I have an odd question for you wise people. What are yalls opinion on people who call soldiers and officers of the Wehrmacht nazis? It is to my understanding that although the Wehrmacht were the armed forces of nazi Germany and were indoctrinated to nazism to a certain degree, it was composed of every day german soldiers that were conscripted or were just performing their duty despite the politics. I know of many objections within their ranks to what the regime was doing, and that also some of them must have believed in the ideological target they were fighting to achieve, but is it accurate to label it as a nazi organization?
In my opinion, the only accurate military representation of "nazi" would have been the waffen SS, where the requirements to join (at least at first) were fueled by the ideology (had to be aryan, certain height, perfect teeth, ideologically pure, etc). Within these ranks, the ideological views of nazism, such as the superiority of the aryan race and "untermensch" were implemented into the men, which in fact made them careless of human life in the battlefield and effective fanatical soldiers. This in my opinion as I said before would be accurate as nazi.
But what about the Wehrmacht? What do y'all think?
One thing that clouds the issue here is the “Myth of the Clean Wehrmacht” – the notion that the Wehrmacht was just fighting a war, whereas the Government and the SS were responsible for all of the war crimes. The myth was developed as a deliberate attempt to rehabilitate the Wehrmacht in order to legitimise the establishment of the Bundeswehr in the 1950s. The development of the Cold War led politicians to decide that West Germany needed armed forces to defend itself, but the establishment of these forces needed to get over the obstacle of public opinion. In 1950 the Himmelrod Memorandum was issued suggesting that the German Chancellor adopt the following policies:
German soldiers convicted as war criminals should be released.
Defamation of the German soldiers would have to cease.
Domestic and foreign public opinion of the German military would need to change.
This approach spread to the Western powers and President Eisenhower declared “a real difference between the German soldier and Hitler and his criminal gang.” It worked and the Bundeswehr was established.
This was a cover up. As the military arm of the Nazi state, the Wehrmacht was complicit in crimes against humanity, actively supported the Final Solution and committed war crimes on a vast scale. Ahead of the invasion of Russia the Wehrmacht was given carte blanche to abuse Russian soldiers and civilians without fear of prosecution and the military was instructed to carry out summary justice for Russian civilians. The infamous “Commissar order” issued by the army high command instructed soldiers to execute Russian political officers on sight. Prisoners of War were routinely executed or left to die through neglect. The war against Russia was declared to be a war of annihilation and so the Wehrmacht considered crimes against humanity to be a military method of achieving the political aim of exterminating Slavs and “Judeo-Bolshevism”.
Even before the invasion of Russia, the Wehrmacht had committed a number of atrocities against civilians in Poland and throughout the occupation of Eastern, Southern and Western Europe its domestic security role meant that it was entwined in the criminal affairs of the state. It helped to implement the “Night and Fog” decree, which allowed for the disappearance of suspected partisans leading to extrajudicial torture and execution; it implemented policies of discrimination and persecution against “undesirables”; and it took part in reprisals against civilians including summary executions, torture and rape. The Wehrmacht also maintained a network of military brothels in which local women were forced to work.
These were not isolated cases and nor were commanders or soldiers “just following orders”. For example General von Manstein issued an order to his soldiers in November 1941 including this:
Jewry is the middleman between the enemy at our rear and the still fighting remnants of the Red Army and the Red leadership; more than in Europe, it occupies all key posts of the political leadership and administration, of trade and crafts and forms the nucleus for all disquiet and possible revolts. The Jewish-Bolshevist system must be exterminated once and for all.
Analysis of letters sent by German soldiers shows that this fervor spread throughout the ranks, with soldiers reporting that they were happy to execute partisans. They routinely took photographs of atrocities and consistently used Nazi language to describe their opponents and the civilian population as sub-human.
Intriguingly the Wehrmacht was not declared a criminal organisation at the Nuremburg trials because it was too disorganised to pass the legal test to be defined as an organisation.
If you’d like to read more then I highly recommend Wette’s The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality and for an appraisal of the American view of the Wehrmacht, Smelser and Davies’ The Myth of the Eastern Front.