Postwar Soldiers by Jörg Echternkamp

Postwar Soldiers by Jörg Echternkamp

Author:Jörg Echternkamp [Echternkamp, Jörg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Germany, Military, Veterans, Political Science, Political Ideologies, Democracy
ISBN: 9781789205589
Google: btGwDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2020-03-20T01:06:48+00:00


CHAPTER 14

The Military Resistance

Fostering Tradition as a Political Act and Biographical Challenge

It was not only the Allies’ symbol politics and judicial demilitarization programs that fed the notion of a criminal war. Rather, a flip side to the idealized self-image that had begun to emerge among veteran associations and the former generals arose in the efforts of those who, in reaction to the premises of demilitarization, sought to portray “another Germany” in which the military resistance featured as one, albeit miniscule, facet of the German army. These early reports, anecdotes, and recollections were ambivalent to the extent that they testified to the exceptional character of those few who did resist on the one hand, and on the other inevitably placed the behavior of most under suspicion. Narrated at times with drastic language, stories of the resistance thus brought forth both the positive and negative elements of the wartime past. By the second half of the 1940s, 20 July 1944 already represented a retrospective focal point for attitudes toward war and the Wehrmacht. The attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life distilled the moral crux of the military resistance. During the war, Germans condemned the assassination attempt on the Führer because they hoped for a victory. To many, the National Socialist propaganda that decried the would-be assassins as cowardly traitors without honor seemed reasonable. While there had already been plans to overthrow Hitler in 1938 when his claims on the Sudetenland caused an international crisis, the experiences of the war, the crimes in Poland, and the war of annihilation against the Soviet Union were the essential factors leading the military opposition to decide in favor of an attempt on the dictator’s life.1

In the immediate postwar period, one could read about the crimes of the war and their perception either in the accounts of outraged contemporaries or in the posthumous publications of those close to the resistance. Directly after the war’s end, a variety of witnesses testified: former Officer Fabian von Schlabrendorff,2 for example, or Hans Bernd Gisevius, who had belonged to the OKW’s Foreign/Defense Office as a “special leader” (Sonderführer).3 Early research on the resistance, such as the historian Hans Rothfels’s 1951 academic engagement with 20 July, which was originally published in English after his remigration to Germany from the United States,4 should be viewed against the backdrop of the sweeping Anglo-Saxon criticism of Germans as a people, as well as the defamation of the resistance as treason by nationalist, militaristic circles. Given the context, contemporary eyewitness accounts and research were not least concerned with giving an idea of the “other Germany.” As both the texts and their reception show, this resulted in a grim sketch of World War II and the Wehrmacht. Reviewing Schlabrendorff’s firsthand account for the Frankfurter Hefte, Karl O. Paetel astutely registered the author’s insight into the “myth” of the Wehrmacht. Schlabrendorff showed “the falsity and disastrous effects of the myth of ‘the Wehrmacht’ as a politically active oppositional force, to which even Hitler’s enemies have clung almost monomaniacally for a decade now.



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