At 6 p.m. on January 27, 1942, Konrad Jarausch, a staff sergeant in the German army, died in a hospital near the Russian city of Smolensk. The cause was typhoid fever. He was 41. Two weeks earlier, Jarausch had mailed a letter to his wife, Lotte. “May God bless our wishes for the future. Everything is now in his hands,” he wrote, concluding: “Now goodbye and be well together with our child.”
That child, then five months old, never met the father for whom he was named. But Konrad H. Jarausch, the son, who is a professor of European civilization at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has always wrestled with his father’s legacy. “After the unspeakable crimes, we couldn’t pin a military decoration to the wall next to his photograph and say, ‘Well, he died for the Fatherland.’”
Instead, his mother turned his absent father, who had published essays on philosophy and religion, into a model of scholarly ambition. “She tried to make me his replacement,” says Jarausch. That meant studying theology. Though he followed in his father’s intellectual footsteps—at least until mounting a teenage rebellion and taking off for America—Jarausch never knew what to make of the slight man who stared out from old photographs through owlish glasses. How did this reportedly brilliant and kind individual end up in Hitler’s army?
The beginning of an answer is found in the roughly 350 letters that Jarausch’s father wrote during the war. Spurred by a debate among historians about the complicity of the German military in Nazi crimes, Jarausch five years ago decided to examine the correspondence closely for the first time. He found letters that capture the ambivalence of a soldier at once sympathetic with Nazism’s aim of national renewal and uneasy about the brutality of a military campaign that he describes in late 1941 as “more murder than war.” Jarausch was particularly intrigued by the reports that his father sent while stationed at transit camps for Russian prisoners of war, which reveal the horror of a relatively neglected aspect of the war: the mass deaths of Russian POW’s.
The letters struck Jarausch as atypical of most German World War II memoirs. “There are accounts from enthusiastic Nazis, and some reports from figures in the resistance, but my father’s letters are the work of someone in between—a soldier who supports the war but begins to have second thoughts,” the professor tells me. We’re sitting in the atrium of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington, where Jarausch, a soft-spoken man in a tweed blazer and red tie, would later that day deliver a talk about his recent book, Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier’s Letters From the Eastern Front, a collection of his father’s correspondence published by Princeton University Press. (A German-language edition appeared in 2008.)
Jarausch, 69, says that for decades he was uninterested in the letters. Like many children of the war, he has long resented his parents’ generation. “They left us to deal with the stain of being German,” says Jarausch, who is the author or editor of more than 30 works on modern German history. He was, moreover, uneasy about what he might find: “When a historian finds a collection of letters, it’s like a birthday and Christmas all rolled into one. But when the letters are from your own family, it’s more problematic.”
As the military historian Richard Kohn notes in the foreword of Reluctant Accomplice, Konrad Jarausch was not a typical soldier: He was older, more religious, and more bookish than most of his comrades. A devout Lutheran, he began every morning with a reading from the Bible. For pleasure he turned to Plato and Aristotle in the original Greek. In civilian life, he was a secondary-school teacher, co-editor of two volumes of essays, and a frequent contributor to the journal of the Protestant Teachers’ Association, which he also co-edited.
In one article, published as the Weimar Republic waned, Jarausch anxiously speculated about “the immense chaos of modern life,” and wondered how it could “once more be conquered and transformed into a sensible order.” The Nazi Party provided one answer. Jarausch was wary but intrigued. After Hitler came to power, in 1933, Jarausch tepidly embraced the change as a return to a “genuine state” that, he hoped, might “put the individual into the Volk.” But Jarausch never joined the Nazi Party, and in private correspondence he fretted about the threat Hitler posed to the church.
On September 1, 1939, Germany attacked Poland. A week later, Jarausch’s reserve unit was sent east. “This Polish state had to be smashed,” he declared, puffed up with the thrill of Germany’s lightning victory. Jarausch believed that Germany had a civilizing mission in Eastern Europe. He described Poland as “pitifully retarded.” Yet he was not blind to the suffering of its inhabitants. At times he was clear-eyed about the potential consequences of Germany’s occupation: “We live at the expense of these people and we are sucking them dry completely. What should we expect, other than bitterness and an abiding desire to overthrow this foreign rule?”
Too old for the front lines, Jarausch was assigned to secure strategic locations, combat guerrilla activity, and guard prisoners. In those roles, he became aware of atrocities being committed against Jews and other Polish civilians, though he himself seemed not to have been directly involved. “The SS is cleaning up terribly,” he wrote at one point. “Everything Bolshevik is being ruthlessly eradicated whenever it falls into our hands. Ditto the Jewish element.”
Jarausch’s personal views toward Jews are difficult to discern. According to his son, he was simultaneously repelled and attracted. Shortly after his arrival in Poland, he complained about the “miserable seediness” of the Jews he encountered, noting their “squalid and pathetic” appearance. At other times, he seemed bewildered by the violence. “Three Jews have been hanged in a public square in ód´z—why, I don’t know.” Later, while preparing to leave the city, he wrote: “The only people who’ll miss us are the Jews who bring our coal—I often gave them a few cents. They’re poor fellows who were previously carrying sacks in a factory that burned down. ... We’ve always gotten along pretty well.” Perhaps most disturbing is Jarausch’s suggestion that for Jews, it is “most merciful if they are led into the woods and bumped off, as the technical term has it.”
Beginning in August 1941, Jarausch was stationed at POW facilities in Poland and Belarus. Just a year earlier, he commented with evident pride that “German camps are orderly and run with good intentions.” That was no longer the case (if it ever was). Germany’s rapid initial advance into Russia had produced a flood of prisoners. Food was in short supply; disease was rampant. (It was in the camps that Jarausch contracted the typhoid fever that would kill him.) “Today another case of cannibalism was discovered,” he noted matter-of-factly. In all, some two million Russian POW’s captured during 1941 perished in German custody.
Troubled by the “infinite suffering” of the prisoners, Jarausch turned for solace to a Christian humanism that he found increasingly at odds with German war aims. Shortly before he died, he wrote that “genuine humanity between peoples and races is necessary if a better world is to arise from the excess of blood and destruction.”
Asked about the evolution of his father’s views, his son is unforgiving: “He didn’t distance himself early enough from the Nazis.” In the book, however, Jarausch strikes a more sympathetic tone, noting that his father’s experience “demonstrates how annihilationist warfare could turn doing one’s duty into becoming an accomplice of crime.”
Near the end of our conversation, Jarausch points to his favorite letter. It’s dated September 6, 1941, the day that news of his birth reached his father. “Thank God the waiting is over,” the letter begins. “I’m so happy and grateful.” Jarausch says this letter helped him somewhat to make peace with his father—"not in the sense of approving his values or what he got himself into,” he clarifies. “But I accept the fact that as a human being, I’m connected to this other human being.” He pauses, smiling gently. “And I appreciate that my father was looking forward to having a son.”
