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578 Robert G. Moeller The Contexts To illuminate these themes, I want to locate this film in the context of broader postwar discussions of how best to reconstruct Germany, focusing in particular firstly on the amazing vanishing Nazi, and the ‘clean’ Wehrmacht; secondly, on militant maternalism and the ‘new woman’ of the Adenauer era; and thirdly on mothers, fathers, and ‘citizens in uniform’ or how rearming West Germany was a family affair. Context One: The Amazing Vanishing Nazi and the ‘Clean’ Wehrmacht There is little to dislike about the men in uniform who appear in KMG. In some films from the mid-1950s, nasty Nazis abound, caricature cut-outs who are immediately identified by their fanaticism, their willingness to sacrifice innocent men, their ability to send others into battle while remaining in safety, and their complete lack of any sense of humour. 29 But in KMG there is not a single Nazi in sight. Uniformed chests are adorned with iron crosses, not swastikas. The closest the film ever comes to a true believer is Harald Asmussen, Helene’s son, who holds on to an idealistic faith in Führer and Fatherland until the bitter end. However, even his zeal is more youthful hot-headedness than conviction, and the looks Dornberg and his mother exchange at the end of the film suggest that in a reconstructed family, Harald will learn different lessons. In telling the war’s end in this fashion, the film did not challenge, rather, it confirmed, how most West Germans had come to view Hitler’s Wehrmacht. For most West Germans, putting soldiers on trial at Nuremberg immediately after the war was proof positive of the Allies’ misunderstanding of National Socialism and the zealous pursuit of conceptions of German ‘collective guilt.’ Post-war public opinion polls revealed that only a handful of those Germans questioned believed that soldiers deserved any particular condemnation. 30 Many had ‘served’ (gedient), and those who had not were unlikely to accuse male relatives who had worn a uniform. For postwar West Germans, the Allies failed to see who was victim, who perpetrator, of crimes against 29 See, for example, Moeller, ‘‘‘In a Thousand Years’’’ 30 Jay Lockenour, Soldiers as Citizens: Former Wehrmacht Officers in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945 1955 (Lincoln, Nebraska, 2001), p. 27; also, Jörg Echternkamp, ‘Arbeit am Mythos: Soldatengenerationen der Wehrmacht im Urteil der west- und ostdeutschen Nachkriegsgesellschaft,’ in Klaus Naumann (ed.), Nachkrieg in Deutschland (Hamburg, 2001), pp. 421 44; Echternkamp, ‘Von Opfern, Helden und Verbrechern: Anmerkungen zur Bedeutung des Zweiten Weltkriegs in den Erinnerungskulturen der Deutschen 1945 1955,’ in Jörg Hillmann and John Zimmermann (eds), Kriegsende 1945 in Deutschland (Munich, 2002), pp. 301 16; Echternkamp, ‘Wut auf die Wehrmacht? Vom Bild der deutschen Soldaten in der unmittelbaren Nachkriegszeit,’ in Rolf-Dieter Müller and Hans-Erich Volkmann (eds), Die Wehrmacht: Mythos und Realität (Munich, 1999), pp. 1058 80; and on the Nuremberg trials, Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford, 2001), pp. 21 2, 41 2.
What Did You Do in the War, Mutti ? 579 humanity. Decent men, forced to execute irrational orders, were also victims of the Nazis. KMG moved a step beyond most war films by also addressing the shattering effects that war could produce. But even the tortured executor of military justice—Kinski’s lieutenant ‘who can no longer laugh’—is no Nazi. Rather, he has been pushed to the limits by circumstances beyond his control. In a different Germany, he too could have kept his sense of humour. By the early 1950s, the western Allies who were among the most aggressive prosecutors at Nuremberg, charging the German military at the war’s end, had also backed away from their condemnation of the Wehrmacht. A few years—that included wars in Korea and French Indo-China and the fears that a European Cold War could easily become hot—made a big difference. In 1945, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, publicly maintained ‘that the Wehrmacht, and especially the German officer corps, had been identical with Hitler and his exponents of the rule of force,’ 31 perpetrators of the same crimes, subject to the same penalties. Less than six years later, Eisenhower and the Allies had moved dramatically away from this global indictment; soldiers and Nazis could not be lumped together. In an official statement, hammered out by West German representatives and the upper echelons of the US forces of occupation, Eisenhower now averred that ‘there is a real difference between the regular German soldier and officer and Hitler and his criminal group.’ ‘The German soldier as such,’ Eisenhower assured West Germans, had not ‘lost his honor’; the ‘dishonorable and despicable acts’ committed by a handful of individuals should not reflect on the overwhelming majority of Germans in uniform. The soldiers of KMG confirmed Eisenhower’s observation and corroborated what most West Germans already believed. 32 The Cold War and the sharp division of the world between East and West explain Eisenhower’s change of heart. By setting its action ‘east of Stettin’ KMG immediately invoked this larger geopolitical context. Stettin was not just one more former German city, now ‘under Polish administration,’ as the West German atlases of the 1950s noted; 33 it was a terminal point on that line that stretched to Trieste, defining the ‘iron curtain’ that Winston Churchill had described descending ‘across the Continent’ in the famous 1946 speech that marked the onset of the Cold War. As one of Dornberg’s men explains to the boys, ‘War is filth, nothing but filth. Those who lose the 31 Quoted in Donald Abenheim, Reforging the Iron Cross: The Search for Tradition in the West German Armed Forces (Princeton, 1988), p. 70. 32 Quoted in ibid., p. 70; see also David Clay Large, Germans to the Front: West German Rearmament in the Adenauer Era (Chapel Hill, 1996), pp. 114 17; and on the background in the late 1940s, Roland G. Foerster, ‘Innenpolitische Aspekte der Sicherheit Westdeutschlands (1947 1950)’, in Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (ed.), Anfänge westdeutscher Sicherheitspolitik, vol. 1, Von der Kapitulation bis zum Pleven-Plan (Munich, 1982), pp. 403 576. 33 JRO Weltatlas: Handausgabe, prepared under the direction of Ernst Kremling (Munich, n.d. [1953]).
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