Understanding One Another
How Empathy Binds
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Why did millions of Allied propaganda leaflets have so little effect on German soldiers? In Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History, Doug presents Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz’s finding that loyalty to comrades mattered more at the front than Nazi ideology. A survey of half a million American veterans revealed a parallel: they too remembered fighting less for national ideals than for the people beside them.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
The content in this post is based on the book Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
During World War II German soldiers were fierce fighters and the allied fighters were finding it difficult to advance. These German soldiers were not fighting for the Thousand Year Reich or for Blut und Bolden —- blood and soil – but because they did not want to let down their mates.
‘Nazism begins ten miles behind the front line,’ scoffed one German prisoner, whereas friendship right there in every bunker and trench. The military commanders were well aware of this, and as later historians discovered, used it to their advantage. Nazi generals went to great lengths to keep comrades together, even withdrawing whole divisions for as long as it took to new recruits to form friendships, and only then sent everyone back into the fray.’
“When researchers at the Psychological Warfare Division put two and two together they discovered why their propaganda campaign had virtually no impact. Writing about the effects of millions of leaflets dropped behind enemy lines, Janowitz and Shils noted that ‘Much effort was devoted to ideological attacks on German leaders but only about five percent of the prisoners mentioned this topic [when questioned].
In fact, most Germans didn’t even remember that the leaflets criticized National Socialism.
When researchers asked one German sergeant about his political views, the man burst out laughing: ‘When you asked such a question, I realize well that you have no idea of what makes a soldier fight.”
Transcripts of general soldiers a tremendous ‘martial ethos’ and placed a high value on qualities such as loyalty, camaraderie, and self-sacrifice. Conversely, anti-jewish sentiment and ideological purity played only a small role in the consciousness of Wehrmacht members.
The same is true of American fighting in the Second World War. In 1949, a team of sociologists published the results of a vast survey among a half million US war veterans, which revealed that they had not been motivated primarily by idealism or ideology. An American soldier wasn’t fueled by patriotic spirit any more than a British one was by democratic rule of law. It wasn’t so much for their countries that these men fought as for their comrades.