FGV 2026.2Questão 43de 60THE PRIMARY GROUP (Historical Note: Germany's Wehrmacht ["defense force" or "armed forces"] existed from 1935 to 1945
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Numeração da prova tipo 1.
THE PRIMARY GROUP
(Historical Note: Germany's Wehrmacht ["defense force" or "armed forces"] existed from 1935 to 1945, and comprised the Heer [army], Kriegsmarine [navy], and Luftwaffe [air force].)
- Allied commanders assumed that the German army's terrifying effectiveness stemmed from [decorria da] fanatical Nazi ideology. In 1944 and 1945, however, two sociologists interviewed thousands of German prisoners of war (POWs) on the Western Front and discovered a far simpler reality.
- In their landmark study ("Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II"), published in 1948, Edward A. Shils and Morris Janowitz found that political ideology had almost nothing to do with the Wehrmacht's battlefield tenacity. Instead, a German soldier fought to the bitter end because of his "primary group"—the immediate squad of six to ten men he ate, slept, and suffered with. As long as the soldier's primary group remained intact, he continued to fight effectively. He was not defending the Third Reich; he was defending his friends. When that immediate social network broke down through heavy casualties, surrender quickly followed.
- This psychological reliance on small-unit cohesion explains why some military organizations were far more effective than others. The German army intuitively understood the primary group. When a German unit took heavy losses, the military pulled the entire unit off the line to rebuild, train, and bond with new recruits before sending them back into combat.
- The US Army, by contrast, used a notoriously flawed Individual Replacement System. When a seasoned [experiente] American unit lost a soldier, the army sent a single recruit straight from a military base to fill the gap on the front line. These solitary replacements were strangers. Veterans, exhausted and traumatized, often refused to learn a new arrival's name because this replacement was statistically likely to be killed in his first 48 hours. Without a primary group to anchor them, these isolated replacements suffered astronomically high rates of psychiatric breakdown.
Adapted from Quora, July 29, 2026
In paragraph 1, the phrase "a far simpler reality" most likely refers to which of the following?
- Alternativa A: A German soldier's primary duty, as with any soldier, was to fight well and stay alive.
- Alternativa B, a correta: An intense loyalty to a small group of comrades inspired German soldiers to fight well.Resposta
- Alternativa C: German soldiers rarely thought about political indoctrination when fighting on the front lines.
- Alternativa D: The only way a soldier can survive a war is to have dependable comrades.
- Alternativa E: It's not that German soldiers were well trained, but that American soldiers were badly trained.
O que a questão pede: a que se refere "a far simpler reality" (uma realidade muito mais simples) no parágrafo 1.
Etapa 1. O contraste do parágrafo 1: os Aliados achavam que a eficiência alemã vinha da "fanatical Nazi ideology" (ideologia nazista fanática); os sociólogos descobriram outra coisa, mais simples.
Etapa 2. O parágrafo 2 explica qual: "a German soldier fought to the bitter end because of his 'primary group', the immediate squad of six to ten men he ate, slept, and suffered with [...] He was not defending the Third Reich; he was defending his friends" (o soldado alemão lutava até o fim por causa do seu "grupo primário", o pelotão de seis a dez homens com quem comia, dormia e sofria [...] Ele não defendia o Terceiro Reich; defendia seus amigos). É a lealdade intensa a um pequeno grupo de companheiros, como diz a alternativa (B).
Por que as outras caem:
- (A) O texto não fala em dever de lutar bem e sobreviver; a motivação é a lealdade ao grupo.
- (C) O texto diz que a ideologia pouco pesava na tenacidade, mas não trata da frequência com que pensavam em doutrinação; e isso não é a "realidade simples" descoberta.
- (D) O texto fala em lutar bem, não na única forma de sobreviver a uma guerra.
- (E) A comparação com o exército americano aparece no parágrafo 4 e trata do sistema de reposição, não de treinamento.
Resposta: alternativa B.
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