers as prostitutes. ‘So now you could say, I suppose, that our minds were somehow set against the Jews.’ The interviewee in question, who studied political science after the war, and later went into industry, still holds this attitude today: for him, 100,000 Jews in Vienna are too many; he thinks a figure of 20,000 would be more appropriate.17 Given such disconcerting enduring beliefs, the stories of some contemporaries appear to come from a different planet. But these are the other side of European history amidst the darkness of the twentieth century: the concentration camp inmate who emigrated to the United States and came back with the US Army (56); the son of a Jewish medical corps officer in the Austrian Army who joined the French Army in 1938, and then the English Army, with whom he liberated Austria (122); another, who grew up in Israel, whilst his parents, as German nationals in Riga, were deported, and thereby ‘rescued’ by Stalin (21); lastly, one of the visitors interviewed was a Jew from Lvov, whose entire family, except for his mother, was liquidated by the Germans. He spent the whole war as a Red Army soldier, in the locations documented by the Exhibition: ‘We only saw terrible things from the Germans.’

4.4 The old (1915–19) The five interviewees who were born before, or during, the First World War differ from the other interviewees in the respect that they had already developed a clear political standpoint before the Nazis came to power. One was politically active in the organized Left from the age of 13. From 1934, he helped to establish illegal communist groups and in 1937, he went to join the International Brigades in Spain. In the end, he was handed over to the SS and spent four years in Dachau (80). A second was a supporter of the ‘Austrofascist’ federal chancellor Dollfuß. By the time of Ernst Röhm’s murder in 1934,18 he had come to hate the Nazis. Because of his age, he was called up to serve in air defence, and then, at his own instigation, joined a supplies unit. As a detached observer of events and eyewitness to some of the crimes – for example, the murdering of Jews in Riga during the summer of 1941, or the apocalyptic conditions in the Warsaw ghetto – he believed ‘that the soldiers could have extricated themselves … if they had given any kind of reason – for example, that they couldn’t or wouldn’t do that on religious grounds.’ Based on his experience, he finds the argument that soldiers were under irresistible pressure to obey orders implausible (69). The third con-

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temporary witness is a communist who married an Italian comrade, and emigrated with him to the Soviet Union. There she witnessed the panic caused by the fear of a German Wehrmacht victory, heard rumours of Jews being murdered in gas vans and waited in vain for the return of her husband, who had been arrested in 1937. In fact, the NKVD had shot him shortly after his arrest (94). We owe the most detailed account of the war to a member of this cohort. Born in 1915, he became involved with Catholic youth groups at an early age and in 1938, joined with those of like mind to resist the ‘Anschluss’ (135). He ended up in detention, from which he was released only because of the protective intervention of a friend from his youth, who had since become a senior Nazi. He found refuge in the Wehrmacht, where he trained as a medical orderly. It was in this capacity that he experienced the war against Poland and the Soviet Union. As early as 1939, in Poland, he witnessed the expulsion and execution of Jews by the SS. In the Ukraine, in 1941, he saw the notices instructing Jews where and when to assemble – to be taken away and shot, as he was told. He saw the mass graves and travelled through the empty Jewish villages: ‘There were several villages and countless previously Jewish smallholdings. There was a whole area where they lived, and they were all gone. […] If anyone says he didn’t know anything, that’s nonsense, of course. Because every soldier knew that the Jews … that most of the Jewish population was being massacred or at any rate carted off.’ He says that those responsible were Wehrmacht units ‘at the rear’. The fate of prisoners of war, too, is described in detail. He witnessed how, either at the moment of capture, or when the troops were withdrawing, they were shot dead so as not to become an inconvenience, or they were allowed to starve or refused any kind of medical care. He also recalled how some brave medical officers had defied such demands. He had himself ensured that a POW-murderer became isolated within his unit. He also provides a great deal of evidence concerning the brutal treatment of the Soviet civilian population: the allegation of being a Partisan was always to the fore, peasant villages were plundered, women were forced into prostitution through hunger and hardship, and anyone who was a hindrance to withdrawal was mercilessly annihilated. On the question of the mentality of the ‘annihilators’, he made some interesting observations: the most fanatical were the Austrian mountain infantry – ‘they were worse than the SS’ – and soldiers originating from the Sudetenland. He sees some of the troops as being characterized by two traits: (1) their propensity for violence, in which soldiers could indulge without being penalized, and (2) the acceptance of a racist ideology. However, he does mention by name three company commanders who held anti-Nazi views.

4.5 Group conversations All the arguments referred to above are echoed in the eight group conversations which arose spontaneously during the exhibition, and were filmed.

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Taking only the main speakers into account, these involved 35 people in all. Eleven of these served in the Soviet Union, one in Yugoslavia, one in France, one in North Africa, one in Germany towards the end of the war, and one in Czechoslovakia, with four veterans providing no information about where they had served. The rest were made up of those born immediately before the war, and the children and the grandchildren of the war generation. The debates did not proceed on the basis of a division between ‘former soldiers’ and ‘succeeding generations’, but along very much more complex lines. In one case, there was an amicable discussion amongst those whose experience of the war was as the ‘last reserve’, or merely as child spectators, that is to say, those born between 1925 and 1935 (discussion group V); in two cases, discussions of a controversial nature ensued between this group and the former soldiers (I and VIII), and in five cases, extremely animated discussions took place amongst the former soldiers themselves (II, III, IV, VI, VII), during which the more self-critical veterans of the former Wehrmacht were supported by younger men from the second and third generations. This critical perspective was reflected in the accounts of the crimes witnessed: concentration camp (VII), forced labour (II), the murdering of prisoners (III, IV) – and in the characterization of the war as a crime from the start (IV, VI). The young critics were more inclined to address questions than counter-arguments to those former soldiers who sought to justify their conduct during the war. The patterns of justification tally with the inventory outlined above: the enemies were ‘exclusively to blame’ or ‘also to blame’ (11 times); ‘we spent the whole time at the front’, ‘we were under orders’ and ‘the small soldier was powerless’ (5 times each); ‘it was the SS’ (4 times); ‘we only did good’ (twice); ‘the Austrians in the Wehrmacht were particularly upstanding’ and ‘we were victims ourselves’ (once each). Sometimes these explanations were called into question by the unexpected intervention of an emigrant or a national of one of the invaded states (II, VIII), but for the most part, it was the ex-soldiers themselves who became lost and disoriented in their own rhetorical labyrinth. A former soldier became agitated (II): ‘Now I am convinced that I’m a criminal, because of this … you see, this is what you have achieved – we all feel like criminals now. This stupid exhibition. There were a few, maybe, who did things like that, but the vast majority of us, the soldiers who worked there or served in the army, we didn’t do anything, we just … I never even saw a Jew, OK? Wherever we went, the houses stood empty. […] I have no idea whether there were any there. But wherever we went, the houses were … everyone had left.’ A comrade takes over the conversation. He too was at the Eastern Front: ‘You see, this is my insignia, this is the Rush Cross of the 44th [Infantry Division]. […] And I can vouch for this, that from the very first day in France, and also in Russia, and I can vouch also that in Regiment 132, no

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such incidents occurred, the way they are portrayed here. I myself was in charge of a heavy machine-gun platoon […] and in our unit it was strictly forbidden to carry out any acts of excess against the civilian population, or people who weren’t like us.’ A few moments later, the conversation turned to just such an incident: the former leader of a heavy machine-gun platoon was recovering from a wound in the summer of 1941, in the Polish town of Rzeszów. ‘All of a sudden the commander calls for me, the local commander, right. He says, “you are being assigned to a firing squad.” I said, “I am not doing that, you can send me right to the front of the front line, and my men too, the whole platoon.”’ The victims of the shootings were the Jews of Rzeszów. No harm came to the platoon leader for his refusal to take part in the shootings. Who had then actually carried out the local Wehrmacht commander’s order, he was unable to say. He said he suspected the SS, and with that, the web of excuses and reinterpretations, which had momentarily come apart, was back in one piece. By way of another example, one veteran – having characterized the invasion as a pre-emptive war, and the German terror as a reaction to atrocities perpetrated by the enemy – was asked to explain, ‘What business did you have in Russia anyway, as a soldier?’ His response was as follows (IV): ‘You have your orders … you’d be shot on the spot. What do you think …’ Were you following orders or acting out of conviction? ‘Following orders, of course.’ Not out of conviction? ‘I’d be lying if I said no. At the beginning, it was out of conviction, but later …’ And how do you see those orders now, that you received at the time? ‘As time went on, we began to realize what was going on. And if you have the good fortune – as I did – never to have been in units that were, shall we say, involved in executions, and so on … The Wehrmacht became culpable, because the transfer orders … well, for example, it handed over Jews for deportation …’ The chain of justification began with the ‘pre-emptive war’ explanation, which is where it also ended: ‘Look, it was an ideological war, you have to admit that … only in the East. Only in the East. But the atrocities, well – apart from persecuting the Jews and so on – the atrocities came from the Russian side, I can assure you …’

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And what was the German Wehrmacht doing there, anyway? ‘Listen, if the German Wehrmacht hadn’t gone into Russia, we’d all be living in a communist Europe today, I’m telling you …’ We can see from these group discussions, more clearly than from the individual interviews, that the way in which these former soldiers respond is not primarily a matter of denial, or even repression – that is, the successful locking away of negative subject matter in memory, or even an irreversible act of ‘active forgetting’. Rather, we are dealing with a process of reinterpretation, which takes place in order to preserve one’s personal ‘value system’ and positive self-image. Such processes, however, are fluid and fragile, because they rely on acceptance by one’s social peers (Emrich, 1998). This phenomenon was described accurately by Renate Schostack in her portrayal of the old men and former soldiers who gathered daily, in 1997, on Munich’s Marienplatz facing the Rathausgalerie, where the exhibition was currently on display: They just stood there, hoping to snap out of decades of cultivated silence. […] These were men referred to by Goldhagen as ‘Hitler’s willing executioners’: insignificant lackeys, whose deeds are held in abhorrence by the whole world today. But more than 50 years ago, according to the laws of a criminal regime, their actions were not punishable. Not many people have shown any interest in listening to their stories – not the families, few amongst their drinking pals. […] Many of those who have spoken during the past decades played down and glossed over their activities, and even turned them on their heads, until they believed their own stories – perhaps because their conscience whispered to them that they should have been saviours and not killers. Some of these men, of whom there are not many left, stood on the Marienplatz making defensive statements which were actually more of a plea for someone to talk to them, perhaps even to hear a confession. This nearly always followed the same pattern. The speaker would point to himself or show you a photograph: ‘Do I look, does my brother look like a criminal?’ They expected the answer, ‘No, you do not look like a criminal.’ Then they would rapidly recount stories of atrocities that they had heard about, or seen on television. And then they would add immediately, ‘We didn’t do that kind of thing.’ And then the third step: ‘We had to do it.’ What they really needed was a father confessor, to ask what it was they had done. But nobody heard these men’s confession. They find no consolation in statements by politicians that the soldiers in the Second World War were not criminals. The Furies are howling something different in their ear. These men stood and awaited absolution. But no one could grant it to them.19

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4.6 Women Women were represented in each of the age groups. It is interesting to consider whether, and if so, how, their perceptions and coping strategies differ from those of the men. In our exploration of this question, we restrict ourselves to one particular group of women, namely those associated with the perpetrators, who witnessed the Nazi period for themselves. We also use a different age categorization. For men, the categorization was made on the basis of a dividing line which has become established over the years – whether a person saw active service at the front, or not. For women, the use of this criterion as an indicator of experience has only very limited value. We therefore distinguish between two age groups: those born in the 1920s and those born in the 1930s. 4.6.1 Women born 1930–35 There are ten women in this age group. Four of them visited the exhibition together with their husbands. In the case of these couples, the high degree of consensus between both partners is striking. This is demonstrated by their attitudes to the exhibition, their motives for coming to see it, and their postvisit assessments: whilst one couple expressed a neutral viewpoint (13a, 13b), three other couples decided one way or the other, one against the exhibition (34a, 34b) and two in favour (74a, 74b and 90a, 90b). The internal agreement of these three couples is based on a shared experience of the war. The couple with a negative view of the exhibition both see themselves as victims of the war: the woman cannot dispel memories of the occupation by Soviet troops and the associated acts of brutality, perpetrated predominantly on women, whilst the man is influenced by the death of his brother at the hands of Czech Partisans towards the end of the war, and was looking for an image of him at the exhibition. It was, however, the wife who first articulated her repudiation of the exhibition. Amongst the two couples positively disposed towards the exhibition, the women and the men both spoke about the persecution of Jews, the fate of the captured soldiers, what was known about the existence of concentration camps, and the final crime of the death marches. Nonetheless, there were differences in the responses of these former boys and girls: one woman had enquired, as a girl, why her Jewish classmate had suddenly disappeared, she had been listening when it was announced on the radio that there would be 100 executions for every German soldier shot by Partisans in Yugoslavia, and when the grown-ups referred yet again to a concentration camp inmate ‘dying from illness’, she had tried to ‘make up a rhyme about it’ (90b); the other girl had been more active and had even become involved: she witnessed the escape of a prisoner of war and kept quiet about it. When the Police or the SS came for a slave labourer who happened to be living in her house, she sat on her bed and comforted her (74a).

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By comparison with their male contemporaries, girls also developed a greater perceptiveness and empathy in situations where the parents tried to keep ‘everything that was dangerous at a safe distance’ (90b). This capacity is demonstrated by two unmarried women who held extremely different attitudes towards their respective fathers. One of the two women gives a very detailed account of her parental home and her experiences (6). The father was drafted into the Ninth Panzer Division and served in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. He never talked about his experiences at the time. The rest of the family were just as silent: ‘The women knew nothing … in fact, nobody knew anything about anything. But I actually knew by the time I was six that all of a sudden, Dita’s grandparents weren’t there any more. I grew up in the Second District … Dita was half Jewish. I knew two, Liesl and also Dita, who actually went to school. […] But I was already amazed when I was a child, and I played with these children in the Heinepark, and the grandparents were taken away and the grown-ups told me they didn’t know where they had gone.’ Only after the war were her suspicions confirmed, including about what her father had seen and done during the war – ‘the awful things they can make soldiers do’. Today, the woman has a clear standpoint with regard to the period, the crimes and her parents’ responsibility: ‘I always say that their generation did … cheer him [Hitler] on and was to blame … but they did build the country back up again.’ But for all the understanding, there is one sticking point: ‘It doesn’t disturb me too much that they didn’t know at the time. […] But that that generation doesn’t know even now what went on back then – I do find that really disturbing.’ This statement retains both the following features: unreserved empathy with the victims, her two childhood friends, and a cautious, fragile reconciliation with the perpetrators, her own parents. The second woman was unable to perform such a difficult balancing act (20). We hear nothing about her wartime experiences and nothing about the crimes taking place all around her, only that her father died in 1943 and that two of her uncles fell at Stalingrad. This woman, too, displays a considerable capacity for empathy. But it extends only to members of her own family. For her, these are the only victims: ‘They are all being made out to be murderers, now. I cannot believe that. […] I don’t believe that my uncles were murderers. And I don’t believe that my grandfather was a murderer, either. I cannot believe that, otherwise I would have to hang myself.’ However, the Jews who were murdered, the civilians who were hanged, the prisoners of war who perished, and the deportees lie beyond the reach of this compassion. 4.6.2 Women born 1920–25 The ten women interviewed can be grouped into those who visited the exhibition alone, those who were interviewed together with their husbands and those who made it quite clear that they were widows.

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The three women who came to the exhibition alone recalled their youth with much enthusiasm. All three were in training, one to become a midwife (128), another to become a kindergarten teacher (49), whilst the third, having attended school in Austria, was at an agricultural college in Germany. Afterwards she became a leader in the League of German Girls (BDM) (89). The first two, who had remained in Vienna, knew nothing about the open persecution of Jews and the ensuing removal of legal rights. The lessons in racial theory did not trouble them at the time, and nor was the kindergarten teacher taken aback when, as part of her training, she was introduced to euthanasia and shown one of the ‘hospitals’ at the Steinhof complex, where euthanasia was practiced: ‘That wasn’t an issue. They had been segregated. So they were separate, they were in … once, for example, even during our college training, we had a tour round Spiegelgrund, that’s at Steinhof. That’s where … But those really were the most severely handicapped children …’ And why were you actually taken to Spiegelgrund. What was the purpose of the tour? ‘Well, that was … so that they could show us that [a life like] that practically wasn’t worth living.’ Only later, serving with the auxiliary service in Yugoslavia, and witnessing the Partisan war for herself, did the woman start to have reservations. Later, through her future husband, who was in the resistance, she came to understand completely what was happening. The BDM leader, on the other hand, justified the persecution of Jews explicitly. Even the attack on the Soviet Union was not a crime, but a preemptive war and a battle against an ideology, Bolshevism, and its supporters the Jews. ‘It was certainly … it was, if I may say so, I don’t know about Lenin, but Trotsky and the others … it really was Jewish Bolshevism’. Five women came to the exhibition accompanied by their husbands and agreed to be interviewed. One of them had studied law during the Nazi period, and then worked at an ‘industrial tribunal’, probably in the ‘Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’ (109b). She vehemently dismissed any suggestion of having acted in the interests of National Socialism: ‘I didn’t actually follow what was going on very much … We were so cut off, my grandmother, me and the child, and we were so full of worries of our own, that we didn’t have time to think about anyone else …’ Even events an the Eastern Front supposedly did not interest her: ‘My husband was in the West.’ At a later point in her account, she did nonetheless concede that she had been active in the Nazi organization ‘Belief and Beauty’, a section of the BDM for young women aged 18 to 21, and that she had firmly believed, until shortly before the end of the war, that the ‘V-weapons’ would deliver ultimate victory.

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The accounts of the other four women were very clearly different from the one described above. One had witnessed the ‘Aryanizations’ in Vienna (97); from photos or conversations of soldiers on leave, they had picked up hints of the crimes in the East (39b, 97); they knew about the existence of concentration camps, and had a good idea what went on there (83b); or they had heard, while serving in the War Auxiliary Service in Yugoslavia, how the Germans were conducting the war against the Partisans (93b). Whilst the last of these interviewees revealed no information about her parental home, the other three grew up in households in which anti-Nazi attitudes prevailed. The two widows came to the exhibition with clear intentions: they were messengers for the dead. By virtue of their marriages, the war had become an important aspect of their lives, and the exhibition provided them with a public arena in which to proclaim their marriage partners’ legacy. One of the messages was that the Wehrmacht had fought a clean fight, both in the East and in the West, and that, on both fronts, they had faced a brutal and criminal enemy (140). Following the defeat at Stalingrad, the husband, an airman, had been posted to Italy, where, as a paratrooper, he had survived the battles of Monte Cassino. Now she had to defend him against the exhibition’s – alleged – claim that he had been a murderer. The other widow had lost her husband because of the enduring consequences of war: he could not live with the fact that his unit had taken part in a massacre in France, and took his own life after the war. He had left behind his wife and five children (26). Just like their husbands, who had been called up and then required to obey orders, the two women feel themselves to be victims.

4.7 Conclusions In attempting to draw general conclusions from these analyses of individual cases, we find that it is possible to do so only with respect to the particular age groups. The range of experiences, the degree of involvement and the strategies for dealing with these experiences are too different for any universal conclusions to be drawn. 4.7.1 War children (born 1929–35) Nearly all the individuals in this age group witnessed for themselves the crimes of the Nazi regime in their own country – the persecution of Jews, the inhumane treatment of forced labourers, the death marches in 1945. Their recollections of these events were detailed and candid. However, from stories or allusions heard within the family home, they had also come to learn about the war being fought on distant fronts. For some, the anti-Nazi climate in the family home had made it easier to know how to deal with this knowledge. Others, whose parents were Nazis, had been affected in their ability to see things clearly. Those who voiced the strongest criticism of the Nazi era were those whose parents had wanted to protect their children from

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the reality of the crimes: they had experienced their childhood and youth as oppressive, and they also viewed the post-war period critically, because of the widespread practice of hushing things up or denying them altogether. 4.7.2 The ‘last reserve’ (1925–28) Two-thirds of the individuals in this group had witnessed the war as soldiers – at a time when fronts were collapsing and the military was in permanent retreat. The others had come close to the action; for example, as trainee recruits, through joining the RAD, by becoming involved with the building of tank traps or by serving in the Volkssturm. Nor were the women excluded from this experience. Most have retained terrible images – of the Partisan war in Yugoslavia, of the disregard for the civilian population and of the persecution of Jews – combined with a feeling of the total senselessness of their efforts. Attempts to legitimize these efforts retrospectively are observed only in the few instances of individuals who spent longer at the front, and who were therefore more exposed to the typical rationalizations of the soldiering community. For most of the interviewees, the revisiting of past events caused them to reflect on the distorting impact of the education and propaganda of the time, and to evaluate critically their own role during this period. 4.7.3 The soldiers (1920–24) Most of the interviewees had taken part in the war against the Soviet Union. The crimes perpetrated there against Soviet war captives and Jews were not denied, although the Partisan war appears to be remembered as a strangely vague event, evidently still surrounded by taboos. Four postures are typically observed on the part of those confronting these crimes: (1) dissociation from the events, (2) remaining troubled by them, (3) acknowledgement of the crimes, combined with either a blanket denial or a tried and trusted legitimization of any personal involvement, and (4) the openly Nazi-like justification of the crimes. The behaviour outlined under point 3 is typical of the majority of the interviewees. The typical legitimization pattern consists of a combination of several exculpatory arguments. The most frequently observed pattern combines the following arguments: one had only been in ‘forward’ positions, serving at the front, while the crimes had been perpetrated by special units ‘at the rear’, and one was compulsorily enlisted and under orders, with no room for discretion. Statements by the older soldiers, born between 1915 and 1919, are also consistent with this model, as are the positions articulated by the veterans in this age group who took part in the group conversations. 4.7.4 The women (1920–35) Differences in the way that the women interviewees responded, when recalling the Nazi period, correspond with the age group to which they belong.

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Women born in the years 1930–35 do not respond in the same way as their male contemporaries to the crimes that took place all around them. Boys were conditioned at school, and in the Hitler Youth, into becoming the warriors of the future, and therefore identified strongly with the National Socialist war. Girls, on the other hand, were prepared for their future role as mothers, and therefore their field of experience tended to be restricted to the domestic sphere. This provided a space in which they could acquire and develop the capacity for empathy. This is reflected in their more precise characterizations of the crimes, in a greater determination to break through the wall of silence, and in a remarkable degree of concern for the victims. This observed gender difference disappears for the women born between 1920 and 1925. Due to their greater age, they were exposed for longer to indoctrination both at school and in their extra-curricular activities. Subsequently, during their vocational training, they came into contact with central facets of the annihilation agenda – for example, euthanasia and Germanization. This affected the way they perceived things, and interfered with, or reduced, the capacity for empathy which was so evident in the previous age group. The only exceptions, apparently, occurred were where the parents had imparted a fundamentally different outlook on the Nazi system, and where it was possible, within the family environment, to discuss all experiences freely. In the case of the war widows, the death of the husband had assumed an importance that transcended everything else, leading, in some cases, to the male interpretation of events supplanting their own point of view.

Part II The Wehrmacht in Collective Memory after 1945

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5 Defining the Victims of Nazism: The Austrian ‘War Victims Benefits Act’ (KOVG) in Cabinet Discussions, Parliamentary Debates and the Press Günther Sandner and Walter Manoschek

Millions of frontline soldiers believed they were courageously and selflessly devoting their lives to a Fatherland that had almost been driven to ruin by the Versailles Treaty, and faced the even greater threat of Stalin’s Communism. Democracy, a functioning constitution, and a stable society were things this generation had not enjoyed for a long time. They had no knowledge of the appalling crimes to which their idealism and commitment would make them unwitting accessories, and when they found out, it was much too late. (Jörg Haider, The Freedom that I Mean, 1993, p. 115) … when one considers the conditions under which Austrians were forced to serve in Wehrmacht1 (From notes to the first Austrian War Victims Benefits Act)

5.1 Introduction The two extracts above illustrate two contrasting Austrian approaches to dealing with the past. On the one hand, articulated by the former Freedom Party (FPÖ) leader Jörg Haider, is a construction characterized by a positive attitude toward ‘doing one’s duty’ under the Nazi regime and ‘making sacrifices’ for the ‘Fatherland’. This approach is typical of the German nationalist ‘Third Camp’ in Austrian politics. During the Waldheim controversy,2 a substantial proportion of the Austrian public and, in particular, the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) adhered to it. A different approach, on the other hand, 99

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is typified by the second quotation. Here, the emphasis is on compulsion and the ‘un-Austrian’ character of National Socialism, to which the Austrians had submitted only under conditions of extreme duress. In two respects, however, the two approaches converge: first, in both constructions – even if the emphasis is quite different – the soldiers of the Wehrmacht are seen as victims. For Haider, and from the perspective of the Third Camp, they are idealists who were led astray, and to whom posterity has failed to show due gratitude. In the commentary on the War Victims Benefits Act (KOVG), on the other hand, they are portrayed as having been coerced into serving a foreign state. The two approaches also converge on a second issue: both perspectives constitute a complete abrogation of responsibility for any crimes, be this due to ignorance on the part of the soldiers, or powerlessness to act. 5.1.1 War victims’ benefits in Austria The subject of benefits for soldiers harmed by the effects of war, and their dependents, did not arise for the first time during the Second World War. The First Republic (1918–33/4) had already had to face this problem. The War Invalid Compensation Act that came into effect on 1 July 1919, along with its total of 15 amendments, actually remained in force for some months following the Anschluss. However, as a consequence of legal alignment, it was partly replaced on 1 October 1938, and completely replaced in April 1939, by the German Imperial Welfare Law.3 The welfare of former members of the newly created German Wehrmacht was covered by the Wehrmacht Care and Welfare Act4 of 26 August 1938 (Hasiba, 1979, p. 22). The impact of war on civilians was dealt with under the Personal Injuries Act5 of 10 November 1940. Under transitional legislative arrangements, the Second Republic initially retained many legal provisions from the Nazi period. Over the longer term, however, the new democratic authorities would have to devise their own laws and regulations. The way that the issue of war victims was handled as part of this process is a subject of particular interest: for the designation of former Wehrmacht soldiers (and subsequently members of the SS) as ‘victims’ was a logical outcome of the official state claim to victimhood, which commanded a broad consensus amongst the political elite. This previously mentioned, universal notion of victimhood could not, however, coincide completely with the subjective experience of those who took part in the war (see Chapter 3 in this volume). Moreover, political victims of National Socialism and Austrian Jews didn’t fit neatly into this construction because they were – to put it bluntly – the victims of the Austrian ‘victim’ group already referred to. This presented a challenge, not only in terms of political morality, but also in terms of the official interpretation of history. Jewish voices, too, pointed out the contradictory nature of the ‘victim’ construction in relation to the welfare of war victims. Thus Emil Maurer, then president of the Jewish Cultural Community, maintained in 1953 that if Austria really

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had been a victim, it should not be paying pensions to Wehrmacht soldiers who, when all was said and done, had certainly not been fighting for its freedom (see Embacher, 1995, pp. 143–4). What was the nature of the political context in which Austria’s political actors sought to legislate on the welfare of war victims? The War Victims Benefits Act (KOVG) was passed in 1949, by which time the national ‘claim to victimhood’ had already undergone a radical change. Whereas Austria’s political strategy in 1945, and immediately afterwards, had been to exaggerate and draw attention to Austria’s own part, compared to that of the Allies, in bringing about liberation from National Socialism,6 by now, the integration of former National Socialists – supporters, Wehrmacht soldiers and the SS (in other words, the vast majority of Austrian society) – was high on the political agenda.7 The years 1948–49 marked a clear political watershed. By 1948 – on the initiative of the Soviets – some 90 per cent of the least incriminated ex-Nazis had been amnestied, bringing to an end ‘denazification’ as a mass phenomenon (Stiefel, 1981, pp. 300–8). In keeping with this, the number of convictions under the ‘Banning Law’ and war crimes legislation reduced dramatically from 1949 onwards.8 In late 1948, an association for those ‘affected by restitution’ was formed.9 This organization intervened against alleged ‘injustices’ that ‘Aryanizers’ were faced with as a consequence of the restitution of ‘Aryanized’ (i.e., looted) fortunes (Bailer, 1995). This was followed in February 1949 by the founding, with the support of the Austrian Socialist Party (SPÖ), of the ‘Association of Independents’ (VdU),10 which saw itself from the outset as a political gathering point for former National Socialists (Luther, 1997, p. 286). Having been threatened by the denazification laws during the early post-war years, these groups were courted strenuously by politicians in the late 1940s. Conversely, the changing political climate meant that Austrian resistance to National Socialism played an increasingly marginal role, both in terms of Austria’s projected image abroad, and in relation to establishing an identity at home. Following the dissolution of the non-partisan ‘League of the Politically Persecuted’ in 1948, there was no longer a unified interest group representing the victims of the Nazis, which led to an overall weakening of the position of victims’ organizations (Forster, 2001, p. 137). As a result of policies designed to integrate the majority of the population; having lent their support to National Socialism, or at least not actively opposed it, ‘the subject of resistance, by the late 1940s, had become practically taboo’ in the political arena (Neugebauer, 1997, p. 163). The debates in the cabinet and the lower chamber of parliament, the Nationalrat, concerning the introduction of the KOVG, must be considered against the backdrop of this ‘climate of reconciliation’. Oliver Rathkolb’s general claim about this phase in the development of policies for dealing with the past applies also to the KOVG: ‘Substantive discussions were a thing

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of the past, and probably the most frequently used word in the years 1948–49 was ‘reconciliation’ (Rathkolb, 1986, p. 99). The historical image of the Wehrmacht underwent a transformation in the latter half of the 1940s. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the Wehrmacht was not considered ‘untainted’ by any means, but rather as the military instrument of National Socialism (see the analysis of press coverage by Alexander Pollak, Chapter 6 in this volume). Early cabinet meetings considered the role played by Austrians in the Wehrmacht in view of the government’s strategy of ‘claiming victimhood’. During this initial post-war period, the government’s political intention was to play up Austrian resistance, so as to divert attention away from Austria’s share of responsibility for National Socialism, as encapsulated in the ‘Moscow Declaration’.11 The Allies’ view that Austrians in the Wehrmacht had fought for Hitler with passion and enthusiasm, and that Austria could not therefore be acquitted of responsibility, was to be countered by an Austrian version of history. State Chancellor Karl Renner set out the direction in the summer of 1945: ‘We must now go one step further and say: we were punished enough during those years – and we must now say more and more clearly that we bear no responsibility at all. That is the only way that we can gradually recover our freedom’ (quoted in Enderle-Burcel et al., 1999, p. 353). The communist minister Ernst Fischer suggested ‘that we … must underline the fact that we have made our own contribution to our liberation. We must tell the world the facts about our resistance’ (quoted in Enderle-Burcel et al. 1999, p. 354). This emphasis on the resistance went hand in hand with the downplaying of the role of Austrians in the Wehrmacht – for at the time in question, the summer of 1945, the Wehrmacht had not yet been absolved of responsibility for the crimes that had been perpetrated. The line of argumentation suggested by the junior minister Franz Winterer was not, therefore, aimed at a general exoneration of the Wehrmacht – his concern was much more to portray the Austrians within the Wehrmacht as a source of danger to National Socialism, and as potential war saboteurs: ‘There was no Austrian army left – not even a single Austrian company. All our officers, NCOs and men were scattered across the entire German Reich. This was done intentionally, because they were afraid that our people would sabotage the war effort’ (quoted in Enderle-Burcel et al., 1999, p. 355). The Austrian state government summarized its position in an official declaration to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA): When the war broke out in September 1939, there was no such political entity as the ‘Republic of Austria’ and neither, therefore, was Austria a belligerent power. The country had been broken up into seven provinces answerable directly to the Reich. Her people were disenfranchised, and

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politically powerless and helpless. Her officers and soldiers were, without exception, dispersed amongst German military groupings, and not a single formation, down to the level of company, consisted mainly of Austrians. (quoted in Enderle-Burcel et al., 1999, p. 363) In foreign policy, the ‘claim to victimhood’ served to distance Austria from the ‘German’ Wehrmacht. The Wehrmacht was characterized in the early post-war years as a German institution, into which Austrians had been forced against their will. This narrative, in its basic form, existed from the Austrian declaration of independence in April 1945 onwards. In legislation relating to it, the Wehrmacht was referred to as an institution that had committed wrongdoing,12 but a clear distinction was maintained between the Wehrmacht as an institution and the Austrian soldiers who had served in its ranks. Because the latter had not been represented as a group, even at the lowest levels of the organization, they could not now be held collectively responsible. In the domestic political arena, the ‘claim to victimhood’ functioned as a means with which to promote the national and social reintegration of Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers. With regard to material welfare, the so-called war injured – that is, those who had fought in German uniform – and their dependents were, from the outset, better off than the victims of political and racial persecution under National Socialism. If one compares the ‘Victim Compensation Act’ (OFG),13 which had been enacted back in 1945, with the KOVG, it is immediately apparent that the OFG is concerned with paying ‘victims of the struggle for a free and democratic Austria’ state compensation with the character of voluntary, charitable support. The awarding of a pension was means-tested, with the level of pension being determined by the regulations governing payments to war invalids and their surviving dependants. Thus, payments to the victims of National Socialism were based from the start on the material benefits that former Austrian soldiers received from the Wehrmacht (see Forster, 2001, pp. 124f.). This levelling, not to say conflation, of the victims of Nazism with the ‘victims of war’ is typical for Austria, and originated in the immediate aftermath of the war. Initially, it was necessary to place the political victims of National Socialism in the foreground when dealing with the Allied Powers, whereas domestically, the governing parties continued to work towards the creation of a national victim group. Members of the Wehrmacht were not only included in this group, but – as the numerically strongest sub-group – would soon be top of the pecking order amongst victim groups. 5.1.2 Research questions and selected debates In the following sections, rationales resorted to by the Austrian government and the political parties in relation to those entitled to war victims’ benefits – in

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other words, former soldiers of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS, and their surviving dependants – are analysed and placed within the context of the ‘politics of memory’. The analysis begins with the political debates surrounding the initial, interim provisions for war victims’ welfare, and then turns to the development and introduction of the original KOVG, which came into force on 1 January 1950. The first amendments, from the period up to 1955, are then also analysed. This temporal limitation is in part pragmatic, because the current project had only limited personnel and financial resources at its disposal. However, a further reason is that a preliminary evaluation of the limited amount of literature available, and of the relevant sources, revealed that the topic was debated more thoroughly and comprehensively during this period than at any time afterwards. This does not exclude the possibility that important subsequent political developments in connection with the past could have impacted on debates about the KOVG. For example, the period of government under Chancellor Bruno Kreisky (1970–83) was described in a publication by the Central Organization of War Victims’ Associations14 as the ‘golden age for war victims’ welfare’ (Ernst, 1995, p. 272). Also, the impact of the Waldheim Affair, and the resulting doubts in relation to the ‘claim to victimhood’, would certainly be worthy of closer study. Besides tracing the general developmental history of the substance of the Act, three debates about the KOVG – in the cabinet, the national parliament and selected print media – are subjected to closer analysis. The following cabinet and parliamentary Nationalrat debates were selected for this analysis: ●

●

●

The debate on the first KOVG, which was approved by the Nationalrat on 14 July 1949. The KOGV came into force on 1 January 1950, and was amended several times in 1957 for the purpose of clarification. The debate is interesting in part because of the proposal to lift certain entitlement exclusions that still applied. In particular, former National Socialists who, according to the ‘National Socialism Act’ or the Banning Law, were liable for atonement payments were not initially entitled to any benefits under the KOVG. The interesting question here is how the political parties and the government set out their respective positions with respect to this exclusion clause. The cabinet discussion of the KOVG on 26 June 1951, and the subsequent Nationalrat debate, which led ultimately to the first amendment adopted by the Nationalrat. Amongst other important questions was the extension of benefit entitlement to ‘ethnic Germans’, which the minister for social affairs had been particularly strongly in favour of. Close attention is paid to the arguments put forward by the political actors in favour of broadening the constituency of those entitled to benefits. The cabinet discussion of 15 June 1954 and the subsequent Nationalrat debate, in which a new amendment – the fourth – was on the agenda. The

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amendment, which came into force on 1 September 1954, led to clear social and financial improvements for war victims. The two relatively short debates illustrate, on the one hand, the typical constellation of opinion inside the government, in which the minister for social affairs (Karl Maisel) emerged as an advocate for the interests of war victims, while the finance minister (Reinhard Kamitz) pressed for fiscal moderation. On the other hand, the Nationalrat debate clearly shows the consensus, in principle, of all the parliamentary parties on the question of the KOVG. The successful passage into law, in the early 1950s, of the politically highly sensitive extension of entitlement to former members of the Waffen-SS, ‘incriminated’ National Socialists and ‘ethnic Germans’ brought about the integration of these groups into the Austrian ‘national victim group’. Thereafter, the subject of the KOVG was reduced to a purely budgetary matter. The former combatants were defined as victims, and firmly planted as such in the collective memory for decades to come. 5.1.3 Literature and sources Whilst there are quite a few scholarly papers dealing comprehensively with so-called ‘victim compensation’ in Austria, there is very little available on the subject of war victims’ welfare benefits. The literature on the Victim Compensation Act (OFG) does make a regular point of casting a comparative and morally critical look at welfare provision for former Wehrmacht soldiers and their dependants, yet despite the relatedness and occasional interdependence of the two issues, a true comparative analysis has yet to be undertaken. However, there is a literature – of a decidedly apologist character – on the subject of war victims’ welfare. This has been produced and published by the war victims’ associations themselves, sometimes in collaboration with the Federal Ministry for Social Affairs.15 In addition to the small amount of available literature, therefore, we have made use of relevant original source material. The minutes of cabinet discussions were viewed at the cabinet offices or at the Austrian state archive. In addition to the selected cabinet discussions, the corresponding Nationalrat debates and their coverage in the press were also analysed. 5.1.4 Context and actors In the context of war victims’ welfare provision, as already explained, not only Wehrmacht soldiers and their dependants, but also, subsequently, members of the Waffen-SS are designated as ‘victims’ in such a way that they are regarded in some sense as being on a par with those persecuted by the Nazi regime. The problem that arises is clear: the only people refused victim status were those in leadership positions, whose involvement in National Socialism and its policy of annihilation was patently voluntary, and who displayed an unusual level of commitment.

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The complex character of the Austrian concept of victimhood has been clearly demonstrated by studies on the subject. Critical studies must accordingly take this multi-dimensionality into account. Gerhard Botz (1996a, p. 57) distinguishes the following aspects and variants of the Austrian claim to victimhood: ● ● ●

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Austria as the victim of Germany Austrians as victims of the World War Austrians in general (not merely the persecuted) as victims of National Socialism Austrians who, as rape victims, victims of looting and prisoners of war, were victims of excesses by Allied soldiers, especially the Soviets Austria, as a ‘subjugated nation’, once again a victim of the victorious powers Austrians who, as former Nazis, that is to say, ‘ordinary party members and journeymen’ were victims of anti-Nazi legislation and the denazification of the administrative infrastructure

As Gerhard Botz observes, this enabled practically all Austrians to see themselves as victims. And yet, those who really did suffer extreme persecution or death on ‘racial’, political or other grounds were accorded only limited victim status, if any at all. Richard Mitten (1999b) has pointed out that, in conjunction with the development of an Austrian nationalism / national identity, this construction of an all-encompassing notion of Austrian victimhood was completely in harmony with the political strategy of the Western Allies because it underlined Austria’s distinctness from Germany, whose revival was to be checked, along with any lingering Austrian desires for accession. The historiographic constructions of the two main political camps after 1945 also implied Austrian victimhood: whilst the ÖVP celebrated its martyr Dollfuß16 and dubbed the Schuschnigg17 government the last bastion against Hitler, the SPÖ portrayed itself as the victim of a fascism that had already begun in 1933–34 (under Dollfuß) as opposed to 1938, and which had helped to prepare the ground for the Nazi regime. Both discourses ruled out any responsibility for what had happened during the Third Reich. Consequently, there was no specific place in such a victim group for persecuted and murdered Jews (Mitten, 1999b). As complex as the victimhood concept was, and remains, the significance of the claim to victimhood changed according to the political situation of the moment. Its legitimacy actually derived from the Moscow Declaration of Autumn 1943, in which, in fact, the Austrian share of responsibility for the war had also been noted. In the course of the ‘Waldheim debate’ its tenuousness became ever more evident: could one be the victim of a regime, at the same time as doing one’s duty in its army? The late 1980s and the 1990s saw a partial acknowledgement of complicity, for which the Social Democratic

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federal chancellor, Franz Vranitzky, took much of the responsibility. This did not, however, seriously threaten the hegemonic historical interpretation of Austrian victimhood. The period under review is an interesting one in any event, for it was at the start of the 1950s that we see the emergence of the ‘double speak’ which can be seen as being characteristic of Austrian strategies for dealing with the past. By drawing attention to the home-grown resistance, Austria presented itself to the world at large as an anti-fascist state. In Austria itself, however, this memory of the resistance was increasingly marginalized, or even denigrated, while at the same time tributes were paid to Wehrmacht soldiers – when unveiling war memorials, for example – for ‘doing their duty’ and ‘defending the Homeland’. At the negotiations on the Austrian State Treaty, a proposed clause acknowledging complicity was ruled out. The legal argument resorted to – as it had been over demands for material compensation for Jewish victims of the Nazis – was that from March 1938, there had been no Austrian state (Uhl, 2001, p. 25). What lines of argument were used in the Austrian cabinet and the Austrian parliament to support the status of ‘victim’ for soldiers who had served the Nazi regime? To what extent did the tensions already alluded to actually surface, and to what extent did this lead to competing discourses? The answer to these questions may indicate that Norbert Frei’s dictum – that policy for dealing with the past was oriented less towards the victims of the Nazi regime than towards the victims of ‘coming to terms with it’ – is even more true in Austria’s case than in the case of the early German Federal Republic (Frei, 1996, p. 14). 5.1.5 Victim compensation and war victim welfare – two sides of the same coin? Unlike the Federal Republic of Germany, the Republic of Austria did not consider itself, after 1945, to be under any obligation to make restitution payments to the victims of National Socialism. The only duty it acknowledged were so-called ‘measures of care’, which, under the terms of the 1945 Victim Compensation Act (OFG), were in any case restricted to political resistance fighters (Bailer, 1993, p. 25). According to Austrian perceptions, a state which had itself been a victim of the Nazi regime had nothing to make amends for vis-à-vis the victims of National Socialism. It is quite obvious that Austrians, too, were represented right across the trio of ‘perpetrators, victims and bystanders’ (Raul Hilberg), yet despite this, issues connected with both war victims and the victims of National Socialism were tackled on the basis of an inclusive and undifferentiated notion of victim. The 1947 OFG had already linked victim and accidental injury pensions to those of war victims: ‘In this way, the victims of National Socialism, as well as those who fought against National Socialism, were placed on a par with those who, as serving Wehrmacht soldiers, albeit reluctantly for the most part, helped to envelop Europe in National Socialist terror’, argues Brigitte Bailer (1993, p. 25). This principle of (at least implicit) equivalence, disputed by the victims’ organizations, endures to this day.

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With regard specifically to the rates of benefit, the two laws were administered conjointly. Comparatively speaking, benefit payments to soldiers of the Republic, deemed to have been victims of National Socialism and the German Reich, appear to have been taken on willingly and without hesitation. At the root of this was a socio-political necessity, namely the need to reintegrate combatants and returning prisoners of war (for more on the consequent implementation, see Bailer, 1999). By contrast, the integration of victims of the Nazi regime, whether (surviving) Austrian Jews, political resistance fighters or those returning from exile, was seen from a functional perspective as much less important, with the potential to have a disruptive impact on the official historical narrative. Examples of the unambiguously preferential treatment of ‘war victims’ by comparison with ‘victims of the Nazis’ are nonetheless fairly remarkable. Widows of fallen soldiers, for example, received a surviving dependant’s pension without regard to their own capacity for work, whereas widows of those condemned to death by the Nazi regime only received a pension under the OFG if they were both unable to keep themselves, and had no other family to support them. The political parties, who soon established their own offices to deal with returnees, recognized the former Wehrmacht soldiers as a substantial pool of potential voters. This was scarcely a consideration for the few remaining Austrian Jews, and those in the political resistance. The inequality of treatment can also be seen clearly in the case of compensation for returning POWs. In the 1950s, even war criminals convicted abroad came to enjoy returnees’ compensation, as shown by the example of Josef Weiszl, an agent of the SD (the intelligence wing of the SS) and a member of Eichmann’s staff. He was directly involved in ‘rounding up’ Jews in Vienna, Prague, Paris and Lyon, and was guilty of grievous maltreatment. Weiszl was deported to France and sentenced to life imprisonment, but pardoned in 1955, upon which he returned to Austria. He said about his reception: ‘On my return to Austria, I was informed by the Federal Chancellor’s office that I was covered by the provisions for late returnees, and also that I was entitled to compensation for returning POWs’(Bailer, 1999). No further legal proceedings were instigated against Weiszl in Austria (Bailer, 1999). Returning Jewish refugees and concentration camp prisoners, on the other hand, were left to their own devices and to the charitable aid of international organizations. Last but not least, a strong voice on behalf of former soldiers was provided by the war victims’ organizations, which acted as a lobby on matters relating to political strategy for dealing with the past. 5.1.6 The Central Organization of War Victims’ Associations In the First Republic, organizations for war victims were segregated along party political lines. This situation changed in the Second Republic, as the

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claims of the organizations merged seamlessly with the emerging political culture of cross-party consensus. As early as the autumn of 1946, a basis was established for the founding of an Austrian ‘Central Organization of War Victims’ Associations’. War victim officials from the federal states had met in Salzburg to prepare for the creation of an Austrian nationwide interest group (Karrer, 1979, p. 39). This brought into existence a powerful lobby, which called again and again for continued financial improvements. This was very different from the situation affecting victims’ compensation, as the victims of the Nazi regime had no similarly influential interest group. The non-partisan ‘NS Victims’ Association’18 was disbanded in 1948 in response to communist takeover attempts, and in the wake of the communist seizure of power in Czechoslovakia. This difference in the organizational strength of the two interest groups was reflected in the fact that amendments to the KOVG were frequently designed to suit the Central Organization. Those of its demands that were within the realms of financial feasibility were largely met. The Central Organization’s successes included, amongst others, the fact that in the course of the first wave of amendments, an increasing number of exceptions to the citizenship clause were introduced (on questions of entitlement, see Ernst, 1995, pp. 241–4). The Central Organization was involved from the start in the process of evaluating the law, and its views were sometimes represented by the social affairs minister, Karl Maisel, especially in his speech to the cabinet.19 If one reads through the history of Austrian war victim welfare benefits written by Karl Ernst, a head of section in the ministry for social affairs, and a man extremely well-disposed toward the Central Organization, it can bee seen that from the perspective of the war victims’ lobby groups, there were two main areas of concern: on the one hand, the question of entitlement to benefits under the KOVG, and on the other hand, the level of benefit payments, which was determined, amongst other things, by the ‘degree of incapacity for work’ stated in percentage terms. Besides collaborating on the drafting of laws affecting war victims, the Central Organization and its long-time president, Friedrich Karrer, continually tried to stimulate public pressure in favour of its demands. This could extend to announcing, or at least threatening, protest marches on Vienna, should their demands not be adequately met. This occurred in 1963, when the payment levels planned for 1964 seemed insufficient to the Central Organization of War Victims’ Associations (Ernst, 1995, p. 252). In 1964, the threat of action by the war victims was mobilized again, and only when negotiations between the Central Organization and the federal ministers for social affairs and finance were concluded to the former’s satisfaction, were arrangements for the threatened ‘march on Vienna by 40,000 war victims’ called off (Ernst, 1995, p. 268). Some three years later, there was a renewed show of political strength by the Central Organization. The benefit levels announced in the 1967 budget seemed far too low to satisfy the expectations of war victims. A demonstration

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in Vienna’s Stadthalle20 on 25 October 1967, was attended by some 14,000 war victims (Ernst, 1995, p. 269). Until very recently, the Central Organization understood how to make it clear that war victims constituted a sizeable group of voters. Nationalrat member Otto Libal (SPÖ), for example, argued this point quite unequivocally. He made a speech on 18 May 1990, as executive president of the Central Organization, in which he complained that amongst the younger generation of politicians, understanding for the concerns of war victims was evidently on the decline (he was referring to the finance minister, Ferdinand Lacina, and minister for social affairs, Walter Geppert). Referring to the Nationalrat elections due to be held in October 1990, he pointed out matter-of-factly that there were still 128,000 war victims entitled to pensions, and that together with family members, this meant almost a quarter of a million voters (Ernst, 1995, p. 303). This was an extremely thinly disguised message to his party colleagues in the government. There have been numerous examples, including some very recent ones, of the relative disadvantaging of victims, as compared to ‘perpetrators’. Whilst expellees continued to be disadvantaged with respect to pension entitlements into the 1980s, periods of military service were, for the most part, accredited without question for pension purposes – after a short time, even for members of the SS. In this domain, some extreme cases can be cited: the widow of Adolf Eichmann’s collaborator, Alois Brunner, received a widow’s pension under the KOVG, as the widow of a supposedly ‘missing person’. Even Walter Reder, responsible for the Marzabotto massacre in Italy, was awarded a KOVG pension from 1967, whilst still serving a prison sentence in Italy (Bailer, 1993, p. 268). The Central Organization of War Victims’ Associations is involved in the legislative process, not only in terms of review, but also in the actual implementation of the KOVG. For example, the provincial war invalid offices, which are responsible for granting KOVG pensions, make use of arbitration panels: war victims are involved in the associated appeal tribunals through their local organizations. The world view of the war victims’ associations is remarkably onedimensional, because it epitomizes the national claim to victimhood in a particularly idealized manner. In a publication on war victim welfare in Austria, the Federal President, Rudolf Kirchschläger, made the following statement: Whilst the Austrian Republic did not participate in the Second World War, many Austrian citizens were drawn into active service, and many were seriously wounded, even in the Homeland. Following the rebirth of our Republic, the decision was already taken in1945 that in the interests of war victims, the Austrian Republic would for the time being continue the payments, in the form of advances, that were no longer obtainable from

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the German Reich. This was in order to avert the most severe hardship for individual war victims, and for war widows and orphans. (Bundesministerium für soziale Verwaltung / Zentralorganization der Kriegsopferverbände Österreichs, 1979, p. 3) It is interesting to note the assumed general unwillingness with which Austrian soldiers had supposedly take part in the Nazi regime’s war. There is no suggestion here that not everyone who had served the Nazi regime could have been a victim. At the same time, the phraseology implies that the Republic of Austria should not actually be held responsible for the extant claims, which is why the Republic had only assumed this responsibility ‘for the time being’ (see Bundesministerium für soziale Verwaltung / Zentralorganization der Kriegsopferverbände Österreichs, 1979, p. 9).

5.2 Discussion of the KOVG by the Austrian cabinet (Ministerrat) 5.2.1 The time of the provisional state government21 The subject of legislation on war victims’ welfare was first debated at a session of the provisional Renner government on 12 June 1945, under the working title ‘legislation on temporary measures for compensation of war victims’. Even in this first debate on the substance of the law, certain basic patterns in the approach to the (war) victim question, and the status of the Wehrmacht, began to crystallize. On the one hand, the term ‘victim’ was applied virtually without question to Wehrmacht soldiers in general (and not only to them), whilst on the other hand, there was a clear political intention to widen, step by step, the constituency of potential beneficiaries under the welfare provisions. The purpose of the law under discussion was to provide for the resumption of payments to war victims. The basis for this was to be the welfare regulations that were in force under the Nazi regime. Because of the Legislative Transition Act (StGBl No. 6), the Wehrmacht Care and Welfare Act, for example, was still in force. However, because its application to the full extent would have been impossible on budgetary grounds, the initial plan was to authorize, as a transitional arrangement, payment of pensions at half their previous level. From the beginning, the question loomed of the relationship between victims of the Nazis and war victims. At the cabinet meeting in question, the communist minister Johann Koplenig (KPÖ) referred already to the need to include a ruling on the question of concentration camp survivors. Koplenig’s exact words were, ‘I do not believe that the question of support for these victims can be considered as an act of charity. It is the duty of the Government to make a decision on the issue.’22 Also during this session, the junior minister Ferdinand Nagl (ÖVP) argued against deeming membership

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of the Waffen-SS to be a blanket disqualification from war victims’ welfare payments (Enderle-Burcel, Jerábek and Kammerhofer, 1995, p. 218). Thus, two significant strands of discourse were already present in embryonic form: on the one hand, the interrelatedness of the two issues through a universal concept of victimhood, and on the other hand, the political striving for a broadening of the recipient group. But the argument put forward by junior minister Nagl led to a paradoxical problem. Benefit payments in force under the Nazi regime were to be used provisionally as the basis for calculating war victims’ pensions, but these were higher for members of the Waffen-SS than for soldiers in the Wehrmacht. Thus, given this definition of the victim group, former members of the Waffen-SS would not only be fully recognized as victims, they would actually become a privileged group amongst victims. Consequently, the minister Johann Böhm (SPÖ) warned of the possible preferential treatment of former Waffen-SS men ‘relative to other war victims’ (Johann Böhm, in EnderleBurcel, Jerábek and Kammerhofer, 1995, p. 219). Such preferential treatment seemed inopportune, and was one reason why members of the Waffen-SS were initially barred from receiving benefits under the provisional war victims’ welfare arrangements. In his pleading on behalf of members of the Waffen-SS, Nagl argued that membership of the Waffen-SS was only voluntary in the early days. As the war continued, compulsory enlistment was introduced, and it would ultimately be unfair to exclude those recruited under duress from receiving benefits. At any rate, the extension of war victims’ benefits to former WaffenSS members was not something that could be undertaken in the summer of 1945 – not least because the views of the Allies had to be taken into account. It was also unclear how, and according to what precise criteria, a distinction would be made between voluntary and involuntary members of the WaffenSS. Böhm argued that a ‘clean break’ had to be made before parts of the former Waffen-SS could enjoy the benefits of war victims’ welfare provision (Johann Böhm, in Enderle-Burcel, Jerábek and Kammerhofer, 1995, p. 219). In this session there was also some discussion about the extent to which the two topics of victim compensation and war victims’ welfare should be linked. Böhm spoke against linking the two on the grounds that catering for the victims of Nazi terror would require huge sums of money, giving rise to a shortfall in support for war victims (Johann Böhm, in Enderle-Burcel, Jerábek and Kammerhofer, 1995). This argument is clearly indicative of a remarkable setting of priorities on the part of the Austrian government: on the one hand, by subsuming them under a single heading, it sought to avoid distinguishing between Austrian perpetrators and the actual victims, and – in keeping with official Austrian political doctrine – establish an all-embracing notion of Austrian victimhood. On the other hand, at a deeper level, and for reasons of political expediency, a distinction was made between victim groups – welfare and pension rights versus compensation – with certain

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advantages being conferred upon the war victim group, whose compass was being steadily widened. This extensive, yet at the same time, selective use of the term ‘victim’ is also clear in the argument of the junior minister Franz Winterer (SPÖ), who explained literally that ‘war victims’ should be considered to include not only soldiers, but also civilians who had lost their lives as a result of bombing. Furthermore, the martyrs who fell for Austria and occupational invalids should also be considered victims (Johann Böhm, in Enderle-Burcel, Jerábek and Kammerhofer, 1995, p. 219). The victims of racially motivated persecution were not mentioned in his catalogue of victims. In the event, the government session of 12 June 1945 decided to place 200,000 Reich Marks at the disposal of ‘Volkssolidarität’, an association which included representatives of the three anti-fascist founding parties of the Republic. For the time being, welfare payments were to be financed from this resource. The following categories of individual were excluded by definition from receiving any benefit: ●

●

●

Persons who, on the 13 March 1938, did not hold Austrian citizenship, or whose claim for compensation derived from such persons Persons who, between 1 July 1933 and 13 March 1938, aged 18 or over, belonged either to the NSDAP (the Nazi party) or one of its paramilitary units; surviving dependents of such persons, except orphans, provided that they did not match the exclusion criteria in their own right Victims of the ‘nationalist movement’ (that is to say, the National Socialists) and their surviving dependants, together with those provided for under regulations governing the welfare of former members of the Waffen-SS and their surviving dependants (Ernst, 1995, p. 231)

The exclusion criteria were linked to the National Socialism Act. Because of the economic situation, pension payments were made at a reduced level, the cuts amounting generally to between 20 per cent and 85 per cent. The number of recipients was substantial: in 1945 the number of war victims entitled to benefits was 505,000; in December 1948, there were 495,124 recognized war wounded, widows, orphans and parents; by December 1949, the number had increased to 510,474. The figures did not include those who were disabled, but whose loss of working capacity was deemed to be less than 30 per cent (Ernst, 1995, p. 230). 5.2.2 The Waffen-SS and war victims’ welfare The question of what should happen to former members of the Waffen-SS in relation to the KOVG preoccupied the cabinet on a number of occasions. As early as May 1946, ministers had reached a consensus that exception clauses should be drawn up which would allow, in certain cases, payment of benefits

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to former members of the Waffen-SS. The current provisions, according to Karl Maisel in particular, implied that exclusion from entitlement should also apply to those who, due to the Emergency Service Decree of 15 October 1938, had been required to serve with the Police, or had been deployed in combat units at the front, behind the lines, or in occupied territory. This situation had come about because of an order issued on 25 July 1943, which had ruled that, in relation to welfare, this group was to be governed by the regulations applicable to the SS Combat Support Force. ‘We have to consider the fact,’ argued Karl Maisel, ‘that we are dealing here with people recruited by force into serving with the German Police, who had no connection with the Waffen-SS or the Security Service (SD), beyond the fact that they were formally subordinate to the Reichsführer-SS (SD).’23 This categorical exclusion should now be lifted, and the individuals concerned granted entitlement, provided there were no other reasons for exclusion. At the cabinet meeting of 25 February 1947, the question of Waffen-SS members was raised again. The social affairs minister, Karl Maisel, explained that the ministry for social affairs had been conscious ‘from the outset’ that it was unjust to disqualify from benefit entitlement those who had been forced to serve in the Waffen-SS.24 The draft legislation presented to the cabinet by Karl Maisel provided that recruitment or secondment to the Waffen-SS should be treated as voluntary if it took place before 1 January 1943, and deemed compulsory if it took place after 1 October 1943. For enlistments and secondments that took place during the period between 1 January and 1 October 1943, the applicant would be required to demonstrate the involuntary nature of their service. It was Karl Maisel’s intention that the Act should enter into force with retrospective application to 1 January 1947, though in the event, this is not what happened. For one thing, the question of the voluntary versus involuntary nature of an individual’s Waffen-SS service could not be clearly resolved. From 1943, it was possible to join the Waffen-SS both voluntarily or through conscription (Stein, 1967, p. 112). On the other hand, Maisel’s proposal also encountered opposition within the cabinet. This was not down to moral or principled political considerations, but rather, it was because of the impression that might be gained abroad. Minister Altmann (KPÖ), for example, said he had no doubt that ‘young people often signed a piece of paper without realizing that were being drafted into the SS’. Even in social terms, the draft was justified. However, it was necessary to consider whether this was the right time to bring in such a law ‘because those in the outside world will judge it in political terms’.25 Finance minister Georg Zimmermann (ÖVP) also thought that ‘a law that is concerned with the SS will not make a good impression abroad’,26 and the chancellor Leopold Figl (ÖVP) agreed: ‘Those abroad will scarcely see any difference whether membership of the SS was voluntary or involuntary.’27

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Abroad, it was simply not realized, lamented Figl, that recruitment to the SS had frequently been compulsory. As the debates in general show, the KOVG always found itself affected by tension over financial policy considerations. The tiny amount of budgetary elbow room represented a further restriction. While the social affairs minister, Karl Maisel, was always strongly motivated to achieve a good deal for war victims, the federal chancellor and the finance minister, especially, pressed for fiscal moderation. Notwithstanding these finance policy wrangles, the question of whether to include former members of the Waffen-SS in the war victims’ welfare programme was soon resolved: in its provisions for the implementation of the War Victims Benefits Act, 1949, the federal ministry for social administration incorporated the Waffen-SS fully into the payment scheme – supposedly as part of the Wehrmacht (Bailer, 1999). 5.2.3 ‘Incriminated’ persons If the provisional arrangements for war victims’ welfare, out of consideration of foreign policy issues, still contained only relatively restrictive provisions, this began to change in step with decreasing pressure on the part of the Allies with respect to denazification. ‘From the autumn of 1946’, as Robert Knight put it, ‘it was a basic tenet of Western policy that criticism – especially public criticism – of Austrian denazification efforts merely played into the hands of the Soviets’ (Knight, 1988, p. 29). Consequently, any lingering pressure from the Western Allies towards anti-Nazi legislation should be set aside, for the benefit of Austrian domestic policy considerations. Thus the way was cleared for a change in the treatment of former National Socialists. On 21 April 1948, the Nationalrat passed a law that released the majority of those registered as former Nazi party members – 482,000 out of 524,000 – from the obligation to pay atonement. On 13 July 1949, the Nationalrat passed a Federal Constitutional Act (BVG) resulting in the removal of the ‘least incriminated’ from the register, and the following day the fourth amendment to the Victims Compensation Act (OFG) and the new KOVG were passed (Bailer, 1993, p. 59). Paragraph 60 of the KOVG stipulates, ‘Excluded from benefit payments under this Federal Law are individuals who are liable for atonement payments, according to the relevant revision of the Banning Law of 1947.’ Thus, ‘incriminated persons’ continued to be ineligible for welfare payments. This regulation encountered the displeasure not only of the Central Organization of War Victims’ Associations of Austria: the Vorarlberg provincial government filed a petition at the constitutional court to have KOVG Paragraph 60 annulled. It was claimed to be an illegal infringement of the constitutional guarantee of equality for all citizens before the law. The cabinet evidently felt that this approach was not at all unreasonable, for it indirectly confirmed such an interpretation of the law: ‘It is the common view of the Federal Chancellor’s Office and the Federal Ministry for Social Administration, that the viewpoint of the Vorarlberg

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provincial government cannot be challenged by substantial constitutional considerations.’28 The constitutional court did indeed repeal the regulation excluding ‘incriminated persons’ from war victims’ benefits in 1952 (Ernst, 1995, p. 241). 5.2.4 The first KOVG of 1950 By 1949, the time seemed ripe to replace the provisional arrangements for war victims’ welfare benefits. Parliament passed the KOVG on 14 July 1949, after ‘drawn out and difficult negotiations with the Central Organization’ (Ernst, 1995, p. 241). The length of time required to introduce the first Austrian KOVG was explained by the federal ministry for finance as being due to it only now being possible to estimate the numbers of invalids, surviving dependants, missing persons and prisoners of war. On 1 January 1949, the total figure stood at 505,124.29 The draft of the KOVG had been sent to a series of interest groups and bodies. In the cabinet discussion, Maisel was therefore particularly at pains to make it clear that the draft he was presenting did not meet the demands of the Central Organization on every point. Whilst the latter wanted payment of a basic pension without regard to income, the social affairs minister intended there to be some restrictions based on earnings thresholds.30 This was opposed not only by the war victims’ interest groups, but also by the Congress of Chambers of Labour. On the other hand, a partial solution was found to ‘the problem of providing welfare benefits to Austrian war victims who, for reasons connected with the granting of citizenship, had signed the well-known relinquishment of entitlement’.31 This partial solution allowed particular groups of people, in spite of the waiver, to register claims for benefit, for example, persons who, on 13 March 1938, had spent more than ten years in the Austrian Republic. A special provision, in light of the national claim to victimhood, was contained in Paragraph 5 of the KOVG. It ruled out, in the first instance, entitlement to welfare benefits if the event giving rise to the claim had been instigated deliberately, or in the course of committing a juridically proven crime. There were, however, exceptions: suicide, execution, self-inflicted injury, criminal proceedings and injuries resulting from service in the Wehrmacht. The accompanying explanatory notes are revealing: ‘The exceptions referred to in this part of the Act to the basic principle that deliberately self-inflicted injuries should not give rise to any welfare entitlement, are necessary in view of the conditions under which Austrians were forced to serve in the German Wehrmacht.’32 The provisions and the explanatory notes in some ways took the task of constructing a notion of Austrian victimhood to its limit: for those who withdrew from military service under the Nazi regime were declared victims of the regime in exactly the same way as those who obeyed it unconditionally. Would deserters therefore have been able to rely on the KOVG? And

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would they then – in common with incriminated National Socialists and members of the Waffen-SS – have been accepted into the ranks of Austrian war victims? The new Austrian War Victims Benefits Act came into force on 1 January 1950. By 1995 it had been progressively extended by means of some 50 amendments, eight of them before the renewal of the Act in 1957 (Ernst, 1995, p. 227). 5.2.5 The first amendments The first amendment to the KOVG came into effect on 16 July 1951. In general, these amendments were concerned with increasing pension levels or harmonizing them with movements in prices and wages. However, this process was driven by demands for improvement, behind which there was always a certain degree of pressure from the associations. The second and, more especially, the third amendments of the KOVG brought the so-called ‘ethnic Germans’ (Volksdeutsche) into the group of those eligible to receive benefits. In the second amendment, only the most severely disabled were included, but the third amendment gave rise to a more generous settlement in favour of ‘ethnic Germans’.

5.3 The Nationalrat debates on the KOVG 1949–54 The first Nationalrat debate on the KOVG took place during the final sitting of the first parliamentary legislative period of the Second Republic, on 14 July 1949. It was also the last sitting at which only the three founding parties (ÖVP, SPÖ and KPÖ) were represented in the Nationalrat. This sitting marked both symbolically, and in practical political terms, the end of the first post-war period of the Second Republic. 5.3.1 The political background The adoption of the KOVG was closely linked to the issue of denazification measures, and was also linked to the question of the Victims’ Compensation Act (OFG). The amnesty, passed the previous day in the Nationalrat, for the so-called ‘less incriminated’, and the extension of benefit entitlement to members of the Waffen-SS, led the numbers of those eligible under the KOVG to increase sharply relative to the numbers qualifying under the previous provisions for war victims’ welfare benefits. The new law defined 419,548 individuals as victims of the Second World War: invalids, widows, orphans and dependants of not-yet-returned war participants. A further 88,564 enjoyed entitlement to benefits deriving from the First World War. This meant that in total, 8 per cent of the Austrian population were defined under the KOVG as war victims. The requisite expenditure for 1949 amounted to 651 billion Austrian shillings, or nearly 60 per cent of the budget for social expenditure.33

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The passing of the Act during the final parliamentary sittings of the first legislative period also provided the parties with an important opportunity to present their accomplishments to the Austrian population, with a view to the forthcoming Nationalrat elections. It was no coincidence that the deregistration of the ‘less incriminated’, and the KOVG, had been brought in at the end of the legislative session. Both laws affected materially a significant proportion of the population, in some cases to the point of survival. In autumn 1949, a new party, the ‘Association of Independents’ (VdU), would step onto the electoral stage, hoping to attract support specifically from this section of the electorate. Bringing the ‘less incriminated’ and the former Waffen-SS within the compass of the KOVG was also part of a political strategy designed to steer potential voters away from the VdU. But these tactical electoral considerations did not imply any change in principle in the three governing parties’ strategy for dealing with the past. The universally shared concept of the victim, which had arisen out of the state’s claim to victimhood, had, from the beginning of the Second Republic, extended to former Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers. Indeed, the fact that they stood at the top of the victim hierarchy is indicated by, amongst other things, the intensive efforts made by Austrian governments to bring about repatriation of Austrian prisoners of war (see Karner, 1995, pp. 195–201). By contrast, the return, during the early post-war decades, of some 130,000 surviving victims of Nazi persecution – the overwhelming majority of them Jewish – was of no concern to governments. Helga Embacher comments: ‘Nowhere in the literature, in the media, or in the records of cabinet meetings could one find any evidence of measures by the Austrian government aimed at repatriation [of Austrian Jews]’ (Embacher, 1995, p. 114).34 The lack of government interest in repatriating the displaced was in tune with public opinion: in a 1946 survey, 46 per cent of those questioned said they were against, and only 20 per cent in favour of, the return of displaced Austrian Jews (Bunzl and Marin, 1983). As already mentioned above, as early as 1947, reparation and maintenance payments for victims of the Nazis were legally harmonized with those paid to so-called war victims. This meant that those who had fought for Austria’s liberation from National Socialism, or had been persecuted by the National Socialists, were placed on an equal footing with those who had – even if unwillingly for the most part – fought on the side of National Socialism. Although the victims’ associations protested against this linkage from the beginning, the principle of equal treatment has remained enshrined in the Victim Compensation Act to this day (Bailer, 1993, p. 61). However, the financial support for both groups was characterized from the start by a quantitative imbalance: against approximately 500,000 individuals eligible to receive support under the KOVG in 1951, there were 15,800 holders of official certificates under the Victims Compensation Act, of whom a mere 6450 actually drew a pension (Bailer, 1993, p. 62). These figures could well serve as an index for the actual relative frequency of political resistance to National

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Socialism versus participation in it. The linking of welfare payments under the Victim Compensation Act and the KOVG legally abolished the politically fundamental distinction between perpetrators and victims, serving to subsume both groups under a common notion of victim. Even the former concentration camp inmate, Rosa Jochmann, who, as an SPÖ member of the Austrian parliament, campaigned tirelessly for decades on behalf of victims of the Nazis, upheld the national victim concept. In a radio address on the occasion of an amendment to the Victim Compensation Act in February 1949, she defined the concept in these terms: We were all victims of Fascism: the soldier at the Front, who experienced war in its most dreadful form, the population in the hinterlands, filled with horror as they awaited the call of the cuckoo,35 so they could flee to their shelters and yearn for the day when they would be delivered from the terror; everyone who had to leave their home, to take on the generally unhappy lot of the emigrant, and ultimately all those of us in prisons, jails and concentration camps, who were helpless at the mercy of the SS. (quoted in Bailer, 1993, p. 58) Jochmann’s hierarchy of Austrian victims, which was accepted without question for decades, was also reflected in the material, political and emotional support provided. At the bottom were the politically persecuted and the victims of Nazi racial hatred. Their entitlement was limited to state handouts in the form of relief payments, geared to the benefits provided under the KOVG. Whilst the Waffen-SS, the ‘less incriminated’ National Socialists, and their respective dependants were covered by the KOVG, at least one victim group, as defined by the Nuremberg race laws, remained debarred from receiving official support: unmarried mothers who, as so-called ‘half-castes’, were forbidden under the National Socialist Nuremberg race laws from getting married. In a similar vein, so-called ‘Aryan’ women could not legally marry ‘half-castes’ called up to serve in the Wehrmacht. For these individuals, ‘support should be forthcoming by way of a generous interpretation of the Hardship Relief Programme’.36 This gave rise to the paradoxical situation whereby the National Socialists, at least for a time, had conscripted so-called ‘Jewish half-castes’ into the Wehrmacht, but their dependants, having been unable to enter into a legal marriage under National Socialism, were denied assistance under the KOGV by the Austrian government. As the ÖVP minister Felix Hurdes correctly pointed out to the cabinet in July 1950, a double standard was being applied: ‘The basic principle of damage reparation is applied in the case of National Socialists, but not in the case of the Nazis’ victims. This causes bad feeling time and again. The victims of the Nazis are repeatedly told, “The state is impoverished and cannot pay”. Yet, when it comes to National Socialists, the state can pay. This is surely a case of double standards’ (quoted in Knight, 1988, p. 169).

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5.3.2 The Nationalrat debate of 14 July 1949 The rapporteur of the social administration committee, Karl Kysela (SPÖ), opened his report with the statement that the deregistration of the ‘least incriminated’ National Socialists ‘resolves the Nazi question once and for all, insofar as it affects the less incriminated’.37 It satisfied a legal precondition for individuals from this group to be brought within the scope of the KOVG. In respect of this integration policy, there were no differences of principle between the three founding and governing parties, as shown by the speeches made in the Nationalrat during the KOVG debate. The KPÖ representative, Viktor Elser, hailed the KOVG as a ‘great piece of social legislation’. Elser’s emphasis on this generally humane aspect of the Act served as a prelude, after which he went on to point out what the KPÖ saw as the dimension of the Act that was geared towards international relations and world peace. The KOVG, he said, stretched far beyond the usual scope of social legislation: ‘It is both a reminder and warning to the Austrian people to serve the cause of peace between nations, to fight for world peace and to shout out to the warmongers in the imperialist camp a resolute “Never again war!”. The obligation of states to provide support to the victims of infernal wars, which must be fulfilled in the form of welfare laws, is an integral aspect of international affairs and world peace.’38 These humanitarian and ideological utterances pointed implicitly to the KPÖ’s conception of victimhood. The KPÖ did not alternate between, on the hand, the explanatory model of enforced participation by Austrians in National Socialism and, on the other hand, that of ‘idealists who were led astray’. The Communists simply declared the less incriminated National Socialists and all veterans of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS to be humanitarian and political victims of National Socialism. Given this political perspective on the past, it becomes easier to understand the supposedly ‘oppositional’ KPÖ’s critique of the KOVG. The concern was not directly with the entitlement of Waffen-SS members to claim benefits, nor, as a matter of principle, with the absence of any real discussion about the definition of victimhood. Instead, the KPÖ’s criticism was limited to what it saw as the overly modest benefits envisaged in the KOVG. Accordingly, the KPÖ called for higher benefit levels for particular categories of eligible claimants – proposals which were all rejected by the parliamentary majority.39 For the SPÖ, the president of the provincial Upper Austrian War Victims’ Association, Alois Wimberger, rose to speak. He saw the KOVG as continuing in the tradition of welfare provision for Austrian war invalids, tracing a historical arc from the monarchy, via the First Republic, though to National Socialism. This technocratic perspective precluded any political contextualization. It recognized only war invalids and their dependants, and approached the problem in isolation from any historical or political context.

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As a representative of the war victims’ associations, Wimberger’s preoccupation was only with ‘veterans as victims’ and the costs arising from this: More than 1.2 million Austrians fought In the German Wehrmacht. Many fell, many ended up in captivity, many went missing – and in some cases remain so – and a very great number returned to their homeland sick or physically disabled. […] This means that every Austrian citizen, man or woman, senior citizen or child, must contribute an average of one hundred shillings in taxes towards the payment of war victims’ welfare benefits. […] However, these figures suggest a well-nigh gargantuan burden on our state finances.40 He appeared satisfied that, through the KOVG, ‘everyone who, in terms of the Act, has come to harm through the War, should be compensated by the state’, and closed with the wish ‘that humanity might see the time come when no parliament will have to pass laws to provide welfare benefits to victims of war. I further believe that the half million Austrian war victims would be happy to join me in this wish.’41 The final speaker, the ÖVP member Josef Dengler, undertook not to ‘repeat what has already been said’.42 The consensus amongst the three governing parties was too broad for there to be any point in setting out positions along party lines. He pointed out that ‘certainly, even this Act would not give war invalids, surviving dependants and war widows everything they needed for their own survival, and the upkeep of their families’.43 He thereby gave notice of a future extension of the provision. This Act should be seen as the first big step towards the material integration of former soldiers and their dependants into Austrian society, with the support of the important political and social powers in Austria. Concluding, Dengler took advantage of the opportunity to state his view ‘that the War Victims’ Federation, the Ministry for Social Affairs and the political parties had devised legislation which marked a worthy conclusion to the first parliamentary session of the Second Republic’.44 The KOVG bill was passed, in its committee version, by all three parties represented in the Nationalrat, and came into force at the start of 1950. Conspicuously absent was any political discussion – or even any indication – of the complex issues that hung in the air pending the introduction the KOVG. According to the official state narrative of the Second Republic, the eligible claimants had served in a foreign army, which, moreover, had illegally attacked the Austrian state in March 1938. From the historical perspective of the all-embracing ‘claim to victimhood’, it would have been logically consistent for the Federal Republic of Germany, as the partial legal successor to the ‘Third Reich’, to have been made to assume responsibility

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for the welfare of injured war veterans originating from Austria. But due to practical political considerations, this issue was never pursued.45 A second set of issues factored out of the Nationalrat debate concerned the inclusion of Waffen-SS members within the scope of the KOVG. Despite being members of an organization declared criminal by the Nuremberg courts, they too received material support under the KOVG, and with it, the status of victims of National Socialism. By virtue of the fact that the KOVG catered for the victims of both World Wars, former Wehrmacht soldiers were accorded the same social standing as veterans of the Imperial Royal Army.46 Thus we encounter the same pattern in the legislative domain as we typically find with war memorials. As a rule, veterans of the First and Second World Wars are commemorated without differentiation by common inscriptions. Symbolically, this places both wars on an equal footing, and excises from memory the specific character of the National Socialist War of Annihilation. The handling of the question of war victims from the Second World War was based on the premise of a ‘zero hour’, without the political elites of any of the parliamentary parties taking account of the historical background. For them, the KOVG represented essentially a budgetary problem and an integration measure. The KOVG of 1949 was thus not only a ‘great piece of social legislation’ (KPÖ member Elser) but also a law that reintegrated Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS veterans into Austrian society, thereby meeting an important precondition for a historical interpretation that would dominate for decades – that of the ‘untainted Wehrmacht’. 5.3.3 The first amendments of the KOVG As might be expected, in the Nationalrat debates on the first revisions of the KOVG, in 1951 and 1954 respectively, the legitimacy of the eligible claimants was not up for discussion. Besides financial improvements for those already entitled to benefits, the 1951 amendment was concerned with extending the scope of the KOVG to include ‘seriously war-injured German speakers’ who had obtained Austrian citizenship after the war, in other words, so-called ‘ethnic Germans’ who were not Austrians prior to March 1938. This extension was justified by the SPÖ, the KPÖ and the ÖVP, not politically, but on humanitarian grounds: it was ‘a really welcome development because, I would say, it made it possible to give some really desperate people the benefits they were entitled to’,47 said the SPÖ member, Alois Wimberger. The KPÖ member, Viktor Elser, welcomed the inclusion of seriously wounded ‘ethnic Germans’ and stateless persons within the scope of the KOVG, and called, without success, for the extension of the KOVG to cover all ‘ethnic Germans’ and stateless war-injured persons living in Austria.48 The ÖVP representative, Franz Grubhofer, justified the inclusion of ‘ethnic Germans’ and stateless persons by pointing out that they too – exactly like the Austrians – had not called for war, and ‘could do nothing other than

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somehow carry out their duty; it was an obligation to one’s fellow soldiers. […] The men were doing their duty. In good faith! And, at the end of the day, society has to see to it that their lives are at least made semi-bearable again. That is the view of my party. That is why we are glad to support this law and anticipate that, in future, the community and the government will think of war victims as they are entitled to be thought of: as completely worthy members of society!’49 This chorus of consensus from the ÖVP, the SPÖ and the KPÖ was joined in by the VdU member, Helfried Pfeifer, albeit on the basis of a contrary underlying political premise: We adhere, furthermore, to the standpoint, just like the previous speaker – I am always pleased when I find someone who shares my attitude – that someone who has performed military service for his people and his Fatherland, and who has shed blood for his people and his Fatherland, or maybe even given his life – that this individual and his family, or his surviving dependants, have an inalienable moral right to expect that the people and the Fatherland for whom he has campaigned, and to whom he has devoted his life, are obliged to take care of him and his dependants.50 With this argument, the VdU politician was, in one sense, aligning himself with the concrete demands of the other parties, but he was placing them in the context of a diametrically opposed rationale. Whilst the three founding parties were arguing implicitly on the basis of an Austrian ‘claim to victimhood’, which, where the Wehrmacht was concerned, relied on the paradigm of enforced military service in a foreign army, the German nationalist VdU saw service in the Wehrmacht as a positive act, for ‘our people and our Fatherland’.51 Accordingly, interjections from the KPÖ and the SPÖ recorded in the parliamentary proceedings referred to the use of these two terms: ‘Member Ernst Fischer: “For ‘the people and the Führer’, they used to say back then!”’; ‘Member Rosa Jochmann: “For whose Fatherland?”’ 52 Pfeifer extended his argument to another group, who were not yet recognized in this first amendment, namely ‘incriminated’ former Nazis who had not been amnestied, and were therefore excluded under the terms of the KOVG. Despite demands by the ÖVP members in the cabinet that the ‘incriminated’ be included, no agreement on this question had yet been reached with the SPÖ. This was further than the SPÖ wished to go at this stage. The idea of granting state assistance to former active National Socialists was something it first had to get used to. The conduct of the SPÖ in the Nationalrat shows, however, that it had already given up its defensive position. The SPÖ speakers gave notice that in the autumn of 1951, the KOVG paragraph which had hitherto excluded incriminated National Socialists from entitlement would be deleted. Referring to this, the SPÖ member Franz Olah stated, ‘On the question of war victims’ benefits, there

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are doubtless still some cases of hardship that need to be addressed. We too are of the opinion that in the foreseeable future – indeed, in the near future – we must do away with regulations that are merely a remnant of emergency legislation, because we do not support a long-term policy of vengeance.’53 The first amendment to the KOVG, and the signalled intention to include incriminated National Socialists, which subsequently came about in 1952 (Ernst, 1995, p. 241), meant that the community of Austrian war victims had now been legally expanded to the point where only convicted Nazi war criminals were not part of it. The consistently consensual behaviour of the three founding parties, already evident during the introduction of the KOVG in 1949, continued in relation to the first revision of the Act. Now, in the shape of the VdU, a party had made its way into the Nationalrat, which represented, from a pan-German perspective, the material and political interests of former Austrian and ethnic German members of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS . With the 1951 amendment, the group of eligible claimants was essentially defined. The later KOVG amendments merely took the form of improvements to the financial benefits (for example, the introduction of a ‘thirteenth month’, nutritional supplements, care allowances and so on). These were discussed in the context of general debates on pensions and social security.54

5.4 Media coverage of the KOVG The parliamentary debates on the KOVG also made their mark in the press. Our analysis of the reporting in selected Austrian daily newspapers addresses the following questions: ● ● ● ●

How detailed were the reports? What were the main issues focused on by journalists? In what contexts were the KOVG debates presented? What positions were adopted by the print media in their capacity as political actors?

In order to make as representative a selection of national Austrian daily newspapers as possible, both so-called independent newspapers, and avowedly partisan newspapers, were included in the analysis. The selection consisted of: the Wiener Zeitung, as an official newspaper (‘the official newspaper of the Republic of Austria’) in which one would expect to find detailed parliamentary reports; the daily newspaper Neues Österreich, which was committed to an official government standpoint and to the Allies; the daily newspaper Die Presse, a further non-party newspaper, albeit one with unmistakable bourgeois leanings; the Arbeiter-Zeitung, the organ of the Austrian Socialist Party (SPÖ); the Kleines Volksblatt, a newspaper unambiguously committed to the standpoint of the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP); and the Österreichische

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Volksstimme, which functioned as the ‘central organ of the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ)’. 5.4.1 The KOVG (1949–50) The Nationalrat debate in which the first Austrian KOVG was discussed took place in the context of discussions on a range of legislative matters concerning Austria’s conduct in relation to its National Socialist past. Not only had the previous day seen the passing of the Constitutional Law (BVG) to remove the ‘least incriminated’ individuals from the registers, but on 14 July 1949, further laws were passed which were supposed to regulate affairs relating to Austria’s National Socialist legacy. These included, for example, the third and seventh restitution laws, and the fourth revision of the OFG (Victim Compensation Act). In media coverage of the Nationalrat debate of 14 July 1949, the various subjects were often dealt with in the same article – with the KOVG invariably occupying a prominent position. The Nationalrat debate on the first Austrian KOVG, which was passed unanimously by the Nationalrat on 14 July 1949, was reported on in detail by the official newspaper Neues Österreich. Under the headline ‘The legacy of Nazi rule: more than 500,000 war victims’, the political discussions of the parliamentary parties were reconstructed. In the editorial leader, the KOVG was described as ‘the most significant of the social laws debated yesterday’.55 A footnote contained cross-references to articles by the Nationalrat members Karla Kysela (SPÖ), Viktor Elser (KPÖ), Alois Wimberger (SPÖ) and Josef Dengler (ÖVP). The coverage in the Wiener Zeitung was similarly factual, and largely free from subjective evaluation, although attention was drawn to the fact that the subcommittee had pushed through improvements to the government’s draft.56 Die Presse did mention the passing of the KOVG, but did not report on it in detail, commenting instead on other subjects debated on 14 July 1949.57 The Arbeiter-Zeitung carried the new KOVG on its front page: ‘An end for the victims of war and Fascism’. This demonstrated in equal measure both the linking of the two subjects and the way they had been subsumed under the inclusive notion of victimhood. Under the heading ‘Austria’s exemplary War Victims’ Welfare Law’ the Arbeiter-Zeitung reported in a consistently positive tone on the previous day’s sitting of the Nationalrat and summarized, in a series of extracts, the speech by the rapporteur, Karl Kysela (SPÖ). The contributions to the debate by Viktor Elser (KPÖ) and Alois Wimberger (SPÖ) were also referred to.58 Quite different to the Arbeiter-Zeitung coverage was that of the Kleines Volksblatt. It gave exposure, above all, to the speech by the ÖVP member, Josef Dengler. The ÖVP newspaper held up the newly created act as an exemplary piece of legislation.59 The Österreichische Volksstimme, under the headline, ‘520,000 war victims bring action against the warmongers’, and the explanatory subheading,

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‘even the war-wounded and widows are the subject of economies’, printed the arguments of the KPÖ member, Viktor Elser. He claimed that even warinjured individuals with 30–40 per cent reduction in work capacity should – in contrast to the provisions of the KOVG – be granted a supplementary pension. At one point, according to the Österreichische Volksstimme, Elser makes reference to the victims of the war and the victims of fascism, and the fact that both should be considered as ‘harbingers of world peace’.60

5.5 Summary: the KOVG as a building block in a ‘construction of history’ By way of a summary, we now turn to a discussion of the significance of the handling of the ‘war victims question’, which we have analysed in three spheres of activity (cabinet, Nationalrat and the press), for the development of Austria’s post-war historical interpretation in relation to the question of Austrians who served in the Wehrmacht. 5.5.1 Government/cabinet: merging the issue of war victims with the national claim to victimhood The Austrian cabinet’s handling of the war victim question arising from the Second World War meshed seamlessly with the state’s claim to victimhood at the hands of the National Socialists. The claim is based on the assumption that Austrians served the Nazi regime reluctantly and under duress. The cabinet, in which there was no representative of the ‘Third Camp’ in the form of the VdU (forerunner of the Austrian Freedom Party, or FPÖ), shared this perspective across the board. Differences of viewpoint – at least along party lines – were barely discernable. Even – or perhaps especially – the stance of the KPÖ, which was in the government until 1947, had a decidedly patriotic Austrian flavour. Exclusion clauses with respect to war victims’ benefits – such as those envisaged in the provisional regulations before 1949–50, or confirmed in the first KOVG in the form of explicit exclusion from benefit entitlement for incriminated National Socialists – were not based by any means on any fundamental political standpoint on the part of the Austrian government with regard to the former activists of the Nazi regime. These exception clauses owed much more to an assessment of opinion abroad and amongst the Allies. The Austrian federal government itself – not least for tactical political reasons – would have preferred to maximize the inclusion of former Wehrmacht soldiers and Waffen-SS within the group entitled to benefits. With the progressive disintegration of the consensus amongst the occupying powers, and the beginning of the Cold War, there was a marked reduction in the pressure from this quarter on Austrian politics. In parallel with a relaxation in the area of denazification, there was a gradual expansion in the number of ‘politically sensitive’ groups (e.g., former Waffen-SS) granted eligibility for war victims’ welfare payments.

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At the same time, in the context of these integration policies geared towards former National Socialists, it was possible to establish the idea of universal victimhood as a dominant historiographic construct. Scarcely any counter-discourse emerged. Neither the victims’ associations, which existed as a cross-party institution only until 1948 (and were in a minority position within the various parties), nor the Jewish Cultural Community, enjoyed sufficient political leverage to challenge this historical construction from the perspective of the victims of National Socialism. In contrast to the victims of political persecution, and to the Austrian Jews, war victims had a strong lobby working on their behalf. They could put much more weight behind their demands and point out their capacity for leverage in the form of hundreds of thousands of voters. Of course, this historical construction on the part of the Austrian political elite did not tie in so well with the subject of victim compensation, which was frequently discussed in parallel. Rifts inevitably arose, because the fact that the (real) victims of National Socialism were subsumed, along with the Austrian National Socialists, under an all-embracing concept of Austrian victimhood, represented a contradiction that was somewhat difficult to resolve. Ultimately, however, it is not the logical rigour or internal coherence of a narrative that determines, in a given political and cultural context, to what extent, and for how long, a particular construction of history can be anchored and made dominant within a society. Rather, it is a function of the distribution of political power and vested interests, and of the interpretations on offer to groups and individuals. At any rate, the debates in the Austrian cabinet on the essentially government-drafted KOVG and its amendments created a solid foundation for the myth of Austrian national victimhood, and for the designation of Austrian veterans of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS as a victim group. 5.5.2 The KOVG in the Nationalrat: the legal implementation of the ‘Austrian war victim society’ Parliament in a multi-party democracy – and in Austria, particularly the Nationalrat – is by definition the forum in which the interests and opinions of citizens are mediated through the dealings of party representatives. The multi-party system assumes that these interests are of a varying nature, and that power-oriented and interest-backed parties will seek to translate their positions into actual legislation or – depending on their strength – at least articulate them in parliamentary discourse. The KOVG is – superficially – ‘only’ an important piece of social legislation, which, despite numerous revisions, is still in force today. On the other hand, when analysed specifically in terms of policy for dealing with the past, the Nationalrat debates during the first phase of the KOVG constitute key discourses in the realization of a historical narrative about the Wehrmacht in Austria.

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An analysis of the narratives contained within the various contributions to the debate shows clearly that the ÖVP, the SPÖ and the KPÖ were not putting forward competing interpretations in relation to the role of the Wehrmacht and its Austrian personnel. The argumentation strategies of the three founding parties differed only in matters of degree. The ‘victim narrative’ is allpervasive and taken for granted by each of the parties. The situation is different, however, with the VdU. It sees the Austrian veterans of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS both as war victims and as heroes – because they fought, according to the VdU, ‘for people and Fatherland’. ●

●

●

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The SPÖ embedded the KOVG into the continuum of Austrian war invalid welfare provision. At the heart of this overarching rationale are the Austrian war victims themselves. Any judgment of the Wehrmacht and the WaffenSS as institutions remains outside the frame, as does the particular political system (National Socialism) that they served. With this neutralization of the political and historical contexts surrounding the KOVG, the SPÖ refrained from discussing the definition of victimhood, and subsequently approved the extension of the KOVG to incriminated former Nazis. The ÖVP neglected to offer any intrinsic justification whatsoever for the KOVG during the debate of 1949. It merely pointed out the significance of the new law, supported by all the parties, as an integration policy initiative. Only when the extension of the KOVG to former ethnic Germans was debated, did the ÖVP invoke the compulsory nature of military service as an argument. Thus wartime service should be understood, not as the fulfilment of duty in respect of National Socialism, but as ‘a duty to one’s fellow soldiers’. Therefore both Austrian and former ethnic German war victims merited a place in the collective memory as ‘worthy members of society’. The KPÖ saw its oppositional role as being to point out that pension payments under KOVG were too small, and to demand better material benefits for the recipients. They stretched the notion of victim further than anyone else, explicitly declaring those covered under the KOVG to be victims of the criminal policies of National Socialism. The combination of this notion of victimhood with the KPÖ’s role as the opposition party led logically to the demand for material improvements. The VdU, which first took part in the 1951 parliamentary debate on the amendment of the KOVG, appeared entirely satisfied with the argumentation strategies of the other parties. Against the backdrop of the German nationalist ‘völkisch’ ideology of the VdU, Austrian veterans of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS were seen as being entitled to benefits because they had served ‘people and Fatherland’. This didn’t entirely coincide with the other parties’ notions of victimhood, but it led to the same demand: the comprehensive accommodation within the scope of the KOVG of all those who had been harmed in the military service of National Socialism.

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What we do not find in the KOVG debates is the institutionalized antagonism between government and opposition that is normally a hallmark of democratic parliaments. Such antagonism is an expression of the fact that societies do not possess a single identity, and that collective identity emerges only when different groups within a given society argue about their past and their future. The debates on the KOVG are characterized instead by the absence of any substantial counter-discourse. The parliamentary consensus encompassed not only an evaluation of the Wehrmacht, but extended also to the WaffenSS, to the less incriminated (and subsequently also to the incriminated) National Socialists and to former ethnic Germans. The KOVG became the law under which, step by step, Nazi perpetrator groups mutated into war victim groups. The KOVG is the normative baseline narrative, cast in a legislative mould, for the Austrian ‘War Victim Society’, which includes Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS members, together with more and less incriminated former National Socialists. From 1949 onwards, in the shape of the VdU and its successor party, the FPÖ, a party was represented in the Nationalrat which sought to include the status of ‘heroes’ amongst the historical interpretations available to this section of society. In the KOVG, the state’s official, hegemonic identity construct of the Austrian war victim society acquired a stable, legally enacted framework, which the individual could refer to and fall back on when engaged in his or her own particular acts of recollection. In other words, any veteran of the Wehrmacht or the Waffen-SS, if he is in receipt a monthly war victims’ pension from the Austrian state, also enjoys the legally attested right to consider himself to be an Austrian victim – or hero – of National Socialism. What can be said, by way of comparison, about the role played by the media’s portrayal of the KOVG debates and their bearing on policy for dealing with the past? Here, we must distinguish between the various print media analysed. The two official (public record) newspapers, the Wiener Zeitung and Neues Österreich, are characterized by relatively detailed reporting of the KOVG and selected amendments. In relation to the debates in the Nationalrat, representatives of all the parties were quoted. In part, because the editorial policies were in favour of the KOVG, and also because matters were decided unanimously in the Nationalrat, relatively little space was given over to views which deviated from the opinions expressed in Parliament. The party newspapers, on the other hand, had a need to convey an impression of ‘dissension amidst the consensus’. The Arbeiter-Zeitung did so only very timidly, mainly by devoting more space to speeches by SPÖ members than to those by members of other parties. A similar tactic – not surprisingly – was employed by all the party newspapers. The Kleines Volksblatt (ÖVP) stressed the ‘dissension amidst the consensus’ topos more clearly. Emphasis was given especially to differences between the ÖVP and the SPÖ. For example, with respect to the past, it was the only paper to make reference to points in the Nationalrat debate where it was disputed whether social democracy could

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legitimately claim the historical credit for the provision of war victims’ welfare in Austria. With respect to social policy, the paper gave positive coverage to criticisms levelled at the so-called ‘pension-snatching’ rhetoric of the SPÖ. The dissension line was pursued most explicitly, however, by the Österreichische Volksstimme, which reported in detail the generally more radical arguments of the KPÖ and the Volksopposition (VO),61 portraying them as social policy demands. Neither the existence of quite different victim groups amongst the recipients of support, nor the fact that, despite its criticisms, the parliamentary group of the VO actually supported the KOVG and the two amendments, were analysed in any detail. Overall, it may be said of the selected media coverage of the debates in the Nationalrat, that the interest lies not only in what is reported, but also in what is not reported. It is striking, for example, that the Kleines Volksblatt refers to controversial statements by ÖVP Nationalrat members, where these remain unreported in the other daily newspapers, and that the Österreichische Volksstimme devotes space almost exclusively to the arguments of the KPÖ member, Viktor Elser, whereas other members’ contributions to the debates are mentioned relatively infrequently. Aside from the news reports, it is striking that, at least in the period immediately surrounding the Nationalrat debates, no commentaries appeared on the subject of war victims’ welfare. There may have been several reasons for this: for one, the debates on the KOVG were frequently eclipsed by other debates held during the same sitting of the Nationalrat, such as general pension questions, or other debates concerned with the Nazi period. Even day-to-day political events, such as the end of the Krauland trial,62 served to overshadow the topic. In addition, the KOVG gave rise to hardly any controversy between the parties in the Austrian Nationalrat, a fact that will certainly have contributed to the lack of journalistic commentary coming down on the side of one policy direction or another. There was never any dispute about the need for steady improvements to war victims’ welfare benefits per se. Disagreements only arose over the most effective way to achieve this. The equating of the moral entitlements of war victims with those of the victims of National Socialism was never challenged. The party newspapers across the board followed the line laid down by the national party organizations and their parliamentary groups. None of the newspapers that we analysed questioned the assumed concept of victimhood; sometimes the two victim groups are even explicitly equated. This failure to distinguish between victim groups coincided with an aspect of government policy for dealing with the past, namely the articulation of an all-embracing notion of Austrian victimhood. It was further bound up with an aspect of social policy: in order to appear to be representing the interests of all benefit recipients, the party newspapers avoided alluding to differences between various recipient groups, especially between victims of the war and the victims of National Socialism. Such representation of interests, incidentally, could be

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very direct. For example, the Nationalrat member Karl Kysela (SPÖ) was also chairman of the Upper Austrian War Victims’ Association, a fact not mentioned in the media reports. The Österreichische Volksstimme, in particular, adhered strongly to the line that the victim groups should be regarded as equivalent, but so, too, did the Arbeiter-Zeitung and, to a large extent, the Kleines Volksblatt. The last of these, however, also provided a forum for opinion which deviated in certain respects from this viewpoint. By also giving space to those for whom military service during the Third Reich was merely a matter of ‘doing one’s duty’, the Kleines Volksblatt ensured a hearing for a conservative standpoint which, in the context of policy for dealing with the past, was ideal for the purpose of building bridges with the Third Camp. It would be a further three decades before it was considered taboo for an Austrian president to maintain in relation to his service in the Wehrmacht that he had merely been ‘doing his duty’ as a soldier.

6 The Myth of the ‘Untainted Wehrmacht’: The Structural Elements of Wehrmacht Mythology in the Austrian Press since 1945 Alexander Pollak

6.1 Introduction Two questions lie at the heart of this chapter. The first is concerned with the content and language used by the media to construct historical narratives which relieve the Wehrmacht and its members of blame and responsibility for the crimes of National Socialism. What ‘historical truths’ are created in the course of developing such exculpatory narratives? How do these ‘historical truths’ become anchored in the present, and what conclusions can be drawn from this? The second question relates specifically to the development in the Austrian media, since 1945, of the myth of the ‘untainted Wehrmacht’. In order to understand this, we must examine, in terms of both language and content, which constructions and assessments of the past were in existence at any given time – and which were dominant. An analysis of the elements that make up the historical construction of the ‘untainted Wehrmacht’ rests upon three theoretical pillars: (1) ideas based on linguistic, specifically discourse analytical, approaches; (2) media-theoretical considerations; and (3) a heuristic model of the discursive construction of historical beliefs derived from these discourse analytical and media-theoretical approaches. 6.1.1 Systemic Functional Linguistics The language-functional approach of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is fundamental to a number of relevant approaches of Critical Discourse Analysis. Systemic Functional Linguistics, as developed by M. A. K. Halliday, is based on the assumption that linguistic activity has three meta-functions: ideational, interpersonal and textual (see Halliday, 1994). The ideational meta-function is concerned with the linguistic representation of experiences, perceptions and internal thoughts, the interpersonal meta-function relates to the use of language 132

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in establishing and maintaining relationships between producers and consumers of texts, whilst the textual metafunction refers to the structure and inner organization of texts. Halliday describes language as a semiotic ‘system network’ of interrelated options. This focus on linguistic choices, and on the functional categorization of language acts, constitutes a cornerstone of SFL. For Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the significance of the SFL approach lies in part in the postulate of the inherent interconnectedness of content and expression: how something is said is inseparably linked with what is said (in a particular situational context) – and vice versa. Also drawn from the SFL approach is the perspective on the ‘unsaid’, that is to say: in the analysis of discursive practices, it is important to consider not only what was said, but also what might have been said, but was not. 6.1.1.1 The discourse-historical approach The ‘discourse-historical’ approach in CDA was developed by Ruth Wodak, Johanna Pelikan, Peter Nowak, Helmut Gruber, Rudolf de Cilia and Richard Mitten in their late 1980s study of Austrian post-war anti-Semitism, and was further elaborated by Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak. Particular attention is paid to the historical dimension of texts and discourses, that is to say, to the investigation of the way in which particular genres and discourses undergo change over the course of time (see Reisigl and Wodak, 2001; Wodak et al., 1990; Wodak et al., 1994; Wodak and Meyer, 2001). The approach assumes, related to Norman Fairclough’s approach in CDA, ‘a dialectical relationship between particular discursive practices and the specific fields of action (including situations, institutional frames and social structures) in which they are embedded. […] discourses as linguistic social practices can be seen as constituting non-discursive and discursive social practices and, at the same time, as being constituted by them’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001, pp. 35f.). Of particular significance for the discourse-historical approach – as it is for CDA generally – is the relationship between text and context. It is of fundamental importance to recognize that every instance of language use can be seen – from the perspective of this dialectical approach – as both the linguistic realization (that is to say, a result) of a specific context and as constitutive of it. The meanings of texts and text fragments can therefore only be understood in the narrower (intertextual, situational) and broader (historical, socio-political) contexts in which they occur. This makes it necessary to examine and interpret the circumstances in which a particular text is produced, as well as to construct a frame of reference to which particular texts and text fragments can be related, and through which they can ultimately be assigned meaning (see the introduction to this volume). 6.1.2 Media-theoretical considerations The media has three main functions in relation to societal historical discourses which are relevant to the following analysis of newspaper articles: (1) it

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functions as a ‘gatekeeper’, that is to say, as an institution which obtains information, processes it and passes it on. As such, the media has a substantial influence over what information is available to newspaper readers, and over which people, opinions and topics are given exposure to a wider audience; (2) the media functions as a kind of moral authority on behalf of society, ruling on how particular subjects may be talked about, and which topics, and in what form, are up for public discussion at any given time. The media represents in this respect a central binding ingredient of an ‘imagined national community’; (3) media organizations are wielders of social power, who have, at least to some extent, an autonomous role in relation to the production and reproduction of particular content, and in the reinforcement of particular social (power) structures (see Van Dijk, 1989a, pp. 42f.). To this is linked the question of vested interests: whom or what do particular actors in the media represent, whose opinions do they convey, whose interests do they promote, whose restrictions are they subject to and what freedoms do they enjoy? We must bear in mind that Austria, despite its having an extremely limited range of media by comparison with other countries, does not have just one media audience. The various media, with their highly diverse political orientations and readership profiles, represent particular audiences, and therefore, both linguistically and in terms of content, different historical discourses and approaches to problems of dealing with the past. Many media texts are characterized by ambiguity and contradiction. Newspaper writers make concessions on one topic in order to be able to venture further in relation to another topic. Statements are couched in the form of allusions and rhetorical questions, which can always be read in several ways, and which can never be subject only to a single interpretation. I do not therefore claim to account for media discourse in its entirety, with all its facets and nuances, its ambivalences and ambiguities, but will try instead, as accurately and comprehensively as possible, to analyse and explain the substantive and linguistic aspects of the media’s construction and propagation of the ‘Wehrmacht myth’. 6.1.2.1 Text types in newspapers We can distinguish four types of history-related text: (1) meta-historical texts, which deal with questions of the approach to, and representation of, historical events; (2) ‘factual accounts’, which claim to be ‘objective’ renderings of historical events; (3) biographical accounts, which portray sequences of historical events on the basis of individual experience and witness accounts; and (4) news and reporting which, in dealing with contemporary events, make reference to what has happened in the past (e.g., media coverage of war crimes trials). 6.1.3 Model of the construction of historical interpretations With particular reference to the text-type ‘factual account’, I shall now discuss the media construction of historical interpretations. On analytical

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grounds, we must distinguish between ‘ideational’ and ‘interpersonal’ aspects of the construction of historical narratives. However, in practice it is the case that both the ‘ideational’ and ‘interpersonal’ aspects are intertwined, and cannot be regarded as separable entities. 6.1.3.1 The ‘ideational’ construction of historical interpretations Historical accounts are based on the production of a particular version of events by construing in a particular way the causal, temporal and spatial relationships between actions and persons within a given situative context. The representation of the social actors and the subsequent construction of causal chains play a significant role in this process. Particular perspectives are generated, as are (implicit) value judgements concerning the historical events in question. Besides the portrayal of historical events, it is important also to appreciate their contextualization in relation to contemporary topics and debates. This gives rise to a further implicit evaluation of the events in question. 6.1.3.2 ‘Interpersonal’ construction of historical interpretations In considering the interpersonal level of historical narratives, two issues are relevant: on the one hand, the explicit evaluation, undertaken in the text, of the events in question, and on the other hand, the political aims which underlie the production of the text. The evaluation of historical events takes place at the interpersonal level through a series of attributions with respect to actors, actions and their interrelationships. The persuasiveness of historical narratives depends above all on how far the producer of a text succeeds in engendering a relationship with the reader/listener such that the latter identifies with the former. This can occur through (1) the ‘legitimation’ of the text, that is, the explanation as to why the text had to be written and should be read; (2) the demonstration of commitment and involvement in relation to the historical events in question; (3) establishing authority and credibility; (4) the use of vocabulary and syntactic constructions likely to engender identification on the part of the reader/listener; and (5) a specific ‘ideational’ construction of the historical events in question. 6.1.4 Source material The source material for the present study consists of articles which appeared in Austrian daily newspapers between 1945 and 1998. The main emphasis is on three national dailies, still in existence, which have been published over a long period: the Christian-conservative Die Presse, the popular daily Neue Kronenzeitung, and the Kurier.1 Besides these, other titles were included in the study, such as Neues Österreich, Wiener Zeitung, Arbeiter-zeitung, Salzburger Nachrichten, Der Standard, Express, Die Furche, Volksstimme, Kleine Zeitung, Tiroler Tageszeitung and Österreichische Neue Tageszeitung. The decision to focus on Die Presse, the Kurier and the Neue Kronenzeitung is due to the fact that these three newspapers cover a wide spectrum, both quantitatively – they

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each enjoy a large share of their respective market sectors – and qualitatively in terms of their differing approaches to the Nazi period. Additional newspaper titles were taken into account in connection with particular periods, notably the Allied occupation from 1945 to 1955 and the period starting in the mid-1980s, when some sections of the media began to develop a more critical perspective on the Nazi past and the question of how to approach it. A total of approximately 2000 articles were included in the study.

6.2 Elements of the Wehrmacht myth The origins of the Wehrmacht myth can be traced back to the final reports by the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW): the Wehrmacht had been ‘honourably defeated’ by ‘overwhelmingly superior forces’, German soldiers could boast of ‘unforgettable achievements’ and could lay down their arms ‘with dignity and pride’. (Pätzold, 2000, pp. 176f.). Not many months after the war ended, the German military elite gave their own written account of the causes of the war and the way in which it had been conducted. The most senior ranks of the Wehrmacht were concerned to acquit the Wehrmacht of blame (see Pätzold, 2000, pp. 176f.). In the late 1940s, field marshals and generals began to publish their memoirs. They sought to revise the negative image of the Wehrmacht created by the Allies in the immediate post-war period, and as a result of media coverage of the war crimes trials. Besides these publications by the military elite, which sold in significant numbers in Germany and Austria during the 1950s, there were widely circulated ‘Landser’ magazines and ‘soldier novels’, which, according to the historian Kurt Plätzold, ‘once again exposed the public to the naked glorification of the “heroic deeds” of soldiers from all branches the Wehrmacht’ (see Pätzold, 2000, pp. 25f.). Also worthy of note is the reestablishment in Austria, in 1953, of veterans’ associations. These set themselves the task of ‘safeguarding traditions’, including those of the Wehrmacht (see Chapter 5 in this volume). Due to their close ties with the political parties, and also the size of their membership (between 200,000 and 300,000), they continue to exert political influence to this day. A distinction must be drawn between the narrower sense of the ‘myth of the untainted Wehrmacht’, which amounts to a general exoneration of the Wehrmacht from the Nazi policy of annihilation, and the broader sense, which refers to any exculpatory discourse in relation to the Wehrmacht and, above all, in relation to the ‘ordinary soldiers’. This exculpatory discourse does not rely on the claim that the Wehrmacht was free of involvement in any kind of brutality or transgression of international or human rights law. Nor does the expression ‘untainted’ necessarily indicate complete innocence, but turns out, on closer inspection, to be a complex ‘relative construct’. Relativizations, about which more will be said below, take place on different substantive and linguistic levels: that is to say, a variety of discursive means

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are employed in order to absolve the Wehrmacht and its soldiers of blame and responsibility. An analysis of the language and content of the newspaper articles reveals ten structural elements which can be related to the creation and maintenance of – in the broader sense – the myth of the ‘untainted Wehrmacht’. It should be noted that the individual structural elements of the Wehrmacht myth operate at different linguistic and content levels. However, the interconnectedness of content and realization in the construction of historical ‘truths’ precludes the clear-cut analytical separation of content-related and linguistic constructional elements. I will nonetheless attempt this separation where it serves a useful expository purpose.2 The ten identified structural elements of the Wehrmacht myth are: 1. The myth of Austrian victimhood. 2. Focusing on a small group of the guilty. 3. Construction of the dominant, symbolically laden ‘victim’ event: ‘Stalingrad’. 4. The offsetting and relativizing of war crimes (including the linguistic diminution of Nazi crimes in which the Wehrmacht was involved, and the linguistic intensification and dramatization of crimes by the Allies). 5. Denying responsibility for the war. 6. Portrayal of individual ‘battles’ in isolation from the whole-war context. 7. Portrayal of the wartime destinies of individuals (biographical accounts) in isolation from the whole-war context. 8. Claims regarding the naivety and apolitical outlook of ‘ordinary’ soldiers. 9. The claimed lack of room for discretion on the part of Wehrmacht soldiers. 10. Writing heroizing obituaries of generals and soldiers. There follows a short outline of the development of the Wehrmacht’s portrayal in the Austrian media since 1945. This will serve as a frame of reference for the chronological placement of the proposed structural elements of the myth of the ‘untainted Wehrmacht’ (on this and what follows, see Pollak, 2002a). It is striking that during the period immediately after the war, no standardized, flattering image of the Wehrmacht took root in media discourse. The immediate post-war period was marked by numerous war crimes trials (some of which involved Wehrmacht personnel), by the return home of prisoners of war and by the myth of Austrian victimhood as a narrative frame of reference. Austrian – and only Austrian – soldiers were incorporated into the Austrian victim group and, in consequence, collectively acquitted of blame and responsibility for the criminal conduct of the war. By 1947–48, with the emerging ‘Cold War’ and the beginning of the State Treaty negotiations,3 the media increasingly acted as though ‘mandated’ to

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work towards the fulfilment of a number of objectives: the attainment of the State Treaty, the integration of ‘returnees’, the construction of an Austrian national identity, and the rejection of reparations demands. A significant device used in the pursuit of these ‘mandates’ was the continued, and for the most part undiscriminating, advocacy of the claim to victimhood. In addition to this, there was an over-emphasis on, and exaggeration of, Austrian resistance to the Nazi regime. By no later than the mid-1950s, the accounts of Stalingrad had crystallized into a narrative that was to assume the dominant position within media recollection of the Second World War. The image of suffering, betrayed, innocent soldiers played a key part in the construction of a quite definite image of the Wehrmacht. The high importance attached to ‘Stalingrad’ by the media can be gauged by the fact that, in extreme cases, the ‘crime of Stalingrad’ was given equal billing to the Holocaust. ‘In the ice desert between the Don and the Volga’, said one of the media reports, ‘it was no different to Auschwitz or Buchenwald.’4 Whilst reference was usually made to ‘the German Wehrmacht’, in the case of ‘Stalingrad’, where the soldiers were identified as victims, the Wehrmacht’s Austrian contingent was placed firmly in the forefront of accounts. Despite early attempts, from the mid-1960s onwards, to debate the question of ‘overcoming the past’, it was not until the 1980s that any discussion took place about the involvement of the Wehrmacht in Nazi crimes. The turning point came in 1985, in the wake of the controversy surrounding the welcome extended by the then defence minister, Friedhelm Frischenschlager, to the just-released war criminal Walter Reder. For the first time, some sections of the media, in particular the Kurier, engaged in critical discussion of the Wehrmacht’s participation in the National Socialist policy of annihilation. The debate about the ‘state reception’ for the war criminal Reder prepared the ground for the ‘great debate’ on policy for dealing with the past, or ‘Vergangenheitspolitik’, that was to be provoked in 1986 by the Waldheim affair.5 Of particular significance in the context of the debate which began in 1986 – besides the question of how to approach the Nazi Balkans campaign – is the issue encapsulated by the phrase which Kurt Waldheim used to justify his actions, namely that he was ‘doing his duty’. The question of ‘doing one’s duty’ was not only about whether the Wehrmacht, in whole or in part, had or had not been involved in the Nazi war of annihilation; the concern now was also with the tangible responsibility of the individual Wehrmacht soldier. The debate on this question oscillated between (1) a critical position in relation to the past, as exemplified by Gerhard Botz in the Kurier, who pointed out that the wars of the ‘Third Reich’ had been wars of annihilation which went far beyond the normal business of war, and beyond what was normally meant by merely ‘doing one’s duty’, and (2) the point of view represented by Viktor Reimann in the Neue Kronenzeitung, who argued that the

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defence of ‘soldierly duty’ was justified, and that the soldiers were not in any way to blame (see Pollak, 2002a, p. 171). From the mid-1980s, the topic ‘Wehrmacht and Nazi crimes’ was no longer an impenetrable taboo, and the façade of ‘innocence’ and ‘respectability’ had begun to show visible cracks. Nonetheless, the image of the ‘untainted Wehrmacht’ remained a dominant one in the public imagination. This state of affairs only changed with any lasting effect in 1995, when the first Wehrmacht Exhibition took place, fundamentally altering the popular perception of the Wehrmacht, as well as the way in which the topic of the Wehrmacht was approached.6 6.2.1 The Austrian victimhood myth7 Essential to the Austrian post-war approach to the Wehrmacht was the hegemonic narrative of Austria and the Austrians as the first victims of Nazi Germany (see Chapter 5). For decades, the victimhood myth functioned in the sphere of public consciousness as a kind of filter on the past, through which the Austrians could, and indeed must, be viewed as a victim group. This victim status also applied to the soldiers of the Wehrmacht, who, according to the media, were ‘forced into foreign uniforms’ and made to serve in a ‘foreign army’. Nonetheless, the Austrian victimhood narrative did not include a general acquittal of the Wehrmacht as a (German) organization, and was therefore not part of a Wehrmacht myth in the narrower sense. In terms of the perception of Wehrmacht soldiers, however, it did represent a kind of additional underpinning of their status as victims. In reality, it was open to every Austrian and, above all, to Austrian politicians, to invoke the ‘national claim to victimhood’ whenever questions of blame and responsibility arose. The most intensive media exploitation of the claim to victimhood occurred during the period from1947 to 1955, as both government and media strove for the attainment of the State Treaty, the integration of ‘returnees’, the construction of an Austrian national identity and the rejection of reparations demands. 6.2.2 Focusing on a small group of the guilty Where the question of blame could not be dismissed or deflected, the Austrian media focused mainly on two small groups of the guilty: first, the Nazi leadership, or Hitler specifically, and second, the SS. The Hitler-centred approach reduced the Second World War to ‘the work of one man’ or ‘Hitler’s war’. By the early 1950s, the general phenomenon of ‘Hitlerization’ had already become a feature of media discourse: National Socialism became ‘Hitlerdom’, ‘Hitler’s rule’ or the ‘Hitler era’; Nazi Germany became ‘Hitler’s Reich’ or ‘Hitler’s Germany’; the Second World War became ‘Hitler’s War’. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the media was engaged in a veritable ‘Hitler craze’. Hitler was the reference point for countless stories, which featured the ‘Führer’ in a variety of settings: the Kronenzeitung

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eventually took the step of no longer enclosing the word ‘Führer’ within quotation marks. The SS-centred approach to dealing with the question of guilt emphasized the role of a small group of ‘real Nazis’, who were portrayed as a self-contained coterie, detached from the rest of humanity. Whilst the crimes committed in the ‘hinterlands’ were attributed to the SS, the Wehrmacht were presented as troops fighting it out in a ‘regular’ war. Members of the SS were often described in media texts as inhuman beasts, who murdered either in cold blood or as a result of a temporary rush of blood to the head. In contrast to the media’s portrayal of the SS, when events were covered in which there was a suggestion of Wehrmacht involvement in crimes, we see the phenomenon of linguistic ‘restraint’ of the Wehrmacht from criminal activity. In such cases, writers would tend to make use of passive constructions, leaving open the question of direct, physical perpetration, and thus avoiding any clear indication of Wehrmacht involvement. An example of this can be seen in the following article, which appeared in the ArbeiterZeitung during the immediate post-war period. In it, ‘an eyewitness, an Austrian socialist’ recounts his ‘personal recollections’ of the war crimes of ‘the Nazis’. Not only was this one of the very few pieces in which the reporting of war crimes was not coupled with coverage of the war crimes trials, it was also one of those very rare ‘returnee accounts’ that dealt (from within the ranks, as it were) with the criminal aspects of the Nazis’ conduct of the war: Russia, 20 June 1941. […] The next morning, the inferno ignites. Thousands of Stukas and fighter-bombers transform the blossoming and peaceful countryside into a flaming desert, thousands of artillery weapons tear up the earth under the explosive impact of shells, countless tanks pulverize everything under their tracks. […] But the most horrific things have yet to happen. The combat troops are followed by the security formations, mainly SS troops. Only now does it all get started: the cleansing, the plundering, the arrests, the executions, the occupation and the extermination.8 The Nazi war of aggression against the Soviet Union is described in the article as a war of annihilation, in which ‘the most horrific things’ occur only after the arrival of the ‘security detachments’. The eyewitness account does not end at this point, however, but goes on to mention the crimes against Russian war captives, the attacks on, and repression of, the civilian population and, finally, the mass murder of Jews. It does so, however, without ever giving a clear picture as to the extent to which the Wehrmacht was a participant in the crimes, or whether only the SS troops were responsible for them. It does clearly follow, however, that the Wehrmacht personnel referred to in the article were at least close witnesses of the crimes: Silent and motionless, thousands of captured Russians wait to be marched away to the assembly camp. Having to go for days without any food, they chew grass, roots, bark, even soil. If one of them steps out of line, there is

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a bang and a body rolls into the ditch. If anyone on the march falls behind out of weakness, he meets the same fate. […] In Bialystok, Jewish dwellings are systematically plundered, and the occupants crammed into the ghetto, where they await liquidation. A horrific fate awaits these men, women and children: at the crack of dawn a column of several hundred Jews staggers to the edge of town, for half an hour there is the racket of machine-gun fire, then the silence of death. Individual ambushes by Partisans on German soldiers – or more often than not just the rumour or pretence – suffice to reduce a village to ashes, complete with inhabitants and livestock. People who try to flee are gunned down. Hundreds of thousands of Jews are exterminated: in Baranavichy more than 10,000; in Bialystok 30,000; in Minsk and Smolensk more than 50,000; in Vilnius alone almost 60,000 […].9 The reason why the extent of the Wehrmacht’s participation in these crimes does not emerge clearly from the text is that the sentences are constructed in such a way that the specific actors are, for the most part, not directly referred to. For example, when the writer describes how ‘there is a bang’ or writes that ‘Jewish dwellings are plundered’, or that ‘there is the racket of machinegun fire’ or that ‘a village is reduced to ashes complete with inhabitants and livestock’, and so on, the question remains unanswered as to who made the loud bang, plundered the Jewish dwellings or set fire to a village with all its inhabitants. The only time that the actors are named is when either the Lithuanian Police or the SS are identified as the perpetrators: In October 1941, in a large pine forest eleven kilometres from Vilnius, the Jews have to undertake eleven vast excavations. Each is about 50 metres long and several metres wide, with a depth of around four metres. The site is surrounded by a fence covered with barbed wire, the height of a man to prevent anyone looking in from outside – a wonderful location for a great ‘liquidation’, which will not be a long time coming. Towards the end of October, lorries drive up to the entrance to the ghetto, Lithuanian police make their way inside and fetch out the old and the frail, and any other Jews incapable of working: men, women and children. They harry them on to the vehicles and head off with them towards to the east under the cloak of darkness. Before dawn breaks, we hear machine-gun and rifle fire in the distance, and we talk about an ‘exercise’. By about ten o’clock, the vehicles are back, some loaded half full of clothes … This goes on night after night, except that later, they march on foot.10 Finally, the author of the newspaper article dramatically describes how he came to be a direct witness of a liquidation operation (by the German SS wearing Lithuanian Police uniforms): At just before seven o’clock they come – some 300 men, women and children, a long, slow-moving procession of the doomed. […] A line of

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men are ushered to the rim of the open grave, anyone who has half-decent clothes has to get undressed, while facing towards the pit. The executioners step back and suddenly two machine-guns let rip. The victims drop down into the pit, and any that stay up are dispatched with a kick. Single pistol shots reverberate, short and loud. These men knew how to die. Not a sound passed their lips. But in the background, you could hear the wailing of the women and children. This spectacle is repeated five times, until all the men are accounted for. The sickening smell of blood lies heavy on the site, the executioners wade through the blood and really do find themselves in a state of murderous, manic frenzy. […] The screams are piercing, the blood curdles in our veins. When it comes to the women, machine pistols and revolvers are used to complete the most appalling murder. But the most harrowing thing is the slaughtering of the children. Most are bludgeoned to death with clubs by means of blows to the head, but the very small ones are grabbed by the feet, swung through the air and their heads smashed against trees. Many of the older soldiers feel ill and have to be sick, some groan, and most turn away – and will not be free of this sight for the rest of their lives.11 In the final part of his report, which is about a concrete instance of a murder operation, the writer of the article draws a clear dividing line between ‘us’, the soldiers, and ‘them’, the ‘executioners’ of the SS. Whilst the former feel ‘the blood curdle in their veins’ and become ill, the latter find themselves in ‘a state of manic frenzy’. 6.2.3 The Stalingrad myth – soldiers as the victims of betrayal From the early 1950s onwards, the memory of ‘Stalingrad’ assumes a significant role in Austrian commemorative discourse and in the construction of a particular image of the soldier. No other event in the Second World War occupies such a prominent and permanent place in the Austrian media as the ‘sacrifice of the Sixth Army’ at Stalingrad. Immediately after 1945, ‘Stalingrad’ was still generally described in media reports as the ‘turning point’ of the war and the start of the victorious campaign by the Red Army – and not, as was later to become the case, as the place of suffering for both German and Austrian soldiers. On 3 February 1948, to mark the fifth anniversary of the surrender of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, the newspaper Neues Österreich carried an article entitled ‘From Stalingrad to Vienna’, in which the turnaround in military fortunes is placed in the spotlight. Stalingrad is described as the place where ‘the man who liked to be thought of as the greatest commander of all time’ had suffered ‘the greatest defeat of all time’.12 Five years later, on 24 January 1953, under the heading ‘Letters from death’s door’, the Wiener Kurier carried an article in which the suffering and recollections of the soldiers, as conveyed

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in their letters from the front, take on a central role in the depiction of Stalingrad.13 In order for the victimhood of the Wehrmacht soldiers to be firmly imprinted on the collective post-war memory, it was necessary to develop quite specific narratives in relation to the event, ‘the Battle of Stalingrad’. The advance of the Wehrmacht troops towards Stalingrad, for example, and the involvement of the Sixth Army in carrying out the National Socialist annihilation policy, had to be left out of the picture. Of importance for the Austrian image of Stalingrad were the sufferings of the Wehrmacht soldiers – the freezing cold, the hunger, the illness and the fear – and the ‘betrayal’ by the Wehrmacht leadership of their own men, leaving the Wehrmacht rankand-file soldiers ‘in the lurch’ in the name of military strategy. Another characteristic feature of the Austrian media’s approach to ‘Stalingrad’ is the frequent use of the text type ‘biographical experiential account’ – a form of text which makes it possible to screen out the context of the war of annihilation, and focus on the fate of individual Wehrmacht soldiers. 6.2.4 Relativizing war crimes The defence used by parts of the media after 1945, when faced with the question of blame, is based not only on the specifically Austrian construct of the victimhood myth, but also frequently on the tallying-up and relativizing of war crimes. Four specific types of relativization can be identified: (1) the general relativization of the Nazi period, by equating it, for example, with the period of occupation which followed; (2) the relativization of the Nazi conduct of war, by the shifting elsewhere of the responsibility for the outbreak of the war (see 6.2.5 on the question of responsibility for the war); (3) the relativization of Nazi crimes by offsetting them against war crimes committed by the Allies; and (4) relativization by equating the Wehrmacht’s part in the Second World War with other military disputes and crimes throughout history. An example of the general relativization of the Nazi period can be found in the Neue Kronenzeitung, in a commentary by the ‘Krone’ editor Hans Dichand, in which he set out his position on the question of jury acquittals in war crime trials. Dichand penned an article with the title ‘Law and Fear’, and drew a parallel between, on the one hand, the ‘shocking – unimaginably dreadful – things’ that happened before the downfall of the Third Reich, and on the other hand, those ‘shocking things’ that occurred after the downfall: ‘More than 20 years ago, the Third Reich was reduced to rubble and ruins. Before this downfall, shocking – unimaginably dreadful – things occurred, and after the downfall, shocking things happened all over again. However, proceedings were only brought in relation to crimes committed before 1945 – that is to say, before the collapse of the Third Reich.’ Dichand complained that ‘victor’s justice’ meant that action was taken only over the crimes of the

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Nazis, whilst no legal process was initiated in relation to the crimes of the Allies.14 With respect to the relativization of Nazi crimes by offsetting these against war crimes on the part of the Allies, again, four approaches can be identified: (a) the explicit equating of Nazi crimes with the alleged or actual crimes of the Allies; (b) placing particular emphasis on the alleged or actual crimes of the Allies (e.g., the bombing of Dresden, the Katyn massacre and the expulsion of ‘ethnic Germans’ after the war); (c) the dramatic linguistic representation of the crimes of the Allies combined with a comparatively watered-down representation of Nazi crimes; and (d) the characterization of Nazi crimes as merely a reaction to the brutal war waged by the enemy. An example of Allied crimes being equated with those of the Nazis can be seen in an article by Clemens Lothar in the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten. Here, Lothar simply turns the question of guilt on its head when he discusses the responsibility of the Allies for the ‘final solution to the German question’. Lothar analyses the ‘responsibility of the statesmen of the Western powers’ for the destruction and suffering in Germany. Only towards the end of his article does he talk about the full magnitude of the Nazi crimes, in order to arrive at the overall relativistic conclusion that the Second World War had been ‘a crusade and a European Civil War’ and that, according to Lothar, crusades and civil wars will invariably have ‘a corrosive effect on moral values, as well as on life and property’: Even if blame is attached to the statesmen of the victorious world powers, as critical voices amongst the victors would claim, this cannot exonerate Hitler from having pursued ill-conceived ends with insufficient resources and mistaken methods. […] Certainly, Churchill and Roosevelt, quite apart from Stalin, also became guilty through the militarily unjustified and pointless bombing terror they inflicted on innocent people, including women and children, and the methods based on hatred with which they pursued their ‘final solution to the German question’, even going as far as the Morgenthau Plan,15 and then long after the fighting was over, driving millions of Germans inhumanely from their homeland. And yet this cannot diminish the horror of the concentration camps and the gas chambers, as it reached its barbaric climax, under Hitler’s command, in the last years of the war. Crusades and civil wars, in the absence of sensible political objectives, do have a corrosive effect on moral values, as well as on life and property. The Second World War was both – a crusade and a European Civil War.16 The article quoted is clearly historically revisionist. This is underlined by the designation of the Second World War as a civil war, and the extreme relativization of Nazi crimes by emphasizing the ‘methods based on hatred’ with which the Allies pursued the ‘final solution to the German question’.

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In the 1980s and 1990s, media preoccupation with particular alleged crimes by the Allies gained in intensity. For example, we find detailed accounts of the ‘death of Dresden’ and the bombardment of Austrian cities. The ‘senseless bombings’ are cited by parts of the media as proof that the Allies, too, and especially the British, did not shrink from committing war crimes. Whilst a major issue was made of the aerial warfare of the Allies, there are few accounts of the bombing raids by the Nazi Luftwaffe on Warsaw, Belgrade, Coventry, Stalingrad and other European cities. The media coverage, for the most part, gives the impression that the bombing war was waged almost exclusively by the Allies. A further heavily emphasized topic is the persecution of so-called ‘ethnic Germans’ (Volksdeutsche) and their expulsion from Central and Eastern Europe towards the end, and in the immediate aftermath, of the war. In more sophisticated treatments – for example, a piece by Hans Rauscher in the Kurier17 – the ‘industrialized bestiality of the Nazis’ was held up against the ‘spontaneous bestiality’ perpetrated on the ethnic Germans, with Hitler being accorded ultimate responsibility for the expulsions. However, such subtleties were absent from other portrayals: one saw the ‘ethnic Germans’ simply as ‘the victims of the barbarity of victor’s justice’ and of the ‘greatest mass expulsion in history’.18 The massacre at Katyn, a place in Poland where thousands of Polish officers were murdered by Soviet units, is an event to which the Austrian media attaches great importance. For more than 50 years, the Soviet Union had denied responsibility for the massacre, and blamed German units for the crime. In Austrian media portrayals, Katyn thus became ‘a symbol of the falsification of history and of unatoned crimes’. This created the opportunity to tell the Soviet Union that she – much more than Austria – had work to do in order to come to terms with the past. This emphasis on ‘dark chapters’ in the Allied conduct of the war was used by parts of the Austrian media to place Nazi war crimes in the context of a generally crime-ridden time in history and, in so doing, to relativize them. A further phenomenon that can be looked at from the point of view of the relativization of Nazi crimes is the dramatic linguistic representation of crimes committed by the Allies. That is to say, these crimes are underlined not merely by virtue of their frequent appearance in the media, but also by the manner in which they are described. The language used to describe and comment on Allied crimes is different, sometimes significantly so, from the linguistic realizations used to represent Nazi crimes. This leads potentially to a much heightened, and more emotional, awareness of Allied crimes, coupled with a diminution of Nazi crimes. In those media which adopt an offsetting and relativizing approach, the actions of the Allies are usually described in more detail, and the actors responsible mentioned far more frequently – using

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active constructions – than is the case for portrayals of German or Austrian crimes. An emotionalizing illocutionary force is created, for example, by endowing the actors with intensifying attributes: Partisans, for example, are described as being in a ‘murderous frenzy’,19 The concept of a murderous frenzy does not occur even once, in the papers analysed, in relation to Wehrmacht soldiers. Finally, it is notable that media reports about Nazi crimes are rarely accompanied by pictures, whereas it is much more common to see images – often dramatic ones – of Allied crimes. Images of devastated German and Austrian cities are shown, as are pictures of victims of the expulsions of ‘ethnic Germans’, or of Soviet ‘excesses’ in Austria. 6.2.5 Disclaiming responsibility for the outbreak of war The relevance of the question of responsibility for the war to the discursive construction of the image of the ‘untainted Wehrmacht’ can be seen in the bearing that judgements – in either direction – on the question of responsibility have on the image of particular World War actors – according to whether their actions are portrayed as justified or unjustified. The various answers to the question ‘who was responsible for starting the war?’ exert an influence on perceptions of the Wehrmacht and its conduct during the war. However, a broader media discussion of the responsibility for the outbreak of the Second World War only took place in the Austrian media from the 1970s onwards. Discussions about the responsibility for the war revolve around a number of substantive points of reference. One such reference point is the question of the role of the so-called Western Powers (Great Britain and France). Related to this is discussion of the so-called ‘disgrace treaty’ of Versailles, which is seen as the first in a chain of events that gave rise to nationalism and militarism in Germany. A further point of reference in the media’s search for the ‘true’ causes of the Second World War is the role of the Soviet Union. The principal point of interest here is the non-aggression pact with Germany (the so-called Hitler-Stalin Pact), which, in the eyes of some of the media, is what first encouraged Hitler and made it possible for Nazi Germany to wage a war of aggression against Poland. Besides the question of responsibility for the outbreak of war in September 1939, another issue highlighted in some parts of the media is that of the circumstances surrounding the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. Some commentators advance the so-called ‘preventive war’ thesis, which supposes that plans existed for a Soviet invasion, thus constituting an acute threat to the German Reich, and thereby justifying, as a pre-emptive strike, Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union. The fact is, however, that the preventive war thesis stands in fundamental contradiction of the historical facts, as understood by most historians, which lead to the conclusion that this was a pure war of aggression on the part of Nazi Germany, in which any supposed threat scenarios were of no significance (see Ueberschär and Wette, 1999).

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What is particularly striking is that the newspapers which most frequently bring the question of the responsibility for the war into the journalistic frame are precisely those which, either largely (like Die Presse, for example), or completely (like the Neue Kronenzeitung), fail to adopt a critical, analytical perspective on the question of blame and responsibility for Nazi crimes, preferring instead to relativize and make allowances. A year in which broad sections of the media were preoccupied with the outbreak of the war was 1979, which marked the fortieth anniversary of the start of the Second World War. The conclusions reached by the various newspapers on the causes of the outbreak of war differed enormously. A piece by the Neue Kronenzeitung ‘historian’, Viktor Reimann, described ‘the perfidiousness with which the powers steered a course towards catastrophe’. For Reimann, the Second World War is ‘basically the dramatic conclusion to the First World War’. If we follow Reimann’s line of argument, the responsibility for the Wehrmacht’s attack on Poland lay, on the one hand, with the Poles themselves, for rejecting Hitler’s ‘not unreasonable’ demands, and on the other hand, with the English, who had ‘provoked’ Hitler by issuing a guarantee to Poland.20 A much discussed question, particularly in the conservative sector of the Austrian media, was that of Stalin’s co-responsibility for the outbreak of war. This example is from a piece in the ÖVP newspaper Neues Volksblatt, entitled ‘40 years on: Stalin’s share of the blame’: In Moscow, on 24 August 1939, the Hitler-Stalin Pact was finalized, and eight days later, on 1 September 1939, Hitler ordered his troops to march into Poland. When Poland was defeated, Stalin also mobilized his troops – in order to seize Eastern Poland. […] Forty years on from the start of the war, historians are still exercised by the question of whether, without his pact with Stalin, Hitler would have risked invading Poland in the face of Great Britain and France’s ultimatum – the question, in other words, of Stalin’s share of responsibility for the war.21 The Neues Volksblatt answers the question of Stalin’s co-responsibility for the war unambiguously, giving equal status to the ‘forces of the century, National Socialism and International Socialism’. The Soviet Union is held jointly responsible, not only for the invasion of Poland, but also for the fact that ‘Hitler [could] march into Belgium, Holland, Denmark and France’.22 A further topic raised in connection with the question of responsibility for the war is the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, which is linked to the preventive war thesis referred to above, and invoked time and again by the historical revisionist lobby. Closely linked to the preventive war argument is the thesis of the ‘defensive war against Bolshevism’, according to which the Wehrmacht rescued Western Europe from the threat of Bolshevism.23

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Heinz Magenheimer put forth the claim in Die Presse that it was now known that the Soviets had made preparations for a war against Nazi Germany, and that it was therefore legitimate to pose the question as to whether the German offensive was indeed of a preventive nature. Magenheimer gives a clear answer to his own question regarding a preventive war: ‘Under such conditions one can very well consider the German offensive to have been of a “preventive character” – even though we should by no means overlook other objectives of the Eastern campaign, especially the persecution of “racially inferior” ethnic groups and the economic exploitation of the conquered territories.’24 6.2.6 Portrayal of individual ‘battles’ outside the context of the War of Annihilation When the War of Annihilation is ‘airbrushed’ out of descriptions of the events of the war, these take on the character of ‘normal’ wartime activity, to be judged from a military strategic perspective or in relation to so-called soldierly values, such as ‘valour’ and ‘camaraderie’. In this way, a positive, ‘untainted’ picture of the combat troops is conveyed; in extreme cases, they are portrayed as heroes. Besides the ubiquitous (in Austrian memory) ‘Battle of Stalingrad’, the articles in the Neue Kronenzeitung by Ingomar Pust on the ‘Tragedy in the Arctic Sea’, the ‘Death Pilots’ and the ‘Mountain Infantry in the Arctic Hell’25 can be cited as examples. In ‘Tragedy in the Arctic Sea’, Pust writes about a Nazi Mountain Infantry troop which had been deployed in Murmansk. Pust descends into raptures about the ‘Austrian soldiery’ of yore, which was admired the world over and had withstood ordeals that ‘the affluent youth of today would be unable to cope with without Arctic kit’: ‘Abroad, Austrian soldiers are marvelled at, but in this country we keep quiet about them, or even sneer at them. Abandonment of tradition erodes our defences.’26 A second piece by Pust, which I include here as an example of undiscriminating epic narrative about the Second World War, is devoted to the ‘selfsacrifice’ of ‘39 death pilots’ who, according to Pust, destroyed bridges for the Wehrmacht. Their ‘self sacrifice’ had admittedly been unable to delay the advance of the Soviet Army to the River Oder, even by a few days, ‘but even this futile sacrifice provides food for thought. Preserved letters written by the “ram pilots” … betray a lack of understanding of the political and military realities. But that does not change anything as far as their courage is concerned, or the way they were inspired by the idea of the “Fatherland”, […]. If we are now going to build monuments to deserters and legalize conscientious objection, then we should not forget the courage that comes from patriotism.’27 In other newspapers, such as Die Presse, scenes of fighting outside Europe are invoked to uphold the virtues of soldiery in the Second World War. For example, Die Presse devoted an article to the Battle of El Alamein under the

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heading, ‘Short on fortune, not on substance’. What is meant by the terms ‘fortune’ and ‘substance’ becomes clear early on in the text. ‘Fortune’ refers to the fortunes of war, whilst with ‘substance’, Die Presse is alluding to the ‘soldierly virtue’ and ‘battlefield valour’ that had been a mark of the Wehrmacht soldiers. In his glorification of ‘soldierly values’, the author of the article then focuses on the ‘Desert Fox’, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who had distinguished himself through an ‘outstanding tactical ability’ and a ‘legendary attacking flair’.28 This uncritical and unsophisticated heroification of Wehrmacht soldiers is not an isolated example amidst all the media coverage, although, amongst the Austrian national daily newspapers, the Neue Kronenzeitung does assume a vanguard role in this respect. 6.2.7 Biographical accounts – soldiers’ destinies A significant proportion of Austrian media content relating to the past consists of portrayals of the fortunes of individual soldiers. This occurs in the form of re-narrations, interviews or autobiographical accounts, in which those involved are able to speak for themselves. It should be noted that such narratives present, for the most part, only a very restricted view of the dayto-day events of war, omitting any reference to the ‘War of Annihilation’, and thereby contributing significantly to the image of the ‘untainted Wehrmacht’. This is primarily due to the fact that only very few survivors of the Nazi racial persecution and the Nazi policy of annihilation are able to have their say. Narrative space in the Austrian media is afforded almost exclusively to those who experienced the war from within the ranks of the Wehrmacht. Only in connection with the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in the early 1960s, was there any significant (albeit short-lived) exposure for accounts by Jewish contemporary witnesses who experienced and survived the crimes of the Nazis. Both before and since, however, accounts by Austrian prisoners of war and Stalingrad veterans predominate. In particular, the ‘war hell’29 of Stalingrad is the linchpin of numerous experiential and autobiographical accounts (see Section 6.2.3, above). As examples of autobiographical prisoner-of-war accounts dealing with the fate of Wehrmacht soldiers in Soviet captivity, let us consider two series from the Neue Kronenzeitung. One of these appeared in 1969, and was authored by Richard Nimmerrichter, known to readers by the moniker ‘Staberl’; the other was published by the Neue Kronenzeitung in 1995, just after the opening of the first Wehrmacht Exhibition. Both series dealt with exactly the same topic, but offered completely different perspectives on the past. Three features stand out in Richard Nimmerrichter’s account of his time in Soviet captivity. First, he refers only to ‘German’ prisoners of war: that is to say, Richard Nimmerrichter sees himself as a German prisoner-of-war; he makes no explicit distinction between Germans and Austrians. Second,

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throughout the series as a whole, there is a strong tendency to equate Soviet prisoners of war in German custody with the German POWs held in Soviet camps. Finally, the portrayal of the Soviets’ treatment of prisoner of war is conspicuously positive. Nimmerrichter stressed that ‘in seven different prison camps [I was] never beaten or otherwise mistreated. And, with one single exception, I never witnessed a case where a German prisoner was intentionally killed. […] I did, on the other hand, register hundreds of cases of heart-warmingly helpful Russian soldiers or civilians lending us prisoners a hand in one way or another.’30 Nimmerrichter also wrote, ‘German prisoners of war probably did die by the thousand, though not due to malevolence on the part of the Russians, but because of the unimaginable hardship that afflicted the whole country in those days.’31 Nimmerrichter described his Wehrmacht service with detachment, for example, when he talks of the ‘balderdash’ that he had to listen to in ‘Hitler’s German Wehrmacht’.32 He sought to distance himself above all from ‘the high-ups’ and to portray himself as a small but restive soldier, bent first and foremost on survival, who rejected (in equal measure) both Hitler and Stalin. The war of conquest, and the criminal manner in which it was waged, were not dealt with by Nimmerrichter as topics in their own right. His account begins with the day of his capture, describes the hardships of wartime captivity, which he does not actually blame on the Russians, and ends with his return to Austria. In 1995, the Kronenzeitung published a prisoner-of-war memoir with content structured similarly to that just described. But apart from this convergence, the two narratives have very little in common. The new series was entitled ‘Our prisoners of war in Soviet camps’ (the title itself is supposed to engender a ‘we’-feeling). The words used by Kronenzeitung editor Hans Dichand to introduce it, and underline its importance, created a very different, emotionally charged narrative frame of reference, clearly marking the series as a reaction to the first Wehrmacht Exhibition, which had just touched down in Hamburg. Thus, the autobiographical account of Johann Leopold Bogg’s experiences as a POW became part of the battle over what is officially ‘history’. In his introduction, Dichand explained that Bogg, whose story was emblematic of ‘hundreds of thousands’ of others, had, over a period of 10 years, ‘endured monstrous oppression and torture’, and that ‘squalor, hunger, sadism, and death’ had been the appalling daily reality for innocent prisoners of war’. Bogg was, however, ‘free of any desire for vengeance’. In stating this, Dichand was actually implying that there might be good reason to harbour such feelings. The central impulse behind the series about ‘our prisoners of war in Soviet camps’, said Dichand, was his – Dichand’s – desire to strike back against the ‘satanic, indiscriminate calumny that the soldiers of the Second World War had been criminals’ and to bring out ‘the truth’.33

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In fact, the ‘appalling everyday reality’, at least in the way that Dichand had described it, crops up only in a small number of passages in Johann Leopold Bogg’s 18-part autobiographical account. Substantially more dramatic than the account itself were the subheadings for the individual episodes, for example: ‘Because they find nothing else on us, they beat us and spat at us … ’; ‘People screamed as they were beaten and shots rang out’; ‘How a prisoner-of-war who tried to escape was satanically tortured to death’; ‘A bread thief is cruelly tortured’; ‘Devilish exercise with men naked in the snow’, and so on. Of particular note is the way in which the escalatory use of the terms ‘satanic’ and ‘devilish’ practically pushes the fate of the POWs into the realms of religious martyrdom. Without entering further into the details of the two prisoner-of-war series, we can clearly see the potential problem with experiential accounts, which is that whilst, on the one hand, they set out to provide an ‘authentic’ rendition of past events, on the other hand, by casting a very narrow look at particular first-hand ‘everyday’ experiences, they can be placed arbitrarily in almost any context, and are therefore open to political exploitation. The Neue Kronenzeitung is a particularly good example of this kind of political instrumentalization, because, like almost no other Austrian media institution, it seeks to play the role of a campaigning political actor, using its full weight to get ‘its’ opinion across (see Pollak, 2002a). 6.2.8 Soldiers as an apolitical group One central narrative element in the portrayal of ‘ordinary’ soldiers, as well as a core argumentational device in debates about the responsibility of soldiers, is their portrayal as an apolitical, uninformed group, that is to say, as people with neither the will nor the capacity, whilst at the front, to appreciate the criminal aims of the war, or the criminal manner in which it was being waged.34 An example of such a portrayal of the soldiers of the Wehrmacht is the three-part commentary feature by Johann Christoph Allmayer-Beck in the Kurier. In his first commentary, entitled ‘Understanding for the war generation’, Allmayer-Beck discussed the social standing of those who took part in the war following their return from the battlefield or from captivity. He spelled out the ‘limited perspective’ of the soldier at the front, who ‘only in exceptional cases’ would have come to the point of thinking about whether he, ‘or the tank that was about to run over him, was actually on the right side’. In this way, Allmayer-Beck stressed the ‘apolitical’ character of the typical Wehrmacht soldier, who, in the thick of combat, had no opportunity whatsoever to question his own actions. In the third part of his commentary series, Allmayer-Beck developed this analysis to the point where ‘hardly any of the soldiers at the front knew with any clarity what they were actually fighting for’, noting that, in any case, ‘political education stops’ when ‘the trouble starts’.

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A further example, this one also concerned with ‘Stalingrad’ and the ‘soldier’s tale’ of a Stalingrad eyewitness, brings to the fore the same narrative element as that emphasized by Allmayer-Beck, namely the apolitical outlook of the ‘ordinary’ Wehrmacht soldier: Fritz Kaiser was born in 1920 – a native of Lower Austria, who matriculated at the grammar school in Seitenstetten: ‘Today I don’t know if I was a Nazi, quite honestly. In 1938 I matriculated, I saw the German Wehrmacht and I wanted to become a soldier. Do you think I knew what was going on? […] ‘They offered me the chance to study in Munich and Berlin, and then I was sent to serve in the Ruhr Basin. We did everything: built pontoon bridges, drove landing craft, explosives exercises over and over again. And finally – though I didn’t understand why – mine exercises … laying them ourselves, then defusing them ourselves. Today any fool knows that these were war preparations. But I didn’t realise that.’35 6.2.9 Citing the ‘pressure to obey orders’ A further important point of debate in the controversy about the responsibility (or lack of it) borne by soldiers is the claim that those at the front had absolutely no room for discretion – that they could choose merely between executing all orders without question, and being executed themselves. This line of argument can be found, for example, in a piece by Clemens M. Hutter in the Salzburger Nachrichten on the occasion of the first Wehrmacht Exhibition, which had just opened in Hamburg. From a historical distance, wrote Hutter, sweeping judgements on the Wehrmacht were not acceptable: For what, and for whom, had they fought and suffered? Had they carried out criminal orders without resistance? Had they not been defending Homeland, women and children? Did they even know about war crimes? Why did they not do anything about them? Was Jägerstätter36 really the only ‘good soldier’ because he refused military service and was condemned to death as result? All these questions are both important and hollow at the same time. For neither the ordinary soldier, nor even the officer below the level of command, could have any semblance of the overview which today’s historian can gain easily in retrospect.37 In his article, Hutter not only advanced the notion of the apolitical and uninformed soldier, but suggested also that a soldier’s only choice was between carrying out orders and facing execution, and that he therefore had no scope to exercise discretion.38 The article is visually reinforced by a picture of a soldier’s baggage, captioned with the text: ‘The end of the German Wehrmacht 1945: first betrayed and then annihilated. The soldiers’ only choice was between following orders

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and facing court martial. Whatever many of these men might have felt to be their duty to their homeland and their family, in those days, the concept of “doing one’s duty” was the propaganda cloak of a totalitarian regime; today it is the (often unintentional) twisting of the truth.’39 6.2.10 Heroizing obituaries The heroizing obituaries of generals and soldiers follow a similar pattern to the portrayal of wartime action and soldiers’ biographies, by being stripped of the context of the War of Annihilation. Only military ‘merit’ and ‘achievements’ are evaluated, whilst the connection with Nazi policies and the Nazi conduct of the war is either not referred to or referred to only peripherally. This is how Wolfgang Oberleitner, for example, writing in Die Presse in connection with the death of the German Grand Admiral, Karl Dönitz,40 dealt with the topic of ‘Wehrmacht honour’. Oberleitner was highly critical of the German authorities for not according the Grand Admiral the ‘last respects’ that he believed Dönitz was due. At the same time, the death of Dönitz ‘found an unexpected echo amongst his compatriots, including in the critical German press, and even amongst his former opponents. The impression given by obituaries from all over the world can be reduced to a single common denominator: in its efforts to overcome the past, Bonn has shot wide of the mark.’41 In his article, Oberleitner called for ‘the minimum of decorum for a dead soldier’ because ‘no matter what the country, a defence force [the literal meaning of Wehrmacht] which denies its own history clearly cannot count on today’s soldiers to take it seriously.’ Dönitz, wrote Oberleitner, had certainly not deserved the treatment meted out to him, ‘because it was only his loyalty to the state and to his supporters that bestowed upon him such a bitter destiny’. In other words: Dönitz only did his duty, and did it very well at that, because he rendered great military service. The selective treatment of issues in Oberleitner’s obituary can be seen as representative of a series of Wehrmacht obituaries which factored out the context of the War of Annihilation and uncritically highlighted the wartime careers and military service of the deceased (see also Chapter 8).

6.3 Conclusion The linchpin of the ideational construction of the myth of the ‘untainted Wehrmacht’ was the separation of the Nazi policy of annihilation from the ‘normal’ or ‘clean’ war waged by the Wehrmacht. The Second World War was construed as an event with a clear dividing line with respect to the way in which the actors were portrayed: on the one side of the line there were the Nazi crimes – for which the Nazi leadership and the SS were held responsible – and on the other side, the war of the Wehrmacht, whose soldiers, prior to the mid-1980s, were rarely mentioned by the media in connection with war crimes. This lack of connection derived, on the one hand, from the fact that

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the media focused mainly on Second World War topics which were not directly related to potential crimes on the part of the Wehrmacht: instead, they portrayed the soldiers of the Wehrmacht as either victims or heroes. On the other hand, where the topics covered did potentially encompass crimes by the Wehrmacht, the choice of perspective and the manner of linguistic realization were such as to construct a picture in which the (systematic) participation of the Wehrmacht in criminal acts was airbrushed out, pushed into the background or at least watered down. This all shows that it was only through the interplay of topic selection, perspectivization and linguistic realization that the image of the ‘untainted Wehrmacht’ emerged, an image which would persist and dominate for decades. Newspaper articles were predominantly concerned with types of event which either (a) had the potential to engender a feeling of empathy with Wehrmacht soldiers and to portray them as victims – whether of Hitler, of the Wehrmacht High Command, of the brutal enemy, of bad weather conditions, and so on, or (b) involved crimes on the part of the Allies. Moreover, hegemonic forms of representation were devised with which to construct and attribute stereotypic roles to actors and groups of actors. One such stereotypical actor group comprised the ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’ soldiers of the Wehrmacht. The combined selection of topic and perspective, together with particular linguistic forms of exposition, were used to construct an image of the soldier as an apolitical and non-ideological victim, and of the collective suffering of soldiers as a group. Even where the media touched on events in which Nazi crimes played a central role, the topic was approached in an exculpatory manner. In such newspaper articles, we find either that the question of blame and responsibility for the crimes was answered by focusing on particular perpetrator groups (Hitler, the SS and so on) who were clearly distinct from the rank-and-file soldiers, or that the actions were justified by portraying the crimes as a response to previous brutalities committed by the other side. Where perspectivization did not, however, suffice to obscure the connection between Wehrmacht soldiers and criminal acts, forms of linguistic expression were selected which would serve to play down or gloss over events, so as not to contradict the general notion of the ‘untainted’ or ‘respectable’ Wehrmacht. At particular stages during the post-war era, the structural elements of the myth of the ‘untainted Wehrmacht’, as outlined in this chapter, have been subject in the media to varying degrees and types of critical historiographic argumentation. This has not been without influence on public perceptions of the Nazi past. Since the 1980s, critical approaches have clearly gained in impetus, and in the mid-1990s, were able to take advantage of the impact created by the Wehrmacht Exhibition to cast lasting doubt on the image of the ‘untainted Wehrmacht’, and to appeal for an open discussion of societal involvement in National Socialism, and post-war approaches to the challenge of dealing with the Nazi period.

7 ‘The appalling toll in Austrian lives …’: The Wehrmacht and its Soldiers in Austrian School Books Sabine Loitfellner

7.1 Introduction Many former soldiers are already dead, or do not wish to speak about their experiences. On the other hand, there are frequent reports about the Wehrmacht in the media, in which the truth is sometimes in short supply. The same is true of Reemtsma’s Wehrmacht Exhibition. […] The ‘Defensive Readiness Initiative’ has taken on the task of putting interested schools in touch with contemporary witnesses from the former Wehrmacht. […] Politics will play no part – this is purely about the personal experiences of these former soldiers.1 This passage was part of a circular from the group ‘Moral Defence of the Nation’ (GLV), which the then Ministry for Education and Art (BMUK)2 forwarded to all Austrian schools in January 2000. The Nationalrat members Dieter Brosz and Karl Öllinger of the Austrian Green Party, Die Grünen, revealed more information about the ‘Defensive Readiness Initiative’, including the fact that there were people involved who could be classed as right-wing extremists. It was only following these revelations that the education minister acceded to a parliamentary request from the Greens to prohibit witnesses involved in the initiative from participating in the teaching of history in schools.3 There are two disturbing aspects to this case: first, that the BMUK issued a recommendation for the initiative – despite the fact that discussions in recent years about the involvement of the Wehrmacht in war crimes had clearly shown the potential for conflict in this subject area, with the consequent need for a sensitive and sophisticated approach. Second, and even more serious, is the fact that the BMUK (henceforward, the BMBWK), as the 155

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authority in charge of the teaching of history and politics in Austria, appears to consider it a good idea to teach a history which sets out to ‘de-politicize’ and ‘de-ideologize’ the Wehrmacht, its soldiers and their role in the Second World War. 7.1.1 School book accreditation: the construction and realization of official interpretations of history in school books Following decades during which a veil was drawn over the embarrassing and potentially explosive topic of Austrian Wehrmacht involvement in the Second World War, the Waldheim affair4 triggered a period of public debate which reached its climax with the controversy over the exhibition, ‘War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944’. However, even today the active support of numerous Austrians for the Nazi regime and its war barely figures in the general public’s historical awareness. The elevation of the notion that Austria was ‘Hitler’s first victim’ to the status of official dogma provided the means by which to institutionalize a political culture based on the flight from responsibility (Ziegler and Kannonier-Finster, 1997, p. 46). So it is hardly surprising that, even now, the most widely held opinion amongst the Austrian population is that its soldiers in the Wehrmacht – out of necessity – ‘did their duty’, ‘fought a clean war’ and ‘defended the Homeland’.5 With regard to the school’s educational and personal developmental role (Wodak and Kissling, 1995, p. 88), the Austrian School Education Act lays down that teachers may only use materials whose suitability they themselves have carefully assessed, or which have already been deemed appropriate by the education minister.6 Textbooks require a declaration of suitability from the education ministry, based on the judgment of an expert panel (see Pingel, 2000). This accreditation of school books is governed by legislation and subject to ministerial responsibility (Thöndl, 1998, pp. 3f.). In order to qualify as suitable for educational use, school books must meet certain criteria, ranging from their contribution to civic education to the factual accuracy of their content and their compatibility with the current state of knowledge about the particular subject in question. This mechanism for the state accreditation of school books is supposed to ensure that the form and content of books used in Austrian schools is of a sufficiently high standard. Beyond that, however, it also serves the aim of propagating the state’s preferred version of history (Dreier, 2000, p. 8). Teachers in the classroom naturally make use of the historical interpretations contained in school textbooks, and are particularly likely to do so if these have been officially approved, because the use of such teaching materials puts the teacher on safe ground vis-à-vis the teaching authorities. Eduard Fuchs finds this ‘alarming’ given the nature of some of the historical interpretations in question (Fuchs, 1987, p. 216).

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Ruth Wodak and Walter Kissling, in a detailed discussion of the evaluation process, summarize the effects of official school book accreditation as follows: ‘The official licensing thus leads, at the same time, to a lack of critical assessment of educational materials by teachers’ (Wodak and Kissling, 1995, p. 89). In the present study we explore, via the medium of textbooks, what school students in Austria are taught about the topics of the Second World War, the Wehrmacht and the latter’s participation in the National Socialist policies of conquest and annihilation. We also consider what official version of history is thereby constructed and imparted. Because it can be taken as read that state-approved texts contain a state-endorsed hegemonic ‘account of history’, school textbooks provide useful source material for the study of the historical interpretations prevalent within a given society (Thonhauser and Gassner, 1994, p. 429). Hilde Weiss and Christoph Reinprecht contend, for example, in their investigation of anti-Semitism in school books, that ‘the history [text]book stands in harmony with [Austria’s] official political self-characterization and – just as it does – denies and suppresses the truth about Austrians and their relationship with anti-Semitism and fascism’ (Reinprecht and Weiss, 1990, p. 301). School books, however, do not only play an important role with respect to the propagation of official interpretations of history, but are equally an important index of the existing historical and political consensus, which serves to legitimize prevailing social norms and conditions (Thonhauser, 1995, p. 184). Whoever determines which ideas about historical and political events are disseminated in history books, also exerts a particular influence on how a society deals with its history and, in particular, on which aspects are ‘airbrushed’ out. It is very difficult, however, to make conclusive statements about the role and importance of school education in general, or of textbooks in particular, in relation to their influence on (1) historical awareness, (2) political attitudes arising out of the study of history, or (3) the construction of political and historical clichés (see the studies of Fuchs, 1986). Many teachers, for example, use no history books at all, or supplement them with other materials, thereby taking advantage of the scope at their disposal for creative discretion.

7.1.2 Materials analysed, analytical framework and methodology The starting point for this study is the assumption that the portrayal of history in school books will tend to conform to the ‘official version’ of history. The focus of the study is not merely the Wehrmacht and its soldiers as historical fact, but above all, the manner of their portrayal. To this end, the historical content analysis draws on the methods of other disciplines. Particularly useful in this context are techniques of discourse analysis, for example: the identification of various argumentation strategies (justification discourses,

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distortions, ‘playing down’), as well as particular forms of linguistic realization (personalization, anonymization and so on). I attempt in this study to demonstrate the ways in which school books since 1945 have dealt with the controversial topic of the Wehrmacht and its crimes. This includes a survey of frequently used representational concepts, some of which are subjected to closer scrutiny in order to assess their impact on the mediation of history and their relationship to prevailing popular historical interpretations. In addition, I analyse from a diachronic perspective continuities, transformations and breaks in the use of particular Wehrmacht memories and interpretations, in order to assess whether these have undergone any change since the Austrian ‘Year of Commemoration 1988’, or as a result of discussions prompted by the exhibition ‘War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944’. Altogether more than 85 school textbooks (excluding variant editions) were available for analysis.7 Based on a thorough assessment of the materials, four categories were drawn up, around which the study is organized: ● ● ● ●

The Wehrmacht in the Austrian context The ‘fall’ of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad The involvement of the Wehrmacht in war crimes Military resistance to the Nazi regime

Given this wealth of material, it has not been possible to take into account when, and with what frequency, each school book has been used in the teaching of history. Moreover, no distinction is made between books intended for use at upper or lower school, or between Gymnasium (grammar school) and Hauptschule (secondary modern) textbooks. Although the degree of sophistication exhibited by the books is probably determined by the type and age range of the schools for which they are intended, in this chapter I am primarily concerned with the identification of trends.

7.2 The Wehrmacht in the Austrian context Historical memories of the Wehrmacht present themselves as multi-layered and contradictory. It is clear that they are closely tied in with the official historical notion that Austria was ‘Hitler’s first victim’. Although, from the early 1990s onwards, it is possible to detect a less naïve approach to Austria’s role in National Socialism, the claim to victimhood persists in a modified form. It is therefore not surprising that – to cite just two examples – no mention is made in any of the textbooks of either the broad sympathy within the Bundesheer8 towards the Anschluss (Safrian, 1989, p.41), or the significant role played by Austrian generals in the perpetration of war crimes in the Balkans (Manoschek and Safrian, 2000). In school books from the immediate post-war period especially, National Socialism is treated as a ‘German export’. Emphasis is given to the ‘horrors of

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war’ or to the suffering inflicted by the ‘German National Socialists’ upon the Austrian people. In general, as this 1955 example illustrates, the portrayals fail to go beyond a moralistic, plaintive, even emotional description of the war: Austria disappeared from the map and could no longer be referred to by name. A terrible war threatened to destroy our Homeland – how we would have wished to avoid the tears – we did not lust for pain and torment. […] [The war] forced the men of our country into uniforms they did not want to wear. It forced into their hands weapons they did not want to use, and it condemned them to a death they did not want to die. (Austrian Federal Government, 1955, pp. 10–12)9 The use of abstract nouns and the anonymization of the actors ensure against having to be explicit about historical facts and actors, and serve to discharge responsibility. This function is shared by the use of metaphors and comparisons, typical of school books up to the 1960s. Portrayals in which, for example, Austria ‘sustained deep wounds’ (Oberleitner, 1948, p. 76) or in which the war is depicted as ‘a savage beast’ (Austrian Federal Government, 1955, p. 10), arouse in the reader the sense of Austria having been helplessly at the mercy of events. Equally rare is any mention of the Wehrmacht as an active organization. Reference is made merely to soldiers who died in the struggle for the Fatherland: ‘Many Austrians in those days lost their lives abroad and many in the Homeland too’ (Austrian Federal Government, 1955, p. 10). This stylization as ‘defenders of the Fatherland’ and the retrospective introduction of the term ‘Austria’ to refer to the ‘Homeland’ are prevalent representational devices. The reader is given the impression that Austrian soldiers – quite unrelated to any imperialistic and ideologically racist war of aggression – had fought for the imaginary ‘Homeland’ of Austria. The indiscriminate use of the term ‘Homeland’ (Heimat) not only obscures the historical truth (Malina, 1989, p. 165), but also belies the fact that ‘defence of the Homeland’ meant the defence of Nazi rule (Hanisch, 1994, p. 373). It is only in school books from the 1990s onwards that this view of history becomes subject to relativization: ‘As soldiers of the German Wehrmacht, Austrians did carry Hitler’s war of aggression across the whole of Europe. In so doing, they were not in any way fulfilling a moral duty, or defending the Homeland. Rather, under the threat of losing their own lives, they were taking part in a ruthless and brutal war of conquest’ (Ebner et al., 1992, p. 102).10 Despite the more balanced perspective contained in this formulation, the accompanying reference to the ‘pressure to follow orders’ means that any possibility of soldiers exercising discretion is ruled out, and that they are portrayed as acting without any motives of their own. In a similar way, the compulsion to perform military service is also emphasized: ‘Austria’s youth

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was press-ganged into the ranks of the German Wehrmacht’ (Ebner and Majdan, 1979, p. 159). An example of a more critical historical approach is found in the school book Stationen 4, published in 1992. Here, reference is made to the fact that Austrian soldiers are remembered as heroes, rather than as collaborators with a criminal regime. Also called into question is the apparent contradiction, ‘We lost the war, and yet were victims of National Socialism.’ Moreover, there is mention of the fact that the liberation of Austria from National Socialism was brought about mainly ‘from outside’, that is to say, by the Allies (Floiger, Ebenhoch and Tuschel, 1992, p. 75). A further device which is used persistently in school textbooks is the dissociation of Austria from ‘Nazi Germany’, resulting in the ‘externalization’ of National Socialism (Sieder, Steinert and Tálos, 1995, p. 20), echoing a practice followed by post-war governments (Suppanz, 1998, p. 52). The central assertion is that only ‘the German National Socialists [waged] a war of aggression from 1939 to 1945’ (ARGE Geschichtslehrer, 1946, p. 10). This introduces a ‘we-discourse’ which absolves Austrians across the board of blame and responsibility and casts them as a collective victim group. The following passage is a typical example: When the Soviet troops pushed their way across the Austrian border from the East in March 1945, the state authorities and administrative offices ceased to operate. The leading National Socialists fled to the West, abandoning the people to their fate. Women, children and the elderly squeezed into the few available trains in order to flee to the West and save themselves from the horrors of the fighting. Remnants of the German Wehrmacht tried to hold up the advance of the Russians and blew up tramways and railway bridges. Austrian resistance groups aimed to save the Homeland from further senseless destruction. (Berger et al., 1967, p. 191) This narrative was sustained without significant modification or qualification into the 1990s. Indeed, far from any acknowledgement of co-responsibility, we find that that in virtually every chapter summarizing the Second World War, reference is made to the heavy losses amongst Austrian troops. It is not unusual for them to be placed top of the ‘hierarchy of victims’. For example, a book entitled Society, Economy and Culture in Changing Times lists in first place the ‘800,000 men’ who were drafted into the German Wehrmacht,11 and in last place – behind the 25,000 civilian victims of the bombing war – ‘the 50,000 murdered Austrian Jews’ (Ebner, Heffeter and Majdan, 1990, p. 93). Readers are presented with the notion that all Austrians had been victims in the same way and to the same degree: amongst the victims of National Socialism ‘were approximately half a million Austrians who died, or remain unaccounted for, either at the front, in air raids on the Homeland or in

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concentration camps’ (Hasenmayer, Payr and Tschegg, 1980, p. 60). This rank ordering of victims at least makes it clear which victims are actually identified as such. A completely different picture emerges in connection with the historical milestone, the ‘Year of Commemoration 1988’. For the first time, all groups of victims under the National Socialist annihilation policy are named: Roma, Sinti, euthanasia victims, Jehovah’s Witnesses and so on. Increasingly, soldiers are not categorized as ‘victims of National Socialism’, or they are placed bottom of the victim hierarchy. Nonetheless, some of the school books in use continue to merit questioning and criticism: for example, the textbook Through the Past into the Present (known popularly as the ‘Lemberger’, after its author) states that the 25 million civilian fatalities included ‘4 to 6 million Jews’. In relation to Austria, however, only the Wehrmacht soldiers are specifically referred to: ‘800,000 Austrians were drafted into the German Wehrmacht; 400,000 of them did not return. Never has war caused so much suffering! All this – and for what?’ (Lemberger, 1997, p. 55). It is in the portrayal of the end of the war that we see most clearly that victims are sought only amongst the German population. Whilst Jewish survivors of the Shoah are not mentioned, women who lost their sons and husbands, those who were bombed out of their homes, prisoners of war and, above all, those expelled from their home territories are expressly mentioned. Commemoration of the victims is reserved for ‘one’s own kind’: ‘Life after the war ended was especially tragic for Germans in the Sudetenland and in Poland. During the final months of the war, the Red Army had begun to avenge themselves on the Germans by committing atrocities. After the German capitulation, the German-speaking population in Czechoslovakia was ruthlessly driven from its homeland’ (Huber, Gusenbauer and Huber, 1998, p. 54). It may be stated, by way of summary, that the portrayal of Austrian participation in the Second World War is characterized by representational strategies invoking the role of victim. A turning point in efforts towards a more accurate representation can be seen to occur with the ‘Year of Commemoration 1988’. Instead of the myth of Austria as ‘Hitler’s first victim’, we now encounter a modified form of the ‘claim to victimhood’. Even so, with the exception of the most recent teaching materials, the majority of textbooks continue to omit any reference to the enthusiastic collaboration of the bulk of Austrians, and their share of responsibility for the Second World War and National Socialism.

7.3 The ‘fall’ of the Sixth Army in Stalingrad No other military event of the Second World War is subject to such intensive treatment in school history books as the Battle of Stalingrad during the winter of 1942–43. The purportedly apocalyptic extent of the downfall of the Sixth Army, and the particular circumstances surrounding it, preoccupied the

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population not merely throughout the final years of the war (Ueberschär, 1992b, p. 192): even today, the narrative about the ‘cannon-fodder’ troops of Stalingrad is rooted in official Austrian commemoration, making it compulsory to view the deeds and the suffering of the soldiers as a ‘meaningful sacrifice’ (see Alexander Pollak’s analysis of Stalingrad documentary films, Chapter 8 in this volume). The memory of the soldiers of Stalingrad is exalted and passed on to post-war generations. It has become a permanent feature in the culture of remembrance, exemplified by the ‘Committee for the 50th Anniversary of Stalingrad’, which comprised prominent people and politicians of all parties (except the Greens) and sought to bring about the erection of a monument to the victims of Stalingrad in present-day Volgograd. The mythology surrounding the ‘sacrifice of the Sixth Army’ overshadows the fact that during the year-and-a-half it took them to reach Stalingrad, these Wehrmacht troops were active henchmen of the Nazi regime in its policy of conquest and annihilation (see Boll and Safrian, 1995, p. 260). Portrayals in school textbooks, meanwhile – with the single exception of Adelmaier and colleagues (1998, pp. 57–61) – follow the official line on Stalingrad. Epithets such as ‘appalling catastrophe’ and ‘greatest human tragedy’ are applied to Stalingrad (Berger et al., 1967, p. 178) as though its occurrence had not been the result of human action. Stalingrad is portrayed as a natural disaster brought about by the powers of fate. This is clearly illustrated in the following passage from the previously cited textbook, Through the Past into the Present, which is used in teaching today: In October came the heavy rains. And with them, the mud. The advance by the Germans became literally stuck. In mid-November came the (early) onset of winter. With snowstorms and temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees, the German advance finally collapsed. As though from nowhere, the Russians suddenly attacked. Only with difficulty could the German lines be held. Hitler, in his first gloomy premonition, said, ‘The war is lost!’ About that, he was not wrong. (Lemberger, 1997, p. 50) The emphasis on suddenly occurring natural phenomena helps to conjure the impression of the forces being delivered up to an inescapable fate. This fatalistic viewpoint obscures the fact that the massive loss of life at Stalingrad was brought about by human decisions, and was the product of social conditions. In other words, the cause of the ‘catastrophe’ is to be found in the war aims of the Nazi leadership and in a totally militarized National Socialist society (Ueberschär, 1992a, p. 14). In school books, the question of causation is answered with the word ‘Hitler’. By personalizing the issue, the soldiers become the betrayed heroes and victims of a single individual, Adolf Hitler. Stalingrad becomes the ‘symbol and proof of the madness of Hitler: 300,000 German soldiers had to give their lives because of the reckless order to hold

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out at Stalingrad. 90,000 were captured!’ (Hasenmayer, Scheithauer and Tscherne, 1977, p. 98). There is little discussion of the questionable value of unconditional military obedience as a defining characteristic of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft. The same is true of the role of General Field Marshal Paulus and his responsibility for the hopeless position of the soldiers encircled at Stalingrad. He only comes into the frame after the defeat – as the distinguished co-founder of the anti-Nazi POW movement ‘Free Germany’12 (Ebner, Majdan and Soukop, 1975, p. 175). Even though textbooks do not actually set out to advance the preventive war thesis – that is, the claim that Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union had merely pre-empted a Soviet attack on Germany – it is nonetheless possible to detect an underlying tenor of anti-Communism until the 1980s. The author of a book called History and Social Studies describes the invasion of the Soviet Union in these terms: ‘Because Hitler was unable to conquer England, he was forced to turn against Russia. As long as the great power in the East existed, all Germany’s successes would remain at risk. For there was always the danger that one day the two great Powers would form an alliance against Germany’ (Geyer, 1974, p. 71). The global political context of the Second World War is dealt with from a widely shared anti-communist perspective: ‘Roosevelt was completely unfamiliar with Communism, and knew nothing whatsoever of its character. It was easy, therefore, for Stalin to enlist the trusting American’s help in defeating Hitler, at the same time promoting the spread of Communism throughout the world. Because Russia made the greatest human sacrifice and America contributed the most money, Churchill lost a good deal of influence. Roosevelt unwillingly helped Communism to achieve its present-day status as a world Power’ (Geyer, 1974, p. 71.). Another example appears in a book called Tracks of Time, approved in 1991 and, according to information from the BMBWK, still in use in the classroom. In a section headed ‘Diplomatic Defeats’ (of the Nazi regime) it states: Neither Vichy-France and Spain nor the USSR could be persuaded to join the war on Germany’s side. Relations between Russia and Germany deteriorated significantly from the autumn of 1940 onwards. Stalin gave notice in Bulgaria, Hungary and Yugoslavia of renewed interest in becoming a superpower. As resentments surfaced in the wake of secret British-Russian negotiations, Hitler resorted to a ‘preventive war’. Ignoring warnings from the High Command of the Armed Forces [OKW], he embarked on a ‘crusade against Communism’ in Operation Barbarossa. (Krawarik, Schröckenfuchs and Weiser, 1991, p. 145) In all school books, irrespective of the year in which they were published, the Battle of Stalingrad is characterized as a ‘turning point of the Second

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World War’. Stalingrad was the ‘beginning of the end’ of the terrible war, the point at which the inexorable collapse began (e.g., Berger, Kolbabek and Schnell, 1968, p. 44). But the defeat at Stalingrad is also credited with having functioned as a catalyst, shattering the morale of the Greater German nation: ‘The decisive defeat of the German Wehrmacht at Stalingrad, and the bombing raids on Austrian cities and industrial facilities, led to widespread passive resistance to the actions of the National Socialist authorities’ (Ebner et al., 1962, p. 74). However, claims that after Stalingrad, ‘only a few fanatics continued to believe in the “final victory”’, or that ‘across the board, hopes [grew] for the re-emergence of our own state’ (Maderner and Walzl, 1979, p. 179) do contradict the historical facts. In a great many textbooks, considerable space is devoted to the description of military-strategic developments. For example, school students are given tasks to perform such as: ‘Follow the progress of the war on the map’ (Novotny, 1973, p. 166). For many years it was standard practice to adopt the perspective of the traditional military historian, reporting on events from the elevated viewpoint of political and military leaders, and in terms of the actions of a single individual: ‘At Stalingrad, in the winter of 1942–43, Hitler suffered his heaviest defeat to date. From that point on, Soviet troops regained all the ground they had previously lost, and by the end of 1944 they had reached the Polish and Romanian frontier. Hitler had to take drastic action – so he ordered total war’ (Hasenmayer, Payr and Tschegg, 1983, p. 64). This personalized style of portrayal not only makes Hitler solely responsible for the war, it also ignores the personal experience of the soldiers. Only the most recent texts abandon this perspective in order to provide a richer picture from the perspective of the soldiers who witnessed the events. Adopting a kind of ‘education for peace’ approach, the following question is raised: for what exactly did 300,000 soldiers ‘suffer’ and endure ‘senseless bloodshed’? (Achs et al., 1989, p. 91). At the same time, we see efforts to shift away from unadulterated heroic myth towards an assessment of the war as a brutal and pointless venture. The portrayal of ‘Austrian soldiers sacrificing their lives for the Homeland’ fades into the background to make way for a different image: Stalingrad is presented as an example of the horrors of the war, and referred to alongside marauding SS troops, the deliberate mass starvation of prisoners of war (Ebner et al., 1992, pp. 83ff.) and the civilian victims of the bombing. This peace education orientation does come at the expense, however, of a differentiated approach to the origins and originators of the horrors of the war. By drawing such crude parallels, responsibility for the Nazi crimes is glossed over, giving way instead to sweeping moralistic pleas about the futility of all war. One sign of this change in perspective to that of the ordinary soldier is the use of letters from the front (see the analysis by Walter Manoschek, Chapter 2 in this volume). This type of source material has long been overlooked, even in research, but is now being drawn on increasingly by textbook writers. The

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idea is that with the aid of this new text genre, history can be taught ‘bottom up’, with increased authenticity, so that the war can be understood in terms of real individual experience. The omission of the background to events, and the failure to explore causal and explanatory links, do indeed mean that the suffering of the ‘ordinary man’, who was sometimes forced into a military system of rule with no way out, is shifted into the foreground. Clearly, the preoccupation of textbook writers with Stalingrad does not generally extend to their questioning and analysing it as a complex historical event. Rather, the myth of ‘Stalingrad’ that exists in official historical memory is simply adopted and perpetuated. The hype that still surrounds Stalingrad cannot be merely a function of the number of dead, however. The losses suffered by Army Group Centre in the summer of 1944 were as great as those at Stalingrad (Vogel, 1992, p. 247). In the same year, millions of people were killed by the National Socialist extermination machine. There are other reasons for the fact that these aspects of the war are not accorded the same status as Stalingrad. The mythology surrounding the defeat can be linked fundamentally to a National Socialist construction: that the German troops were not aggressors, but ‘defenders of the West’ against Communism. ‘The mythologizing of this negative event was the result of a political calculation by the National Socialist leadership …’ (Wette, 2001, p. 99). Only little by little has this apologist interpretation of the Battle of Stalingrad given way to the question of whether or not it had been a ‘purposeful sacrifice’. Even now, commemoration is focused almost entirely on German and Austrian soldiers: Russian soldiers scarcely feature in the memory of ‘Stalingrad’.

7.4 The involvement of Wehrmacht soldiers in war crimes The National Socialist ‘War of Annihilation’ and the war crimes of the Wehrmacht are amongst the taboos of post-war Austrian society – as was clearly shown by the controversy over the exhibition, ‘War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944’ (see Heer, Chapter 10 in this volume). German and Austrian historiography has over a long period concerned itself only peripherally with this potentially explosive subject,13 despite the fact that ever since the Nuremberg trials there has been documentary proof of the Wehrmacht’s involvement in war crimes. It is therefore unsurprising that teaching about the collaboration of Wehrmacht soldiers in war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Second World War is not at the forefront of didactic endeavour in history textbooks. On the contrary, there is widespread ignorance of the realities of the War of Annihilation. This assertion holds true until the early 1990s. It is only as a consequence of the exhibition, ‘War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944’ that there has been any significant – if still somewhat cautious – discussion of the subject of ‘Wehrmacht crimes’. The

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most recent school books do reflect – albeit in a somewhat rudimentary way – the current state of knowledge. Yet despite this, most recent textbooks still manage to accommodate the ‘myth of the untainted Wehrmacht’. ‘Behind the front, special units of the SS and the Security Service [SD] would begin murdering Communist and Jewish prisoners of war, and even civilians’ (Ebner et al., 1992, p. 84). Euphemistically referred to as ‘violent measures’ and ‘terror’ (see, for example, Ebner, Majdan and Soukop, 1975, p. 186), war crimes are routinely attributed to the SS and the Gestapo. ‘Murder operations [against Jews] were now taking place throughout occupied Europe. Special units of the SS followed behind the Wehrmacht and carried out cleansing actions.’ (Absenger et al., 1992, p. 316)14 With respect to responsibility for these crimes, a clear dichotomy is drawn between the murderous SS on the one hand, and the Wehrmacht on the other, who merely fought in a war, albeit an unjustified one: ‘Austrians committed acts of murder – as members of the SS behind the front in the Russian campaign, and as commandants and guards in the concentration camps. As soldiers of the German Wehrmacht, Austrians carried Hitler’s war of aggression right across Europe’ (Floiger, Ebenhoch and Tuschel, 1992, p. 72). Portrayals of war crimes are marked by one-sidedness and superficiality. The accounts generally omit to name the perpetrators, making used of passive constructions and abstract concepts. Victims are not named either, and nor are the time and place of the crime. ‘Hitler had whole swathes of land burned down and countless villages wiped out. He acted with particular brutality against captured Soviet soldiers’ (Huber, Gusenbauer and Huber, 1998, p. 54). Taking ‘the theory of totalitarianism’ as a starting point, ‘Hitler’s’ policy of expansion and annihilation is held up against that of ‘Stalin’ (the massacres at Lidice and Katyn, for example), thereby relativizing the war crimes of the National Socialists. Reference is made to acts committed by the enemy, whilst National Socialist crimes are only hinted at in very broad terms rather than in detail: ‘In the countries of Eastern and SouthEastern Europe under German occupation, both the advancing soldiers of the Red Army and the Partisans often engage in brutal acts. By the end of the war , they abuse and murder thousands of Germans. […] The inhumanity of the war is frequently amplified by memories of the atrocities inflicted on these countries by the German aggressors and occupiers’ (Tscherne et al., 1988, p. 66). Another way that relativization and exculpation are achieved in describing war crimes is by referring to abstract agentless ‘phenomena’ like the ‘brutalization of morals’ or by claiming that the cause of the crimes stems from the ‘power of evil’ (Görlich, Kren and Maderner, 1973, p. 72). Once historians had embarked on a debate about the involvement of the Wehrmacht in war crimes, the term ‘war of annihilation’ began to appear in school books, although the term was not defined precisely, and was not used in the context of the war crimes of the Wehrmacht. Notwithstanding the fact that some recent textbooks do deal with the topic of crimes by Austrians

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under the Nazi regime, it is notable that the terms ‘Wehrmacht’ and ‘Wehrmacht soldiers’ are not used in connection with them: ‘In the occupied areas, Austrians took part in the mass murder of civilians. Austrians were involved in the entire range of operations, in concentration camps, in ghettos, in the Einsatzgruppen, and in the Gestapo. Above all, however, in the extermination of Jews […]’ (Wegl et al., 1995, p. 85). It should be noted that only a few textbooks deal with the topic of war crimes in any real detail. One of these few exceptions is the textbook just quoted, entitled Signs of the Times: The use of the Commissar Order15 to shoot dead all communist political officers upon capture gave rise to determined resistance on the part of both the Soviet troops and the civilian population. In Ukraine above all, German troops had been greeted as liberators from Stalinist rule. But ruthless exploitation by the German administration caused many to put up resistance. They, and anyone who supported them, were persecuted by the SS and Wehrmacht and shot without due legal process. (Wegl et al., 1995, p. 83) A further school book from the series Signs of the Times discusses the ‘mass shootings that took place following the invasion of the Soviet Union’ (Eigner et al., 1996, p. 197). By contrast, most school books simply provide a numerical summary of the deaths and war crimes of the opposing armies. For example, Tracks of Time 7 contains sweeping references to ‘crimes in the shadow of war’: During the Second World War, war crimes were committed by both the National Socialists and the armed forces of other states. For example, millions of prisoners of war were killed by the National Socialists. [This is followed by an extract of the operational orders of Heydrich relating to the mass execution of Soviet prisoners of war]. In 1939, when Soviet troops marched into the part of East Poland allotted to them, thousands of Poles were captured. In order to deprive the Polish army of its leadership, thousands of officers were shot dead at Katyn and buried in mass graves. (Krawarik, Schröckenfuchs and Weiser, 1991, pp. 148f.) The examples of Lidice (‘Hitler exacted retribution’) and the Allied bombing of Dresden are then equated in a similar manner. Moreover, ‘German atrocities’, in an inversion of reality, are widely described as reprisal measures for resistance or Partisan operations: ‘Their attacks led to heavy German reprisals, for which Himmler’s SS was particularly responsible. The shooting of hostages and annihilation of villages were the most notorious forms of terror’ (Knarr, 1968, p. 121).

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In numerous school books the German troops are portrayed as a force for order in the occupied territories. From this is derived a virtual legitimization of operations carried out against the population in the occupied areas: ‘As occupation troops, thousands of German soldiers had to ensure law and order in Poland, in Bohemia and Moravia, in Denmark and Norway, in the Netherlands, in Belgium, in France, in Yugoslavia and in Greece’ (Novotny, 1973, p. 166). What we are observing here is the argumentation strategy of ‘victimvictimizer reversal’. Even the insight that the Partisans had particularly weakened the Wehrmacht in the Balkans and the Soviet Union is used as justification for the Partisan war – euphemistically referred to as ‘operations against Partisans’: ‘In the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia especially, the Partisans succeeded in keeping large areas under their control and inflicting heavy damage on the hated occupiers. This had a very damaging impact on supply lines to the front and made necessary the additional deployment of regular Wehrmacht troops’ (Ebner, Majdan and Soukop, 1975, p. 187). Even when the difficult subject of the murder of Partisans is broached, no mention is made of the fact that the Wehrmacht, acting on numerous criminal orders, deliberately stigmatized every suspected opponent as a ‘Partisan’ in an attempt to legitimize the murder of – amongst others – Jewish men and women. The Nazi command structure, which created the opportunities for war crimes to be perpetrated on civilians and enemy soldiers, goes completely unmentioned in school books. The concept of the National Socialist war of annihilation was not laid down by the Nazi government in customary totalitarian style, but was instead worked out jointly with the Wehrmacht, who then carried it out (Kühnl, 1998, p. 34). But instead of pointing this out, responsibility is attributed to a small number of people – usually just Hitler and Himmler. Admittedly, in some school books (restricted to some of the most recent), mention is made of the ‘Commissar Order’ and the ‘Night and Fog’ decree16 of the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW), but not of many other ‘criminal’ orders which were deliberately designed to allow significant parts of the population to be stigmatized as ‘the enemy’. The involvement of the Wehrmacht rank and file in the practical implementation of these orders also goes unmentioned. A textbook called History Compact does report how, with the help of the document ‘Guidelines for Reprisal Measures in the Partisan War’, ‘the Germans reacted in the Partisan war with the most brutal means and spared neither women nor children. The population was ruthlessly murdered’ (ARGE Geschichte und Sozialkunde, 1996, p. 46). However, no concrete examples are given. Nor is there any mention of the heavy involvement of Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers in the Partisan war in the Balkans. Another topic that is not dealt with is the economic advance planning associated with the war of aggression. In the war against the Soviet Union,

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for example, the death by starvation of millions of captured Russian soldiers was a calculated part of the occupation strategy (see Gerlach, 1998, p. 60). On the other hand, great attention is paid to prisoners of war in Allied captivity and their ‘difficult fate far away from the Homeland’. Only one school book cites the historical facts concerning this aspect of the war against the Soviet Union, which the authors describe as the genocide of 20 million people: ‘The mass annihilation of Soviet prisoners of war was planned from the outset. More than half the 5.7 million Soviet POWs died’ (Hammerschmid and Pramper, 1993, p. 72). Another fact which fails to make it into textbooks is the involvement of Wehrmacht soldiers in the Holocaust (see Hilberg, 1996, pp. 23–38). Only in one Austrian school book – Contemporary History, published in 1993 – is this aspect of the War of Annihilation taken up – using a quotation from Raul Hilberg’s work ‘The destruction of the European Jews’ (Sitte, Walzl and Maderner, 1993, p. 82). In some textbooks, the mass murders of Jewish men and women following the start of the war against the Soviet Union are treated under the heading ‘Final Solution’, although only the SS and the Police are named as perpetrators. ‘Once the war against the Soviet Union started, the plight of the Jews deteriorated dramatically. In the persecutions of the previous years, Jews were often killed without the killers being called to account before the courts. Now, however, a systematic extermination programme began. The SS and police formed special squads whose task was to shoot Jews, Gypsies and political commissars behind the front lines’ (Lein and Weissensteiner, 1998, p. 158). It may be said by way of summary that the genocidal nature of the Second World War and the crimes of the Wehrmacht are dealt with only very cautiously and vaguely (if at all), and only in the more recent school books. The accounts also lag behind the state of the art in historical research. The fact that the Wehrmacht, on the basis of criminal orders, was a crucial participant in the Holocaust is dealt with inadequately – or not at all. The same is also true of the fact that the Wehrmacht waged the war against the Partisans as a genocidal campaign, and systematically murdered captured combatants or allowed them to die (Wette, 2001, p. 92). Instead of confronting school students with the historical facts, a small number of individuals (Hitler, Himmler) and organizations (SS, Gestapo) are held responsible for the crimes. This Hitler-centred approach and the reliance on a personalized model of responsibility convey the impression that history is the outcome of decisions by just a handful of people. On top of this, school books make no distinction between the Wehrmacht, which waged a criminal war of aggression, and the military operations of the Allies. The war crimes – the argument goes – are simply something that happened in the course of an insane war, whether at the hands of the Wehrmacht or the Allies.

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7.5 Military resistance to the Nazi regime As part of the state’s quest for legitimacy, the period immediately following the war saw the politically motivated exploitation of what resistance there had been to the Nazi regime. An investigation into the importance attributed in Austrian history textbooks to military resistance reveals clearly that they exaggerate the latter’s contribution to the ‘liberation from Nazi domination’. The portrayal of resistance fighters as heroes is already evident in the very first school books of the post-war period: As the Ostmark … our Fatherland was forced to collaborate in an atrocious war at the side of a dictator. In the immediate wake of those March days [of the Anschluss], resistance groups were formed, and despite fierce repression and numerous executions, they coalesced into a powerful resistance movement towards the end of the war. By their actions, these patriots have demonstrated to the whole world the will of the Austrians to defend themselves against National Socialist domination. (Geyer, 1962, p. 285) The ‘Moscow Declaration’ is cited as the catalyst for a determined Austriaconscious resistance. It ‘lifted the hopes of resistance fighters for the reemergence of Austria’ (Ebner et al., 1992, p. 104). The detailed portrayal of the resistance in history textbooks gives the reader the impression that a significant part of the Austrian population took part in the resistance. The following passage is a good example. It comes from a book called Austria and World Events, in which the authors confer upon ‘the Austrians’ a somewhat peculiar motive for resisting National Socialism: ‘The forcible and total “alignment” of popular opinion, culture and science with the ideas of National Socialism aroused hatred and indignation across broad swathes of the Austrian population’ (Heffeter and Ebner, 1993, p. 78). Overestimation of the strength of the resistance is particularly evident in the case of military resistance to the Nazi regime. Accordingly, we find reference made to an independent ‘Austrian military resistance’ (Berger, Kolbabek and Schnell, 1968, p. 74). This patriotic textbook representation of the military resistance was supposed to demonstrate the continual, uncompromising struggle against National Socialism. One textbook thus refers to ‘a fourth phase of Austrian resistance’ and includes under this heading the organized military resistance led by Austrian officers and NCOs in the German Wehrmacht (Ebner, Majdan and Soukop, 1975, p. 196). Another refers to there having being many in the ranks of the military who offered resistance (Novotny, 1973, p. 205). For Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers in the post-war period, overstating the extent of military resistance probably functioned as a kind of ‘alibi’, vindicating

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their participation in the war. Resistance is viewed – somewhat idealistically – as the result of a moral revolt within the Austrian population: As soldiers serving in the German Wehrmacht, Austrians had to fight in support of Hitler’s excessive aims of conquest. But the growing number of placards in the streets of Vienna bearing the names of people executed for ‘high treason’, and the transports destined for German concentration camps, were proof of the growing resistance to the tyranny. (Heilsberg and Korger, 1953, p. 48) Two events serve as particular focal points in the portrayal of the military resistance: the assassination attempt on Hitler on 20 July 1944 and the active resistance of the organization ‘O5’. These are not omitted from any post-war Austrian school book. Strictly speaking, only a very small number of leadership figures took part in any orthodox resistance. At the same time, it must be pointed out that the concept of resistance tends to be very narrowly defined. Only from the 1980s onwards do we see the beginnings of a structural approach to resistance history, in which other forms of non-compliance and moral courage are recognized as acts of resistance. Increasingly, the resistance is freed from its heroic and monumentalized image. Moreover, the communist resistance, which was the most significant in quantitative terms, received recognition for its role. A more recent phenomenon is the interest shown since the mid-1980s in the issue of conscientious objection and the naming, since the early 1990s, of Jehovah’s Witnesses as conscientious objectors.17 The reason why these aspects of the resistance remained completely ignored for so long is spelled out by Ernst Hanisch: ‘Both cannot be right – those who “did their duty” in the German Wehrmacht and the conscientious objectors’. And because the overwhelming majority of Austrians did ‘do their duty’, it is this idea which became embedded in the collective consciousness, whilst conscientious objectors continued to be somewhat marginalized even after the war (Hanisch, 1994, p. 390). The most striking feature of how the resistance is portrayed is that desertion as a form of resistance is not dealt with at all in Austrian history textbooks. Accordingly, there is also no mention of the Wehrmacht system of justice. Just one school book contains a very vague reference to the subject – in the form of a brief explanation as to why soldiers simply did not desert from the Wehrmacht: ‘For many soldiers it was unthinkable, during a war, to act against their own comrades and their own government, and they felt bound by their oath’ (Tscherne and Gartler, 1991, p. 138). The implication seems to be that even now, any acknowledgement of deserters as resistance fighters is at odds with the general consensus on acceptable forms of resistance. Equally, the Partisan struggle inside Austria is accorded very little importance

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in school books, if indeed it is referred to at all. Despite the fact that it was one of the best organized and most effective forms of resistance, and despite the fact that – in contrast to numerous other resistance groups – the struggle for an independent Austria was one of its central aims, Partisan activity is saddled in textbooks with the labels ‘subterfuge’ and ‘barbarity’. Such imputations most probably result from the fact that the Partisan war always bore some of the hallmarks of a civil war, particularly as the population did not experience the Nazi regime as an occupation regime. Nothing in this general picture was to change after the war (Hanisch, 1994, p. 394). The decision to turn one’s back on the Nazi regime completely, and then to resist it, was taken only by a few groups, who were largely isolated from each other. At no time was the resistance in a position actually to endanger the stability of the regime. This facet of the war has left barely a mark on the political culture of Austria, a fact reflected in the way that the topic of ‘resistance’ is dealt with in school books. It is utilized in order to lend support to the national claim to victimhood, or to corroborate the lie that ‘the Austrians’ had never been in favour of National Socialism. Otherwise resistance, particularly in the form of conscientious objection or desertion, is referred to only in very vague terms – when it is mentioned at all.

7.6 Conclusion This analysis of Austrian school books clearly shows that the material contained within history books is the product of a societal consensus about the historical interpretations that should be handed down from one generation to the next. It is also evident that school books scarcely reflect the current state of historiographic knowledge or scholarly debate (Dreier, 2000, p. 11). This ‘lag’ in school book content relative to the current state of knowledge is not merely a matter of becoming dated due to the passage of time, but clearly also occurs for other reasons. It seems reasonable to conclude that the way the Wehrmacht is remembered in school books, with their relativism, their balance-sheet approach and their observance of historical taboos, is an expression of political and societal intent. Only in this way can we explain why, even after years of public discussion about the crimes of the Wehrmacht, the majority of new and revised school books continue to deal so inadequately with the topic of the War of Annihilation. A follow-up analysis, in February 2000, of the latest history textbooks to be used in school classrooms showed clearly that only very limited changes were being made to the historical account of the Wehrmacht and its involvement in Nazi annihilation policies. Bodo von Borries claims, in relation to the German context, that despite the Nuremberg trials and the critical studies by Eugen Kogon and Hannah Arendt, which had lifted the lid on Nazi crimes, people could ‘barely accept this at the cognitive level’. The crimes of the Nazis were regarded ‘until

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around the 1960s, for growing children … as practically “a danger to youth”’ (Borries, 2000, p. 215). On the part of Austrians, it is probably reasonable to assume an even greater defensiveness with respect to the historical truth, particularly as the specifically Austrian ‘claim to victimhood’ necessarily entailed the denial of any involvement in Nazi crimes. It must also be pointed out that school book authors are seldom academic researchers. Even today, the literature drawn on as source material for school books is, for the most part, of a popular scientific nature (e.g., illustrated ‘chronicles’ or encyclopaedic ‘compendia’). School books also, however, reflect the presupposed expectations and interests of the school students themselves, who are often assumed to have a ‘popular culture’ understanding of history. Werner Dreier believes that school book authors base their view of the demand for history on what they glean from the mass-media. This is one reason why authors sometimes avoid dealing with issues about which there are uncertainties, or which are the subject of scholarly dispute. They are much more inclined to deal with traditional fare (Dreier, 2000, p. 12). Insofar as the contents of school books allow inferences to be drawn about the historical consciousness of a society, it is apparent that Austrian society possesses no more than a peripheral knowledge of the Wehrmacht and its role in the Second World War. There is a patent lack of information concerning its involvement in the National Socialist war of conquest and in a range of mass crimes. Not least to blame for this is the application of a purely chronological ‘names and dates’ approach in school books. Even if it remains open to debate what impact school books or, for that matter, the school, have on an individual’s historical awareness, we can take it for granted that the ideas and information about the Wehrmacht imparted via school books have a bearing not only school students’ perceptions of the past, but also their view of the present. This in turn means that – following the argument of Jan and Aleida Assmann – by means of the production and dissemination of particular historical representations, a lasting influence may be exerted on the historical consciousness of a society. For this reason, history teaching should not only undertake the task of communicating historical insights and information, but also seek to explain present-day events with reference to their historical causes and links with the past. Despite public discussion of the taboo topic of the ‘Wehrmacht’, historical narratives in Austrian society, not least in school books, revolve even now around the myth of the ‘untainted Wehrmacht’, the ‘heroes of Stalingrad’, Austrian soldiers as ‘Hitler’s greatest victims’ and the ‘defence of the Homeland’. In this pattern of recollection, there is little room for murder and annihilation: only Hitler and the most senior Nazi Party bosses are held responsible for that. The Second World War is dealt with as though it were a perfectly ‘normal’ war between nation states – without elucidation of the specific circumstances that made this war of conquest and annihilation possible in the first place. Beyond that, especially in the more recent school

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books, the intention of authors to portray war as generally pointless leads them more or less to ignore the particular responsibilities associated with the criminal aspects of the war, and thereby to treat the National Socialist war of annihilation as more or less equivalent to the war waged by the Allies. A study by the Society for Social Scientific Studies (SWS) in the summer of 2000 showed that young people are interested in learning about National Socialism and the Third Reich with a view to developing an understanding of history and reassessing the past. A notable finding of this study is that topics such as ‘overcoming the past’, ‘reparations and restitution’, and ‘dealing with the Nazi period’ reveal splits according to age and educational background. While less educated and older people want to ‘finally let the matter rest’, there is considerable willingness amongst younger people, especially the educated, to discuss the highly charged subject of the Nazi past.18 Thus there is a willingness to learn and discuss. It therefore comes down to the quality of the teaching, and in turn to the quality of the school book, whether a deconstruction of the past is facilitated which is appropriate in view of the historical facts, and whether it is recognized, in the interests of political education, that dealing with the history of National Socialism in all its aspects is an activity with relevance to young people’s futures. In terms of how school books deal with the historical truth about the Wehrmacht, its (Austrian) soldiers and its role in the Nazi ‘War of Annihilation’, there is a clear need for further action to confront school students with the historical realities and the factors that gave rise to them.

8 All that Remains of the Second World War: Stalingrad and Wehrmacht Mythology in Television Documentaries Alexander Pollak

8.1 Introduction The rise of television in Austria meant that by the late 1960s, a new mass medium had begun to assume a leading role in the construction and mediation of discourses about the past: a medium which not only conveyed historical accounts in the sense of ‘descriptions of historical events’, but at the same time accompanied these with ‘actual pictures’ and visual sequences which became anchored in the visual memory of large numbers of people. The audiovisual treatment of the past brings to historical events a filmic quality which, for a long time, was claimed to represent an authentic evocation of the past. The versions of events presented on television do not leave the belief system of the viewer unaffected. The filmic representation of National Socialism and the Second World War therefore plays a significant role in the development of particular perspectives on the past, and in relation to the links between the politics of memory and contemporary political issues. The media’s choice of topics and its coverage of events have never been arbitrary: the point is to promote and establish specific historical perspectives. The global event ‘World War II’ is frequently symbolized by specific, selected sub-events, thereby defining a quite specific perspective as the one and only valid one. One set of events with a very high symbolic significance is the mass murder of Jews, whether in its bureaucratized and industrialized form in the Nazi extermination camps, or in the form of the massacres and mass executions carried out by SS units and the Wehrmacht. It should be noted that the Austrian media has broached the issue of the Holocaust only sporadically and, in film documentary form, only very belatedly. That there must have been subconscious or conscious inhibitions about 175

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approaching the ‘sensitive’ topic ‘extermination of the Jews’ seems all too obvious. In the context of narratives about the Holocaust, media discourse became characterized by taboo: questions of guilt and responsibility were either avoided completely, or focused on in a very particular way, on Hitler the ‘psychopath’, for example, or the ‘inhuman monsters’ of the SS (see Pollak, 2002a). In the public sphere, moreover, a clear dividing line was drawn between the Nazi annihilation programme and the ‘normal’ Second World War. The main symbol for the Nazis’ annihilation policy, and of the industrialized mass murder in the concentration camps, was Auschwitz, whilst the main symbol for the Second World War was Stalingrad. Because, in terms of the distinction just outlined, Austrian post-war narratives were dominated by recollections of the Second World War as a ‘normal war’, and because a much greater proportion of the population was prepared to relate to it, rather than to the memory of Auschwitz, the Battle of Stalingrad became the media’s main focus of recollection in the Austrian post-war era. 8.1.1 Stalingrad productions on television In this chapter, I am concerned with two aspects of Stalingrad productions on television: on the one hand, the portrayal of ‘Stalingrad’ as the most significant event of the Second World War, and on the other hand, the actual depiction and reconstruction of the specific event ‘Stalingrad’.1 * * * In the summer of 1942, on orders from Hitler and the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW), the Sixth Army attempted to capture the Soviet city of Stalingrad. In the course of the Wehrmacht’s advance, whole areas of Stalingrad were destroyed. By the autumn of 1942, the ‘Greater German’ troops – amongst them many Austrians – managed to capture and occupy large portions of the city, but all attempts to take the entire city failed. In the course of the fighting, the Soviet Army was able to force the German troops increasingly onto the defensive, and by the end of November, the Soviet Army had succeeded in surrounding the Greater German formations. Following a two-month encirclement, the remaining Greater German troops were forced to surrender. Some 1.1 million Soviet soldiers and up to 800,000 Wehrmacht soldiers were killed in the battle for Stalingrad.2 The Soviet Army took around 90,000 Wehrmacht soldiers into captivity. A significant proportion of the captured Germans and Austrians died during the long prisoner marches, and in the prisoner-of-war camps. This was due mainly to the delayed effects of malnourishment and disease suffered during the Stalingrad encirclement. Approximately 6000 POWs – amongst them some 1000 Austrians – returned home from captivity. This portrayal of the historical event ‘Stalingrad’ is broadly in line with the historical narrative framework that underlies a large proportion of media representations of the events. Some portrayals are more narrowly conceived

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than this and completely ignore, for example, the Soviet side (including the heavy losses), whilst other narratives relate to a somewhat broader frame of reference. In discussing the print media elsewhere in this volume, I have pointed out that there are two media approaches to the ‘Battle of Stalingrad’. Its significance is bound up with its being, on the one hand, a turning point in the war in the East, and on the other hand, a place of suffering for Wehrmacht soldiers (see Chapter 6 in this volume). Alternative narratives also exist, presenting a quite different picture. For example, the first Wehrmacht Exhibition features a portrayal of the Sixth Army’s advance which emphasizes above all the Wehrmacht’s involvement in the National Socialist policy of annihilation, its participation in mass shootings and the cooperation between the Wehrmacht and the ‘Special Units’ of the SS (see Chapter 1 in this volume; and Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, 1996, pp. 62–101). * * * In this chapter I investigate interpretations of the event ‘Stalingrad’, as constructed through the medium of television. I analyse the conclusions reached about the war and its participants, and the perspectives and messages conveyed – including those that relate to contemporary politics. I also analyse which of the two central perspectives on ‘Stalingrad’ – as a turning point in the war, or as a place of suffering, symbolizing the victimhood of the soldiers – is realized in various documentaries, and by what means. A further question is whether, and if so, to what extent, television documentaries made after 1995 – that is, after the opening of the first Wehrmacht Exhibition – adopt the critical perspective of the exhibition. 8.1.2 Source material The present study begins with a number of documentary films made by the Austrian radio and television broadcasting corporation, ‘ORF’, which for decades enjoyed a monopoly position with respect to televisual representations of history in Austria, a monopoly that only began to weaken – to a degree – with the appearance of cable and satellite television in the 1980s and 1990s. I begin by tracing and describing the development of historical discourse in the ORF. I then consider whether a specifically Austrian perspective can be deduced from these documentaries. In order to achieve this, documentaries from Germany, France and the United Kingdom are included in the study and compared both with the Austrian productions and with each other. ORF documentaries ●

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1973, ORF (Kurt Grotter): 30 Jahre Stalingrad (30 Years of Stalingrad) – repeated in slightly shortened form in 1993 1981, ORF (Walter Pissecker): a Panorama feature on ‘Stalingrad’

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1989, ORF (Hugo Portisch): Österreich I (Austria I), programme no. 12, with a segment on ‘Stalingrad’ 1996 (June), ORF (Christian Schüller): Am Schauplatz: Treffpunkt Stalingrad (Rendezvous Stalingrad) 1996 (July), ORF (Walter Seledec): Die Opfer von Stalingrad (The Victims of Stalingrad) 1999, ORF: Österreich unser Jahrhundert (Austria, Our Century) with a segment on ‘Stalingrad’

ZDF documentaries (Germany) ● ●

1983, ZDF/ORF: Stalingrad – 40 Jahre danach (Stalingrad – 40 years on) 1993, ZDF (Guido Knopp): Der verdammte Krieg (The Damned War), five-part series on ‘Stalingrad’

Franco-Soviet documentary ●

1973, Pathé Cinema and Soviet Television: Die Großen Schlachten: Der Weg nach Stalingrad (The Great Battles: The Road to Stalingrad), dubbed and edited by the ORF

BBC documentary ●

2000, BBC, History Channel and NDR: from the four-part series, War of the Century: When Hitler Fought Stalin, the programme Learning to Win

8.1.3 Defining ‘documentary’ I begin by explaining what I mean by the term ‘documentary’. The approach I follow is that of film studies, which does not attempt to define ‘documentary’ as a precisely specified genre. What sets documentaries apart from other film genres is not so much a set of formal criteria, but rather a quite definite claim in relation to truth and factuality. According to Manfred Hattendorf, the starting point for any definition of ‘documentary film’ is the question of the relationship to reality. In film studies, it is increasingly recognized, according to Hattendorf, that documentary films, like other aesthetic artefacts, should be analysed in terms of their specific discourse features and factors that govern their pragmatic effect. […] Thus the focus of scholarly interest extends to the question of modelling the relationship to reality in a particular filmic discourse. And because documentary films do not exist in a vacuum, but are only realized with a particular act of reception, which is anticipated discursively by the adoption of a particular target audience … it is not sufficient merely to focus on the way in which profilmic reality is imposed on the documentary’s subject matter. One must also examine the relationship of ‘documentary’ to ‘viewer’. (Hattendorf, 1994, p. 17) In other words, one must take into account the interactional character of documentaries, and therefore also the interactional dimension of the creation

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of films conceived of, and perceived, as ‘documentaries’. Because historical documentaries claim some measure of truth and credibility, they play a significant part in the production and reproduction of historical interpretations, and in the formation of a kind of ‘collective memory’.

8.2 ‘Stalingrad’ in the 1970s In January 1973, to mark the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the ‘Battle of Stalingrad’, the ORF broadcast two documentaries: an ORF in-house production under the direction of Kurt Grotter (‘30 Years of Stalingrad’) and a Franco-Soviet co-production by Pathé Cinema and Soviet Television (‘The Road to Stalingrad’). Whilst the ORF documentary reports from the perspective of the Austrian and German soldiers and commanders, and completely ignores the Soviet side, the Franco-Soviet production exhibits clear pro-Soviet propagandistic features. Considerable differences between the two productions can also be observed with respect to the narrative style and the technical implementation of the films. Nevertheless, the two documentaries, broadcast in quick succession by the ORF, display some similarities. For example, one thing that the Franco-Soviet ‘Stalingrad’ documentary does not question is the status of the Wehrmacht soldiers as victims. Moreover, there is in both cases a kind of homage-paying discourse in relation to some of the respective German and Soviet generals. A comparison of the productions is therefore interesting not merely in terms of the differences, but above all, in terms of similarities such as those already mentioned – particularly those that concern the way in which the war is viewed and, specifically, the manner in which the soldiers are portrayed. 8.2.1 Debate about ‘the question of blame’ The approach to the historical event ‘Stalingrad’ in the ORF documentary ‘30 years of Stalingrad’ is characterized above all by the fact that ‘Stalingrad’ is viewed not as a closed-off historical event, but rather as part of the present, as the central factor in the recollections of the war generation. The distinctive thing about this documentary is its carefully constructed, exploratory character, that is to say, the way that the historical content is presented not simply as fact, but as events in the past which are open to dispute and held up for discussion within the framework of the programme. There are three principal questions: that of the (unsuccessful) military strategy of the Wehrmacht leadership, the question of the purpose behind the Sixth Army’s steadfastness and refusal to capitulate, and the question of the fate of the Wehrmacht soldiers in Stalingrad. The documentary begins with original footage of the commander-in-chief of the Sixth Army, General Friedrich Paulus, in Soviet captivity. This is followed by the first question posed by the presenter Kurt Grotter to an interviewee,

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the Bundeswehr3 major, Manfred Kehrig. This first interview – interspersed with original shots which are supposed to document the events of the war, but which lack coherence and, above all, any clear connection with the spoken text – serves to open the discussion about the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of ‘Stalingrad’, and in particular to address the ‘question of blame’. However, the scope of the discussion is not unlimited. Only quite specific topics are taken up, and other possible topics are thereby overshadowed. Furthermore, a kind of interplay takes place between the discussion contained in the interviews and the presenter’s statements of ‘fact’. Two different kinds of interviewee are featured: on the one hand, ‘ordinary’ soldiers, who give accounts of an autobiographical nature and testify to the fates of their fellow soldiers, and on the other hand, higher ranking Wehrmacht officers as well as an officer of the Bundeswehr, who are interviewed as historical and military experts. We return now to the ‘expert discussion’ with Major Kehrig4 of the German Bundeswehr. At the start of the interview, the subject is how and why Stalingrad came to be attacked. This is followed by a discussion of military strategic questions, including the matter of responsibility for the failure in planning. Eventually, Grotter asks whether it made any sense for the Sixth Army to hold out and refuse to surrender, whereupon Kehrig explains in ‘positive’ terms what was achieved by the Sixth Army’s holding out for so long: ‘Fighting by the Sixth Army succeeded in tying up approximately 90 large Soviet units. That made it impossible for the Soviets to continue their push through to Rostov in order to entrap Army Group A, who were standing fast in the Caucasus’. The ensuing question-and-answer dialogue between Grotter and Kehrig makes it clear how little distance there is between the interlocutors and the Wehrmacht generals concerned. The latter are furnished by Grotter with such positive attributes as ‘gutsy’ and ‘responsible’. In conclusion, Grotter asks Kehrig about the number of dead (Wehrmacht soldiers) in Stalingrad. There is no mention of Soviet casualties. The interview with the Bundeswehr major is followed by an interlude during which Grotter characterizes the ‘question of responsibility’ as an ongoing discussion between various significant groups of actors, ‘army officers, historians and survivors still debate the question of who was to blame …’. Whilst from today’s vantage point, the term ‘question of responsibility’, in the context of the Second World War, usually relates to responsibility for the Nazis’ crimes, for Grotter the term is synonymous with the question of blame for the military defeat of Nazi Germany. One ‘ordinary’ soldier who appears as an eyewitness in the documentary is the junior medical officer Sergeant Johann Hartl, who is asked by Grotter to describe his ‘lasting impressions of Stalingrad’. Hartl talks emotionally about (necessarily) leaving the wounded behind, about how ‘comrades pegged out’, about the helpless situation and about the survival instinct of those who should have been helping others. This is followed by interviews with

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Colonel Herbert Zelle, who comments on the events of the war from a detached and evaluative perspective; with a chaplain of the 76th Division in Stalingrad, who talks about his personal experiences with the wounded; and with Colonel (Oberst) Arthur Boje. Specific themes are the ‘excellent’ battle conduct of the Austrians, the character of General Paulus, Hitler’s tactical errors, the impossibility of breaking out of the pocket and the role of the ‘highly respected’ Field Marshal von Manstein. In the penultimate interview sequence, the focus is on Franz Bednar, described by the presenter as a ‘wartime volunteer’. This description is quite interesting because it removes from Bednar the status of involuntary victim. He – the ‘ordinary soldier’ – is interviewed not as an expert, but as an eyewitness. He talks about the inadequate food supplies, about the poor condition of his patients in the field hospital and about being captured by the Red Army. The documentary concludes with an interview conducted by Grotter with Friedrich Weiss, who served in Stalingrad as a liaison officer with a Romanian division, and has since published a Stalingrad trilogy5 under the nom de plume ‘Fritz Wöss’. He speaks about the ‘the generals’ betrayal of the men’. 8.2.1.1 Perspective of the documentary The Battle of Stalingrad is portrayed as part of a ‘normal’ war, a military conflict between two armies. The issues of Nazi aggression and the War of Annihilation are ignored completely, while the ‘question of blame’ is reduced to the question of responsibility for the military defeat of the Wehrmacht. War crimes, acts of destruction, and operations directed against the civilian population, are not discussed. Two perspectives lie at the heart of this documentary: first, a military strategic appraisal of the events of the war, and second, the victim perspective in relation to the Austrian and German soldiers. The Soviet side and its victims do not figure at all. From the military strategic point of view, there is speculation as to whether, and if so, how the Sixth Army could have been saved, and what measures might have prevented defeat. With regard to the victim perspective in relation to the Wehrmacht soldiers, there is discussion about the extent to which the soldiers were betrayed and used as cannon fodder by their leaders. Austrian references are present by virtue of the fact some of the interviewees are from Austria. The contemporary witness Franz Bednar, for example, belonged to one of the ‘three Austrian divisions’. Grotter asks Colonel Boje directly how the Austrians had fought at Stalingrad. It follows that ‘Stalingrad’ is being seen as part of Austrian history: there is no hint here of any dissociation by insisting that Austrians had been forced to fight for the Third Reich, or that Austria had ceased to exist as an independent state through the Anschluss (a fact always mentioned when it comes to

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debates about restitution for Jewish victims of the Nazis or the victims of forced labour, for example; see Sandner and Manoschek, Chapter 5 in this volume). From these questions and perspectives, it is clear that the documentary is addressed to the war generation, as well as people of the so-called ‘second generation’, who feel in some way personally affected by the historical event ‘Stalingrad’ (e.g., because their fathers had fought or fallen there). The documentary seeks to identify with the Wehrmacht soldiers. It aims to question the purpose in sacrificing German and Austrian soldiers at Stalingrad, and to identify those who bore responsibility, not to say guilt, for the chosen approach and its failure. At the same time, this form of reappraisal leads to the narrowing of perspective already alluded to, eclipsing the context of the ‘War of Annihilation’. Instead, the battle for Stalingrad, as far as the conduct of the war and the fate of the soldiers is concerned, serves as a symbol for the Second World War as a whole. 8.2.2 German-Austrian sacrifice and Soviet pathos The Franco-Soviet Stalingrad documentary, produced in 1973 by Pathé Cinema, and dubbed by the ORF under the direction of Kurt Grotter, paints a far more sophisticated picture of the historical event ‘Stalingrad’ than the film just described. Both the Soviet perspective on the ‘Battle of Stalingrad’ and the context of the war as a whole are incorporated. The victim status of the Wehrmacht soldier is retained, but is complemented and offset by the hero status of the Soviet defenders. The scene is set with the Battle of Stalingrad being described as a ‘thrilling story’, and as the ‘decisive battle’, unfolding in three phases. The first phase comprises the assembling, by Hitler, of the ‘most formidable fighting force of all time’ and its advance towards Stalingrad and the Caucasus. The flight of the ‘desperate [Soviet] civilian population heading East in endless droves’ is described. The first phase of the ‘decisive battle’ ends with the bombardment of Stalingrad: ‘On 23 August 1942, 600 bombers of the German Army attacked the doomed city all day’ (original footage of aircraft, aerial shots, bomb drops and explosions). ‘On this day of terror, German aircraft bombed the dying city 2000 times’ (explosions, bombs). ‘50 km of ruins, 40,000 people dead’ (shots of the destroyed, burning city, people sitting on piles of rubble or carrying the remains of their belongings from the ruins). The second phase of the narrative commences with Paulus’s order to the Sixth Army to capture Stalingrad. The focus is on the house-to-house fighting and the slow advance of the Wehrmacht through Stalingrad, and on the heroically portrayed Soviet defensive battle. From the apparently hopeless Soviet defensive struggle in Stalingrad, attention shifts to plans by Stalin and the Soviet general staff for a Soviet counter-offensive; 19 November 1942, the day of the Red Army’s encirclement operation, becomes the ‘hour of destiny’, culminating in the completion on

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22 November of the circle of entrapment around the Sixth Army, and in the eventual victory of the Red Army. The situation of the Wehrmacht soldiers is described: ‘Freezing and hungry, the German solders must make do with ever-dwindling bread rations’ (shots of soldiers, close-up of a cloaked German soldier in the snow, eating). ‘By the time the German men fall captive, they are literally starving. The majority are suffering terribly from pestilence. In the Soviet Union, and especially in the war zone, dreadful hardship prevails. As a consequence, there is initially almost no food for an extra 91,000 men’ (shots of columns of prisoners). ‘The survivors of the betrayed army stagger towards the awful fate that awaits them’ (prisoner columns). The documentary ends with shots of Soviet commemoration ceremonies at Mamayev Hill overlooking Stalingrad, where a ‘gigantic monument stands in permanent remembrance of the hundred thousand Soviet citizens who sacrificed their lives defending Stalingrad. […] The fallen Russians gave their lives for the defence of the homeland. […] The Germans and Austrians, however, had to give their young lives in an unprecedented act of self-sacrifice and needless valour because of dreams of power and megalomaniac delusion.’ 8.2.2.1 Perspective of the documentary A comparison of the Franco-Soviet documentary with the Austrian production reveals a reversal of perspective: interviews are conducted exclusively with Russian generals. The struggle of the Red Army is glorified. The Soviet side, airbrushed out of the Austrian documentary, stands centre stage in this appraisal of Stalingrad. In contrast to the ORF documentary on Stalingrad, many battlefield and combat scenes are shown, including soldiers at the moment where they are wounded or killed. A striking feature of this production is the embellished, gushingly metaphorical language used by the narrator: ‘Like an unstoppable flood tide, the German troops storm through the Don Cossack country towards the Caucasus. And yet the encroaching tide peters out in the summer glow of the Kalmyk Steppe.’ Even so, there are numerous overlaps with the Austrian Stalingrad documentary. For one thing, the perspective of the suffering Wehrmacht soldiers, of their betrayal by their leaders, and of their ‘needless valour’, is very prominently highlighted. Likewise, the documentary deals with a terrible and brutal, but for the most part ‘normal’ war. That is to say, no connection is made with the National Socialist policy of annihilation, which the Wehrmacht helped to carry out – and which the Sixth Army in particular helped to carry out. Overall, a one-sidedly positive picture of the Soviet side is presented and empathy with the Soviet generals is evoked. The documentary sets out to describe the heroic Soviet defensive struggle, and so underline the Red Army’s contribution to the defeat of ‘murderous National Socialism’. It is not readily apparent who the target audience for this documentary was or for whose benefit the Soviet perspective was intended. The way in

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which the documentary is framed as the ‘thrilling story’ of the ‘decisive battle’ of Stalingrad suggests that – in contrast to the concerns of the Austrian documentary – this production was not intended to be about a nation facing up to certain questions, but was rather an attempt to represent events in an arresting way and engender empathy with the Soviet side. The documentary (dubbed by the ORF) does establish a connection with Austria insofar as where the focus is on Wehrmacht soldiers as victims, it is emphasized that both German and Austrian soldiers had to give their lives.6

8.3 ‘Stalingrad’ in the 1980s In the following, three documentary productions from the years 1981, 1983 and 1989 are examined. On 31 January 1981, the ORF programme series Panorama7 included a feature on the 38th anniversary of the surrender of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad. Assembled from interviews with Austrian veterans of Stalingrad and the ‘factual account’ of the documentary narrator, the film serves as a monument to the ‘warriors of Stalingrad’ – at once exalted as heroes and declared to be victims. The motto ‘Never again war!’, attributed to the surviving Wehrmacht veterans of Stalingrad, is a central motif of the ZDF production ‘Stalingrad – 40 years on’, first broadcast by the ORF in 1983. This documentary explores a question which is also a central issue in the aforementioned Panorama film, namely what ‘Stalingrad’ means for the veterans today, and what ‘lessons’ they have learned from the events of the war. Towards the end of the 1980s, the ORF screened a documentary series ‘Austria I’, produced by Hugo Portisch and Sepp Riff.8 This production was portrayed as being the official Austrian rendition of history, and was regarded as such by many viewers. The series, like the earlier production ‘Austria II’, was intended not merely to present the (consensualized) historical approach of the state-dominated ORF, but also to ‘reflect the state of the art in scholarly historical research’. The twelfth instalment of ‘Austria I’ is concerned with, amongst other things, the ‘War in the East’, and especially with the ‘Battle of Stalingrad’, which is portrayed not only as the turning point of the war, but also as a symbol for the war as a whole. 8.3.1 A filmic monument to the ‘Stalingrad warriors’ In 1981, the curiously un-round 38th anniversary of the Sixth Army’s surrender at Stalingrad provided the ORF with the occasion to broadcast a ‘Stalingrad’ feature within the programme series Panorama. In the package, three perspectives on the event ‘Stalingrad’ can be discerned: the first is historiographically evaluative, mediated through the narrator and accompanied by original film footage; the second perspective is a biographical orientation towards the past, realized by means of interview recollections of what people experienced at the time; finally, there is a biographical orientation towards the present, effected by means of

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contemporary witness commentaries on the question of what ‘Stalingrad’ means today. The documentary is characterized by the interweaving of original film clips with narrated text and interviews with former ‘Stalingrad warriors’. There is a strikingly loose connection between the original footage and the voiceover. While the narrator tends to speak in general terms about the events of the war, the footage depicts concrete situations involving soldiers, air attacks, destruction, gunfire and explosions. The footage serves ostensibly to give the viewer the feeling of ‘being there’. At the start, the narrated sequences predominate, with the interviews having the character of short biographical inserts. As the documentary progresses, increasing use is made of interview sequences. These culminate in accounts of the night of 30 January 1943, and recollections of entering captivity. The increase in autobiographical narrative causes the personal experiences and feelings of the Wehrmacht witnesses to move into the spotlight, whilst the actual events of the war tend to fade into the background. 8.3.1.1 Perspective of the documentary This documentary sheds light exclusively on the German and Austrian side of the historical event ‘Stalingrad’. Everything is reported from the perspective of Austrian soldiers, and only Austrian Wehrmacht veterans are heard speaking in the interview sequences. The Soviet side is airbrushed out, as is the context of the war as a whole. Only in a single interview is there any suggestion that the Wehrmacht soldiers were not simply victims (i.e., that they also engaged in destructive acts). In the interview in question, a former Wehrmacht soldier describes how the Red Army soldiers had to protect the captured Wehrmacht men from the wrath of the civilian population. This wrath, according to the witness, was thoroughly understandable because ‘Stalingrad had been razed to the ground’. Interestingly, this utterance is followed directly by a cut (which simply interrupts what the speaker is saying) and a change of subject by the narrator, who starts talking, not about the destruction of Stalingrad, but about the casualty figures on the Wehrmacht side. In functional terms, the programme may be seen as erecting a monument, in the form of a documentary film, to the Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers who fought at Stalingrad. The night of the surrender on 30 January 1943 is portrayed as an unforgettable and unique event. The soldiers are cast as heroes for their struggle and their willingness to make sacrifices. Whilst the witnesses show considerable understanding for the actions of the ‘Russians’, the National Socialist leadership (in this case, especially Göring) is held responsible for the fate of the Wehrmacht soldiers. The high number of Wehrmacht personnel who did not survive captivity is explained by the witnesses not in terms of crimes on the part of their Soviet captors, but by the extremely poor state of health in which the soldiers had entered captivity.

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8.3.2 Never again war! In 1983, on the fortieth anniversary of ‘Stalingrad’, ZDF (in collaboration with the ORF) produced a programme about the former Stalingrad combatants. The central theme of the documentary is the veterans’ perception of ‘Stalingrad’ 40 years after the event, and the enduring impact that ‘Stalingrad’ has had on the soldiers. The programme concentrates mainly on the portrayal of the present, and on the lessons that Stalingrad veterans have learned as a result of their experiences. There are also frequent flashbacks to the event ‘Stalingrad’ itself. The documentary begins with a sequence from an old German weekly newsreel, reporting on the struggle and successes of the German troops at Stalingrad. Following this, footage is superimposed of a wreath-laying ceremony in modern Germany for the quarter of a million (German) victims of Stalingrad. The speaker explains, in relation to the biennial reunion of Stalingrad veterans, ‘No matter how one feels about them, one thing has to be acknowledged: they never want another war.’ He is articulating the central message of the documentary, namely that the experience of ‘Stalingrad’ has left behind a pacifist legacy. The first person profiled and interviewed is ‘a clergyman who served as an ordinary soldier’, and who took numerous colour photographs during the war, which these days he presents in slideshows to young Bundeswehr soldiers. An interview with the wife of a photographer who served with the propaganda unit at Stalingrad is followed by a report about a reunion held at a Vienna ballroom, at which an act of remembrance took place in honour of the fallen. Immediately following the interviews, images from the Nazi newsreel are shown, together with photographs which document the suffering of German soldiers at Stalingrad. These include shots of ‘Soviet snipers aiming at the German troops’ (and killing them). These are followed by images of winter in Stalingrad and of bodies (of Wehrmacht soldiers) lying in the snow. The passage into captivity is described and documented in pictures. In the next interview, a German veteran of Stalingrad is asked about the time of the encirclement. He asserts, ‘I remain convinced to this day that we did our duty to the people and the Fatherland. […] But after Stalingrad, I did not believe in the Führer any more.’ This is followed by an interview in which a contemporary witness (a doctor) describes the deadly cold, the malnourishment and the mental distress, and suggests that Stalingrad has made him become tolerant. Subsequently, the previously mentioned Austrian Stalingrad veteran and book author, Fritz Wöss, talks about the ‘betrayal of ordinary soldiers by the Wehrmacht leadership’ and concludes, ‘Stalingrad has made me into a humanist and a democrat.’ The concluding sequence of the documentary shows images from the Volgograd of today: the monuments in the city and shots of the Stalingrad memorial on Mamayev Hill. The narrator makes reference to the fact that on the fortieth anniversary of the

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Battle of Stalingrad, in present-day Volgograd, a tribute took place which was initiated by the German side ‘for our former enemies’. However, ‘only a few German comrades [took part]’, but one of them was ‘formerly a convinced National Socialist’. 8.3.2.1 Perspective of the documentary The documentary presents a picture of the ‘Stalingrad’ event which is both fragmented and contradictory. On the one hand, there are signs of a discriminating approach, by raising, for example, the issue of the destruction of the city, or by invoking the context of the war as a whole when characterizing the attack on Stalingrad as part of the National Socialist war of conquest. On the other hand, there is talk of ‘doing one’s duty’ and the soldiers are reduced to the status of betrayed and suffering victims. At the heart of the documentary is a moral issue: ‘Stalingrad’ had the effect, according to the documentary, of making soldiers become pacifists and democrats, who learned their lesson as a result of the war. In contrast to the Austrian Panorama documentary, the stronger preoccupation with the present, and the clear moral message, are striking, even if the perspective on the past is not as critical as it might be. It is not entirely clear whether the documentary is aimed primarily at the war generation, or rather at the succeeding generation. At any rate, the slogan ‘Never again war!’ seems to perform two functions: first, it conveys the idea that one can learn from history, and second, it shows that at least part of the war generation has become a reformed, peace-loving generation. The documentary does imply, however, that the war waged by the Wehrmacht, however terrible it may have been, was ultimately a ‘normal’ war, like any other. That is to say, the demand ‘Never again war!’ effectively diverts attention away from a more specific demand, namely ‘Never again a racist, anti-Semitic war of extermination and annihilation!’ 8.3.3 ‘Stalingrad’ as the central event of the Second World War At the end of the 1980s, the ORF broadcast a series on Austrian history called ‘Austria I’, produced and presented by Hugo Portisch. In the twelfth part, ‘Wartime resurgence: The German attack on the Soviet Union’, the ‘Battle of Stalingrad’ is a central theme. The opening sequence is used by Hugo Portisch to contextualize the documentary. Of particular note is the way in which the Austrians in the Wehrmacht are directly linked with the historical event ‘Stalingrad’: The year 1941 sees the start of a decisive phase of the war. Hitler attacks the Soviet Union and Japan attacks the USA. […] Due to the growing exertions of the war and increasing losses, more and more people are drawn into military service. In the end, more than one million Austrians

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find themselves serving in the ranks of the German Wehrmacht. Many of them are sent to Stalingrad, where they are killed, wounded or imprisoned. The Nazi regime responds to defeats on the battlefield with ever more brutal persecution of its enemies, real and imagined, leading, amongst other things, to the almost total eradication of Jews in the German sphere of control. […] But there is also growing resistance amongst the population and even amongst the soldiers. An Austrian consciousness begins to assert itself everywhere, both at home and at the front. […] Austria is reborn, in the midst of war, due in part to calculated, and not entirely altruistic, moves on the part of the Allied Powers, but above all, in the hearts of many Austrians. Portisch’s introduction epitomizes the thesis that Austria, faced with losses and military defeat, re-emerged during the war, and that a new Austrian consciousness arose, leading to intensified resistance to the Nazi regime. Portisch also presents the (historically contentious) thesis that the ‘almost total eradication of Jews in the German sphere of control’ was directly linked to ‘defeats on the battlefield’. The opening narration is followed by original footage from June 1941 of the German troops marching up to the German–Soviet border, and of the eventual attack on the Soviet Union. ‘All hell broke loose’, as one speaker puts it. There are reports of the successes of the German troops, who capture hundreds of thousands of prisoners, and of the resistance and flight of the Soviet civilians, who burn ‘their own fields and houses … as they did against Napoleon’. This is followed by shots of Hitler and Mussolini inspecting the battlefield. Subsequently there is mention of the wartime role of the Reich’s broadcasting operations. The film cross-fades to the ‘Homeland’, with a report on the football final between the German team, Schalke, and Rapid Vienna, and a segment on the armaments factories in the ‘Ostmark’.9 The commentary states that, by now, practically the only people working in the ‘Homeland’ are women and forced labourers. After a look at the Vienna Trade Fair of 1941, and a story about women breaking-in horses for use by the Wehrmacht, the focus once again shifts to the war in the East. The main topics are Soviet resistance on the Eastern Front and the problems facing the Wehrmacht due to the onset of winter. There is another brief cut to the ‘Homeland’, with reports about the hard winter in Vienna, collections of clothing for soldiers on the Eastern Front, the wartime postal service and the notifications of soldiers ‘missing in action’. Eventually, there is a ‘change of front’: Japan attacks the United States, Hitler declares war on the United States, a submarine war is waged in the Atlantic, and finally the ‘war in the East’ is back in the spotlight. Hugo Portisch appears on screen, against a backdrop of concentration camps, and embarks on further contextualization: ‘Hitler wages the war which he has promised previously on several occasions: the racial war. There is, it should be noted, a remarkable temporal alignment between the defeat

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at Moscow, the declaration of war against the USA and the beginning of the “Final Solution”, the attempt to eradicate the Jews.’ The sequences that follow feature original footage. One speaker seeks to apportion blame: ‘The SS was responsible for the Final Solution […].’ To conclude, images are shown of Austrian Jews being taken away, and interviews are conducted with contemporary witnesses. The fact is then mentioned that 150,000 Austrians managed to escape abroad, thereby setting up a link to the topic ‘Austrians in exile’. At 20 minutes in length, this part of the documentary accounts for almost a quarter of the programme. By comparison, the persecution and murder of Jews is dealt with in barely 11 minutes, and the documentary devotes almost as much time (eight minutes) to the subject of ‘Stalingrad’, as it does to the mass murder of Jews. The ‘Battle of Stalingrad’ is portrayed as follows: In 1942, the Battle of Stalingrad becomes the great turning point of the war, and indeed, of global politics (original footage: guns firing, smouldering and burning city, aerial attacks). More than 300,000 German soldiers form up for the assault on Stalingrad (shots of advancing tank columns). They encounter fierce resistance by the Soviets: every house is defended (tanks and soldiers in house-to-house combat); every street is fought over for days (fighting). In the area around Stalingrad, the Soviets assemble ten armies. The German front is punched through (shots of the smouldering city) and the city is encircled by the Soviets. Almost 300,000 German soldiers are trapped (photo of Otto Zach). Amongst them are many Austrians. Otto Zach was one of them. In the interview which follows, Otto Zach talks about the food shortage in the Stalingrad pocket, and also about the fighting: ‘It was dreadful. On the slope facing us, there was just this solid mass of Russians. I shot at people like you would at a target – I was completely without emotion.’ The narrator continues to describe events: Only on 2 February 1943 do the remaining German troops at Stalingrad surrender, following a siege lasting for three months. Amongst the mangled tanks are some bearing the Viennese crest (sad music, portraits of fallen soldiers, dead soldiers in the snow). And amongst the fallen are many thousands of Austrians. Out of approximately 300,000 German soldiers, only 90,000 survived at Stalingrad (shots of German captives in tatters). Now they enter captivity … most of them completely exhausted, many of them wounded. Almost all are ill with dysentery or typhus. The German doctors have no more dressings and no medication. The Soviets take care of their own people first. 8.3.3.1 Perspective of the documentary ‘Stalingrad’ is seen as the ‘great turning point in the war’ and as the wartime event in which Austrian soldiers were most crucially involved. The Wehrmacht

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soldiers are portrayed as victims. Conspicuously, the interview with Otto Zach is cut at precisely the moment where he starts to speak about his having shot at people ‘like you would at a target’. Also striking is the differing portrayal of the captured soldiers: in the case of the Soviet prisoners, only images are shown, and it is not mentioned that (presumably) millions died. By contrast, in the interviews with German and Austrian ex-prisoners of war, the subjects raised include the death marches, shootings in the back of the neck, tanks running over people, and hunger and starvation. There is also a heavily symbolic juxtapositioning of images of Soviet artillery letting off volleys of cannon fire, set against a Wehrmacht soldier releasing a single shot from his rifle. The series ‘Austria I’, through its format and composition, clearly addresses the Austrians as a nation. It constitutes an attempt to construct a consensualized documentary version of history. An aspect of this consensualized version of history is the clear distinction between the war of extermination – waged by the SS – and the ‘normal’ war in which the Wehrmacht participated. There is no reference to the Wehrmacht’s active participation in the Nazi extermination programme. The Battle of Stalingrad is used as a symbol for the ‘normal’ war. In other words, the consensual history produced in the late 1980s by the ORF was based substantially on core elements of the historical interpretation that would be challenged in the mid-1990s by the first Wehrmacht exhibition: the myth of the ‘untainted Wehrmacht’.

8.4 ‘Stalingrad’ in the 1990s 8.4.1 ‘Stalingrad’ in an age of reconciliation Whilst the ORF in 1993 broadcast a (shortened) repeat of its own 1973 production ‘30 years of Stalingrad’ (see above), the second German TV channel, ‘ZDF’, screened a German-Russian documentary series on ‘Stalingrad’, directed by Guido Knopp,10 which was substantially different from any of the ‘Stalingrad’ documentaries so far shown in Austria. The five-part series, entitled ‘The Damned War: Decision at Stalingrad’ is guided by the creed of ‘reconciliation’ with the former wartime enemy, the Soviet Union. The documentary is presented by Guido Knopp, together with the Russian Raissa Yevdokimova. The opening sequence, accompanied by archive images, refers to the Third Reich’s war with the Soviet Union as ‘German aggression against the Soviet Union’, and explains that the Wehrmacht allowed itself to be used as an instrument of Hitler’s hunger for conquest. Subsequently, however, the campaign in the East is no longer portrayed primarily as a German assault, but rather as a fight between two nations or regimes under the control of two dictators. That, according to the co-presenters, is why this war must be faced up to together, and why there must be a common symbol of reconciliation. With respect to the shared presenting role of Knopp and Yevdokimova, it can be said that the constant swapping of perspective, and the alternating

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evocation of empathy with both the German and the Russian sides, make for a perspective on events that had been largely absent from previous documentaries. However, it also leads to the two sides in the war being regarded in the same way. The first programme in the series is taken up with the story of how two German contemporary witnesses returned to the scenes of the fighting around Stalingrad. They are the main protagonists in the film, and appear again in later programmes in the series. In terms of content, the focus of this first programme is on the ‘fatal directive’ from Hitler to attack both Stalingrad and the Caucasus simultaneously. The title of the second part, ‘Hate against Hate’ already alludes to the equal status accorded to the two warring parties. In the opening sequence, excerpts are shown from a Soviet wartime (propaganda) film, in which Germans are portrayed as war criminals. Co-presenter Yevdokimova comments, ‘This film was seen by millions of people in the Soviet Union. This is what shaped their ideas about the Germans. […] And how were the Russians portrayed to you [Germans]?’ (looks at Guido Knopp). The next sequences are from a German weekly newsreel, and are about ‘the Bolsheviks’. Immediately afterwards, Knopp speaks about ‘sowing hatred’, about the ‘crimes of Nazi henchmen in the hinterlands’ and about how the documentary was concerned with ‘what people are capable of doing to other people’. Acts of murder by the SS Einsatzgruppen are seen as the original source of ‘hatred’, which led to an ‘escalation of terror by the Partisans’. There are interviews with a former Soviet Partisan (female) and a Jewish Partisan. A German ‘Specialist Officer in the Partisan War’ expresses what he considers to be the balanced view that atrocities were committed by both sides, and that there had been ‘brutal excesses’ on the part of the Partisans. The presenter narrates, ‘Everyday life in this dirty war: burning villages, hostages shot dead, Russians fighting Russians.’ Knopp does not mention, however, that under the cloak of ‘combat against Partisans’, countless Jews were murdered. The exodus of millions of Russians towards the East is referred to briefly. A former Soviet female slave labourer is interviewed, who had originally been seized by Germans. In connection with the murder of Jews, the narrator refers to ‘Hitler’s madness’, ‘Hitler’s killing machine’ and ‘support by parts of the Wehrmacht for SS operations directed against Jews’. Then there is an interview with a German Wehrmacht soldier attached to a propaganda company, who had been an ‘involuntary witness’ to a ‘cleansing operation’. He describes the terror inflicted by SS special units on the civilian population, and operations to round up and shoot Partisans. A Soviet Partisan relates, ‘The people11 were forced into a barn and burned alive.’ The main topic of the third part of the series is the Siege of Leningrad. In numerous interviews, Soviet contemporary witnesses tell of the life and misery in the city, cut off from its surroundings. The documentary generally

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demonstrates great empathy with the population of Leningrad, whilst the German strategy of bombardment and deliberate starvation of the population is shown without pulling any punches. At the end of the programme, standing alongside Yevdokimova at the Leningrad memorial, Knopp declares, ‘It is depressing to stand here as a German.’ He appeals to viewers to help the people of Leningrad, who (due to the bad state of the economy) are once again experiencing hunger. In the fourth and fifth parts of the documentary series, attention is focused on the ‘Battle of Stalingrad’. Topics include the German advance and ‘the End on the Volga’. Once again, the presenters place both warring parties on an equal footing. There is a striking degree of empathy with the Wehrmacht soldiers. A Soviet soldier, discussing his side’s conduct towards the German captives, says, ‘We felt sorry for them, they looked so miserable.’ 8.4.1.1 Perspective of the documentary This documentary is considerably richer and more critical than any of the other Stalingrad documentaries discussed so far. Even the involvement of the Wehrmacht in criminal activities is addressed, although at the same time, the individual soldiers are portrayed as unwitting or unwilling witnesses. The role of the presenters is clearly to create a ‘context for reconciliation’. It seems to be left to the Russian presenter, Raissa Yevdokimova, to say what Knopp cannot say, namely that the two warring parties should be treated as equals, and that Stalingrad should be looked upon as a ‘common burial site’. In this fifth and final programme, there is quite clearly empathy with the German soldiers, as evidenced, for example, by the two interview sequences in which German veterans of Stalingrad break down in tears. This documentary must be seen against the backdrop of both the political upheaval in Eastern Europe and the German desire for reconciliation and forgiveness. The joint reappraisal and pardoning, manifested in this documentary, of ‘crimes against both our nations’, can be seen, in some respects, as a means of drawing a subtle rhetorical line under the Nazi crimes committed in the campaign in the East. The new sense of fellowship between Germany and Russia can be seen to culminate in Guido Knopp’s appeal to viewers, in a visible gesture of reconciliation, to donate money to the Russian people as they face a winter of hunger. 8.4.2 Return to Volgograd I would now like to consider two television broadcasts screened in 1996 by the ORF, shortly after an Austrian Stalingrad monument was erected in Volgograd. In July 1996, a documentary was broadcast which dealt with the events at Stalingrad and the modern perception of those events. The focal points of the documentary, which bore the title ‘The Victims of Stalingrad’, were a journey by a group of Austrian Stalingrad veterans to Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), and their recollections of the wartime events. A few

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weeks earlier, the ORF had broadcast a programme in its popular reportage series Am Schauplatz, entitled ‘Rendezvous Stalingrad’. In keeping with the Am Schauplatz format, the film considered the Austrian-initiated Stalingrad monument from a somewhat detached and ironic perspective. Turning first to the documentary ‘The Victims of Stalingrad’, I would like to discuss its perspective on Stalingrad as a past event whose memory needs to be perpetuated. In the opening sequence, archive images of ice, cold and snow are shown, accompanied by the sound of wind. These are followed by clips of a street survey of young Austrians on the subject of ‘Stalingrad’. Most of the respondents shown have no idea about the events in question. They have trouble placing the name ‘Stalingrad’ in any specific historical context. The findings of the survey virtually justify the making of the documentary by themselves – they convey the message that there is a renewed need for an awarenessraising initiative, in order that young people should know about ‘Stalingrad’. Following the street survey, there are clips of the previously mentioned journey by Austrian Stalingrad veterans to present-day Volgograd: ‘After fifty years, our Austrian veterans revisit the scene of those events.’ On the fields around Volgograd, the veterans find human bones and express shock that these are simply lying strewn about the place. The commentary implies that these are the bones of Wehrmacht soldiers, and not those of Red Army personnel. In an interview sequence, a former Austrian reconnaissance pilot talks about the Soviet encirclement. A Russian woman, who had lived in the house adjacent to General Paulus’s headquarters, relates that ‘the Germans behaved well towards us’. Next comes a report about present-day Gumrak, a locality in the district surrounding Stalingrad, where an airfield had been situated during the war. According to the narrator, the Russian civilian population was not evacuated, and therefore had to witness the fighting. A former Wehrmacht colonel expresses his view about the air supplies to the Sixth Army: ‘The transport crews were the heroes of Stalingrad.’ The documentary continues with shots of house-to-house fighting in Stalingrad and with an account of the battle for Mamayev Hill (‘Height 102’), where ‘terrible fighting’ took place. Finally, the Wehrmacht’s failed attempt to break out of the Stalingrad pocket is described. Another featured topic is that of Christmas Eve at Stalingrad. A veteran relates that the Soviets had played Christmas songs in order to encourage defection and surrender. The documentary intensifies the (highly emotive) contrast between ‘Christmas’ and dying soldiers (pictures of a military cemetery and corpses are faded in). A Russian woman from Volgograd tells of frostbitten and hungry German soldiers to whom she had given some bread to eat. The captivity of the Wehrmacht soldiers is referred to. A Stalingrad veteran recalls: ‘Having decimated Stalingrad, [as prisoners] we had to put it

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back together.’ A resident of Volgograd says of the captured soldiers: ‘They worked well, they were reliable.’ The Austrian historian, Stefan Karner, is asked about the Soviet POW camps, and the newly accessible records related to the prisoners of war. As the documentary concludes, the (controversial) Austrian Stalingrad monument in Volgograd becomes the dominant image. In a final sequence, a solidarity song is sung at the monument. 8.4.2.1 Perspectives of the two documentaries The documentary ‘The Victims of Stalingrad’ paints, on the whole, a very positive picture of the Wehrmacht soldiers, who had ‘behaved well’ and who, after the war, had contributed ‘reliably and well’ – if under duress – to the reconstruction of the Soviet Union. Against that, however, the destruction wreaked by the Wehrmacht is also discussed, and there is reference to the fallen Soviet soldiers. Overall, however, the Wehrmacht soldiers are, so to speak, held in ‘esteem’. The fact that a murderous war of annihilation was waged with the direct involvement of the Wehrmacht is not dwelt upon. The failure to deal with the issue of the Wehrmacht’s role in the Nazi annihilation campaign seems all the more remarkable if one considers that when the film was produced, the exhibition ‘War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944’ was already open to the Austrian public. Indeed, the ‘Sixth Army on the road to Stalingrad’ featured prominently in the exhibition, and sections of the media were already showing early signs of a more critical approach to the event ‘Stalingrad’. The controversial Stalingrad memorial – for which the documentary’s maker, Walter Seledec, was a leading advocate – is portrayed one-sidedly as a positive and necessary development in terms of commemoration policy. However, whereas the documentary ‘The Victims of Stalingrad’ treats the erecting of the Austrian Stalingrad monument in Volgograd as merely a contemporary reference point (albeit one with positive connotations), the documentary Am Schauplatz places the inauguration of the monument and the associated arrival of visitors from Austria – Wehrmacht veterans, dependants and politicians – right at the heart of its subject matter. Interviews are conducted with the local population, and with Wehrmacht veterans and their dependants. Interspersed with these are short historical reflections, with archive footage as well as shots of the Soviet Union’s own Stalingrad monument. The economic plight of the inhabitants of Volgograd is portrayed, as is the anger directed towards Yeltsin’s government. By way of contrast, road-construction activity initiated by Austria – specifically because of the inauguration of the monument – and the construction of an Austriansponsored school are also highlighted. The only committed local opponents of the memorial to appear in the film are two ‘old-school communists’. They regard it as obscene that the perpetrators of rape and destruction should have a monument erected to them on the very site of their crimes. According

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to the Am Schauplatz narrator, the pair were instrumental in preventing the memorial from being erected in the centre of the city of Volgograd. Am Schauplatz provides the viewer with an empathetic, but at the same time, detached and ironic view of the sizeable group of Austrian travellers. Overall, the programme paints a contradictory picture, which contrasts with the documentary ‘The Victims of Stalingrad’ only in certain respects. Archive images are shown of the city of Stalingrad in ruins, and there is mention of the destruction caused by the Wehrmacht, as well as the high number of Soviet civilian and military casualties; yet at the same time, the familiar and almost iconic Stalingrad images of columns of prisoners, ragged Wehrmacht soldiers and bodies in the snow are all used. The interviews with Wehrmacht veterans illustrate a spectrum of viewpoints: one veteran thinks, ‘It was a war of annihilation that we waged,’ whilst another interviewee is convinced that, on the contrary, ‘It was not a war of annihilation, but a fight for the survival of the German nation, and Austrians were part of the German nation.’ A third stresses what, for many of the travellers, was evidently a motivating factor: ‘I came because of the comrades who perished here.’ There is a clear parallel with the documentary ‘The Victims of Stalingrad’ in the fact that none of the interviewees is asked in concrete terms about Wehrmacht crimes, or about the involvement of the Wehrmacht in the Nazi policy of annihilation. 8.4.3 Consensus history in fast motion As a retrospective coda to the twentieth century, the ORF broadcast in 1999 a series entitled ‘Austria, Our Century’, which was intended to provide, amongst other things, a historical digest of events in Austria throughout the course of the twentieth century. A significant portion of this televisual account of history – or, at any rate, four minutes out of a total transmission time of 50 minutes – was devoted to the historical event ‘Stalingrad’. For the first 20 minutes, we are treated to an exposition on the monarchy, the First World War and the inter-war period. This is followed by five minutes of reflection in which the focus is on the Anschluss and the early repression of Jews and political opponents. A short transitional sequence, in which images of the Stalingrad memorial at Mamayev Hill near Volgograd are accompanied by upbeat music, forms the link to the events of the Second World War. The narrator commentates: ‘It’s World War all over again. Hundreds of thousands of young Austrians put on German uniforms. To begin with, the Wehrmacht is victorious on all fronts. Then Hitler’s armies attack Russia, penetrating far into the country (archive footage). Autumn 1942. Stalingrad must fall – it is Adolf Hitler’s will; 50,000 Austrians are in the most forward positions for the attack on the industrial city on the Volga. Amidst fierce fighting, the city is captured one house at a time. It is a decisive battle. It marks the turning point in this war of aggression.’ From this initial spoken text, it is already clear that in this contemplation of the Second World War,

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the focus is on the war in the East, the campaign against ‘Russia’ and, yet again, the Battle of Stalingrad. ‘Stalingrad’ is held up as a symbol for the whole of the Second World War. To put it another way: at the end of the twentieth century, in a consensus-oriented mass-media retrospective produced by and for Austrian television, all that remains of the Second World War, and all that is deemed worthy of commemoration, is ‘Stalingrad’. The Soviet Russian perspective on ‘Stalingrad’ is also briefly referred to against a backdrop of images of the Stalingrad monument on Mamayev Hill: ‘The memory of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ is kept alive in Russia to this day. Some one million Russian soldiers fell during the Battle of Stalingrad. Not even the hugest monument can do justice to the scale of the casualties.’ There follows a further shift back to the dominant perspective, accompanied by images bearing testimony to the severe winter conditions – the cold, the wind and the snow. The soldiers are portrayed as victims of the Hitler regime. Their lives, we are told, meant nothing more to the ‘Führer’ than those of the other Austrians who lost their lives during the years of National Socialist rule. Austrians who fell on the battlefield or were killed in bombing raids are, by virtue of their victimhood, looked at in the same way as the victims of racially motivated persecution and murder: ‘During seven years of National Socialist rule, half a million Austrians lose their lives – on the battlefield, in concentration camps or in bombing raids.’ This Second World War narrative concludes with the commentary that ‘the War [reaches] the Home Front (shots of aircraft, bombardments). Thousand of civilians fall victim to the bombing.’ 8.4.3.1 Perspective of the documentary ‘Stalingrad’ is portrayed – as it was in the ‘Austria I’ documentary – as the decisive battle of the Second World War, and as a symbol of Austrian involvement in the war. Moreover, the Second World War is reduced simply to ‘Stalingrad’, and is portrayed as a war to be viewed in isolation from the Nazi policy of annihilation. The Second World War is described not as a criminal war initiated by the German side, but simply as a war in which all soldiers suffered in equal measure. As far as the documentary ‘Austria, Our Century’ is concerned, in relation to ‘Stalingrad’ (and, therefore, in relation to the involvement of Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers in the Second World War as a whole), there are just ‘victims’, although here the Soviet fatalities do at least merit a mention. The result is that Wehrmacht soldiers, as the victims of military demands and the ruthlessness of their own regime, are equated with concentration camp victims. The documentary thus reinforces the undifferentiated notion of victimhood that dominated Austrian politics for decades, and which was associated with the refusal to recognize, as a victim group in their own right, those who had suffered racial persecution. The documentary not only bids farewell to the twentieth century, it also portrays the Nazi period as a closed chapter of the past, without any kind of

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connection to the present. In keeping with the ‘Zero Hour’ myth, a completely new Austria is born in the year 1945, the Austria of economic reconstruction and boom (accompanied by brisk, loping music). This documentary can be seen as a prime example of uncritical historical retrospective, disregarding any ongoing political debates about the past, and simply filtering out some sort of ‘positive’ consensus.

8.5 ‘Stalingrad’ in the year 2000 (on the BBC) In the year 2000, German television broadcast a documentary series entitled ‘War of the Century: When Hitler Fought Stalin’, produced by the BBC, the History Channel and the North German channel, NDR.12 Its approach to the subject of ‘Stalingrad’ stands out clearly from the other productions discussed so far. The series looked at the Second World War as a whole, but included one programme, ‘Learning to Win’,13 which dealt specifically with ‘Stalingrad’. The ‘Stalingrad’ programme takes as its starting point the spring of 1942, when Stalin ordered a counter-offensive at Kharkov. The narrator relates that the Red Army was encircled and defeated. In June 1942, Hitler ordered the push towards Stalingrad and the Caucasus. A former German infantryman explains in an interview: ‘We were the better soldiers. […] It filled us with pride to advance that far to the East.’ Another Wehrmacht veteran speaks about reaching the Volga in August 1942: ‘It was an exciting feeling to be at the Volga.’ In the BBC documentary, the advance is portrayed by the former Wehrmacht soldiers as a positive experience, and there is no suggestion that they saw themselves during the war as suffering victims. To secure the Volga as a frontier, explains the narrator, Stalingrad would have to be taken. A Soviet woman tells us, ‘People weren’t allowed to leave. Everyone hoped Stalingrad would not be surrendered.’ Even children, says the narrator, had to live in the ruins of Stalingrad. The documentary refers both to the destruction of Stalingrad brought about by the Wehrmacht attacks, and to the policy of holding out imposed by the Stalin regime on the civilian population. A Soviet soldier is interviewed about the immense losses suffered by the Red Army when crossing the Volga. The narrator adds, ‘Even if Soviet soldiers managed to get to the Stalingrad bank of the Volga, there remained horrific dangers for them – as these bones testify. Almost daily around the city, farmers still uncover human remains.’ It should be noted that the skeletons in the fields are attributed here to the Soviet side and not, as in the case of the Austrian documentary, to soldiers of the Wehrmacht. In a further interview sequence, a Soviet officer recalls the crassness and brutality exhibited by the commander of the defending Soviet troops, Vasily Chuikov, towards his own men. The narrator explains, ‘The Soviets made newsreels which demonstrated Chuikov’s ruthless tactics for fighting in the city itself. Chief amongst them was the use of special assault groups to enter buildings.’ This,

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incidentally, is the only instance where documentary material is explicitly referred to. In none of the other documentaries discussed is there any reference to the subject of documentation (apart from inserts such as the ‘German Weekly Newsreel’). A survivor of one of these ‘suicide squads’ is interviewed: ‘I was like a beast. I wanted only one thing – to kill. […] We had spades. Mine was a good one. […] I kept it beside me for hand-to-hand fighting. I sliced a few of them up quite well.’ Another Soviet soldier, describing how he shot dead a German, now shows remorse: ‘It was terrible. […] I fell down and was vomiting for the rest of the day. […] I’ll never forget it.’ The narrator sums up: ‘110,000 German soldiers were taken prisoner, and 95 per cent of them were to die in Soviet captivity. Now, as Soviet forces prepared to advance, they were ready to make the rest of the Germans pay for the suffering inflicted on their motherland.’ 8.5.1 Perspective of the documentary What distinguishes this production from all the others is the presence of a critical perspective, in relation both to the German war of aggression, and to the Soviet side. Moreover, elsewhere in the four-part series, interview sequences are shown in which both German and Russian informants are questioned about acts of physical violence – which was not the case with the other documentaries. Finally, some interviews feature contemporary witnesses who display only a very slight awareness of any possible wrongdoing. In other words, no attempt is made to cast a flattering light on the attitudes of soldiers in relation to the conduct of the war. It does not appear to be the case that this documentary was produced under pressure to arouse in viewers a strong identification response (in order to satisfy their appetite for a positive-self image), or in order to convey any specific moralistic or pedagogic message. Instead, critical perspectives on the past are taken up and explored, both in relation to the Wehrmacht’s participation in the Nazi policy of annihilation, and – particularly in the ‘Stalingrad’ programme – with reference to the brutal manner in which the Stalin regime treated its own citizens and its own soldiers.

8.6 Summary Let us begin by reviewing the development of the ORF’s television documentaries about ‘Stalingrad’. In the early 1970s, ‘Stalingrad’ is still portrayed as part of the immediate present, as a historical event that continues to move people, and which leaves many questions unanswered. In terms of content, the important questions concern military strategy, the responsibility for the Wehrmacht’s defeat at Stalingrad and whether the soldiers’ deaths had served any (military) purpose. Beyond that, there is a general concern with the suffering endured by the soldiers and the horrendous conditions under which they had to hold out, these being graphically documented by contemporary

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witnesses. A notably deferential, at times even adulatory, tone is adopted in relation to certain Wehrmacht generals. By the early 1980s, there are already signs of a significantly different approach to ‘Stalingrad’, which treats the event less as a part of the present beset by unanswered questions, and more as a significant past event that should be commemorated and extolled. The main preoccupation is the suffering of the soldiers, who are now regarded as the betrayed victims of the Nazi regime. The Panorama documentary also has a tendency to portray the soldiers as heroes. By the late 1980s, as shown by the focus on the Wehrmacht’s war of conquest in the East, and the prominent featuring of ‘Stalingrad’ in the ‘Austria I’ documentary series, there is an attempt to adopt a historicizing, objectivizing perspective on ‘Stalingrad’. ‘Stalingrad’ is not regarded simply as a closed chapter of the past, but is also embedded within a wider context. This can be seen, on the one hand, in the way that ‘Stalingrad’ serves as symbol for Austrian participation in the Second World War (and for the victimhood of the Wehrmacht soldiers), and on the other hand, in its characterization as the turning point of the war, leading to the defeat of Nazi Germany and marking the beginning of the ‘re-emergence’ (‘rebirth’) of Austria. By the mid-1990s, it appears as though ‘Stalingrad’ can no longer be taken for granted as a central event in Austrian collective memory. At any rate, the producers of ‘The victims of Stalingrad’ find it necessary to justify their decision to make a documentary about ‘Stalingrad’. In fact, though, with its focus on the paying of ‘last respects’ to the fallen soldiers of Stalingrad, and the erecting of an Austrian memorial in Volgograd, the documentary does draw a kind of line under ‘Stalingrad’. The idea of ‘drawing a line under events’ looms even larger in the feature on the Stalingrad monument in the series Am Schauplatz. Here, too, central billing is given to the paying of ‘last respects’ to fallen comrades and relatives. On the other hand, the somewhat aloof style of the programme lends an anachronistic air to the events surrounding the inauguration of the Stalingrad memorial. The 1999 fastmotion documentary ‘Austria, Our Century’ represents par excellence (and not merely in relation to ‘Stalingrad’) a carefully constructed historicization of the twentieth century. ‘Stalingrad’ continues to be portrayed as an important episode in Austrian World War history, and serves as a symbol for the entire Second World War. The issue of Wehrmacht participation in the Nazi war of annihilation and extermination is conspicuously absent from the narrative. The above analysis of Austrian television documentaries about ‘Stalingrad’ allows three key features to be identified: first, the fact that Stalingrad narratives – this applies above all to those from the 1970s and 1980s – stand in stark contradiction of the Austrian ‘victimhood myth’. The programmes attest to a large measure of identification with the German Wehrmacht, on the part of both the programme makers and the Wehrmacht veterans they interviewed. Not a single sequence contains any allusion to the notion that

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Austrian soldiers had been made to fight in ‘foreign uniforms’ for a ‘foreign army’. Occasionally the interviews even contain explicit expressions of enthusiasm for National Socialism, or at least for the idea of ‘doing one’s duty for the (German) Homeland’. The second notable characteristic, which is shared by all the Austrian documentaries on ‘Stalingrad’, is the decontextualization of the event, for example, the decoupling of the battle from the wider context of the war of aggression and annihilation in which the Sixth Army was also involved. A clear separation is maintained between the Nazi policy of annihilation (as symbolized by concentration camps) and the – however terrible for both sides – ‘normal’ war symbolized by the Battle of Stalingrad. Not a single word of criticism is uttered by the documentary narrators in relation to the Wehrmacht’s conduct – be it the treatment of civilians or Soviet prisoners of war, or the campaign of extermination directed against the Jewish population. Instead, they highlight the suffering of the Wehrmacht soldiers and their passage into captivity. Finally, the Austrian documentaries are characterized by endlessly repeated stereotypical pictures and the iconic use of particular photographic images (snow storms, bodies in the snow, cold and hungry Wehrmacht soldiers and columns of prisoners captured by the Soviets). These images, which are also encountered time and again in the print media, have served to implant a very specific ‘Stalingrad’ event in the visual memory of media-consuming Austrians.14 Two creative aspects of the documentaries will now be considered: first, the role of images and second, the narration. With respect to the function of the images, it should be noted that both still and moving images are used mainly to illustrate the spoken text (narration or interview sequences). In some cases, the images add an emotional dimension to the spoken or captioned text (primarily in combination with a particular musical theme). Mostly, however, the images help to engender a sense of ‘being there’, that is, by conveying an authentic impression of the scenes of past events, and aiding understanding of how the events could actually have taken place. On the other hand, the images provide a frame of reference for the (visual and conceptual) imagination of the viewer, who is supposed to glean from the images an impression of the events that took place. What is seldom made explicit in documentaries, however, is the fact that the pictures shown actually supplement the content of the spoken texts; that is, they become a text in their own right. Narrators do not respond to what is shown, indeed they do not refer to it directly at all. The images are not commented on, nor even alluded to – they are simply there, an ingredient of the documentary that is simply taken for granted. Only in isolated cases is there any accounting for the provenance of the images (e.g., by superimposing a caption to the effect that they are from a German weekly newsreel) or any reflection on the possible significance, content or function of the images in the documentary. The link between images and narration is mostly a very

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Plate 8.1 Stalingrad graveyard

Plate 8.2 A dead soldier on the ground

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Plate 8.3 Cold and hungry Wehrmacht soldiers

Plate 8.4 Column of prisoners captured by the Soviet Army

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loose one. A connection with the film’s viewing audience is established with the help of the contextualizing function of the voice-over and the soundtrack. The soundtrack has a central function in the production of documentaries, but this, too, remains wholly implicit. Only when accompanied by music and sound effects do images become more vivid and dynamic, enabling an emotionalizing effect to be achieved. Yet no explanation is given when archive material is used with its original sound, nor when a new soundtrack is added for the sake of the documentary. A further significant creative function is performed by the presentational style. One can distinguish between documentaries with an introductory, contextualizing presentation (Walter Pissecker), documentaries with an accompanying, interpretative commentary (Kurt Grotter, Hugo Portisch, Guido Knopp and Raissa Yevdokimova) and documentaries without any visible presenter (e.g., Am Schauplatz). Especially in cases where the presenter accompanies an entire documentary with commentary, the authority of the presenter acquires real significance. We see this, for example, in the way that the presenter Hugo Portisch, invested with historiographic authority by virtue of his journalistic activity and the high media profile of the ‘Austria I’ and ‘Austria II’ series, presents as quasi-objective truths, rather than as his particular assessment, his theories about the background to the National Socialists’ conduct of the war and their policy of annihilation. A further function can be attributed to the dual presentation of Knopp and Yevdokimova. Not only do they exude historiographic authority, but by virtue of their interaction and co-presentation, they engender above all an atmosphere of reconciliation. I conclude by comparing the Austrian television documentaries with the four non-Austrian programmes, taking the Franco-Soviet and BBC documentaries as reference points. These two documentaries share the attribute that they take account of the Soviet perspective. This distinguishes them from the ORF Stalingrad documentaries, which, although they mention Soviet casualty figures from the late 1980s onward, only really highlight the German and Austrian (Wehrmacht) perspective. The Franco-Soviet and BBC productions differ from one another in that the former adopts a pro-Soviet approach, which extols the Soviet generals, while the latter casts a critical light on the Soviet conduct of war, and the brutal policies of the Soviet leaders towards their own armed forces. Moreover, the BBC series, ‘War of the Century’ – although not, as it happens, in the Stalingrad programme – does deal with the issue of the Wehrmacht’s criminal conduct of the war. It is interesting to note that the ORF documentary ‘30 years of Stalingrad’ and the Franco-Soviet production ‘The Road to Stalingrad’ were broadcast by the ORF in the same month, January 1973, thereby confronting the television audience with two differing perspectives on the historical event ‘Stalingrad’. The two perspectives overlap in some significant ways, however, and can therefore be considered to complement rather than contradict each other. Crucial points of overlap

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are the representation of the Wehrmacht soldiers alone as victims of the war, a portrayal also conveyed by the Franco-Soviet documentary, and the adulatory discourse in relation to (certain) German generals on the one hand, and Soviet generals on the other. The Franco-Soviet documentary stands in contradiction to the Austrian production, however, in celebrating the Red Army’s victory at Stalingrad as a positive turning point in the war and a victory against ‘murderous National Socialism’, thereby running counter to the questioning, almost lamenting ‘Why did we lose?’ perspective of the Austrian documentary. The two Stalingrad productions from Germany stand out from the ORF documentaries in that they to convey ethical or pedagogical messages, namely, in the one instance, that ‘Stalingrad’ had been a kind of salutary shock, which turned Wehrmacht veterans into good democrats and pacifists, and in the other instance, that it was time to ‘reconcile’ oneself with Russia and come to terms with what the sides had inflicted ‘on each other’. In the Austrian Stalingrad documentaries, we find no such attempt to draw a moral lesson from history. Instead, we find attempts to ‘honour’ the soldiers, or even to underline the ‘soldierly values’ of camaraderie, mutual assistance, struggling and suffering together, and so on. Critical perspectives on the Wehrmacht’s conduct of war, such as those that occur, for example, in the five-part ‘Stalingrad’ series by Guido Knopp, do not feature in the Austrian documentaries – not even in the films produced after 1995, that is, after the opening of the exhibition ‘War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944’. Neither the 1996 documentary, ‘The Victims of Stalingrad’, nor the fast-motion documentary produced in 1999, ‘Austria, Our Century’, takes issue, even in a rudimentary way, with the criminal wartime activities of the Wehrmacht. These included the Sixth Army’s cooperation with Sonderkommando 4a over the implementation of the policy to exterminate the Jewish population of the Soviet Union, the plundering and starvation tactics of the Sixth Army at Kharkov, and the inhumane treatment by the Wehrmacht of Soviet prisoners of war (see Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, 2002). It may be pointed out in this context that only one of the Stalingrad documentaries examined, ‘The victims of Stalingrad’, makes any direct use of contemporary historians, and even then, they are not called upon to correct or challenge statements made by witnesses or by the narrator. In this chapter, we have discussed the act of reducing the global event ‘World War II’ to the ‘Battle of Stalingrad’. This can be observed in the documentaries ‘Austria I’ and Austria, our century, along with extremely selective, narrowly focused and exculpatory accounts of the Wehrmacht’s conduct of the war. This suggests that even in the late 1990s, these issues belong to the domain of living history, and that they are overlaid with taboo so as not to threaten the positive self-image of the war (and reconstruction) generation, or indeed the possibility of identifying with it.

Part III Reaction to the Wehrmacht Exhibitions

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9 Crime Scene: Wehrmacht Exhibition Alexander Pollak and Ruth Wodak

9.1 Introduction The touring exhibition ‘War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944’ did more than stir up controversy and debate amongst the general public: it was also seized upon by the entertainment industry as a subject within the domain of popular culture. As an example of such an approach to the Wehrmacht Exhibition, and to historical and political issues associated with it, in this chapter we analyse an episode of a television series which has for decades enjoyed considerable popularity amongst German-speaking audiences: the detective series Tatort, or ‘Crime Scene’.1 The plot of the Tatort episode in question, ‘Picture Storm’, revolves around two detectives.2 Together they have to solve a case that features a number of topical socio-critical references. The two detectives are the main identification figures, and complement each other in terms of both their personalities and their manner and appearance. They are true ‘buddies’ who will stand by each other, no matter what the situation. The programme contains other elements which are typical of this type of crime story, such as chases, mistakes by colleagues and police officers, class differences, not to mention a developing love story between the female victim and the investigator. The plot is multilayered and convoluted. At the outset, through snap-shots and short sequences, all the characters are introduced, whilst the plot’s logic and coherence emerge more slowly. The sound effects and music are also significant: they accompany all aspects of the story, both building and relieving the tension. Musical motifs are associated with particular individual characters and content, one example being the way in which dramatic classical music accompanies scenes from the past and traumatic memories. 9.1.1 The content of the Tatort episode ‘Picture Storm’3 Starting with the criminological aspects of the plot, the Tatort investigators, Ballauf and Schenk, are confronted with threatened and actual neo-Nazi attacks on both the exhibition, ‘Scorched Earth – The Crimes of the Wehrmacht 207

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Plate 9.1 Detectives Ballauf and Schenk looking at WWII photographs

and their Consequences’, and the exhibition’s curator, Anna Klee. In addition, there are cases of murder preceded by extortion of the victims, former Wehrmacht soldiers posing in one of the photographs in the exhibition. The Tatort episode is characterized by an abundance of interpersonal relationships, such as the buddy relationship which exists between the detectives Ballauf

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and Schenk, a developing romance between Ballauf and the exhibition curator Anne Klee, the relationship between Schenk and his uncle, who turns out to be one of the Wehrmacht soldiers in the photograph, and numerous other relationships which we will discuss further in the course of our analysis. The murderer of the former soldiers is revealed – in a surprising twist – to be the Wehrmacht exhibition’s academic director – a historian whose Belgian family had been murdered by the very Wehrmacht soldiers depicted in the photograph in the exhibition. The murders are construed as an act of revenge on the part of a victim of the Nazis, with the former perpetrators becoming victims of the victim. The topos of ‘revenge’ pervades the entire film: the Wehrmacht soldiers, too, attribute the murder which they committed to an emotional impulse, an act of revenge for the shooting of one of their fellow soldiers. Thus justice and revenge are juxtaposed, though not explicitly linked in the film. This is a question the viewer is left to reflect on.4 9.1.2 Principal research questions ●

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How is the film’s Wehrmacht exhibition (at the time of the broadcast, a topical reference to the real world) portrayed and recontextualized within the genre of the popular film?5 It must be particularly borne in mind that on German television, Tatort is prime-time viewing, broadcast on Sundays during the main evening schedule. How are the sensitive, ambivalent, taboo subjects associated with the real Wehrmacht Exhibition packaged in a form ‘acceptable’ to a mass audience (as distinct, perhaps, from the more polarizing film by Ruth Beckerman, ‘East of War’)? How is the Nazi period approached? Which topics are singled out, and on which events, people and roles does the film focus? How is the subject of neo-Nazism handled? How is the revenge topos (the victim–victimizer relationship or the victim– victimizer reversal) developed in the film? How are the individual characters and their relationships portrayed? What domestic scenarios and family histories does the plot contain? How are scholarship and the character of the academic researcher portrayed in the film?

9.1.3 Methodology Our approach to the Tatort film is twofold: on the one hand, we document and analyse the content and narrative structure of the film, as well as the actors (in the non-theatrical sense) and their relationships; on the other hand, we ask how the Tatort episode manages to fulfil the most essential aim of any popular entertainment film – the engendering of a sense of identification amongst a widely dispersed TV audience. What reference points are provided for the audience to use for orientation or identification purposes?

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We must emphasize that we are not seeking here to undertake a semiotic film analysis in any strict sense: neither a genre analysis, nor a detailed analysis of the film’s ideological stance or imagery. We have elected instead to apply a methodology which focuses on the analysis of arguments and topoi, whilst still attempting to pay due regard to the filmic aspects of the programme. Our exploration of the Tatort episode ‘Picture Storm’ therefore differs substantially from the study of hybrid forms of contemporary historical discourse, as undertaken, for example, by Adi Grewenig in relation to the Wehrmacht Exhibition on the basis of the Tatort film (see Grewenig, 2000). Grewenig analyses, from a media-theoretical perspective, the fusion of elements of both documentary and fictional film genres into a hybrid docudrama format for dealing with historical and political subject matter. What Grewenig considers only at the margin, however, represents the main substance of the present analysis: the Tatort episode (content and linguistic realization) as the recontextualization of highly contentious and emotive historical and contemporary issues within the domain of popular culture, thereby intended for a wide audience to identify with in one way or another.6

9.2 The Wehrmacht Exhibition as ‘reality fiction’ How is the Wehrmacht Exhibition portrayed in the Tatort episode ‘Picture Storm’? What characteristics are attributed to it? How does it impact on the individual actors in the story and what is its significance for the plot? 9.2.1 The Wehrmacht Exhibition as a photograph album The film’s Wehrmacht exhibition bears the title ‘Scorched Earth: The Crimes of the Wehrmacht and their Consequences’. It thus includes a significant element of the title of the first actual Wehrmacht Exhibition, namely the reference to Wehrmacht crimes. It does not, however, retain the term ‘War of Annihilation’, which alludes to the intentional and systematic nature of the crimes committed, and specifically to their genocidal character. However, much more striking and significant than the title of the exhibition in the film is its format, which differs significantly from that of the original exhibition. The original exhibition comprised three case studies: ‘the Partisan War in Serbia’, ‘the Sixth Army on the road to Stalingrad’ and ‘the three-year occupation of Belorussia’. The case studies were elaborated by the use of texts and illustrated with photographic images. In addition, the so-called ‘iron cross’ exhibit contained a collection of photographs on a variety of topics. The film’s Wehrmacht exhibition, by contrast, consists purely of display panels with photographs, some enlarged to poster size. It is thus a textless exhibition, a Wehrmacht war crimes photograph album, so to speak. By reducing the exhibition to just pictures, the Tatort episode plays strongly on

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Plate 9.2 From left to right: Inspector Ballauf, exhibition curator Anne Klee and Inspector Schenk

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the fact that the first Wehrmacht Exhibition had come to the public’s attention largely because of its photographic content. The film also gives prominence to the so-called photo debate – that is, the controversy surrounding allegations of incorrect captions and attributions. The accusation of falsification and manipulation of photographs is dealt with in a particularly pointed way. 9.2.2 Photo-critique The photograph controversy is represented in the film by a sequence in which a fictitious televised debate takes place between the historian (and director of the exhibition) Tilman Koning and the historian and CSU7 politician Heinrich Pollert about the claims and the production of the (film’s) Wehrmacht exhibition. At the start of the debate, reference is made to a neo-Nazi attack to which the exhibition has been subjected the previous day. Even the opening remarks by the anchorman Kuntze make a number of clear attributions: the exhibition is described as ‘very controversial’, the exhibition’s supporter, Koning, is introduced as being on the viewers’ left, whilst its ‘harsh’ critic is on the right (and also on the political Right, by virtue of his being in the CSU). Right at the outset, the presenter credits the exhibition’s adversary, Pollert, with possible intellectual responsibility for the neo-Nazi attack. This is rejected out of hand by Pollert, who condemns the attack but upholds the right to criticize the exhibition: Pollert: Of course, one can only reject such attacks … Koning (cuts him off): but … but through your constant verbal attacks, you have created the climate for these physical attacks. Pollert: I am not responsible for any misguided radicals. But criticism of the exhibition can and must be allowed. Even now. Because this topic cannot be dealt with in some kind of colossal horror show. The main point of this conversation, however, is not the question of responsibility for the attack on the exhibition, but Pollert’s criticism of the photographs in the exhibition. Given that the fictitious Wehrmacht exhibition consists solely of photos, this amounts to a criticism of the exhibition as a whole. It is acknowledged in the Tatort film that Pollert has indeed discovered a misleadingly captioned photo, or even a falsified one, in terms of the way the photo has been cropped. Pollert’s allegation that the exhibition is manipulating the truth therefore seems to be justified: Kuntze: Professor, what are you accusing the exhibition organizers of in concrete terms? Anna Klee, the exhibition curator and Ballauf are watching the production live on studio monitors. The viewer’s perspective alternates between this and a ‘normal’ (direct) view of the interview.

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Pollert: Falsification of historical fact. Photos are being used purely to shock … Questions are not asked about their origin – about the ‘who, how and what’, the indispensable basis of scholarly research. Take this one, for example … Pollert reaches beside him and holds a photograph up to the camera. In it we see a group of men guarded by soldiers in uniform. Pollert: This is a photograph from the exhibition. ‘Partisans awaiting execution’. In reality, the photo shows something quite different. Pollert holds up a second photograph. This one shows the same scene, only this time more is visible and it is clear that the picture actually shows a crop-picking brigade under military guard. In the TV studio, Ballauf looks at Anne Klee, whose face betrays her sense of shock. On the monitor, Professor Pollert holds a pamphlet up to the camera. Pollert: These men were being accompanied by German soldiers on a harvesting expedition. As you can see, the photograph was manipulated in order to achieve a more lurid effect. It is striking that in the debate, Pollert not only enjoys a disproportionate amount of speaking time, but also – and uniquely – supports his critical approach with solid arguments, whilst Koning merely makes short, sweeping and dismissive remarks. The televised debate is later subjected to a postmortem by Inspector Ballauf and the exhibition curator as they leave the TV studio by car: Ballauf is at the wheel. Anne Klee sits silently beside him and gazes out of the window. She is crying. Ballauf: He can hardly claim that all those things didn’t actually happen back then. That’s why he is trying to discredit your exhibition. Anne Klee: It’s just one photo – one photo out of hundreds. Ballauf: Why don’t you just take it [the photograph] down? Anne Klee: Oh … Ballauf: I mean, if you make one concession, it doesn’t mean you are giving up. You can afford to concede one small weakness. Anne Klee: Like I am now, you mean? Anne Klee is also not allowed to confront the accusations against the exhibition in any rational way. Instead she is scripted with a stereotypically female emotional reaction – she cries. And yet, in another scene, Klee is portrayed as thoroughly rational: when Inspector Ballauf remarks on the devastated state of the exhibition space following the neo-Nazi attack (which had only taken place the previous night), Klee responds: ‘It may be cynical, but it brings in the punters.’

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Plate 9.3 From left to right: the academic director of the Wehrmacht exhibition, Tillman Koning, Anne Klee and Inspector Ballauf

9.2.3 The exhibition as the key to a crime story Not only does the Tatort episode portray the Wehrmacht exhibition as the cause and focal point of polarizing disputes, the filmmakers also tie it in to the central criminal storyline: the two murders are closely connected with the Wehrmacht exhibition. If we consider the portrayal of the Wehrmacht exhibition in the film, we see that the exhibition – with the exception of the closing sequence (see below) – is not cast in a positive light in any of the scenes. It is portrayed as an emotionalizing, polarizing and – thanks to the case made by Pollert – justifiably disputed photo exhibition. Moreover, as a location, it is bound up with criminal activity. There are just two short sequences in which the film suspends the sense of detachment towards the exhibition which it otherwise conveys: first, when Inspector Ballauf walks past the photos on display and stops briefly to have a look – the intention seems to be to show that the exhibition does give food for thought – and second, a scene in which visitors to the exhibition express their consternation at the scenes depicted. Nonetheless, the exhibition portrayed in the Tatort episode ‘Picture Storm’ has negative connotations overall.

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9.3 The ‘Banality of Evil’ – the treatment of the Nazi period in Tatort The Wehrmacht exhibition is linked in the Tatort film to the Nazi period, and in the passage that follows, to the question of what kind of people played a part in Nazi atrocities, or became actual perpetrators. Two approaches to this question are depicted in the film, and these are represented by the two detectives, Ballauf and Schenk. In one scene, Inspector Ballauf addresses the topic: Ballauf is driving down a steep road. Anne Klee is sitting next to him. Anna Klee: Have you not even looked at the exhibition? Ballauf: Not really. Anna Klee: What do you mean, ‘not really’? She looks at him. Ballauf: When I was younger, I went to Poland on a school trip. We looked at these incineration ovens. I understood immediately why there was a lever here and a flap there, and I thought to myself, ‘if I had to build an oven, it would look just like that one.’ That’s what was so crazy – to understand that it wasn’t monsters who killed thousands and thousands of people back then, but people like you and me. And that is what was so shocking. And your exhibition, it has a similar effect. So, though I don’t like to say it, I sometimes prefer to close my eyes to it all, too. Ballauf’s reflections on Auschwitz capture above all the technical, or indeed technocratic, dimension of mass murder: he adopts the perspective that Hanna Arendt emphasized in ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ (Arendt, 1963), namely that those who had been responsible for the genocide had not all been sadists, or ‘monsters’, but rather technocrats – at least in the case of some of the key figures. Ballauf is reflecting precisely this insight when he speaks about it being ‘people like you and me … who killed thousands and thousands of people’. Detective Schenk represents exactly the opposite viewpoint: Schenk: Back in the war, it was no different. I mean, there must be something wrong with anyone who slaughters a family. Women, children … It’s not normal people like you and me that do things like that. Or how … You believe it was him, too, don’t you? This scene relates principally to Schenk’s Uncle Richard, who is suspected of being one of the Wehrmacht soldiers who carried out the murder of the Belgian family referred to previously. Uncle Richard’s role in the Tatort film is that of the favourite uncle. His behaviour does not permit any immediate inferences to be drawn about

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whether he could have committed murder during the war. At the end of the film, it emerges, however, that Uncle Richard was indeed one of the soldiers responsible for the family’s murder. Ballauf is thus right to contend that it was ‘people like you and me’ who committed crimes during the Second World War. The ‘confession scene’ Uncle Richard: Brenner made the whole family stand in front of the house. We thought he wanted to scare them into saying who was still left in the village. But suddenly he shot the father, because he wouldn’t speak. Waldmann said when the Yanks arrived, they’d make short work of us if that came out. And suddenly everyone started shooting. So I raised my pistol and fired as well – just like that. Schenk: I was there this morning. It’s a children’s playground now. Pause. Schenk avoids looking at his uncle. Uncle Richard: What happens now? Schenk: I don’t know. The old man can no longer hold back the tears and begins to weep quietly. Schenk looks at him and moves closer to him. The sentence spoken by Uncle Richard: ‘Then I raised my pistol and fired as well – just like that’ reminds us that this was an impulsive act rather than a premeditated act of ‘evil’, that is to say, that Uncle Richard has reacted ‘just like that’ to the situation, in what was more or less a reflex action. Besides the question of what sort of people committed crimes during the Second World War, the film opens up three further topics in relation to the Nazi period. It raises the issues of ‘following orders under pressure’, the problem of traumatization and the possible desire for revenge (amongst surviving victims of the Nazis). While the topos of revenge pervades the film as a whole, the issues of ‘following orders under pressure’ and traumatization are dealt with in the ‘showdown’ between the historian Koning (the child survivor of the murdered family, and murderer of the Wehrmacht soldiers) and Uncle Richard (the Wehrmacht criminal): Koning has pushed Uncle Richard into the middle of the bare, white-decorated room. On the wall hangs a crucifix. A freshly made bed stands beneath the small window. Uncle Richard: It was an order. I was just following an order. Koning: Yes, that’s what Brenner and Waldmann claimed too. But you and I both know that’s not true. There was no order. Uncle Richard: They shot one of my comrades. We had to do something. Koning: But you were already withdrawing. The Americans had long since broken through.

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Uncle Richard: Dear God, he was sitting right next to me. I got so much blood on me, I thought I had been hit too. Koning: And why didn’t you just drive straight through? Uncle Richard: Because Hans … just before, he’d said, ‘Hey, in a fortnight, we’ll be sitting fishing in the Rhine again.’ And then he got shot. Koning: And the sniper was at the church. The house was 100 metres further on, past the bend. The shot could not have been fired from there. Uncle Richard: But there was a gun in the house. Koning: Yes, that’s true. There was a gun in the house. But it hung above the fireplace. As décor. It didn’t even have a firing pin. You slaughtered innocent people. And you knew that perfectly well. Because you wanted revenge, and that was your own choice. Koning gives Uncle Richard a cigarette. Koning: When you’d finished murdering people, Lieutenant Brenner also passed the cigarettes around. As a reward, wasn’t it? And you have believed to this day that there were no witnesses. You thought to this day, that you got everyone. […] Koning: That morning, it was freezing cold outside. It was my birthday. I was six. There weren’t any presents. But my grandma had … had a cake in the oven … and you could smell it right through the house. It smelt lovely. And I was upstairs taking a warm bath. Upstairs on the first floor. Because my mother said that today, for once, I should be properly washed. And then suddenly there was that noise. That shouting: ‘Out! Out! Out! Everybody outside!’ Why are you looking at me like that? I know what you’re thinking – I was a coward. Yes, I was a coward. I secretly got out of the bath and crept upstairs to the attic. And from up there I saw everything. And I wanted to help. But I was rooted to the spot. I left them all in the lurch. I was just a pathetic coward. I let them all die. I was a miserable, detestable coward. It is striking is that Koning is portrayed as traumatized and plagued by guilt complexes, whilst Uncle Richard seems not to be troubled by any feelings of guilt. He merely tries to justify his actions, first by claiming to have been under pressure to follow orders, and then, when Koning is able to refute his version of events, by using the shooting of his fellow soldier to explain why they ‘had to do something’.

9.4 Neo-Nazism The Nazi period is not the only topic to be broached in connection with the Wehrmacht exhibition. Another is the issue of neo-Nazi activity. This activity

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is represented in the film by just one character, Robert Hattey, who sends threatening letters and carries out attacks on the exhibition, including the attempted murder of the exhibition curator. In a search of Hattey’s home, documents are found which indicate that he is not acting alone, but is linked to a global network of neo-Nazis. After a chase, Robert Hattey is arrested and brought to the police station for questioning. Here we see that the detectives are patently no match for the neo-Nazi and are (verbally) powerless to break him down. Eventually, there is a violent police assault on Hattey. Hattey: I’m not going to be stitched up by her. The Wehrmacht fought a war so that we wouldn’t all have to speak Russian today. They were heroes, don’t you understand? And she is dragging everything through the dirt. She’s even worse than those dammed Jewish pigs who betrayed all Germany. Ballauf leaves the room Schenk: You smartarse. You should be starting to get nervous. Because we’ll make sure you spend the next few years looking over your shoulder when you bend down to pick up your soap. Hattey remains unmoved and speaks calmly: Hattey: You know what? I’m not on my own. I’m not on my own in Europe, I’m not on my own in Germany, and I’m certainly not on my own in prison. But you are on your own, and right near the top of our hit-list. […] Robert Hattey grins menacingly at Schenk. Ballauf is watching from outside as Schenk sets about Hattey and starts to beat him up. As in the dialogue between Koning and Pollert mentioned earlier, in the dialogue at the police station, it is the right-wing extremist who is allowed to lead the argument – even though it is an anti-Semitic and revisionist one. The police do not know how to counter the claims and threats of Hattey other than by verbal, and ultimately physical, abuse. The film thus conveys the impression that is not possible or advisable to argue against right-wing extremist ideas and neo-Nazism.

9.5 Family histories The Tatort episode interweaves a total of four family stories, each of which illustrates different facets and nuances of the generational conflict over the Nazi period and its consequences. First, there are the family stories of the Wehrmacht soldiers who were photographed whilst committing at least one war crime, then researched by the historian, Koning. Also featured is the

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story of the victims, the Koning family, who were murdered by the soldiers in a Belgian village. The son, who had to watch his parents being murdered, and spends his life feeling guilty because he didn’t help them, avenges their death. In so doing, the victim of the Nazis becomes a perpetrator. The three Wehrmacht soldiers who shot the family also seek to justify their action, quite explicitly, as an act of revenge for the shooting of a ‘comrade’. Both the topoi of ‘guilt’ and ‘revenge’ and the victim–victimizer reversal pervade the entire film. In addition, the families are portrayed with very different degrees of emotional intensity. They come from different social milieux and deal with the aftermath and long-term consequences of the war in contrasting ways. One is rich and healthy, another poor and sick. What they have in common is that they maintain a wall of silence in relation to the past. The families of the perpetrators know nothing about the events of the war and the murders that took place. All the former Wehrmacht soldiers (Schenk, Waldmann and Brenner) have begun ‘new’ lives and taken part in the reconstruction effort. The silence is broken by the impact of the exhibition: suddenly the past resurfaces and forces those involved to confront it. Even now, the three former soldiers behave in a similar fashion: they say nothing to their families, and allow themselves to be blackmailed (not that Koning is interested in money). The wall of silence remains. Even the historian lives behind a wall of silence. As the academic director of the exhibition, he appears analytical and rational. Only at the end, when telling his story (see above), do his emotions surface. He himself puts the detectives on his trail, when he advises them to investigate a particular unit on the Western Front and to look for a village in Belgium with a similar church to the one in the photograph. Did he therefore want to be discovered? In many ways, the ending of the story is left open. Will the avenger be convicted – perhaps acquitted? Will nephew and uncle (Schenk) be reconciled? Will the past now be discussed or locked away once more? Will the exhibition continue? Who should the television audience identify with? Who, ultimately, are the victims and who the perpetrators? Who is acting humanely and who inhumanely? Who is ‘normal’ and who is not? Is the exhibition ‘to blame’ for bringing up the past, and for the criminal acts that have taken place? Moving ahead, in the final scene of the film, the exhibition curator is guiding a group of school students round the exhibition. One girl comments at the end of the tour that the point of the exhibition was to try to ensure that ‘this could never happen again’. The curator answers, ‘that is a good note to end on’. If this sentence remains in the viewer’s mind too, then the film has at least served to point out that one cannot forever remain untroubled by ‘skeletons in the closet’. 9.5.1 The Schenk family The generational conflict in the Schenk family is especially intertwined with the film’s plot. Its portrayal involves Inspector Schenk, his Uncle Richard

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and Schenk’s daughter. We also learn that the rest of the family is on holiday in Crete. The detective attends to his uncle in an affecting way, often looking in at his tobacconist’s shop and fretting about his uncle’s chain-smoking. Uncle Richard rarely talks about the war. He had been a cook, and – like many others – had seen and heard nothing. In the scene where Uncle Richard is introduced, there is a short discussion in the tobacconist’s shop, when an elderly regular customer becomes agitated by a press report about the Wehrmacht exhibition and says it is time finally to let go of the past. This also establishes an experiential frame and a particular perspective for Uncle Richard. As the plot progresses, attention centres on the search for the ‘third man’, that is to say, for a third Wehrmacht soldier who could be on the revenge killer’s list. Courtesy of Waldmann’s widow, Schenk acquires a photograph, and with the help of computerized enhancement and enlargement, soon comes to recognize the outline of his uncle’s face. However, instead of telling Ballauf about it, he sets about trying to find his uncle, barely able to believe what he has discovered. But the doubts increase, and mistrust grows. What, or whom, should he believe – the photographs or his uncle? Via this conflict, a topos is addressed which is fundamental to the entire debate about the past – the tension between family loyalty and the truth: Schenk sits down next to Uncle Richard and opens the exhibition catalogue at picture no. 73. He points to Waldmann and Brenner. Schenk: These two men have been shot dead. Both these men received the same letter as you. Uncle Richard: It’s got nothing to do with me. He draws on his cigarette, his hand is shaking. Uncle Richard: It’s got nothing to do with me! Schenk: Come with me. Uncle Richard: I’m staying put. Schenk: You are in grave danger, Richard. Two people have already died. Do you understand what I’m saying? The family conflict comes to a head. Uncle Richard, who is now living with the Schenks, faces hostility from Schenk’s daughter whose schoolmates have suddenly started calling her a ‘Nazi pig’. The insult has been daubed on her rucksack. She wants her uncle to disappear. For Schenk himself it is an enormous effort to keep his head. The topos of collective guilt is being addressed here: for how does Schenk’s daughter come to feel responsible for the deeds of her great uncle? Schenk’s conflict of loyalty towards his uncle deepens: Ballauf, Schenk and Uncle Richard are in the office. Uncle Richard is sitting in front of a computer screen, looking at Picture no. 73. Schenk paces up and down while Ballauf talks to the uncle: Ballauf: Don’t you think there is a certain resemblance?

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Schenk looks at Ballauf earnestly. Uncle Richard: No I do not. How many times do I have to tell you? I was a cook. I’ve never been to Belgium in my life. I … I don’t know these people. I was with a field kitchen in Russia and didn’t head West until the end of the war. But I’ve never been to Belgium in my life. Ballauf: Then why do you think you got the letter? Uncle Richard: Because he is confusing me with someone else – just like you are. You think it’s me, too. (To Schenk:) Why don’t you believe me then? You know me. Schenk: I believe you. Schenk considers removing himself from the case. Ballauf, however, will not accept this. A trap is set up: Uncle Richard is sent into the exhibition in order to lure the killer. The plan fails, however, and Uncle Richard is driven back to Schenk’s house, where, out of desperation or fear, he tries to commit suicide. The suicide attempt and the confrontation with the suffering uncle engender feelings of sympathy on the part of Schenk and his daughter, and no doubt the TV audience. Schenk’s daughter apologizes to her uncle when she visits him in hospital. The family is united again for the time being, and it would now be possible to ‘get back to normal’ and resume ‘the silence’ – had Ballauf not discovered approximately where the fateful photograph might have

Plate 9.4 Detective Schenk and Uncle Richard

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been taken. Schenk and Ballauf fly to Belgium, where they locate the place where the three Wehrmacht soldiers, Uncle Richard included, had murdered an entire family. Their gravestone bears the family name ‘Koning’. The circle is complete: the historian and academic director of the exhibition must be the child of the murdered family. Schenk now has to confront the evident guilt of his uncle – silence is no longer an option. Yet the film ends on an ambivalent note – there is no indication as to whether, or how, things will change in the Schenk family following the exposure of Uncle Richard’s participation in war crimes. This portrayal of three generations within a family demonstrates the difficulties which arise when individual pasts are not dealt with. It is almost impossible to cope with the shock when one’s past catches up with one. This is precisely the problem that Schenk is alluding to at the beginning of the film, when he is unable to believe that the murderers were ‘normal people’. The whole family structure becomes unstable because the ‘normal’ uncle is revealed to be a murderer. The family histories of the two murdered Wehrmacht veterans Brenner and Waldmann are dealt with much more briefly. 9.5.2 The Brenner family The Brenner family is portrayed as disagreeable and cold: an affluent, statusoriented family, where feelings of affection between the marriage partners had apparently ceased to exist. Only the young grandson, Konstantin, is portrayed as friendly and as having emotions. He had loved his grandfather, and it is he who brings up the subject of revenge – his desire for vengeance is portrayed in the film as a ‘natural’ reaction to the crime perpetrated on somebody close to him: Konstantin: What are you doing here? Schenk: I’m looking for the person who killed your grandfather. Konstantin: Will you kill him too if you find him? Schenk: No, you can’t kill people just like that. Konstantin: But he killed my grandfather just like that. Frau Brenner is purely interested in salvaging the family’s reputation. To this end, she even attempts to bribe Schenk. In this family, silence and denial were the order of the day. The confrontation with the past leads ultimately only to a stiffening of attitudes, not to a rethink. Schenk visits the Brenner family home for a second time: Schenk: Why did you lie yesterday? Widow Brenner: A few years ago, my husband was caught up in a bribery scandal. Our name was dragged through the mud. I hated him for that. I didn’t want any more scandal.

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Schenk: If you had informed us [about the blackmail letter], he might still be alive. Widow Brenner: Spare me your accusations – I am well aware of that. But even now I will continue to do anything necessary to keep my family’s name out of the affair. I would like the press to hear nothing of this. You are handling the case. You can organize that. Would ten thousand be sufficient? Schenk: I’d say that would be a bad investment, dear lady. There has been another death in the meantime, and not even you will find a carpet big enough to sweep this story under. 9.5.3 The Waldmann family The third story – that of the Waldmann family – is portrayed quite differently. The couple had been married for 40 years. At first, Frau Waldman does not understand what the two detectives are trying to tell her when they inform her of her husband’s murder. She knew nothing at all – here, too, silence had prevailed. When she later discovers pictures from her husband’s Wehrmacht days, she brings them to the police station. Her entire life, and her belief in her husband, are shattered: Frau Waldmann: I found this in the attic. Ballauf removes a shoe box from the bag and opens it. In it, there are photographs from the war and a diary. Schenk also looks into the box. […] Frau Waldmann sees the display board and picture no. 73 and moves towards it. She stands in front of the picture. Ballauf is standing next to her. She looks at him. Frau Waldmann: Is that the photo? Ballauf: Yes. She examines her husband’s face closely. Her facial expression betrays nothing. Frau Waldmann: We were married for 40 years – excuse me. Without waiting for a reply, she leaves the room slowly and makes her way along the passage beyond the glass screen to the exit.

9.5.4 The Koning family The family of the scientist Koning no longer exists. Only at the end of the film do we learn from the Belgian priest, and from Koning himself, what happened: Ballauf and Schenk follow the vicar from the side exit of the church to the adjacent village graveyard. We hear the sound of gravel underfoot.

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Vicar: My predecessor told me about it. It was the family of the local schoolteacher. A tragic story. Schenk: What do you mean, tragic? Vicar: I think it was just before the end of the war. A few retreating German soldiers came through the village. They were ambushed and one of them got shot. The soldiers didn’t even try to find out where the shot came from. They just rounded up the first family they came across in front of their house and shot them all. They probably wanted to make an example of them. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. (Pointing to the grave stone.) Here we are. Ballauf and Schenk read the name on the gravestone, ‘The Koning Family’. Underneath there are seven names, each accompanied by the date of birth. Four men and three women. The youngest victim is just four years old. Under these stand the words, ‘We will never forget’. When Koning encounters Uncle Richard at the hospital, Koning, the rational scientist, becomes emotional. Through the previously mentioned dialogue scene between Koning and Uncle Richard, which is practically a monologue by Koning, it becomes evident that he is suffering from a massive guilt

Plate 9.5 Detectives Ballauf and Schenk looking for the scene of the Koning family tragedy

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complex. But the question of whether revenge could be a remedy remains unanswered.

9.6 Conclusions The Wehrmacht exhibition does not function merely as a highly topical and glamorous backdrop. It is in fact at the heart of both the criminal storyline and the societal dimension of this episode of the crime series Tatort. The exhibition, ‘Scorched Earth – The Crimes of the Wehrmacht and their Consequences’ is portrayed in various ways as the cause of social unrest. First, there is the criminal activity linked to the exhibition – that is to say, the neo-Nazi attacks on the exhibition and the murders of the former Wehrmacht soldiers – and the effects of these on the families. Then there are the public demonstrations and debates, which are portrayed as a consequence of the exhibition. As a result, the exhibition’s function as a ‘socio-political intervention’ is strongly underlined. The film thus casts research and scholarship in a diversity of roles: as a means of enlightenment, as a tool for socio-political intervention and as a ‘revenge motive’. The principal identification figures are without doubt the two detectives: the ‘smooth’ Ballauf, who makes very clear anti-fascist pronouncements, falls in love with the curator of the exhibition and gives her support, and Schenk, a somewhat more abrasive character, who is distinguished above all else by his loyalty to his family. Schenk is drawn even closer to viewers because he symbolizes the main conflict in the film: he is forced to confront the past of his beloved uncle. The unease experienced by the detective is most certainly felt by the television audience. Only the scientist remains a very controversial figure. Koning is portrayed as a person who is outwardly cold, yet tormented on the inside by a guilt complex. One possible interpretation of this, namely the practising of science as a route to revenge, is left open, and not developed, analysed or even commented on. We never find out what happens to Koning following his arrest, or what part, if any, his family history and trauma will play in subsequent events. The question of why someone chooses to be professionally involved with the past is given one possible answer to the effect that personal loss and a guilt complex are involved, and that therefore we can take for granted an intention to take revenge on the former perpetrators. From a scholarship point of view, this would be a dangerous imputation – for it would confirm many existing prejudices, to which scholars researching recent history already feel exposed. In this film, the former perpetrators, without exception, make themselves out to be ‘normal people like you or I’. They are portrayed very differently, some likeable, some not, but all of them as people liable to keep silent and tell lies. Uncle Richard, the only one whom the viewers really get to know, is likeable, weak and ultimately full of self-pity. Whether the self-pity is tinged

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with self-awareness is not made clear. Here, too, we do not know how life will continue. The message of the film is that neighbours or other normal people can become ‘monsters’. You cannot tell by looking at them, and they do not seem unusual (cf. Rosenstrauch, 1988). The topos of revenge is central. Exemplified by the grandson Konstantin, the academic Koning, and the murder of Koning’s family in revenge for the death of a fellow soldier, the revenge motive crops up everywhere, designed to make the various deeds understandable, at least. What is not provided is an explicit evaluation of the crimes. All the acts are thus treated as equivalent. The fact that it is a child who demands revenge for his grandfather’s murder perfectly complements the act of vengeance on the part of Koning, who as a child, had to watch his family being murdered. The film clearly depicts a victim–victimizer reversal: the act of revenge by the victim of a Wehrmacht crime turns the offenders into victims and the victim – many years later – to a (cold-blooded) perpetrator. Whilst the former victim is plagued by feelings of guilt regarding his abandonment of his family, the Wehrmacht criminal Schenk is not plagued by any apparent feelings of guilt whatsoever. He simply wants to hear nothing more about the incident, and has sorted out the crime in his own mind as a justified act, in revenge for a murdered comrade, just part of a ‘normal war’. Even the conclusion does nothing to counteract the reversal. The actual ending to the film is politically correct. A schoolgirl rationalizes her visit to the exhibition by saying it has made her aware that such a thing must never happen again. This establishes the primary function of the exhibition, and also provides a certain degree of justification for the ‘unease’ which it effectively causes. What we are left with is the combination of the aim of the exhibition with the latent fear amongst the German and Austrian wartime generations (and also certain sections of the post-war population) that the victims might one day seek retribution for the crimes committed. Thus the victim of a Wehrmacht crime remains a remote, aloof character in the story, whereas one of the Wehrmacht criminals, ‘Uncle Richard’, benefits – not least through his kinship to Inspector Schenk – from an empathy-laden portrayal. It would appear that, in the context of German and Austrian entertainment culture, the engendering of identification with a victim of the Nazis, even 50 years after the end of the war, remains problematic.

10 The Head of Medusa: The Controversy Surrounding the Exhibition ‘War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941 to 1944’ Hannes Heer

10.1 The history of the Wehrmacht Exhibition The Wehrmacht Exhibition was restricted to the period 1941 to 1944 and to events that took place in just a few sectors of the front line. Its arguments were constructed on the basis of three case studies: ●

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It showed how, during 1941, the first year of the war in the Southeast and the East, all male Jews in the Serbian zone of military administration, under the guise of defence against Partisans, were detained as ‘hostages’, and then progressively murdered. It testified to the way in which the Sixth Army, whilst passing through the Ukraine during the summer and autumn of 1941, provided active assistance to the SS Einsatzgruppen responsible for murdering Jews. It revealed how, from day one of its three-year occupation of Belorussia, the Wehrmacht waged a remorseless ‘racial war’ against Jews and ‘Slavic sub-humans’; how it was responsible for the massive, planned, death toll of hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war; how it colluded in the ‘Final Solution’ by registering, marking with the Yellow Star, ghettoizing and murdering Jews in the villages; how it murdered, in collaboration with other occupation forces, hundreds of thousands of civilians under the pretext of the Partisan war – or transported them into forced labour in Germany.

The exhibition, devised by Bernd Boll, Hannes Heer, Walter Manoschek and Hans Safrian, and produced by Christian Reuther, opened in Hamburg on 227

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5 March 1995 (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, 1996; Heer and Naumann, 1995) and was subsequently shown in 33 German and Austrian towns and cities: Berlin, Potsdam, Stuttgart, Vienna, Innsbruck, Freiburg, Mönchengladbach, Essen, Erfurt, Regensburg, Klagenfurt, Nuremberg, Linz, Karlsruhe, Munich, Frankfurt am Main, Bremen, Marburg, Konstanz, Graz, Dresden, Salzburg, Aachen, Kassel, Koblenz, Münster, Bonn, Hanover, Kiel, Saarbrücken, Cologne, again in Hamburg and finally in Osnabrück. Approximately 900,000 visitors attended the exhibition over a period of four years. Further dates were planned for the exhibition at home and abroad up to the year 2005.1 During its initial phase, the exhibition met with widespread media approval in the Federal Republic of Germany. It was acknowledged by the major German daily and weekly newspapers to be a noteworthy contribution to the Year of Commemoration, 1995. A typical reaction was that of Die Zeit: ‘The most important historical exhibition in a long time.’2 The mood of the coverage can be further gauged from the near-identical headlines: ‘The destruction of a myth’, ‘Living a lie’, ‘The myth is reduced to a lie’, ‘The respectable Wehrmacht lie’, ‘The myth of the untainted Wehrmacht’, ‘The sobering end of a legend’, ‘An exhibition destroys the historic lie of the untainted soldier’.3 It was with palpable relief that journalists recorded this state of affairs – as though the way had now been cleared to set the record straight in the public domain, and examine one’s conscience in private. Instead of the myth, wrote Die Zeit,4 ‘we can now hear the terrible truth … which could never previously penetrate the German public’s protective wall of silence.’5 Naturally, there were other voices, too. From the beginning, the Wehrmacht veterans’ associations put up a united front against the exhibition and accused it of ‘combining fabricated source material with sweeping defamation’.6 But these voices only began to gain any weight when, at the start of 1996, the more serious-minded newspapers paid critical attention to the exhibition, thereby initiating a second phase – of increasingly antagonistic and animated public debate.7 It began with an article by Günther Gillessen in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, protesting against what he called the one-sided and indiscriminate laying of blame on the Wehrmacht. The SS had been responsible for the crimes, he claimed, and excesses on the part of the Wehrmacht – as in the Partisan war, for example – were merely a reaction to Stalin’s brutal conduct of the war behind German lines. The exhibition was not a piece of scholarly work, but a ‘campaign tract’, arising out of a ‘need to feel concerned’, as well as ‘guilt feelings’ in desperate search of an outlet.8 At the same time, the well-known former television journalist, Rüdiger Proske, published a scathing polemic, in which he called the authors and initiators of the exhibition ‘former communists and late-68ers’ and ‘revealed’ their alleged objective – the defamation of the Bundeswehr9 (Proske, 1996). Both publications created turbulence on the political stage in Bonn: the federal minister for defence banned the various branches of the Bundeswehr from any official contact with those responsible for the exhibition

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and prohibited any public comment in relation to it; CSU10 mayors refused, for the first time, to attend the opening of the exhibition in their cities; in Bremen, the conservative CDU placed its social-democratic coalition partner, the SPD, under such pressure over the exhibition that the coalition came close to the point of collapse. The culmination of these events came when the Bavarian CSU made a statement on the matter in February 1997. Their Munich chairman, Peter Gauweiler, insulted Jan Philipp Reemtsma, the promoter and financial backer of the exhibition, who had used part of his inheritance from Germany’s largest tobacco company to found a private research institute, by challenging him to use his millions for the good of the victims of tobacco consumption rather than for the commemoration of murdered Jews, Red Amy captives and lynched civilians.11 With a wreath-laying by the Munich CSU at the tomb of the ‘unknown soldier’, a recommendation by the Bavarian culture minister that schools not visit the exhibition, and a large demonstration of 5000 neo-Nazis (if not actually supported by conservatives, then certainly tolerated by them), the campaign reached its miserable climax, whilst at the same time marking a clear defeat for its supporters: for with 90,000 visitors – including 20,000 school students – the exhibition had finally become an event of national importance. The events in Munich led to the isolation of the exhibition’s right-wing conservative opponents. A clear expression of this was the memorable debate in the Bundestag12 on 13 March 1997 on the subject of the exhibition and the crimes documented in it. Speakers from all parties tried – in a very personal way, and sometimes in tears – to come to terms with this (never previously officially acknowledged) aspect of German wartime responsibility (Dubiel, 1999). Soon afterwards, the exhibition was shown in the very place where, following the revolution of 1848, the first German parliament had assembled, and which can thus be considered the birthplace of German democracy – St Paul’s Church in Frankfurt am Main. From this point on, it appeared, the exhibition had finally become accepted – and so the third phase began. In place of the predominantly private promoters previously involved, public institutions started queuing up to host the exhibition, including the parliaments of the federal states (Länder), museums and archives, and universities and adult education centres. The opening addresses were now being given by ambassadors, first ministers, exministers and even ex-federal chancellors. The exhibition venues were transformed, during the staging of the exhibition, into dedicated public discussion forums. Contemporary witnesses would have their say, and local newspapers could barely keep pace with events. The first books and academic papers about the exhibition appeared. Again, it was the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung who accurately summarized the turn in fortunes: The war made the Holocaust possible, and because the events of the war were essentially dominated by the Wehrmacht, questions arose about the conduct of the Wehrmacht in relation to the Laws of War […]. Whether

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or not it was merely a question of breaking ‘the last taboo’ in German history, the controversy unleashed by the Reemtsma Institute’s exhibition ‘War of Annihilation’, over the involvement of the Wehrmacht in the criminal policies of the regime, has brought about, during the 1990s, a change in our understanding of the Second World War. Despite the many imperfections of the ‘Wehrmacht Exhibition’ (which, of course, was never in a position to do justice to the entire Wehrmacht), having toured 32 cities and recorded entrance figures approaching one million, it has become the most successful political exhibition in the Federal Republic’s history. As such, it has altered our awareness of the facts.13 Yet the impression that a breakthrough had been made, and the debate resolved, was a deceptive one. Spurred on by the exhibition’s obvious success and its imminent opening in New York on 2 December 1999, the critics stepped up their opposition. This time, the key intervention came not from veterans, journalists or politicians, but, for the first time, from historians. It was directed not against the exhibition’s principal claim, but against its shocking and powerful medium: the images and the stories they told. What the magazine Focus had already sought to do with a campaign centred on a single photograph,14 was now attempted on a much wider scale and to greater effect. A historian originally from Poland, Bogdan Musial, claimed that ten photographs showed crimes committed not by the Wehrmacht, but by the Soviet NKVD. Moreover, ‘about half’ the photos contained scenes that had nothing to do with war crimes. Musial’s Hungarian colleague, Krisztián Ungváry, complained that one series of six photographs showed the execution of Serbian youths in a Yugoslav town occupied at the time by Hungary, and that the executions were carried out not by members of the Wehrmacht, but by soldiers of the Hungarian army. Ungváry claimed furthermore that 90 per cent of the photographs in the exhibition had nothing to do with Wehrmacht crimes. Finally, Dieter Schmidt-Neuhaus, an amateur historian, cast doubt on the captions of four photographs from the ‘Document Archive of the Austrian Resistance’ in Vienna, which showed victims of a massacre in Tarnopol (Musial, 1999; Schmidt-Neuhaus, 1999; Ungváry, 1999). This was a concerted offensive: the criticisms appeared simultaneously in two specialist history journals and the major newspapers were in possession of advance copies. The media ‘drumfire’ kicked in immediately: ‘Claims true – pictures false?’ – ‘The dubious power of pictures’ – ‘Sadistic voyeurism’ – ‘A false picture of the War’ – ‘The tip of the iceberg’.15 Amidst the maelstrom of protest and public declarations, two voices stood out in particular, having been amongst the most vehement and critical from the start.16 First, Rolf-Dieter Müller, a distinguished scholar at the Military History Research Institute (MGFA) in Potsdam, accused the exhibition of having caused ‘damage almost beyond measure’: ‘Hundreds of thousands of visitors will today be asking why they have actually paid the admission

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charge: what is actually true and what is false?’17 Müller, who had himself published important works on the ‘War of Annihilation’ in the East, had since distanced himself from the concept and had subsequently been criticized for making questionable claims in relation to the massacre of Jews at Babi Yar and the Wehrmacht’s attitude to National Socialism (Müller, 1999, pp. 21ff.; criticized by Herbert, 1999, and Boll, 2001). Second, the director of the renowned Institute of Contemporary History (IfZ) in Munich, Horst Möller (who would himself soon become the focus of public attention as a consequence of his laudatory address at an award ceremony for Ernst Nolte),18 was beside himself with anger over the exhibition’s supposed ‘agitation’: ‘This is the “hammering it home” technique … which Hitler himself would refer to: keep repeating the same thing and eventually it will sink in – in this case, that the Wehrmacht was sufficiently involved in the crimes for it to be considered overall as an agent of the crimes.’19 The clamour of media and expert criticism, whose intensity was also explained in part by the sometimes insensitive attitude on the part of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research towards critics of the exhibition,20 was too much for the Institute director Jan Philipp Reemtsma to withstand: having already forbidden the authors from making public statements,21 he withdrew the exhibition and turned it over to an independent commission of historians for scrutiny. The commission’s report, presented on 15 November 2000, after an enquiry lasting one year, came to a remarkable conclusion: errors were confirmed in relation to the captions of some photographs – the authors had simply adopted the captions contained in the archives, both in the East and in the West. Consequently, ‘in two of the ten photographs criticized’, victims of the NKVD had been falsely referred to as victims of the Wehrmacht. The consequence of this careless handling of the photographic sources, the commission concluded, was that ‘out of the 1433 photographs in the exhibition, fewer than 20 have no place in an exhibition about the Wehrmacht’. This demonstrated not only the excessive nature of the criticism, but also the fact that these few errors had been merely a convenient excuse and not the true reason for the closure of the exhibition. The commission had unambiguously affirmed that ‘the fundamental claims of the exhibition in relation to the Wehrmacht and the war of annihilation waged in “the East” are consistent with the facts.’ It also endorsed ‘the intensity and the seriousness of the research into sources undertaken by the exhibition’s authors’, and set the record straight, in view of the public campaign on this question, that the exhibition contained ‘no falsifications’. Admittedly, the report did draw the critical conclusion that ‘the shortcomings of the exhibition [were due to] the remarkably casual use of photographic sources, as is unfortunately very common with both serious historiographic and popular publications.’ The criticism was offset, however, by the concluding statement that, first, ‘no historical exhibition involving photographs has ever been so thoroughly researched’ and, second, that the

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exhibition’s methods for dealing with ‘historical photographs [are] so widespread that it seems likely that, at present, few exhibitions and publications of historical photographs would meet the strict criteria on which we base our evaluation’ (Bartov et al., 2000, pp. 25, 29, 79, 85). These conclusions, which clearly pointed towards a reprieve for the exhibition and its authors, could have served as a useful aid to the rapid elimination of the shortcomings identified. But the director of the Hamburg Institute had long since come to a different decision: without waiting for the findings of the commission of historians, and without involving the former authors, he conceived a completely new exhibition.22 It opened in Berlin on 27 November 2001, and made do without any of the visual elements and content to which the old exhibition owed both the public outrage and the purifying catharsis which it provoked.

10.2 A brief look at German collective memory In order to understand both the success and the failure of the exhibition, it is useful to recapitulate the manner in which large swathes of society in the German Federal Republic have approached the National Socialist period and the significance they have attached to the Wehrmacht. In 1945, six leading military figures had already drafted a memorandum for the Nuremberg trials, which contained the outline of an image that was to reside in public consciousness for 50 years. They had claimed that the Wehrmacht had always kept its distance from Hitler and his party, had refused to take part in the persecution of Jews before the war, and had exerted no influence during the war over the SS, which was actually responsible for the persecution. They claimed that the military had rejected Hitler’s notion of a racial war of annihilation in the Soviet Union, and had conducted the campaign nobly and in the spirit of international law (Messerschmidt, 1995). Telford Taylor, one of the American prosecutors in the first Nuremberg trial, and chief prosecutor in the subsequent trials, recognized even in those days that these statements ‘in embryo, are the myths and legends’ with which the defeated generals sought to cover their tracks (Taylor, 1992, p. 531). An early attempt to destroy this edifice of ‘myths and legends’, and to replace it with a true picture of the war, came unstuck in 1954. In his novel ‘A Time to Love and a Time to Die’,23 Erich Maria Remarque depicted the way in which the Wehrmacht had treated Jews and supposed Partisans in the occupied Soviet Union, how its soldiers had spared neither children nor old people and how they had raped women before executing them. The hero of his novel, an ordinary Landser, maintained that the soldiers were all murderers, and that none of them could simply hide behind some order or other. The publisher Kiepenheuer intervened to force major changes (Remarque, 1954, and 1998). Remarque recognized that the changes required were symptomatic of a fundamental conflict, as shown by his diary entry for

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27 March 1954: ‘[They] want to put the Wehrmacht on a pedestal.’ The emigrant adds bitterly, ‘The headmasterly tone […]: you were not there. It was different (and not quite that bad)’ (Remarque, 1998, p. 495). Rather than Remarque, it was a former senior Wehrmacht medical officer, Peter Bamm, who triumphed. His novel ‘The Invisible Flag: A Report’ portrayed upstanding soldiers who, having been forced into battle, fought in the name of humanity and distanced themselves from the barbarism of the Nazis (Bamm, 1952). His ‘report’ became a bestseller because the characterizations corresponded to the way that most Germans wanted to see themselves: that they – like the Wehrmacht – had remained upstanding, even in a state which was ruled by a gang of criminals, and that they themselves had become victims – victims of deception, terror and war (Heer, 2004, pp. 170–97). Maurice Halbwachs has shown that memory ‘is to a very large extent a reconstruction of the past with the help of images drawn from the present’, and that every individual recollection is influenced from the outset by a ‘collective memory’, which draws on common knowledge and experience and lends to groups a sense of identity (Halbwachs, 1967, pp. 55, 31; see also Heer and Wodak’s introduction to this volume). Only thus can we explain what happened in Germany after 1945. By keeping quiet about crimes that were common knowledge, and by reinterpreting her own history, Germany sought after 1945 to ensure continuity, whilst at the same time creating an identity which would correspond with present-day norms and guarantee a positive self-image. The process was reinforced by films, illustrated magazines, generals’ memoirs and books such as that by Peter Bamm. It was lent legitimacy by Adenauer’s policy for dealing with the past – his Vergangenheitspolitik – which in reality was nothing other than an amnesty leading to the rehabilitation of most of the functionaries of the Nazi regime (Frei, 1996). The Cold War and the state doctrine of anti-Communism constituted a further factor, which even helped to lend an air of retrospective legitimacy to the crimes committed by the Wehrmacht in Poland, the Soviet Union and the Balkans. Overall, the traces of the Nazi period and its crimes were so thoroughly erased that those involved were capable of giving the impression that there had never been any Nazis or National Socialism in Germany (Heer, 2005). This national historical narrative was vehemently questioned – and ultimately demolished – by the student movement of 1967–68, aided by the impact of the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann and the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt. If the fathers and mothers of rebellious students had acquired their post-war identity by erasing the Nazi period from memory, their sons and daughters forged a new identity by declaring the crimes of the Nazi regime to be the linchpin of German history, and by insisting that a critical appraisal of them was a prerequisite for the emergence of a democratic culture in Germany. When Willy Brandt fell to his knees before the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, he was poignantly confirming the new

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approach to dealing with the German past. With his new Ostpolitik, the self-image of the Germans, which had hitherto centred primarily on being victims of National Socialism, at least now incorporated the dimension of complicity. However, whilst the Holocaust at last found a place in German history, and the memory of it became a permanent feature of the educational curriculum, a theme in literature and the focus of an official culture of commemoration, the War of Annihilation remained taboo. It is true that since the late 1970s, much light has been shed on the crimes in a number of critical Wehrmacht studies – such as those by Christian Streit, Helmut Krausnick, Hans Heinrich Wilhelm and, above all, the history of the Second World War emerging under the direction of Manfred Messerschmidt – but these important contributions have not altered the dominant image of the ‘untainted Wehrmacht’. Only the exhibition of 1995 has, in Ute Frevert’s words, ‘[reshaped] the landscape of memories of the war from the ground up’ (Assmann and Frevert, 1999, p. 281). Not only did it confront with historical fact the official version of history (which had sought to identify in the actions of the Wehrmacht a vestige of reason and a reference point for tradition), the exhibition also called into question the individual recollections of former soldiers and the collective memory of the entire Nazi generation, and showed the latter’s discourse to be based on illusions aimed at promoting and preserving a positive sense of identity.

10.3 The disappearance of the perpetrators When the director of the Hamburg Institute presented the new exhibition in Berlin on 27 November 2001 under the slightly different name, ‘Crimes of the Wehrmacht: Dimensions of a War of Annihilation, 1941–1944’, he could draw satisfaction from the attendance of guests who had stayed away from the old one. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, known to be a strong opponent following a report in Le Monde,24 sent his culture minister, Julian NidaRümelin, to open the exhibition officially in the capital. Rudolf Scharping, the defence minister, who had previously banned soldiers from any official contact, now allowed the scientific director of the Military History Research Institute (MGFA) to give the main address, and even permitted generals in uniform to attend the event. If the guest list alone hinted at the semi-official character of the new initiative, the commentaries in the major newspapers confirmed that the time for scandal and heated public debate was now over. The headlines following the opening proclaimed: ‘Sophistication replaces provocation’ – ‘Strictly factual’ – ‘Less provocation – more objectivity!’ – ‘Scholarliness versus the politics of the past’ – ‘More context, less emotion’ – ‘More crimes, fewer polemics’ – ‘The return of the texts’.25 In the eyes of the media, the new exhibition distinguished itself from the old one principally by virtue of a different, more objective tone, the predominance of texts, the

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presentation of even more crimes and (by comparison with the Arte Povera style of the old exhibition) a pleasant, somewhat opulent aesthetic. Apart from that, however – on this, too, everyone was agreed – there were no concessions in the content, nor any watering down of the conclusions: ‘The claims remain’ – ‘Reemtsma reaffirms central claim’ – ‘Central message unchanged’.26 An initial inspection of the exhibition confirmed this view.27 With the exception of some massacres which took place in Greece, it was about the war waged by the German Reich against the Soviet Union. The war’s criminal character was comprehensively documented in relation to both its planning and its implementation. The perpetrator of the crimes featured was the Wehrmacht. The references to the standard of scholarship were also accurate: the exhibition was richly endowed with documents and organigrams, and items which were not mounted on the walls or laid out on table-tops could be found in drawers and folders, or called up on the computer screen. Important topics which had been missing from the old exhibition were dealt with this time round, for example, the status of international law at the time and the definition of a war crime, or the question of orders and obedience and the room for discretion that existed nonetheless. Other topics that the old exhibition had dealt with only cursorily (the treatment of captured Soviet soldiers, the policy of plundering and starving civilians, deportations into forced labour, reprisal and hostage shootings, and the post-war period in Germany) were covered much more fully in the new version. Lessons had also clearly been learned from the mistakes caused by the lack of rigour in dealing with the photographs, which had led to the withdrawal of the original exhibition: these were now accompanied by detailed information about their provenance and an example was presented in order to demonstrate the difficulties associated with photographs as a historical source. This selfreflective approach was also evident in the way the exhibition’s own history was dealt with: in one section an attempt was made to reconstruct an impression of the old exhibition and the debates that surrounded it. What is regrettable, however, is that the thematic deficiencies with which the old exhibition was repeatedly and justifiably reproached were not remedied in the new version. To this extent, we must acknowledge as justified the criticism that the new version of the exhibition constituted an ‘impressive’, yet at the same time, merely ‘quantitative upgrade to the exhibited material’ (Hesse, 2002, p. 596). This charge weighed all the more heavily because of the very topics in question – the role of the Wehrmacht in the Nazi system, the crimes committed during the Polish campaign, the genocide of Sinti and Roma people and the significance of collaboration – there were either standard works that had been available for a long time (Messerschmidt, 1969; Müller, 1969) or academic works that had appeared during the period since the original exhibition had first opened to the public.28 Ultimately there was a failure to address one question posed by visitors to the exhibition from the

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outset: how was it all possible? How could these crimes have occurred? The new exhibition consistently refused to engage with questions about the motives and mentalities of the perpetrators, as we shall see. How, therefore, should we assess the media’s unanimous proclamation that the second exhibition confirmed (or even strengthened) the ‘main thesis’ of the original version, namely that the war in the East had been a war of annihilation and that the Wehrmacht had been guilty of numerous crimes? In reality, this verdict represents a sloppy and potentially serious distortion of the facts. If the title ‘War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941 to 1944’ really had been the ‘main thesis’, there would not have been a four-year battle over the exhibition. Even the most conservative critics would have subscribed – with certain qualifications – to this general proposition.29 The protests and polemics came about only because of three specific claims which had been developed under this general heading, each of which represented a challenge to the hitherto received version of history: 1. that the Holocaust began in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, and that the Wehrmacht was involved on the basis of a planned and systematic division of labour; 2. that the crimes against Jews and other sections of the Soviet population were not simply the work of Hitler’s tame generals and a few fanatical Nazi officers, but were carried out and supported by the troops, without any noticeable resistance; 3. that a key factor in this was an anti-Semitic and anti-Slavic racism, which made it possible to legitimize as military objectives the genocide of Jews and the decimation of the Slavic population which the orders that were issued entailed. With this in mind, it is worth undertaking a second examination of the exhibition. This leads one to a conclusion very different from the impression given by the Hamburg Institute, and by the media, that the ‘central message’ of the old exhibition had remained intact: for none of the three ‘specific claims’ outlined above could still be found in the new exhibition. 10.3.1 The Holocaust In the first exhibition, the Holocaust was not merely one crime amongst several, but formed the common axis of the three main sections. It was the Wehrmacht who took on the responsibility for ‘preparing the ground’ – by means of the registering, marking, pillaging, consignment to forced labour and ghettoizing of the Jews.30 The characterization of the Jews as a nonbelligerent actor on the war stage was the first great provocation of the exhibition. It prompted hostile reactions in which, interestingly enough, no attempt was made to dispute the claim as a whole, but which sought to undermine its credibility by attacking individual photos and texts.31 Such

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reactions were all too easy to understand. Until now, the Holocaust had been regarded by the German public as having been carried out at extermination camps like Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibór. As most of these camps had been located beyond the borders of the Reich, and as few photos existed of the industrialized killing process, the Holocaust became the imageless act of faceless perpetrators. What occurred was a ‘derealization’ of the truth (Rupnow, 2002, p. 89), which lent itself perfectly to the assuagement of latent feelings of guilt. The fact that only some 60 per cent of the six million Jewish Holocaust victims lost their lives in extermination camps under ‘death factory’ conditions, whilst more than a third succumbed to ‘very traditional and well-nigh archaic forms’ of murder (Herbert, 1998a, p. 57), was not consistent with the popular image of the Holocaust. Jan Philipp Reemtsma has described this misuse of Auschwitz – to erase the memory of the Jews exterminated in the War of Annihilation – as a case of ‘rendering invisible by highlighting the extremes’ (Reemtsma, 2000, p. 276). German historical research has contributed little to the elimination of this blind-spot (Bartov, 1995a, 1995b; with more recent examples, Manoschek, 2002, p. 65). It was the Wehrmacht Exhibition of 1995 that managed, for the first time, to alter ‘conscious knowledge’.32 This was achieved by a number of means: (1) the exhibition documented the individual sites of the Holocaust in the occupied regions and the varying degrees of Wehrmacht involvement in the crimes; (2) it showed examples of different annihilation scenarios and the division of labour involved – for example, Wehrmacht cooperation with the Einsatzgruppen during the advance, and with the police battalions in the ‘Partisan war’; (3) it highlighted the creation of specific enemy stereotypes – the Jew as ‘commissar’, ‘sniper’, ‘plunderer’ and ‘Partisan’ – and the use of these stereotypes to legitimize the murder of Jews; and (4) it demonstrated how linguistic code words and bans on taking photographs were used by the Wehrmacht from the outset to hide any trace of its crimes. By these means it was possible to show that the murder of Jews was an everyday occurrence in the War of Annihilation and that the soldiers took part in it – whether as spectators and accessories after the fact, or as perpetrators and accomplices. In the new exhibition, this portrayal was substantially tempered. No longer was the Holocaust, as before, the common axis; it was now dealt with instead in one of the exhibition’s six sections. The programme of systematic annihilation of Jews in the occupied territories, particularly the Soviet Union, which the Wehrmacht had helped to carry out from 1941 to 1943, was reduced to a number of ‘anti-Jewish measures’ and 12 specific actions, none of which was documented beyond the year 1941. Moreover, both in the individual case studies33 and in its general account of the annihilation of Jews, the exhibition reverted to an obsolete state of knowledge: for example, the claim that the Wehrmacht had taken part in the persecution and murder of Soviet Jews ‘against previous agreements’ (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, 2002, pp. 10, 75) is disproved by the ‘Guidelines for the

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Conduct of Troops in Russia’ issued before the campaign, which ordered ‘ruthless and energetic measures against Bolshevik agitators, irregulars, saboteurs and Jews’. Other materials distributed to the troops beforehand – ‘ethnic maps’ with exact details of the Jewish population in every settlement, placards ordering the marking of Jews, the abolition of freedom of movement and the introduction of forced labour for Jews, not to mention flyers calling on the population to hand Jews over – show that the persecution of Jews was a premeditated and centrally instigated feature of the war, rather than something that was ordered only after the invasion.34 In the light of work undertaken by Raul Hilberg and, more recently, Christian Gerlach, the claim that the Wehrmacht had ‘repeatedly’ provided organizational, logistical and personnel support for the persecution and murder of Soviet Jews (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, 2002, pp. 10, 75) can only be described as euphemistic. It may be true, as its director has asserted time and again, that the new exhibition provided ‘much more evidence’ and ‘many more details’ of crimes,35 but it is certainly also the case that the price paid for this demonstration of the systematic mass murder of Jews was a very high one – for the crime itself had dissolved into the background. 10.3.2 The perpetrators As early as 1992, the Hamburg Institute had given notice that it was planning an exhibition about the Wehrmacht, and had justified its interest in the subject by stating that the Wehrmacht experience represented ‘the most salient and possibly the most significant point of contact between the German population and the entire range of Nazi crimes’ and that the Second World War had been ‘the setting for a society-wide barbarization process’ (Naumann, 1992, p. 132). The director of the Institute underlined this idea of the Wehrmacht as a window on the Volksgemeinschaft – and the interface between the general population and the crimes of the Nazis – when he stated, at the opening of the exhibition on 5 March 1995, that its explosive impact was precisely due to the fact that it did not set out to highlight, in the now customary manner, the criminal role of the elite under Nazism, but to shed light instead on the ‘potential crimes of “Everyman”, of anybody’s husband, father, brother, uncle or grandfather’. The exhibition was thus providing an answer to the question of ‘how “completely normal people” (usually, but not exclusively, men) could do “something like that”’ (Reemtsma, 1998, p. 9). This confronted the public with a second challenge to the received version of history. ‘The focus in historical research up to this point had rarely been on the perpetrators “on the ground”, whether generally, or specifically in relation to those in the Wehrmacht’, wrote Walter Manoschek in his description of the state of research prior to 1995 (Manoschek, 2002, p. 66). Thomas Kühne supplemented this summary with the observation that, even in critical military historiography, the focus had been fixed firmly on ‘Hitler, and only

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secondarily on the Wehrmacht leadership’ (Kühne, 2000, p. 184). By analogy with the ‘derealization of the actions’ of the Wehrmacht, one could also speak of a ‘depersonalization of the perpetrators’ (Rupnow, 2002, pp. 90f.), which rendered them unrecognizable. At first, blame for all the crimes was heaped on the Einsatzgruppen of the SS, then the focus shifted to a small number of senior military figures, far removed from the action on the ground. However, in relation to the latter, it was the direct and massive influence of Hitler that was deemed decisive, invoking an apologist ‘rhetoric of abuse of power …, seduction, coercion and tragedy’. This depersonalization was accompanied, as Kühne puts it, by the ‘casting [of the perpetrator] in the role of the victim’ (Kühne, 2000, pp. 184f., 189). The exhibition of 1995 broke with both practices. It did so by depicting not only the leading military personnel who issued the orders, but also the troops on the ground as they carried out the crimes they had been ordered to commit. In other words, it ‘documented, in an individualizing and graphic way, how “normal” soldiers, and not merely shadowy, pathological figures, by no means only suffered under the criminal conditions of the war, but actually also enjoyed it’ (Kühne, 2000, p. 189). The topic of one of the three sections of the first exhibition was the Sixth Army on the road to Stalingrad. Here, an attempt was made to end ‘the confinement to the topos of victimhood, which remains to this day a feature of discourses about Stalingrad, and is a longterm historical consequence of National Socialist mythologizing’ (Boll and Safrian, 1995, p. 260; see also the analysis of documentary films on Stalingrad in Chapter 8 by Alexander Pollak in this volume). The outcry over this twofold breaking of a taboo was enormous, and did not only emanate from the public at large. Serious scholars36 spoke out against so-called ‘sweeping judgements’ and demanded ‘historical justice’ for those involved at the time. Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, for example, maintained, ‘Most of the soldiers, steeped in the discipline of military obedience, bound to Hitler by oath and pushed to the limit psychologically and physically by an unrelenting battle from 1941 onwards, were indoctrinated, manipulated and tragically trapped.’37 Things were not, however, restricted to such generally couched polemics and pleas – individual critics produced figures in order to refute the exhibition’s supposedly wildly exaggerated claims. Ungváry, for example, claimed that only the Secret Military Police and the Field Gendarmerie, that is, less than one per cent of the Wehrmacht, had participated in executions, and, moreover, that this percentage had been recruited ‘from sections other than a normal combat division’ (Ungváry, 1999, p. 590). Möller, in his calculations, arrived at a figure of 10 per cent of the soldiers who had marched into the Soviet Union in 1941, that is, ‘400,000’ who ‘had carried out criminal orders’. Later he reduced this figure drastically to a sum of ‘possibly many tens of thousands’ of soldiers who had been involved in crimes, and he warned against ‘simply extrapolating’ the figure.38 Rolf-Dieter Müller proposed a figure of less than 5 per cent.39

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The new exhibition responded in its own way to this opposition, which had yet to subside when the old exhibition was halted. Instead of holding fast to the claim of responsibility on the part of both the military leadership and the troops for the genocidal crimes, it was now only the war planners of the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW) and the Army High Command (OKH) who stood in the spotlight. On the ground, it was the generals who were held responsible, a fact underlined by the inclusion of a corresponding portrait photograph alongside each featured crime. This time, as Der Spiegel wryly observed, it was ‘no longer the ordinary soldiers, but Hitler’s generals in the dock’.40 Asked about the number of Wehrmacht soldiers who took part in war crimes, the spokeswoman for the new exhibition, Ulrike Jureit, explained, ‘It is not possible to say anything about that. Any figure where that is concerned, apart from zero, would be entirely speculative.’41 Hans Mommsen, the chairman of the academic advisory committee, when asked about the number of perpetrators, added, ‘It is not about looking at individuals, but at the Wehrmacht as institution.’42 The ‘potential crimes of Everyman’, which the director of the Hamburg Institute had once so pointedly placed in the spotlight, no longer seemed to be of interest. However, if the actual perpetrators of the crimes on the ground – ‘anybody’s husband, father, brother, uncle or grandfather’ – are moved into the shade, the crimes themselves lose clarity and form. 10.3.3 Mentalities The challenge with which the organizers of the first exhibition were confronted most frequently and most vehemently was to explain how the crimes on display could have come about. This question was indeed not directly dealt with in the exhibition, the reason being that, at the time of its completion, only a single study existed on the mentality of soldiers in the Wehrmacht (Bartov, 1992). Drawing on its findings, as well as on their own research at the Federal Military Archive in Freiburg, together with studies of soldiers’ letters from the front and personal war memoirs, the creators of the exhibition came to the conclusion that there must obviously have been a high degree of consensus between the National Socialist leadership and the troops. These provisional results were published as discussion material (Heer, 1995c, Manoschek, 1997) and featured in the companion volume to the exhibition. Here, drawing on the behaviour of Wehrmacht soldiers in the Partisan war, three very different kinds of explanation were put forward by Mark Mazower, Michael Geyer and the present author for the destruction of moral standards and the potency of National Socialist racism (Geyer, 1995, p. 230; Heer, 1995b, pp. 115, 119ff.; Mazower, 1995, p. 182). There was no public acknowledgement of this wealth of explanatory approaches, nor of the insights gained into the interrelationship between pre-war ideological indoctrination and situational radicalization during the war. Instead, there was outrage over the conclusion concerning ‘independent

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genocidal motives and actions on the part of the military’ (Kühne, 2000, p. 184), and especially over claims of ‘enthusiasm for the war’. This provoked a great deal of bitter media polemic.43 Over the next few years, the available material on which to base an account of Wehrmacht mentalities became richer, thanks to studies of letters from the front (Humburg, 1998; Latzel, 1998), comradeship and desertion (Kühne, 1996; Ziemann, 1999), the process of breaching moral norms (Heer, 1996, 1997a, 1998a; Nedelmann, 1998; Gerhardt, 1998) and the subsequent reinterpretation of this process in memory (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, 1998b). Given this material, it would be possible today – by contrast with 1995 – to present a more detailed picture of how and why ‘normal’ men become perpetrators and accomplices (see the Chapter 9 by Pollak and Wodak in this volume).44 The new exhibition rejected this analytical advance, even though it would have been warranted both in the interests of scholarship and for the benefit of the visitors. By claiming to document ‘on the basis of international law and the laws of war applicable at the time, the participation of the Wehrmacht in crimes committed during the Second World War’, the exhibition cast just one important contextual aspect as the only reason for the crimes worth mentioning (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, 2002, p. 9). This, however, had certain consequences. To explain the Holocaust in the occupied regions simply on the basis of the ‘law-free zone’ created by ‘criminal orders’ contradicts all previous understanding of the issues. ‘Not all, but certainly a great many German soldiers’, as Wolfgang Wippermann attests, ‘murdered Jews and “Commissars”, not simply because they were ordered to, but because they hated Jews and “Jewish Bolsheviks”. The murderers knew what they were doing. They were, to quote Daniel Goldhagen, possessed by an “eliminationist anti-Semitism” and also, as we must certainly add, an eliminationist anti-Bolshevism.’45 Placing the laws of war, rather than the racist aims and objectives of the Nazis, at the core of the analysis leads to other perplexing questions. How, for example, should we explain the persecution and deportation of Jews by (as Ute Frevert reminds us) administrative offices and combat units of the Wehrmacht in parts of occupied Europe where – according to statements by the Hamburg Institute – the international laws of war were adhered to – in France, for example, or in the Netherlands, or Greece?46 The ‘legalistic’ perspective adopted by the new exhibition in relation to the crimes of the National Socialist war also had disturbing implications for the topic of the Partisan war. During the period from 1995 to 1999, this had been at the heart of criticisms emanating from the ranks of former soldiers. They claimed that their struggle had been a defensive measure, justified on military grounds and permitted under international law. The new exhibition supported this argument by claiming that reprisals against the civilian population – ‘in order to defend against attacks on the soldiers and

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secure the rule of occupation’ – were, according to the international laws of war at the time, no less ‘permissible’ than it was legal ‘under certain circumstances’ to string up Partisans.47 These formally correct statements distort the reality of the war, however, if it is not demonstrated at the same time, and in a systematic fashion,48 how the various commands issued, the propaganda and the actions of the Wehrmacht forged a situation in which neither the term ‘attack’ nor the word ‘Partisan’ had anything in common with concepts enshrined in international law, and actually reduced the latter ad absurdum on a daily basis. The consequence, as Werner Röhr complains, is that we find ‘the Wehrmacht’s basic approach towards the Partisans [portrayed] as legally within its rights and only the extent of the reprisals criticized for being contrary to international law’.49 The Spiegel, too, saw this as a ‘weakness’ of the exhibition, which was bound to attract criticism. It took the approach to its logical conclusion: ‘A certain amount of barbarity was legal in those days.’50 The director of the new exhibition had stated in an interview some time before the opening that he intended to be ‘somewhat cautious’ with statements about the mentality of the soldiers: ‘The old exhibition made too many claims about mentalities, and these were open to further exaggeration.’51 The information contained in the new exhibition is similarly reticent, failing to go beyond the statement ‘that many soldiers agreed to a large degree with National Socialist interpretation of reality’ (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, 2002, p. 629). Even more attention was paid to an installation which received, not undeservedly, the utmost praise from the media. This was a listening room, in which trial records and transcripts were used to document the decisions by a dozen soldiers as to whether or not to take part in the crimes. However, important as it was to expose the myths associated with ‘the pressure to obey orders’, and to point out the existence of ‘room for discretion’, and as moving as it was to be confronted – at least in one part of the exhibition – with the images and voices of ‘Everyman’, the good intentions completely missed their target. Quite apart from the absence of any reference to the fact that the stories featured could not claim to be representative, and that a number of the statements were unverifiable,52 the significance of the exhibit is questionable because the context in which mentalities developed was missing. ‘The individual decides how to behave in a given situation’, it was explained in the exhibition (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, 2002, p. 579). As a historiographic statement, this has limited value. It would carry more weight if one knew whether, and if so how, the individual in question had been indoctrinated into National Socialist ideology, and of any change or reinforcement that had resulted from the experience of war. It would help, too, if one were able to correlate these individual aspects with the behaviour and the attitudes of comrades, year of birth, and military rank. ‘The question as to why one person acted this way and others acted that way remains unanswered’, maintained one journalist after she visited the listening room.53

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The exhibition’s analytical conclusions hark back to a time before 1995. At that time, according to Thomas Kühne, military historiography favoured ‘a kind of division theory … according to [which] there were “good” and “bad” soldiers in the Wehrmacht, effectively independent from each other, who either stood side-by-side with one another or acted against one another’ (Kühne, 2000, p. 188). Horst Möller – in levelling criticism at the first exhibition – summarized this approach more succinctly: ‘there were those who took part – and those who did not’.54 10.3.4 The images The report by the commission set up to review the exhibition attributed the latter’s provocative impact above all to the ‘shock effect of its images’. For the majority of contemporary witnesses, their ‘interpretation of history had been massively undermined’, and the public imagination had experienced a ‘visualized expansion of the perpetrator group’. The popular image of the extermination of Jews, which had previously centred on Auschwitz and the SS, had undergone ‘image realignment’. ‘Things about which the public had previously possessed only rudimentary knowledge, in very abstract and general terms, were now vividly personalized thanks to the individualization and visual realization of deed and perpetrator afforded by the photographic image. They now also became the subject of public discussion. The photographs seemed to acquire a special authenticity by virtue of the fact that, to a large extent, they originated from nameless soldiers, effectively acting as unsuspecting witnesses.’55 Prior to this ‘image realignment’, however, for almost half a century a virtual ‘ban on images’ had prevailed (Rupnow, 2002, p. 89). Rupnow used this idea to demonstrate that the derealization and depersonalization of the Holocaust had not been an unconscious act, but a deliberate and exculpatory process. He pointed out that historians, by referring to the crimes as ‘unimaginable’ and ‘beyond the pale’, had ensured the perpetuation of this ‘image ban’. Whether this came about for reasons of protection or selfprotection, unintentionally or by design, ‘it has nonetheless always helped to obscure the crime and avoid any confrontation with the details’ (Rupnow, 2002, p. 90). Therefore, not only former soldiers, but also scholars, ensured by their actions that photographs depicting the murder of Jews ‘in the open country’, that is to say, the crimes that took place beyond the confines of the camps and the SS – in which ‘soldiers and civilians were routinely involved’ – did not come to the attention of the public (Knoch, 2001, p. 28). The exhibition, with its 1400 photographs, abruptly ended this practice in 1995. Helmut Lethen has pointed out that, initially, a collection of photographs ‘as a collection of black and white rectangles, is merely an “archive of dead images”’ which must be ‘animated … in order to make sense’. This animation is brought about through application, as a consequence of implied purpose, so that in this case, the photos served as ‘circumstantial evidence for a tribunal’

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(Lethen, 2002, pp. 77f.). The exhibition organizers had not intended to initiate a ‘tribunal’, but their exhibition was perceived as such by the public (see Chapter 11 in this volume by Heidemarie Uhl).56 As far as the creators of the exhibition were concerned, the photographs were utilized not as ‘circumstantial evidence’, but as supplementary source material.57 For visitors, however, especially for Wehrmacht veterans and their lawyers, the photos came to be seen as ‘evidence for the prosecution’. By this time, if not before, those responsible for the conference should have assessed all the photographs in terms of the criterion ‘admissibility as evidence’, that is to say: which photographs were evidence of a specific crime, and which merely demonstrated the habitual criminal behaviour towards Jews, prisoners and Partisans, or provided insight into the mentality of the actors? This assessment was left to opponents, however, with the wellknown outcome that some photographs did not pass the test – and with that, the original exhibition’s days were numbered. This had fateful ramifications for the new exhibition. First of all, the number of photographs was reduced by half, with a significant number not showing crimes, but depicting places, buildings and portraits of generals. The photographs were moved, moreover, to a different location (Bopp, 2002). In the first exhibition they were mounted on the upper part of the display boards. Although they were in a small format, as in a photo album, their placement made them visually striking, so that they caught the eye of the visitor.58 In the new exhibition, the photographs – mostly mounted on forwardprotruding table tops reserved for supplementary documentation – had ceded their previously dominant role to the texts. The latter now defined the appearance of the exhibition walls as ‘long screeds of text’. The pictures, as one perceptive commentator observed, ‘are now framed by a wealth of written and tonal documents’.59 To put it more dramatically, the photographs now merely served to ‘illustrate the texts’ (Hesse, 2002, p. 601). The result is ‘the perfectly documented and authenticated visual realization of an academic book’.60 These changes in design were not made out of consideration for the aesthetics, but rather on the basis of a radical reassessment of the value of photographs as source material. In order to appreciate this, it should be pointed out that the drastic reduction in the number of photographs in the new exhibition came at the expense of a quite specific genre of images: it was the private snapshots of the soldiers that had disappeared. The grinning faces captured in front of the frozen, dangling corpses, the pistols held at the back of the victims’ necks, the toecaps of soldiers’ boots at the edge of excavated pits filled with bodies: none of this counted any more as a meaningful source – supposedly because one could no longer determine who the photographer was, where and when the picture was taken, which studio developed it, who owned it, or how and when it found its way into the archive. Every one of the millions of German soldiers who had been in the East and

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snapped away with their cameras until they packed up, was now, all of a sudden, only a ‘questionable eyewitness’ – was how Die Zeit paraphrased statements by the spokesperson for the new exhibition.61 This seemed to confirm the suspicion, expressed earlier by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, that ‘those responsible for the reworking of the exhibition had almost completely lost confidence in pictures’.62 More likely, however, was a different motivation – one that surfaced time and time again, and which had evidently become the all-important factor in the new project. Klaus Theweleit had observed in relation to the first exhibition: Murder is not perceived as ‘murder’ – because it is sanctioned. It can go home in the form of a holiday snap or end up in a wallet next to the family photos, because it shows life under the free conditions of a criminal paradise purporting to be the liberation of the world from vermin. ‘Punishment?’ Not likely. We will have won. This certainty – this look – comes across all too clearly in the photographs of the camera-wielding soldiers in Russia, in Poland and in the Balkans: all too clearly and all too innocently. All the talk of the supposed innocence of the German soldier in the East, which came out in West German monologues delivered in defence of the Wehrmacht: it is all on display in these photographs. This is the reason why the photos unleashed such shock amongst the opponents of the Wehrmacht Exhibition.63 The families of the perpetrators experienced the same effect as they looked at the exhibition displays.64 However, even those who did not themselves have to fear encountering a familiar face found that it was not so much the painfully rigorous argumentation of the textual exhibits, as the horror of the photographs, that shook them out of their previous level of awareness, not to say complacency. Newspaper headlines testified to the degree to which people were shaken: ‘Pictures that you do not forget’ – ‘The photographs jump out at you’ – ‘The abominable truth of the images’ – ‘War photos tear open the scars of a generation’.65 It therefore comes as no surprise that criticism was levelled almost exclusively at this part – the photographic part – of the Wehrmacht Exhibition.66 And this was precisely the reason for the lack of importance attached to, and effective disappearance of, photographs in the new version – for to repeat the shock of the (now researched) soldiers’ photographs would have meant once again being the target of this criticism – both the heckling and the denigration – and that was to be avoided at all costs. The measure were said to be justified on scientific grounds: the photograph of a grinning soldier standing alongside hanging corpses would only be used, argued the director of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research responsible for the exhibition, ‘if it has a proper place in the exhibition’. Elsewhere he elaborated: ‘Photographs are presented in such a way that it is

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always clear what they are saying.’67 This would have been consistent with rendering the photograph admissible as ‘evidence’ in a trial called ‘Crimes of the Wehrmacht’. But if one was going to convey the idea that most of these photographs – whose message was not ‘clear’, but opaque and full of ambiguity – were tangential to the topic, or even damaging, then one needed to be aware of the consequences of such a decision, for it was nothing less than an attempt to proscribe an entire category of source material. This might result in such material being classified as ‘too dangerous’ in the context of future contemporary history projects, and lead to a situation where it finds little, if any, future application. Helmut Lethen has vividly pointed out the arbitrariness of such an outcome, characterizing it as usurpation by a dubious and non-representative concept of order: The greatest bone of contention in the old catalogue – the items found in briefcases in which the soldiers’ family photographs lay side by side with pictures of people who had been hanged and shot – has been removed from the new one. The presentation of this mixture had left the observer to reflect on how it was possible for the murders to become mixed up with the private affairs of the family. Was it necessary for the contents of briefcases to be unscrambled so that individual photographs could once again be accorded the status of historical source material? The briefcases now belong to the historical detritus which is refused entry into cultural memory. But the metaphor of ‘the detritus of history’, according to which those things that do not get archived simply disappear, suggests that these materials emanate from a place of disorder. In fact, however, they come from a different order – in the case of the knapsacks, uniform jackets and briefcases, from the order of the private collection of memories. The critical treatment of sources by the historian should seek to reconstruct the order from which the source material is derived. (Lethen, 2002, p. 84) Miriam Arani, to whom the Hamburg Institute confirmed that it had adopted only photos for which ‘no disputes or doubts had come to light concerning their provenance or content’, also criticized this approach: ‘What is strange about this is that an institute for social research does not critically analyse the social practices surrounding the use of the photographs’ (Arani, 2002, p. 114). Arani provides an example of how such a critique might look in a study of the photographs used in the new exhibition. She draws attention to the fact that half of the photographs were produced by propaganda companies, that is, by units whose role it was to deliver to the front lines and to the newspapers at home the image of a heroic and just war. This propagandistic brief, according to Arani, was not referred to in the new exhibition. The photographs were used ‘as though they were pictorial material reflecting a politically neutral social perspective’

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(Arani, 2002, p. 115). One effect of this was to perpetuate subtly, at the visual level, the myth of the ‘untainted Wehrmacht’, an effect amplified by the 70 photographs of generals linked to the various crimes featured in the exhibition. These ‘studio portraits’, rooted in a long tradition of European iconography, served a particular social function. Even when the depicted military men are named in the accompanying text as the perpetrators of crimes, what is more likely to linger in the mind is the visual image of the ‘idealized self-portrayal’ which this genre of picture typifies (Arani, 2002). Helmut Lethen supplemented this disturbing observation with another one, for when contemplating the exhibition, he was left with a ‘peculiar’ impression: ‘The perpetrators are absorbed by texts, while the presence of the victims stands out from the texts, because the photos that were taken of them have entered into our culture of recollection. This effect is probably intended’ (Lethen, 2002, p. 84).

10.4 Consensus history It seems unlikely that the marked changes of emphasis in the new exhibition went unnoticed by the columnists of the major newspapers, yet only a few – such as the historian Werner Röhr – had anything to say about it. ‘The power of the pictures. Enlarged and then moved back. Illuminated and yet obscured’ was the title of his commentary.68 And scarcely anybody pondered openly over what the reasons might have been. The Vienna journalist Christa Zöchling – confronted with the conspicuous absence of the private photographs and any other materials that might have offered an insight into the mentality of the soldiers – did form her own hypothesis, however: ‘Perhaps the new team, out of the honourable intent not to pillory the wartime generation, has disregarded one important dimension: an examination of how an entire institution like the Wehrmacht could function in such a way that genocide took place.’ Zöchling quotes the linguist, Ruth Wodak, who thought it would be ‘anachronistic … if researchers were to base decisions about what to investigate on the feelings of the war generation’.69 Michael Jeismann also suspected that such considerations were involved – not merely in relation to this one group, but across the board. In a piece which appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, he paid tribute to the new exhibition as ‘a good piece of consensus history’.70 The spokesperson for the new exhibition confirmed this. Confronted with the observation that the exhibition no longer provoked any polarization, her response was: ‘In the FAZ [Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung] the question was asked, is it history by consensus that is on display here? For the moment, that is a very apt way of putting it.’71 This statement can only be interpreted as an indication that the creators of the exhibition had succeeded in balancing very different interests, and that their production, in consequence, depicted the common denominator of socially dominant perspectives. Three such perspectives

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come to mind: 1. The first exhibition, with its claim that millions of soldiers knew about the crimes, and could even have been involved in them, caused shock amongst the majority of former soldiers, as well as amongst conservative politicians, academics and journalists. This led to a number of angry responses: the exhibition (it was said) overgeneralized, extrapolated unduly from the particular to the general, held millions of ordinary soldiers responsible for the mistakes and crimes of the military leadership, passed judgement on an entire generation, postulated a collective responsibility that surpassed even the Nuremberg trials, drove a wedge between the generations, damaged the standing of the German nation abroad, and so on. The director of the Institute of Contemporary History (IfZ), Horst Möller, for whom the first exhibition had simply resorted to Hitler’s ‘hammering home’ methods, affirmed that the new one ‘had taken the criticisms on board’ and was ‘academically serious’.72 RolfDieter Müller of the Military History Research Institute (MGFA), who wanted to see the old exhibition mothballed in the form of a museum magazine, now called on the Federal Government to adopt the new one as a permanent exhibition.73 The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung proclaimed triumphantly, before the exhibition had even opened, ‘The Wehrmacht was not a gang of murderers.’74 2. Within the ruling elites of politics and the media, a consensus had clearly emerged in favour of severing any connection with the generation of 1968, and with what might be considered its ethos and legacy. First in the line of fire was the ‘left-wing extremism’ of the so-called ‘generation of ‘68’, of which ‘Anti-fascism’ was considered to be the fossilized ideological core. This is a reference to a political orientation that some formerly left-wing authors regard as, at best, totalitarian and anti-democratic (Grunenberg, 1993), but which those on the right regard as nothing less than the continuation of the anti-German propaganda of the Second World War and of the re-education programme instigated by the victorious powers (Kittel, 1993; Knütter, 1993; cf. Wiegel, 2001, pp. 179ff.). It was insinuated that the first exhibition had been born out of this spirit, and its sudden withdrawal, not to mention the unexpected departure of its director, Hannes Heer,75 was applauded by the Frankfurter Rundschau for being a repudiation of ‘Anti-fascism by proxy’ and an opportunity to open up possibilities ‘for new policy initiatives on memory and commemoration’.76 The change in the times detected by this formerly left-of-centre newspaper was confirmed by the conservative Die Welt. It regarded the unloved Wehrmacht Exhibition as fitting in with ‘the old German recipe for “overcoming the past” … the eternally backward-looking obsession with German crimes’ and its ‘equally backward-looking flipside, the repression of those crimes’, and it saw its closure as a clear indication of a ‘change in the tide’.77

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3. The political class in the German Federal Republic had been fairly appalled to learn in 1999 that, on 2 December of that year, an Englishlanguage version of the exhibition was to open in New York, and would then undertake a tour of some of the country’s most famous universities. Quite apart from the possibility that the disturbing images in the exhibition might reinforce the stereotype of the German Nazi held by millions of Americans, and have an inflationary impact on the ongoing negotiations over compensation for forced labourers,78 this foreign premiere came at the most unfavourable time imaginable. The former Chancellor Helmut Kohl had engaged in a systematic, if at times somewhat clumsy (at the graves of the Waffen-SS in Bitburg, for example)79 policy of ‘normalizing’ and ‘historicizing’ the German past, and Chancellor Schröder now sought to continue this process and bring it to a conclusion. The new exhibition, on the other hand, was helpful to this quest for closure, which is why a federal government minister was allowed to open it as an emissary of the Chancellor. Michael Jeismann precisely described the felicitous scenario in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: It seems as though the period of exclusion governing our rights over our own history is drawing to an end. Since 1989,80 it has been a case of borrowed time, as we must now clearly recognize. The Federal Republic has used this time, above all, to cultivate her own prehistory so that she can determine for herself how she wishes to appear on the world stage. In the space of a single month, November this year, the task will be completed. In Berlin, work is to begin on the Holocaust Memorial. In Nuremberg, the dilapidated monumentalism of the Nazi Party rally grounds has been subjected to a critical historical treatment.81 And the final step will be the new Wehrmacht Exhibition, which promises to be both accurate and judicious. This is now our past – ours both to shed light on and to interpret as we see fit.82 Political initiatives in relation to history are not conspiracies. There are spokespersons and actors who make public interventions and occasionally manage to make a far-reaching political impact, even if some of these actors are convinced, or claim, that they are ‘only’ conducting scholarly research.83 At such junctures, what is at stake is nothing less than the determination of new orientations towards the tangled web of past, present and future, and decisions about what should be the prominent features in a society’s image of itself. This process takes the form of a dispute and ends with a consensus which is sometimes fragile and always temporary. It may well be that we are now at such a crossroads. National Socialism, which is now a part of history that most people have only learned about and not experienced, may be just as responsible for that as the frustrating presence of a guilt that refuses to subside. Perhaps it is for this reason that the perpetrators, whose faces had suddenly become recognizable, and which were such an inescapable reminder of this guilt, had to be pushed back into obscurity and anonymity.

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With the disappearance of the images, the perpetrators, too, disappeared. Even if the names remained, they no longer had faces. The head of Medusa, we are told, killed anyone who caught sight of it. Perseus protected himself by means of a clever ploy: he used his shield as a mirror to weaken the effect, enabling him to endure the fatal gaze and free the people from the monster. For four years, the Wehrmacht Exhibition functioned as such a mirror. But the horrific sight of the War of Annihilation and its crimes was too much. The ploy failed, and the mirror shattered. Items which offered greater protection appeared in its place.

11 Interpreting the ‘War of Annihilation’: Responses to the exhibition ‘Crimes of the Wehrmacht: Dimensions of a War of Annihilation, 1941 to 1944’ When Staged in Vienna in 2002 Heidemarie Uhl

The original Wehrmacht Exhibition, which dealt with crimes committed by the Wehrmacht during the ‘War of Annihilation’ waged against the Soviet Union and in the Balkans, was one of the most successful projects ever undertaken in the field of historical-political education. Between its opening in March 1995 and premature closure in 1999, the exhibition had registered more than 800,000 visits in a total of 33 German and Austrian towns and cities (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, 2002, p. 687). A similar resonance was created by the newly formed exhibition ‘Crimes of the Wehrmacht: Dimensions of a War of Annihilation, 1941 to 1944’. In Vienna, the third city to host the exhibition (after Berlin and Bielefeld), the event attracted approximately 33,000 visitors between 9 April and 26 May 2002, amongst them 357 school classes, some of whom had travelled from as far afield as Tyrol and Vorarlberg.1

11.1 Variations on an educational project: the reverberations of the first and second ‘Wehrmacht Exhibitions’ How should we account for the enduring fascination with the original Wehrmacht Exhibition and its successor? The express purpose of the first exhibition, as Hannes Heer made clear in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, was to dispel a ‘lie’, namely the myth of the ‘untainted Wehrmacht’. The creation of this myth,2 wrote Heer, began back in 1945, 251

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when former generals attempted to rebut allegations that the Wehrmacht had participated in war crimes: The military, they said, had kept its distance from Hitler and the Nazi regime, had fulfilled its duty with dignity and honour, and had been informed only after the fact, if at all, about the atrocities committed by Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen. In 1995, 50 years after the war had ended, it was ‘time to nail this lie once and for all, and to accept the reality of a great crime: between 1941 and 1944, the Wehrmacht did not wage a “normal war” in the Balkans and the Soviet Union, but a “war of annihilation”, targeting captured soldiers, Jews and other civilians, and claiming millions of lives’. The participation of the Wehrmacht in war crimes is well known to military historians, but what had been missing (or, perhaps, what German military historians had refused to face up to) was the inference ‘that the Wehrmacht was actively involved as an organization in all these crimes’. The exhibition now set out to ‘prove just that’. The intention was not, said Heer, ‘to pronounce belated and sweeping condemnation upon a whole generation of former soldiers’, but rather ‘to open up a debate about what was – besides Auschwitz – the most barbaric chapter in German and Austrian history, the War of Annihilation waged by the Wehrmacht from 1941 to 1944’ (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, 1996, p. 7). This declared historical-political intention was reflected even in the exhibition’s title, which encapsulated the criminal dimension of Germany’s war in the East in the controversial term ‘War of Annihilation’. Yet, if we look at the original conception of the exhibition, we find no evidence that the planners and the research team had initially been striving after a confrontation with taboos. ‘War of Annihilation’ was devised by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research as part of a broader project dealing with the history of violence in the twentieth century, to coincide with the ‘Year of Commemoration, 1995’. It had been under development since 1990. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, the Institute intended not merely to cast a retrospective look at the war and at National Socialism, but to deal also with the history of institutional violence throughout the twentieth century, in terms of both its causes and its consequences. The resulting ‘Project 1995: Civilization and Barbarism’ was conceived as an ‘interdisciplinary scholarly and political initiative by way of a critical reflection on the relationship between civilization and barbarism in the twentieth century’. Out of this project arose the exhibition ‘200 Days and One Century’, an exhibition which covered the period from the liberation of Auschwitz to the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (see Manoschek, 2002, p. 64).3 In parallel with this, a second exhibition was to be produced which would be concerned ‘specifically with the German (and consequently also the Austrian) contribution to the history of violence’. ‘The crimes of the Wehrmacht’ first surfaced as a topic in 1991, recalled Walter Manoschek, an Austrian member of the project research team. The rationale for focusing on this issue was based on the supposition that the

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proximity of the general population to the spectrum of National Socialist crimes was nowhere closer and more direct than in the context of the Wehrmacht. This was also the reason for the public taboo surrounding Wehrmacht crimes, and for the fierce responses that greeted efforts to confront the issue (see Manoschek, 2002, pp. 64f.). The potential impact of the exhibition, however, had been assessed very differently during the planning stage. It had indeed been expected that the exhibition might prove ‘disturbing, perplexing and unsettling’, but it was also perfectly conceivable that it would fail to attract any special attention. This was the case, for example, with a comparable exhibition about the ‘War against the Soviet Union, 1941–1945’, held in 1991 at ‘Topography of Terror’4 in Berlin. The discussions about the siting of the exhibition also reflect the fact that in the Hamburg Institute’s own hierarchy of importance, the Wehrmacht Exhibition was by no means top of the list: it had been envisaged that the first venue would be some rooms in the Institute itself, at ‘Mittelweg 36’.5 This location, however, would only have been suitable for a small exhibition with limited public appeal. As the exhibition grew steadily in size, there were discussions about the library and about a marquee in the car park behind the Institute. The decision to use Hamburg’s ‘Kampnagel Factory’, an exhibition site used primarily for alternative cultural events, was taken only a few months before the opening of the exhibition (see Manoschek, 2002, p. 66). Therefore the inevitable suspicion, in light of the rush of visitors and the heated debates, that the Wehrmacht Exhibition had been ‘carefully planned as a media event’, (Manoschek, 2002, p. 67), was not warranted in this instance: the exhibition organizers were themselves surprised by the intense level of public interest. Attempts to explain the scale of the emotionally charged public uproar provoked by the exhibition tend to point first and foremost to the explosive nature of the pictures and their recontextualization as tokens in the semantic field ‘War of Annihilation’: more than 1400 photographs portraying so-called ‘hostage shootings’, the execution of civilians, and the murdering of the Jewish population – women, children and (mainly older) men. The pictures confronted the viewing public with images of the victims and left no room for doubt as to the direct involvement of Wehrmacht soldiers as perpetrators of the crimes. In particular, it was the private wartime photographs, found chiefly in the wallets of German soldiers, that documented the latter’s participation in acts of violence against civilians.6 The scene at the cemetery wall in Paneevo (shown on the cover of this book), in which a Wehrmacht officer is pointing his pistol at a Serbian hostage, would eventually become, by virtue of its repeated reproduction in the media, a visual icon of the crimes of the Wehrmacht (see Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, 2002, pp. 708–10). Thus it was not textual sources, but photographic documents which functioned as the catalyst for the lasting antagonism that permeated debates in

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the media between opponents and supporters of the exhibition. The interviews that Ruth Beckermann conducted with visitors to the exhibition for her documentary film ‘East of War’ (see Chapter 4 by Hannes Heer in this volume) provide an insight into the intensity of the emotionally charged, sometimes aggressive tension which could be detected within the exhibition rooms (Beckermann, 1998). The ‘image realignment’ brought about by the exhibition (Rupnow, 2002, p. 88) involved not only the images of the War of Annihilation brought into the public domain through the Wehrmacht Exhibition, but also the private family repository of photographic souvenirs, as maintained in countless albums. For the snapshots of soldiers going about their daily business, enjoying the partying and the comradeship, had now lost their innocence; alongside these, there now appeared the images of the ‘War of Annihilation’, posing new questions. The ‘harmless’ pictures seemed to hide more than they showed – just what had the fathers and grandfathers really done, or, for that matter, what had they simply seen and known about during the war? The potential for conflict inherent in the photographic sources acquired additional potency by virtue of the ‘touring exhibition’ format: for one thing, at each venue an ever-reappearing ‘window of media attention’ was opened, whilst at the same time, with its increasing success,7 ‘War of Annihilation’ came to act as a ‘mobilizing force’ in the political-cultural arena. The prospect of staging the Wehrmacht Exhibition gave rise, especially in the larger cities, to a particular (historical-)political ‘scenario’, or ‘performative dynamic’, whose structure may be outlined in the following terms:8 the question as to whether ‘War of Annihilation’ should be staged would become a challenge which required a response; every reasonably wellknown municipality was obliged to state its position on the project; action groups would form and campaign for the exhibition to be shown locally, encountering both support and bitter opposition. Amidst the controversy over the exhibition, a historical-political scenario would arise, in which various groupings and initiatives could enrol as actors and in which new coalitions (or confrontations) could be put to the test in the struggle over the interpretation of the past. This conflict would typically already be underway during the run-up to the various exhibition openings, notably in the editorials and letters pages of the local and regional press, which offered both opponents and supporters a media platform for their respective views. Once the concrete decision had been taken to host the exhibition, debate would shift to the centre ground of politics: applications to municipal authorities and provincial governments for grants and subsidies would compel the political parties to adopt a clear position on the exhibition. The use of public money or, conversely, the refusal to grant financial support (as, for example, in Linz in 1996)9 became a primary source of conflict. But amongst other aspects which developed into highly charged political issues were the search for suitable venues, the question of endorsement by party

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representatives, speakers offering their services for opening ceremonies and participation in the accompanying programme. These demanded a clear stance, both from the political parties and from other actors in the political-cultural sphere (churches, schools, universities, the media, cultural institutions and associated supporters’ clubs, and so on). This struggle over the staging of the exhibition in the various different local political contexts, and the necessity for those in the political arena to make clear pronouncements in favour of, or against, the project (especially with regard to the question of public subsidy), were played out in one location after another. Thus, at regular intervals, the touring exhibition would open the ‘window’ of public attention already alluded to. Consequently, it was not merely the topic ‘the crimes of the Wehrmacht’ that came repeatedly to the public’s attention (or, for that matter, into public discourse), but increasingly also the surrounding political activity, particularly that which accompanied the opening of the exhibition. Interest centred in part on statements made by politicians in relation to the controversial topic, but also on oppositional demonstrations by radical right-wing groups, who took advantage of these ‘windows of opportunity’ in order to publicize themselves. The success of the first Wehrmacht Exhibition as a provocative intervention in the domain of historical awareness was due not only to the shock effect of the visual portrayal of the War of Annihilation, but also to the political ‘scene’ that developed around it. The project’s principal aim had been to raise awareness of the ‘myth of the untainted Wehrmacht’, but it also came to function, on repeated occasions, as a powerful political icon whose ‘social energy’ was demonstrated afresh at each new venue. More than a decade after the historians’ dispute in the German Federal Republic10 and the Waldheim debate in Austria,11 and only a few years after the fall of the Iron Curtain and German reunification, the exhibition ‘War of Annihilation’ made it possible to gain an insight into the deeper effects, at both local and regional levels, of the change of perspective or ‘gestalt switch’ that characterized scholarly and intellectual discourse in both West Germany and Austria from the 1980s onwards. This change was marked by a growing interest amongst Germans and Austrians in the question of their own society’s involvement in the ‘rupture of civilization’ at Auschwitz (Diner, 1988). Thus the Wehrmacht Exhibition functioned, on the one hand, as an index of the power relations governing efforts to deal with ‘the past’, and on the other hand, as a dissemination medium – in that it enabled a decade of change in both academic and political historiography to impact on local spheres of discourse. 11.1.1 ‘Not a conventional war’: argumentational and representational strategies of the second Wehrmacht Exhibition The second exhibition by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, with the modified title ‘Crimes of the Wehrmacht: Dimensions of a War of Annihilation, 1941 to 1944’, opened in Berlin on 28 November 2001

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(Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, 2002). This project, too, was conceived as a force for education, but at the same time, as the antithesis of its forerunner. Even the emphasis on the ‘fully new conception’ was perceived to be a disavowal of the old exhibition. The contemporary historian Ulrike Jureit, a researcher and spokesperson for the new exhibition, declared during the run-up to the opening in Vienna that this was not a corrected or revamped version of the old Wehrmacht Exhibition, but a ‘completely new exhibition’. At the same time, she stressed that ‘the core thesis, that the Wehrmacht had been both actively and passively involved in crimes’, had not changed.12 This emphasis on the continuity of the central thesis, combined with a fundamental change in the mode of presentation, was a consequence of the spectacular abandonment of the first exhibition, ‘War of Annihilation’. It was inevitable that the Hamburg Institute for Social Research should come out with a clear statement, because the decision to end the first exhibition on account of the erroneous classification of photographic sources, and to have the exhibition reviewed by a commission of historians, had called into question the very claims at the core of the project. Jan Philipp Reemtsma also underlined in Vienna the need to address the public once more via the medium of an exhibition: ‘Many visitors have asked, “Well, do the claims made by the exhibition still hold?” This is what we now need to show: that the claims are not affected by the mistakes.’13 We can therefore assume that the intentions behind the narrative structure and creative concept of the second, revised exhibition are inextricably linked to considerations arising out of the abandonment of the first exhibition. The uncertainty over the validity of the central claims also affected the academic reputation of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research; the reconception was therefore motivated and guided primarily by the desire to corroborate and strengthen the central thesis by means of meticulous scholarly argument and the presentation of evidence. This gave the project a fundamentally new orientation. The continuation of the debate started by the exhibition ‘War of Annihilation’ was no longer the central objective, nor indeed was confronting the wartime generation and its descendants with the question of involvement in the ‘War of Annihilation’. The ‘destruction of a myth’ and the closely related and widely felt intervention into collective historical awareness were also no longer the overriding matter of concern. As far as these aspects were concerned, the exhibition ‘Dimensions of a War of Annihilation’ could simply fall back on the success of the previous project, which had performed this consciousnessraising task. Having said that, the failure to follow up on these causes of insecurity and indignation, which had been responsible for the impact of the first exhibition, can also be viewed as a gesture of conciliation towards the opponents of the earlier project (Arani, 2002, p. 118). The defensive tenor of the second exhibition was also a function of its argumentational ‘setting’. The defence of the original ‘War of Annihilation’

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thesis led to the presentation of a structured ‘storyline’, whose argumentation was aimed largely at refuting two contra arguments which had been articulated time and again during the course of the debate about the first exhibition. These were (1) that acts of violence are committed in every war (whereas only those committed by the Germans were shown here), and (2) that soldiers in the Wehrmacht had been obliged to obey orders. The conception and content of the new exhibition can be interpreted, to a certain degree, as a response to these objections raised by opponents of the exhibition: ‘Not a conventional war’, proclaims the banner in the foyer, thereby enunciating the aim of the new project, namely to demonstrate that even during the planning of the Soviet invasion, the Wehrmacht, as an institution, had renounced the prevailing laws of war and international law, so as to ‘allow a free hand for crimes against civilians’ (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, 2001, p. 3). This was also reflected in the selection of photographs in which crimes against the civilian population were portrayed. There would be no ‘acts of excess’ on display, explained Ulrike Jureit, ‘nor is the topic the War of Annihilation in the East, for then there would have to be a huge section about the SS Einsatzgruppen, about the Gestapo, and so on’.14 At the heart of the exhibition there now stood, against the background of the laws of war and the international legal framework then in force, an awkwardly abstract portrayal of the singular nature of the National Socialists’ racial ‘War of Annihilation’.15 The introduction to the exhibition brochure begins with the statement: ‘The war against the Soviet Union differed from all other European wars of the modern era, including the campaigns waged by the Wehrmacht against other countries during the Second World War.’ Referring to the aims of the Wehrmacht Exhibition, it says, ‘Taking the then current laws of war and system of international law as its starting point, the exhibition “Crimes of the Wehrmacht: Dimensions of a War of Annihilation, 1941 to 1944” documents the involvement of the Wehrmacht in crimes perpetrated during the Second World War in the Eastern and Southeast European theatres of war’ (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, 2001, p. 3). Despite the affirmation of continuity, the switch to an analytical framework based on legal history and the philosophy of law meant that the central claims of the Wehrmacht Exhibition now appeared in a different light. An overpowering visual confrontation with the crimes of the ‘War of Annihilation’ was now precluded, and the question of the possible involvement of one’s own parents and grandparents in those crimes was now evoked only indirectly, through the ‘social energy’ of the original exhibition, against the backdrop of which the second exhibition was staged. It was no longer the confrontation with the crimes that stood centre-stage: ‘Instead, it is the work of the academic researcher that is being showcased.’16 The frequently voiced argument that the new exhibition was ‘objectifying’ and ‘academicizing’ a controversial subject served, at the same time, to undermine the perception of scholarship as the authority in matters of historical policy and education.

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In this ‘blunted’ exhibition, ‘historiography was styled as a sterile laboratory activity’.17 The de-emotionalizing effect was entirely intentional: the assessment by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, that the exhibition was showing ‘consensus history’, was acknowledged with approval by Ulrike Jureit.18 This overt endeavour to neutralize the potential for confrontation inherent in the topic was expressed most clearly in the manner of production, which was consistent with the exhibition’s designation as a ‘historical documentation’ (Ulrike Jureit).19 The eschewing of provocation as a stylistic device (which, in the case of the first Wehrmacht Exhibition, had been partially responsible for a change in collective historical consciousness) affected first and foremost the selection and presentation of photographs. The dimension of the ‘shocking visual experience’ was absent from the newly created exhibition: the visitor would suppose that he or she was entering a study area – so overwhelming was the abundance of source material and supporting literature. A ‘history clinic’ is how the Neue Zürcher Zeitung characterized the new Wehrmacht Exhibition when it opened in Berlin: ‘White boards bear long texts and white chairs invite one to spend time amongst the source archives.’20 The photographs played only a supporting role: no longer covering whole walls (as they had within the ‘Iron Cross’ installation of the first exhibition) but placed mainly on desks and surrounded by texts, they had lost the power to induce a disturbing visual experience (see Lethen, 2002).

11.2 Removing the emotion: the exhibition ‘Crimes of the Wehrmacht: Dimensions of a War of Annihilation, 1941 to 1944’ in Vienna The reaction to the second Wehrmacht Exhibition within Vienna’s political and media circles was framed very largely by the concept of inter-generational reconciliation and the desire to take the emotional heat out of an explosive topic. A broad consensus existed that there was a need to examine the ‘repressed’ past – with the two significant exceptions of the Neue Kronenzeitung and the FPÖ (Austrian Freedom Party), of whom more will be said below. The implementation of the plans proved to be remarkably fuss-free, even if the expected historical-political dividing lines were in evidence initially. When Boris Groys, the former rector of the Academy of Fine Arts, first suggested inviting the exhibition to Vienna and offered to make available the exhibition rooms in the Academy’s studio building (the so-called Semper-Depot), the Greens, on 14 December 2001, tabled a motion before the Vienna municipal council calling for the exhibition ‘Crimes of the Wehrmacht’ to be hosted in Vienna. The motion was carried with the support of the SPÖ (Social Democratic Party of Austria), whilst the ÖVP (Austrian People’s Party) and FPÖ withheld their support.21 At the same time, in the Austrian province of Voralberg, the Greens’ motion to bring the exhibition to the town of Bregenz22 with the aid of regional funding was likewise rejected by the ÖVP

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and FPÖ.23 In March 2002, as the question of a subsidy for the exhibition from the City of Vienna was being voted on, only the FPÖ continued to voice its opposition. The ÖVP – whilst openly distancing itself from the exhibition – ultimately supported a grant from the public purse to the tune of €50,871.24 ‘Only FP opposes Wehrmacht Exhibition’, ran the headline in the Kurier on 5 March 2002. A month later, faced with an impending demonstration by extreme right-wingers, a report in the Kleine Zeitung observed, ‘Only the extreme right continues to sound the attack.’25 Clearly, in deciding to bring the Wehrmacht Exhibition to Vienna, one could count on a broad political consensus, or at least on the absence of the formation of any massive opposition. This climate of consensus was further consolidated by the policy of the Vienna City Council cultural affairs executive, Andreas Mailath-Pokorny, who justified the city’s financial support by arguing that the exhibition was not a divisive affair, or a one-sided condemnation of the Wehrmacht, but was rather a matter of a ‘sophisticated process of examination’.26 The emphasis on the ‘balance’ in the exhibition, which avoided any sweeping judgements on the soldiers of the Wehrmacht, was reinforced by integrating it into a reconciliation programme which was doubtless also expected to take the wind out of the sails of potential critics. Mailath-Pokorny declared the Wehrmacht Exhibition to be part of an initiative, devised by him, entitled ‘Dialogue, Discussion, Democracy’, which would be devoted to different aspects of violence and war and, in reference to the Wehrmacht Exhibition, promote an ‘open dialogue’ between the generations. Besides actual encounters between school students and ‘contemporary witnesses’ in the context of school projects on the Wehrmacht Exhibition, public discussion events and workshops were announced on topics such as ‘Violence, War and the Media’, ‘Globalization and Violence: Perspectives after 9/11’ and the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans in the aftermath of the Second World War. The initiative was intended to open up ‘spaces for critical exchange, discussion and controversy’.27 At the same time, however, it was linked to an explicit reconciliation agenda (‘dialogue of the generations’) at a time when it was still barely possible to articulate critical questions concerning the possible culpable involvement of the war generation in the War of Annihilation.28 The weaving of the ‘War of Annihilation’ into the history of twentieth century violence can also be seen as an attempt to ‘defuse’ and ‘even up’ the conflict between the different historical-political tendencies, or even as an accommodation with those who were predisposed to adopt an oppositional stance towards the Wehrmacht Exhibition. 11.2.1 Not an ‘occasion for emotion’: the Austrian media’s verdict on the exhibition The eagerly anticipated exhibition opened its doors in Vienna on 9 April 2002. ‘So now the exhibition is here’, wrote the conservative Die Presse, ‘and

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with it, no doubt, the occasion for much emotion and polemic.’ At the same time, however, the newspaper sounded the all-clear, for the ‘defused’ exhibition gave no cause for alarm: The creators of the exhibition have learned lessons. This completely redesigned exhibition by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research … in contrast to the old version … comes across as generally convincing, scientifically well-founded, objective, almost cold and even self-reflective and self-critical. […] A friendly, well-lit room with white display boards and glass cabinets awaits the visitor. Armchairs invite one to sit down and spend time in quiet contemplation.29 The report in Der Standard likewise referred to this being ‘quite a sober exhibition’ which was characterized by the ‘utmost objectivity and discernment’.30 The imagery of a ‘cold’, ‘scientific’ atmosphere could also be found, for example, in the Carinthian daily Kärntner Tageszeitung: the ‘consciously super-cooled production of the exhibition’ was said to transport ‘the visitor into a chilled laboratory environment’, and the concentration on textual sources, it was said, should help to ‘steer the discussion along more objective lines’.31 Media reaction to the rhetoric of the exhibition – described in terms of ‘sobriety’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘scholarliness’ – was thoroughly approving.32 Evidently, one of the key areas of conflict in the 1990s debates about the past had been successfully transformed into a model of consensus. This assessment was widely disseminated even in the run-up to the Vienna opening, on the basis of the exhibition’s reception so far in the Federal Republic of Germany. The German press had underlined the exhibition’s ‘strict objectivity’, reported Der Standard, a week before the exhibition began.33 The Kurier, in the light of the FPÖ’s criticism of the exhibition (‘an incitement’), drew attention to the public debate in Germany, where the new Wehrmacht Exhibition had ‘silenced most of its critics’. It reported that even conservative publications like Die Welt had acknowledged the ‘coldly objective’ documentation of ‘the involvement of the German military in the racial biological war of annihilation’. With a lengthy quotation from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Kurier highlighted the positive assessment by the Polish historian Bogdan Musial, who, by proving that some of the photographs had been wrongly classified, had contributed decisively to the closure of the first Wehrmacht Exhibition. Musial credited the new exhibition with sobriety, scientific balance and the utmost credibility. According to him, it dispensed with the ‘accusatory tone of the original exhibition’: ‘It does not provoke, it enlightens.’34 A feature common to all the coverage of the exhibition is that the central issue was not actually the crimes of the Wehrmacht, but rather the question of differences when compared with the previous exhibition. The drama of the shocking visual experience and the emotional disturbance triggered by

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the first Wehrmacht Exhibition were still in people’s minds, and it was against this background that the second version was judged. The provincial press, which provided detailed coverage of the exhibition’s opening in Vienna, was also chiefly interested in the difference between the two versions, and the absence of the stylistic use of confrontation and provocation was commented on favourably. In addition, a number of journalists went to some lengths to try to convey the abstract and subtle arguments involved in defining a ‘war of annihilation’. In a leading article in the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, for example, the first exhibition was condemned as a ‘deliberate provocation’ which ‘bore the hallmark of a politically and ideologically motivated allegation’, whereas the current, fully revised version ‘no longer sought to provoke, but instead approached the topic, which remains nonetheless a divisive one, in a consciously objective and discriminating manner’.35 Even if the stance of the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten towards the exhibition was critically ambivalent – the main objection was the presentation of German crimes only: ‘guaranteed to make some people’s blood boil’ – the ‘merits of the exhibition’ were still acknowledged. Reassessing the past was necessary, if only for pragmatic reasons, for ‘if you don’t define your own past, you can be sure that someone else will do it for you’. Even the central thesis of the exhibition was endorsed in the report in the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, and was presented to readers in these terms: the Russian and Balkan campaign was to be regarded as a war of annihilation – this expression (used here without quotation marks) had already become established as part of the standard vocabulary in press coverage elsewhere – ‘because it was not purely a military campaign, but a politically driven war, in preparation for which Hitler and his leadership had set aside the land war provisions of the Hague Convention. And this was supposed to be an “honourable war”?’ In terms of content, ‘not one iota of the allegation that parts of the Wehrmacht were responsible for abominable war crimes has been withdrawn’, but the production dispensed with ‘provocation’: ‘It all comes across as tightly constructed and sober’, and the description of the room for discretion which existed showed that ‘in the final analysis, it was a question of individual responsibility’. There really was no cause for uproar in the second exhibition: ‘If anyone is still determined to feel personally affronted, the new style of presentation is not going to make it any easier.’36 The ‘accusatory tone’ of the first Wehrmacht Exhibition was also criticized by the Tiroler Tageszeitung in a commentary which actually advocated intensive reassessment of the past. The exhibition’s ‘central claim’, it explained, was ‘beyond challenge. […] Wehrmacht soldiers were amongst those who took part, particularly in Eastern Europe, in the persecution and murder of thousands of people’.37 The Kärntner Tageszeitung stressed that the new exhibition was ‘not about polarizing opinion, but about a rigorous and discriminating examination of the facts’.38

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Similarly, the Styrian edition of the Kleine Zeitung underlined the deemotionalized character of the ‘corrected version’ of the Wehrmacht Exhibition. The most apparent change was the suppression of photographs in favour of texts, which on its own contributed to the ‘dampening of emotions … because if one has to read through the endlessly long passages of text on the display boards, and can no longer simply be shocked by images, one may well be gleaning information and expanding one’s awareness, but at some point one will leave the exhibition feeling jaded’.39 Only a few voices in the press expressed quiet criticism of the ‘emphatically objective’ creative concept of the clinically sterile science laboratory. The visitor would be disturbed, according to Christa Zöchling in the news magazine Profil, only upon a ‘second look’, if at all (at the documents, that is, with the pictures having ‘largely vanished’). This in turn meant that the exhibition was falling short of its own aim to provide effective political-historical education: ‘Perhaps the new team, out of the honourable intent not to pillory the war generation, has disregarded one important dimension: an examination of how an entire institution like the Wehrmacht could function in such a way that genocide took place’.40 The structure of the media coverage also reflects the absence of scandal: for the daily press, the window of attention opened and closed with the opening of the exhibition and certain of the associated events – apart, that is, from the extensive coverage of the demonstration by the extreme Right on April 13, and the associated counter-demonstration. More space was devoted to the subject in the news magazines Profil and Format. Here, too, the War of Annihilation was portrayed predominantly from the perspective of generationspecific recollection and narrative, enabling former Wehrmacht soldiers, as well as representatives of the second generation, to have their say. A further indication of the degree to which the potential for conflict had been neutralized is the inclusion of the subject within news media outside the domains of politics and culture. The society column of the news magazine Profil, for example, revealed that ‘re-evaluating the past’ was currently ‘quite in vogue’.41 The magazine for users of Vienna’s public transport system, which can be picked up in buses, trams and the underground, perfectly summed up the consensus strategy: in the ‘what to see and what to miss’ column Hui-Pfui, included on the positive (‘Hui’) side was: ‘Wehrmacht Exhibition: the first exhibition was controversial. This second, revised version dealing with military atrocities is indisputably worthwhile and a must for anyone who wants to explore this dark chapter of modern history’.42 11.2.2 A ‘superfluous’ exhibition: media and political counter-strategies Ranged against the strategy of consensus and reconciliation evident in most of the media coverage were the voices of the exhibition’s opponents. Principal

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amongst these were the populist Neue Kronenzeitung, which had made no secret of its disapproval even in the run-up to the Vienna exhibition, and the FPÖ. Both sought to use the Wehrmacht Exhibition in order to create a profile for themselves as the only political force opposing a historically critical interpretation of the past, but without actually engaging with the arguments put forward in the exhibition. The repudiation of the exhibition, which was frequently dubbed the ‘AntiWehrmacht Exhibition’, was explained in terms of arguments which had also figured frequently in the debates surrounding the first exhibition: that the exhibition only showed crimes committed by Germans, and not by the armies of the enemy; that war crimes were committed by every army in action, but only those committed by Germans were decried; and that there was no concern with the war crimes of the Red Army or with the expulsions of Germans in the aftermath of the war. The FPÖ municipal councillor Heinz-Christian Strache stated in the free newspaper Wiener Bezirkszeitung that the Wehrmacht was ‘no more immoral than other armies in the Second World War’, and that the ‘deliberately one-sided exhibition’ nonetheless sought to convince the public ‘that there had been only one “criminal army”. This creates an objectionable climate of bias’. Particular criticism was levelled at the financial support provided by the Viennese municipality. Any exhibition, even the so-called Wehrmacht Exhibition, should be allowed to take place in Vienna, but ‘the expense of this sweeping disparagement of a generation [should not be] heaped on the backs of Vienna’s taxpayers. From this perspective, the SPÖ, the ÖVP and the Greens have a good deal of explaining to do to those affected.’43 The war generation, wrote Strache in Zur Zeit, have ‘earned our respect and appreciation!’.44 The FPÖ’s repertoire of arguments exhibited a degree of strategic nuancing, constructed around the relativizing of Wehrmacht crimes by drawing attention to the ‘crimes of the others’. It was conceded, for example, by Andreas Mölker in Zur Zeit,45 that no one ‘could object that much to the newly constructed Anti-Wehrmacht Exhibition’: the organizers had sought to ‘avoid any of the all too obvious mistakes of the event’s predecessor’. Nonetheless, the few objections that could be made were important ones – in particular, that the exhibition remained ‘one-sided and short-sighted’, because ‘it disregards the crimes of the other belligerent armies, especially those of the Red Army and Tito’s Partisans in the Balkans, but also those of the Western Allies’. The subject was said to have lost some of its topicality in the meantime, however – as ‘we are living in a different time’. Now, at last, subjects were being dealt with which were compatible with the FPÖ’s view of history, and which had hitherto been ignored by the media: The media, all of a sudden, no longer shows Germans and Austrians as perpetrators, but rather as victims. The flight and expulsion of Germans from East Prussia and the Sudetenland are the subject of major

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TV documentaries and newspaper features. Great crimes against humanity, such as the sinking of the refugee ship Wilhelm Gustloff, are dealt with by the acknowledged master of German contemporary literature, Günther Grass. The suffering of German soldiers in captivity, and the suffering inflicted on the civilian population by the Anglo-American bombing, are once again emerging into public consciousness. The Anti-Wehrmacht Exhibition simply constitutes one element of an opposing process of consciousness-raising.46 Another newspaper to speak out against the ‘superfluous’ exhibition47 was the Neue Kronenzeitung. Without responding to the changes in what was actually portrayed and argued in the new exhibition, it repeatedly employed the strategy of relativization – already central to its campaign against the first exhibition – in a multitude of articles, commentaries and other sorts of text.48 Opposing action was carried out primarily by radical right-wingers and skinheads, who – just as they had in Berlin and Bielefeld – took advantage of the opening of the Wehrmacht Exhibition to mount a presence in the central area of the city with guaranteed media attention. On 13 April, approximately 200 opponents of the recently opened exhibition marched on the Heldenplatz (literally Heroes’ Square), the ‘most important memorial site in the Republic’, to take part in an officially sanctioned rally.49 Amongst the placards carried by marchers were ones bearing a picture of a Wehrmacht soldier with the caption ‘Hero’. Banners with messages such as ‘Grandfather, we thank you’ could also be seen. Protesters in a counter-demonstration attempted to break though the police cordon that was protecting the rightwing radicals, resulting in some violent incidents which were later described in the daily press as a ‘street battle’ and a ‘serious riot’ (see Stachel, 2002, pp. 8f.).

11.3 Summary and conclusion The conflicts witnessed on the ‘Heldenplatz’ and at the ‘Semper-Depot’ were fairly typical of the political repercussions of the second Wehrmacht Exhibition: provocation and emotional overheating no longer emanated from the exhibition itself, which in common with the associated academic and educational initiatives (symposia, for example) formed part of a sober and reflective scholarly discourse. The media coverage, too, was in keeping with the new, contemplative approach to the subject: whilst, at the time of the first exhibition, it had been the actual portrayal of Wehrmacht crimes that dominated the news, there was now a significantly greater degree of interest in the rhetoric of the new exhibition, set against the background of the historical-political controversy provoked by the previous exhibition.

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The intention of the exhibition organizers had evidently been to dampen the eruptive ‘social energy’ of the first exhibition; the project ‘War of Annihilation’ and the ‘destruction of the myth of the untainted Wehrmacht’ were retrospectively undermined by the historicizing approach of the second exhibition (see Pollak, 2002b). On the other hand, as a consequence of the public debates surrounding the first exhibition, it was no longer possible to divorce from one’s image of the Wehrmacht the crimes against humanity committed during the War and the question of involvement in the Holocaust. However, the central tenet of the topos ‘War of Annihilation’ – that it was not simply a question of acts of excess by individual soldiers, but a matter of calculated crimes factored into the Wehrmacht’s plans for war – was not universally accepted: many readers’ letters and opinion columns expressed the view that the exhibition would be more acceptable if its title were ‘Crimes in the Wehrmacht’ rather than ‘Crimes of the Wehrmacht’. The more consensual second exhibition was broadly accepted at the level of public discourse, even if not completely undisputed. The most emphatic opposition came from political groupings who, whenever questions of historical policy were debated, had always professed themselves to be roundly opposed to the paradigm of critical appraisal of the past, and whose approach to history was characterized by intense sympathy for the so-called ‘war generation’. This assessment applies not only to the Neue Kronenzeitung and the FPÖ, but also to ‘right-wing radicals’ and to certain core elements of the FPÖ who expressed their identification with the Wehrmacht by actually demonstrating against the exhibition. The critical journalist and historian, Peter Huemer, made the pertinent observation that the two Wehrmacht Exhibitions were responsible for the fact that denial of the war crimes is now considered a revisionist position, an assessment borne out by the absence of a ‘scandal’. Clearly, it was precisely the dialectic between, on the one hand, the first Wehrmacht Exhibition’s audacious intervention in the realm of historical awareness and, on the other hand, the second exhibition’s ‘translation’ of this intervention into the rhetoric of cold ‘objectivity’, that accounted for the enduring success of this initiative in the domain of political-historical education. The first exhibition had been responsible for a shocking visual experience, which had ‘contaminated’ with images of crimes against humanity the emotion-laden memories of the Wehrmacht previously propagated in political circles and handed down within families. The process of academic self-regulation – the moratorium and the setting up of a commission of historians – had lent additional weight to the notion of the ‘War of Annihilation’, such that its legitimacy was rarely called into question by the time of the second Wehrmacht Exhibition. Politically motivated attempts to emotionalize the subject now attracted little support. It is certainly true that the second Wehrmacht Exhibition succeeded in reducing the first exhibition’s capacity to disturb – relinquishing its

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explosiveness and metamorphosing into a vehicle for consensus and reconciliation. However, this in turn enabled the topos to gain entry into mainstream media discourse. At least now it is no longer possible to talk about the Wehrmacht’s role in the Second World War without prompting questions about the ‘dimensions of the War of Annihilation’.

Glossary

This glossary elaborates certain Austrian and German cultural, political and historical references with which readers outside these countries may be less familiar. Press titles appear in a separate list. Anschluss: the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938. Whilst opposed in principle by the Austrian government, no military resistance was offered, and the arrival of German troops was greeted with enthusiasm by a significant proportion of the Austrian population. Aryanization: the official, euphemistic term (German: Arisierung) for the confiscation of Jewish property, businesses, works of art and other belongings, and their subsequent transfer to non-Jewish ‘owners’. Austrian Republic: the First Austrian Republic existed between 1918 (following the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and 1938, when the Anschluss (q.v.) made Austria part of Nazi Germany. Many consider that the First Republic really ended in 1934, when an ‘Austrofascist’ dictatorship was imposed. The Second Austrian Republic was first proclaimed before the end of the war, in April 1945, and subsequently attained independence from the Allies in 1955 through the ‘State Treaty’, signed on 15 May 1955. Bundestag: the lower chamber of the German federal parliament. From 1949 to 1999 the Bundestag assembled in the West German town of Bonn. Thereafter, it relocated to the refurbished Reichstag building in Berlin, which had been reinstated as the capital of Germany under the terms of the 1990 Unification Treaty. Bundeswehr: the modern German armed forces, founded in 1955, when the Federal Republic of Germany (which, at the time, meant West Germany) was first allowed to begin rearming. CDU (Christlich Demokratische Union): the mainstream party of the right in Germany, except for Bavaria (see CSU). The first post-war chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, was a Christian Democrat, as was Helmut Kohl. The longest-serving federal chancellor, Kohl, held office from 1982–98, during which period East Germany was absorbed into the Federal Republic. Only in 1957 did the ‘CDU-CSU Alliance’ win a slender majority of the popular vote (and no other party has ever done so); therefore, because of the Federal Republic’s proportional representation system, the CDU has only ever governed Germany in coalition with other parties. 267

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CSU (Christlich-Soziale Union): Bavarian mainstream conservative party, strongly Catholic, and traditionally regarded as being to the right of the CDU (q.v.). In national political elections, the CDU and CSU operate in permanent coalition. Their controversial former leader Franz Josef Strauß failed in his bid to be elected chancellor of West Germany in 1980. Einsatzgruppen: special mobile units within the SS (q.v.), as distinct from the Wehrmacht (q.v.), often also referred to as ‘death squads’. They were deployed behind the front lines in the Eastern military occupation zones to carry out acts of racially and ideologically motivated mass murder. Estimates of the number of victims vary between one and two million, of whom more than half were Jews. FDP (Freie Demokratische Partei): the German Free Democrats have been the main centre party in the German Federal Republic since the Second World War. Though generally polling only between 5 per cent and 10 per cent at elections, they have frequently been part of the governing coalition, even bringing down the SPD government in 1982. Their most prominent member has been Hans-Dietrich Genscher, foreign minister of the Federal Republic from 1974–92. FPÖ (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs): the Austrian Freedom Party, a populist and nationalistic party of the far-right, which attracted international attention when, under the leadership of the Carinthian politician Jörg Haider, it gained 27 per cent of the popular vote in the 1999 elections and formed a governing coalition with the ÖVP (q.v.). Since then, a series of scandals and internal disputes have significantly reduced the popularity of the FPÖ (and its recent offshoot, Haider’s BZÖ) at national level. Federal Republic of Germany: the official designation (German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland or BRD) for the modern state of Germany. The Federal Republic was one of two German states established after the Second World War, the other being the Soviet-backed GDR (q.v.). The ‘reunification’ of 1990 was enacted by dissolving the GDR and incorporating its territories into the Federal Republic under the terms of a Unification Treaty and significant changes in the relationship between Germany and the Allied Powers, enshrined in the ‘Two Plus Four Agreement’. GDR (German Democratic Republic): the state established in the Soviet Zone of occupation when negotiations for single German elections broke down (German: Deutsche Demokratische Republik or DDR). The smaller of the ‘two Germanies’, the GDR dealt with the Nazi period largely by blaming everything on the ‘fascists in the West’ and otherwise ‘forgetting’ all about it. It eventually achieved a sort of recognition in the West thanks to the then West German chancellor Willy Brandt’s realist ‘Ostpolitik’. Having been too slow to respond to the reforms introduced by the then

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Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, and in dire financial straits, the ‘workers’ and peasants’ state’ famously imploded in 1989, heralding an end to the Cold War. General Government (Generalgouvernement): the ‘rump’ of Poland during the Second World War, neither incorporated directly into the Reich (q.v.) nor taken into the possession of the Soviet Union following the German invasion and occupation of Poland in 1939. The puppet state was firmly under Nazi control, and was intended to become a permanent source of slave labour for the Third Reich, once it was ‘cleared’ of its Jewish population of more than two million. Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei): the ‘Secret State Police’ existed in an uneasy equal relationship with the SD (q.v.). whereby the SD undertook intelligence gathering and the Gestapo carried out ‘enforcement’ duties. Both organizations were ultimately under the control of Heinrich Himmler, from 1939 under the aegis of the RSHA (q.v.). Historians’ Dispute (Historikerstreit): high-profile intellectual dispute in West Germany in the late 1980s over the appropriate treatment of Germany’s Nazi past. Key issues included the extent to which Germans’ support for Hitler could be ‘excused’ by virtue of a perceived Bolshevist threat and how ‘bad’ the Holocaust actually was, and whether it should be viewed as unique or like other genocides. The discussion was heated and had something of a left–right polarity, though by no means a straightforward one, with a wide variety of positions emerging as the debate unfolded. KPÖ (Kommunistische Partei Österreichs): the Communist Party of Austria, represented in the Austrian Nationalrat (q.v.) from 1945 until 1959 (and until 1970 in some provincial parliaments). It was particularly strongly represented in the provisional three-party government established in 1945 pending elections. Landser: former informal designation for lower-ranking German soldiers in the land forces. It is little used these days other than by veterans’ organizations and, more politically, by right-wing apologists for the Third Reich. Landser was also the title of an anti-Semitic soldiers’ weekly, widely distributed to combat troops during the Second World War. Luftwaffe: the German Air Force, a constituent part of the Wehrmacht, was formed in 1935 in defiance of the Versailles Treaty, by Hermann Göring, who remained its commander for virtually the whole time of the Third Reich. The term, however, is a generic one, used to refer to the air force of any country, and does not have the same ideological loading as ‘Wehrmacht’. Ministerrat: literally Council of Ministers, the Austrian cabinet.

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Moscow Declaration: a declaration signed by the USA, the USSR and the UK – in part also by China – in October 1943, regarding the conclusion of the war against the Axis Powers, and arrangements for after the war. One part of the declaration laid the basis for the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials. Another part of the declaration declared the Anschluss null and void and called for the re-establishment of an independent Austrian state. The Moscow Declaration declared Austria to have been the first victim of the German Reich’s policy of aggression; in the subsequent paragraph it also stated Austria’s responsibility for war crimes. The Austrian ‘victimhood myth’ is based on the first part of this declaration. Nationalrat: the Austrian lower parliamentary chamber, with 183 seats elected by a proportional system. NDR (Norddeutscher Rundfunk): one of the largest of nine regional public service broadcasters in Germany. NDR is based in Hamburg and covers an audience of about 15 million viewers in Northern Germany (although nowadays all German regional channels are nationally available via cable and satellite). Germany’s first national broadcaster, ARD, is a joint venture of the nine regional broadcasters. NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei): literally the ‘National Socialist German Workers’ Party’, the acronym and full name of the German Nazi party, which, under Adolf Hitler’s leadership, came to power in Germany in 1933 and almost immediately established the oneparty state which became known as the ‘Third Reich’. The term ‘Nazi’ is simply a truncated form of the word National-Sozialist. OKH (Oberkommando des Heers): Army High Command. Although nominally subordinate to OKW (q.v.), in practice the two commands tended to have direct command of separate units and operations. The OKH was principally involved in military action in the East, but was increasingly sidelined when Adolf Hitler assumed direct control of the German Army in December 1941. OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht): Wehrmacht High Command, that is, the High Command of the Armed forces as a whole. However, in practice the OKW did not actually exercise much power over the nominally subordinate OKH (q.v.). The OKW chief Wilhelm Keitel was sentenced to death at Nuremberg for waging wars of aggression and for perpetrating crimes against peace, crimes against humanity and war crimes. ORF (Österreichischer Rundfunk): state-owned Austrian Radio and Television Corporation which dominates Austrian broadcasting. Austria was the last Western European country to have a national private broadcaster, with the Vienna-based ATV only being broadcast nationwide via conventional aerials from 2003. Ostmark: the new name for Austria, following the Anschluss (q.v.) and Austria’s incorporation into the German Reich. By 1942 Hitler (an Austrian)

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had become convinced that even this designation was too suggestive of an independent state, and decreed that Austria should henceforth be referred to as ‘the Danube and Alpine districts’. This is a particularly extreme instance of ‘pan-German’ or ‘German Nationalist’ ideology, which still has proponents today in the ‘Third Camp’ of Austrian politics. Ostpolitik: Willy Brandt’s ‘Eastern policy’ involved the limited recognition of the GDR (q.v.) and of the Oder-Neisse line as the border to Poland, a de facto acceptance of the territorial losses Germany suffered as a consequence of the Second World War. Brandt saw the previous confrontational stance as dangerous and self-defeating. His rationale has been described as ‘seeking change through rapprochement’. The immediate consequence was a reduction in tension between the two German governments and the easing of restrictions on personal travel and communication between the two states. ÖVP (Österreichische Volkspartei): the ‘Austrian People’s Party’, founded in 1945 as the democratic successor to the Christian Social Party, this right-of-centre party dominated Austrian politics until 1970, when they lost power for 17 years. The party remains a major force in Austrian electoral politics, but is no longer a dominant one. When Wolfgang Schüssel became chancellor in 2000, he was the first ÖVP politician to hold the office following 30 years of Social Democratic power. Reich: the German word for ‘empire’. The German state which Bismarck created in 1871 was called the German Reich. The term ‘Second Reich’ was coined retrospectively in the 1920s, as a way of alluding to the glories of the Holy Roman Empire (the ‘First Reich’) and underscoring the need for a new settlement, a ‘Third Reich’. The Nazis’ subsequent proclamation of a Third Reich was rhetorical (no such state was ever founded) and they were later to drop it for fear of inviting derision. The adoption of the term ‘Third Reich’ as a quasi-official label for the period of Nazi rule is a post-war phenomenon. RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt): literally ‘Reich Security Main Office’, the organization was created by Himmler in 1939, by bringing the Gestapo (q.v.), the SD (q.v.) and the Kriminalpolizei under a single authority. The RHSA controlled the Einsatzgruppen (q.v.), which were instrumental in pursuing its policy of combating (murdering) the ‘political and racial enemies’ of the Reich. Its first chief, Heydrich, was assassinated by Czech Partisans and his successor sentenced to death at Nuremberg. SD (Sicherheitsdienst): literally, the ‘Security Service’, the SD was the intelligence wing of the SS (q.v.), active both in the occupied territories as well as in surveillance within the Nazi party. Sipo (Sicherheitspolizei): literally the ‘Security Police’, the Sipo initially controlled the Gestapo (q.v.) and the Kriminalpolizei, but was superseded in 1939 by the RSHA (q.v.), when all the state police agencies came under SS (q.v.) control. The name Sicherheitspolizei continued to be used in

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Glossary

relation to various functionaries, even when the organization itself had no separate existence. SS (Schutzstaffel): literally the ‘protection squadron’, the SS, originally a personal bodyguard for Hitler, became a vast multi-faceted security organization within the Nazi party, often characterized as a ‘state within a state’. The SS, led by Heinrich Himmler from 1929 onwards, had a military wing, the Waffen-SS, which was roughly as large as the Wehrmacht, and other powerful branches such as the SD (q.v.) and the Gestapo (q.v.). With the establishment of the RSHA (q.v.), the SS completed a takeover of state security organizations such as the criminal police. SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands): the mainstream left-ofcentre party in the German Federal Republic. Its first post-war chancellor was Willy Brandt, immediately followed by Helmut Schmidt. The third and most recent SPD chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, was defeated in the inconclusive 2006 election, but the SPD remained in a governing ‘grand coalition’ with the CDU/CSU under Chancellor Angela Merkel. SPÖ (Sozialistische / Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs): the mainstream left-of-centre party in Austria, which enjoyed a period of 30 years in government, either alone or in coalition with the ÖVP (q.v.) or briefly the FDP (q.v.), between 1970 and 2000. For the first 13 years of this period, the internationally prominent Bruno Kreisky was chancellor. In 1995, the party changed the first part of its name from ‘Socialist’ to ‘Social Democratic’. It has strongly embraced the so-called ‘Swedish Model’s has progressive policies on gender equality, requiring at least 40 per cent of its election candidates to be women, and has also modernized the judicial system, education, and so on. In the 2006 national election, the SPÖ was the most popular party, albeit with just 35 per cent of the vote. Sudetenland: the name was used to refer to parts of Western Czechoslovakia (Bohemia, Moravia and extending into modern Poland) in which significant number of ‘ethnic Germans’ were settled. Although these regions had never been part of the German Reich, the aspirations of ‘Sudeten Germans’ were exploited in order to crush Czechoslovakia and expand the Nazi sphere of control in 1938–39. VdU (Verband der Unabhängigen): initially a pro-nationalist pressure group rather than a political party, the ‘Association of Independents’ set out to represent the interests of former Austrian National Socialists, expellees and returning prisoners of war. The VdU did achieve electoral success in 1949 (12 per cent of the votes cast) which, however, diminished in 1953. In 1955 the party was absorbed into the newly founded FPÖ (q.v.). Volksgemeinschaft: the National Socialist (Nazi) conception of German society as a ‘national community’ in which the interests of the individual are subordinate to those of the nation, or ‘Volk’.

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Waldheim Affair: Kurt Waldheim (1918–2007) was president of Austria from 1986 until 1992 (and had previously been secretary-general of the UN). His candidacy and term of office were marked by deep controversy over his concealment of his wartime activities and allegations that he had been involved in war crimes. Wehrmacht: the German armed forces (literally ‘defence power’) during the Third Reich. The Wehrmacht officially came into being in 1935, although the term was used to refer to the German ‘Reichswehr’ from 1919 onwards. However, the term is not used generically, and is never used to refer to the modern Bundeswehr (q.v.), or to any other armed forces. Die Wende: term (literally ‘the turn’) used to refer to the events surrounding the opening of the Berlin Wall, leading to the fall of the communist regime in the GDR (q.v.) and ‘reunification’ of Germany. The term is also sometimes used to refer to the period of political change in Eastern Europe as a whole. ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen): founded in 1963 as West Germany’s second national broadcaster, the ZDF is based in Mainz and is funded by both licence fees and income from advertising.

Print Media

Many of the press titles referred to in this book are local and regional newspapers. The titles listed below are mainly ones with a national profile, or which have a readership, or at least a reputation, which extends beyond the place of publication. Allgemeine jüdische Wochenzeitung: Weekly newspaper published by the Central Council of Jews In Germany (since 2002 as the Jüdische Allgemeine). Arbeiter-Zeitung: Austrian daily published by the SPÖ; founded in 1889, became independent in 1989 and folded in 1991. Badische Zeitung: Significant regional quality daily for the Freiburg (Black Forest) area, with a good cultural supplement. Berliner Zeitung: Important, quality local newspaper with liberal outlook. Falter: Viennese weekly listings magazine with liberal outlook. Focus: Politically right-wing Spiegel rival. Format: Austrian news and current affairs magazine founded in 1998; initially in competition with Profil, both are now owned by the same publisher. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (also abbreviated to FAZ): Germany’s leading conservative quality broadsheet and financial daily. Die Furche: Austrian quality weekly newspaper, sometimes mistakenly assumed to be a church publication because it deals regularly with religious topics. Hamburger Abendblatt: Mainstream conservative local newspaper published by Springer. Hamburg’s only daily newspaper. Kleines Volksblatt: Newspaper of the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) from 1945 to 1947. Kurier: From 1945 to 1954 the Vienna Kurier was the newspaper of the American Information Service in Austria. Since 1954, the Kurier (initially the Neuer Kurier) has been a popular independent middle-class national daily. Neue Kronenzeitung: Said to be the most popular newspaper in the world, relative to the size of population; re-established in 1959, the frequently provocative Krone is a highly influential, popular and populist Austrian tabloid; anti-immigration. Neues Österreich: Founded in 1945 by the three governing parties, ÖVP, SPÖ and KPÖ as the first Austrian post-war daily and the ‘newspaper of democratic unity’; intended to convince the Allies of the existence of a new culture of democratic debate; folded in 1967. Neue Zürcher Zeitung: Switzerland’s leading daily newspaper. Conservative and internationally renowned. 274

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Neues Volksblatt: Conservative Austrian regional daily, with links to the ÖVP. Published in Linz. Oberhessische Presse: Major conservative German regional newspaper. Based in Marburg. Österreichische Neue Tageszeitung: Newspaper of the ÖVP until its closure in 1964. Österreichische Volksstimme: Daily newspaper of the KPÖ founded 1945, simply as Volksstimme from 1957. Became a weekly magazine in 1991 and a monthly magazine Volksstimmen in 2004. Die Presse: Conservative Austrian broadsheet with ÖVP outlook and a strong following as a newspaper for business. Profil: Weekly (originally monthly) liberal news magazine founded in 1970 somewhat in the mould of the German Der Spiegel. Actively involved in the historical-political controvesies of the 1970s and 1980s, acting as a counterweight to the Neue Kronenzeitung. Rhein-Zeitung: Major German regional liberal newspaper based in Koblenz. Rheinische Merkur: Conservative weekly German newspaper. Salzburger Nachrichten: very widely read in Salzburg region, but some following elsewhere. Together with Die Presse and Der Standard, seen as one of the three main Austrian quality newspapers. Der Spiegel: A once legendary German current affairs magazine, which has become middle-of-the-road and lost its outspokenness. Der Standard: An Austrian national broadsheet with liberal views founded in 1988, and now well established, particularly in Vienna. The liberal German Süddeutsche Zeitung acquired Axel Springer’s 50 per cent share in 1998. Stuttgarter Nachrichten: Important Southern German quality local newspaper, liberal. Süddeutsche Zeitung: Germany’s largest supra-regional newspaper. Liberal counterpart to the Frankfurter Allgemeine. Der Tagesspiegel: Important, liberal, quality Berlin newspaper. Die Tageszeitung (also known as ‘taz’): German daily newspaper with unique ‘alternative left’ origins. Nowadays seen merely as non-conformist. Volksstimme: See Österreichische Volksstimme. Die Welt: Loss-making German national daily, right-wing flagship of the publishing giant Axel Springer. Welt am Sonntag: Even more conservative Sunday edition of Die Welt. Wiener Bezirkszeitung: the largest, in circulation terms, of several free newspapers distributed to households in Vienna. Wiener Zeitung: The world’s oldest daily newspaper still in print (founded 1703). Published by the state and functions as the Republic’s official gazette. Die Woche: Short-lived German weekly established in 1993 as liberal-left rival to the increasingly staid and more conservative Die Zeit. Die Zeit: Heavyweight German liberal weekly newspaper founded in Hamburg in 1946.

Notes Preface to the First Edition: ‘How history is made’ – The Origins and Aims of the Project 1. This is a literal translation of the German title for the exhibition Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944. The English-language version of the exhibition (albeit with significant changes from the original), which had been scheduled to open in New York in 1999, was to have been called The German Army and Genocide: Crimes against War Prisoners, Jews and Other Civilians in the East, 1939–1944. For the English-language exhibition catalogue, see Hamburg Institute for Social Research (1999). 2. See Uwe Schmitt: Vorwürfe und Mutmaßungen: Ein Historiker-Symposium diskutiert in New York die Verbrechen der Wehrmacht (Accusations and suspicions: A historians’ symposium in New York discusses the crimes of the Wehrmacht), in Die Welt, 10 December 1999. 3. The term Traditionsverband is widely used to refer to veterans’ associations, many of which pursue an active political agenda, both in relation to the financial welfare of veterans and in relation to how their past actions as soldiers are perceived by the general population. (See, for example, Chapter 5 by Manoschek and Sandner in this volume.)

Introduction: Collective Memory, National Narratives and the Politics of the Past – the Discursive Construction of History 1. ‘Event models’ integrate and update every new experience in specific stereotypical and/or prejudiced ways, even if these events might mean something totally different. Event models store experiences in specific schemata and scripts, and offer models for updating and explaining new experiences. In our case, they are used to reduce complexity and afford coherence to otherwise fragmented or conflicting life stories (Linde, 1993). They get distorted, adapted and integrated with previously stored event models. 2. On family recollection, see Keppler (1994, 2001); Welzer (2001b, 2001c); Welzer, Moller and Tschuggnall (2002). On the generation of Nazi elite schoolchildren, see Schneider, Stillke and Leineweber (1996). On former Wehrmacht soldiers as a group with shared experiences, see Heer (1998b, 1999a, 1999c). On the generations during and after National Socialism, see Rosenthal (1990, 1994, 1997a). 3. The selection of events is not determined by coincidence. The processes of selection and identity formation are explored in this book by means of a multidisciplinary approach – applied to a case study – on a wide variety of levels. 4. We define topoi as ‘parts of argumentation that belong to the obligatory premises. They are content-related warrants or “conclusion rules” that connect the argument with the conclusion’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001, pp. 74–5). 5. In his seminal lecture ‘Ordre de discours’, Foucault formulates a number of crucial axioms about the nature and contexts of discursive events (énoncés): I make the assumption that the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and canalized in every society – and that this is done by way of 276

Notes 277 certain procedures whose task it is to subdue the powers and dangers of discourse, to evade its heavy and threatening materiality. (Foucault, 1984, pp. 10–11) 6. See Wittgenstein (1967); Benke (2000a); Wodak and Van Dijk (2000); and Wodak (2001a, 2001b). 7. See Wodak and Reisigl (1999) for an overview of discourse-theoretical approaches to stereotype formation, discursive production and reproduction of prejudices, and text planning and comprehension. On the planning and comprehension of legal texts, see also Pfeiffer, Strouhal and Wodak (1986).

1 The Crimes of the Wehrmacht in the Second World War 1. Notes of General Franz Halder, quoted in Ueberschär and Wette (1999, p. 249). 2. Bundesarchiv Militärarchiv (Federal Archive military archive) Freiburg (BA-MA), RW 4/v. 577: Erlaß über die Ausübung der Kriegsgerichtsbarkeit im Gebiet ‘Barbarossa’ und über besondere Maßnahmen der Truppe (Decree on the exercising of military jurisdiction in the area ‘Barbarossa’ and on special measures for the troops). OKW chief of staff, Wilhelm Keitel, 13 May 1941. 3. Ibid. 4. OKW Bandenbekämpfung (counter-insurgency), 16 December 1942, quoted in Müller (1980, pp. 139f.). 5. Kriegstagebuch (War journal) AOK 6, Ic, 7 December 1941, quoted in Boll and Safrian (1996, p. 92). 6. German occupation zone comprising the Soviet Baltic states and parts of Belorussia. 7. BA-MA, RH 26–403–2, p. 69; BA-MA, RH 26–339–5; Lagebericht 5.11.1941; BA-MA RH 26–707–15, p. 4. 8. The two letters quoted are from the Library of Contemporary History (Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte) in Stuttgart (‘Sammlung Sterz’). 9. OKW, Anordnungen für die Behandlung sowjetischer Kriegsgefangener, 8.9.1941 (Instructions on the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war), quoted in Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (1996, p. 179). 10. Notes of General Halder, quoted in Ueberschär and Wette (1999, p. 249). 11. NOKW-Dokument 1150 (Nuremberg High Command document 1150), Bemerkungen anlässlich der ‘Reise des stellvertretenden Herrn Oberbefehlshaber nach Serbien’, 5.12.1941 (Remarks concerning the ‘visit to Serbia by the acting commander-in-chief’). 12. Numerous examples of this can be found in Gerlach (1999a, esp. pp. 503–773); Heer (1995c); Krausnick (1985); and Wilhelm (1996). 13. Journal entry for 4 June 1941, quoted in Uhlig (1965, p. 319).

2 The Holocaust as Recounted in Wehrmacht Soldiers’ Letters from the Front 1. See, amongst others: Gerlach (1999a); Heer and Naumann (1995); Hilberg (1996); Krausnick and Wilhelm (1981); Manoschek (1995); Streit (1978). 2. The files of the department ‘Ic’ (Nazi party intelligence service – forerunner of the Sicherheitsdienst, or ‘SD’) were destroyed by the Wehrmacht, either in retreat or, towards the end of the War, at the army archive in Potsdam (see Heer, 1999b, p. 88).

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3. See Walter Manoschek, ‘Quantitative and Qualitative Assessment of the Questionnaire Survey “Austrians in the Second World War”’ (Chapter 3 in this volume). In view of the fact that – in Austria too – expressions of anti-Semitism became somewhat taboo after the War, it seems plausible that this percentage could have been somewhat higher during the period of the Wehrmacht service. 4. On the anti-Semitic mentality of German society during National Socialism see Bankier (1995), Heer (1997b) and Klemperer (1995). 5. On the methodological principles of sampling processes in empirical social research, see Bürklin (1995, pp. 165–70). 6. On the methodological criteria of qualitative approaches to political field research cf. Reh (1995). 7. Sergeant Eduard E., March Battalion, 18 December 1942. 8. Private Wilhelm H., HQ, Construction Battalion 46, 28 May 1941. 9. The figures are estimates by Bogdan Musial. Newly accessible NKVD sources refer to 9689 political prisoners having been killed, although these data are incomplete. The remaining prisoners were either released, were able to escape or were evacuated by the NKVD into the Soviet Union (see Musial, 2000, p. 138). 10. In Heydrich’s operational order no. 1 of 29 June 1941, he states, with reference to his verbally issued instructions of 17 June 1941, in Berlin: ‘There must be no hindrance to efforts at self-cleansing on the part of anti-communist and antiJewish elements in the areas to be occupied. On the contrary, these are to be discretely encouraged, intensified and, where necessary, steered in the right direction, provided that these local “self-defence forces” cannot later invoke instructions or political assurances in mitigation’ (original German text quoted in Longerich, 1990, pp. 118f.). 11. Private Ferdinand B., 1st Medical Company, 125th Infantry Division, 3 July 1941. In Lvov, between 22 and 28 June 1941, some 3500 prisoners were murdered by the NKVD (Musial, 2000, p. 113). Among them were 34 Jews and a number of downed German pilots, some of whom had been mutilated, doused in petrol and set alight, causing the advancing Greater German troops to be greeted by a pall of foul-smelling smoke (see Sandkühler, 1996, p. 113). See also the description of these events by the CSU politician Franz Josef Strauß, who, as a Wehrmacht soldier, entered Lvov at this time (Strauß, 1989, pp. 46f.). 12. Incident report 24 of the Sipo and the SD of 16 July 1941 records that ‘in Lvov the population rounded up approximately 1000 Jews, subjecting them to mistreatment, and delivered them to the Wehrmacht-occupied GPU [Soviet secret police] prison. […] The Sicherheitspolizei rounded up and shot approximately 7000 Jews in reprisal for the inhuman atrocities’ (quoted in Longerich, 1998, p. 337). This figure apparently includes all victims of Einsatzgruppe C up to mid-July 1941. 13. SS ranks are given as their mainstream military equivalent to aid comprehension. SS ranks use a more lurid nomenclature; for example, Hauptscharl führer (main squad leader), as in this case, and Sturmbannführer (storm unit leader), which is equivalent to a major. 14. Diary entry of Felix Landau for 5 July 1941 (quoted in Klee, Dreßen and Rieß, 1988, pp. 90f.). 15. An anti-Semitic weekly magazine founded in 1923 by Julius Streicher, with a circulation of one million copies. 16. Lieutenant K., 1st Company, Corps Signals Detachment 44, 13 February 1942. 17. According to NKVD records, 574 prisoners were killed in Tarnopol. Eyewitnesses speak of up to 1000 victims (Musial, 2000, p. 128).

Notes 279 18. The Special Units, or Sonderkommandos of the SD should not be confused with the grotesquely named Sonderkommandos at concentration camps. The latter were groups of inmates required to carry out particularly appalling tasks, such as disposing of the bodies of the victims of mass extermination, usually before being murdered themselves. 19. Bundesarchiv Koblenz, R 58/214, events report of Sipo and SD no. 14, 6 July, 1941; no. 19, 11 July 1941; no. 24, 16 July 1941. 20. Bundesarchiv Koblenz, R 58/214, events report of Sipo and SD no. 28, 20 July, 1941. 21. Bundesarchiv Koblenz, R 58/214, events report of Sipo and SD no. 14, 6 July, 1941. 22. Major Hans Sch., HQ, Engineer Battalion 652, 11 July 1941, from Lutsk. 23. Bundesarchiv Koblenz, R 58/214, events report of Sipo and SD no. 14, 16 July 1941. 24. Private Eugen M., Reserve Hospital Bad Nauheim, 20 November 1941. 25. Soldier Christoph B., 7 July 1941. 26. Private Herbert S., member of a signals company, August 1941. 27. Diary entry of General Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb, 8 July 1941 (quoted after Krausnik, 1985, p. 181). 28. Bundesarchiv Militärarchiv Freiburg, RH 26–295/22, Propaganda Company report 666, 6 July, 1941. 29. A formation within the Einsatzgruppe. The latter is made up of Sonderkommandos (special units) and Einsatzkommandos. 30. Diary entry of Felix Landau, 9 July 1941 (quoted in Klee, Dreßen and Rieß, 1988, pp. 94–104). 31. Walter Jung, interviewed by Bogdan Musial, in Musial (2000, p. 243). 32. Captain Hermann G., HQ, Security Regiment 2, 15 July 1941 from Kosow, Eastern Galicia. 33. Captain Hermann G., HQ, Security Regiment 2, 17 July 1941 from Kosow, Eastern Galicia. 34. Private Max F., 7th Company, Infantry Regiment 481, 256th Infantry Division, 23 July 1941. 35. Field judicial inspector Franz A., Field Command HQ 199V, 26 October 1941. 36. Customs official Hans B., 9 August 1942 from Ogrodzieniec. On instructions from the commander-in-chief of the Sixth Army, General Field Marshal von Reichenau, and ‘in accordance with instructions from the chief-of-staff of Army High Command 6’, as well as ‘in consultation with the commanders of the Rear Army area of the Sixth Army and / or the Rear Military Zone’, the 1st SS Infantry Brigade, in a ‘cleansing action’ in and around Novograd Volynsky between 27 and 30 July 1941, shot dead 800 Jewish men and women aged between 16 and 60. It was thus the first unit that, by the end of July 1941, had resorted to shooting Jewish women also (quotation after Longerich, 1998, pp. 368f.). 37. Testimony of eyewitnesses and survivors of the massacre in Grossmann and Ehrenburg (1994, pp. 43–58). 38. Private Ludwig, 10th Light Infantry Column, Infantry Division Column 296, 269th Infantry Division, 28 September 1941. A military security officer present at the discussion in question, on 27 September 1941, stated in a post-war trial in the German Federal Republic, that the executions of Jews had nothing to do with the house explosions carried out by the Red Army by means of timed detonations: ‘In the discussion, as far as I can recall, there was no mention that these Jews were being evacuated in retaliation for the timed explosions that the Russians set off in the city of Kiev. I remember that we, as Ic-officers, were informed in good time we should expect the explosions in Kiev. Also, the troops were constantly being warned

280

39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48.

49.

50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

Notes by us before the capture of Kiev about the possibility of all kinds of disruption action. […] According to my impressions at the time, these were actions of a military nature that had nothing to do with the Jews.’ (Statement by G. Sch., Federal Archive, Central Office of the State Judicial Administration, Ludwigsburg, Js 4/65, special volume X, quoted after Boll and Safrian, 1995, p. 278). On the murder of Jews by the 707th Infantry Division see Heer (1995b) and Gerlach (1999a, pp. 615–25). Letter home from Oberleutnant J. K. 15 October 1941 (quoted in Heer, 1999d, pp. 22f.). Soldier Xaver M., 8th Company, Infantry Regt. 747, 707th Infantry Division, 2 November 1941. With reference to rampages against Jews in the Belorussian villages, the district commissar Gerhard Erren noted ruefully in Slonim: ‘Over a period the flat country was painstakingly cleansed. But unfortunately only in places with fewer than 1000 inhabitants’ (quoted in Klee, Dreßen and Rieß, 1988, p. 168). Altogether the 707th Infantry Division registered between 1 and 15 October 1941 ‘2721 captured, of whom 2053 shot dead’, and between 11 October and 10 November 1941 ‘total number captured: 10,940, of whom 10,431 shot dead’. By the end of December 1941, the total had increased to 19,000, of whom ‘far more than half were Jews’ (quoted in Gerlach, 1999a, pp. 618f.). The Einsatzgruppen initially still used the term ‘Partisans’ as a cover for the massacring of Jews. With few exceptions, prior to the spring of 1942 there was practically no partisan activity in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union (see Heer, 1995c). Lance Corporal Richard T.-G. v. F., 2nd Company, Engineering Battalion 70, 25 September 1941. Letter from a soldier from an engineering unit in Belorussia, 17 October 1942. Institute of Contemporary History, Munich [Ifz] (quoted in Möller, Dahm and Mehringer, 1999, p. 239). At the end of 1942 there were still some 12,000 Jews living in Minsk, of whom 2600 were Austrians and Germans deported to Minsk, and 9472 Belorussian Jews. Corporal Franz K., 4th Company, Construction Battalion 55, 14 August 1942. Military administrator Heinrich K., Baranavichy, 18 April 1942. Military administrator Heinrich K., Baranavichy, 21 April 1942. Heinrich K. gave the exact figure (2007) of Jewish men and women shot dead on 3 and 4 April 1942. This comprised individuals who had been categorized as neither capable of work, nor dependents of those deemed to be capable of work (see Gerlach, 1999a, p. 691). Military administrator Heinrich K., 28 May 1942, from Brest-Litovsk. Thousands of Jews from the Brest area were set to work in Spring 1942 in the forced labour camps of ‘Organization Todt’ (OT) for road, bridge and railway construction. They ‘were to be dealt with by the executive authorities only after the end of the construction season’ (Inspection report of the OT commissioner for Central Russia, 5 August 1942, quoted in Gerlach, 1999a, p. 662). Military administrator Heinrich K., 18 July 1942, from Brest-Litovsk. On 15 July 1942 1300 Jews from Bereza Kartuska – approximately half the Jewish population of this small town – had been shot (see Gerlach, 1999a, p. 716). Military administrator Heinrich K., Baranavichy, 23 September 1942. Most ghetto inmates had already been deported to the extermination camps and murdered in 1942. A small number remained for a time in the ghettos. These ghettos were then called Restghettos (remnant ghettos). Private Georg C., 2nd Workshop Company 311, 20 May 1944. Private Wolfgang R., Regiment HQ, Grenadier Regiment 753, 326th Infantry Division, 9 November 1944. Lance Corporal G. B., 13th Company, Infantry Regiment 42, 18 July 1941.

Notes 281 55. On the decision-making process concerning the comprehensive killing of all Jewish women and children, see Ogorreck (1996). 56. Lance Corporal (name unknown), Military police / Replacement Company 4, 16 December 1941. After an assassination on 28 November 1941, 50 Jews and communists were shot. When several days later another assassination followed, a further 45 people were shot. A further 1000 Jewish inmates and 500 imprisoned as communists at internment and police prison camps were selected for transportation ‘to the East’. However, due to transport problems, they remained for the time being at the camps in France. Only in the Spring of 1942 did the automation of hostage shootings and the deportation of Jews take effect in France: between 18 April and 31 May 1942 approximately 6000 Jews and communists were deported ‘to the East’ as a ‘reprisal measure’ (see Herbert, 1998b, pp. 189–93). 57. Soldier Sigbert M., Radio Platoon 28 (whilst on the way to the Front), 7 December 1942. 58. Soldier W. Sch., 8th Company, Flight Training Regiment 63, 26 March 1942. 59. Cavalry Captain K. H., National defence department, Wirtschaftskommando (economic commando) Brieg z.b.V, 30 January 1943. 60. Corporal A. N., Airfield Command (A) 221/XII, 15 May 1943, from Lyon. 61. Corporal A. N., Airfield Command (A) 221/XII, 29 May 1943, from Lyon. 62. Lance Corporal H. H., 1st Company, Signals Battalion 91, 6th Mountain Division, 12 June 1943. 63. Corporal O. D., 4th Company, Transport Security Regiment 882, 16 August 1944. 64. Private K.B., 6th Company, Motor Transport Battalion z.b.V. 503, 27 August 1944. 65. W. J., 7th Battery, Artillery Regiment 116, 5th Panzer Division, 22 December 1943. 66. Corporal E., local command HQ (II) 351, 7 August 1944. 67. Lance Corporal G. G., Engineer Machine Platoon / Bridge Building Battalion 624, 11 August 1944. 68. Private H. W., 3rd War Hospital for Minor Cases / War Hospital Battalion 518, 29 September 1944. 69. Organization Todt (OT): the OT, named after its founder, Fritz Todt, was a construction organization for military installations in the ‘German Reich’ and in the occupied territories. In 1944 more than 1.3 million people were employed by the OT, including approximately a million forced labourers, prisoners of war and Jewish and non-Jewish concentration camp inmates. 70. Luftwaffe junior auxiliary, 20 November 1944, from Dormettingen. 71. Corporal Heinrich V., HQ, Observation Battalion 71, 15 October 1944. 72. Corporal Heinrich V., personal diary, 3 May 1945, Revnice (Prague). 73. After the war two of the three Austrian camp commandants, Siegfried Seidl and Karl Rahm, were condemned to death by a Czech court and subsequently hanged. The third commandant of Theresienstadt, Anton Burger, was condemned to death in absentia. Burger was able to go underground with a false name and died in Essen in 1991 (Benz, 1997, pp. 757–8, 826). 74. Notes of Chief of General Staff Halder (quoted in Streit, 1978, p. 34).

3 The Attitudes and Beliefs of Austrian Soldiers in the German Wehrmacht 1938–45: Analysis of the Questionnaire Survey ‘Austrians in the Second World War’ 1. My thanks to Gustav Spann and Peter Malina of the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna for making available the Final Report and the volumes of tables for secondary analysis. 2. 3.5 per cent of those questioned (some 39 individuals) were with the Waffen-SS (Univariate Data Analysis, vol. 2). The ranks of the Waffen-SS numbered some

282

3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

Notes 900,000 men by the end of the war. In the survey the Waffen-SS is significantly under-represented in terms of numbers, which is related to the fact that membership of the Waffen-SS was not explicitly asked about, and the information provided voluntarily. On the method of multiple linear regression, see Hauer (1991). Memorandum for the foreign ministers’ negotiations in London, 1947 (reproduced in Csaky, 1980, p. 121). Rot-Weiß-Rot-Buch (Red-White-Red Book) 1946: in this book the official position of the government on the relationship between Austria and National Socialism was set out. Companion volume to the exhibition ‘Niemals vergessen!’ (Never forget!), staged in Vienna in 1946 (quoted in Konrad, 1997, p. 96). Ronald Reagan resorted to this interpretation, inspired by theories of totalitarianism, as recently as 1985, in his speech at a military cemetery in Bitburg. Moreover he included the Waffen-SS: ‘Those young men are victims of Nazism too, even though they were fighting in the German uniform, drafted into service to carry out the hateful wishes of the Nazis. They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps’ (quoted in Mitten, 1999a). The Trial of German Major War Criminals, the Nizkor Project: www.nizkor.org/ hweb/imt/tgmwc/tgmwc-22/tgmwc-22-215-04.shtml. Another useful online source for Nuremberg transcripts and other documents is the Yale Law School Avalon Project: www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/imt.htm (both links accessed 10 December 2006). Grete Nitsch, in Kleine Zeitung Klagenfurt, 29 April 1995. On the various aspects of the (Federal German) myth of the ‘untainted Wehrmacht’, see Naumann (1998, pp. 8–18). CDU Association, Bremen, Das Wahre is das Ganze’ (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, philosopher). Dokumentation über die Ausstellung ‘Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941–1944 (Bremen, February 1997). The epithet ‘Heroes of the Homeland’ (Helden der Heimat) is one of the most prevalent inscriptions found on local war memorials in Austria. Kleine Zeitung, 5 June 1951 (quoted in Uhl, 1996, p. 152). Ostmark was the name given to Austria after the Anschluss, when it became merely a province within Großdeutschland (Greater Germany). The term Reichsdeutsche (Germans of the Empire) is sometimes used to refer the population of Germany as it was constituted before its acquisitions under the Nazis. In a supplementary question concerning differences in soldierly virtues, ‘Ostmarkers’ were attributed with a greater degree of comradeship (41.9 per cent) than Reich Germans (14.2 per cent). Austrian school-leaving examination required for University entry. For the texts of the orders in question, see Ueberschär and Wette (1999, pp. 241–350).

4 ‘That is what is so terrible – that millions of soldiers were there, yet today they all claim they never saw a thing’: War and the Nazi Period, as Recalled by Visitors to the Wehrmacht Exhibition in Vienna, 1995 1. German title: ‘Jenseits des Krieges’ (literally, ‘Beyond war’). The film was released on DVD in 2006 by HOANZL in cooperation with the Austrian newspaper Der Standard. English and French subtitles are provided.

Notes 283 2. A first attempt was undertaken by Benke and Wodak (2003) and Benke (2000b). 3. The birth data are taken from the material available, and are not intended to construct a generational model, as attempted by Gabriele Rosenthal. The model she developed is related to German society – for example, Weimar youth (1906–20) – and therefore cannot be applied to Austria. It is, however, not always coherent in itself. Thus, it must be doubted whether, in the case of the ‘Hitler Youth generation’ (1922–29), it is actually the Hitler Youth that is the factor defining common experience, or whether, in fact, it is the intensive wartime experience of those born in 1920–24 that separates this age group clearly from the next, who experienced only the end of the war (cf. Rosenthal, 1994, 1997a). 4. From voluntary organization beginnings, converted into a state organization in 1935 under the name Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD). All youths from the age of 18 were required to take part in collective work assignments at camps for a period of six months. Males received a preparatory military training and when war broke out, most were immediately called up to the Wehrmacht. As an auxiliary formation, the RAD provided logistical support to the Wehrmacht throughout the Second World War, though in the latter stages, RAD units were increasingly called into combat service. 5. Gabriele Rosenthal uses for this age cohort the generational rubric: ‘children of the Third Reich’ (see Rosenthal, 1998). 6. The figures in brackets signify the specific interviews. 7. On the narrative behaviour of children who have lost close relatives in war, see Rosenthal (1998). 8. Gabriele Rosenthal uses the term ‘justificatory dialogue’ to characterize the entire age group. Her argument, developed on the basis of 12 interviews, is plausible. However, amongst the 17 interviews we examined, this is the only one to which Rosenthal’s term is applicable. The discrepancy must be due to the differing German and Austrian narratives (cf. Heinritz, 1985; Rosenthal, 1998, pp. 126ff.). 9. The Volkssturm was a national militia mobilized during the final stages of the war to fight on the home front, offering resistance (and thereby prolonging the war and costing more lives) even though defeat was by now inevitable. 10. Kriegshilfsdienst. From July 1941, after their period of service with the Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD), women were conscripted to a further six months of service with Wehrmacht organizations, in hospitals or in arms production. 11. Now Kranj, Slovenia. 12. In October 1942, on Hitler’s orders, a special Wehrmacht formation was created under the name of ‘Probation Battalion 999’. It consisted of soldiers of ‘conditional military worthiness’ – that is, recruits whose ‘fitness for service’ had not been recognized or soldiers who had been demoted as a consequence of political or criminal offences. The unit, consisting of approximately 30,000 men, was deployed on all fronts. It was considered unreliable because of the lack of social coherency, and brutal because of the widespread desire for rehabilitation. Many of the anti-Nazi conscripts tried to desert. 13. The Flakhelfer were children born 1926–29, conscripted after January 1943 to work in anti-aircraft defence, under the supervision of the Hitler Youth and the Luftwaffe. 14. Bund Deutscher Mädel. 15. An early extermination method, which actually predated the static gas chamber. First used in 1942, the ‘gas’ was the vehicle’s own exhaust fumes, which were piped into an airtight container mounted on the vehicle’s chassis. 16. The reactions discussed in the following passages can be also be observed in German interviews carried out on behalf of the Hamburger Institute for Social Research (see Heer, 1998b).

284

Notes

17. Actually the Jewish cultural community (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde) in Vienna has approximately 7000 members. 18. Ernst Röhm: an early leading light of the Nazi party, and founder and chief of the SA, fell out with Hitler and other Nazi leaders and was arrested and subsequently murdered in 1934, in a purge known as the ‘night of the long knives’. 19. Renate Schostack, ‘Beichtväter gesucht’ (father confessors wanted), in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 8 April 1997.

5 Defining the Victims of Nazism: The Austrian ‘War Victims Benefits Act’ (KOVG) in Cabinet Discussions, Parliamentary Debates and the Press 1. Minute no. 157 of the Ministerrat (cabinet), 17 May 1949. (Notes on the drafting of the KOVG, p. 7.) 2. The conservative (ÖVP) presidential candidate in 1986, Kurt Waldheim, caused a heated public debate about Austria’s past and how the Republic dealt with it after 1945, when it emerged that his official CV was missing details about his military service in the Second World War (see Tóth and Czernin, 2006). 3. Reichsversorgungsgesetz (RVG), 12 May 1920. 4. Wehrmachtsfürsorge- und -versorgungsgesetz (WFVG). 5. Personenschädenverordnung (PSchVO). 6. These efforts culminated in an official document which sought to document Austria’s role as victim (Rot-Weiß-Rot Buch [Red-White-Red Book], 1946). 7. As Alexander Pollak is able to demonstrate in Chapter 6 of this volume, the statement in this form does not apply to the print media. Whilst the integration of former National Socialists was pursued at the societal level, media reports on Austrian resistance increased during the period from 1948 until the attainment of the State Treaty (granting Austrian independence) in 1955. This justifies the conclusion that the media acted ‘for the State’, that is to say, with reference to the Allies, whilst domestic policy was concerned with integrationist political objectives. 8. In the years 1947 and 1948 there had been, respectively, 3793 and 4161 convictions. In 1949 there were only 1810, and in the early 1950s only a few hundred people were convicted under the two laws (see Forster, 2001, pp. 238f.). 9. Verband der Rückstellungsbetroffenen. 10. Verband der Unabhängigen (VdU). 11. The Moscow Declaration, published on 1 November 1943, was a common statement by the governments of the Soviet Union, the United States and the United Kingdom (France joined the declaration later on). In it, the Allies agreed that Austria should be regarded as the first German-occupied state, to be re-established after the end of the war. However, the declaration also stated that Austria had a responsibility to fight for its own liberation. While Austrian politicians, after 1945, referred extensively to the first part of the declaration, they rarely mentioned the second (see Steininger, 2005). 12. The Annulment Act (StGBl. No. 48, 3 July 1945) envisaged the annulment of convictions by the Wehrmacht courts martial against Austrians, as they had been of ‘typically National Socialist character’. The War Criminals Act (StFBl. No. 32, 19 June 1945) Article 1, paragraph 2 says that anyone must be convicted as a war criminal ‘who, in the actual or presumed interests of the German Wehrmacht or National Socialist tyranny, committed or caused to be committed during this war, in connection with combat activities, military actions or actions of militarily

Notes 285

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

organized units, any act against other persons which contravenes the natural requirements of humanity.’ Opferfürsorgegesetz (StGBl. No. 90, 17 July 1945). Second Act: BGBl. No. 183/1947. Zentralorganization der Kriegsopferverbände. Bundesministerium für soziale Verwaltung/Zentralorganization der Kriegsopferverbände Österreichs (1979); Kriegsopfer- und Behindertenverband für Wien, Niederösterreich und Burgenland (Ernst et al., 1995). Engelbert Dollfuß, ‘Austrofascist’ chancellor from 1932 until his assassination by Nazis in 1934, during an attempted coup d’état. Kurt von Schuschnigg, ‘Austrofascist’ chancellor from 1934 (succeeding Dollfuß) until the ‘Anschluss’ on 12 March 1938. NS-Opferverband. Karl Maisel (SPÖ), minute no. 22 of the Ministerrat (cabinet) meeting of 28 May 1946 (speech by the federal minister for social affairs to the cabinet). Stadthalle: not the town hall, but one of Europe’s largest and (at the time) most modern venues for cultural events. The government of Austria from April 1945, under the chancellorship of Karl Renner, pending national elections held in November 1945. Minute no. 12 of the Ministerrat (cabinet) meeting of 12 June 1945, quoted in Enderle-Burcel, Jerábek and Kammerhofer (1995, p. 218). Karl Maisel (SPÖ), minute no. 22 of the Ministerrat meeting of 28 May 1946 (speech by the federal minister for social affairs to the cabinet). Karl Maisel (SPÖ), minute no. 58 of the Ministerrat meeting of 25 February 1947. Karl Altmann (KPÖ), minute no. 58 of the Ministerrat meeting of 25 February 1947 (transcript, p. 14). Georg Zimmermann (ÖVP), ibid., p. 15. Leopold Figl (ÖVP), ibid. Minute no. 266 of the Ministerrat, 23 October 1951 (speech by the federal chancellor to the cabinet). Minute no. 157 of the Ministerrat, 17 May 1949. (Notes on the drafting of the KOVG.) Georg Zimmermann (ÖVP), ibid. (transcript, p. 11). Karl Maisl (SPÖ), ibid. (speech by the federal minister for social affairs to the cabinet). Minute no. 157 of the Ministerrat, 17 May 1949. (Notes on the drafting of the KOVG, p. 7.) Karl Kysela (SPÖ), rapporteur for the Social Affairs Committee on the government bill Federal Act for the Welfare Benefits for War Victims and Surviving Dependents (KOVG), 177th sitting of the Nationalrat of the Republic of Austria, fifth legislative period, 14 July 1949, p. 3377. The Viennese municipal councillor Viktor Matejka, one of the very few to make any effort with regard to the return of expellees, noted: ‘I demanded no more or less than that all offices and individuals in positions of authority in Austria inform all our emigrants, at least in theory, that they were most welcome back in their liberated homeland. No such declaration was ever made at the time by any Austrian authority’ (Matejka, 1984, p. 192). This heralded the approach of Allied bombers. Viktor Elser, rapporteur for the Social Affairs Committee, 177th sitting of the Nationalrat of the Republic of Austria, fifth legislative period, 14 July 1949, p. 3379. Karl Kysela, ibid. Viktor Elser, ibid. Ibid., pp. 3381–2.

286 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62.

Notes Alois Wimberger, ibid., p. 3385. Alois Wimberger, ibid., p. 3387. Josef Dengler, ibid., p. 3387. Josef Dengler, ibid., p. 3388. Josef Dengler, ibid. The Austrian government satisfied itself with ‘avoiding the enshrinement in law of Austrian co-responsibility and thus warding off, to the greatest extent possible, any ensuing reparations demands by the Allies, as well as claims for restitution or ideas about compensation’ (quoted in Botz, 1996b, p. 32). The ‘kaiserlich und königlich’ (k.u.k.) Army of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy from 1867 to 1918. Alois Wimberger, 62nd sitting of the Nationalrat of the Republic of Austria, sixth legislative period, 25 July 1951, p. 2154. Viktor Elser, ibid., p. 2156. Franz Grubhofer, ibid., pp. 2164–5. Helfried Pfeifer, ibid., p. 2166. Helfried Pfeifer, ibid. Helfried Pfeifer, ibid. Franz Olah, ibid., p. 2172. See, for example, the 44th sitting of the Nationalrat of the Republic of Austria, seventh legislative period, 6 July 1954, pp. 1870–900. Neues Österreich, 15 July 1949. Wiener Zeitung, 15 July 1949. Die Presse, 14 July 1949. Arbeiter-Zeitung, 15 July 1949. Kleines Volksblatt, 14 July 1949. Österreichische Volksstimme, 15 July 1949. The Volksopposition (‘People’s Opposition’) was a strategic alliance for the parliamentary elections in 1953 between the Austrian Communist Party (KPÖ) and left-wing socialists who had left the SPÖ. It was the last time in the history of the Second Republic that a group to the left of the SPÖ succeeded in being elected to the Nationalrat (see Keller, 1993, p. 104–21). Peter Krauland, minister for economic planning from 1945–49. Resigned 1949 and left the ÖVP in 1951 over allegations of misuse of office (though acquitted at trial of any criminal wrongdoing).

6 The Myth of the ‘Untainted Wehrmacht’: The Structural Elements of Wehrmacht Mythology in the Austrian Press since 1945 1. For more information on the news media quoted in this chapter, see Appendix. 2. For a more detailed representation of the individual constructional elements, see Pollak (2002a, 2002b and 2003). 3. Negotiations for the creation of a new, independent Austrian state, following annexation by Germany and occupation by the Allies. The State Treaty was signed on 15 May 1955. 4. August Adam: ‘Stalingrad die große Wende’ (Stalingrad, the great turning point), in Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, 23 January 1963. 5. Critical discourse analytical studies of the Waldheim affair can be found, for example, in Wodak et al. (1990) and Wassermann (2000).

Notes 287 6. This change in approach to the subject of the Wehrmacht also affected those parts of the media that continued to proclaim the collective innocence of the soldiers. It meant that henceforth, instead of equivocating, they were obliged to take a position – albeit a negative one – on the Wehrmacht exhibition and its contents. 7. Roland Barthes defines myths as second-order semiological systems. After the primary linguistic codification there follows a further (secondary) codification which confers meaning. This second codification takes place in the context of a discursive process whereby a meaning, once produced, excludes all other possible meanings (see Barthes, 1964, p. 92). In the case under discussion, however, and this applies both to the Wehrmacht myth and Austrian victimhood myth, we are not only dealing with myths in the Barthian sense. The Wehrmacht myth and the victimhood myth are not merely symbolically potent and collectively meaningful narratives which influence collective identity, but at the same time narratives which are counterfactual, in the sense that they contradict – or ignore – historiographic knowledge. 8. K. R.: ‘Beweismaterial. Erinnerungen eines Heimkehrers’ (The evidence – recollections of a returnee), in Arbeiter-Zeitung, 22 January 1946. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. P. D.: ‘Von Stalingrad bis Wien’ (From Stalingrad to Vienna), in Neues Österreich, 3 February 1948. 13. ‘Briefe im Angesicht des Todes’ (Letters from death’s door), in Wiener Kurier, 24 January 1953. 14. Cato: ‘Recht und Angst’ (Justice and fear), in Neue Kronenzeitung, 15 October 1966. 15. Morgenthau Plan: a radical US plan calling for the partition and deindustrialization of Germany after the Second World War. Although initially backed by Roosevelt, the plan was considered too extreme, and was not adopted by the Allies. Indeed, the knowledge of its existence during the last year of the war was believed to have handed a propaganda coup to Goebbels, who cited it as ‘proof’ that Germany’s enemies planned to enslave her. 16. Clemens Lothar: ‘30 Jahre nach der Machtübernahme – 20 Jahre nach Stalingrad: Adolf Hitler – Voraussetzungen und Folgen’ (30 years after the takeover of power – 20 years after Stalingrad: Adolf Hitler – preconditions and consequences), in Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, 26 January 1963. 17. Hans Rauscher: ‘Die Vertriebenen – die Volksdeutschen und ihr Schicksal’ (The expellees – the ethnic Germans and their fate), in Kurier, 8 May 1985. 18. Viktor Reimann: ‘Die Vertreibung der Rechtlosen’ (The expulsion of those without rights), in Neue Kronenzeitung, 7 February 1981. 19. Waltraud Dengel: ‘Versöhnung mit der Vergangenheit’ (Reconciliation with the past), in Neue Kronenzeitung, 8 July 1990. 20. Viktor Reimann: ‘Wie es zur Katastrophe kam’ (How the catastrophe came about), in Neue Kronenzeitung, 1 September 1979. 21. Fritz Linke: ‘Nach 40 Jahren: Stalins Mitschuld’ (40 years on: Stalin’s share of the blame), in Neues Volksblatt, 1 September 1979. 22. W. G. Arminger: ‘Der Krieg’ (The War), in Neues Volksblatt, 1 September 1979. 23. Both theses are advanced in Die Presse by Heinz Magenheimer. See for example: ‘22. Juni 1941, “Unternehmen Barbarossa”’ (22 June 1941: ‘Operation Barbarossa’), in Die Presse, 22 June 1991. Cf. the contrasting (because based on the longer-range war planning of Nazi Germany) portrayal in Ueberschär and Wette (1999). 24. Ibid.

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25. Ingomar Pust: ‘Gebirgsjäger in der Hölle der Arktis’ (Mountain Infantry in the Arctic hell), in Neue Kronenzeitung, series in January and February 1976. 26. Ingomar Pust: ‘Tragödie am Eismeer’ (Tragedy in the Arctic Sea), in Neue Kronenzeitung, 25 March 1994. 27. Ingomar Pust: ‘Die Todesflieger’ (The Death Pilots), in Neue Kronenzeitung, 8 June 1994. 28. Peter Gerner: ‘Es hat an Glück gefehlt, nicht an Wert’ (Short on fortune, not on substance), in Die Presse, 24 October 1992. 29. Manfred Wrussnig: ‘Stalingrad’, in Kurier, 29 January 1993. 30. Richard Nimmerrichter: ‘Hinter Stacheldraht in Russland’ (Behind barbed wire in Russia), in Neue Kronenzeitung, 22 April 1969. 31. Richard Nimmerrichter: ‘Hinter Stacheldraht in Russland’ (Behind barbed wire in Russia), in Neue Kronenzeitung, 24 April 1969. 32. Richard Nimmerrichter: ‘Hinter Stacheldraht in Russland’ (Behind barbed wire in Russia), in Neue Kronenzeitung, 29 April 1969. 33. Hans Dichland: ‘Unsere Kriegsgefangenen in sowjetischen Lagern’ (Our POWs in Soviet camps), in Neue Kronenzeitung, 23 April 1995. 34. See also Chapter 3 (this volume). 35. Werner Schneider: ‘Rückkehr aus dem Stalingrad-Kessel’ (Return from the pocket at Stalingrad), in Kurier, 7 February 1993. 36. Franz Jägerstätter: a Catholic sacristan in Austria, who refused to serve for the Wehrmacht. He was executed by the Nazi regime in 1943. 37. Clemens M. Hutter: ‘Der Soldat ist Rächer am jüdischen Untermenschentum’ (The soldier is the avenger of Jewish subhumanity), in Salzburger Nachrichten, 13 May 1995. 38. The new Wehrmacht Exhibition devotes an entire section to the topic: ‘room for discretion’ and shows very clearly that the command situations of the officers and men of the Wehrmacht almost certainly provided scope for discretion (see Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, 2002). 39. In Salzburger Nachrichten, 13 May 1995. 40. Karl Dönitz was commander of the German Navy throughout the Second World War and briefly succeeded Hitler (following the latter’s suicide) as head of the Third Reich. 41. Wolfgang Oberleitner: ‘Die 23 Tage des Großadmirals – Wenig letzte Ehren für Karl Dönitz’ (The 23 days of the Grand Admiral – few last respects for Karl Dönitz), in Die Presse, 31 December 1980.

7 ‘The appalling toll in Austrian lives …’: The Wehrmacht and its Soldiers in Austrian School Books 1. Circular from the GLV (Geistige Landesverteidigung), No. 95, January 2000. Quoted in Der Standard, 6 March 2000. 2. The ministry in question is now called the Federal Ministry for Education, Science and Culture or BMBWK (Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur). 3. Der Standard, 6 March 2000. 4. The controversy surrounding the presidential candidature of Kurt Waldheim. See Appendix for more information. 5. On these recurring topoi, see further Heer, Chapter 4 and Pollak, Chapter 6 in this volume.

Notes 289 6. See Article 15, paragraph 2 of the School Education Act (Schulunterrichtsgesetz 1986): BGBl. Nr. 472/1986 (WV). 7. A note on the conventions used in the reference section: the additional years of publication given are ones in which the chapters relevant to this analysis remained substantially the same across editions. 8. The name for the Austrian armed forces from 1921 onwards, except during the years of Nazi rule, 1938–45. 9. This emotionally phrased paragraph recalls in its selection of vocabulary and style the declaration of independence. See StGBl. 1/1945, the Austrian Declaration of Independence – Unabhängigkeitserklärung Österreichs, proclaimed on 27 April 1945. 10. Virtually identical in: ARGE Geschichte und Sozialkunde (1996, p. 47); Floiger, Ebenhoch and Tuschel (1992, pp. 72f.); and Schimper et al. (1989, p. 106). 11. The actual figure was more than 1.2 million. 12. Freies Deutschland. 13. The first critical studies to concern themselves with the crimes of the Wehrmacht met with widespread rejection in the late 1970s and early 1980s (see especially Streit, 1978; and Krausnick and Wilhelm, 1981). 14. A similar wording (albeit in a historically incorrect context) is found in Absenger and Pfeiffer (1998, p. 181). 15. On the significance of the ‘Commissar Order’ [Kommissarbefehl], see Walter Manoschek, Chapter 1 in this volume. 16. The ‘Night and Fog’ (Nacht und Nebel) decree, also known as the ‘Keitel Order’, issued on 7 December 1941, provided for political opponents and resistance figures to be clandestinely removed to concentration camps and/or murdered. 17. Examples typically mentioned include the conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter and the religious anti-Nazi activist Roman Scholz. Both men paid for their principles with their lives, being executed in 1943 and 1944, respectively. 18. Der Standard, 24 August 2000.

8 All that Remains of the Second World War: Stalingrad and Wehrmacht Mythology in Television Documentaries 1. On the differing types of narrative concerning the historical event ‘Stalingrad’, see also Kumpfmüller (1995). 2. Figures for the number of dead vary greatly, according to how narrowly or broadly the battle for the city of Stalingrad is defined. The more narrowly based estimates of Wehrmacht losses amount to around 200,000 men. 3. The armed forces of modern Germany. The Austrian equivalent is called the Bundesheer. 4. Kehrig is the author of the book ‘Stalingrad: Analyse und Dokumentation einer Schlacht’ (Kehrig, 1974). He works for the Military History Research Institute (MGFA), latterly as director of the Federal Military Archive (Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv) in Freiburg. 5. The best-known book by Fritz Wöss, ‘Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben?’ (Dogs, do you want to live forever?) (1958) was also made into a film. 6. Unfortunately, the author was unable to obtain the original version of the documentary in order to compare it with the version edited and dubbed by the ORF.

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7. The Panorama programme format was described in the ORF Yearbook (ORF, 1974) in the following terms: ‘Pissecker and Podgorski’s Panorama is a satirical, featurebased magazine which uses state-of-the-art camera work and editing techniques to hold a mirror up to contemporary society.’ 8. Hugo Portisch is a well-known journalist and broadcaster in Austria, who started his career in 1948 at the Wiener Tageszeitung and later became chief editor of the newspaper Kurier. From the late 1950s onwards, he also worked for the Austrian Broadcasting Company (ORF) as a reporter and political commentator. His TV series Österreich I (Austria I) and Österreich II (Austria II), which he produced together with cameraman Sepp Riff in the 1980s, earned him the unofficial status of ‘Austria’s voice on history’ and became the hegemonic narrative. In 2005, he produced another series of documentaries entitled Die Zweite Republik – eine unglaubliche Geschichte (The Second Austrian Republic – An Incredible Story). 9. Ostmark is how Austria was referred to, once it became absorbed into ‘Greater Germany’. 10. Guido Knopp is a well-known writer and journalist, and presenter of history programmes on German television, with the emphasis on twentieth-century German history. He has been with ZDF since 1978 and is widely credited with popularizing historical documentaries in Germany, although he is not without his critics. 11. The speaker means ‘the entire population of the village’. 12. The title used for the German language version was Hitlers Krieg im Osten [Hitler’s war in the East]. 13. The German language version was called Der Wendepunkt (The Turning Point). 14. The present author conducted guided tours of the exhibition ‘Verbrechen der Wehrmacht: Dimensionen des Vernichtungskrieges 1941 bis 1944’ (Crimes of the Wehrmacht: Dimensions of the War of Annihilation, 1941 to 1944), in Vienna, April and May 2002. Visitors to the exhibition regularly conjured up the images in question when referring to ‘Stalingrad’. In other words, the images shown in television documentaries, and similar images in the print media, really were anchored in the visual memory of many Austrians, and impacted both on the visual perception and historical understanding of ‘Stalingrad’ and the Second World War.

9 Crime Scene: Wehrmacht Exhibition 1. The series Tatort is a firm fixture in the main evening schedule in Germany, and is also broadcast in Austria. In 2001, according to the German national broadcaster ARD, an average 7.46 million viewers watched the investigations of the Tatort detectives, making it the most popular crime series on German television. 2. The two detectives in this episode of Tatort are Max Ballauf (played by Klaus J. Behrendt) and Freddy Schenk (Dietmar Bär). The ARD website (www.daserste.de/ tatort/kommissare.asp) describes the two detectives in the following terms: Ballauf: After serving in Düsseldorf at the side of Detective Superintendent Flemming, Max Ballauf undertook specialist training with Drug Enforcement Agency in Florida. Since his return, the previously ‘happy-go-lucky’ Ballauf has become more serious and reflective, with a heightened awareness of background influences and the limits of law enforcement. Max Ballauf is not short of popularity with the opposite sex, a fact which has landed him in tricky situations from time to time. Since turning 40 years of age, he is increasingly starting to question his lifestyle as a bachelor and permanent guest in a small hotel.

Notes 291

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

Schenk: Family man Freddy Schenk is no square. That much is clear from his elegant dress sense: the brawny police officer and gun enthusiast loves wearing trainers – together with tight-fitting business suits! Because he works so much and spends too little time at home, he has more and more quarrels with his wife, which he usually ends up trying to smooth over on the telephone. He watches his two daughters with mixed feelings as they mature into young women. Since becoming partner to Ballauf, the former wild boy with his heart in the right place has become a smart detective, who not infrequently becomes emotionally affected by the cases he is working on. The Tatort episode ‘Picture Storm’ was broadcast simultaneously in Germany and Austria on 21 June 1998. The original German title of the episode is Bildersturm, which simultaneously alludes not only to the storm of controversy provoked by (and about) the pictures at the exhibition, but also to its iconoclastic (image shattering) purpose and impact. Our intention here is not to conduct a reception and impact analysis, but rather point to several possible ways of interpreting the film. The concept of ‘recontextualization’ was introduced by Bernstein (1996) and refers to the functionally influenced transformation of meanings and practices in other genres and spheres of life. See further Muntigl, Weiss and Wodak (2000); van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999); and Wodak (2000a) and. As a consequence of decontextualization and recontextualization, important changes of meaning occur in arguments and topoi. See also the Introduction by Heer and Wodak, in this volume. For an overview of recent and important approaches in media analysis from a discourse analytical perspective, see Wodak and Busch (2004), in which the few extant works on reception analysis and ‘popular culture’ are reviewed. German (Bavarian) conservative party. See appendix for more information.

10 The Head of Medusa: The Controversy Surrounding the Exhibition ‘War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941 to 1944’ 1. An English-language version of the exhibition, complete with catalogue, was produced in 1999–2000. Catalogue: Hamburg Institute for Social Research (1999); companion volume: Heer and Naumann (2000). 2. Karl-Heinz Janssen: ‘Als Soldaten Mörder wurden’ (When soldiers became murderers), in Die Zeit, 17 March 1995. 3. Die Welt, 2 March 1995; Die Tageszeitung, 8 March 1995; Frankfurter Rundschau, 9 March 1995; Die Zeit, 17 March 1995; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6 April 1995; Allgemeine jüdische Wochenzeitung, 23 March 1995; Leipziger Volkszeitung, 3 May 1995. 4. For further information on news media mentioned in this chapter, see the section on the Print Media. 5. Karl-Heinz Janssen, Die Zeit. 6. The so-called ‘Schustereit report’, 26 September 1995, p. 44. In a similar vein, see the book ‘Armee im Kreuzfeuer’ (Army in the crossfire), initiated by the working group (composed of veterans) ‘Wahrheit für die Soldaten der Wehrmacht’ (Truth for the soldiers of the Wehrmacht) (Weber, 1997). See also Latzel (2000). 7. For the debate up to 1999, see Greiner (1999); for more recent summaries, see Wiegel (2001) and Klotz (2001). 8. Günther Gillessen: ‘Zeugnisse eines vagabundierenden Schuldempfindens’ (Evidence of a guilt complex on the loose), in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6 February, 1996.

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9. Bundeswehr: the modern German armed forces. 10. CSU: mainstream party of the Right in Bavaria. For further information on political organizations mentioned in this chapter, see the Glossary. 11. Berthold Neff: ‘CSU attackiert das Rathaus’ (CSU attacks the City Hall), in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 15 February 1997. 12. Bundestag: lower chamber of the German federal parliament. 13. Ulrich Raulff: ‘Schockwellen’ (Shockwaves), in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 1 September 1999. 14. See Markus Krischer and Robert Vernier: ‘Warnung vor “Bild 26”’ (Beware of ‘Picture no. 26’), in Focus, issues 16, 17 and 24 (1997); see also Robert Vernier et al. in Focus, issues 6, 11 and 42 (1998). 15. Dominik Wichman, in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 16 October 1999; Susanne Leinemann, in Die Welt, 21 October 1999; Andreas Krause, in Berliner Zeitung, 21 October 1999; Kai Müller, in Der Tagesspiegel, 22 October 1999; Welt am Sonntag, 24 October 1999. 16. Müller (1995, pp. 324ff.); also ‘Die schwierige Frage nach der Schuld’ (The difficult question of blame), conversation with Horst Möller and others, in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 6 March 1997. 17. ‘Eine Blamage’ (A disgrace), interview with Rolf-Dieter Müller, in Die Woche, 12 November 1999. 18. Johannes Wilms: ‘Die Fahne hoch’ (Raise the flag), in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 22 May 2000. Note that the title of this article mimics the title of the Nazi anthem whose words were written by the SA man and Nazi ‘martyr’, Horst Wessel (1907–30). 19. ‘Es geht nicht um die Wahrheit’ (It’s not about the truth), interview with Horst Möller, in Focus, issue 43 (1999); on Möller’s ‘nationalist conservative background’, and the circumstances surrounding his appointment as director, see Elisabeth Bauschmidt: ‘Im schwarzen Loch’ (In the black hole), in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 3 June 2000. 20. Proceedings were brought against Musial, for example, ‘not because he criticized us, but because we felt that he was misrepresenting the circumstances in which he approached us’ (see ‘Ein Gespräch mit Jan Philipp Reemtsma’ (A conversation with Jan Philipp Reemtsma), in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6 November 1999). Hannes Heer and the director of the Hamburg Institute have described this behaviour as a symptom of the ‘bunker mentality’ brought about by the constant attacks and apologized publicly to all those involved. 21. Uwe Schmitt: ‘Vorwürfe und Mutmaßungen, ein Historikersymposium diskutiert in New York die Verbrechen der Wehrmacht’ (Accusations and suspicions: A historians’ symposium in New York discusses the crimes of the Wehrmacht, in Die Welt, 10 December 1999. 22. Volker Ullrich: ‘Sie waren Mörder. Die Wehrmachtsausstellung ist rehabilitiert’ (They were murderers. The Wehrmacht Exhibition is reprieved), in Die Zeit, 17 November 2000. The Institute’s director had already produced two papers, in November and December 1999 respectively, setting out suggestions for a ‘new version’ or a ‘transformation’ of the withdrawn exhibition. For a critical perspective, see Heer (unpublished internal position paper, 2000). 23. The original German title of the novel translates as ‘Time to live …’ but the American-made film (in which Remarque made a cameo appearance) and the 1954 Denver Lindley translation of the novel both use the title given here. 24. Bernard-Henri Lévy: ‘La tentation de l’oubli’ (The temptation to forget), in Le Monde, 6 February 1999. Appeared in German as ‘Ein paar Versuche, in Deutschland spazieren zu gehen’ (A couple of attempts to go for a walk in Germany], in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 17 February 1999.

Notes 293 25. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 28 November 2001; Volker Ullrich, in Die Zeit, 6 December 2001; Dana Micke and Mathias Hoenig, in Stuttgarter Nachrichten, 27 November 2001; Eckhard Fuhr, in Die Welt, 29 November 2001; Hans Hinrich Timm, in Ruhr-Nachrichten, 6 December 2001; Jochen Thron, in Südwest Presse, 29 November 2001; Heribert Seifert, in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 29 November 2001. 26. Ekkehard Böhm, in Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, 30 November 2001; Matthias Gretzschel, in Hamburger Abendblatt, 28 November 2001; Rainer Jung, in Frankfurter Rundschau, 28 November 2001. 27. Compare Pollak (2002b) and Stefan Reinecke: ‘Ende eines deutschen Dramas. Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die Vergangheitsbewältigung’ (The end of a German drama: The assault by the present on the overcoming of the past), in Die Tageszeitung, 3 December 2001. 28. In the US version of the exhibition an entire section on Poland was planned. See Hamburg Institute for Social Research (1999); on Poland, see also Rossino (1997) and Böhler (2006); on Sinti and Roma people, see also Zimmermann (1998); on collaboration, see also Chiari (1998) and Dean (2000). 29. These qualifications relate to the title ‘Crimes of the Wehrmacht’ (see Jacobsen, 1997, p. 26; and the plenary discussion transcript in Thiele, 1997, pp. 153–69). 30. Heer and Naumann (1995, p. 30); Heer (1995a, p. 60). 31. See Focus (1997), issue 16 (‘bathing photo’) and issue 17 (murder of Jews in Neswizh); Stoecker (1997, pp. 81ff.); the photo-critique by Bogdan Musial and Dieter Schmidt-Neuhaus also centred on ‘photos of Jews’. The ‘bathing photo’ and an extract from the 1997 Focus article are reproduced in Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (2001, p. 718). 32. Raulff, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 1 September 1999. 33. The portrayal of the murdering of Jews in Lvov, for example, follows the apologist interpretation of Musial (2000, pp. 102ff.); cf. Heer (2001). 34. For example, military geographical data from the Lida-Vilna-Kovno-Suwalki region, Bundesarchiv/Militärarchiv (Federal Military Archive) (BA-MA) RH 21–3/424; Notice (signed), The Commander of the German Army, BA-MA RH 27–4/120; General Command VII.AK/ Dept. Ic, re: Poster campaigns, 23 June 1941, BA-MA RH 26–23/47. 35. Jochen Thron: ‘Mehr Verbrechen, weniger Polemik’ (More crime, less polemic), in Südwest Presse, 29 November 2001; ‘Mehr Information – und mehr Schmerz’ (More information – and more pain), interview with Jan Philipp Reemtsma, in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 26 November 2001. 36. Hans-Adolf Jacobsen: ‘Im historischen Sinne Mittäter’ (Accomplices in the historical sense), in Bonner Generalanzeiger, 28 February 1997; Eberhard Jäckel: interview on ‘Deutschlandfunk’ (a German radio news network), 4 March 1997; conversation with Horst Möller and others, in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 6 March 1997; Hans-Ulrich Thamer: ‘Wehrmacht und Vernichtungskrieg’ (Wehrmacht and War of Annihilation), in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 27 April 1997; Lothar Gall, interview in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18 May 1997. 37. Jacobsen (1997, pp. 48f.). 38. Conversation with Horst Möller and others, in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 6 March 1997; Horst Möller: ‘Eine Blamage, wirklich keine Pionierleistung’ (A disgrace, certainly not a pioneering achievement), in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 3 January 2001. 39. ‘Gegen Kritik immun’ (Immune to criticism), interview with Rolf-Dieter Müller, in Der Spiegel, no. 23 (1999). 40. Klaus Wiegrefe: ‘Abrechnung mit Hitlers Generälen’ (Reckoning with Hitler’s generals), in Der Spiegel, no. 48 (2001). The effort to exculpate the troops leads to

294

41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

47.

48.

49. 50. 51.

52.

53.

54. 55. 56.

Notes some peculiar accreditations: for example, the city commandant responsible for the street murders in Lvov in 1941, Colonel Wintergerst, is promoted by the exhibition creators to the rank of General; the Wehrmacht regiment ‘Großdeutschland’ (Greater Germany), responsible for the murder of 36 civilians in Paneevo, is no longer referred to by name. Instead, the court-martial proceedings presided over by an SS judge are emphasized, with the consequence that a reputable Viennese journalist attributes the massacre of Paneevo to the SS (see Christa Zöchling, ‘Verstörung auf den zweiten Blick’ (Disturbing upon the second look), in Profil, no. 14, 30 March 2002). ‘Die Wehrmacht war keine Mörderbande’ (The Wehrmacht was no gang of murderers), conversation with Jan Philipp Reemtsma and Ulrike Jureit, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 27 November 2001. Hans Mommsen: interview in Profil, no. 14, 30 March 2002; in a similar vein, see Darmstädter Echo, 28 November 2001. See, for example, Horst Möller, who accused the author of claiming ‘that the German soldiers had fought against the Soviet Union in order to satisfy sadistic urges’; cf. interview with Horst Möller, in Focus, no. 43 (1999). For advances in perpetrator research, see Wersch (2000). W. Wippermann, in Die Woche, 7 December 2001. ‘Statt “kalter Wut” jetzt “klinisch steril”. Podiumsdiskussion: Wissenschaftler zur alten und neuen Wehrmachtsausstellung’ (Instead of ‘cold rage’ now ‘clinically sterile’. Panel discussion: academics on the old and new Wehrmacht Exhibitions), in Neue Westfälische Zeitung, 23 February 2002. Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (2002, p. 507); conversation with Jan Philipp Reemtsma and Ulrike Jureit, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 27 November 2001. This is attempted in detail at particular points in the exhibition. See, for example, pp. 469–74 of the exhibition catalogue (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, 2002). Werner Röhr: ‘Die Macht der Bilder’ (The power of images), in Junge Welt, 19 December 2001. Klaus Wiegrefe: ‘Abrechnung mit Hitlers Generälen’. ‘Das hat mit Relativierung nichts zu tun’ (This has nothing to do with relativism), conversation with Jan Philipp Reemtsma and Bogdan Musial in Die Welt, 16 September 2000. Of the 12 soldiers featured, the behaviour of eight ranged, morally speaking, from impeccable to exemplary: two of them deserted and one was shot; these selfevaluations by veterans of the 691st Infantry Regiment of their own actions are simply adopted from court transcripts, without questioning their potentially selfprotective nature. Zöchling: ‘Verstörung auf den zweiten Blick’; in a similarly critical vein, see Konstantin Lukas: ‘Fragen, die bleiben’ (Questions that remain), in Die Tagespost, 11 December 2001; cf. Peter Steinbach: ‘Der Mensch im Zentrum’ (The person in the centre), in Rheinischer Merkur, no. 5 (2002) and Hesse (2002, pp. 15f.). Conversation with Horst Möller and others, in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 6 March 1997. Report by the committee examining the exhibition (Bartov et al., 2000) pp. 15f. The exhibition was originally supposed to take place in a room at the Hamburg Institute and was not planned as a touring exhibition. The catalogue appeared only once the decision had been taken for a touring exhibition.

Notes 295 57. In order to demonstrate the problems associated with the interpretation of photographs, the companion volume contains two differing perspectives on the private photographs featured (cf. Reifarth and Schmidt-Linsenhoff, 1995 and Hüppauf, 1995). 58. The press characterized this as ‘the power of the pictures’ and gave the impression that this was a ‘photography exhibition’ (cf. Bernard-Henri Lévy, in Le Monde, 7 February 1999 and in The Jerusalem Post, 28 March 1995). 59. Markus Schwering: ‘Die alte These ohne Dramatisierungen’ (The old claims without the dramatization), in Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 29 November 2001. 60. Steinbach: ‘Der Mensch im Zentrum’. 61. ‘Fragwürdiger Augenzeuge’ (Questionable eyewitness), conversation with Ulrike Jureit, in Die Zeit, 29 November 2001. 62. Stefanie Flamm: ‘Die neue Wehrmachtsausstellung will gelesen werden’ (The new Wehrmacht Exhibition wants to be read), in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 28 November 2001. 63. Klaus Theweleit: ‘Schulddiskussion und Wehrmachtsausstellung’ (Discussion of guilt and the Wehrmacht Exhibition), in Badische Zeitung, 11 November 2000. 64. Gabriele Rosenthal has pointed out that ‘photographs showing Wehrmacht soldiers engaging in criminal and inhumane activity are far more threatening to the children of Wehrmacht soldiers than are texts’ (Rosenthal, 1998, p. 116). 65. Uetersener Nachrichten, 30 January 1999; Kölnische Rundschau, 29 October 1998; Süddeutsche Zeitung, 25 February 1997; Rhein-Zeitung, 13 August 1998. 66. Miriam Y. Arani expressed this fact in the title of her study of the use of photographs in the two exhibitions (Arani, 2002). 67. Conversation with Jan Philipp Reemtsma and Bogdan Musial ‘Das hat mit Relativierung nichts zu tun’; Interview with Jan Philipp Reemtsma, in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 26 November 2001. 68. Röhr: ‘Die Macht der Bilder’; Franziska Augstein: ‘Wiederholungen gefallen’ (Repeats please), in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 28 November 2001. 69. Zöchling: ‘Verstörung auf den zweiten Blick’. 70. Michael Jeismann: ‘Das Ende der Wiedergänger’ (The end of the walking dead), in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 29 November 2001. 71. ‘Die Verweigerung von Argumentation (The rejection of argument), interview with Ulrike Jureit, in Der Standard, 15 April 2002. 72. ‘Wehrmachtsausstellung hat der Kritik Rechnung getragen’ (Wehrmacht Exhibition has taken criticism on board), interview with Horst Möller, in Oberhessische Presse, 19 December 2001. 73. Berliner Morgenpost, 5 December 2001. 74. Interview with Jan Philipp Reemtsma and Ulrike Jureit, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 27 November 2001. 75. The dismissal of the author was neither the first nor the only political flip-flop by the Hamburg Institute and its director: 1989 saw the dismissal of Karl-Heinz Roth, one of the most innovative and radical researchers of the National Socialist apparatus of control and terror; in 1994 the publication of the 20-volume collected works of Trotsky was abandoned after the appearance of just three volumes, and payments to the contracted researchers were discontinued (see Dahmer, 1998, p. 92). 76. Thomas Medicus: ‘Hannes Heer muß gehen’ (Hannes Heer must go), in Frankfurter Rundschau, 15 August 2000. 77. Eckhard Fuhr: ‘Gezeitenwechsel’ (Change of tides), in Die Welt, 16 September 2000.

296

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78. A senior official from the Chancellor’s office let it be known that this would cost the Federal Republic several billion marks. I am indebted to Peter Steinbach for this information. 79. In 1985, the US president Ronald Reagan and the West German chancellor Helmut Kohl made a joint visit to a cemetery in Bitburg near Trier in order to mark the fortieth anniversary of VE day. Having decided against visiting a concentration camp in order to avoid stirring up too many uncomfortable memories, the Americans learned two weeks before the visit that 49 SS-men were buried at the cemetery. However, they decided to go ahead with the visit, primarily due to pressure from the West German government. The visit took place amidst great controversy, which was exacerbated by Reagan’s remark that the members of the SS had been victims of Nazism ‘just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps’. 80. The year in which the Berlin Wall ‘fell’ and the two German states embarked on the rapid path towards unification. 81. A reference to the opening, on 4 November 2001, of the ‘Documentation Centre Nazi Party Rally Grounds’ in the North wing of the Congress Hall, a vast building which outwardly resembles the Colosseum in Rome. 82. Michael Jeismann: ‘15 Tage Ausschlussfrist: Wann darf die Geschichte beginnen’ (Two more weeks of exclusion: When can history begin?), in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 16 January 2001. 83. In a conversation with Bogdan Musial, which, in the opinion of the newspaper moderating the discussion, was concerned with ‘a new approach to the Nazi era’, the director of the Hamburg Institute had spoken in favour of ‘a historical anthropology’ and made it clear how unhappy he was with the ‘heated situation with regard to historical policy’ and with the categorization of his project ‘under a particular label in terms of policies for dealing with the past’ (see interview with Jan Philipp Reemtsma and Bogdan Musial in Die Welt, 16 September, 2000). Willi Jasper recognized this as a clear declaration of intent and commented ‘that the director of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research is back-pedalling furiously, in order to arrive in the current mainstream of official historical policy’ (Willi Jasper: ‘Ein Geschichtspolitiker rudert zurück’ (A historical policy-maker backpedals), in Die Welt, 28 September 2000). Edgar Wolfrum had fundamentally criticized Reemtsma’s negative conception of historical policy, which had emerged clearly in the course of the conversation: ‘Historical policy is part of the political culture of a country. […] It is absurd to see historical policy as an exclusively negative phenomenon and to condemn it as a quasi degeneration of historical understanding …’; (cf. Edgar Wolfrum: ‘Von der Nützlichkeit der Geschichtspolitik’ (On the usefulness of historical policy), in Die Welt, 21 September 2000).

11 Interpreting the ‘War of Annihilation’: Responses to the exhibition ‘Crimes of the Wehrmacht: Dimensions of a War of Annihilation, 1941 to 1944’ When Staged in Vienna in 2002 1. On the schools educational programme, see Büro trafo.K (2002). On generational differences in the exhibition’s reception, using the Vienna exhibition as a case study, see the topic ‘Generation und Gedächtnis: Reaktionen auf die “Wehrmachtsausstellung II” – die Erfahrungen der “wissenschaftlichen Guides”’ (Generation and Memory: Reactions to the second Wehrmacht Exhibition – the

Notes 297

2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

experience of the ‘expert guides’), in eForum Zeitgeschichte, online journal, no. 2/3 (2000) at www.eforum-zeitgeschichte.at (accessed 23 October 2006). For the myth of the ‘untainted Wehrmacht’, see Bald, Klotz and Wette (2001) and Pollak (2002a, 2002b, 2003 and Chapters 6, 8 and 9 in this volume). In the exhibition ‘200 Days and One Century’, the range and scale of historical destructiveness were illustrated by means of particular focal points (Auschwitz, the Sétif massacre by French colonial troops in Algeria, the Gulag system, Hiroshima). Also documented are attempts to combat destructivity with civilizing methods (Nuremburg Military Tribunals, UN Charter and the Cambodian declaration of independence). See Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (1995). Topography of Terror: a permanent exhibition and documentation centre located on the site of the former Berlin headquarters of the Gestapo, the SD and the RHSA, as well as the offices of the SS chief, Heinrich Himmler. The initiative began as a temporary exhibition in 1987, to mark the city’s 750th anniversary, but a government-supported foundation has since been allowed to acquire the site and develop a permanent centre. Mittelweg 36: the Hamburg address of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and also the name of its bi-monthly journal. On the specific value as source material of private photographs, as distinct from the self-portrayal by the National Socialist administrative elite through propaganda photography, see Arani (2002, pp. 113–18). By contrast, ‘200 days and One century’, actually the central project of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research’s initiative in relation to the history of violence in the twentieth century, attracted relatively little interest from the public and was discontinued after being shown in five locations (see Manoschek, 2002, p. 73). On Graz, see for example the special issue of ‘Zebratl’, the information bulletin of the association Zebra, which brought the exhibition to Graz: ‘Just looking sets you free. Lectures, commentaries and analyses regarding the exhibition’, Zebratl Special, no. 1a (1998); on the realization of the exhibition in Linz, see Kanonier (1997); on Klagenfurt, see ‘Kurzbericht Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944. Eine Ausstellung des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung, Kunsthalle Ritter, Klagenfurt, 6.9.–6.10.1996’, (Klagenfurt: Drava, 1996); on the developmental dynamic of this process in the German context, see Nedelmann (1999). In response to the refusal by the city of Linz and the federal state of Upper Austria to support the exhibition, ‘a broad solidarity movement virtually erupted’. In the event, it was possible to finance the exhibition and the accompanying programmeexclusively through donations, to which a fundraising ‘brick campaign’ by the Greens made a significant contribution (see Kannonier, 1997, p. 20). The Historikersteit (historians’ dispute) was an intellectual and political debate in West Germany about the appropriate historical treatment of the Holocaust and the Gulag. It took place between 1986 and 1989, with the conflicting views of Ernst Nolte and Jürgen Habermas being at the centre of the dispute. A reference to the controversy surrounding the presidential candidature of Kurt Waldheim in 1986. Quoted from ‘Die Grundaussage blieb gleich’ (The basic message remained the same), in Salzburger Nachrichten, 9 April 2002. Quoted from ‘Ich verbürge mich für die Qualität’ (I vouch for the quality), Jan Philipp Reemtsma on the new conception of the Wehrmacht Exhibition, past errors and individual responsibility, in Format, no. 15, 5 April 2002.

298

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14. Quoted from ‘Die Verweigerung von Argumentation’ (The rejection of argument), interview with Ulrike Jureit, conducted by Claus Philipp and Reichensperger, in Der Standard, 15 April 2002. 15. Responding to a question posed by journalists about whether the topic of the exhibition would actually interest the average exhibition visitor, and whether the exhibition did not now seem ‘too academic’, Ulrike Jureit said that for reasons of language, it was certainly ‘difficult to present international and war law in everyday terms’ (quoted from ‘Die Grundaussage blieb gleich’ (The basic message remained the same), in Salzburger Nachrichten, 9 April 2002). 16. Dirk Rupnow: ‘Verbrechen der Wehrmacht II’ (Crimes of the Wehrmacht II), in Falter, no. 5, 1 December 2002, p. 14. 17. Ibid. 18. ‘Die Verweigerung von Argumentation’, Der Standard. 19. Ibid. 20. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 29 November 2001 (quoted in Lethen, 2002, p. 76). 21. ‘Wehrmachtsausstellung in Wien’ (Wehrmacht Exhibition in Vienna), in Der Standard, 26/27 January 2002. 22. The capital of Voralberg, population c.30,000. 23. ‘Wehrmachtsausstellung’ (Wehrmacht Exhibition), in Salzburger Nachrichten, 18 December 2001. 24. See ‘Wehrmachtsausstellung neu – Aufklärung, die notwendig ist’ (New Wehrmacht exhibition – a necessary clarification), in Der sozialistische Kämpfer, nos. 1/2/3, May 2002. 25. Oliver Pink: ‘Nur noch die extreme Rechte bläst zum Angriff’ (Only the extreme right continues to the attack), in Kleine Zeitung (Graz), 8 April 2002. 26. Quoted from ‘Differenzierter Blick. Stadt Wien unterstützt finanziell’ (A sophisticated review: City of Vienna gives financial support), in Wiener Zeitung, 9 April 2002. 27. Andreas Mailath-Pokorny: ‘Diskurs fördern, Mut zur Kontroverse zeigen’ (Encourage discussion, face controversy), in Der Standard, 7 March 2002. 28. ‘The show is not intended to polarize opinion, but to stimulate dialogue’. This quotation from the city’s culture executive Mailath-Pokorny was used at the head of a report on ‘The role of the Wehrmacht in the War of Annihilation’, and on the Wehrmacht Exhibition, in the municipal employees’ newsletter Wien.at aktuell. See also ‘Dialog der Generationen’ (Dialogue of the generations), in Unsere Generation, no. 4, April 2002 (magazine for the over-50s, Vienna: Echomedia). 29. Reinhard Ellensohn: ‘Entschärfte Wehrmachtsausstellung’ (Toned down Wehrmacht Exhibition), in Die Presse, 9 April 2002. 30. Richard Reichensperger: ‘Eine Topografie des Terrors’ (A topography of terror), in Der Standard, 9 April 2002. 31. Bertram Karl Steiner (‘bks’): ‘Vergangenheit unterm kalten Sezierskalpell’ (Dissecting the past with a cold knife), in Kärntner Zeitung, 11 April 2002. 32. Richard Reichensperger, ‘Eine Topografie des Terrors’. 33. Eva Linsinger and Peter Mayr: ‘Alltag der Kriegsverbrechen’ (The everyday reality of war crimes), in Der Standard, 3 April 2002. 34. Quoted from Andreas Anzenberger: ‘Nur FP gegen Wehrmachts-Schau’ (Only the Freedom Party against Wehrmacht Exhibition), in Kurier, 5 March 2002. 35. Hans Köppl: ‘Der Wahrheit ins Auge sehen. Die Wehrmachtsausstellung regt auf und macht betroffen’ (Facing up to the truth: The Wehrmacht exhibition causes excitement and concern), leading article in Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, 10 April 2002.

Notes 299 36. Karl Danninger: ‘Auch Befehle ließen Handlungsspielraum offen’ (Even orders left room for discretion), in Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, 11 April 2002. 37. Peter Nindler: ‘Im Namen der Ehre. Vergangenheit lässt sich nur noch aufarbeiten’ (In the name of honour: The past still requires reappraisal), in Tiroler Tageszeitung, 10 April 2002. 38. ‘Neustart der neuen Schau’ (New start for the new exhibition), in Neue Kärntner Tageszeitung, 9 April 2002. 39. Oliver Pink, Kleine Zeitung. 40. Christa Zöchling: ‘Verstörung auf den zweiten Blick’ (Disturbing upon the second look), in Profil, no. 14, 30 March 2002. 41. Ro Raftl: ‘Asyl für Hamanns Hitler-Buch’ (Asylum for Hamman’s book on Hitler), in Profil, no. 10, 4 February 2002. 42. ‘Hui-Pfui’, in VOR Magazin, no. 8, May 2002. 43. Municipal councillor Heinz-Christian Strache: ‘Aus der Sicht der Freiheitlichen’ (From the perspective of freedom lovers), in Wiener Bezirkszeitung, no. 6 (2002). 44. Heinz-Christian Strache: ‘Beißreflex gegen die Kriegsgeneration’ (Biting reflex towards the wartime generation), in Zur Zeit, no. 18, 3 May 2002. Strache became leader of the FPÖ in May 2005. 45. Zur Zeit is an FPÖ-allied magazine, categorized by the Document Archive of the Austrian Resistance as extreme rightwing (see Bailer and Neugebauer, 1994). 46. Andreas Mölzer: ‘Verbrechen der Wehrmacht – und die der Anderen?’ (Crimes of the Wehrmacht – and those of the others?), in Zur Zeit, no. 17, 26 April 2002. Reproduced in UNI PRESS (Innsbruck), May 2002. Mölzer became an MEP for the FPÖ in 2005. 47. The quotation originates from a poem by Wolf Martin in the Neue Kronenzeitung, entitled ‘In den Wind gereimt’ (Rhyming into the wind), which dealt with the subject of the protests. 48. See, for example, the article by Andreas Mölzer: ‘Radikaler Themenwechsel’ (Drastic change of subject), in Neue Kronenzeitung, 4 April 2002. 49. Heldenplatz: a historical royal plaza in Vienna. Its history is overshadowed by the memory of Hitler proclaiming the ‘Anschluss’ of Austria from the balcony of the Neue Burg on 15 March 1938. Heldenplatz has been the subject of several works of literature, notably Thomas Bernhardt’s play ‘Heldenplatz’, first performed in 1988.

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Index Note: Additional personal data are given for political and military figures. Authors are referred to by name only. 1968 generation, 9, 228, 248 see also student movement 44th Infantry Division, 84, 88 Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, 258 Adenauer, Konrad (1876–1967, West German chancellor 1949–63, CDU), 233 Adriatic Sea, 76 Africa, 88 Africa Corps, 78 Altmann, Karl (1904–1960, Austrian politician, KPÖ), 114 America, see USA annihilation of Jews, 21–6, 30, 37–42, 69 and post-war memory, 70–96, 132–54, 175–204 of Soviet prisoners, 169 see also War of Annihilation anniversaries Stalingrad, 142, 162, 179, 184, 186 WWII, 147, 252 Anschluss, 72, 87, 158, 170, 181, 195, 267, 270 anti-fascism anti-fascist movement, 248 in Austrian politics, 107, 113 in German TV production, 225 anti-Semitism, 3, 78, 85, 157 indoctrination, 19, 269 post-war, 10, 133, 218 pre-war, 85, 241 amongst soldiers, 28–31, 43, 50–69, 236 see also stereotypes Arani, Miriam, 246–7 Arbeiter-Zeitung, 124–5, 129, 131, 135, 140, 274 ‘Aryanization’, 25, 77, 94, 101, 267 Assmann, Jan, 7, 173 Association of Independents, see VdU attitudes, 10–11, 50–69, 71–96

Auschwitz, 42, 75, 138, 237, 255 symbolic role of, 176, 215, 237, 243 trial in Frankfurt, 233 Austria Austrians in the Wehrmacht, 50–69, 75–86, 99–131, 137–9, 155–74, 176, 182–4, 187–90, 199–200 Declaration of Independence (1945), 52, 103, 267, 288 First Republic, 72, 100, 267 and National Socialism, 50–69, 99–131, 170–2 news media, 124–31, 132–54, 258–64, 274–5 responsibility for WWII, 102–3, 106, 137, 146–8 State Treaty (1955), 107, 137–9, 267 treatment of war criminals, 108, 110, 138 victimhood, national claim to, 52–4, 61, 100–31, 137–9, 158–61, 172–3, 199, 270 see also Anschluss; war victims; Wehrmacht Austrian People’s Party, see ÖVP Babi Yar, see under massacres Bailer, Brigitte, 101, 107–19 Balkans Partisan war, 168, 263 soldiers’ photographs, 245 war crimes, 138, 158, 233, 251–2, 263 Baltic states, 31, 75 Latvia, 37 Lithuania, 35, 40, 141 see also Ostland Bamm, Peter, 233 Baranavichy, 40–1, 141 Barbarossa Decree, see criminal orders Bartov, Omar, 28 see also commission of historians BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), see documentaries 319

320

Index

BDM (Bund Deutscher Mädel), 78, 93 beard removal, 76, 79 Beckermann, Ruth East of War (film), xii, 70, 254 interviews with exhibition visitors, 70–1 Belgrade, 24, 145 beliefs, 10–11, 50–69 Belorussia, 18, 24–5, 34–40, 210, 227 Bereza Kartuska, see under massacres Berlin Holocaust Memorial, 249 Wehrmacht Exhibition, 71, 228, 232, 234, 255, 258 Wehrmacht HQ, 27, 33 betrayal, soldiers as victims of, 54–5, 138, 142–3, 181, 183, 187, 199 Bialystok, 24, 141 biographical accounts, 134, 137, 143, 149–51 Bismarck, Otto von (1815–1898, first German chancellor 1971–90), 47, 271 Bitburg, 249 bivariate analysis, see statistical analysis blame, attribution of, 31, 66–8, 88, 92, 139–42, 146–7, 153–4, 160, 179–82, 189, 228, 239 Blitzkrieg, see bombing Bock, Fedor von (1880–1945, commander of Army Group Centre, 1941), 25 Bohemia and Moravia, Protectorate of, 48, 93, 168, 272 Böhm, Johann (1886–1959, Austrian politician, SPÖ), 112–13 Boll, Bernd, 34–8, 227 Bolshevism, 191, 238 ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, 21–3, 31–40, 69, 72, 93, 241 as the main enemy, 19–21, 31, 64, 68, 74, 147, 241, 269 bombing Allied bombing, 5, 10, 119, 144–5, 167, 196, 264 atomic bombs, 252 Blitzkrieg, 27, 43 Luftwaffe bombing, 145, 182, 192 Botz, Gerhard, 106, 138

Brandt, Willy (1913–1992, West German chancellor 1969–74, SPD), 233, 268, 271, 272 Brest (Galicia), 40 briefcase contents, soldiers’, 246 see also photographs Brunner, Alois (b.1912, SS officer), 110 Bundestag, 229, 267 Bundeswehr, 180, 186, 228–9, 267 captives, see prisoners of war CDA, see discourse analysis CDU (Christlich Demokratische Union), 229, 267, 272 Central Organization of War Victims’ Associations, 104, 108–11, 115–16 Certeau, Michel de, 5 children as enemy target, 18, 24, 39, 41–2 as murder victims, 24, 38, 40, 141–4, 168, 253 war children, 72–5, 92, 94–5 see also euthanasia Churchill, Winston (1874–1965, British prime minister 1940–45 and 1951–55), 85, 144, 163 civilians accounts of NKVD massacres, 32, 34 brutality towards, 76–80, 191 as enemy target, 17–26, 167–8, 235, 241–2, 252 see also Holocaust Cold War, 126, 137, 233, 269 collaboration, 235 Austrian, 160–1, 170 local, 32, 79, 83 Wehrmacht, 165, 227 collective farms, 85 collective identity, see identity collective memory, 1, 4–9, 53–4, 105, 128, 199, 232–4 Commemoration, Year of 1988, 10, 158, 161 1995, 228, 252 commemoration memorials and monuments, 54, 107, 122, 233, 264 official policy, 162, 234 Stalingrad monument controversy, 162, 192–9 see also Holocaust

Index 321 ‘commissars’, 34, 39, 85, 169, 237, 241 Commissar Order, see criminal orders commission of historians, 28, 231–2, 243, 256, 265 Communism, see Bolshevism Communist Party of Austria, see KPÖ compensation, 107–31, 249 complicity, German, 234 concentration camps awareness of, 72, 76, 91, 94 Dachau, 78, 86 internment of Jewish civilians, 24 Reagan’s Bitburg speech, 249, 282 role in Holocaust, 42–5 soldiers as camp guards, 42–5, 166 as symbol of Nazi regime, 200 treatment of survivors, 108–11, 119 see also extermination camps consciousness historical, 2, 173, 232, 258 moral, 46, 171 political, 29, 50–69 consensus history, 8, 172, 195–7, 247–50, 258 contemporary witnesses, see witness accounts Coventry, bombing of, 145 Cracow, see Kraków criminal orders, 17–26, 48, 152, 168–9, 239, 241 Barbarossa Decree, 17–18, 25 Commissar Order, 17, 19–20, 79, 167–8 Guidelines for the Conduct of Troops in Russia 19, 22, 25 Orders concerning Sipo and SD, 20 Orders relating to the treatment of Soviet POWs, 20–1 critical approach, xvi see also discourse analysis CSU (Christlich-Soziale Union), 212, 229, 268 Czechoslovakia, 75, 109, 161, 271, 272 Dachau, 78, 86 death camps, see extermination camps death marches, 72, 76, 91, 94, 190 death squads, see Einsatzgruppen denazification, 101, 106, 115, 117, 126

denial of knowledge of or involvement in war crimes, 19, 53, 80, 83, 85, 92, 95, 145, 173, 222, 265 of responsibility for the war, 137, 146–8, 157 Dengler, Josef (1894–1976, Austrian politician, ÖVP), 121, 125 Denmark, 75, 147, 168 depersonalization, 239, 243 deportations, 42, 79, 89, 92, 235, 241 derealization, 237–43 desertion, 73, 78–80, 81, 84, 116, 148, 171–2, 241 ‘detritus of history’, 246 Dijk, Teun van, 3, 11–12, 134 dilemmas, ideological, 11 discourse, 1, 7, 10–12 media, 136–42, 176 parliamentary, 127–9 discourse analysis critical discourse analysis, 10, 132–3 socio-cognitive model, 3, 11 discourse-historical approach, xv, 10, 133 discretion, room for, 48, 87, 95, 137, 152, 159, 235, 242 see also orders, pressure to obey documentaries, 175–204 BBC documentary, 178, 197–8, 203 definition, 178–9 Franco-Soviet documentary, 178, 182–4 ORF documentaries, 177–9, 184–5, 187–90, 192–7 production techniques, 200–3 ZDF documentaries, 178, 184–6, 190–2 Dollfuß, Engelbert (1892–1934, Austrian chancellor 1932–34), 32, 86, 106 Dönitz, Admiral Karl (1891–1980, Hitler’s immediate successor 1945), death of, 153 Dresden, 228 bombing of the city, 144–5, 167 Drohobych, 36 duty fulfilment, 46, 54, 58–62, 99, 106–7, 123, 128, 131, 138–9, 153, 156, 159, 171, 186–7, 200, 252 East of War (film), see Beckermann, Ruth Eastern Front, 17, 40–2, 79, 88, 93, 188

322

Index

Eichmann, Adolf (1906–1962, senior Nazi official), 108, 110 trial in Jerusalem, 149, 233 Einsatzgruppen, 20–4, 31–41, 63, 167, 191, 227, 237, 239, 252, 257, 268 Elser, Viktor (1893–1979, Austrian politician, KPÖ), 120, 122, 125–6, 130 Embacher, Helga, 118 England failure of Hitler to conquer, 163 ‘provocation’ of Hitler, 147 views expressed by soldiers, 43–4, 66 enthusiasm for war, 55, 239, 241 Ernst, Karl (Austrian ministry for social affairs), 109–10 ‘ethnic Germans’ and benefits legislation, 104–5, 117–29 post-war expulsions, 144–6, 161, 259 euthanasia, 76, 93, 96, 161 event models, 3–4 Everyman, crimes of, 238–40 executions disputed exhibition photographs, 213, 230–1, 253 extent of Wehrmacht involvement, 239–40 ‘Hitler’s willing executioners’, 71, 90 mass executions, 21, 32–6, 141–2, 175 threat of execution, 152, 170 exhibitions 200 Days and 1 Century, 252 Topography of Terror, 253 War against the Soviet Union, 1941–45, 253 see also Wehrmacht Exhibition expectation, horizon of (Koselleck), 2 experiential space (Koselleck), 2, 5 expulsions of Germans after WWII, 144–6, 161, 259, 263, 272 of Jews under Nazism, 48, 87 extermination camps, 175, 237 of Jews, 21–6, 30–42, 76, 81, 167, 169, 176, 200, 243 squads, see Einsatzgruppen see also Auschwitz Fairclough, Norman, 133 ‘Fatherland’ belief in Germany as, 57–63, 67–8

duty to, 54, 99, 123, 186 use of the term, 59, 159 FAZ, see Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Figl, Leopold (1902–1965, Austrian chancellor 1945–53, ÖVP), 114–15 ‘Final Solution’, 40, 48, 169, 189, 227 ‘final victory’, 44, 58, 62, 67, 80, 164 Finland, 79, 81 ‘first generation’ (post-war), 70 First World War, 85, 117, 147, 195 Fischer, Ernst (1899–1972, Austrian politician and writer, KPÖ), 102, 123 forced labour, 19, 24–5, 40, 72, 76, 79–80, 88, 188, 227, 236, 238 compensation for, 182, 249 forgetting, active (Nietzsche), 6 Format (magazine), 262, 274 Foucault, Michel, 10, 13 FPÖ (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs), 54, 129, 268, 272 opposition to Wehrmacht Exhibition, 258–60, 263, 265 and the ‘Third Camp’, 99, 126 frames (schemata), 2–3 France annihilation of a village, 79, 82, 94 conviction of Josef Weiszl, 108 shootings and deportations, 42 Frankfurt (am Main), 229 Auschwitz trial, 233 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 228–9, 245, 247–9, 274, 275 Freedom Party (Austria), see FPÖ Frei, Norbert, 107 Frevert, Ute, 9, 234, 241 Friedländer, Saul, xii, 8 Die Furche (newspaper), 135, 274 Galicia, 23, 31, 36 gas vans (mobile gas chambers), 24, 41, 79, 87 Gauweiler, Peter (b.1949, German politician, CSU), 229 General Government, 31, 269 Geneva Convention, 20, 53 genocide allusions in TV drama, 215 in school books, 169 treatment in the Wehrmacht exhibition, 235–40 Wehrmacht participation in, 22–6, 27, 48, 247, 262

Index 323 Geppert, Walter, (b.1913, Austrian politician, SPÖ), 110 Gerlach, Christian, 25, 238 ‘Germanization’, 75, 96 Germany critical questioning of the past, 70–1 fear of defeat, 43–5, 61 national narratives, 8–10, 53–4, 107, 232–4 post-war criminal proceedings, 28 post-war politics, 107, 192, 233–4, 249, 267–72 see also ‘ethnic Germans’; ‘Greater Germany’; Reich Germans Geschichtspolitik, 5, 8, 296 Gestapo, 41, 166–9, 257, 269 Geyer, Michael, 240 ghettos, 24–5, 39–41, 79, 81, 86, 141, 227, 233, 236 Giesen, Bernhard, 7 Gillessen, Günther, 228 Goffman, Erving, 2–3 Goldhagen, Daniel, 71, 90, 241 Grass, Günter, 264 ‘Greater Germany’, 41, 47–8, 54–64, 164 Greece, 168, 235, 241 Green Party (Die Grünen), 155, 162, 258, 263 Grewenig, Adi, 210 Groscurth, Helmuth (1898–1943, 295th Infantry Division), 36 Groys, Boris, 258 Grubhofer, Franz (1914–1970, Austrian politician, ÖVP), 122 guilt complexes, 217–26 see also topoi Gypsies, 78, 161, 169, 235 Haerpfer, Christian, 50 Haider, Jörg (b.1950, FPÖ leader 1986–2000), 54, 99–100, 268 Halbwachs, Maurice, 4, 233 Halder, Franz (1884–1972, Chief of German Army General Staff 1938–42), 20, 48 Halliday, Michael, 132–3 Hamburg Institute for Social Research, xii, 71, 231–46, 252–60 Harris, Arthur ‘Bomber’ (1892–1984, head of RAF Bomber Command 1942–45), 85

Heer, Hannes, 1, 5, 32, 70, 227, 240, 248, 251–2, 292 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 6, 282 hegemonic narratives, xiii, 5, 47, 68, 107, 139, 157 Heimat, see Homeland Heldenplatz, Vienna, 264, 299 Heydrich, Reinhard, 31, 41, 167, 271 Hilberg, Raul, 25, 69, 169, 238 Himmler, Heinrich (1900–1945, head of the SS), 20, 24, 41, 167–9, 270, 271–2, 297 Hiroshima, 85, 252 historians’ dispute (Historikerstreit), 255 historicization, 9, 199, 249, 265 history consensus history, 190, 195–7, 247–50 ‘detritus of history’, 246 discursive construction of, xii historical consciousness, 2 and identity, 4–10 media construction of, 134–5 national narratives, xiii, 1, 5–10 teaching in Austrian schools, 155–74 theories of, 5–6 History Channel, 178, 197 Hitler, Adolf (1889–1945, German dictator 1933–45) assassination attempt 1944, 171 in the Austrian victim narrative, 52, 156, 173, 196 errors at Stalingrad, 181, 191 on the Heldenplatz, Vienna, 299 Hitler-centred narratives, 53, 139, 154, 162–9, 173, 176, 191, 238–9 instigating the War of Annihilation, 17, 27, 146–7, 188 as the lesser evil than Stalin, 82 Hitler Youth, 72, 73, 75, 96 Holland, see Netherlands Holocaust criminal proceedings, 28 and history, 8–9, 269 Memorial, 9, 249 in the open countryside, 243 popular image of, 176, 236–7, 243 rationalization of, 78 reflected in soldiers’ letters, 27–49 TV series Holocaust, 9–10 in the Wehrmacht Exhibitions, 237–43 Wehrmacht involvement, 22–6, 48, 69, 169, 265

324

Index

Holocaust – continued see also extermination; genocide; Shoah ‘Home Front’ (Austrian / German), 78, 196 ‘Homeland’, 54, 59, 63, 107, 156, 159, 173, 188, 200 Hornung, Ela, 55 hostage shootings, 42, 167, 191, 235, 253 Hoth, Hermann (1885–1971, commander of Panzer Group 3 1940–41), 25 Huemer, Peter, 265 Hungary, 75, 163, 230 gassing of Hungarian Jews, 45 Hurdes, Felix (1901–1974, Austrian politician, ÖVP), 119 iconic images, 195, 200, 253 ideational narrative construction, 135, 153 identity Austrian, 61, 101, 106, 138–9 collective, 4–7, 58, 60, 129 German post-war, 233–4 ideology, 4, 10–11 ideological dilemmas, 11 ideological motives amongst soldiers, 50–69, 87, 242 Nazi ideology, core elements, 64 WWII as ideological struggle, 17, 89, 94 IfZ (Institute of Contemporary History), 231, 248 ‘image embargo’ (Rupnow), 243 independence, Austrian declaration of, 52, 103, 174, 267 interdiscursivity, 11 International Brigades, 86 international law, see under law interpersonal narrative construction, 135, 153 intertextuality, 11, 133 Israel, 8, 86 Istria, 75–6 Italy, 74, 78, 81, 94, 111 Jocobsen, Hans-Adolf, 239 Jeismann, Michael, 247, 249 Jenseits des Krieges (film), see Beckermann, Ruth Jerusalem, Eichmann trial in, 215, 233

Jews blamed for WWII, 62, 66–9 equation of Jews with Bolsheviks and Partisans, 19–23, 93, 237, 241 Jewish Cultural Community (Austria), 127 ‘Jewish question / problem’, 23, 31–46 marking with the Yellow Star, 24, 37, 227, 237 murder of Jews, 21–6, 30–42, 45, 86–7, 89, 140–1, 169, 175, 189, 227, 237–8, 253 persecution before WWII, 75–6, 232 portrayal in Wehrmacht Exhibition, 236 post-war treatment in Austria, 107–8, 118 see also anti-Semitism; genocide; Holocaust; Vienna Jochmann, Rosa (1901–1994, Austrian politician, SPÖ), 119, 123 Jureit, Ulrike, 240, 256–8 Kamitz, Reinhard (1907–1993, Austrian politician, ÖVP), 105 Kampnagel Factory, Hamburg, 253 Kärntner Tageszeitung, 260–1 Katyn, see under massacres Kaunas, see Kovno Keitel, Wilhelm (1882–1946, OKW chief), 17, 20, 270 see also ‘Night and Fog’ Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 232 Kiev, 24, 38 Babi Yar, see under massacres Kirchschläger, Rudolf (1915–2000, Austrian president 1974–86), 110 Kharkov, 197, 204 Kishinev, 34–5 Kleines Volksblatt, 124–5, 129–31, 274 Kleine Zeitung, 135, 259, 262 Kluge, Günther von (1882–1944, commander of the 4th Army 1938–41), 25 Knight, Robert, 115 Kohl, Helmut (b.1930, German Federal chancellor 1982–98, CDU), 249, 267 Koplenig, Johann (1891–1916, Austrian politician, KPÖ), 111 Korfes, Otto, (1889–1964, commandant in Zloczow 1941), 36

Index 325 Koselleck, Reinhart, 2, 5 KOVG (Kriegsopferversorgungsgesetz), 9, 99–131 Kovno (Kaunas), 35, 293 KPÖ (Kommunistische Partei Österreichs), 111–30, 269 Kraków, 81 Krainburg (Kranj), 76 Krauland, Peter (1903–1985, Austrian politician, ÖVP), 130 Krausnick, Helmut, 234, 289 Kreisky, Bruno (1911–1990, Austrian chancellor 1970–83, SPÖ), 104, 272 Kriegshilfsdienst, see War Auxiliary Service ‘Krone’, see Neue Kronenzeitung Kühne, Thomas, 238–9, 243 Kurier, 135, 138, 142, 145, 151, 259–60, 274 Kysela, Karl (1901–1967, Austrian politician, SPÖ), 120, 125, 131 Lacina, Ferdinand (b.1942, Austrian politician, SPÖ), 110 Landau, Felix (1910–1983, SS officer and diarist), 32, 36 Landser, 78, 232, 269 soldiers’ weekly, 136 see also soldiers Lanzmann, Claude (b.1925, director of the film Shoah), 71 ‘last reserve’, 75–8, 88, 95 Latvia, 37 law definition of a war crime, 235, 241–2 Geneva Convention, 20, 53 Hague Convention, 53, 261 international law, 17, 232, 235, 241–2, 257 legalistic perspective of second Wehrmacht Exhibition, 241–2 Legislative Transition Act (Austria, 1945), 111 martial law, 18, 36 see also war victims League of German Girls, see BDM League of the Politically Persecuted, 101 Lebensraum, see living space Leeb, Wilhem Ritter von (1876–1956, commander-in-chief of Army Group North, 1941–42), 35

Lemke, Jay, 10 Lethen, Helmut, 243, 246–7 letters from the front, 20, 27–49, 65, 142–3, 164, 240–1 Libal, Otto (b.1917, Austrian politician, SPÖ), 110 Lidice, see under massacres ‘living space’, 64–8, 72 Luckmann, Thomas, 2–3 Luftwaffe (German Air Force), 75, 80, 145, 269 Luther, Martin (1483–1546), 47 Lutsk, 24, 34 Lvov, 32–4, 81, 86, 293 Lyon, 108 Mailath-Pokorny, Andreas (b.1959, Austrian politician, SPÖ), 259 Maisel, Karl (1890–1982, Austrian politician, SPÖ), 105–16 Manoschek, Walter, 9, 17, 27, 50, 99, 227, 238, 252 Manstein, Erich von (1887–1973, commander of the 11th Army, 1941–42), 23, 30, 181 Marzabotto, see under massacres massacres 23–5, 87, 94, 140–2, 175 Babi Yar 38, 231 Bereza Kartuska, 40 Greece, 235 Katyn, 144–5, 166–7 Lidice, 166–7 Marzabotto, 110 NKVD prison massacres, 31 Vilnius, 141–2 Zloczow, 33, 36 mass shootings, see massacres; murder Maurer, Emil, (president of Vienna Jewish Cultural Community, 1952–63), 110 Mazower, Mark, 240 media functions of the media, 133–4 see also documentaries; press memorials, see commemoration memory ‘agents of memoria’, 7 avoidance of deep, 8 collective, see collective memory and experience, 2–5, 233

326

Index

memory – continued and historical narratives, 5–9, 53–4, 176, 193, 196, 233–4, 237, 241 participants’ memory of the events of war, 70–96 reawakened memories, 56, 79, 91 visual, 200 mentality, 29 of perpetrators, 87, 236 of soldiers, 37, 42, 66–7, 240–3, 244, 247 Messerschmidt, Manfred, 234 MGFA (Military History Research Institute), 230, 234, 248 Minsk, 24, 39, 141 Mitten, Richard, 106, 133 Mogilev, 23 Möller, Horst, 231, 239, 243, 248 Mölzer, Andreas (b.1952, Austrian politician, FPÖ), 263 Mommsen, Hans, 240 monuments, see commemoration Moscow, 20, 84, 189 Declaration, 102, 106, 170 mountain infantry, 34, 85, 87, 148 Müller, Rolf-Dieter, 230–1, 239, 248 multidisciplinary approach, 12 multivariate analysis, see statistical analysis Munich, 90, 152, 228, 229, 231 murder, see civilians; extermination; hostage shootings; Jews; massacres Musial, Bogdan, 49, 230, 251, 252, 260 Nacht und Nebel, see ‘Night and Fog’ Nagl, Ferdinand (former Austrian politician, ÖVP), 111–12 national narratives, see history Nazis, see National Socialism National Socialism atonement payments, 104, 115 in Austrian school books, 155–74 denazification, 101, 106, 115, 117, 126 in German popular culture, 226 historicization of, 9, 249 ideological elements, 64 incrimination, degrees of, 115–29 language of, 46, 54 legislative legacy, 100, 111

National Socialism Act (Austria, 1947), 104, 113 Nazis and welfare entitlement, 99–131 post-war approaches to, 9–10, 154, 232–4; see also Austria (claim to victimhood); historians’ dispute race laws, 119 socialization of soldiers under, 28 soldiers’ attitudes towards, 50–69 Nationalrat, 101–31, 155, 269–80 Navy, German (Kriegsmarine), 75–6, 287 neo-Nazis, neo-Nazism, 207–13, 217–18, 225, 229 Netherlands, 147, 168, 241 Neue Kronenzeitung, 135, 138–9, 143, 147–51, 258, 263–5, 274, 275 Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 258, 274 Neues Österreich, 124–5, 129, 135, 142, 274 Neues Volksblatt, 147, 275 New York, xii, 230, 249 Nida-Rümelin, Julian, 234 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6 ‘Night and Fog’ Decree, 168 Nimmerrichter, Richard (‘Staberl’), 149–50 NKVD, 87 disputed exhibition photographs, 230–1 massacres perpetrated by, 31–7 Nolte, Ernst, 10, 231 Non-aggression Pact, 146–7 North Africa, 88 Novohrad-Volynskyy, see Zvyagel Nuremberg, 228 Nazi Party rally grounds, 249 Nazi race laws, 119 war crimes tribunals, 53, 122, 165, 172, 232, 248, 270, 271 Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, 144, 261 obituaries, 137, 153 OFG (Opferfürsorgegesetz), 99–125 OKH (Oberkommando des Heers), 48, 240, 270 OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht), 17–20, 53, 136, 163, 168, 176, 240, 270 see also Keitel, Wilhelm

Index 327 Olah, Franz (b.1910, Austrian politician, SPÖ), 123 orders, pressure to obey, 82, 86, 152–3, 159, 216–17, 242, 260 see also discretion, room for ORF (Österreichischer Rundfunk), see documentaries Österreichische Neue Tageszeitung, 135, 275 Österreichische Volksstimme, 124–6, 130–1, 135, 275 Ostland, 19, 39 Ostmark, 57, 60–1, 170, 188, 270 ÖVP (Österreichische Volkspartei), 99, 106–28, 147, 258–63, 268, 271 Paneevo, 293–4, 253 Paris, 42, 108 Partisans interviews with former, 191 Partisan war, 25, 27, 75–9, 93–5, 168, 210, 227–8, 237 as pretext for acts of murder, 18–26, 27, 191, 227, 237, 241–2 referred to in soldiers’ letters, 39–40 in soldiers’ recollections, 75–85, 95 past / pasts Austrian strategies for dealing with the past, 107, 118 dealing with traumatic pasts, xiv–xv normalizing the German past, 249 the past and identity, 6 see also Vergangenheitspolitik; victimhood Paulus, Friedrich (1890–1957, commander of Sixth Army 1942–43), 163, 179–82 see also Stalingrad perpetrators as victims, see victimvictimizer reversal Pfeifer, Helfried (1896–1970, Austrian politician, VdU), 123 photographs dispute over captions, xii, 230–2, 260 soldiers’ snapshots, 34, 76, 79, 244, 254 treatment in TV drama series, 207–26 in the Wehrmacht Exhibitions, 243, 245–7, 253, 257–8 see also iconic images

pogroms, 31–7 Pohl, Dieter, 36 Poland as scene of Holocaust, 41, 47, 75–81, 87 General Government, 31, 269 Polish campaign, 235, 245 Polish victims of Soviet NKVD, 31, 145, 167 under Wehrmacht occupation, 31, 37, 75–81, 168 police detective series Tatort, 207–26 involvement in war crimes, 23–6, 35, 38–42, 76, 169, 239 Lithuanian, 40, 141 welfare benefit entitlement, 114 see also Gestapo; Sipo popular entertainment, 207–26 Potsdam, 71, 228, 230 POWs, see prisoners of war Prague, 48, 108 Prater, Vienna, xii pre-emptive war, see preventive war thesis prejudice, 3, 28, 31 Die Presse, 124–5, 135, 147–9, 153, 259–60, 275 press, the Austrian, 124–31, 132–54, 259–66 German, 228–32, 234–50 preventive war thesis, 85, 89, 146–8, 163 primary framework, see frames prisoners of war captured at Stalingrad, 176, 183, 189, 198–204 deliberate starving of, 21, 87, 164, 169, 192 returning POWs, 108, 137, 272 shootings, 76, 79–83 see also criminal orders; massacres Profil (magazine), 262, 274, 293–4 propaganda, 29–49, 56, 66, 69, 77–8, 95, 191, 242, 248 Proske, Rüdiger, (b.1916, Austrian broadcaster), 228 racism, see anti-Semitism; Slavs; stereotypes

328

Index

RAD (Reichsarbeitsdienst), 72, 75–6, 95 Ranke, Leopold von, 1, 5 Rathkolb, Oliver, 101–2 Rauschenbach, Brigitte, 8 recontextualization, 12, 209–10, 253 Red Army, 80, 193, 197, 263 brutality, 161, 166 capture by, 181, 185 Nazi propaganda stereotypes, 10, 32 victory at Stalingrad, 142, 176, 182–3, 204 see also commissars Reder, Walter (1915–1991, SS officer and convicted war criminal), 110, 138 Reemtsma, Jan Philipp, 155, 229–31, 235, 237, 256 Reich Germans, 57–61 Reich Labour Service, see RAD Reich Security Main Office, see RSHA Reichenau, Walter von (1884–1942, Commander-in-Chief of Sixth Army 1939–42), 22–3 Reisigl, Martin, 10, 133 relativization of Nazi war crimes, 137, 143–6, 166, 263–4 Remarque, Erich Maria, 232–3 Renner, Karl (1870–1950, Austrian president 1945–50, SPÖ), 102, 111 reprisals, 34, 76, 91, 167–8, 235 fear of future Jewish reprisals, 45 question of legality, 241–2 see also resistance resistance, 93 Austrian, 77, 101–2, 107, 138, 160, 170–2, 188, 230 Partisan, 19 as pretext for reprisals, 42, 85, 170 within Wehrmacht ranks, 28, 158, 236 returnee accounts, 140 Reuther, Christian, 227 revenge feared by perpetrators, 30, 42–5 motive, 30, 209, 219, 225–6 see also topoi revisionism historical, 144, 147, 218, 265 terminological, 54 Ricoeur, Paul, 4–5 Riga, 79, 86

Röhm, Ernst (1887–1934, prominent Nazi), 86 Roehsler, Peter, 70 Röhr, Werner, 242, 247 Rosenthal, Gabriele, 71, 282–3, 295 RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt), 33, 271 Romania, 10, 34–5, 41, 75, 164, 181 Russia, see Soviet Union Rzeszów, 89 Safrian, Hans, 34, 38, 227 Salzburg, 109, 228, 275 Salzburger Nachrichten, 135, 152, 275 Scharping, Rudolf (b.1947, German politician, SPD), 234 schemata, 2–4, 11–12 Schenckendorff, Max von,(1875–1943, rear area commander, Army Group Centre), 23, 24 Schmidt-Neuhaus, Dieter, 230 schools history text books, 155–74 under National Socialism, 72, 76, 92, 96 and the Wehrmacht Exhibition, 228, 251, 259 Schostack, Renate, 90 Schröder, Gerhard, (b.1944, German chancellor 1998–2005, SPD), 234, 249, 272 Schuschnigg, Kurt (1897–1977, Austrian chancellor 1934–38), 106 Schwarz, Josef, 50 SD (Sicherheitsdienst), 20–5, 31, 38, 41, 48, 74, 76, 79, 83, 108, 166, 271 see also criminal orders; Einsatzgruppen ‘second generation’ (post-war), 182, 262 Security Police, see Sipo Security Service, see SD Serbia, 18, 24, 210, 227, 230, 253 Shoah (film), 71 see also Holocaust Siberia, 21, 34 Sicherheitsdienst, see SD Sicherheitspolizei, see Sipo Sinti and Roma, see Gypsies Sipo (Sicherheitspolizei), 17, 20–1, 24, 41, 272 see also criminal orders; Einsatzgruppen

Index 329 Sixth Army, 18, 21–4, 30, 143, 161–2, 194, 200, 204, 210, 227, 239 see also Paulus, Friedrich; Reichenau, Walter von; Stalingrad skinheads, 264 slave labour, see forced labour Slavs, racist indoctrination against, 69, 72, 227, 236 Smolensk, 141 snapshots, see photographs Sobibór, see extermination camps social sciences, critical role of, xvi Socialist Party of Austria, see SPÖ soldiers attitudes and beliefs, 50–69 claims of political apathy, 151–2 recollections of war, 70–96 see also duty fulfilment; letters from the front Soviet Union German invasion of, 17–26 losses at Stalingrad, 176–7 non-aggression pact with Germany, 146–7 responsibility for Katyn massacre, 145 as scene of Holocaust, 236–8 Soviet Army, see Red Army Wehrmacht soldiers’ impressions of, 30–44 Spanish Civil War, 86 SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands), 229, 268, 272 SPÖ (Sozialistische / Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs), 101, 106–31, 258, 263, 272 ‘Staberl’, see Nimmerrichter, Richard Stalin, Joseph (1878–1953, Soviet leader 1922–53), 82, 85, 144, 147, 150, 163, 197–8, 228 Stalingrad, the Battle of in Austrian school teaching, 161–5 contrasting narratives, 177, 198–204 as focus of Austrian post-war memory, 176 media representation of, 175–204 mythologizing, 137–8, 142–3, 239 soldiers’ experience of, 43, 72, 74, 80, 92, 95 victimhood narratives, 137, 142–3, 239 Der Standard, 135, 260, 275

starving, deliberate of civilians, 79, 204, 235 of prisoners, 21, 87, 164, 169, 192 State Treaty, see Austria statistical analysis methods, 50–2 survey findings, 57–69 stereotypes, 3, 154, 200, 213, 249 anti-Semitic, 28, 37, 66–9, 237 anti-Slavic, 69 Strache, Heinz-Christian (b.1969, Austrian politician, FPÖ), 263 Strauß, Adolf (1879–1973, commander of the 9th Army, 1940–42), 24 Strauß, Franz Josef (1915–88, German politician, CSU), 50, 268 Streit, Christian, 234 student movement, 233 see also 1968 generation Stülpnagel, Otto von (1878–1948, German military commander of France 1940–42), 42 Stuttgart, 71, 228 Sudetenland, 87, 161, 259 Systemic Functional Linguistics, 132–3 taboo subjects ‘doing one’s duty’, 131 familial, 56 Holocaust, 176 Nazi sympathies, 59 Partisan war, 79, 95 post-war anti-Semitism, 10 resistance, 101 War of Annihilation, 234 and the Wehrmacht Exhibition, 230, 239, 252 Wehrmacht war crimes, 139, 165, 172–3, 204, 209, 230, 253 Tarnopol, 33–4, 230 Tatort (TV detective series), 207–26 Taylor, Telford, 232 textbooks, 155–74 texts, 1–13, 132–4 text types in newspapers, 134 use of text in Wehrmacht exhibitions, 210, 234, 244, 258 Theresienstadt, 48, 75 Theweleit, Klaus, 245 Third Camp, 99–100, 126, 131, 271 Tiroler Tageszeitung, 135, 261

330

Index

topoi, 10–13, 129, 210 anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik, 10 guilt, 226 loyalty versus truth, 220 perpetrators as victims, 10, 209 revenge and punishment, 43, 209, 226 victimhood, 239 War of Annihilation, 265 traumatic pasts, see past Treblinka, see extermination camps trials, war crimes, 136–43, 242, 279 Adolf Eichmann, 149, 233 Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, 233 Nuremberg trials, 165, 172, 232, 248, 270, 282 Tokyo, 270 Ueberschär, Gerd, 21–2, 146 Ukraine as scene of Holocaust, 87, 227 Jews blamed for NKVD atrocities, 35 militia responsible for atrocities, 32, 36 mixed response to German invasion, 86, 167 Ukrainian victims of Soviet NKVD, 31, 145 Ungváry, Krisztián, 230, 239 univariate analysis, see statistical analysis UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), 102 ‘untainted Wehrmacht’ myth, 63, 132–54, 190, 228, 232–4, 247, 251, 255, 265 origins, 53, 102, 122 in school books, 166, 173 structural elements of the myth, 136–9 USA, 43–4, 66, 74, 163, 187, 189 Vaterland, see Fatherland VdU (Verein der Unabhängigen), 101, 118, 123–9, 272 Vergangenheitspolitik policy for dealing with past, 7, 12, 138, 233 and Geschichtspolitik, 8 Adenauer’s, 233 Versailles Treaty, 86, 99, 146, 270 veterans of Stalingrad, 184–6, 191–5, 204 veterans’ associations, xiii, 54, 228 see also soldiers; war victims

Victim Compensation Act (Austria, 1945), see OFG victimhood, claim to, see Austria victim-victimizer reversal, 168, 209, 219, 226, 233, 239 Vienna City Council, 258–9, 263 demonstrations by war victims, 109–10 perception of Jewish population, 85–6 persecution of Jews, 108 Rapid Vienna football team, 188 staging of Wehrmacht Exhibition, 70, 228, 251–66 under national Socialism, 75–8, 80, 93–4 Vilnius, see under massacres Volga, 80, 138, 192, 197 Volksdeutsche, see ‘ethnic Germans’ Volksgemeinschaft, 21, 63–4, 163, 238, 273 Volksopposition, 130 Volksstimme, see Österreichische Volksstimme Volkssturm, 75–6, 95 Vorarlberg, 115–16, 251 Vranitzky, Franz, (b.1937, Austrian chancellor 1986–97), 107 Waffen-SS attitudes and beliefs, 50–69 political representation, 124 responsibility for war crimes, 41 as ‘victims’, 53, 104–29 see also Einsatzgruppen Wagner, Eduard (1894–1944, Army Quartermaster General), 21 Waldheim affair, 99, 104, 106, 138, 156, 255, 267 war aims, 21–2, 59–68 War of Annihilation, 8–10, 69, 71, 165, 232, 237, 251–66 decontextualizing the events of war, 122, 148–51, 153–4, 181–2 use of the term, 166, 195, 210, 231, 252, 261 see also topoi; Wehrmacht Exhibition War Auxiliary Service, 75, 94 war crimes allegations of Allied, 5, 144–5, 264 legal definition, 235

Index 331 war crimes – continued see also genocide; Holocaust; massacres; trials; Wehrmacht Exhibition Warsaw, 24, 86, 145, 233 war victims benefits and compensation, 105–31 Central Organisation of War Victims’ Associations, 104, 108–11, 115–16 demonstrations and protests, 109–10 laws in force before 1945, 100, 111 War Victims Benefits Act (Austria, 1949, 1957), see KOVG Wehrmacht in Austrian school books, 155–74 cooperation with other organizations, 27, 177, 204, 237 High Command, see OKW mythologizing, see ‘untainted Wehrmacht’ myth; Stalingrad and Nazi race laws, 119 participation in war crimes, see genocide; Holocaust soldier’s narratives, 10, 27–49, 70–96 Wehrmacht Care and Welfare Act (1938), 100, 111 see also Austria; criminal orders; veterans Wehrmacht Exhibition first exhibition: ‘War of Annihilation’, x, xii–xiv, 9, 28, 139, 149–50, 154, 207, 227–50, 252 second exhibition: ‘Dimensions’, xiii, 234–50, 251–66 enquiry into first exhibition, 28, 231–2, 243, 256, 265 fictionalization on TV, 207–26 New York opening (aborted), xii venues, 228

visitors to the first exhibition, 70–96 Weiszl, Josef (Austrian war criminal), 108 Welzer, Herald, 4–5 cumulative heroization, 4, 56 Western Front, 75, 219 Wiener Bezirkszeitung, 263, 275 Wiener Zeitung, 124–5, 129, 135, 275 Wiking (Waffen-SS division), 36 Wilhelm, Hans-Heinrich, 234 Wimberger, Alois (1898–1981, Austrian politician, SPÖ), 120, 122, 125 Winterer, Franz (1892–1971, Austrian politician, SPÖ), 102, 113 Wintergerst, Karl (1892–1945, town commandant, Lvov), 33, 293–4 Wippermann, Wolfgang, 241 witness accounts, 70–96, 134, 140–2, 149–52, 175–204 Wodak, Ruth, ix, 1, 12, 133, 157, 207, 247, 286, 291 Yellow Star, 24, 37, 227 Yugoslavia, 76–95, 163, 168, 230 Zapp, Paul (b.1904, death squad commander), 35 ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen), see documentaries Zhytomyr, 24 Zimmermann, Georg (1897–1958, Austrian politician, ÖVP), 114 Zloczow, see under massacres Zöchling, Christa, 247, 262 Zur Zeit, 263 Zvyagel, 38