Psychological//Psychiatric Casualties

[Carl Schwamberger]

Can anyone point me towards refrences anywhere, or discussions here on the attitude towards psychological casualties from combat stress and their subsequent treatment in 20th Century Germany?

In the US there has been a growing interest in the subject the past fourty years & I am curious about how this problem was dealt with in Germany in the various periods of the 20th Century.

[Reb]

Carl

I've read a good bit about this from Allied sources who mention the Germans in passing.

What they say is interesting however - that the Germans got a higher percentage of such casualties back to their units than anyone else.

Americans caught on to the German tactic of keeping shell shocked men close to their units and treating them with seconal and other such drugs that would help them sleep and unwind.

Allied accounts seem to infer that draconian German discipline might have something to do with that - I'm not sure I buy it and it has a ring of sour grapes to it. My own durmise is that German emphasis on unit cohesion was probably helpful.

cheers
reb

[Carl Schwamberger]

Thanks. Anyone know anything of postwar attitudes or treatment?

[LANKIR]

Hi Carl,

My father was German infantry on the Eastern Front for about three years. He saw a lot of combat. He was a POW for about another five years. My father was released in about 1950. The Red Cross and western powers were protesting considerably about the poor condition and small numbers of German POWs being released prior to 1950. The Soviets were using the German POWs as labour and believed their internment to be a punishment for alleged criminal activites against the Soviet State. The Russians started to send larger numbers back home.

My father spent about a year in a hospital recovering. I don't know much about that period. He then lived with his sister for about a year before coming to Canada. His sister, my aunt, told me that my father's behavior was abnormal. He wasn't the same person she knew before the war. My aunt said Dad used to be happy and funny and loved to joke and laugh. The father I knew wasn't a happy-go-lucky kind of guy. Dad was very serious about most everything. My aunt said Dad would run and hide in the closet when someone knocked at the door.

My aunt said that German nurses used to go around by bicycle and visit all the returned POWs. The nurses would organize dances and encourage the POWs to attend. I think they were trying to reintegrate the POWs into society. I believe it was some kind of resocializing process.

My Dad could drink a lot and did suffer from alcohol abuse from time to time. My mother (born in Canada) said she couldn't at first sleep in the same bed with him because he had such violent dreams. Dad would howl and scream and also kick and punch when he slept. Mom said he improved over the years. I remember waking up one night because Dad had kicked the wall between our rooms with such force that he had hurt himself.

My father was not one to suffer fools. I would not describe him as violent but he was capable of being violent if necessary. He put two guys in hospital that I know of. My father had great difficulty sharing himself with others or even family. I never really knew him. I know that often he was very quiet and had the ability to shut off the world even if he was in room full of people. I think he was case book PTSD but not much was know about it in his time. He just dealt with it himself as did the thousands of others.

Horrido!

[phylo_roadking]

L., all classic traits of guys who've had to learn to survive inside their own heads, and never wholy come out again. Which was, after all, the only place where most of their friends and comrades live on. But I'm willing to bet the five years in the USSR did far more than the war years.....

[Carl Schwamberger]

Lankir...thanks. It is not good to derive a general conclusion from one, or six annecdoates. But, in each of these individual cases of Wehrmacht soldiers like your fathers its evident the cultural differences between German of the early 20th Century & the US of the latter did not alter the symtoms much.

The refrence to the German nurses is a new item to me. It suggests there was a organized attempt to 'care' for these veterans in a social way. That is beyond looking aftter their pyisical welfare.

I expect the professional or official literature on the subject of German veterans is largely in German & thus not acessable to the casual internet reader. But, if anyone as anything else they can post here on the subject I'd appreciate it.

[Reb]

In America, the Lutheran Church had a policy of helping soldiers re-adjust - the assumption was we were teaching these guys ninety ways to kill somebody and couldn't expect them to just hit the "off" button when the enemy finally surrendered.

Sadly, most of America did fact, assume that the "off" button existed. Our GI bill put a whole lot of vets in college where they buried themselves in work. Nothing seemed hard after combart.

I know that my father despite protestations to the contrary, was very much tied to the war years. For him, Leyte Gulf and Okinawa were the first really big things that happened to him - and nothing bigger ever did. He swore he hated weapons (my grandfather taught me to shoot) but

Dad worked most of his life testing (for the govt) the very weapons he purported to hate. And most of his off hours drinking with other veterans.

And then the world changed into this cess pool we see today. Dad told me if he had it to do over again they could fight their own damn wars...

One story he told me was of a guy whose hair had turned white (teen) and who sailed for home (on a carrier) in '45 - fishing off the back of the carrier with a cane and humming to himself. They had no shrink on board obviously. He'd been close by when the Kamikazi hit the ship and saw too much.

I've often wondered what happened to that small percentage of shell shock / combat fatigue cases who weren't returned to their unit - what happened when they got home?

Somebody came up with a figure like 250 days of combat = emotional breakdown - with many breaking down much earlier. I wonder if it was harder to fix those who were actually tougher and took much longer to break?

What a sad topic...

cheers
Reb

[phylo_roadking]

Sad - but now almost gone and forgotten because the people themselves are long gone in the main. Modern studies on PTSD and combat date from Vietnam and after.

Somebody came up with a figure like 250 days of combat = emotional breakdown - with many breaking down much earlier. I wonder if it was harder to fix those who were actually tougher and took much longer to break?

...the answer is simple; now check the survivability rates for soldiers in combat. How many tougher guys...simply got to survive long enough to encounter the "wall"?

Re the german nurses; i've always had the impression that from WWI onwars, the Europeans were much better at nursing longterm casualties - physical or mental from war than anywhere else. Maybe in the cases of mental injury, not successfully, but they tried, particularly on the continent. They had long years of doing this in the UK France and Germany from the effects of gas, blindings, multiple limb loss etc. So there was a whole level of veterans' care that didn't really exist in the US until the VA was instituted.

Reb- regarding the "off" buttons...some more reading for you. Take a look at the incidence of gun crime in the UK, particularly London in the years following 1945. it spiralled upwards phenomenally. Not only were "souvenir"guns readily available, but also the skill and knowledge to use them. Prior to 1939, gun crime in the UK was remarkable by its low incidence, except in certain levels of society were guns were "commonplace" - hunting opieces, ex-service sidearms etc. - or "political" crimes - the occasional incidence of IRA violence on the UK mainland before the war, for example.

Or - come home to the US, and study the history of...of ALL things...the early motorcycle clubs and gangs postwar. ALL of them veterans, who didn't integrate back into society in that their sense of "fun" had become much more extreme. They still worked hard monday-friday, 9-5, but come the weekend....they spent their disposable income in ways that just didnt happen prewar. Non-integration doesnt have to meant violent crime or violence per se, but you can find examples of where social behaviour became more extreme, less sanitized, in every nation postwar.

[Carl Schwamberger]

"Re the german nurses; i've always had the impression that from WWI onwars, the Europeans were much better at nursing longterm casualties - physical or mental from war than anywhere else. Maybe in the cases of mental injury, not successfully, but they tried, particularly on the continent. They had long years of doing this in the UK France and Germany from the effects of gas, blindings, multiple limb loss etc."

Thats intresting. Any other details on this?


"Or - come home to the US, and study the history of...of ALL things...the early motorcycle clubs and gangs postwar. ALL of them veterans, who didn't integrate back into society in that their sense of "fun" had become much more extreme. They still worked hard monday-friday, 9-5, but come the weekend....they spent their disposable income in ways that just didnt happen prewar. Non-integration doesnt have to meant violent crime or violence per se, but you can find examples of where social behaviour became more extreme, less sanitized, in every nation postwar."

Carefull with the motorcycle gang thing. I spent some time studying that one back in the 1980s & early 1990s & a lot of accepted widom turned out to be fabrication. Rather like WWII history : )

But your general point about the spike in violence post war seems to be valid. This may have been reflected with increased vsciousness in other venues suchas organized crime, Union activites, local politics... again there is a lot of myth floating around so it is very difficult to judge how much residual violent behavior there was.

One possible venue for academic research might be alcoholism & general alcohol consumption. There may be some statistical matches between that & illegal drug use amoung US vets post Viet Nam war.

[phylo_roadking]

Carl, as close as here in N.I. there were a number of "hospitals" dedicated to the nursing of Ulster veterans from WWI that eventually became either general nursing homes or closed for redevelopment in the 1980s. There were a lot of "patients retruned from the war with longterm if not permanent lung injuries, and multiple amputations,,where nursing at home pre-WWII was just not possible before the National Health System in Britain. Veterans hosptials in the UK were similarly instituted as charitable hospitals, later becoming "cottage hopitals" under the NHS. Every big town in the 1950s and 60s appeared to have a cottage hospital - what they really had were what you'd know as "veterans hospitals", but as the veteransm died, the facilities were generally available. In France there were a similar number of hospitals, but these were funded from day one by the state, and were VERY useful during the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918-9, as the nursing staff was already very experienced at handling lung cases in large numbers.

Regarding "motorcycle clubs", I use THAT term, not any of the later, because I'm specifically dealing with the period 1946-55, and the immediately postwar clubs. A lot of the later "patch clubs" had their origins there as properly-instituted clubs as we would know the term, but their later reputation built on these earlier days, with club names such as "Hells Angels" and "Galloping Gooses" directly reflecting nicknames for military units - often aviators who had a healtheir respect for machinery than grunts...for some strange reason! Jobs were easy to come by, most men still had their demob allowance, and only a percentage took up full time education under the G.I. Bill.

Regarding gun crime in the UK, this was typified by an appearance of guns in all levels of crime right down to the petty. Something that just hadn't happened before. BUT there's something about this, and increasingly "edgy" behaviour everywhere after the war that people usually attribute to young average guys being taught to kill, but not being taught NOT to. I've always wondered - how much is it THAT....and how much is it just... that their life-forming experiences as young men taught really how worthless life was, and how easy it could be snuffed out?

I remember standing in a railway station in Switzerland in 1983 and reading the headlines on a rolled up copy of the Daily Mail in the foreign languages section of a newspaper kiosk, and reading about the Argentinians landing on South Georgia and firing on HMS Endurance. I said to others there that we would be at war in days, and I was laughed at "We don't do that sort of thing anymore," I was told. Since when? It seems EVERY generation needs to get taught that these long years of European peace are an aberration and not...a right? The british people are learing THAT again now in iraq and Afghanistan, and the US in Iraq; what, in a few years' time, will the incidence of drug dependence and alcohol dependence AND VIOLENT CRIME in the social groups of those veterans-to-be? Not just because they get taught to kill, but because they DO get taught how easy it is to die, so what's stuffy old civilised rules got to do with anything when someone dressed in dynamite can walk up to you and destroy you in a flash? and thats THEIR "accepted" civilised values??? What exactly do the rules that govern how we all live together matter - when its so easy to die instead?

[LANKIR]

I have read as well that prolonged exposure to combat results in PTSD and that treatment including getting these guys back into their units. I think one has to realize that circumstances in the German Army were very different than its counterparts. German soldiers were not rotated out as often and hardly at all in the latter parts of the war. My father didn't speak much of leave. In fact, he said it was probably more dangerous trying to travel home than staying near the front. I think he spend any leave he had in the rear drinking as much as he could. Dad said anything moving behind the front was a target. The Americans were strafing everything with their "two tailed devils." The reality was that German soldiers ended the war either dead, seriously wounded, or captured.

My father said he saw guys who just gave up. They dropped their rifles, fell to their knees, and cried for God and/or their parents to come take them. They were left behind.

Horrido!

[Reb]

Phylo

I wonder if re-adjusting is harder these days because of a) all the nancy boys blathering constantly about how evil it is to do violence, and b) all the movies showing quite the opposite.

We live in a very schizoid world.

I know that susbsequent to war violent solutions used to seem more natural to me but that went away fast. However, I still regard people who go camping without a firearm as pretty darn weird.

If there is anything war teaches a man it is this: there are people who will kill you - thats for absolute sure; and your own leaders are suspect.

And it leaves you in a fix - there you were in an outfit where you could utterly depend upon your comrades - and here you are now - working at a bank with a bunch of sport fans who tremble when the boss issues an edict. One adapts. But its no surprise to me that death rates for vets (proven out by my own comrades) seem rather higher than the norm.

cheers
Reb

[Qvist]

I've often wondered if training methods have something to do with what appears to be increased problems with PTSD today compared to the world wars.

American research on WW2 revealed that a staggeringly low percentage of soldiers fired their weapon in any given engagment, and that there was a surprisingly widespread emotional resistance to directing aimed fire at enemy soldiers. As we know, this gave the impetus for a much stronger weight on psychological conditioning in training during the post-war period, aimed at breaking down that resistance and increasing the willingness to fire to kill. Research conducted on Korea, Vietnam, Somalia and the Gulf indicated that this worked better and better, and that "emotional restraint" interfered far less with combat than previously. If I remember correctly, the findings were that in Somalia, virtually every american soldier would shoot to kill, whereas the WW2 findings pointed to as few as 15% of riflemen even firing their weapons in any individual engagement.

Now, my frankly speculative hypothesis is whether this has contributed to the apparent increase in destructive after-effects on the soldiers? The barriers that are consciously broken down in training are, after all, there for a reason. Previously, if a man overcame them, he did so of his own accord - perhaps it is somewhat in the nature of things that by pushing people systematically past such constraints regardless of their psychological strength, strains are created which the individuals in question may not be equipped to bear?

cheers

[Reb]

Qvist

I think its been long proven that the low rate of fire of American infantry was a thing of flawed doctrine more than anything. It was a classic case of having good data and using it to draw a false conclusion.

Americans were trained to aim carefully at targets - suppressing fire was a for them, a learned skill. Apparently we were training our men to fight in Belleau Wood where aimed Marine corps fire saved the day.

Patton tried to get around slow that firing hesitancy with his "marching fire" but never got it totally together - turnover was too high. (plus a lot of Americans were hunters and poor - makes for a slow shooting hard aiming fellow! )

This gave the Germans an advantage who relied on MG fire rather than rifles in any case. I'm always surprised at the lack of firepower in a US inf squad then. Even with 2 BAR it seems low. (particularly when now days there may be as many as a MG per 4 men)

In subsequent wars area fire was taught and assualt weapons issued - in VN for instance we may have gone overboard in the other direction - shooting too much.

Our current US Army seems to be the most professional in our history even with the rather complicated task they've been saddled with. And they will shoot.

cheers
Reb

[kanzel]

Carl,

Your Father suffered much more than you can know. When you talk to vets ask them about starving, not having enough clothes or enough to eat. That was in their youth growing up in a defeated, blockaded, Post World War I Germany. If one lived on a farm it was a little better, but not much. Watch your Father next time he eats an orange, he didn't see any while he was growing up, deprived of than and many other foods we take for granted. Then came the depression, hyperinflation and then the war.
Try and imagine losing all your money and having to sell family valuables and heirlooms just to eat? You can't imagine what that generation went through, and in the end it sure toughened them up. That's why those old timers are so careful with their money, they never want to be broke again.