Soldaten

The strongest indicator that a frame of reference is functioning is the bewilderment an individual feels at other people seeing things differently than he does. Puzzlement about how members of other nations could regard Germans as “swine” also tells us a lot about what the Holocaust meant in ordinary soldiers’ lives. The gravity of the atrocity by no means caused Germans to question their self-appointed status as the bearers of high culture. There may have been an undertone in the protocols suggesting an awareness that limits had been transgressed. But National Socialist moral codes had convinced many soldiers that Jews represented an objective problem that needed to be solved. This was part of the reference frame in which they interpreted the events they described to one another. The frame of reference was why soldiers tended to criticize the way mass murder was taking place, but not the fact that it was happening.

For example, a W/T (wireless telegraph) operator, who was shot down in a Junkers 88 bomber over northern Africa in November 1942, recalled:

In the main, soldiers saw the persecution and even annihilation of Jews as sensible while criticizing the means of carrying it out, and that sort of logic also extended to people like Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss^{216} and Holocaust planner Adolf Eichmann.^{217} The participation of people in a variety of functions and at a variety of hierarchical levels was key to the Holocaust—as was the willingness of myriads of others to tolerate what they had witnessed. Marksmen at the shooting grounds where mass executions were carried out^{218} or concentration camp doctors^{219} charged with selecting who would be killed immediately and who was deemed fit for work were concerned with methods of killing, not with justifying its necessity. The same applies to countless others who were directly or peripherally involved in the Holocaust.

The eradication of European Jews was simply not part of German soldiers’ emotional world, even though they sometimes used expressions of horror and even regret when talking about it:

Lieutenant Priebe may have feared that Jews would avenge themselves someday, but that wasn’t the core of his argument. He objected to the treatment of Jews because even a self-proclaimed Jew hater like his father was upset about how he was ordered to deal with them and suffered under what he was allegedly forced to do.

Hannah Arendt pointed out the linguistic tendency under Nazism to speak of those receiving orders as bearing a “burden,” implying that those who followed instructions were themselves victims.^{221} It was a sign of an intact moral sense to criticize the executions precisely because one had always supported the persecution of Jews. In his Posen speech, Himmler himself refers to the “weighty task” of annihilation and the challenge of remaining “morally upright” while killing others. The precondition for a perspective like this was that the overarching definition of what was just and unjust had already been turned on its head. Within this frame of reference, killing people could be considered “good” because it benefited the welfare of the racial community. The National Socialist ethics of murder normatively encompassed individual scruples and individual suffering when faced with the task of doing the killing.

Priebe’s story continues:

The narrator Priebe has no difficulty incorporating even the most contradictory aspects into a single story. The mass destruction of Jews is presented as a ghostly rumor in which Jews simply disappear in a flooded reservoir. In the same breath, Priebe criticizes the SS for stealing Jewish jewelry and “their uncontrolled sexual activities” and assures his listeners that he himself wouldn’t have been capable of killing Jews, at least not women and children. The only positive is that the SS and not the military proper is responsible. This view is reminiscent of Major General Kittel, who objected to the location but not the practice of mass killings per se.

Soldiers were only interested in carrying out their tasks, not questioning them. With that in mind, we must acknowledge that there was a certain empiric basis to the following complaint of Himmler’s in his Posen speech of October 4, 1943:

Himmler’s speech is often seen as the height of cynicism and the incarnation of moral corruption. But it can be read more productively as evidence of the moral standards Himmler presumed his high-ranking SS officers would maintain and of what comprised the ethical frame of reference of National Socialism. Aspects of this frame of reference appear throughout the surveillance protocols. They include the rhetorical figure of Germans suffering under the “poor” realization of the “proper” aim of persecuting and even killing Jews, or questions of how one could have better implemented the Holocaust as a central project of National Socialism.

The frame of reference encompassing the mass executions and the extermination camps represents an idiosyncratic amalgamation of anti-Semitism, support for genocide, delegated responsibility, and horror at practical implementation. Excerpts from the protocols show that the soldiers perceived the Holocaust as something unprecedented and even terrible. Their complaints could be summarized in the formula: what must be must be, but not in this form. In Priebe’s narrative, that is exactly the perspective of the father as a reference figure: a self-professed Jew hater who objects to how Jews are being treated.

In both the surveillance protocols and postwar testimony about the Holocaust, Germans emphasized the extreme brutality of the native inhabitants of countries Germany occupied, distancing themselves in the process from the crassest examples of “inhumanity.” But this, too, only suggests that the criminal nature of the entire endeavor had little to no significance in their frame of reference. In fact, when observed empirically, what historians and sociologists refer to by way of shorthand as annihilation, genocide, or the Holocaust dissolves into an array of countless individual situations and actions. That was how the soldiers perceived events. It was the basis of their interpretation and the source of their answers and solutions to problems. Human beings in general behave according to particular rationales, and it is fundamentally false to imagine that they clearly see universal contexts when acting. For that reason, social processes always produce unintended results, outcomes no one desired but everyone helped to bring about.

Another individual who drew clear distinctions between the historical mission of the Holocaust and its unsatisfactory practice was Colonel Erwin Jösting, commander of the Mainz-Finthen military airfield. In April 1945, he related:

To Jösting’s eyes, the campaign against Jews as it was being pursued seemed irrational because it squandered badly needed resources and thus worked against the ultimate goal of the final elimination of supposedly pernicious Jewish influence. Jösting feared that “the Jew” was already exacting revenge through the soon-to-be-victorious Allies. Moreover, he worried that Germans would be blamed for crimes they did not commit. He is particularly critical of the timing of actions aimed at exterminating Jews. After the war, he believes, the time would have been far more propitious.

Two other German soldiers saw the situation the same way:

The surveillance protocols also contain firsthand descriptions of the murder of Jews. In one excerpt, SS Oberscharführer Fritz Swoboda discussed the difficulties of carrying out executions in Czechoslovakia with First Lieutenant Werner Kahrad:

This rare instance of inside access to the Holocaust not only allows us to hear a mass murderer in his own words. It also highlights the difficulties of organizing mass executions and the rewards and strategies used to overcome them. The assumption that, because of their experience with violence, all veteran frontline soldiers would be suitable for executions proved false. If Swoboda is to be believed, some of them lost their nerve when called upon to kill women. He even admits that in the beginning he himself had to steel himself, and that there were special rewards for carrying out this particularly tough form of duty.

Soldiers also mentioned cases in which the corpses of murdered Jews were exhumed and burnt. The operation took place under the command of SS Standartenführer Paul Blobel in summer 1942 and was given the code name “Action 1005.” In it, Jewish concentration camp inmates were forced to dig up the bodies and burn them. In order to destroy the victims’ remains more efficiently, Blobel came up with special types of bonfires and devices for grinding up bones. The idea was to destroy evidence of the mass murders, but the secret still got out:

Other soldiers speaking on different occasions also discussed the details of the extermination of European Jews:

Children represented a particular problem at mass executions because they often didn’t follow instructions or die quickly enough.^{233} The descriptions of the executions of children are among the most grisly events recorded in Holocaust literature and research. It is no wonder, therefore, that Edwin Graf von Rothkirch expresses his disgust.

At a somewhat later point in time, he continues his story with a further episode:

This description shows how normal executions seemed to the perpetrators. The SS man’s offer to postpone the killings as a favor to a photographer speaks volumes not only about how routine executions had become but also about how openly they were carried out. In this case, no attempt seems to have been made to keep the mass murder secret.

Rothkirch, who talks in dramatic and detailed fashion about the various levels of the extermination process, sees this as a sign of brutalization. But it would again be a mistake to conclude that the speaker himself objects to the extermination of Jews per se:

This statement is another bewildering conjunction of seeming contradictions, including Rothkirch’s outrage at the way the executions are carried out, the laconic attitude of the executioner, and the arbitrary process by which victims are selected. Rothkirch’s anti-Semitism is also unusual. He is one of the few POWs to have spoken of “Jewish Bolshevism.” He is also someone who fears Jewish revenge. The frame of reference within which he argues, however, admits the possibility that Germans can regain the international trust they have lost and that Germans will be allowed to play a part in “creating a sensible world.”

We should resist the temptation to shake our heads at these astonishing disparities between perception, interpretation, and argumentation. What appears hopelessly contradictory today was not necessarily so six decades ago. People who supported anti-Semitic policies could criticize how they were put into practice without any inherent contradiction. Indeed, they could even regard anti-Semitic practices as a mistake that would cause considerable trouble. Hostility toward Jews did not automatically mean that people wanted to be excluded from the circle of nations that would shape the world of the future. Rothkirch’s belief that anti-Jewish policies were implemented in the wrong way does not call into question the racist worldview that formed his frame of reference. Nor did it shake his faith that Germans should be full-fledged members, worthy of trust and equal in status to others, in world politics. Rothkirch’s views may appear, ex post facto, to be the products of hubris, naïveté, or sheer stupidity. But they reveal the contours of the frame of reference within which he acted at the time.

The dilemma is the same one that left many Germans, at least until the 1970s, unable to comprehend that what they had done or tolerated in the Third Reich could have been utterly wrong. This resulted from what we today might call an absolute incompatibility of the frame of reference “Third Reich” with the political and normative standards that applied in democratic, post–World War II Germany. This incompatibility is at the root of the frequent, heated debates and scandals surrounding the past in post-Nazi German society.^{237}

Incompatibility also occurs in the protocol excerpt cited at the beginning of this section, in which a German POW wonders how others could see Germans collectively as “swine,” when they were the people of Liszt or Wagner. In another dialogue, a low-ranking artillery officer and a foot soldier search for an explanation:

Within the frame of reference of the Holocaust, beliefs about the negative traits and enormous influence of Jews are so securely anchored that Jewish treachery can serve as an explanation for practically anything. That explains soldiers’ reflexive tendency to cite Jewish stereotypes, even in those anecdotes that begin with someone expressing a modicum of sympathy for the plight of Jews:

Especially significant here is Queisser’s use of the phrase “lively bargaining” to describe Jews swapping gold for bread. Even if the narrator found it unpleasant to travel through the “Jewish quarter” (i.e., ghetto), he could not pass up the opportunity to engage in such a lucrative transaction himself. This excerpt provides further evidence of the structure of temporary opportunities that opened themselves up to Wehrmacht soldiers in the course of German persecution and extermination of Jews.

Another story revolves around the role of so-called capos in a forced labor camp. It is one of the few dialogues in which a listener expresses doubt as to what the narrator, in this case a pilot, is telling him:^{240}

Taumberger’s description of the labor camp is basically historically accurate. Kruse’s incredulity is apparently directed at the detail that inmates were used as guards, although that is open to interpretation. He could have been expressing doubt at the entire story or the role of the capos, or he might simply have not wanted to hear anything, although Taumberger responds by going into more detail about the capos. Strikingly, he stresses his own moral contempt for people he considers “Judases”—as though they were acting entirely of their own free will.

Postwar family reminiscences do feature occasional instances of Germans who seem to have unambiguously rejected the murder of Jews. An interviewee named Doetsch, for instance, recalled: “In Lvov, I once saw a so-called Jew transport… Suddenly there was a lot of movement in the ranks. Up at the front, the SS were beating people up. It was… the SS, and they’d gotten drunk. They lined them up in front of anti-tank trenches. The first had to take their place, then machine gun fire, and down they went. The next ones had to push them into the trench before they themselves went down. They weren’t even dead. Dirt was shovelled. The next ones… can you imagine that? Women and children and old people. I knew exactly what was going on. Someone told me. ‘We had orders,’ he said, ‘but I couldn’t watch.’ Germans nailed children to the walls. They did that.”^{242}

The protocols do not just contain descriptions of mass executions, but of exterminations using car exhaust fumes. A POW named Rudolf Müller at Fort Hunt in the United States told the following story:

This dialogue is one of the scant bits of direct evidence we have of the gassing of Jews using carbon monoxide fumes. It is also unusual in that the narrator clearly abhors the events he describes—an attitude he was forced to answer for in front of a military hearing. The listener also seems shocked. Apparently, he had previously heard nothing about these kinds of murder.

Let us summarize. German descriptions of all aspects of the Holocaust—from the ghettos to the mass executions to the extermination camps—not only characterized but judged the behavior of those involved. The same was also true for stories about Jewish capos, even though they were not acting of their own free will. The trope of “blaming the victim”^{244} is well known from studies on the psychology of prejudice and functions by blotting out the circumstances under which people act, reducing behavior entirely to personality factors. This mechanism is active in all sorts of prejudices against underprivileged or discriminated groups, so it is hardly surprising that it should have played a role in a situation of such completely one-sided violence and extreme social stereotyping. It occurs in descriptions of how women were raped or how those about to be executed behaved. Past experiences are narrated as though the storyteller were describing an experiment on lab animals, without mentioning the conditions under which the experiment was carried out.

This perspective, which completely ignored the conditions one side created in explaining the behavior of their victims, can be related back to a frame of reference in which “the Jews” belonged to a completely different social universe to the tellers of the stories. Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, for instance, was excellently informed about the conditions under which his inmates died—he himself created them. Yet even Höss assumed this perspective in his recollections when he spoke of so-called special commandos—camp inmates forced to bring victims to the gas chambers and take them back out again once they had died:

VOLUNTARY KILLERS

Let us move on now to two aspects of soldiers’ behavior that have thus far been largely ignored by the literature on the Nazi war of annihilation and the Holocaust. Wehrmacht soldiers from various units and of divergent ranks occasionally took part in mass executions, even though they were not ordered to and formally had little to do with “Jewish actions.” Daniel Goldhagen, writing about one of the few known cases of this sort, concluded that Germans in general were motivated by a kind of exterminatory anti-Semitism. Goldhagen focused on a Berlin police unit, consisting of musicians and performers, that was sent to the front to entertain troops in mid-November 1942. They asked the commander of a reserve police battalion in the German town of Luckow if they could take a turn shooting Jews at an upcoming execution. Their request was granted, and the entertainers spent the following day amusing themselves by murdering people. Holocaust historian Christopher Browning also mentions this incident.^{246} But the question remains: did the Germans in question need anti-Semitic motivation to find killing fellow human beings an entertaining pastime?

Their real motivation was probably a lot more trivial. The police officers in question enjoyed doing things they would never have been allowed to under normal circumstances. They wanted to experience what it felt like to kill without fear of consequences, to exercise total power and do something extraordinary and monstrous, free from the possibility of any negative consequences. This is what sociologist Günther Anders has called the “chance for unpunished inhumanity.” For some people, senseless murder was apparently a temptation that could hardly be resisted. Violence of this nature needs neither a motive nor a reason. It is its own motivation.

The surveillance protocols also contain descriptions of how German soldiers took part in mass executions, voluntarily or after having received an invitation to do so.^{247} These episodes, mind-boggling as they may be to us today, indicate that Nazi genocide by no means took part in secrecy and was not always viewed with horror and disgust. On the contrary, curious onlookers—local people, Wehrmacht soldiers, and members of the civilian administration—regularly turned up at the execution pits, turning exterminations into a semipublic spectacle with a high amusement value. In fact, in July 1941, Higher SS and Police Leader Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski was forced to ban spectators at mass executions. His order read: “All male Jews between the ages of 17 and 45 who have been found guilty of plundering are to be shot in accordance with military procedure. The executions will be carried out at a distance from cities, villages and roadways. Their graves are to be leveled in such a fashion that they cannot serve as sites of remembrance. I expressly forbid photographs or spectators. Executions and graves are not to be made public.”^{248} Nonetheless, people continued to flock to executions, taking photographs, probably delighting in the obscene spectacle of helpless, naked women, and offering advice to and cheering on the shooters.^{249}

The lure of a good show proved stronger than people’s fear of violating rules or disobeying commands. A Major Rösler described “soldiers and civilians… pouring in from all directions” to witness one execution: “Police were running around in dirty uniforms. Soldiers, some clad only in bathing trunks, congregated in small groups. And civilians, among them women and children, looked on.” At the conclusion of his report, Rösler declares that while he had experienced no shortage of unpleasantness in his life, he had never seen anything like this sort of bloodbath carried out in public on what amounted to an open-air stage. Something of that nature, Rösler complained, ran contrary to German values and ideals.^{250} But no amount of commands and instructions, it seems, could put an end to the problem of execution tourism. A conference of military administrators on May 8, 1942, decided that the murder commandos should make “amicable adjustments” and if possible carry out executions at night and not during daytime. But such measures had little effect.^{251}

It is useless to speculate about what may have attracted individual onlookers to defy the prohibitions and attend executions. Their motivations probably varied. Some probably sought out the thrill of witnessing a spectacular and surreal event that would have never been allowed to happen in normal life. Others were likely drawn by horror and disgust, perhaps mixed with a feeling of satisfaction that one was exempt from the fate others were suffering. What is more significant in the present context is the sheer phenomenon of audiences witnessing the mass murders. People being gunned down wholesale didn’t elicit the sort of repulsion that made people try to avoid witnessing it. Voyeurism and satisfaction at observing others’ misfortune are well-documented psychological phenomena that also occur in contexts other than the Holocaust. This is probably also the explanation for the prominence of descriptions of genocide in the surveillance protocols. If one could not witness an execution oneself, one could at least enjoy the vicarious thrill of a detailed description of what it was like.

A navy mechanic and POW named Kammeyer watched an execution in summer 1941 in Liepaja in today’s Latvia, while he was deployed on the Baltic coast:

But watching an execution paled in comparison to actually taking part in one. Luftwaffe Lieutenant Colonel von Müller-Rienzburg recalled:

It is unclear in this excerpt whether Müller-Rienzburg accepted the invitation or not, although he unambiguously says that others did. Bassus immediately imagines a hunt but does not express any special amazement or surprise at what he’s just heard.

A Lieutenant Colonel August von der Heydte also reported—albeit in secondhand fashion—that executions resembled hunts:

In another conversation, a soldier actually admitted accepting the invitation to take part in an execution. Surprisingly, the story related by Luftwaffe First Lieutenant Fried calls forth unmistakable uneasiness in his interlocutor, Infantry First Lieutenant Bentz:

These two POWs talk past one another somewhat. Their basic outlooks differ considerably, and neither immediately registers that fact. Whereas Bentz rejects the mass murder of Jews and believes that Germany has “the wrong attitude to the whole of this racial question,” Fried says he accepted an invitation to execute Jews during Germany’s campaign against Poland. At first, Bentz failed to comprehend that Fried was among the executioners. Only when Fried adds that the experience was unpleasant, does Bentz realize whom he’s talking to. Fried, though, doesn’t let Bentz’s obvious dismay disrupt his story. He continues to relate how he shot not just Jews and partisans, but “women and children” as well. His laconic remark that this was not “pleasant” might have meant that he didn’t enjoy killing as much as he thought he would. Or it might simply reflect the fact that he notices his interlocutor is critical of Jewish persecution.

As is the case with the presence of picture-snapping tourists, the phenomenon of soldiers being invited, either alone or in groups, to execute Jews suggests that the people concerned required no period of adjustment before carrying out the most brutal kinds of acts. Fried steps up as a shooter just as immediately as the police entertainers in Goldhagen’s and Browning’s studies. They killed for entertainment and amusement. They didn’t need to be acclimatized.

The openness with which the hosts issued their invitations indicates that they saw nothing unusual about their activities and did not expect them to disconcert or repulse people. We can assume, then, that soldiers participating voluntarily in executions, either by invitation or at their own request, was just as common as spectators attending them for their own amusement. That implies that mass executions did not fall outside the bounds of the soldiers’ frame of reference or fundamentally run contrary to the way they viewed the world.

These conclusions are supported by a number of statements in the protocols in which POWs explicitly endorse the annihilation of Jews. One of them is a conversation between two young submarine officers, First Lieutenants Günther Gess and Egon Rudolph:

OUTRAGE

Stories about crimes against humanity were nothing new for most of the soldiers. Tales of horror were scattered throughout narratives about other topics: fighting on the front lines, for instance, or being reunited with friends while on leave, although stories about extreme violence were relatively infrequent. They called forth, by today’s standards, scant outrage. As we have seen, it was very unusual for soldiers to feel repulsed out of principle. Even more rare were instances in which first- or secondhand knowledge of brutality prompted soldiers to reflect on the moral character of the war. Their most common response when confronted with tales of mass murder was to ask, with voyeuristic curiosity, for more details.

It is striking that soldiers never discuss the legal dimension of what was going on. They showed no interest whatsoever in interpretations of the Hague or Geneva Conventions—the documents scarcely crop up in the surveillance protocols. “The whole question of what is allowed or not is finally a question of power,” one first lieutenant opined. “If you have the power, everything is permissible.” Yet this speaker also distinguished between what forms of violence could be carried out and what forms should. “In spite of that, our troops should not massacre civilians who do not shoot (at them),” the lieutenant said.^{258} It’s worth directing our attention now at what acts the POWs did see as evil, awful, or repulsive.

German soldiers considered executing captured partisans as nothing short of a dictate of common sense, beyond question, since partisans did not enjoy the status of combatants. Stories about regular prisoners killed on the front lines were also accepted without commentary since that was everyday practice, particularly on the Eastern Front. Narratives had to depart from standard operating procedure in a massive quantitative or qualitative sense to call forth an intense reaction.

One example is a conversation between Lieutenant Kurt Schröder and a lieutenant named Hurb* from Bomber Wing 100 about the execution of pilots who had been shot down. The discussion was prompted by the news that the Japanese had killed U.S. airmen captured during the first American aerial bombardment of Tokyo:

Hurb’s view that murdering enemy pilots is a legitimate means of preventing attacks on civilian targets is not only naïve. It also reflects the general Wehrmacht belief that brutal measures could be used to dictate the enemy’s behavior. Schröder disagrees for both empirical reasons and because such “swinish” behavior runs contrary to what he sees as soldiers’ honor. Significantly, he does not argue that such executions violated the Geneva Convention. His views are based on his military ethos.

Similar sorts of arguments, often with the same choice of words, occur in conversations between army men. Colonel Hans Reimann, for instance, thought it was “swinish” that the SS reconnaissance unit “Hitler Youth” executed eighteen Canadian soldiers in Normandy. For him, such behavior was inexcusable. Nonetheless, the topic of what should be allowed rarely led to serious debates among the POWs. Most often, a reference to the excessively brutal SS or the “inhuman” war on the Eastern Front sufficed to establish consensus and allow the conversation to turn to other topics. The discussion between Schröder and Hurb was one of the few that featured two obviously different ethical stances. Most soldiers were simply concerned with establishing points of agreement and avoiding any far-reaching conclusions that could have caused them to question their own actions and views.

German POWs were far more interested in the qualitative and quantitative dimensions of war crimes, and this influenced their perceptions. Reports about Soviet prisoners dying en masse in German POW camps elicited far more outrage than tales of soldiers being executed at the front. What happened in the camps was, in the view of one Luftwaffe sergeant, “a downright disgusting bit of work.”^{260} Two men named Ernst Quick and Paul Korte agreed that the treatment of Red Army soldiers was “dreadful.”^{261} Georg Neuffer spoke of “ghastly business,”^{262} while a private named Herbert Schulz went even further, saying the war was a point of cultural shame and the greatest crime in human history.^{263} As early as September 1940, “terrible things” were being told, for instance of the entire male population of a village being executed after someone fired shots at German occupying troops from a house.^{264} A First Sergeant Doebele asked himself: “Why do we do all these things? It’s not right.”^{265}

A translator who was deployed with German troops in occupied Italy was also outraged at how Wehrmacht soldiers had treated the civilian population:

The striking thing is that SS Sonderführer Blaas refers to his soldiers not just as bandits but Bolshevists, one of the National Socialists’ archenemies. Talking about crimes that had occurred only a few days previously also reawakened memories of the Eastern Front. “And then the things they are doing in Russia!” Blaas exclaimed. “They massacred thousands of people, women and children. It was frightful!”^{267} Blaas’s experiences in Italy and Russia merged into a kind of orgy of violence that left him deeply disturbed. Significantly, references to the SS as the perpetrators, which normally allowed the speakers to disassociate themselves from the violence depicted in their stories, are missing here.

The crime that called forth the greatest outrage was the murder of women and children:

This statement by army lieutenant Meyer is unusual insofar as, in the speaker’s eyes, the death of a single German soldier did not justify the act of retribution. Atrocities committed against women and children were frequently described as “appalling” or “horrible”^{269} deeds that made one’s “blood boil.”^{270} Soldiers usually quickly distanced themselves from the war crimes they described and then changed the subject. Yet on occasion, stories about the execution of prisoners or the mass murder of Jews did provide food for moral thought. Germany’s youth had lost all respect for humanity, one POW complained, referring to the relatively young average age of those who perpetrated crimes against humanity.^{271} A soldier named Alfred Drosdowski called his fellow soldiers “swine” who had given Germany a bad name for decades to come.^{272} A Sergeant Czerwenka even declared: “I have often felt ashamed of wearing German uniform.”^{273} After hearing a cell mate relate details about a mass execution in the town of Luga in the Leningrad oblast, Franz Reimbold responded: “I tell you. If that’s the way things are, I’ll stop being German. I don’t want to be German any more.”^{274}

When Colonel Ernst Jösting learned from his wife about the conditions under which Jews were deported from Vienna, the two agreed: “That’s bestial, unworthy of a German.” Helmut Hanelt came to much the same conclusion when a comrade named Franz Breitlich described in detail how thirty thousand Jews had been executed: “It makes you ashamed of being German.”^{275}

Higher-level ranks were notably more prone to reflect on what conclusions should be drawn from the prevalence of war crimes. For example, Colonel Eberhard Wildermuth opined:

Lieutenant General Friedrich von Broich was likewise frank in his assessment:

Broich was also one of the few German officers to object on moral grounds to the Kommissarbefehl, Hitler’s order that all Soviet political commissars should be immediately executed: “The shooting of the commissars—I have not been able to discover in any war, except in the dimmest past, that orders like that have been issued by the highest authority. I have seen (?) these orders personally. That is a sign that like a God, that man has simply disregarded everybody and all pacts which exist, and exist on both sides—that is megalomania.”^{278}

Broich’s views were exceptional. Most German officers welcomed the Kommissarbefehl.^{279} Broich’s moral reflections were made in the Trent Park officers’ POW camp. There, distance from Germany and an abundance of free time led to a number of extraordinary conversations:

We have no way of knowing what personal reasons might have led individual POWs to be critical of Wehrmacht war crimes. Some probably found what German soldiers were ordered to do simply too horrible, while others may have maintained deeply entrenched moral beliefs. Yet significantly, such criticism was constantly advanced from the perspective of the noninvolved observer, powerless to change anything. Rarely did POWs raise the possibility of their own culpability, and the protocols contain almost no evidence of any of them engaging in active resistance. One exception was Colonel Hans Reimann, who told of having approached his superior officer during the Polish campaign in an effort to halt the SS execution of Polish intelligentsia. “He wouldn’t think of doing so,” Reimann reported his superior saying. “His position and salary meant far more to him.”^{281}

Breaking the constraints of conformity seemed impossible to most German soldiers, no matter how gruesome the crimes they observed. In this respect, a story told by a Major Arp from the Army Field Command 748 is typical. When Arp was a first lieutenant in Russia, a mother begged him to protect her two children from the Wehrmacht countersabotage secret field police. The next day he saw them shot to death, lying on the ground. He does not tell of an effort on his part to save these people, launching instead into a description of the mass executions in Kaunas, Lithuania. When Arp’s interlocutor asks if he had tried to prevent the murders, Arp becomes evasive.^{282}

Thus, it is hardly astonishing that the surveillance protocols contain exactly one account of an act of rescue, the truth of which cannot be determined:

RESPECTABILITY

Despite the atrocities they described and their knowledge of the mass murder of Jews and the appalling treatment of Soviet prisoners, the soldiers lived in a moral universe in which they felt like good people—people who, in Himmler’s words, had remained “morally upright.” The National Socialist ethos of respectability focused on the idea that fighters were not to engage in crimes like murder, rape, and plunder to benefit themselves, but for the sake of a higher cause. This ethos allowed Germans to justify actions that were absolutely evil in terms of Western, Christian morality and to integrate them as unavoidable necessities into their own moral self-image. National Socialist morality contained the idea that the perpetrators of atrocities might themselves suffer from the “dirty work” they did.^{284} The trope of sacrifice, too, allowed Germans to kill without feeling guilty. Ideologists of annihilation like Himmler or practitioners like Rudolf Höss continually stressed that destroying human lives was an unpleasant task that ran contrary to their “humane” instincts. But the ability to overcome such scruples was seen as a measure of one’s character. It was the coupling of murder and morality—the realization that unpleasant acts were necessary and the will to carry out those acts in defiance of feelings of human sympathy—that allowed the perpetrators of genocide to see themselves as “respectable” people, as people whose hearts, in Höss’s words, “were not bad.”^{285}

The autobiographical material left behind by perpetrators—diaries, interviews, and interrogations—has one very conspicuous feature. Even when the people in question showed absolutely no comprehension of the enormity of what they had done, they were very concerned to appear not as “bad people,” but as individuals whose moral fiber remained intact despite the extreme nature of the actions. It could be that such statements were shaped by the contexts in which they were made. Autobiographical documents are always self-justifications in which the narrator tries to bring the stories he tells into harmony with the image he has of himself and wants others to have of him. The case of interrogations also features a further legal, complicating component. The perpetrator wants to portray himself as moral and avoid incriminating himself.

The situation is different with the surveillance protocols. In them, the speakers do not address their statements to any external moral arena. At the time their conversations were recorded, the POWs did not know how the war was going to turn out or that the “Jewish actions” and other crimes against humanity would attract near universal moral condemnation. In other words, they did not have to define “respectability” or assure one another that they were indeed respectable people.

Only when they refer to foreign countries do the soldiers explicitly talk about “respectability.” In those cases, they usually claim to have been more respectable than was actually required:

It wasn’t necessary for members of the enemy group—be they partisans, terrorists, or just people who had gotten a bit drunk—to do anything in particular to incur the wrath of German soldiers. The act of “decency” around which this story revolves is simply that the speaker did not immediately kill the “swine of a Pole.” The person in question had done nothing more than brush up against the soldier on the street. Nonetheless, it was considered a mark of decency to let the Pole get away with his life, if not for long.

Stories of this sort were by no means restricted to Germany’s war in Eastern Europe. A similar situation also took place in Denmark:

German soldiers, as we have seen throughout this book, cited even the most trivial reasons for putting people to death:

RUMORS

Fantasies and flights of imagination, difficult as they are to identify empirically, are part of the world in which we feel we exist. It is impossible to deny the enormous destructive force of Germans’ mental images of Jews, regardless of whether they were based on quasi-objective sources or merely common stereotypes and biases. Fantasies are not bound to empiric reality. Nonetheless, they can trigger actions that permanently change things in real life, the obvious example being the imaginary universe of Germans in which the Aryan race was superior and thus destined to rule the world. There are too few studies of the opaque area of imagination in the context of the Third Reich. One of them, Charlotte Beradt’s compilation of dreams people had during the period, hints at the central role the Führer and other leading Nazis played in the German subconscious.^{289} Another source that sheds light on this otherwise obscure aspect of the reference frame of the Third Reich is the love letters written to Hitler. Eight thousand in number, they contain the unrealistic fantasies of women who wanted nothing more than some sort of intimate contact with the Führer.^{290}

The surveillance protocols contain little fantasy material. That’s likely because the British and American officers in charge of the operation didn’t think that conversations of this kind were worth preserving. But the protocols do contain significant information about a topic related to fantasy: rumor. Rumors crop up a lot in the soldiers’ tales, especially in the context of the Holocaust, an initiative that was supposed to be kept secret and was felt to be monumentally transgressive. Such rumors sometimes took the form of fantasies about how people were killed or particularly bizarre events.

Sometimes, things the POWs had actually experienced seemed like the products of fantasy. In conjunction with “Action 1005,” for instance, Rothkirch related:

Events like the digging up and burning of Jewish corpses challenged the comprehension even of people like Rothkirch who were familiar with the Holocaust. But the Holocaust had path dependencies and consequences of its own, including “Action 1005.” In 1941, none of the perpetrators reckoned that the bodies would later have to be disposed of, and the horror this entailed crossed a further boundary of what they could imagine. It’s thus no wonder that Rothkirch and Ramcke use imaginary places as points of reference. Things like “Action 1005,” they both seem to be saying, cannot be part of their normal reality. They belonged on another nonearthly plane, that of the fairy tale or hell.

Here we see that for the soldiers the Holocaust demarcated a thin, permeable boundary between the real and unreal, the imaginable and unimaginable. The shifting nature of this border opened up space for fantastic rumors:

Rumors of this sort floated around freely and could be attached to a variety of events. But they remained uncanny, even as the roles of the actors, in this case Poles, changed.

A low-ranking Luftwaffe officer named Heimer told of Jews being killed by diverting gas into train cars:

Astonishingly, this story was told in late 1942, before the introduction of gas to Auschwitz. It conflates two facts: the deportation of Jews in trains heading eastward and exterminations using exhaust fumes of motor vehicles, which had been taking place in Chelmno, in Riga, and around Poznan since the end of 1941.

The conflation of separate half-understood facts is a typical way in which rumors were started. Heimer’s laughter at the end of his anecdote indicates that he regards his story as something unbelievable, and in fact his interlocutor doubted its credibility:

This is one of the rare instances in the protocols when a listener expressed disbelief and disgust at what he was hearing. But the listener in this case was a British stool pigeon who was trying to elicit further information from Heimer, a W/T [wireless telegraph] operator. That’s why he assumes the role of the disbeliever. Thus, even this exception confirms the rule that listeners usually didn’t consider even the most horrible of stories to be unlikely or improbable.

One recurring rumor was that the bodies of murdered Jews were dissolved by acid:

This story weaves historically accurate details and imaginary elements together into a rumor about how the bodies of victims were completely destroyed. The parts about Jews being deported from France and deceived as to the purpose of the “delousing” are based on fact. Victims heading into the gas chambers were told they were going to be disinfected. The bits about baths with electric currents, into which acids are then poured, were a product of the sort of imagination typical of rumors.

Rumors are an emotional form of communication, spreading a feeling of something monstrous or uncanny. As such, they express an element that rarely occurs in the soldiers’ conversations: feelings.

FEELINGS

It was extremely rare for soldiers to talk about negative emotions, at least not those that they themselves had felt. This reluctance is by no means unique to World War II. We find it in all modern wars. Being confronted with extreme violence, be it as a perpetrator, observer, or victim, likely changes individuals in ways that cannot be easily communicated. There may be discursive forms for talking about violence that one has committed oneself: the adventure tales of shooting down planes, “knocking over” civilians, or raping women. But there seem to be no formats for speaking about one’s own fears, especially fears of death and dying. The reason for this, psychologically speaking, is probably simple: members of combat units are so close to violence and death that those things are constant, realistic possibilities, and the idea of one’s own death is as terrible and unreal for soldiers as it is for civilians. Even in normal social circumstances, people rarely enjoy talking about their own deaths. That reluctance is no doubt all the greater in situations where dying is far more likely, and the likely manner of death will be violent, brutal, painful, and usually lonely and dirty.

One of the few POWs to talk explicitly about his fears, in this case being burned alive in a plane crash, was Luftwaffe Sergeant Rott:

Fears about dying also resonated in soldiers’ irrational attempts to formulate “rules” about who would be killed:

Moreover, certain types of warfare were unpopular because they were particularly dangerous. Nighttime sorties were one example in the Luftwaffe, as two veteran bomber pilots made clear in November 1943:

Luftwaffe airmen were confronted with different sorts of dangers in the various places and situations in which they were deployed. That emerges clearly from a conversation between two Luftwaffe lance corporals from October 1942. They discuss the toll that the enemy’s numerical superiority could take on soldiers’ nerves:

Those remarks echoed the confession of a German airman in October 1940:

Comrades whose planes had been shot down were one of the recurring topics in Luftwaffe POWs’ conversations. But the speakers usually tried to avoid explicitly referring to death. The airman cited above who confessed his fear of being burned alive was the exception to the rule.

Instead, POWs remained abstract when they talked about lost crews, omitting names and causes of death. Why? Talking about death was thought to bring bad luck, as a bomber pilot named Schumann revealed when relating the heavy losses suffered within his crew: “Our morale was… low. As we were climbing into the aircraft the W/T operator said: ‘Get ready to die.’ I’ve always said it’s wrong to talk like that.”^{303}

When soldiers did discuss the psychological strain that resulted from extreme stress and fears for one’s life, they often used comrades as surrogates for expressing what were likely their own emotions:

These remarks were recorded in March 1943. That same month, a bomber observer named Johann Maschel reported about a comrade whose nerves were completely shot after flying seventy-five missions:

Maschel, who had ejected from his burning Dornier 217 over Scotland on March 25, 1943, was a member of Luftwaffe Bomber Wing 2, one of the few units to continue flying bombing raids against Britain after the summer of 1941. The wing suffered heavily in their attempt to take aerial warfare to enemy territory, losing 2,631 men, of whom 507 were killed in 1943 alone.^{306} Statistically, the unit was exhausted, and the psychological consequences of such heavy losses, as this conversation shows, were dramatic. The members of the unit were all too aware that it was only a matter of time until they, too, were shot down. The Luftwaffe did not have the sort of rotation system used by the British and American air forces, in which bomber crews were withdrawn from the front after flying twenty-five sorties.

To numb their growing fear as German prospects deteriorated during World War II, more and more soldiers turned to alcohol, drinking “like mad.”^{307} Staff Sergeant Nitsch of Bomber Wing 100 admitted in September 1943 that they also took stimulants like Pervitin: “We had terrific drinking bouts before each sortie. We had to get up our courage. However drunk I am, I can always fly. The only thing is, if I get tired. But then I just took one of those tablets and was then as refreshed and cheerful as if I’d been drinking champagne. The things really have to be prescribed by a doctor but we always had some with us.”^{308}

Surprisingly, though, the protocols do not bear out the idea, postulated by historians, that German fighting morale declined toward the end of the war.^{309} Airmen who were shot down in 1945 do not talk any more frequently about being afraid to die than those captured earlier. Instead, they still proudly recount their triumphs and engage in specialist discussions about the technical details of their aircraft.

It was rare for them to reflect on the personal consequences of their deployment in battle. One of the few exceptions came in June 1942, before the Luftwaffe had suffered any major defeats:

In many respects, narratives about extreme personal burdens are the mirror image of the tales of adventure, conspicuous in their brutality, that highlighted the sporting side of aerial warfare. The former reveal that war did indeed encompass many emotions, including stress, worry, and fear for one’s own life that POWs tended not to talk about, especially to one another. Just as captured soldiers could not bolster their status among their peers by citing attempts at anti-Nazi resistance or expressions of sympathy with the victims of executions or enemy prisoners, there was little to be gained from revealing one’s own vulnerability. Stories about “nerves being shot” needed to be told via a surrogate in order to be deemed acceptable. Communicatively, showing any sort of weakness seems to have been perceived as dangerous.

The causes of this communicative block are not solely psychological. The military frame of reference in general, as we can see from statements made by soldiers in the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, does not admit conversations about death, dying, or present-tense fears. Today, we talk about soldiers’ suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but this diagnosis did not exist during World War II. The military frame of reference left no room for physical weakness—to say nothing of psychological vulnerability. In this respect, no matter how thoroughly they were integrated into the total group of their commando or unit, soldiers were psychologically alone. This helps us understand an otherwise cryptic remark made by a German POW in 1941:

Among the infrequent statements that concern soldiers’ own fears were tales about how their aircraft were shot down or their ships sunk. Whereas the hunting tales were characterized by an absolute lack of differentiation vis-à-vis the victims and their suffering, these narratives are extremely detailed. A German sailor, for instance, told of the sinking of the armed merchant cruiser MS Penguin in the Indian Ocean in May 1941:

This is what war looked like from the losing perspective—although even such stories were told by survivors and thus transmitted only a part of the terror that must have been involved. Dead men, as the cliché goes, tell no tales.

Soldiers rarely spared any thoughts for those wounded. This is one of the few exceptions from the protocols:

This dialogue not only shows what the soldiers considered to be in the realm of the possible. It also hints at the fears which they maintained but could only be discussed in stories about the fates of others. This was apparently one way to express one’s feelings without talking about them directly.

War does not just consist of violence perpetrated and witnessed—the shooting down of planes, the gunning down of enemies, rape, plunder, and mass murder. It also consists of violence suffered. Yet that category carries far less communicative weight among soldiers, and different individuals experience it in different ways. Life during wartime is differentiated and multifaceted. How soldiers experience war depends on factors like place, rank, time, weaponry, and camaraderie. Empirically speaking, what we conceive as the total experience of war can be broken down into a kaleidoscope of diverse, more or less happy or terrible experiences and actions. War is only a total experience insofar as the group, commando, or unit forms the social frame for what soldiers have to endure. That situation does not change in a POW camp. The normal civilian world exists only as the subject of melancholic longing. Or as one soldier put it: “Life is cruel. When I think of my wife—!”^{314}