Soldaten

The murder of POWs, the execution of civilians, massacres, forced labor, plunder, rape, the perfection of deadly technology, and the mobilization of society were all characteristics of World War II. But they were not new. New were the dimensions and the quality of these phenomena, which went beyond anything previously experienced in human history. In terms of the modern age, new was the revocation of limits on violence, culminating in the industrialized mass murder of European Jews. But it is not our aim here to offer a retrospective evaluation of the character of World War II. The central questions we would pose are: what was specific to the perceptions and actions of German soldiers at this point in time, and what elements can be found in other twentieth-century wars?

These two questions form a prism through which we in the present can look back on the past. And that being the case, another question emerges: what aspects of World War II, and in particular Wehrmacht soldiers’ perceptions and deeds, are specifically National Socialist or specific to this particular armed conflict?

WHO GETS KILLED

On July 12, 2007, two American helicopter crews opened fire on a group of civilians in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. Among them was Reuters news agency photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen. As a video titled “Collateral Murder” later published on the WikiLeaks website would show,^{849} most of those fired on were killed instantly. One person, apparently seriously wounded, tried to crawl his way to safety. When a delivery truck arrived, and two people tried to help the wounded man, American helicopter crews resumed fire. Not only were the would-be rescuers killed in the barrage. A short time later, it emerged that two children who happened to be in the truck were also seriously wounded. The attack was launched after the helicopter crews believed they saw people in the first group carrying weapons. When the identification was confirmed, they opened fire, and the rest took its course.

The entire event transpired in a matter of minutes, and the protocol of the GIs’ radio conversations is revealing:

The tragic fate of the people on the ground begins at the moment when a helicopter crew member thinks he recognizes a weapon. From this point on, the group, which the helicopter crews watch from a distance via video monitors, becomes a target, and the intention to focus on and destroy this target is preprogrammed. It only takes a few seconds for other crew members to identify further weapons. Almost instantaneously an armed individual becomes a whole armed group. Equally quickly, the weapon becomes an AK-47 and then a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. When the first helicopter receives permission to attack, the group disappears from view behind a building. At that point, from the soldiers’ perspective, the only thing that matters is to get their sights back on their targets, and one of the people deemed to be carrying a weapon is perceived as having fired a shot. Precisely because the group has disappeared behind a building, the U.S. soldiers’ desire to “incapacitate” them as quickly as possible becomes overwhelming. Any remaining doubt about whether these people actually are “insurgents” and whether they really are carrying weapons is rendered moot. The soldiers have defined the situation, and that definition calls for a set procedure.

Group thinking and mutual confirmation of what is perceived replaced the factual situation with an imagined one. Viewers watching the video now don’t see what the soldiers see. But the viewer doesn’t bear the burden of having to make decisions. What happens in the video may unfold before his eyes, but it has nothing to do with him. The task of U.S. helicopter crews as well as ground troops, however, is to battle insurgents. Every person on the street is perceived under this condition. Moreover, every suspicion those on the street raise, for whatever reason, carries a fatal tendency to be confirmed by further indications. When a group of people that has seemingly been clearly identified then disappears from view, soldiers perceive extreme danger. From that point on everything is directed toward combating the target:

Within the blink of an eye, eight people are dead, and one seriously wounded. The attack itself has confirmed the definition of the situation beyond any doubt. A combat situation does in fact exist, whereas before it was simply imagined.

The video caused a sensation when it was illegally made public in 2010, since it depicted American GIs killing a group of defenseless civilians from the air without being in any real danger. Yet upon closer examination it is completely unspectacular. Everything shown happens within the frame of reference “war” and carries a certain degree of inevitability. The “Collateral Murder” video is a perfect illustration that the consequences are real whenever people define a situation as real. The soldiers have a task, and they are trying to carry it out. In order to do that, they see the world through professional eyes. Everyone down below is suspect. Part of seeing the world professionally is exchanging impressions with others, and the tendency is that observations and comments that have been made once will be confirmed. Thus a single weapon becomes many, and passersby become combatants. One can call this phenomenon a “dynamic of violence,” an instance of “group thinking,” or a “path dependency.” In practice, all these elements come together with fatal consequences for eleven people within the space of a few minutes.

But the procedure is by no means over when the targets are destroyed. On the contrary, the soldiers take stock of their work:

What might appear to outsiders, and the media who reported on the video, as sheer cynicism is nothing other than professional acknowledgment after a job well done. The soldiers’ mutual congratulations once again make it clear that, from their perspective, they have destroyed completely legitimate targets.

The other side’s casualties are almost always regarded as fighters, partisans, terrorists, or insurgents. We recall here the rule among U.S. troops from the Vietnam War “If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s Vietcong,”^{850} as well as the Wehrmacht soldiers who justified killing women and children by saying they were “partisans.” It is the violent act following the definition that confirms the definition’s accuracy. In this way, violence serves as proof that one has correctly assessed a situation. The “Collateral Murder” video clearly illustrates how violence transforms a murky situation, in which men suffer from a lack of orientation and don’t know what to do, into something crystal clear. When all the targets are dead, order has been restored. Once the procedure has been set in motion, any further details will be seen in light of the original definition. The delivery truck with the men who are trying to help the wounded civilians to safety is an enemy vehicle. And as a logical extension, the would-be rescuers are further terrorists.

Even the fact that there were children in the vehicle, who were badly wounded by American gunfire, can be made to confirm the original definition of the situation:

We see how enormous the power of definition is. In this case, child casualties are not even considered collateral damage, let alone evidence of a grievous or indeed any mistake made by the U.S. helicopter crews. The wounded children are just one more piece of evidence of how perfidious the “insurgents” are since they don’t even hesitate to take their kids into battle.

THE DEFINITION OF ENEMIES

At one point in the “Collateral Murder” video, one of the helicopter gunners says of the injured man trying to crawl away, “Come on, buddy. All you gotta do is pick up a weapon.” Here, too, we see the convergence of violence and the confirmation that it was justified. The gunner wants the man to behave according to the soldiers’ definition of the situation, as an insurgent, so that they can kill him. We observed the same mode of self-fulfilling prophecy in relation to World War II soldiers’ treatment of supposed partisans. In that case, it was the ammunition allegedly found on victims that justified executing them as “terrorists.”

This is a general characteristic of violence in war. The behavior of those defined as the “enemies” confirms the legitimacy of that designation. This has nothing to do with stereotypes, prejudices, or “worldviews.” The only characteristic of “target persons” that counts is that they pose a threat. Any indication to that effect provides sufficient reason to kill. In the Vietnam War, soldiers feared that even babies could be carrying concealed hand grenades. In World War II, children could be considered partisans, just as in the Iraq War they could be regarded as insurgents.

In a voluminous study of the dynamic of violence in the Vietnam War, historian Bernd Greiner cited a series of examples of the “self-evident” identification of enemies. The simplest one was that anyone who tried to flee was automatically an enemy who should be shot. The attempt to escape confirmed suspicions that an individual was a Vietcong.^{851} Somewhat more complicated is the discovery of “evidence.” When examining the surveillance protocols, we highlighted the story of the presence of ammunition being used to distinguish supposed partisans from civilians. The same procedure, however illogical it was, was applied in the Vietnam War, where GIs sometimes razed villages in which they had previously deposited Soviet-made ammunition as proof of a Vietcong presence there. The U.S. 9th Infantry Division killed a total of 10,899 people but only secured 748 weapons. That suggests that 14 civilians were murdered for every true Vietcong eliminated. As a justification, soldiers often claimed that the Vietcong were killed before they could go get their weapons.^{852}

It was difficult for American soldiers in Vietnam to precisely identify enemies since the Vietcong waged a guerrilla war. Not knowing whether they were confronted with incognito fighters, men and women, or harmless civilians, created a huge challenge. The lack of orientation soldiers feel in a “war without fronts,” or what we today would call asymmetrical warfare, underscores the compulsive need soldiers feel to establish certainty, particularly under violent conditions. Precisely in situations in which soldiers do not face standard sorts of battle, but can be killed in irregular attacks, explosive traps, and ambushes, their ability to orient themselves is a precondition for survival. Ambush situations also make soldiers feel helpless. As one present-day German sergeant serving in Afghanistan described it: “If you’re ambushed, things get hectic. You require a phase of orientation. Who is being shot at from where? It feels awful, to say the least. The enemy is always at an advantage since he chose the place of the attack and is familiar with it…. I was also glad if I could alight from my vehicle. You may lose some cover, but you’re a much smaller target. And you can act on your own terms again, decide whether to shoot back or hide.”^{853} Only when a situation of clarity has been restored about who the enemies are do soldiers once again feel secure. Fatally, violence is precisely the means by which orientation can be regained most simply, quickly, and unambiguously. A successful act of violence removes the gray areas.

This was the reason why the Wehrmacht most often engaged in acts of extreme violence against innocent civilians in the context of fighting partisans. It is beyond question that the POWs in the surveillance protocols operated under the assumption that in the battle against presumed partisans, one was allowed to kill, burn down villages, and terrorize civilians. The threatening chimera of the “Franc-tireur,” the irregular fighter, had already played a prominent role in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, and it was an established Wehrmacht doctrine to nip any incipient guerrilla activity in the bud with brute force.^{854} Thus, internalized cultural factors combined with objective uncertainty to make the use of “ruthless severity” seem unavoidable and normal.

It is unique to the conditions of war that the definition of the enemy justifies all acts taken as a result of that definition. In this respect, the way the Wehrmacht waged war was no different from the way many fighting forces have. This perspective applies equally to war between sovereign states and asymmetrical warfare. The parties at war have the right to define who is and isn’t an enemy. The perennial argument that one was only trying to defend oneself against an enemy bent on world domination or enamored of senseless violence is a standard element of war crimes trials or interviews and personal testimonies. It’s the excuse perpetrators use to justify why they did certain things. At the moment when violence occurs, though, it needs no justification. Or as the leader of a German mobile medical unit in Afghanistan formulated things: “You feel great rage in battle. You don’t have much time to think. That only comes later.”^{855}

The decisive point in the example of the U.S. helicopter crews’ behavior is this: entirely unrelated to historical, cultural, and political circumstances, the definition of a specific situation and all the actors present in it establishes the frame of reference for everything that happens subsequently. Group thinking and the dynamic force of unfolding violence ensure that the ending is almost always deadly.

REVENGE FOR WHAT WAS AND COULD BE DONE TO US

The analogy of killing can be extended by definition all the way to the level of genocide. The murder of Jews was also defined as an act of self-defense, at least by racial theorists and those who helped arrange the Holocaust. Only here the subject of the fear and aggression was a whole community and not an individual. It is no accident that Jews about to be killed were also described as partisans, that is: irregular enemies it was permissible to eradicate. As one Wehrmacht soldier remarked, “Where there’s a Jew, there’s a partisan.”^{856}

Killing under the guise of self-defense also occurs in other cultural and historical contexts. The genocide carried out by the Hutu against Tutsi in 1990s Rwanda was preceded by forms of perception and interpretation that American historian Alison Des Forges vividly described as “accusation in a mirror.” In a kind of putative genocidal fantasy, one side accuses the other of planning to completely annihilate it. This schema of mirror-image accusations is not just a psychosocial phenomenon. It is also an explicitly promoted propaganda method. With the help of this technique, as one source quoted by Des Forges asserts, “the side actually terrorizing the other will accuse its enemy of terrorizing it.”^{857} The logical corollary to spreading fantastic fears of being threatened is to create a willingness for self-defense among the party that feels itself under threat. Every form of murderous attack and systematic annihilation can also be perceived as a necessary act of self-defense.

This emerges very tangibly in the motif of “revenge” that plays such a prominent role in narratives of war, irrespective of cultural, historical, or geographical context. Indeed, we have to speak of a narrative trope here. The basic story, as exemplified in countless novels, films, and oral war stories, begins with a soldier relating how a close friend died in battle in an especially horrible or treacherous way. From that moment on, the story usually concludes, the protagonist decided to pay the enemy back in kind. Occasionally this narrative figure is augmented with a promise made to the dying friend by the storyteller. In any case, personal trauma legitimizes the protagonist’s lack of mercy toward the enemy. It was in this sense that one American soldier in Vietnam told his father in a letter that total destruction was the only way to deal with the Vietcong and confessed that he could never have imagined feeling such hatred.^{858}

Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, who worked with a number of Vietnam veterans, reported that the desire to revenge the death of a buddy inspired some GIs to reenlist for additional tours of duty.^{859} One of them was author Philip Caputo: “Finally, there was hatred, a hatred buried so deep that I could not then admit its existence. I can now, though it is still painful. I burned with a hatred for the Viet Cong and with an emotion that dwells in most of us, one closer to the surface than we care to admit: a desire for retribution. I did not hate the enemy for their politics, but for murdering Simpson, for executing that boy whose body had been found in the river, for blasting the life out of Walt Levy. Revenge was one of the reasons I volunteered for a line company. I wanted a chance to kill somebody.”^{860}

These sorts of desires for revenge, which ascribe the necessity of horrific and brutal actions to experiences of loss, can be generalized. With allusions to the biblical idea of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, the enemy’s behavior can be defined as a transgression that demands a payback in kind. In World War II, for instance, an American GI wrote home about the requisitioning of German apartments: “It’s a really rough deal and these Krauts are getting a good belly full of their own medicine.”^{861} Desire for revenge was one of the central themes in a comprehensive study of American soldiers’ attitudes during World War II made by a group of authors under the direction of Samuel A. Stouffer.^{862}

Not all soldiers, of course, were able to live out their desires for vengeance against those they considered their enemies. Sometimes, they were hindered by comrades or sudden, unexpected feelings of empathy for the adversary. The desire to perform one’s tasks efficiently can also act as a counterweight, as is evident in a letter from a senior German staff medic in Afghanistan: “At the very latest when the alarm sounds for the second time in a bunker, even the greatest philanthropist will develop desires for bloody revenge. The simplest solution in military terms, the one favored by soldiers here, is a major artillery counterstrike. Technically speaking, this is no big problem. You locate the target, point your guns and fire away. It takes less than a minute. The first time the enemy shelled us they had bad luck, but the Taliban aren’t stupid. The next time they attacked, they used longer cables and fired their rockets from a spot next to a kindergarten.”^{863} Yet even such reflections and observations about the potentially self-defeating nature of desires for revenge, comparable to those in all situations of war,^{864} underscore the significance of the vengeance motif in the daily lives of soldiers.

TAKING NO PRISONERS

During World War II, POWs were treated in radically different fashions. Some were dealt with according to a strict interpretation of the Geneva Convention, while others were put to death en masse. While only 1 to 3 percent of Anglo-American POWs died in German captivity, 50 percent of Red Army prisoners perished^{865}—a figure that exceeded even the high numbers of Allied soldiers who died in Japanese captivity. The Wehrmacht decision to let Russian POWs starve to death, which soldiers discussed in the surveillance protocols, was something that went beyond the normally accepted boundaries of war and can only be understood in the context of the Nazi campaigns of annihilation. That is the reason why German POWs were disgusted at how Russian prisoners were being treated and even sympathized with them.^{866} Although most German soldiers never came into contact with German POW camps, many had witnessed the transport of prisoners from the front lines and had a good idea of how captured enemies were being mistreated. The German soldiers remained mere witnesses, though, with scant opportunities for changing what they found objectionable.

The situation was different on the battlefield. Here, practically every foot soldier was an active participant who decided for himself whether or not to kill his enemy. In the heat of battle, questions of whether an enemy taken prisoner would be allowed to live were subject to constant renegotiation. Gray areas could persist for hours or even days, especially when the troops that had taken prisoners became embroiled in new battles.

Depending on the situation, enemies who surrendered were sometimes shot without any further ado. But that was unique neither to the Wehrmacht nor to the Nazi approach to war. Examples of POWs being executed go all the way back to antiquity, although the dimensions expanded dramatically in the twentieth century. In other wars as well, there were standing official and unofficial orders to “take no prisoners,” and even when no such instructions existed, it was often more expedient for soldiers to simply kill enemies rather than have to disarm, care for, transport, and guard them. Reports about such executions often read “shot while attempting escape” or simply “no prisoners taken.” In World War I as well, POWs were killed out of revenge or simple jealousy, since many soldiers resented the fact that they would have to fight on, while the lives of the prisoners were presumably safe—or because keeping POWs was inconvenient or dangerous.^{867} The same was true in the Korean and Vietnam wars, and we can assume nothing has changed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars either.

Situational conditions in war often establish rules that violate those of the Geneva Convention. Soldiers may consider it inadvisable or superfluous to burden themselves with POWs, opting simply to eradicate them. This phenomenon occurred in all theaters of World War II, although with varying frequency. In those areas where fighting was particularly fierce, the numbers of POWs executed rose. Because of the prevailing cult of toughness, elite units were more likely to kill enemies who tried to surrender. The U.S. 82nd Airborne Division in Normandy, for example, did not behave all that differently in this regard than the SS division “Götz von Berlichingen.”^{868}

The greatest eruptions of violence in World War II occurred in the Soviet Union and the Pacific. But extreme violence was also part of everyday life in the relatively “normal” European theaters of war in France and Italy,^{869} and it was perpetrated by both sides: “‘Even in hopeless situations,’ reported American Joseph Shomon, who saw many bodies as the commander of a graves registration unit, ‘the Germans would usually fight to the last, refusing to surrender. [Then] when their ammunition was gone, they were ready to give up and ask for mercy [but because] many American lives had been lost in this delay, our troops often killed the Germans.’”^{870} According to historian Gerald Linderman, the most frequent reason for American GIs to shoot German POWs was to avenge their own lost comrades. But Linderman also cites intentional and not just situational factors. Sometimes soldiers were ordered not to take any prisoners,^{871} and they were more likely to execute captured soldiers who conformed to Nazi stereotypes, yelled “Heil Hitler,” or belonged to the Waffen SS.^{872} For instance, four years after the fact, Ernest Hemingway still told with pride how he had boldly shot a captive member of the Waffen SS.^{873}

To briefly summarize: A lot of what appears horrible, lawless, and barbaric about war crimes is actually part of the usual frame of reference in wartime. For that reason, stories about cruelty don’t attract any more attention in the World War II German surveillance protocols than they do in reports and commentaries by U.S. soldiers who served in Vietnam. Such instances of cruelty rarely seem like anything spectacular to the majority of soldiers as long as they are not called to answer for themselves before a court of law. Such violence is instrumental in nature. It’s hardly any surprise, then, that it occurs in war.