Wehrmacht

The Wehrmacht is the German armed force whose victories and continuing campaigns shape the political order in the novel, while its losses and participation in the occupation expose the costs concealed by official triumphalism. It appears both in the public memory of the 1939 invasion of Poland and in the ongoing war in the East, where propaganda’s language of success collides with coffins, casualty estimates, and the machinery of mass murder.

Military force and public image

The state’s account of the Wehrmacht’s history is built into everyday life: a propaganda description of the central U-Bahn line presents its station names as a journey through German history. That managed national memory contrasts with Xavier March’s private reading of the newspaper. Its coverage is dominated by Adolf Hitler and President Kennedy, while Josef Bühler’s death is reduced to a brief obituary describing a “bathing accident.” The same gap between public presentation and hidden reality recurs in the regime’s account of military affairs.

The novel portrays comfort in the conquered territories as one consequence of military victory. Occupied Poles and Ukrainians work in German households, while French and English servants attend to the privileged. March reflects that these comforts have weakened the population’s appetite for continued war. The Wehrmacht’s military success has therefore produced not only territorial domination but also a society that benefits from conquest even as it grows detached from the fighting that maintains it.

The eastern war and its concealed cost

March describes the eastern front as a conflict whose costs Berlin does not openly acknowledge. Although news from the capital reports victories, he says the Wehrmacht must send coffins home from the Urals Front on special trains at night so that the scale of German deaths remains unseen. He cites a Pentagon estimate of 100,000 Germans killed since 1960 and describes the Luftwaffe bombing Russian towns without stopping the return of the people fighting there. In his account, Germany cannot win because its opponents have nowhere else to go, while nuclear escalation risks destroying the world.

The campaign is also tied to the novel’s account of Nazi expansionism. In March’s recollection of September 1939, the Wehrmacht’s Tenth Army rolls across the road toward Poland; old newsreels had shown horse-drawn artillery, tanks, and marching troops, and the invasion had seemed easy to the cheering public. At the Oder, the remembered scene is set against a present in which Poland no longer exists as a frontier or a country. An exit sign points toward Gleiwitz, identified as the town where the war began. The route that once carried the army into conquest becomes a reminder of the destruction that followed.

From conquest to occupation and killing

The Wehrmacht’s military campaigns form the wider setting for a system of occupation, extraction, and mass murder administered through multiple state agencies. March reconstructs how, during the favorable conditions of the 1942 campaigns, Josef Bühler requisitioned art in the General Government and sent it to Wilhelm Stuckart at the Interior Ministry; Martin Luther then smuggled it abroad for sale. The three men later retired wealthy and honored. The account places this corruption alongside the military fortunes that made plunder possible, showing how conquest created opportunities for officials to turn state power into private gain.

The documents March finds about the January 20, 1942 meeting at Wannsee make the relationship between administrative policy and mass killing explicit. Reinhard Heydrich’s invitation refers to a July 31, 1941 commission from Hermann Göring to prepare measures for a “complete solution of the Jewish question in Europe,” and notes that deportations eastward were already under way. When March and Rudi Halder search the records, they find that the meeting minutes have been removed at Heydrich’s request on grounds of state security. The removal, dated April 6, 1964, shows that the regime is still actively controlling access to evidence decades after the meeting.

The surviving conference draft reveals what the official record suppresses. It enumerates the Jewish population targeted across Europe and describes deportation and forced labor in sanitized bureaucratic language. In a draft passage, Heydrich’s notes record discussions of shootings, gas vans at Kulmhof, and experiments with Zyklon B at Auschwitz; Heydrich objected to the passage, and the final minutes reduced it to a single phrase. The contrast between draft and approved text shows how the paper trail both records the crime and conceals its method.

The record of implementation

Martin Luther’s inspection notes supply a detailed account of how deportation and killing were organized at Auschwitz. They describe the camp’s railway siding, fencing, observation towers, and the arrival of a transport from France. The deportees are separated: able-bodied men are directed toward labor, while women, children, older people, and others are led to an underground chamber presented as a bathing and disinfection facility. The orderly instructions and staged setting are part of the deception.

Luther’s account continues beyond the killing site to the handling of property and bodies. He records that belongings were gathered in a section called Canada, with quantities of clothing and other goods listed for the authorities. His notes describe the processing of corpses, the removal and collection of hair, and the recovery of valuables. The scale was institutional: four gas-chamber and crematorium installations were said to have a combined capacity of 8,000 bodies per day. A separate circular ordered concentration-camp hair to be processed into industrial felt and thread, including socks for U-boat crews and felt stockings for the railways. In this system, the language and logistics of war, labor, transport, and administration converge in the conversion of human lives and possessions into resources.

Narrative significance

The Wehrmacht is not treated as an isolated military institution with a separate history from the regime’s crimes. Its invasion and continued war make occupation possible; the occupied territories provide labor and plunder; and the state’s military priorities coexist with the bureaucratic concealment of mass murder. The novel makes this connection legible through contradictory forms of evidence: propaganda and newspaper reports, remembered newsreels, military casualty accounts, conference files, and inspection notes.

That contrast also shapes March’s investigation. The decisive facts do not emerge from public accounts of victory but from documents that have been hidden, altered, copied poorly, or removed from state archives. The Wehrmacht’s place in the story is therefore both material and mnemonic: it advances the regime’s power on the ground, while its celebrated history helps obscure the violence and losses on which that power rests.