In Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus, Waitman Wade Beorn presents a clear account of the extent to which regular German army units participated in the Final Solution, laying bare in the process the organizational culture that permitted such atrocity. In the piece below, Beorn considers how his work on the German military should inform American attitudes toward rare but repugnant acts of atrocity by American military personnel.
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Several isolated incidents of American military atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan have recently shocked America (and the world). In 2010, a Marine Scout Sniper unit posed with their adopted unit flag, depicting the “SS” runes of that infamous Nazi organization. There is much evidence to suggest that this was not an isolated incident and that Scout Snipers have been using the runes for years. In that same year, a group of Army soldiers murdered unarmed Afghan civilians and proudly documented their actions. Dubbed the “Kill team,” this platoon had a “reputation” and “a lot of practice staging killings and getting away with it,” according to one Army witness. In 2011, a different group of Marine Scout Snipers filmed themselves urinating on the corpses of dead enemy combatants. A recent interview with the leader of that group, SGT Joseph Chamblin, generated anger among many. It should. He was unrepentant: “I don’t see anything wrong with it, they're a bunch of f---ing animals.” Another member of the group condemned the Marine who released the video as a “traitor” and a “coward.”
Public responses to these crimes vary from strident condemnation (and polemical stereotyping) to apologetic platitudes. Regardless, it is clear these incidents stemmed from permissive and/or dysfunctional organizational cultures. I do not argue that the American military is culturally immoral or dysfunctional; to the contrary, the extraordinary nature of these incidents indicates that our prevailing military culture generally prevents such events. On the other hand, culture is created at all levels and dismissing the atrocities above as merely the actions of disturbed individuals or “rogue units” misses the very importance of cultivating ethical organizational climates.
A disturbing example of the tendency to admire the German military’s tactical abilities without regard for the larger context of Nazi genocide appears in the professional military publication, Small Wars Journal. Last year, the editor-in-chief Dave Dilegge was “appalled” by outrage to the SS-flag incident and said the use of the runes indicated “a professional respect for the German military’s martial capabilities on the battlefield and not the politics or actions of the Nazi fascist regime.” Such misplaced professional respect for the Wehrmacht remains a troubling aspect of American professional military culture.
After detailed research into the actual behavior of that same German military, I would strongly argue that there is nothing to respect (professionally or otherwise) about the Wehrmacht, precisely because one cannot separate the “politics and actions of the Nazi regime” from its military arm. Dilegge and others buy into the old “Clean Wehrmacht Myth” seeing the German army as a professional organization fighting a conventional war while the SS and “true Nazis” carried out the Holocaust behind them. The historical evidence conclusively indicates that this is simply not true.
The leadership of the Wehrmacht and the organization itself supported both Hitler’s aggressive expansionism and his plans for genocidal population engineering, which included the Holocaust. It supplied the SS Einsatzgruppen mobile killing squads who murdered around 1.5 million Jewish men, women, and children. It was fully cognizant of their activities and continued to work closely with them. It established ghettos. It instituted the first antisemitic policies in the Soviet Union, including the wearing of the yellow star. It used slave labor in its industries and in its units. My research on the German Army and the Holocaust in Belarus shows that the common soldier in this organization whose “capabilities on the battlefield” we are supposed to admire participated in the mass murder to a shocking extent.
Certainly, Nazi propaganda and latent antisemitism were powerful influences. So, too, were a virulent hatred of Bolshevism and the belief that their enemies did not merit the protections of the international conventions to which Germany was a signatory. But organizational climates and leadership built units who became complicit in genocide. At the small unit level, accepted norms encouraged atrocity. Junior officers and NCOs led, encouraged, or studiously ignored mounting excesses conducted by their subordinates. Former soldiers repeatedly recalled that certain groups of soldiers could be counted on to volunteer for actions against Jews. Weak officers lacked the ability to stand against the prevailing current of violence. As a result, most Wehrmacht units tended to be more likely to become complicit in the larger Nazi genocidal project than not. Yet, even in the face of such overwhelming ideological, organizational, and situational pressure, some soldiers refused participation. Some officers refused to carry out criminal orders; one lieutenant refused to murder the Jews in his area, telling his battalion commander “my company would not shoot any Jews” and that he could not “expect decent German soldiers to dirty their hands with such things.”
What do the behaviors of Wehrmacht soldiers tell us about recent American atrocities in our longest wars? First, let us explicitly recognize the distinctions between the American military and the Wehrmacht. The German Army fought willingly under the banner of a totalitarian state bent on conquest, whose racist goals could not be achieved without genocide. Its soldiers and officers were inculcated with a set of norms that favored racial views of the world, extreme violence and retribution against civilians, and a view of the war as a zero-sum game with few constraints.
By contrast, our military operates under the control of a democratically elected government whose values and norms are as a rule ethical. It fundamentally respects the laws of war and rejects the zero-sum mentality that underlay much of the Wehrmacht’s behavior. Finally, our soldiers come from a society that while not perfect, generally values human rights and compassion for civilians on the battlefield.
However, these differences do not allow us to avoid any comparison. Unit climates and organizational cultures create conditions for atrocity. Certainly, such conditions were both more widespread and the accepted norm in the Wehrmacht, but, in all of the above cases of American atrocities in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is evidence of commanders and cultures encouraging dysfunctional behavior by soldiers and Marines. The fact that a Marine unit could find anything to admire in the SS is but one example. The Army Brigade Commander whose men went on to form the “Kill Team” “sneered” at the army’s counterinsurgency policy and “told shocked U.S. and NATO officials that he was uninterested in winning the trust of the Afghan people.”
Writing off atrocities like those in Iraq and Afghanistan as inexplicable aberrations inhibits us from recognizing the very cultures that make them possible. These behaviors are in many ways the culmination of a gradual process of acculturation based on the attitudes and policies of leaders and the norms they allow to develop in their units. Symbols and words thus have real power. It is to the great credit of the American military that its norms and values most often prevent atrocities rather than encouraging them. However, the importance of building ethical climates even as we fight the enemy is a lesson from the forests of Belarus that we ignore to our own peril as our wars continue to demand both lethality for the enemy and sensitivity for civilian populations.
