[d33lio]

Thanks for your reply, I had no idea the germans issued go-fast chocolate bars! The implications of alcohol rations are also interesting - especially for the social bonding aspect the germans sought to exploit among their troops.

[throwanem]

I don't know so much about that, especially in that the Wehrmacht inherited the Prussian tradition and thus generally looked with severe disfavor on vertical fraternization among the ranks. The Waffen-SS maybe, but they also always struggled to be taken seriously by the Heer, who not without cause regarded them by default as dangerously incompetent pretenders to the profession of arms - some units and formations eventually became very effective in combat, but many didn't, and Heer commanders frequently complained about and sought to avoid operating with the Waffen-SS overall. The Heer's contempt also had much to do with the conflict between the aforementioned Prussian military-aristocratic tradition of their officer corps vs. the SS's origins as an offshoot of the "working-class rabble" of the SA, with its reputation for fraternization-driven collapse of discipline so severe that the whole organization had had to be purged. (We know now that this isn't really true; it was the SA's broad populism and redistributive political tendency, and the concern these caused among the corporate elite Hitler and the Party establishment had so carefully cultivated during their rise to power, which drove the purges - debauchery and indiscipline were mainly just a convenient propaganda cover, but the propaganda worked and these were understood at the time to be the driving cause behind the purge.) So, for political reasons alone, it seems unlikely the Waffen-SS had much use for liquor as a bonding tool. Too, the SS overall had their own weird "New Aryan Man" ideology thing going already, which tended to frown somewhat on alcohol even before that was reinforced by party leadership about halfway through the war. And finally, as social bonding promoters go, I suspect booze doesn't add up to much next to the total experience of shared purpose and adversity that is WWII-style mobile warfare.

I can think of a few reasons why liquor might feature heavily in the WWII German experience of war. Primary among them, I think, has to be that it acts as something of an emotional anesthetic, and soldiers in both wars often used it to help cope with what would otherwise be intolerable. In WWI that was mostly the manifold horrors of life in the static trench warfare of the Western Front - you see something similar in WWII Stalingrad, for example, though only sporadically and briefly due to the ever-straitening circumstances of the besieged Sixth Army. Put simply, they ran out of everything before Paulus finally threw in the towel, but while they still had liquor, this was the way they used a lot of it.

Alcohol also helped support the rapid, continuous advances required in the WWII style of mobile warfare, serving as something of a dual to benzedrine. The ferocious German materiel buildup of the 1930s notwithstanding, their entire war plan, again much as in WWI, was predicated on the knowledge that their only path to victory lay in finding a way for a smaller force to beat a much larger one. Technical and training superiority was one aspect of the solution; another was the speed, precision, and decisiveness of action that that individual superiority enabled. All of those grow steadily harder to maintain over time, as action takes its toll, and countenancing alcohol use helps blunt this effect for a while. In the long run I'd expect it to be more a hindrance than a help, but German plans in both wars were intended to ensure that the war was won before there could be a long run - because, in the long run, the Germans knew they would lose.

And, of course, alcohol helped blunt the psychic damage of participation in atrocity, for the vast majority of soldiers and others to whom it did not come naturally - this, along with suicide, was in particular a problem among early Sonderkommandos and prior to the industrialization of massacre for which the Nazi regime is most deservedly loathed today. Part of the purpose behind that industrialization was in fact to provide enough emotional distance, for those tasked with carrying it out, to stop them constantly drinking themselves insensate or eating their guns or both.