The Worth of War (4 page)

Among the major factors leading to Germany's defeat was its leadership's commitment to Nazi racial ideology. This form of magical thinking greatly weakened Germany's military capabilities in at least three ways. First, throughout the war, Germany devoted substantial resources that were badly needed by its military forces in the furtherance of racial policies, particularly the campaign against the Jews. The Germans built some ten thousand concentration camps to imprison and murder Jews and other putative racial enemies. Despite the fact that German military manpower was stretched to its extreme limits, more than 100,000 soldiers and military police officers, as well as tens of thousands of civilian officials, were assigned to the task of rounding up, incarcerating, and killing Jews.
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Similarly, trains, trucks, and supplies badly needed by the military were used, instead, to facilitate the transport and murder of Jews. Even as the German army was being driven back by the Soviets, trucks and trains transporting Jews to death camps were given priority over military transports. Like the Aztecs preoccupied with the blood of their captives, the Germans assigned a lower priority to their military effort than to their magical rituals.

A second way in which Nazi ideology had a disastrous impact upon the German military effort was the German treatment of Slavs. German racial ideology defined Slavs as Untermenschen who would be worked to death to make room for future German colonists. Germany's military plan for the Russian campaign, however, assumed that the army would be able to acquire food and other supplies from Russian and Ukrainian peasant farmers. Local requisition had been the practice of German armies since Frederick the Great.
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Initially, of course, these materials would simply be confiscated, but some cooperation from the peasantry would be useful if the army was to be supplied over a longer term.

When German forces first crossed the Soviet border, the Wehrmacht was greeted as an army of liberation by millions of peasants who
long had been abused under Soviet rule. In addition, large numbers of Soviet soldiers, themselves drawn from the Russian and Ukrainian peasantry, were only too happy to surrender to the Germans at the first opportunity, thinking that so civilized a nation as Germany would offer them better treatment than they received from their own commissars and officers. Soon, however, the Germans disabused peasants and soldiers of these hopeful notions by showing that Soviet cruelty paled by comparison to that of the Nazis. Germany's generally brutal treatment of the Russian, Ukrainian, and other peasants in the occupied portions of the Western Soviet Union, along with its savage treatment of Soviet prisoners, quickly turned the initial welcome into intense hatred of the Germans, particularly among ethnic Russians. An oft-repeated joke among peasants began with the question, “What did Hitler accomplish in one year that Stalin was unable to achieve in two decades?” The answer was, “He made us like Soviet rule.”
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Some German military officers understood the importance of eliciting the cooperation of the peasants rather than antagonizing them. One Wehrmacht officer reportedly sought to explain this principle to a Nazi deputy governor in the Ukraine. The support of the Ukrainian peasants was useful, this officer explained, and, at any rate, 40 million Ukrainians could not simply be exterminated. The Nazi official rebuffed the soldier, declaring, “It is our business.”
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German brutality soon provoked resistance in the form of peasant cooperation with Stalin's scorched-earth policy to deprive the Germans of food, and the formation of numerous partisan groups that continually hammered at Germany's long and vulnerable rail and supply lines. Some Ukrainians, whose hatred of the Soviet Union was intense, continued to cooperate with the Germans. Russian peasants, however, resisted, and many Ukrainians fought against both the Russians and the Germans. Ultimately, shortages of food and supplies were among the major factors leading to the German defeat.
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As to Soviet soldiers, surrender rates had been high in the early months of the war. However, as troops began to learn of the inhuman manner in which the Germans treated Soviet prisoners, surrender rates diminished sharply,
and even groups of soldiers cut off from their units would continue fighting rather than lay down their guns and turn themselves over to the Germans. Here too, Nazi ideology prevented the development of a rational policy designed to encourage Soviet soldiers to surrender.

Then, of course, there is the matter of the atomic bomb. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany became a world leader in the natural sciences thanks in no small part to the work of its Jewish scientists. The most famous of these were, of course, such physicists as Albert Einstein, James Franck, Max Born, Hans Bethe, and a host of others—many of whom had struggled against professional and academic restrictions prior to Weimar—who helped to make Germany the unquestioned world leader in the field of physics at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the 1930s, however, these and many other scientists were forced to leave Germany. One of the Nazi party's early anti-Jewish enactments was the 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service. Among other things, this measure and its subsequent amendments, followed by the Law Against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Institutes of Higher Learning, was designed to drive Jews from the universities. Thousands of Jewish professors lost their posts and many, particularly the most eminent, soon sought positions abroad. What ensued was an enormous transfer of intellectual capital from Germany and its allies, such as Hungary, to the United States, and, to a lesser extent, Great Britain. Soon, scientific research and teaching in Germany lost its pre-war momentum with a loss of some 3,000 teachers and researchers and a 65 percent decline in the number of students in physics and mathematics.
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Asked by the German education minister if his department had suffered because of the departure of the Jews, the head of the mathematics faculty at the University of Gottingen replied, “Suffered? It no longer exists.
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Of special importance were the great German–Jewish and Hungarian–Jewish physicists who stood at the forefront of this realm of science in the early twentieth century. The departure of these individuals from Germany was, perhaps, the greatest transfer of human capital in a short period of time in the history of the world.

The list of emigrants includes the greatest names in physics as well as chemistry and other natural sciences, including 33 present of future Nobel Prize winners: Hans Bethe, Felix Bloch, Konrad Bloch, Max Born, Ernst Chain, Peter Debye, Max Delbruck, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, James Franck, Denis Gabor, Fritz Haber, Gustav Hertz, Gerhard Hertzberg, Victor Hess, Bernard Katz, Hans Krebs, Rita Levi-Montalcini, Fritz Lipmann, Otto Loewi, Salvador Luria, Otto Meyerhoff, Wolfgang Pauli, Max Perutz, Josef Rotblat, Erwin Schrödinger, Emilio Segrè, Jack Steinberger, Otto Stern, Georg Von Hevesy, Eugene Wigner, and Richard Willstatter. Other scientific luminaries included Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Stanislaw Ulam, and John Von Neumann.
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Some of these scientific refugees fled to Great Britain, where the newly formed Academic Assistance Council helped them find positions.
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Most, however, found their way to the United States where university positions were found for them by the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars, a private organization funded mainly by the Rockefeller Foundation.
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A major result of the transfer of scientific talent from Germany to America was, of course, that it was the United States, not Nazi Germany, that developed the atomic bomb. In 1939, Szilard and Einstein, in consultation with fellow Jewish refugees Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner, sent a letter to President Roosevelt in which they described the possibility that a new type of weapon of unprecedented power could be built, based upon the principle of nuclear fission. Such a weapon, they said, might potentially destroy an entire city with one blast. Moreover, the letter went on to say, there was reason to believe that Germany had already begun work on a nuclear bomb. Roosevelt received the Einstein–Szilard letter a few days after the German invasion of Poland and was sufficiently concerned to authorize the creation of an advisory committee, which, in turn, funded the first stages of work on what would become an atomic bomb. Over the ensuing years, for the Jewish scientists, both native-born and refugee, who joined the project, the defeat of Nazi Germany was an overriding objective. “After the fall of France,” Hans Bethe wrote, “I was desperate to do something—to make some contribution to the war effort.”
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And
Oppenheimer wrote, “I had a continuing, smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany.”
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It turned out the fear of a German atomic bomb was misplaced. Absent the Jewish physicists, such a project had few advocates in a Germany, whose leaders had other obsessions. The Nazis said that nuclear theory smacked of “Jewish science,” which was to be supplanted by a purer “Aryan science.” The leaders of this Aryan science included two once-eminent but now superannuated German physicists, Johannes Stark and Phillip Lenard, who apparently were unable to make much sense of such newfangled notions as relativity and quantum theory, which they dismissed as
Judenphysik
and “kabbalistic” in origin. At the same time, Germany's leading Gentile nuclear physicist, Werner Heisenberg, was accused of being a “white Jew” and very nearly arrested for his ideas and Jewish associations.
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Thus, in these three ways, Nazi ideology greatly undermined the German war effort. For ideological reasons, substantial resources were diverted from the war effort to a campaign of murder. For ideological reasons, the potential cooperation of the Soviet peasantry was rejected and its enmity ensured. And, for ideological reasons, Germany's potential to build an atomic bomb was thrown away. It was Nazism and not
Judenphysik
that turned out to be a magical form of thought and proved unable to survive the remorseless audit of war.

THE GENERAL CURRICULUM OF WARFARE

At the level of the participant, war seems to encourage superstitious beliefs. Roman soldiers prayed and sacrificed to the gods before battle. Nervous soldiers going to war often carry lucky charms and amulets to calm their fears. Even as famous and intrepid a warrior as the late admiral William F. Halsey harbored the common belief that thirteen is an unlucky number. Assigned to command Task Force 13, Halsey angrily changed the flotilla's numerical designation to sixteen and accused the navy's high command of attempting to “jinx” him.
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At the societal level, however, those groups that frequently engage in warfare, particularly against opponents who pose a serious threat to their survival, tend to learn a number of basic lessons. This educational process has both Lamarckian and Darwinian components. That is, war confronts societies with harsh realities that they must master. Those threatened by powerful foes and unwilling or unable to learn these lessons are not likely to survive. The survivors are likely to be those who have learned to be smarter about the realities of war. The first lesson societies must learn from war is what might be called a rationalist or realist perspective. The essence of this perspective is succinctly stated in Thucydides' account of the discussion between the Athenians and the Melians during the Peloponnesian wars.
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In 416 BCE Athens invaded the island of Melos and presented the Melians with an ultimatum. They could surrender or be destroyed by the powerful Athenian army. In their response, the Melians appeal to justice and declare that the gods will surely support their just cause. The Athenians, having had a good deal of experience of war, explain that neither justice nor the intervention of the gods will help a weaker army defeat a stronger foe. The Melians refuse to surrender, appeal to the gods, and are destroyed. Of course, some years later, the Athenians were reminded of the wisdom of their advice when they were, in turn, defeated by the Spartans. The rationalist perspective derived from the experience of war is evident in the works of the great early theorists of war and statecraft. These include Sun Tzu, Kautilya, Vegetius, and, later, Machiavelli and Clausewitz, as well as the writings of more contemporary authorities. These theorists of war generally wrote in times and places that had experienced a good deal of armed conflict and sought to elaborate the lessons learned from that experience. For example, Sun Tzu, himself a high-ranking military leader, wrote during China's Warring States period, probably in the fourth or fifth century BCE, and presents military theories and axioms derived from China's two millennia of warfare. Writing in India during roughly the same period, Kautilya played a central role in the decades of military struggle leading to the destruction of the Nanda empire and the rise
of the Maurya empire during the fourth century BCE. Not too many centuries later, the work of the Roman, Vegetius, reflects lessons culled from nearly a millennium of Roman military experience. While each of these theorists represents a particular time and place, a number of commonalities seem to arise suggesting what might be called a general curriculum of war learned, or at least studied by, most militarily experienced societies.

The basic perspective of the general curriculum is realism. Like the Athenians, societies with martial experience learn to think realistically about war or, like the Melians, court destruction. Thus, Sun Tzu points out that in the realm of warfare it is important to consider facts rather than to consult the heavens.
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The Romans watched with contempt as their barbarian foes painted their bodies and asked their gods to guarantee victory. Roman commanders showed respect for the gods but relied mainly upon superior military force to bring success in battle.
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In a similar vein, Machiavelli famously dismisses “unarmed prophets” as doomed to failure. In other words, victory is won by military prowess, not ideology.
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Clausewitz avers that war should be undertaken only as an instrument of policy and only to achieve concrete goals.
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Following from the general perspective of realism are several main principles of warfare. Each of these, as we shall see, is the philosophical equivalent of a dual-use technology. Societies that learn these principles in the military sphere are inclined to make peaceful use of them as well.