Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (13 page)

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,
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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.
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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.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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