by Richard A. Koenigsberg
Contents
- The Psychological Interpretation of Culture
- Hitler’s Ideology
- War and Genocide
- The First World War
- War as Sacrifice
- Training Soldiers to Die
- Like Sheep to Slaughter
- The Psychopathology of War
Works Cited
III. War and Genocide
When people became aware of the Holocaust after the Second World War, it was viewed as an anomalous event. The war itself, however—in spite of the magnitude of destruction it wrought—was not viewed as an aberration, rather as a more or less “normal” dimension of the historical process. Yet it is estimated that twenty-million Russians were killed during the Second World War, more than three times the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. Apparently people do not flinch at the idea of mass-murder when it occurs within the framework of the social institution called “war.”
Omer Bartov’s, Murder in Our Midst (Bartov, 1996) broke down the distinction between war and genocide, leading to other publications understanding the invasion of Russia as the first phase of the Final Solution. Hitler vowed to wage a “war of extermination.” Einsatzgruppen (special killing forces) followed the German army as it moved eastward through Russia, rounded up Jews from towns and villages, herded them into tank ditches, and shot them en masse. Well over one-million Jews were slaughtered before the Germans began to build death camps and gas chambers. of genocide. It is reasonable to view war against the Soviet Union as the first phase of the Final Solution.
IV. The First World War
I now will explore the relationship between nationalism and mass-murder through the lens of another case study—The First World War, one of the most monumentally destructive events in history. The “final tally” of casualties put together by the U. S. War Department for eleven Allied Nations and the four Central Powers counts 65 million forces mobilized, of which more than 9 million were killed or died, over 21 million wounded, and 8 million taken prisoners and missing, for total casualties of 37 million, 58% of the forces mobilized. The mind boggles at these statistics. We assume there must have been good reasons for the slaughter. However when it comes to explaining the First World War—its magnitude, ferocity, and massive destructiveness—historians are baffled.
My initial reaction when I began studying this war was surprise at the blandness with which historians report what occurred; how they describe horrific mass-murder, but rarely question or express astonishment at its persistence. One is shocked, not only by the number of casualties, but by the way the war was fought.
Modris Eksteins (1989) describes the fundamental pattern of battle: “The victimized crowd of attackers in no man’s land has become one of the supreme images of this war. Attackers moved forward usually without seeking cover and were mowed down in rows, with the mechanical efficiency of a scythe, like so many blades of grass” (100). In spite of its futility, this method of fighting persisted from the beginning of the war to its end.
We are familiar with this strategy of directly assaulting the enemy line—and the disastrous results it produced—for nations fighting on the Western Front: France, Great Britain and Germany. However, a similar tactic was employed on other fronts. In his war memoir, Carlo Salsa (in Bonadeo, 1989) reveals that the Italian general staff disregarded the enemy’s strength and sent troops to their deaths in futile attacks. In November 1915, he recorded the following account of the fate of Italian regiments fighting the Austrians in a charge at Mount San Michele:
“Waves of young, enthusiastic, unknowing, and generous soldiers rushed this wall of stones. We came up against the first trenches protected by barbed wire. Courage can do nothing against this miserable and terrible thing. We had no tools to cut it, and the human waves caught in these iron cobwebs broke as if they had hit a rocky cliff. The human tide was blindly flung against the fierce enemy defenses: human flesh against brute matter, and everywhere the rallying cry of the attackers was muted by the cold stammering of the machine gun. The ground was strewn with corpses; all the regiments were wiped out; it was impossible to move forward.”
This account of a suicidal attack is identical to many others. In John Keegan’s Soldiers (1986) there is a photograph taken from the German side of a Russian infantry attacking from across a field on the Eastern Front in the autumn of 1914. We see hundreds of men rushing forward en masse without protection or cover in what looks like the start of a cross country or marathon race. The caption says: “Men are already falling.” What a simple matter it was to shoot and kill the soldiers as they rushed toward the enemy line. One asks: Why were soldiers attacking in a way that made it so easy for them to be killed?
Insofar as the First World War was fought in a similar manner on so many fronts, I suggest that the method of fighting represents a structurally similar pattern of behavior fueled by a common psychological dynamic. How are we to understand or interpret this destructive battle strategy? Why did it persist in spite of its futility? Why were nations willing to accept the deaths of so many young men? Why did commanders continue to insist that men attack by going ‘over the top’ after it became evident that the result of this battle strategy was slaughter? Further, why didn’t young men rebel against their fate? Eksteins poses the question, “What kept them in the trenches? What made them go over the top? Just why the soldier kept going has to be explained, and that matter has often been ignored” (171).
Historians continue to struggle to account for the catastrophe of the First World War and to explain the battle strategies of its military leaders. Some suggest that commanders failed because they were operating on the basis of a medieval battle-strategy or because they “underestimated the potency of the machine-gun.” Other commentators (see, for example, Travers, 1987) argue that disaster was the result of the “cult of the offensive,” a military ideology insisting battles could be won solely on the basis of determined, unrelenting assaults upon the enemy lines.
These explanations assume that the objective of nations fighting in the First World War was to “win” and that what occurred was governed by rational thought processes. It is more reasonable to argue that the First World One was a case of collective irrationality. The magnitude of slaughter and persistence of an absurd, futile battle strategy make it necessary to develop alternative explanations to account for what occurred.
WORKS CITED
Bartov, Omer. “Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews, and the Holocaust.” American Historical Review 103.3 (June 1998): 771-816.
—. Murder in Our Midst. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
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Keegan, John and Richard Holmes. Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle. New York: Viking, 1986.
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Koenigsberg, Richard A. Hitler’s Ideology: A Study in Psychoanalytic Sociology. New York: Library of Social Science, 1975.
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Travers, Tim. The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front and the Emergence of Modern Warfare, 1900-1918. Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987.
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