Soldaten

GUNNING PEOPLE DOWN

They say that war brutalizes, that soldiers are turned into beasts by the experience of violence, by being confronted with mutilated bodies and dead comrades or, in the case of a campaign of annihilation, with masses of murdered men, women, and children. Even the Wehrmacht and the SS were concerned that constant exposure to extreme violence, be it as witnesses or perpetrators, would damage soldiers’ “manly discipline” and lead them to engage in unconstrained, unregulated brutality—at the cost of the efficiency needed for both World War II and mass exterminations.^{83} The idea of war brutalizing soldiers plays a central role in social-psychological research on violence.^{84} Scholars assume that extremely violent experiences change the way people evaluate their worlds and make them more prone to violent acts of their own. Autobiographies and war fiction reinforce the impression that over time, soldiers become brutal as they themselves are exposed to increasing brutality.

But the words of the Luftwaffe first lieutenant cited above suggest that this notion may be misleading. The brutalization hypothesis excludes the possibility that violent behavior can be something attractive for which one “itches,” and it presumes, with no real proof, that people need to be somehow pre-trained to commit acts of extreme violence. Perhaps all that is needed is a weapon or an airplane, some adrenaline, the feeling of having power in areas where one normally has none, and a social framework in which killing is permissible, even desirable.

The hypothesis of successive adjustment to and acceptance of violence may have more to do with self-images that historical actors would like to maintain and the preconceived ideas of researchers than with the realities of war. The surveillance protocols contain an abundance of material suggesting that soldiers were extremely prone to violence right from the start of World War II. The quote introducing this chapter, for instance, was recorded early on in the war, at a point when the conflict had not become an all-or-nothing struggle for survival. Moreover, the first lieutenant in question had only experienced war from above, from the air. Thus, while many soldiers may recount a process of brutalization when they recall violent events, by their own admission the time in which they are socialized to accept extreme violence often spans no more than a few days.

Let us take the example of a conversation between Lieutenant Meyer*,[2] a Luftwaffe pilot, and Lieutenant Pohl, a Luftwaffe observer, from April 30, 1940:

In Pohl’s own account it only took him three days to get used to the violence he began exercising as part of the German campaign in Poland. Already on day four of his mission, feelings of desire predominated, as he illustrates with the phrase “before-breakfast amusement.” His conversation partner, apparently somewhat taken aback, articulates the hope that those killed were enemy soldiers exclusively, but this hope is quickly dashed. Pohl says he shot at “people,” i.e., civilians: in retrospect, the only thing he can’t accept is that horses were hit as well. Meyer seems to sympathize with that.

Pohl then continues his narrative by telling how he bombarded an entire city:

Pohl seems most concerned about inflicting maximum damage before his plane crashed and indeed, as he himself stresses, taking as many lives as possible. He takes aim where the town is “chockablock,” and he’s unmistakably irritated at not having achieved the desired results.

Meyer’s next question is one of professional curiosity:

In this conversation, one of the parties clearly feels the need to communicate something about himself, while the other tries to analyze whom he’s talking to and what the conversation is really about. We don’t know how often Meyer spoke with Pohl or whether he knew him well. But he seems somewhat revolted at his cell mate’s statement that he’d have liked to have directly shot and killed another human being. He comments:

Meyer’s questions and comments tend to be technical in nature, although he does react with emotional dismay on two occasions: when Pohl tells of killing horses and when he confesses his desire to kill someone “with his own hands.” If Pohl’s own account is believed, he didn’t need an adjustment period to get used to violence. He was apparently able to call up violent impulses almost immediately, with little prelude. Strikingly, Pohl does not describe having gotten accustomed to violence. Instead, he repeatedly expresses regret for having perpetrated too little violence and a desire for more victims.

This conversation was recorded in the summer of 1940; the events that are its subject happened in September 1939, directly after the start of World War II. Even if we were to assume that Pohl had had months of combat experience before his exchange with Meyer, and that the experience may have brutalized his stories about his first days of war ex post facto, he was still taken out of the war long before the drastic escalation of violence that came with Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. It is beyond doubt that German soldiers committed crimes against humanity in their campaign against Poland, including the murder of civilians and the execution of Jews.^{86} But Pohl was in the air force. He hunts down and kills people from the skies, and he does not give the impression of being ideologically motivated when he describes bombarding cities and gunning down people. His victims have no personal attributes by which he selects them. He doesn’t care which targets he hits, only that he hits targets. He enjoys killing and needs no other motivation. His behavior is not aimed at advancing a larger cause or purpose, but merely at achieving the best results possible. The senseless killing resembles a hunt, a sporting activity in which the only purpose is to be better than others, in this case, by hitting more people with bullets. That’s what most angers Pohl about getting shot down. It spoiled the end result of the hunt.

AUTOTELIC VIOLENCE

In the earliest phase of World War II, without having been brutalized himself by previous events, Pohl perpetrated a kind of violence that could hardly have been more brutal. Pohl’s individual motivations notwithstanding, such senseless hunting down and killing of people is a perfect example of what German sociologist Jan Philipp Reemtsma called “autotelic violence”—violence committed for its own sake without any larger purpose.^{87} Reemtsma distinguished this type of physical violence from attempts to eradicate people because they represent an obstacle to a source of personal gain. Those are practical, instrumental motivations which, moral scruples notwithstanding, are easily comprehensible. Autotelic violence, on the other hand, challenges our powers of comprehension since it radically contradicts the civilized self-image maintained by modern societies and their members. It undermines our faith in the stability of our institutions and rules and, above all, in the state’s monopoly on the legitimate exercise of force. “Faith in the modern age,” writes Reemtsma, “is unthinkable without the state monopoly on force.” The truth of this statement becomes self-evident when we imagine the carnage that would ensue if the protections offered by modern rule of law were suspended even for a single day.

Such faith is the basis for what modern individuals like to believe is their own distance from violence. Violence is considered the exception to the rule, and when it does occur, we seek explanations, even in cases where no instrumental motivations are apparent. By contrast, those who do not assume they will be physically protected constantly reckon with the possibility of violence and are not shocked when it occurs. Faith and violence exist in a precarious equilibrium. In our world, “senseless,” “unmotivated,” or “raw” violence has to be immediately characterized as “insanity,” “rupture,” and “barbarism”—i.e., the antithesis of modernity. For this reason, sociological and historical research on violence is accompanied by subjective moralism and often encounters serious difficulties.^{88}

From a broader historical perspective, the modern age is the first time in which violence has been considered the antithesis of civilization, something to be suppressed and battled against. Violence, in and of itself, must be contained. Instrumental violence cannot, of course, be entirely prevented, but we can justify or at least explain it. We consider the use of violence to solve problems normal, whereas using violence for its own sake is pathological. Violence is a sign of someone straying from the path of modernity, indeed heading in the opposite direction. Nonetheless, as our most recent wars illustrate,^{89} violence is in no danger of extinction. Paradoxically, we can only maintain our faith in modernity if violence is not considered part of the normal daily functioning of modern society. For that reason, we see ourselves as nonviolent, and ostentatiously demonstrate our shock when an act of violence is committed and immediately begin searching for explanations.

The sort of autotelic violence committed by Lieutenant Pohl, however, needs no motivation. It is a reason unto itself. Within a universe of purpose-driven rationality and the universal imperative to justify social behavior, autotelic violence is an erratic exception, unlike everything else in the social realm. But this view may be irrational. Do we feel the need, for instance, to account for the human sex drive? Do we try to explain why human beings eat, drink, and breathe? In all these core areas of human existence, questions may arise as to how people try to satisfy their needs. But we never question the fact that human beings want to eat, drink, breathe, and have sex. Inquiries in those areas focus on mode, not motivation, and perhaps it would be better to do the same when confronting violence. Violence, as German sociologist Heinrich Popitz proposed, is always an option in social behavior, and in phylogenetic terms, this could hardly be otherwise. Ultimately, the human race did not survive thanks to its peaceful demeanor, but because of the violence it committed when hunting or fending off competition for food.

The state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force in Western societies may arguably be the single greatest civilizing innovation in human history, creating previously unknown levels of personal security and freedom. But that doesn’t mean that violence has ceased to be a social option. In being transferred to the state, violence changed form, but did not disappear. On the contrary, violence can be converted back to its direct form at any time. Moreover, the state monopolization on force may regulate the central realm of society, namely, all matters of public concern, but by no means does it cause violence to disappear from other segments of society.

In the domestic realm, people continue to use violence against their partners, children, and pets, and violence occurs frequently in relatively isolated social realms like churches and boarding schools. Fistfights and attacks are still common in public spaces like sports arenas, nightclubs, bars, and subways as well as on the street. In addition, there are regular forms of organized public violence beyond the state monopoly, for instance, at boxing or martial arts contests or performances in S&M clubs. One need only to take a drive on an ordinary highway to experience the chronic potential for violence and even homicide among perfectly normal people. It is impossible to imagine television, cinema, or computer games without violence. Indeed, as everyday reality increasingly distances itself from violence, our need for symbolic or compensatory acts of violence may even be growing. And internationally, humankind is far removed indeed from any sort of monopoly on force. States still wage war, no matter how problematic that might be for relatively pacifist societies like contemporary Germany.

In other words, violence has by no means disappeared from societies that consider themselves fundamentally nonviolent. It exists at all times as both a fact and a possibility, and as such plays a major role in human imaginations. That, too, is a kind of presence, even in situations where violence would seem to be absent. If we rewind history seven decades, back to the point when Pohl and Meyer’s conversation took place, and consider how much closer to violence people were back then, we will realize that exercising and suffering from violence was something many people experienced on a daily basis. Corporal punishment and severity were the norm in the Wilhelmine educational system of the nineteenth century. Indeed, they were considered not only permissible, but essential to a child’s proper upbringing.^{90} The educational reforms of the early twentieth century were nothing more than a reflexive response to this phenomenon. Violence continued to feature in German educational institutions of all levels as well as in agricultural labor and trade apprenticeships.

On all levels of society, violence was much more present than it is today. Political violence was common in the Weimar Republic, which saw no shortage of brawls at political meetings, street fights between left- and right-wingers, and political assassinations. Moreover, everyday social interactions—between police and detainees, husbands and wives, teachers and pupils, and parents and children—were permeated with physical violence. After taking power, the Nazis further undermined the state monopoly on legitimate force. Para-state organizations like the SA arose alongside the actual state and operated as a kind of auxiliary police force. They exercised massive violence until the summer of 1934 without ever being called to account by the government. We have already discussed the socializing function of violence and its capacity for differentiating groups within a society, and there is no doubt that the violence perpetrated against Jews and other persecuted groups helped raise the level of violence in Nazi society and in the everyday consciousness of its members.

A pilot and low-level officer named Hagen, for example, described the situation as follows:

In 1940, violence was far more normal, expected, legitimate, and commonplace than it is today. Moreover, if we consider that significant numbers of people were part of an organization whose very purpose was violent, it is perhaps clearer why many, although not all, German soldiers did not need to get accustomed to violence. Violence was part of their frame of reference, and killing part of their duties. Why should they have seen it as something alien to their self-perception, essence, and intellect? That rhetorical question applies all the more in a case like the Luftwaffe, where violence was carried out with fascinating high-tech tools like fighter planes and strafe bombers and experienced as a highly attractive mixture of ability, technological superiority, and thrill.

The initially surprising discovery that not all German soldiers needed a phase of brutalization is supported by the empirically recorded rise in violence against the civilian population directly after Germany’s invasion of Poland. Women were raped, Jews harassed, and businesses and private homes plundered, much to the consternation of the German military leadership, which issued a number of largely unsuccessful new regulations on conduct.^{92} For example, on October 25, 1939, less than two months after the start of World War II, the commander in chief of the army, General Walter von Brauchitsch, threatened “all those officers who continue to disobey orders and enrich themselves” with dishonorable discharge. “The achievements and success of the Polish campaign,” he wrote,

Despite this warning, however, Brauchitsch continued to see the need to issue further regulations aimed at maintaining “manly discipline” until the end of 1939.^{93}

The same things true of society at large were also true of the army. People differ, and what for someone like Pohl might have been a source of pleasure could be alien, if not repulsive, to someone like Meyer. Yet because both came from the same institution, the Luftwaffe, and found themselves in the same situation as prisoners of war, their social similarities outweighed their individual differences. Even if Meyer thought his comrade Pohl was a reprehensible swine, Meyer would have likely found Pohl’s anecdotes suitable subject matter for later conversations, along the lines of: “I was interned together with this guy who told of how much he enjoyed hunting down human beings…”

ADVENTURE

German soldiers rarely used the words “death” and “kill” in their conversation. That may seem surprising since killing is one of soldiers’ central duties and the production of dead enemies is a main result to be achieved. But precisely for this reason, death and killing were rarely subjects of discussion. Just as construction workers tend not to discuss bricks and mortar during their breaks, soldiers seldom talked about killing.

Killing others in battle was so commonplace that it hardly merited discussion. Moreover, except in cases like those of solo fighter pilots,^{94} battle is a heteronomous undertaking that depends more on factors like group strength, equipment, the tactical situation, and the enemy than on the doings of any one individual soldier. Individual soldiers have little influence over whether they kill anyone and, if so, whom, or whether they themselves get killed. Anecdotes about that possess little amusement value and would have required soldiers to talk about emotions like fear and desperation. It was taboo, within the masculine culture of the military, to admit that one had wet one’s pants, vomited in fear, or anything of the kind. Moreover, rehashing things that everyone knows and has experienced for himself (or at least claims to know and have experienced for himself) isn’t good conversation. In normal civilian society, one doesn’t discuss the minutiae of one’s daily work routine or describe the egg one ate for breakfast. A central criterion for a good story, one worth telling and hearing, is something extraordinary, be it especially irritating or welcome, witty, horrible, or heroic.^{95} People spend very little time talking about normal everyday life. Why should they? Things that were part of the normal lives of soldiers—including death, killing, and injuries—were background that was taken for granted and seldom discussed.

But commonplace routine was only one of the things the soldiers didn’t talk about. Another was emotions, especially those of fear or threat, uncertainty, desperation, or sheer concern for one’s own survival. Such topics rarely crop up in the surveillance protocols, and previous research has shown that soldiers in general filter them out of their conversations.^{96} Soldiers don’t like talking about death. It’s too real to them. Moreover, just as they only very rarely discuss the all-too-realistic possibility of being killed or wounded themselves, death as a general phenomenon or process seldom occurs in their conversations. In soldier-speak, people are mowed or shot down, drop out of sight, or are simply gone. Obviously, if soldiers were to imagine their own deaths they would have to imagine how they died, and the phenomenon of death, which many of them had experienced often, directly in front of their own eyes, would seem very near. Thus soldiers’ conversations about death and killing revolve around violence of all sorts without ever explicitly mentioning death or killing. Navy men, for instance, describe the success of their efforts in numbers of dead or tonnage of ships sunk. But they rarely speak of who or what it was that they sent to a watery grave.

Descriptions of killings like those related by Lieutenant Pohl occur frequently in the protocols with similar frankness and a likewise matter-of-fact tone, although most of them are less detailed. Apparently, soldiers did not fear that their interlocutors would react with confusion, condemnation, or protest when they told of gunning down others. We can likely put that down to the fact that the speakers under surveillance were all men with similar horizons of experience communicating in the same frame of reference. They were all members of the German military and had all waged the same war for the same reason. They didn’t need to explain to one another the whys and wherefores of things that readers of the protocols seventy years later might find puzzling. In fact, the character of their conversations is much like the sorts of chats people have at parties or occasions when people with similar experiences happen to come together. They swap stories, asking questions and interjecting remarks of their own. They exaggerate and are keen to show that they all belong to the same group, the same experiential community.

The topics of conversation among soldiers may be different, but the structure of their conversations isn’t. Luftwaffe members tend to tell hunting tales, not surprisingly, since many of them were fighter or bomber pilots tasked with destroying specific targets like enemy planes or ground installations. As of 1942, they were also charged with spreading general terror among civilian populations. The tales the men tell are adventure stories that focus on their own flying skill and ability to produce destructive results. Here is one typical example:

Motorcyclists and extreme-sports enthusiasts tell structurally similar tales. In the soldiers’ stories, those killed are mentioned simply by way of providing colorful detail. Victims never have personal attributes. Their role in the anecdotes of German airmen is much the same as that of enemies in video games, particularly of the ego-shooter variety, a half century later. This comparison is hardly anachronistic. In both air combat and video games, the process itself is more important than a clearly defined result. The airman/game player’s activity revolves around skill and reflexes, and the results are measured in “counts,” the number of various types of targets destroyed. A significant component of the reference frame here is competitive sports, coupled with a typical male fascination with technology. The victim is insignificant either as an individual or part of a collective.

The complete absence of distinguishing details concerning targets makes it apparent that the storytellers aren’t concerned with whom they hit. The main thing is that they hit their targets, and that the stories they can tell about it afterward are entertaining:

The listener in this excerpt from the protocols, Bieber, was a German stool pigeon working for British intelligence. That is why he poses questions, ostensibly out of specialist interest, about the details of German air raids. The storyteller, Lance Corporal Küster, was a gunner on a German bomber. The anecdote is from January 1943.

The anecdote does not touch on a lot of details that might be of interest to civilians. Instead the questions that drive the dialogue between the two airmen are: why wasn’t the train station attacked, and when was the target set? The conversation produces entertaining insider-oriented stories structured around three aspects: an action, its execution, and the fun that was had. Questions like why was the mission flown and was it legally and morally justifiable play no role whatsoever. Nor do airmen discuss the dramatically changing strategic and operational framework of air combat.

From the perspective of Luftwaffe fighters, there was no difference between a raid against a military target in the strict sense, an attack intended to terrify civilians, or a bombing mission aimed at a group of partisans:

In this anecdote, violence is clearly experienced as a kind of sport. The “game” Winkler talks about is the dropping of fragmentation bombs on an alleged group of partisans in the Vercors region of the French Alps in July 1944—something he clearly enjoyed. After a series of difficult and deadly missions targeting Allied ships in the Mediterranean, such a relatively easy assignment came as a welcome change. At long last, Winkler had another success story, another tale of a fruitful hunt and what was gunned down. The British staff Winkler hit somewhat haphazardly in the process barely rates a mention.

Conversations of this sort took place in an atmosphere of mutual agreement and tacit consensus. This example is from April 1941:

Angermüller’s pride is unmistakable. The attack on London he describes had a special status because, although it was a solo mission, he did not just drop bombs, but also flew low to strafe ground targets with machine gun fire. This sort of raid was so uncommon that it made a British newspaper—at least Angermüller says it did in order to underscore the impressive nature of his story. Angermüller’s answer to his comrade’s question as to whether he shot at civilians is obviously ironic. It was an opportunity for a bit of shared laughter.

THE AESTHETICS OF DESTRUCTION

One of the most central and frequent conversational topics among soldiers was how their kills were visibly verified. In great detail, they list the targets they themselves hit as well as those destroyed by their squadrons and their competitors. This is not surprising when we consider that their superiors handed out awards and promotions on that basis. (There were also other measures of achievement: Iron Crosses First Class and Knight’s Crosses were bestowed after a certain number of missions or verified kills.) In contrast to infantry soldiers, airmen had immediate concrete evidence of their success. They could see, with their own eyes, the decapacitated, burning remnants of enemy machinery or houses, trains, and bridges that went up in flames or collapsed.

Two aspects of killing from the air made it particularly suitable for being perceived and experienced as an aesthetic phenomenon. The destruction was visible, and it could be viewed from a relatively safe distance:

Just as important as visibility were all the myriad improvements in bombing accuracy. A first lieutenant related in 1940:

Another example came from a major:^{103}

Along with detailed discussions of technical questions, the visible aesthetic accompanying individual soldiers’ destructive prowess was perhaps the most central theme of German airmen’s conversations.

Interlocutors told stories of attacks and successful kills in the greatest possible detail and vividness of language:

This is war as witnessed from above, from the perspective of bomber crews and, in particular, fighter pilots. War looks very different from the ground, where the destruction is actually taking place, where people are running, fleeing, and dying. The German Luftwaffe also suffered significant casualties, more than 1,700 from August 1, 1940, to March 31, 1941,^{106} but that contributed to the sporting character of airmen’s missions and their aesthetic experience of destruction.

Risk was an essential part of war, and it took particular skill and control over one’s machinery if one was to have any hope of surviving:

Another conversation explicitly focuses on the fact that air attacks were filmed—a further element in visible destruction. At the latest since the Second Gulf War, we are used to seeing targets being destroyed from the perspective of the person causing the destruction. On the nightly news, we have experienced for ourselves, in real time, how a missile strikes and obliterates a bunker. But the phenomenon began much earlier. World War II also saw, in historian Gerhard Paul’s words, “a fusion of camera and weapon.”^{108}

It began when cameras were mounted on the wings of fighter planes. Later home-movie cameras were integrated into the onboard weaponry so that pilots could document their kills themselves, providing the press with spectacular images. Weekly newsreels showed pictures of targets being destroyed from the perspective of pilots and marksmen, and pictures of dive-bombing attacks proved particularly popular with the viewing public:

FUN

The fun to be had from a successful attack played a major role in the Luftwaffe airmen’s conversations. The category not only served to mutually confirm the virtuoso skill with which one handled one’s aircraft and the superiority one enjoyed over the enemy or others. It also had a considerable communicative significance. Fun was part of what made a story worth telling. It was part of the tension of a well-rounded narrative, comprehensible and with a striking ending, and the mutual laughter it elicited showed that soldiers inhabited one and the same world, a world in which hitting targets and having fun went hand in hand. Victims in the sense of people with whom soldiers could empathize do not appear in their stories. Whether they were talking about ships, planes, or houses, bicyclists, fairground visitors, train and ship passengers, or mothers with children, the victims appear only as targets.

The following anecdotes from Germany’s air campaign against England from 1940 to 1944 require no commentary:

HUNTING

A hunt consists of locating, pursuing, felling, and eviscerating game. Hunts come in various forms. The most common ones are the hunt in which a solitary rifle wielder goes after his prey together with a game dog, and the roundup, in which beaters drive the prey into the hunter’s sights. Hunting has a sporting aspect. The hunter has to be skillful and alert, smarter than his prey. He has to know how to hide, how to attack without being spotted, and how to shoot well. But hunting also entails special rules. One hunts only at particular times, for instance, and only shoots at individual animals.

Taken together, all these elements correspond to the demands placed upon a fighter pilot. (Indeed, the German for fighter pilot, Jagdflieger, contains the word for hunt Jagd.) This is why German fighter pilots understood what they did in the context of hunting. It was considered dishonorable, for instance, to fire upon enemy pilots who had ejected from their planes and were parachuting back to ground, even though these men were technically still enemies.^{116} Luftwaffe General Adolf Galland supposedly once deemed it “unworthy of a huntsman” to bombard groups of American bombers. The hunt is the source of the “fun” of which Luftwaffe POWs constantly spoke. The only other military men who talked about battle in such sporting terms were U-boat crews.

A good example of this trope is a metaphor used by German navy Lieutenant Wolf-Doetrich Danckworth, the only survivor from the German submarine U-224:

For soldiers, it made no difference whether the prey consisted of military or civilian targets. In his diary, an enthusiastic Ernst Jünger described how he finally, after two and a half years of war, succeeded in “felling” his first Englishman with a “precise” shot.^{118} Soldiers’ anecdotes were less concerned with who was killed and why than with the more spectacular results one had achieved. This, too, is an instance of how soldiers saw battle in terms of sports.

The more prominent or important the target, the greater the triumph, and the more interesting the stories that could be told about the kill:

Dock’s anecdote about shooting down the Douglas DC-3 transport airplane carrying the actor Leslie Howard particularly underscores the sporting aspect of the frame of reference of war. His victims are big game. Dock clearly expresses his admiration for the pilot of the Douglas, who tried to avoid being shot down with a spectacular evasive maneuver. But the pilot had no chance against a fighter plane. All Dock and his comrades had to do, as he puts it, was “to press the button, quietly and calmly.”^{120}

Such anecdotes once again show that most soldiers did not distinguish between military and civilian targets. The point was to sink ships, shoot down planes, and destroy targets—who was killed was simply not very important. Occasionally, POWs even emphasized that their targets were not military ones. For example, in January 1945, First Lieutenant Hans Harting from the Luftwaffe’s Fighter Wing 26 related:

A conversation between bomber pilot Wille* and submarine corporal Solm provides an especially drastic example of what conscious attacks on nonmilitary targets meant:

Solm was likely referring to the sinking of the British passenger ship City of Benares on September 18, 1940, in which seventy-seven children died.

It is irrelevant in this context that Solm’s account deviates from the historic record in a number of respects: German U-boat commanders, for instance, did not know that there were children aboard the Benares. What is important is that Solm thinks he can impress his interlocutor with a story about how he sank a ship transporting children.

SINKING SHIPS

Otherwise, the stories told by German navy men and army soldiers starkly differed from those related by Luftwaffe members. For starters, hunting tropes played far less of a role. For purely technical reasons, ships’ crews had few opportunities to act individually. Unlike fighter pilots, navy men could not brag about how perfectly they could handle their equipment, since in general they were more dependent on whole crews working as one. The word “fun” hardly occurs in their conversations.

Astonishingly, German infantry soldiers, too, rarely tell of killing others in battle. Franz Kneipp, an SS Untersturmführer in the “Hitler Youth” Division who was captured in Normandy, is one of the few who did. On July 9, 1944, he recalled:

German soldiers were most likely to talk about killing when the enemies were defined as partisans or “terrorists” (this trope will be treated in detail in the next section). But both army and navy men were generally reluctant to discuss the topic.

What navy men did enjoy talking about in great detail was the tonnage of the ships they sank. It was irrelevant in terms of medals whether those ships were passenger, merchant, or fishing boats. All sorts of vessels were “knocked over,” “shot down,” “cracked,” or simply “sunk.” Navy POWs rarely mention any victims. One exception was this narrative told by an E-boat sailor about an experience in the Baltic Sea:

If the rescue attempt had gone off without incident, the navy man probably wouldn’t have mentioned it. What made the story worth telling was the unusual detail that the Russian women didn’t want to be saved, and that they, too, had been killed.

The battles surrounding convoys HX 229 and SC 143 seem to have made a particular impression. Forty-three German submarines attacked the ships, which were on their way from Canada to Great Britain, in March 1943. Over the course of a few days twenty-one Allied merchantmen were drowned.

Evidence that sailors felt pity for the crews of ships they sank were very rare, as were reports about successful rescues. Apparently, the POWs talked very little about whether submarines occasionally rescued and cared for enemies fleeing destroyed vessels. One exception was First Mate Hermann Fox from the submarine U-110:

By contrast, most narratives are simply concerned with how many gross registered tons had been sent to the bottom of the ocean. Victims mainly appear in the anonymous form of masses of killed or dying enemies.

Lieutenant Captain Heinz Scheringer, for instance, told two of his comrades of the final mission of the U-26:

Stories concerning ships that were sunk were omnipresent not only among submarine crews, but navy men in general. The strategy of German naval command against Great Britain was one of tonnage: the German navy aimed to sink more ships than Allied dockyards could replace. So the criterion for success was size.^{128} That was true as well for the crews of armed German merchant marine vessels. Evidence of this is a dialogue between crew members of the raider MS Penguin and its supply ship MS Atlantis:

Games of verbal one-upmanship are common in the surveillance protocols. That’s partly because bragging is a frequent element of everyday conversations, in which the person talking tries to outdo his interlocutor with a better story or a superior achievement.

The sailors’ stories revolve around the sinking of ships regardless of what type they were. Even navy men taken prisoner early on in World War II think in terms of this paradigm:

The excerpt was recorded on February 10, 1940, when the war was only a few months old. As of January 6 of that year, German naval command had allowed U-boat commanders in the North Sea to sink merchant vessels from neutral countries without warning,^{131} a move intended to disrupt supplies traveling between Scandinavia and Great Britain. At the same time, submarine crews were to avoid attracting too much attention in order to head off international protests.

Of the six ships sunk by U-55 on its maiden patrol in January 1940, two were Norwegian and one was Swedish. U-boat crews didn’t care whom they sent to a watery grave. On the contrary, they spoke enthusiastically about new technological possibilities that would allow them to sink more ships. There was little room in their heads for thoughts about the fates of the crews on enemy ships. Saving enemies was only infrequently an option, and efforts to do so were correspondingly rare:

Sinking ships without warning significantly lowered the chances that anyone would survive attacks. On the 5,150 merchant vessels the Allies lost to German submarines in World War II, more than thirty thousand sailors were killed.^{133}

German sailors did not need to be socialized in order to kill. No one questioned whether crews of enemy merchant vessels should have to die. Such “collateral casualties” had been an accepted part of naval warfare since 1917. Individual navy men had only limited opportunities to demonstrate their individual skill, bravery, or virtuoso handling of their machinery. If your ship was hit, you sank. If you hit someone else’s ship, that person went down. With that in mind, it is not surprising how ostentatiously detached and emotionless German navy POWs were when they told their stories of sinking ships and causing others to drown. The sailors didn’t want to let death get too close to them. Torpedoes are fired from a relatively great distance, and in contrast to fighter pilots, submarine crews rarely saw the results of their work. When a submarine launched a surface attack, there were usually only four men on deck, and the captain with his periscope was the only one who saw the target during an underwater attack. At most, the rest of the crew only heard the sounds of a ship sinking—hardly a basis for a great amount of empathy.

WAR CRIMES—OCCUPIERS AS KILLERS

Human beings’ understanding of what a war crime is has varied considerably from antiquity to the present day. There is no one standard as to what forms of violence constitute “normal” warfare. In light of the countless people who have lost their lives to war in the course of human history, it’s worth asking whether limits set on violence during wartime are the exception and not the rule. Conversely, there has never been a war, or for that matter any form of social behavior, that has been completely without rules. That includes World War II. The frame of reference of that conflict provided soldiers with a clear idea of what forms of violence were and weren’t legitimate—although soldiers did occasionally transgress such boundaries.

Nonetheless, the Second World War saw limits on violence, in both a qualitative and quantitative sense, removed to an unprecedented degree. More than any other conflict, World War II approximated the theoretical state of total war.^{134} The experience of World War I continued to influence military discussions in the interbellum period, and many people saw the radicalization of war as unavoidable. The experts all agreed that the next war would be a total one.^{135} Thus, despite no shortage of initiatives in that direction, there was no way to regulate or restrict the brutalization of armed conflict. The power of the major political ideologies, the general resistance to liberal ideas, the continued development of weaponry such as strategic bombers, and the intensifying plans for mass mobilization doomed all efforts to contain violence.^{136} Additionally, the experience of a number of armed conflicts between 1918 and 1939—the Russian Revolution, the suppression of uprisings in Germany, the Spanish Civil War, and the Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1939—diametrically opposed attempts to subject wartime violence to accepted rules. The adoption of the Second Geneva Convention on the humane treatment of prisoners of war was not enough to counteract this trend.

Much has been written about the horrible dimensions of unfettered violence in World War II, with many experts trying to explain it as the result of a combination of both situation and intent. Their reasoning draws comparisons with religious and colonial wars, maintaining that the ideologization of war prevented soldiers from recognizing the enemy as a fellow human being. Enemies could thus be killed on a whim. The perspective of the political and military leadership has been well documented, but the question remains: how did ordinary soldiers feel about these issues? What did they regard as war crimes, and which rules of warfare were anchored in their frame of reference?

The POWs in the surveillance protocols never refer to the idea of a war crime, or the Geneva Convention and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. Their decisive reference point was the customs of war, the things soldiers normally did in combat. From the onset of World War II, both sides engaged in unlimited submarine warfare, and tens of thousands of merchant marines lost their lives, even though they were not, strictly speaking, enemy combatants. Submarine crews generally offered them little assistance, since to do so would have been dangerous, and many navy men were indifferent to others’ fate. Nonetheless, it was a general rule not to kill sailors whose ships had been sunk—only a few exceptions are known. Prior to 1942, the German Luftwaffe was officially forbidden from launching “terror attacks” against exclusively civilian targets. But as we have seen, for bomber crews, the distinction between military and civilian targets had long been blurred. Everything was a potential target, even if that idea ran contrary to the official policy of the Luftwaffe high command. The exercise of violence modified the rules of combat and extended the boundaries of what was considered permissible. Tens of thousands of British civilians may have been killed in German air raids, and hundreds of British pilots shredded by German machine gun fire, but it was still taboo to kill a pilot who had ejected from his plane while he was parachuting to the ground. Tank crews who had abandoned their vehicles, on the other hand, were usually gunned down. Different rules applied in the air and on the ground, and though there were occasional violations, those rules retained their force. And since rules and customs of war were interdependent, international laws concerning war crimes were not completely ineffective. They still represented something of a frame of reference.

Rules are least applicable in ground combat. Wherever soldiers take prisoners, secure occupied territories, and battle partisans, particular forms of logic dominate. Often, that logic revolves around troops’ security or the satisfaction of material and sexual desires. Individually perpetrated violence, such as rape or killing, becomes more possible and likely. In other words, war opens up a social space that is far more violence-friendly than peacetime. Force becomes expected, accepted, and normal. The conditions under which instrumental violence—the taking of territory, the pilfering of the vanquished, and the rape of women—is allowed to change together with the dynamics of the war itself. The same is true of autotelic violence. The borders between the two types of violence are so permeable that distinctions between legitimate and criminal force in battle become exceedingly tenuous. A lot of what the German POWs relate in the surveillance protocols is typical less of crimes committed by the Wehrmacht specifically than of war crimes in general.

The killing, wounding, and raping of civilians is as much a part of the everyday reality of war as the murder of prisoners, the illegal bombardment of nonmilitary targets, and the strategic terrorization of populaces. The Wehrmacht wasn’t the only army to execute prisoners. Both Soviet and U.S. troops did so as well—and not just in World War II. General Bruce Palmer, former acting chief of staff of the U.S. Army, revealed a little bit more than he intended when he wrote: “Americans did indeed commit war crimes in the course of the protracted Vietnam War, but no more in proportion to the number of people involved than have occurred in past wars.”^{137} Palmer made explicit what is always assumed about military prohibitions of illegal actions. No one believes that they will not be violated. Nonetheless, the standards of what constitutes a tolerable level of violations of international law varies from historical period to historical period, and from individual to individual. Within the framework of a total war, soldiers push the limits of legitimacy to the extreme. What distinguishes the Nazi campaigns of extermination from the standard general practice of World War II is the elimination of certain groups who had nothing to do with the war itself, as well as the genocidal treatment meted out to Russian POWs, including the execution of Soviet commissars. Here, racist ideology made itself manifest. It translated the situation of warfare into the most radical practice of destruction and annihilation ever seen in the modern age.

Numerous narrative examples of these tendencies occur in the surveillance protocols, although they are not as frequent as German historiography, which tends to focus on Nazi crimes, leads us to expect. The reason why is simple. The things that emerged, after decades of politicized historical arguing, as the signature characteristics of World War II were by no means anything special in the eyes of German soldiers. The vast majority of them knew of Nazi crimes, and no small number of them were actively involved, but those crimes did not occupy any special place in their frame of reference. Soldiers were most concerned with their own individual survival, their next home leave, the loot they could pilfer, and the fun they could have, and not the suffering of others, especially those considered racially inferior. Soldiers’ own fate was always at the center of their perception. Only in rare cases did the fate of enemy troops or occupied peoples seem worthy of note. Everything that threatened one’s own survival, spoiled the fun, or created problems could become a target of unlimited violence.

“Taking care” of partisans was rationalized with the idea that they ambushed German soldiers. Revenge was a powerful motivator and functioned regardless of individual soldiers’ political attitudes. Thus General Wilhelm von Thoma, who was critical of the Nazi leadership, told the British intelligence officer Lord Aberfeldy:

Together with the execution of prisoners, the battle against partisans was the framework in which German soldiers most frequently committed war crimes. The ways in which the German military interpreted international law and the perceptions of individual German soldiers proved a deadly combination. International law did not provide any unambiguous rules for dealing with guerrilla warfare. The 1907 Hague Convention was full of contradictions and open questions concerning the rights and responsibilities of an occupying force. The main problem was not the status of partisans in and of themselves. Insofar as they fulfilled certain conditions, wearing rudimentary uniforms, bearing their arms openly, having a clear command structure, and respecting the laws of warfare, partisans were allowed to assist the armies of their homelands in defensive wars. But the Hague Convention made no mention of what should happen if partisans continued to fight after a state had been forced to capitulate or had been completely occupied. It thus lacked any provision for protecting the rights of resistance movements, even if they wore uniforms.^{139}

Rules concerning retaliatory measures were even more problematic and contradictory. Article 50 of the Hague Convention allowed collective punitive measures against a civilian population if a connection between partisans and their general environment could be proven. This rule was open to widely divergent interpretation. In the legal discussion of the interbellum years, no international consensus emerged, and the taking of hostages was deemed legitimate everywhere but in France. Opinions differed on whether they could be killed, with German military lawyers taking the hard-line position that the continued existence of “an arena of battle” justified such measures of retribution. This disagreement appeared one last time in the war crimes trials after World War II. The judges in Nuremberg ruled that the main defendants had acted illegally in ordering the killing of hostages, but in subsequent trials, defendants were deemed to have acted within the scope of the law. Convictions in the latter cases were based solely on the excessive ratios (1 to 100) German occupiers had applied when executing hostages.^{140}

Even the pre-Nazi Reichswehr believed that partisans had to be combated with extreme force. A potential wildfire, so the logic ran, needed to be extinguished at the first spark. And although this approach proved ineffective, in some regions the German struggle to put down resistance movements led to an unprecedented spiral of violence. Before long the killing of hostages and innocent victims, and the razing of whole villages, was part of everyday routine. This did not differ dramatically from practices maintained in the Napoleonic Wars or World War I. What was new were the dimensions. The rigor with which German occupiers pursued alleged partisans was one reason that 60 percent of the casualties in World War II, an unprecedented proportion, were civilians. Distinctions between military combatants as legitimate targets of attack and civilian noncombatants, who should have been protected, basically dissolved.

The surveillance protocols offer a number of paradigm examples of how Wehrmacht soldiers viewed the war against partisans, and they show that German military leaders and their troops basically saw eye-to-eye. Drastic measures were justified by psychological deterrence:

Franz Kneipp and Eberhard Kehrle also related how German occupiers answered attacks with brutal forms of violence. They saw nothing unethical about this. On the contrary, they both felt that partisans deserved to die horrible deaths:

Interestingly, Kehrle and Kneipp had diametrically opposed attitudes toward the military in general. Kehrle found the primitive life of the army “idiocy” and “absolute shit,” while for Kneipp it was a form of “education.”^{144} Yet despite that, and the inherent differences between a radio operator and an SS infantryman, they completely agreed on the methods needed to deal with partisan warfare.

The practical rules of warfare often established norms deviating from international law. That is why the POWs spoke of war crimes in matter-of-fact terms and rarely showed signs of outrage. What offended them most was the behavior of occupied local populaces. The soldiers thought it was essential to take action against any and every form of noncooperation. Such attitudes prevailed as early as October 1940, as illustrated in this exchange:

Reflections about the rectitude or proportionality of such forms of extreme violence against civilian populations do not occur in the POWs’ conversations. The soldiers do not think to question their behavior. Their task is to take care of the necessities: “work,” “extreme measures,” and “retribution.” They focus on achieving results, not finding reasons.

Stories about war crimes were part of soldiers’ everyday communication with one another in the same way that tales of shooting down planes and sinking ships were. In and of themselves, atrocities were nothing unusual. Only unusual actions or individual forms of behavior merited telling. One example focused on the mass executions carried out after SS leader Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in Poland:

The appeal of this story for the soldier in question rested not in the killings themselves, but in how they were staged. Soldiers were given time off so they could witness the spectacles, and the executions were accompanied by a ritual of humiliation designed especially for the occasion.

Together with tales revolving around unusual acts of violence, stories concerning individuals who distinguished themselves in some way or another also made for good telling. One example is an anecdote related by Private First Class Müller:

At the end of his story, Müller distances himself from the action by claiming he never fired a shot at innocents. But he still offers a detailed description, in the first-person plural, of how his unit burned down Russian houses. Stories like this illustrate what the soldiers regarded as crimes and what not, and how porous the boundary was between the two. Müller considered executing women and children a crime insofar as it was unclear whether they truly were partisans. Burning down a village, on the other hand, was not.

Müller also conspicuously includes a figure in his story, Brosicke, from whom he can positively distinguish himself. Brosicke’s behavior, in Müller’s telling, is unambiguously criminal, as is that of those for whom killing was fun. Müller’s own behavior, by contrast, is not criminal. This is a typical and significant element in the protocols. By differentiating himself from others, the typical storyteller was able to find a space within a larger criminal endeavor in which he himself could not be accused of behaving immorally. Yet as we have already observed in the various different groups that took part in the mass executions and other anti-Jewish initiatives, individual interpretations of one’s own role and duties ultimately helped the killing as a whole to proceed smoothly.^{148} Individual attitudes and decisions are not usually overridden by “group pressure” and social influence in the way some sociologists would have us believe. On the contrary, internal differentiation within a group makes it capable of acting as a whole. To adapt a phrase coined by German scholar Herbert Jäger, what we have here is a case of individual action in collective states of emergency.^{149}

One good example of this phenomenon occurs in a detailed description by a Private First Class Franz Diekmann about how he combated “terrorists” in France:

One could almost imagine Diekmann as one of the “many pals” from Müller’s story, who had “lots of fun” killing, but the two men were describing entirely different situations. What stands out from Diekmann’s story is the personal motivation he ascribes to his deeds: the desire to exact revenge for a fallen comrade. Despite the sympathy he shows for the four or five children of that comrade, he doesn’t transfer that empathy to his victims, whom he executes completely at random. We do not know which anti-partisan operation Diekmann is referring to here, but it was common for German soldiers to “go wild” and indiscriminately shoot people after a lone incident in which one of them had been killed. On the other hand, the POWs don’t always mention motivations and rationale when they tell stories like these. Their common horizon of experience makes that unnecessary. The detail of the fallen comrade could just be a narrative element Diekmann chose to make his story seem more interesting and well rounded.

From June to September 1944, with the Allies on the offensive, Wehrmacht violence against civilians escalated even in France and Belgium. The extent of German war crimes reached a new dimension. So it’s hardly surprising that a number of stories which relate atrocities come from these three months:

Jäger was likely a stool pigeon for MI19, but Private First Class Büsing, a paratrooper, seems to have had no idea of this and freely answered his questions. In his own eyes, Büsing’s experiences were so commonplace that he doesn’t think of holding anything back. As far as he’s concerned, his story, brutal as it is, falls clearly within the bounds of what was to be expected. Indeed, German POWs who listened to similar anecdotes were neither shocked nor revolted. The fact that the POWs could remain absolutely unemotional while relating the acts of violence they perpetrated speaks volumes about the violent nature of the world they inhabited. Soldiers were intimately familiar with crimes of all sorts.

Not even stories about killing women and children elicit emotion. A second paratrooper related:

We have no way of knowing where the difference resided between the “cold-blooded” actions of the sniper Müller and Enziel’s long-range gunning down of women, but he apparently thought it was significant. Heuer was another British spy, which is why he tries to tease out information about war crimes with his questions.

Like Enziel and Private First Class Müller, Private First Class Sommer also built a reference person, his first lieutenant, into his narrative:

Their shared laughter indicates that neither Sommer nor Bender saw anything fundamentally immoral about the deeds related in Sommer’s story. Bender’s reaction was hardly surprising. He was a member of the navy Special Commando 40, a unit whose whole identity was based on a cult of macho toughness.

One interesting detail in this anecdote is the fact that the commanding officer did not want any war crimes committed in the immediate area in which he was quartered. Apparently, he did not want to jeopardize the chance for sexual encounters with local women by behaving brutally toward civilians. Sommer continues his story with an episode that happened in France:

Sommer’s unit, Panzergrenadierregiment 29, had previously been involved in a number of crimes in Italy. The French story refers to atrocities committed in the Robert Espagne region of Lorraine. There, on August 29, 1944, Sommer’s unit murdered eighty-six French civilians.^{155}

Sommer adopts a position of distance to the events he recounts in two respects. In contrast to his first lieutenant, he tries to find a legitimate reason for the execution of civilians, arriving at the fact that they had ammunition on them. This attempt at legitimation is directed both externally and internally. Apparently, Sommer felt the need to justify what he did, assuring himself that his actions did not amount to mere murder. Moreover, he stresses that he did not act of his own free will. He may have participated in every sort of “shit,” but he didn’t volunteer to do so. This recalls the sort of differentiation we found in Müller’s story. Among those who committed crimes, there were more and less willing executioners, and most of the perpetrators wanted to be seen as part of the latter category.

An anecdote told by Sergeant Gromoll contains an example of legalistic justifications for violence:

We can no longer reconstruct the exact details of this incident. But Gromoll’s story suggests that German soldiers did not need to find any weapons to conclude that what could have been ordinary card players were terrorists. They could have thrown their weapons in the canal, the logic runs. Legalistic reasoning of this sort suggests that, for some soldiers, it was important to justify killings in terms of a formal structure, a framework that would legitimate their actions, even if those actions really amount to little more than indiscriminate murder.

There was a similar unwritten rule among U.S. troops in Vietnam: “If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s a Vietcong.” Private First Class Diekmann tells a story in precisely this mode about a series of executions carried out in France after the Allied invasion of Normandy:

In Diekmann’s narrative, the killing of the French major requires a legalistic justification, his carrying ammunition. That identifies the officer as a terrorist. Notably, Diekmann also does not hesitate to include children among the “terrorists” who are placed against a wall and shot.

Fantastic delusions about what sorts of people might belong to the enemy are by no means unique to German soldiers. Similar incidents have been documented among U.S. troops in Vietnam, who sometimes even claimed babies were members of the Vietcong. This is not a sign of insanity. It marks the shifting of a frame of reference so that group membership is more important than all other defining characteristics, including age, in determining who the enemy is. Joanna Bourke, a scholar who has studied soldiers’ perceptions of killing in various wars, has argued that such skewed frames of reference do not prove that soldiers personally enjoyed murder. Instead, Bourke suggests, the cold-blooded killing of people categorically defined as belonging to the enemy is part of the normal, everyday practice of warfare.^{158}

Paradoxically, though, when such killings are subjected to legal scrutiny, they are treated as exceptions to the rule. The misconception thus arises that, by and large, war adheres to international law, and violations of that law are the deeds of rogue individuals. Autotelic violence, so the logic goes, is not a systematic aspect of war, but a regrettable deviation. But the surveillance protocols show that once the floodgates of violence are opened, anything can provide an impetus and justification for soldiers to start shooting.

CRIMES AGAINST POWs

Ever since antiquity, the mistreatment and murder of prisoners has been an example of extreme wartime violence. But with the mass armies of the modern age, the phenomenon of the POW took on entirely new dimensions. In World War I, there were some 6 to 8 million POWs.^{160} In World War II, that number was 30 million.

It was always difficult to feed and house millions of prisoners adequately. Even in World War I, some 472,000 Central Powers soldiers died in Russia.^{161} Those numbers increased dramatically in World War II, and the gravest crime of the Wehrmacht was the mass murder of Soviet POWs. Of the 5.3 to 5.7 million Red Army soldiers captured by the Wehrmacht, some 2.5 to 3.3 million died. The estimates vary, but the percentage of Soviet POWs who died in German custody is somewhere between 45 and 57 percent. Most perished in camps for which the Wehrmacht was responsible: 845,000 in military-administered territory near the front lines, 1.2 million in civilian-administered areas further back from the fighting, 500,000 in the so-called General Gouvernement of Poland, and 360,000 to 400,000 in camps located within the German Reich proper.^{162}

The main cause for the horrifying numbers of casualties was the German military leadership’s cynical decision to abandon POWs to the fate of starvation, making little to no effort to provide them with adequate nourishment. German military leaders never ceased reminding common soldiers that they were fighting “an enemy race and culture of inferior nature,” which one was to encounter with a “healthy feeling of hatred.” In this battle, German soldiers were not supposed to show “any bleeding-heart sentiments or mercy.”^{163}

AT THE FRONT

From the onset of the Third Reich’s war with the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, it was clear that the perennial calls for German soldiers to show steely hardness would have consequences. The Wehrmacht immediately began fighting with unusual brutality. There were numerous reports of “the bodies of countless [Soviet] soldiers lining the roads, without weapons and with their hands raised, showing unmistakable signs of having been shot in the back of the head.”^{164} One significant factor in the extreme violence was that German predictions about the terrible tactics employed by the Red Army were quickly confirmed. From the first day of the war onward, Soviet forces fought in ways violating international law and foreign to Western European custom.

German anecdotes about Soviet brutality stoked the violence already being perpetrated with the power of imagination. A Lieutenant Leichtfuss reported seeing six German soldiers nailed to a table through their tongues, ten hung up from meat hooks in a slaughterhouse, and twelve to fifteen who were thrown down a well in a small village and then stoned to death. This leads his conversation partner to ask: “Were those soldiers dead who were hanging on the meat hooks?”

Reports about Russians mistreating German POWs, mutilating German wounded, and liquidating German soldiers who tried to surrender continued throughout the war and were too frequent and too well documented to be complete fiction. Today, it is estimated that 90 to 95 percent of German POWs captured in 1941 soon died. Most of them were executed directly at the front.^{166} The horror stories about German wounded and prisoners being mutilated only encouraged the German Eastern Army’s willingness to commit acts of unscrupulous violence.

In early July 1941, General Gotthard Heinrici wrote to his family: “Sometimes there’s no mercy at all anymore. The Russian has behaved bestially toward our wounded. And now our people are clubbing and shooting to death anything in a brown uniform. Both sides are driving each other on so that there are enough corpses to fill whole mausoleums.”^{167} Similar statements can be found through Wehrmacht files. The daily war report of the 61st Infantry Division, for instance, recorded that on October 7, 1941, the bodies of three Wehrmacht soldiers were discovered, whereupon the division commander ordered ninety-three Russian prisoners shot the following day. Many such atrocities were never registered because soldiers lower down in the chain of command, like Lieutenant Schmidt, “took care of things” themselves.

The frontline murder of countless Red Army soldiers was primarily an act of revenge and retribution. The character of the fighting in Russia was completely different from that in Poland, France, or Yugoslavia. The Red Army put up unexpectedly stiff resistance, and many Soviet soldiers preferred to fight to the death rather than surrender. Embittered hand-to-hand combat led to heavy losses on all sides and further ratcheted up the violence. Consider the following exchange:

Faller’s stories show once again that female members of the Red Army were particularly at risk since women in battle were not part of German soldiers’ frame of reference. Denigrated as “rifle sluts,” they were denied the status of true combatants and thus regarded as on the same level as partisans. For that reason, they were more likely than male members of the Red Army to become the victims of excessive brutality.^{169}

Along with the determination of individual soldiers to fight to the death, what most angered Germans were the tactics used by the Red Army. Soviet soldiers would often pretend to be wounded or play dead in order to attack from behind—something Germans regarded as a massive violation of the customs of warfare. The Hague Conventions did not explicitly prohibit deceptions of this kind, but they represented a break with the unwritten rules of open warfare. Before the invasion, manuals written by the German military leadership predicted that the Red Army would use such tricks, and German troops punished them with extreme brutality. For example, as early as late June 1941, a regiment of the 299th Infantry Division reported: “Prisoners were not taken because troops were so bitter about the dishonest fighting style of the enemy.”

Other tactics that were part of conventional warfare were unfamiliar to Germans and thus interpreted as evidence of the Red Army’s refusal to fight fairly. They included opening fire from behind, letting the enemy advance before unleashing a barrage at short range, and letting vanguard troops pass by so as to attack them from the rear. A German soldier named Hölscher, for instance, passed on a description of the Eastern Front he had heard from a friend:

In German soldiers’ eyes, there was nothing criminal about their behavior toward the Red Army, even though it, too, clearly violated international law. Soviet misbehavior was justification enough for German troops to execute prisoners, and almost no one, it seems, saw any alternatives.

Thus, within the first weeks of Nazi Germany’s campaign against the Soviet Union, new customs of war that flouted international law were established. The exercise of violence was not static, but rather constantly in flux—depending on structural, personal, and situational conditions. In the fall of 1941, for example, the extreme violence of the summer receded. But no sooner had the Eastern Army been compelled to beat a chaotic retreat in the winter of 1941–42, than they once again began regularly executing POWs who could not be transported.^{171} Phases of escalation and de-escalation would continue until the end of the war.

The surveillance protocols contain scattered instances in which soldiers describe refusing to commit war crimes against prisoners. An SS Second Lieutenant (Untersturmbahnführer) named Schreiber recounted one such story, including a description of his shock at a prisoner’s murder:

Significantly, the interlocutor here—Navy Lieutenant Bunge—expects a different end to Schreiber’s story, one in which the SS man does indeed end up “putting down” the Russian POW. Killings of that sort were common in soldiers’ conversations, and it was far more unaccustomed when they did not occur. Sergeant Grüchtel had a similar tale to tell:

We have no way of knowing whether stories of this kind are true or not, but they occur very rarely in the protocols. This fact should not be mistaken for evidence that humane treatment of POWs or occupied populations happened any more or less frequently in real life than it did in soldiers’ conversations. It merely documents that behavior which today would be considered humane played a very minor communicative role among the POWs. Stories relating what we consider inhumane acts, often told in the first person, were much more frequent than ones describing what would be deemed “good” behavior under contemporary norms.

This might be an indication that describing one’s own “good” behavior wasn’t bound to increase one’s popularity. In situations where killing is regarded as both an everyday practice and a social duty, charitable behavior toward Jews, Russian POWs, and other groups deemed inferior would have represented a violation of the norm. Even after World War II, it took years until stories of that nature elicited greater approval than the sorts of deeds the soldiers usually recounted in the surveillance protocols. Only later did Germans begin to give their recollections other nuances. So the relative infrequency of stories in which German soldiers show pity or empathy with prisoners, or simply treat them decently, might be due to the fact that such behavior was considered antisocial at the time and thus conversationally off-limits. Or perhaps the frame of reference in which others and their behavior were categorized simply did not admit of a category like empathy. In any case, the fact that stories in which soldiers boast of their own inhumanity rarely elicited any criticism suggests that such stories, and not the humane ones, reflected the normal everyday reality of World War II.

IN THE CAMPS

Most Red Army POWs did survive for a few days after being captured. But their martyrdom began as soon as they began making their way to prisoner of war camps:

Soviet POWs resorting to cannibalism is a recurring topic in the protocols. A First Lieutenant Klein, for instance, recounts: “When one of them died the Russians often ate him while he was still warm. That’s a fact.”^{175} Lieutenant General Georg Neuffer and Colonel Hans Reimann recalled a POW transport in 1941:

The mass starvation of Russian POWs was the result of the absence of adequate measures to feed them. It began in the summer of 1941 and reached its high point that winter, before relenting somewhat in the spring of 1942. By that time some two million Red Army soldiers were dead.

German policies toward POWs changed as the German wartime economy began to suffer from a labor shortage, and the German leadership recognized the instrumental value of people it would have preferred to let starve. Nonetheless, the Wehrmacht brass never fundamentally changed their policy, even if isolated individuals did fight for POWs’ lives and protested, however unsuccessfully, against their abysmal treatment.^{177}

Reports of the horrible conditions in POW camps occur even more often than recollections of executions in the surveillance protocols. The mass deaths of tens of thousands of people were apparently something remarkable even to hardened veterans of the Eastern Front. A soldier named Freitag recalled:

Many German soldiers seemed to have been aware of the dimensions of a conflict in which millions of POWs were dying. For example, Freitag, a Luftwaffe sergeant, remarked in June 1942: “In any case we had taken 3½ million prisoners, up to Christmas. And then there were certainly as many, if not more, killed, ‘as many more again’ said the communiqué. And if as many as a million of the prisoners survived the winter, that’s a lot.”^{179} First Lieutenant Verbeek of Artillery Regiment 272 expressed his outrage to a comrade: “Do you know how many Russian PW died in GERMANY in the winter of 1941/42? Two million actually died, they didn’t get anything to eat. Offal was brought from the slaughter-house to the camp for them to eat.”^{180}

The racist belief in innate German superiority that prevailed among the Eastern Army no doubt encouraged soldiers to liquidate Soviet prisoners, “mow down” enemies in battle, and carry out mass executions in revenge for assassinations. German soldiers’ proclivities toward violence were promoted by a mentality that saw the Russians as “an inferior people,”^{181} indeed “animals”^{182} and “members of a foreign race, Asians.”^{183} Nonetheless, the tales of mass death in the POW camps were by no means completely free of empathy, be it only as an undertone that the treatment of prisoners was unjust and cruel.

The propagandistic picture of the bestial Red Army soldier incited by Jews and Bolsheviks gradually gave way to a more multifaceted view that included respect for Russian soldiers’ military performance. Living in the country probably also altered occupying German soldiers’ perspectives on Russian culture and the lifestyles of a populace that had to deal with a relatively rough climate. German soldiers’ perceptions of Russians became more differentiated and positive. Moreover, some one million Russians also fought alongside the Wehrmacht as volunteers—a fact that must have revised many Germans’ opinions of what “the Russian” was like.^{184}

On the other hand, some soldiers in British POW camps felt that Russian prisoners had been treated too humanely. Lieutenant General Maximilian Siry, for instance, opined on May 6, 1945:

ANNIHILATION

From 1995 to 1999, an exhibition titled “Crimes of the Wehrmacht” sparked one of the most intense historical debates in postwar German society. Compiled by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, this collection of documentary material about war crimes committed by the German army and its complicity in the Holocaust toured museums throughout Germany, often to the dismay of older visitors, many of whom had themselves served in the armed forces during the Third Reich. The exhibit is widely regarded as having marked the end of the myth of the “clean” Wehrmacht. One striking thing to emerge from the debates was how vehemently German veterans rejected any suggestion that the armed forces had been involved in the Holocaust. As the surveillance protocols show, this was not a case of either repression or denial. Many of the crimes we today consider part of the Nazi campaigns of annihilation and the Holocaust were seen very differently in the 1940s, for instance, as a battle against partisans. The debates reflected the collision of two frames of reference, today’s versus that of the past.

The surveillance protocols reveal that many soldiers were astonishingly well aware of the specific details of the extermination of European Jews. Indeed, on occasion the POWs discuss aspects of the Holocaust that have remained undiscovered by historical research. The soldiers generally do not draw connections between what they know and their own behavior, although it was no secret during World War II that the Wehrmacht had indeed committed a great number of war crimes and was involved in the murder of Jews throughout occupied Europe in a number of ways: as executioners, witnesses, accomplices, support workers, and commentators. On very rare occasions, individual Wehrmacht officers disrupted the mass killings by registering complaints, saving victims, or, in one unusually spectacular instance, threatening the SS with violence in order to hinder the murder of a group of Jews.^{187} Naturally, such occasions were exceptions to the rule. Historian Wolfram Wette has estimated that there were only one hundred attempts at rescuing Jews among the 17 million members of the Wehrmacht.^{188}

None of the large-scale executions such as Babi Yar, where more than thirty thousand people were shot to death in two days, took place without Wehrmacht involvement. Moreover, the knowledge of the mass executions in Russia and the smaller-scale ones that had preceded them in Poland went far beyond the circles that directly participated in or witnessed those atrocities. The spreading of rumors is an effective means of communication, especially when the subject matter is inhuman, secrecy is supposed to be maintained, and information is restricted. In the surveillance protocols, the topic of crimes against humanity perpetrated upon Jews only occurs explicitly in 0.2 percent of the conversations. But the absolute numbers are of limited relevance, especially since the concept of the war crime played such a minor role in the soldiers’ frame of reference. The soldiers’ conversations make it clear that practically all German soldiers knew or suspected that Jews were being murdered en masse.

What’s surprising for contemporary readers is, above all, the way in which soldiers discussed crimes against humanity:

Lieutenant General Heinrich Kittel recounted these events on December 28, 1944. In 1941, he was a colonel in a reserve unit of the Army Group North in Daugavpils, Latvia, where some 14,000 Jews were shot to death between July and November. His own role in the executions has never been historically established. He himself spoke from the perspective of an outraged observer, but as a high-ranking officer he would have had considerable opportunities to intervene in the course of events. Unlike ordinary soldiers, Kittel did not have to remain in the role of the passive spectator. He could have done something.

The narratives in the surveillance protocols are often told from an observer’s perspective, which obscured the fact that the storyteller may have participated in the events described. The narrators position themselves in the innocuous role of the reporter—a tendency that historical eyewitnesses frequently maintain even today. The detail Kittel uses to relate past events is also nothing unusual. Executions made for good conversation, offering numerous opportunities to weigh up questions of guilt and responsibility.

Conversation partners rarely pose the sort of intense questions Felbert does in this excerpt. Much more frequently, the impression is that, while the details the storyteller recounts may be surprising to his audience, the overall process of annihilation was something familiar. Felbert, for instance, is clearly familiar with the fact that Jews were transported in “cattle cars.” The listeners in the protocols rarely react with astonishment or dismiss what is being said as unbelievable or unacceptable. The annihilation of European Jews, to put it concisely, was part of the world the soldiers not only knew, but knew much better than even the most recent research would lead us to expect. Undoubtedly, not everyone had knowledge of everything.^{191} Nonetheless, the surveillance protocols are full of Holocaust specifics, from the asphyxiation of Jews using the exhaust fumes of motorized vehicles to the exhumation and burning of bodies as part of “Action 1005.” In it, Jewish concentration camp inmates were forced to dig up the bodies and burn them. Moreover, soldiers traded rumors so furiously that we must assume that nearly all of them knew that massive numbers of Jews were being murdered.

A second surprising aspect of the stories is the unpredictable turns they tend to take from today’s perspective. For instance, we would expect Kittel to conclude his narrative by telling how he tried to stop the killings for humanitarian reasons. But that’s not the upshot of his story:

Despite the expressions of horror he occasionally uses, Kittel’s objection to the executions is practical and technical. As far as he was concerned, the mass shootings could continue, but not where they were taking place.

What disturbs Kittel is the visibility of the executions and the fact that no one seems to have thought of the risk that the water supply could be infected. Felbert, however, is less interested in those issues than in how the story goes on:

At Felbert’s insistence, Kittel continues his narrative, and the story takes further surprising turns. His explanation for why the killings are carried out by Latvians, on command from Germans, is the popular anger that allegedly accumulated in Daugavpils. This is one of countless examples in the protocols of obvious contradictions—or even sheer nonsense.^{194} In the same breath as Kittel talks about popular resentment as a motivation for the executions, he also says that the Latvians were following orders by the German Security Service.

Contradictions crop up all the time in human conversations without disconcerting the participants to any great degree. Transmitting information isn’t the only reason people converse. Communication has two discrete functions: passing on information and establishing social relations between participants. To speak in the language of classical communications theory, narratives are as much about relationships as they are about content. The situation in which stories are told is thus often more important than whether what is narrated makes either historical or logical sense. Listeners often forgo questions and requests for explanations because they don’t want to disrupt the narrative flow or interrupt the speaker. When captivated by a narrative, they often do not even register whether details can possibly be true or not.

But Felbert in this excerpt is an attentive listener, asking “Against the Jews?”^{195} Significantly, another person jumps in to answer that question, perhaps because he has registered a contradiction in Kittel’s narrative. He tries to put a positive spin on the story and then invites the general to resume his story:

Now it’s Felbert’s turn to steer the conversation in a different direction:

Kittel assumed the role of the pragmatist in his story. What bothers him about the mass murder of Jews is not the killings per se, but the haphazard methods with which they are carried out. He fails to grasp that Felbert wants to discuss the moral dimensions of mass executions in general and not the specifics of one particular case:

Felbert explicitly assumes a position diametrically opposed to Kittel’s. In outraged tones, he speaks of a “scandal” and the necessity of holding those in charge responsible for it—although he clearly excludes his present company from moral culpability.

Yet the source of even Felbert’s outrage is not primarily ethical. It, too, stems from practical, personal considerations: “That will be marked up against us afterwards, as though it had been we who did it.” Major General Johannes Bruhn seconds that thought:

In these POWs’ view, the “state apparatus” should be censured for making Wehrmacht generals into tools of Nazi crimes, for which other groups, most prominently the German Security Service, are actually responsible. Bruhn and Felbert are worried that they will be held culpable for things in which they were not involved. Bruhn’s macabre statement that one’s children might have to pay with their own blood for the crimes their parents committed shows how far the normative frame of reference he operated in deviated from today’s standards. Felbert agrees that the parties truly responsible need to be identified. And Kittel concludes the discussion with what reads almost like a Freudian slip: “I keep silent about a great many things.”

The interlocutors then move on to discuss in detail the anti-Jewish measures that preceded the Holocaust. In conclusion, Felbert turns the topic back to the mass executions, posing a somewhat bizarre question:

By 1944, Kittel had been made the defensive commandant of Krakow, and the facility he refers to is the Plaszów concentration camp, where commandant Amon Göth used to shoot inmates from the veranda of his house, and where the industrialist Oskar Schindler negotiated the deals that allowed him to save more than one thousand Jews.^{201} Kittel was far less outraged by anti-Jewish repression in Krakow than in Daugavpils because the technical aspects were far better organized. Felbert, on the other hand, remains captivated by the lurid topic of what was done with Jewish women, although the group resists this conversational strand.

The group then returns to the topic of who should truly be held responsible for the Holocaust, chiefly Himmler’s Security Service:

Here the group identifies the guilty parties and offers an explanation in the form of the latter’s background. The semi-criminal milieu of the SS Security Service, according to the POWs’ logic, is the source of the problems that have emerged, although it remains unclear whether the interlocutors consider the Holocaust or its insufficient organization to be the main problem. It is remarkable how quickly the group switches from outrage to more relaxed and seemingly cheerful topics. The “swine” of which Schaefer speaks are definitely the Security Service, and Kittel is at pains to point out that the Wehrmacht’s only failing is that they sat back and watched, instead of intervening.

This excerpt is a perfect example of any number of conversations the POWs had about the Holocaust. One of the interlocutors serves as the expert, while his partner(s) play the role of the inquisitive audience, who themselves possess a degree of background knowledge. Their comments about events are frequently, if not exclusively, negative, but the basis of their criticism is often not what we would expect. In the end, the speakers usually claim the role of passive onlookers who failed to take sufficient notice that atrocities were occurring.

Another interesting aspect of this discussion is that it was quoted in another conversation. A few weeks later, Major General Bruhn passed on to others what Kittel had reported:

Conversations like this are often like games of Chinese whispers. Researchers in the fields of narrative and memory research have determined that stories necessarily change as they are retold.^{204} Details are constantly invented, characters substituted, and settings exchanged according to the needs and wants of the storyteller. Retellers of previously heard stories rarely make these changes consciously. Modifications and embellishments simply seem to be an integral part of the storytelling process, with the content being made to fit the teller’s perspective and current situation. For that reason, stories shape and don’t just reflect events. Stories also reveal what concerns are most important to both tellers and their audience, as well as what knowledge both groups possess and what historical facts and myths are familiar to them. On the basis of such stories, we can determine the extent to which the events connected with the Holocaust were part of the soldiers’ communicative arsenal. This particular story shows how outraged Bruhn was at the coldheartedness of Kittel, who he believes was relatively indifferent to the executions.

It is difficult to say to what degree the Holocaust generally occupied soldiers’ thoughts. If we assume that the Allied officers in charge of the surveillance would have been interested in learning about the annihilation of European Jews, conversations about that topic would have been disproportionately recorded. The 0.2 percent of stories that centered on the Holocaust seems surprisingly small, especially considering the fact that the narratives encompass the full spectrum of activities associated with anti-Jewish persecution, from ghettoization to executions and mass murder using gas. The shock felt after the end of the war—and today—at the images from Bergen-Belsen or Buchenwald should not lead us to conclude that all German soldiers necessarily participated in or actively knew about the Holocaust. They knew what they did from scenes they had witnessed or registered, largely passively, and from hearsay. The project of eradicating Europe’s Jews was not German soldiers’ central task, although they sometimes provided logistical support or collegial assistance, and some soldiers certainly participated in the killings of their own free will. “Jewish actions” were mainly organized by storm trooper units, reserve police battalions, and local groups, and they took place in occupied territories well behind the advancing front lines. Troops actively engaged in battle could thus logically not have had much to do with these acts of mass murder.

Regardless of whether individual soldiers found those acts right or wrong or simply surreal, the Holocaust was not a central part of their world in the way it has been ascribed to them by the German and broader European culture of memory in the past thirty years. Knowledge that mass murders were taking place was widespread. It could hardly have been otherwise. But what did that knowledge have to do with the work of war the soldiers were charged with? In far more innocent eras, a lot of parallel events happen without people taking active notice of all of them. Modern reality is complex. It contains a plethora of “parallel societies.” Thus the Holocaust might not have been central even to the consciousness of SS men. To take one notorious example: in his “Posen speech,” SS leader Heinrich Himmler openly referred to the destruction of European Jews, but the topic only occupied a few minutes of an address that went on for three hours. This fact often gets overlooked in our sheer horror at some of Himmler’s statements, such as “Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when 500 lie there or when 1,000 are lined up.”

Our source material has led us to conclude that while soldiers were aware of the Holocaust and knew a fair amount about how it was being carried out, that knowledge did not interest them very much. The percentage of conversations dealing with the Holocaust is very small compared to the endless gabbing about weapons and air raid techniques, military honors, ships sunk, and planes shot down. It was clear to the soldiers that the extermination was happening, and the extermination was integrated into their frame of reference. But it remained quite marginal in terms of what commanded their attention.

On the other hand, relatively rare as they are, soldiers’ discussions of the Holocaust are usually very detailed and considerably more precise than the painstaking reconstructions made by postwar prosecutors. The surveillance protocols are both more frank and temporally more proximate to the atrocities. Much of what soldiers discussed had taken place in the very recent past and, even more significantly, had not been subjected to the filters of postwar interpretation. As a result, the protocols are far more direct than postwar testimonies or memoirs, which are typically influenced by the authors’ desire to exculpate themselves.

The protocols confirm all the facts about the Holocaust that have thus far been established by historical research, criminal investigations, and survivors’ testimony. But here, the ones doing the reconstructing are perpetrators or at least observers of the crimes and members of the perpetrating society:

Major General Walter Bruns’s description contains a number of astonishing details, including the length of the line of people waiting to be put to death and the enormous number of individuals this entailed. Another significant fact concerns those doing the shooting. Together with the procedure of having the victims line up in rows, this detail confirms the serial, mechanistic character of the executions.^{206} Finally, we should also take note of the reference to the sexual aspect of the “Jewish actions.”

Bruns describes the mass execution as a highly organized procedure utilizing division of labor. In the removal of the victims’ clothes and the shifts of the shooters, for example, the perpetrators had clearly come up with an arrangement that allowed the killings to proceed in orderly fashion. That had not been the case with the earliest executions. The event Bruns described was the result of a swift professionalization of killing. As historian Jürgen Matthäus has summarized, executions followed a standardized schema: “Jews were first rounded up in raids and taken in groups of various size to a more-or-less nearby firing range. Immediately upon their arrival they were made to dig a mass grave. Then they were forced to disrobe and line up in front of the pit so that the force of the bullets propelled their bodies into the grave. Those who followed were made to lie down on top of those who had already been killed before they themselves were shot. What the perpetrators like to portray as an ‘orderly’ execution process was in reality a bloodbath. Near larger cities, although it was officially prohibited, something approaching an ‘execution tourism’ arose. Various types of Germans, sometimes while on duty and sometimes in their own free time, would visit the firing ranges to watch or take pictures.”^{207}

Matthäus’s summary includes crucial details also found in the protocols: the basic procedure of the “Jewish actions,” which was continually being modified; the problems and difficulties encountered when executions were carried out; the modifications and instances of optimization that followed; and the behavior of those involved: the officers, shooters, and victims, as well as the eyewitnesses or, perhaps more accurately, curious audience members.^{208} The mass executions, it needs to be reiterated, were the end result of a series of relatively unprofessional experiments about how to kill the greatest number of people in the shortest possible time. Reports from individual death squads were passed on to high-ranking SS and reserve police officers, who then regularly met to debate the most efficient methods.^{209} In this fashion, innovations such as having the victims disrobe or choosing the most suitable sort of firearms were quickly incorporated into the job of killing and helped standardize the execution procedure.

The stories told by army, navy, and Luftwaffe soldiers revolve around “Jewish actions” that began in mid-1941 in the occupied territories behind the front lines. In the subsequent four years, some 900,000 Jewish men, women, and children were systematically executed.^{210}

Sergeant Kratz, a mechanic deployed with his unit, Bomber Wing 100, in southern Russia in 1942, focuses on how the executions have been technically optimized. He notes, in a professional tone, that the forms of killing are still not adequate because too few victims fall into the graves.

Kratz’s perspective is clinical, as though he were describing just another of the many technical complications one might experience as a soldier, but at the end of his anecdote, he does point out that the execution was something out of the ordinary, something that, in his words, will be “avenged.” Descriptions of mass killings often conclude with bits of reflection like this. Many of the speakers seem aware that retribution might follow excesses that went far beyond conventional warfare and the sorts of crimes deemed normal and usual in wartime. Mass executions violated and deviated from wartime expectations to the extent that soldiers assumed that they would bring punitive consequences, if Germany lost the war.

Another dialogue revolving around a “Jewish action” in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius is worth citing at length because it superbly illustrates the contradictory but clinical ways in which soldiers observed atrocities. The dialogue also shows what details about the Holocaust particularly interested soldiers. The interlocutors were two navy men who were part of a U-boat crew, twenty-three-year-old mechanic Helmut Hartelt and twenty-one-year-old sailor Horst Minnieur, who witnessed the scene he describes while serving with the Reich Labor Service:

This dialogue brings together a number of things that interested many soldiers about the “Jewish actions” (a term they themselves did not use). One primary interest is in the procedure, which is described in detail. The soldiers also noted that women, too, were executed, even pretty ones. In this case, the teller of the anecdote even appears to have had personal contact with one of the victims, who had done forced labor at his military camp. Hartelt seems to assume that attractive forced laborers were required to service soldiers’ sexual desires. Minnieur confirms that this was, of course, the case, but points out that German soldiers had to be careful not to get caught in acts the Nazis considered a defilement of racial purity. Minnieur continues by referring to the practice of Jewish women being shot after sex so that they could not inform on soldiers. Clearly the mass executions opened up an arena for violence in which a variety of acts were permissible. If people were going to be eradicated one way or the other, one was allowed to do otherwise impossible or impermissible things to them before they were murdered. It is striking that these two men, whose use of the formal form of address implies that they did not know one another well, could speak completely frankly about an otherwise delicate topic. Stories of sexual abuse were part of the routine inventory of soldiers’ conversations and were not greeted with any sort of moral objections.

The conversation then continues casually. Minnieur reports that the victim went to university in the German city of Göttingen, causing Hartelt to remark that she was sleeping around. Formulations like that exemplify the specific attitudes the soldiers have toward sexual violence. They don’t see anything particularly objectionable about rape. They take what they would call a “human” interest in victims who are attractive and feel personally involved in the latter’s fate. But in light of the massive number of victims, which Minnieur puts at 75,000, an individual tragedy such as that of a pretty Jewess has no significance.

For the soldiers, murder is destiny, as though some sort of higher power had preordained that select people—whether well educated, attractive, and stylishly dressed or not—had to become victims. That demonstrates the frame of reference in which the mass eradication of Jews was interpreted. In this excerpt from the protocols, Hartelt and Minnieur do not just discuss mass murder. They also indirectly communicate that they do not consider mass murder to be unjust, immoral, or indeed negative in any sense. Directly witnessing the killings might, as Minnieur put it, cause a feeling of horror. But murder per se is part of the universe of things that simply happen.