Page 363 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo I

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the army of the intention to ‘liquidate’ them.
The idea of liquidating the racial enemy was quite new and went beyond anything seen
in European (although not colonial) warfare. Yet there were other connections between the
First World War and the new war. One was the army’s will to shatter the Versailles order; in
common with Germany’s conservative-national establishment it shared with Hitler above all
the aim of destroying Poland. As early as 1922 General von Seeckt, chief of the Troop Office,
had said that the existence of Poland was ‘intolerable’. The assumptions about the inferiority,
backwardness, and brutishness of the eastern European enemy peoples derived from the era
of the First World War.
Another was the doctrine of annihilation warfare that emerged from the First World War.
The concept of annihilation, used by Clausewitz in the early nineteenth century in a restricted
sense, was radicalized by Falkenhayn and Ludendorff: they accepted the mass killing of en-
emy soldiers and the mass death of their own men, the devastation of entire landscapes, the
starving of occupied populations, deportations, forced labour, and torture. Since the concept
evoked all these connotations and memories in the minds of the Wehrmacht commanders in
1939-41, they found that the moral threshold to genocidal war was not particularly high. The
participation of Polish civilians and paramilitary units in the defence against the invasion
was, unlike the Belgian francs-tireurs of 1914, a reality, and it confirmed the army’s expec-
tations and facilitated collaboration with the Einsatzgruppen charged with security behind
the lines and in executing ‘suspects’. Low as it was, the moral threshold was still present in
1939, which explains the revulsion and even protests by senior Wehrmacht generals such as
Blaskowitz and Halder in 1939. By 1941, however, it had disappeared.
Naturally, it is problematic in methodological terms to claim continuity from 1914 to
1939 in the absence of connecting elements. However, just as the war of 1870/71 left a deep
imprint in the cultural memory of the army, it is reasonable to assume that the memory of the
Great War only twenty-one years later in many ways conditioned military conduct. The links
were of two kinds: one was the rather intangible ‘cultural memory’, the other was the explicit
learning process. Hitler, most Nazi party leaders, and almost all senior Wehrmacht officers
had fought in the Great War, and the presence of various topoi of the war is unmistakeable.
However, such biographical and cultural continuities did not exclude development and radi-
calization. On the contrary. Military training, independent of the influence of the Nazi regime,
reflected the presumed lessons of the First World War. Military theory was dominated by the
notion of ‘total war’ in which not only the armed forces but also the entire civilian population
would be involved. The essential characteristics of total war were ‘total mobilization’ of all
human and material resources, ‘total control’ by the state, ‘total war aims’, and ‘total meth-
ods of war’ that erased the distinction between the combatants and non-combatants. Obsolete
relics such as moral scruples and international law were to be discarded. As the semi-official
(but not Nazi-inspired) ‘Handbook of Modern Military Science’, published in 1936, stated,
the target of the future ‘total … people’s war … was not only the enemy combatant but the
entire people…. Such a war knows no mercy towards the enemy people.’
The necessity of ‘terror’ to control the civilian population was thus one supposed lesson
of the last war. ‘Psychological’ warfare, about which a large literature was published in the
1930s not only, but above all, in Germany, entailed ‘”operations aimed at strengthening or