Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier's Letters from the Eastern Front - Hardcover

Jarausch, Konrad H.; Kohn, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691140421 ISBN 13: 9780691140421

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2011

Synopsis

Reluctant Accomplice is a volume of the wartime letters of Dr. Konrad Jarausch, a German high-school teacher of religion and history who served in a reserve battalion of Hitler's army in Poland and Russia, where he died of typhoid in 1942. He wrote most of these letters to his wife, Elisabeth. His son, acclaimed German historian Konrad H. Jarausch, brings them together here to tell the gripping story of a patriotic soldier of the Third Reich who, through witnessing its atrocities in the East, begins to doubt the war's moral legitimacy. These letters grow increasingly critical, and their vivid descriptions of the mass deaths of Russian POWs are chilling. They reveal the inner conflicts of ordinary Germans who became reluctant accomplices in Hitler's merciless war of annihilation, yet sometimes managed to discover a shared humanity with its suffering victims, a bond that could transcend race, nationalism, and the enmity of war. Reluctant Accomplice is also the powerful story of the son, who for decades refused to come to grips with these letters because he abhorred his father's nationalist politics. Only now, late in his life, is he able to cope with their contents--and he is by no means alone. This book provides rare insight into the so-called children of the war, an entire generation of postwar Germans who grew up resenting their past, but who today must finally face the painful legacy of their parents' complicity in National Socialism.

About this title

About the Author

Konrad H. Jarausch is the Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His many books include "After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945-1995" and "Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories" (Princeton).

From the Back Cover

"There were German soldiers in World War II who went to war with open eyes. Many condoned what they saw or did not care. Others were shaken, and even they hesitated to write it all down. Their flickers of conscience, the way they struggled to articulate their doubts, their sense of futility in the face of degrading circumstances, and their knowledge of the incommensurability of good deeds in a barbarous war--all this makes the letters of Konrad Jarausch an important and challenging document."--Michael Geyer, University of Chicago

"This is a fascinating and moving collection of letters from the German side of World War II. The esteemed historian Konrad H. Jarausch has edited the letters of his father, a reserve officer on the eastern front, who died of typhoid fever in 1942. With unblinking honesty, Jarausch presents the father he never knew--a deeply religious, well-educated, conservative nationalist, a man sympathetic to the Nazis. Yet amid the brutalities perpetrated by the Third Reich, Jarausch Senior found his common humanity with Nazism's victims. Jarausch Junior's sensitive and intelligent introduction, which masterfully captures the complicated meaning of German history in the twentieth century, only adds to the value of the book."--Eric D. Weitz, author of Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy

"This is a moving collection of letters by Jarausch's father, who served as a soldier in World War II and died in Russia in 1942. Here is the evolution of a patriotic supporter of Hitler's regime into a man so horrified by the reality of German war making, war crimes, and genocide that he gradually loses faith in everything he believed in."--Omer Bartov, author of Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich

"A very intriguing book. These letters provide a valuable portrait of a middle-class German at war. His letters are worth reading for his seriousness of purpose, his wonderful eye for detail, and his persistent humaneness in the face of the awful conditions around him. There is poignancy knowing Jarausch looked for and found his own father, whom he never knew, through these letters."--Norman M. Naimark, author of Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe

From the Inside Flap

"There were German soldiers in World War II who went to war with open eyes. Many condoned what they saw or did not care. Others were shaken, and even they hesitated to write it all down. Their flickers of conscience, the way they struggled to articulate their doubts, their sense of futility in the face of degrading circumstances, and their knowledge of the incommensurability of good deeds in a barbarous war--all this makes the letters of Konrad Jarausch an important and challenging document."--Michael Geyer, University of Chicago

"This is a fascinating and moving collection of letters from the German side of World War II. The esteemed historian Konrad H. Jarausch has edited the letters of his father, a reserve officer on the eastern front, who died of typhoid fever in 1942. With unblinking honesty, Jarausch presents the father he never knew--a deeply religious, well-educated, conservative nationalist, a man sympathetic to the Nazis. Yet amid the brutalities perpetrated by the Third Reich, Jarausch Senior found his common humanity with Nazism's victims. Jarausch Junior's sensitive and intelligent introduction, which masterfully captures the complicated meaning of German history in the twentieth century, only adds to the value of the book."--Eric D. Weitz, author ofWeimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy

"This is a moving collection of letters by Jarausch's father, who served as a soldier in World War II and died in Russia in 1942. Here is the evolution of a patriotic supporter of Hitler's regime into a man so horrified by the reality of German war making, war crimes, and genocide that he gradually loses faith in everything he believed in."--Omer Bartov, author ofHitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich

"A very intriguing book. These letters provide a valuable portrait of a middle-class German at war. His letters are worth reading for his seriousness of purpose, his wonderful eye for detail, and his persistent humaneness in the face of the awful conditions around him. There is poignancy knowing Jarausch looked for and found his own father, whom he never knew, through these letters."--Norman M. Naimark, author ofFires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Reluctant Accomplice

A Wehrmacht Soldier's Letters from the Eastern Front

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14042-1

Contents

Preface...............................................................................viiForeword by Richard Kohn..............................................................xiiiIn Search of a Father: Dealing with the Legacy of Nazi Complicity.....................1The Polish Campaign...................................................................45Letters from Poland, September 1939 to January 1940...................................53Training Recruits.....................................................................139Letters from Poland and Germany, January..............................................1940to August 1941........................................................................146War of Annihilation in Russia.........................................................237Letters from Russia, August 1941 to January 1942......................................246Acknowledgments.......................................................................367Notes to "In Search of a Father"......................................................369Selected Suggestions for Further Reading..............................................381Index.................................................................................383

Chapter One

The Polish Campaign

The outbreak of the Second World War disrupted millions of lives and plunged Europe once again into a bloody conflict. Hitler's attack on Poland had been long in coming, since the Right never accepted Germany's defeat and the Nazi movement made reversing the "shame of Versailles" into one of its chief propaganda themes. In spite of protestations of peacefulness in order to mislead domestic and international opinion, the Third Reich systematically rearmed, preparing for a second conflict to be waged more ruthlessly and successfully. Hitler cleverly used the reluctance of the victors to grant Germans rights of ethnic self-determination as cover to conquer Austria, annex the Sudetenland, dismantle Czechoslovakia, and demand a transportation corridor to East Prussia. When the West failed to reach an agreement with the Soviet Union and he succeeded in buying Stalin's neutrality on August 23, 1939, war became inevitable. Because German civilians remembered the privation of the First World War, many of them were notably unenthusiastic about another struggle.

Konrad Jarausch was mobilized and sworn in on September 1, 1939, since he was still young enough to serve and not essential enough to the home front to be exempted. Although he had been drafted in June 1918 and trained for the field artillery, he had been saved from going to the front by the armistice in November. Because he had been transferred to the reserves after his thirty-eighth birthday in February 1938, he was called up as a member of battalion V/XI of the Landesschützen (territorial defense forces) from Magdeburg. As an academic he was anything but military in physique or bearing, yet he complied out of a Prussian sense of duty and also because he wished to participate in a historic event that he had missed the first time around. Surprisingly enough, he was quickly promoted to the rank of Obergefreiter (private first class) on October 1, 1939, and to Unteroffizier (noncommissioned officer) on January 1, 1940. This initial advancement was a result of the Wehrmacht's need for competent personnel as well as of his superiors' recognition of his leadership abilities.

Like many other soldiers, my father observed the rapid victory over Poland with amazement and gratitude. On paper, both sides fielded almost equal numbers of troops, tanks, and airplanes, but in practice the fighting quickly turned into a rout. Britain and France failed to mount a relief attack in the West, while on September 17 the Soviet Union occupied the Eastern Polish territories according to the provisions of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, taking advantage of Poland's focus on the West. The Poles fought gallantly, but the Wehrmacht had better equipment and a superior strategic position, invading from three sides at once: in the north from East Prussia, in the middle from Brandenburg, and in the south from Silesia. With giant pincer movements the German army bottled up the Polish forces around Warsaw and eventually defeated the remnants around Lublin. During the fierce fighting not only the SS but also the regular army began to commit atrocities against Jews and Polish civilians, prefiguring what would become the Holocaust. When on October 6 the Polish army capitulated, Hitler had won his first, perhaps all too easy, blitzkrieg victory, cementing his popularity.

As a member of the reserves, Konrad Jarausch was assigned to security duties during the Polish campaign and its aftermath. Due to reports of guerrilla activity, the Landesschützen were used to secure significant objects like train stations and search the woods for snipers behind the Army Group South in the former Prussian province of Posen. His own unit was ordered to guard POWs, who continued to be captured in large numbers due to the rapid advance. This responsibility involved selecting ethnic Germans who could be sent home quickly, picking out Poles who had to be controlled until the fighting was over, and identifying Jews, increasingly subject to anti-Semitic persecution. Because of his intellectual training Jarausch tended to be assigned to writing reports, giving background lectures, or leading small groups of guards. Repelled by the often rough and alcohol-centered comradeship of army life, he nonetheless strove for a degree of acceptance in his troop. Although these tasks kept him away from the fighting, they brought Jarausch close enough to the front to witness the war's devastating effects.

Unlike many of his comrades, he developed a keen interest in the conquered country and people, wondering how Germans and Poles might be able to live together in the future. To begin with, Konrad Jarausch was fascinated by the east central European landscape in which he discovered many similarities to his native Brandenburg. At the same time, he was appalled by the poverty of many rural towns where he detected architectural traces of earlier aristocratic rule, subsequent Prussian administration, and the new national Polish state. As a practicing Protestant, he was also interested in his own denomination's conflation with German nationality and in the Catholic piety of the Poles, which he saw as one of the sources of their patience in suffering and pride in their own culture. In order to bridge the gap between occupier and occupied, he also tried to learn a bit of the Polish language. While welcoming the return of former Prussian provinces, he was less sure about the success of ethnic resettlement schemes and of harsh Germanization policies. As a historian he sensed that a new order had to rest on more than force and would need to leave space for a degree of Polish identity.

Konrad Jarausch saw the suffering of the war through the lens of the nationalities' struggle, somewhat tempered by a sense of Christian humanism. His credulity regarding tales of German victimization and gladness over the "liberation" of lost territories show that he shared some of the prejudices that justified harsh occupation measures as necessary retaliation. But his descriptions of the streams of refugees and of the plight of the defeated Poles evince a considerable amount of sympathy for the human cost of the conflict. Similarly, he seems to have been both repelled by and attracted to the Jews whom he encountered because he used linguistic stereotyping along with astute observations in the same description. On the one hand he graphically portrayed the hunger and filth of Jewish ghetto life, but on the other hand he also recognized a superior intelligence that evoked compassion. Only occasionally did he note atrocities, citing their official justifications without making it clear how far he really believed in them. While his letters document the existence of racist crimes in Poland, they also indicate these were still limited, because units like his own were not involved in them.

During the initial stage of the fighting, he viewed the war with ambivalence, alternating between elation about German victories and despair over the final outcome. Konrad Jarausch was willing to put up with a considerable amount of personal discomfort as long as he had a sense of participating in a grand reshaping of history, which would be told and retold as a heroic tale by future generations. Like many of his comrades he was delighted with the speed and extent of the German advance in the East, which had taken years to accomplish in World War I. But he was also concerned that the surprising ease of the victory in Poland would reinforce a set of nationalist attitudes and racial prejudices that might eventually undermine German domination, since it was likely to foster unthinking arrogance. Especially in the letters to his brother-in-law, he remained acutely aware that the real war in the West had not yet begun and that Poland was at best a first step. Unlike many other soldiers, Konrad Jarausch therefore thought about the war in long-range terms and continued to worry about the unpredictability of its ultimate outcome.

His aims as a Prussian and German patriot overlapped to a considerable degree with the Nazi program of expansion, but eventually also parted ways with the racial imperialism of the SS. Undoing the perceived injustice of Versailles, restoring prior Prussian territories, and even consolidating scattered German settlements in the annexed Warthegau around Posen might still be justified by the precedent of the Holy Roman Empire and a belief in the superiority of German culture. But completely extinguishing Polish identity or murdering an entire Jewish people went beyond his imagination and exceeded his feeling of what would be "right." Moreover, he considered many of the Nazi exploitation measures or SS atrocities counterproductive to the German cause, because they would engender eternal hatred. At the same time, these policies violated his sense of humanism, based on his reading of the Greek and Roman classics, as well as the precepts of his intense, scriptural Christian faith. During his entire service he wrestled with the irresolvable dilemma of wanting to support the war effort, while doubting its moral justification and worrying about its political consequences.

Letters from Poland, September 1939 to January 1940

Arrival in the East

September 9, 1939

Dearest Lotte,

After an eighteen-hour trip we arrived this morning in a very rural and peaceful area right near the German border by Gross-Wartenberg. The trip was tolerable. We now have a seven-kilometer march ahead of us. Where we'll go from there, no one knows. In any case, we are in the East. We traversed the route I've become familiar with, one that I traveled just two months ago as I went on to Oels. Now relax and don't worry too much about me. I have in fact up until now managed to get through everything that was demanded of us in terms of my health and there isn't any danger of battle here. Be well. I'm thinking of you always.

Your Konrad

Initial Impressions

September 9, 1939

Now we're moving again. We're sitting, comfortably and cozily, in a third-class compartment. The sun is shining on the peaceful, quiet countryside. A German fighter buzzes once over a field. I had an interesting night. I was sent to do telephone duty; it was a mistake, but because of it I spent a wonderful hour at my post for the first time in a thickly wooded park under a star-studded sky, and I chatted with the housekeeper for fifteen minutes. Today we're seeing real East German vistas and everything that goes along with it—large estates with manors, parks, and halls. Wide swathes of land. Between those, there are woods, deer, and hares. A temporary airfield lies between them. On the roads, steady streams of transports and trucks. Single batteries. Ambulances. At the crossing, a sign announces "158 km to Lodz." We are starting a sort of gypsy existence. One day here, the next, somewhere else. It's easier not to unpack one's things. The experienced infantrymen show us how to pile them up next to us on the straw. I slept well under my coat until it began to get light. At that point we had to get out of our "beds" anyway. In the large hall of the inn where we're quartered, there are over a hundred men. We still have it rather easy in regard to these externals. Since I only got to our quarters at 11:30, I picked out a little corner all to myself.

Even the train trip had at least something gypsylike about it, especially during the night. I fell into a deep sleep right after Magdeburg and woke up only after Rosslau. Then I took turns either standing at the door or eating. It was really lovely that you kept me so well supplied, especially with fruit. There was hardly anything to drink. The trip went quickly, except for the deepest hours of the night; at times it was fully dark in the compartments. Then one couldn't hear a word, only the rattling of the wheels and the clattering of the iron. As it grew dark, I stood with a comrade in the doorway and looked up at Mars, which was large and glowing on the southern edge of the sky. These were actually the first hours of reflection I've had in over fourteen days. Then I slept again as much as I could. As we drove through the suburbs of Breslau, it began to get light and the night was over once again. One gets used to going without sleep relatively quickly, at least if one doesn't have to do anything during the day.

Now we're traveling through the liberated areas. The first, yet infrequent, signs of war. Swastikas fly from many houses. Decorated arches have been draped over the streets and the railroad lines, which had been disconnected since 1920 but have been running now for several days. People are at work in the fields. Many greet us with their right hands raised or wave at the train. We're happy that this area in particular has hardly seen any suffering.

Now it seems that we're going to see and experience more than we thought we would at first. But it's really only an inconvenience, and we aren't in any grave danger. And we're happy to take on the task.

Today at noon we're starting a new phase. I'm entering it with heartfelt thoughts of you. When will we hear something from home? But please wait until I send my military post number.

Take care.

Please keep this letter and send it when you can to Berlin. Please get me, if possible, a little Metoula language guide for Polish, and send it to me when possible. I'm sending this letter from an almost purely Polish land—especially in terms of patriotic feeling.

September 10, 1939

Sunday morning in the home of a Polish railroad employee. The inhabitants have fled, naturally. The furniture has been pushed toward the walls. Straw has been spread throughout the rooms. Above it all, the pictures are still hanging on the walls. Everyone takes what he needs at any given moment, according to military custom. Nothing is being destroyed willfully. But of course, things will get scratched or damaged when people put their weapons on polished furniture or drip coffee on the upholstery—these things are typical behind the front. Field kitchens and supply wagons are in the courtyard. Across the yard is the only well, at which hundreds of soldiers (including comrades from the lower Danube) do their morning ablutions. Now it's dry again. I write to you from a vine-covered garden shed. The sunflowers are in bloom. I can hear the bells from the village. Sunday morning.

The Shabbiness of Polish Life

September 12, 1939

In the meantime we've had a chance to get acquainted with the town where we find ourselves. Everything is somewhat shabby here, especially in comparison to, say, Schwedt. There's hardly any industry. The only thing here is a mill, and its owner has had to let us use his car. That was an interesting transaction. Our company leader tried his best to be polite. And at the end of it all, Jan signed as Johann. There's also a creamery here at the train station that is in German hands, and there one can now buy lovely cream and butter. Otherwise there aren't many stores. In the bakery where I bought my Sunday ham there was a photograph on the wall from an apprenticeship in Dresden during the prewar days, and the woman's German was quite good. Otherwise only the broad, market square gives an impression of urbanity. Even in the Marshall Pilsudski Street the houses are all of differing heights. Hardly any of the window frames are painted. The curtains are dirty and full of holes. Spider webs hang in every corner. The only beautiful building is the baroque Catholic church, a simple structure surrounded by greenery. We got to know the area quite well yesterday in an official capacity; I unfortunately saw it only from the outside, because I had to keep watch—with my weapon clamped under my arm—in front of the Dom Katolicki, the Catholic club house. I had ample time to think about this new affirmation of the old relationship between the terms German=Protestant and Catholic=Polish. Unfortunately, I didn't get too far in my reflections, because if you wear a steel helmet for a couple of hours in a row, it begins to press upon your head. Notably, the Protestant pastor has been named the acting mayor of the place, and the area around the Protestant church is the only place where swastikas hang in somewhat larger numbers. Even the population doesn't make a particularly sympathetic impression.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691140421
• ISBN 13: 9780691140421
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 408