Perceptions of war by Austrian members of the Wehrmacht

The project will gain information about how "Austrian" members of the Wehrmacht perceived and interpreted events and situations on and behind the front at the time or shortly afterwards. It will make use of hitherto untapped sources: the transcripts of monitored conversations made by the American and British secret services of "Austrian" POWs between 1940/42 and 1945. These multi-facetted and extensive holdings are deposited in the London and Washington Archives and include over 20,000 files with roughly 120,000 pages. An inter-disciplinary method will be employed: the analysis of referential frameworks; a method, which has been developed in order to research determining attitudes and conduct of people in a given historical situation. The inter-disciplinary approach of the project ensures that the levels of historical factuality and the psychosocial process of perception and interpretation can be precisely related to one another. The American monitored material also provides a unique opportunity to combine patterns of perception of POWs with their socio-graphical profile, as it has personal data on each monitored POW. The whole source provides, in an almost ideal manner, points of departure in order to pursue, on a broad basis, the central question as to what extent and whether patterns of perception and interpretation of members of the Wehrmacht in the Second World War were determined by social and generational factors. Thus the project applied for can provide a new perspective on the thinking and actions of average "Austrian" soldiers and NCOs in the Wehrmacht. The project will, in terms of exploitation of sources and method, be linked to other, already running projects: those of the international co-operation partners Prof. Sönke Neitzel (Universität Mainz), Prof. Harald Welzer (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen) and Prof. Michael Matheus (Deutsches Historisches Institut Rom). These parallel investigations will also make possible a systematic comparison between "Austrian" members of the Wehrmacht and German and Italian POWs.

Western Allied intelligence services listened in on and transcribed to paper conversations of thousands of German POWs during the Second World War. Among them were, from almost all military ranks and social classes, hundreds of "Austrian" members of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS. The aim of this project was, using these monitoring protocols, to explore the perception and interpretation of the Second World War by "Austrian" soldiers. A key outcome of the project was the realization that many of the "Austrians" serving with the Wehrmacht regarded it as their army while for them Austria itself - apart from the events surrounding the Anschluss in March 1938 - was hardly worth remembering. Monitored "Austrians" regarded themselves as the equals of German soldiers and were regarded as such by their reichsdeutschen comrades. The everyday life of the soldiers before their capture was war and this provides the dominant framework of their conversations. The waging of war - including killing people - was seen as a task one tried to accomplish with professionalism. To talk about ones own death and ones own fears was largely taboo. The omnipresence of death in war was largely reflected in tales of others. Once in captivity the "Austrian" members of the Wehrmacht were not subject to draconian German military courts; consequently their conversations were extremely open. A lot of time was devoted to discussions about Nazi elites, which were overwhelmingly judged in a critical and negative fashion. The NSDAP was perceived as corrupt while the SS was blamed for excessive violence. A surprisingly clear result of the investigation is that the "Austrian" prisoners of war talked very openly about German crimes in the occupied territories and in the German Reich itself. They were aware of the mass shootings, the existence of concentration camps; could name them and knew people were being murdered there. This knowledge was not limited to a few but was rather shared by the bulk of the monitored "Austrians". The crimes were sharply rejected by a significant majority on account of their inhuman implementation. One of the main reasons was that the soldiers feared their own families would meet a similar fate as that suffered by the civilian population of the occupied territories in the course of an allied advance.