The Wehrmacht's oath of loyalty to Hitler

On 2 August 1934, a few hours after the death of President Paul von Hindenburg, officers and men of the Reichswehr in garrisons all over Germany assembled on their parade grounds and repeated after their commanders the words of a new oath: “I swear by God this sacred oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to the Führer of the German Reich and People, Adolf Hitler, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and that as a brave soldier I shall be ready at any time to lay down my life for this oath.” Until then the German soldier had pledged loyalty to the nation and the fatherland, and less than a year before that to the constitution. Now he pledged obedience to one man, named in full. The order was issued by the Reichswehr Minister, General Werner von Blomberg, without waiting for any law. This single formula bound the German army to Adolf Hitler for eleven years.

The date

Some chronologies state that Wehrmacht soldiers began taking the oath on 8 August 1934. The sources and the historical literature do not support this date. Blomberg’s order for the “immediate swearing-in of the soldiers of the armed forces to the Führer of the German Reich and People, Adolf Hitler” was issued on 2 August, the day of Hindenburg’s death, and units throughout the country took the oath that same day. The oath acquired a legal basis only later: on 20 August 1934 Hitler signed the Law on the Swearing-in of Civil Servants and Soldiers of the Armed Forces, which gave it the force of law and extended a similar oath to civil servants. The name is also inaccurate: in August 1934 the army was still called the Reichswehr, and received the name Wehrmacht only in 1935. The word “Wehrmacht” did, however, already appear in the text of the oath in its older sense, as a term for the armed forces as a whole.

Three oaths in fifteen years

The oath of 1934 was the third in the Reichswehr’s short history. The first was introduced on 14 August 1919, the day the Weimar constitution came into force. In it the soldier swore “loyalty to the constitution of the Reich” and promised to protect the German Reich and “its lawful institutions” and to obey the Reich President and his superiors. Many officers, brought up in loyalty to king and Kaiser, took it reluctantly and kept the Republic at arm’s length. General Hans von Seeckt built the army as a “state within the state”, serving Germany above the changing governments.

After Hitler came to power the oath was changed on 2 December 1933. The constitution and the President disappeared from its text, and the soldier swore to “serve the nation and the fatherland loyally and honestly” and to be ready to give his life for this oath. It was a national oath, but an impersonal one. The oath of 2 August 1934 kept the ending, but in place of the nation and the fatherland it put the person of Hitler and the obligation of “unconditional obedience”.

The generals’ idea

It is widely believed that Hitler imposed an oath to his own person on the army. Historians, among them Klaus-Jürgen Müller, have shown that this was not the case. The initiative came from the Reichswehr leadership itself: from Minister Blomberg and the head of his Ministerial Office, General Walter von Reichenau. Reichenau, an avowed supporter of Nazism, dictated the text of the oath to his assistant, Major Hermann Foertsch. No legal consultation preceded it, and Hitler’s title, “Führer of the German Reich and People”, even differed from the one written that same day into the law on the head of state (“Führer and Reich Chancellor”).

Blomberg and Reichenau had their own aim. After the Night of the Long Knives, in which Hitler had broken the SA and promised that the army would remain “the sole bearer of arms in the nation”, they wanted to bind the new head of state to the military as its “leader” rather than as leader of the party. They hoped that a personal bond would secure the army a privileged place in the state and protect it from the ambitions of the party, the SA and the growing SS. The oath was also meant to forestall any doubts: since on Hindenburg’s death Hitler was taking over his office, and with it supreme command, the soldiers were to recognise him as their commander from the very first moment. The law on the head of state, promulgated on 2 August, merged the offices of President and Chancellor, and Blomberg cited it in his order. Sources differ on how far Hitler himself had been let into the plan beforehand: according to some historians the oath was agreed with him, according to others he was surprised by the generals’ zeal, and the order was issued without consulting the government.

The ceremony

The oath was taken in haste, on the very day the President died, in barracks and on training grounds. The soldiers – and in many places the officers too, who had been told of it only that day – repeated the words after their commander and finished with a cheer for Hitler. Only a few immediately grasped the gravity of the moment. According to later accounts, the head of the Truppenamt – the camouflaged general staff – General Ludwig Beck, called it the blackest day of his life and considered resigning. He was talked out of it with the argument that no one outside the army would understand.

Most officers saw nothing alarming in the new oath. In their eyes Hitler had saved the army from Röhm, was promising large-scale rearmament and a break with the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles, and in the Prussian military tradition fidelity to one’s oath was sacred. For many of them that tradition later proved to be a trap.

The law of 20 August and Hitler’s letter

On 20 August 1934, the day after the plebiscite that approved the merging of the offices, the government passed the Law on the Swearing-in of Civil Servants and Soldiers of the Armed Forces. The law adopted Reichenau’s text for soldiers and introduced a similar one for civil servants, who from then on swore to be “loyal and obedient to the Führer of the German Reich and People, Adolf Hitler”. That same day Hitler sent Blomberg a letter thanking him for the oath. He gave his assurance that, just as the officers and soldiers had pledged themselves to the new state in his person, he would always regard it as his highest duty to defend the existence and inviolability of the armed forces and to make the army “the sole bearer of arms in the nation”.

In the years that followed, civil servants, teachers, university professors and judges also swore the oath to Hitler. Few refused. The Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth, a professor at Bonn, agreed to take it only with the reservation that it applied within the limits of his responsibility as a Christian, and lost his chair. In July 1935, after the Reichswehr had been renamed the Wehrmacht, the words “commander-in-chief” in the oath were changed to “supreme commander of the armed forces”, but the substance remained the same.

Significance

The oath of 2 August 1934 turned the German army into Hitler’s army. The generals who had hoped that a personal bond would give them influence over the Leader discovered that it worked only one way. In February 1938 Hitler removed Blomberg and the commander of the Army, Werner von Fritsch, in the Blomberg–Fritsch affair, and took command of the entire Wehrmacht himself. When in the summer of 1938 Beck tried to persuade the generals to make a joint stand against war with Czechoslovakia, most refused, and some of them cited the oath they had sworn. Beck resigned.

During the war the oath was one of the main arguments officers used to justify obedience even to criminal orders: the Commissar Order, the extermination of Soviet prisoners of war, and participation in the murder of Jews and civilians. Many commanders who could see that Hitler was leading Germany to disaster refused to join conspiracies because they considered the oath binding. The conspirators of the 20 July plot of 1944 first had to convince themselves that an oath sworn to a man who broke every law, divine and human, no longer bound them. Those who refused to take it for religious reasons, such as thousands of Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter, paid for it with prison, the camps and often their lives.

After the war many defendants before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and in the subsequent trials invoked the oath and the duty of obedience. The Tribunal rejected this defence: carrying out a superior’s order did not absolve anyone of responsibility for a crime, and could at most be a mitigating circumstance. Because of the experience of the 1934 oath, soldiers of the Bundeswehr in the Federal Republic of Germany swear loyalty to the state and its law, not to any person, and the law expressly releases them from the duty to carry out an order that would lead to a criminal offence.