Read Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying Online
Authors: Sonke Neitzel,Harald Welzer
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:
I got into my car and went to this Security Service man and said: “Once and for all, I forbid these executions outside, where people can look on. If you shoot people in the wood or somewhere where no-one can see, that’s your own affair. But I absolutely forbid another day’s shooting there. We draw our drinking water from deep springs; we’re getting nothing but corpse water there.” It was the
M
ESCHEFS
spa where I was; it lies to the north of
D
VINSK
.
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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:
F
ELBERT
: What did they do to the children?
K
ITTEL
(very excited): They seized three-year old children by the hair, held them up and shot them with a pistol and then threw them in. I saw that for myself. One could watch it; the
SD [Sicherheitsdienst, the Security Service of the SS] had roped the area off and the people were standing watching from about 300 m. off. The Latvians and the German soldiers were just standing there, looking on.
F
ELBERT
: What kind of SD people are they, then?
K
ITTEL
: Nauseating! I’m convinced that they’ll all be shot.
F
ELBERT
: Where were they from, from which formation?
K
ITTEL
: They were Germans and they were wearing the SD uniform with the black flashes on which is written “Sonder-Dienst.”
F
ELBERT
: Were all the executioners Latvians?
K
ITTEL
: Yes.
F
ELBERT
: But a German gave the order, did he?
K
ITTEL
: Yes. The Germans directed affairs and the Latvians carried them out. The Latvians searched all the clothes. The SD fellow saw reason and said: “Yes, we will do it somewhere else.” They were all Jews who had been brought in from the country districts. Latvians wearing the armband—the Jews were brought in and were then robbed; there was a terrific bitterness against the Jews at
D
VINSK
, and the people simply gave vent to their rage.
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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.
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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?”
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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:
S
CHAEFER
: Yes, because the Russians had dragged off 60,000
Estonians. But, of course, the flames had been fanned. Tell me, what sort of an impression did these people create? Did you ever see any of them shortly before they were shot? Did they weep?
K
ITTEL
: It was terrible. I once saw them being transported but I had no idea they were people who were being driven to their execution.
S
CHAEFER
: Have the people any idea what is in store for them?
K
ITTEL
: They know perfectly well; they are apathetic. I’m not sensitive myself but such things just turn my stomach; I always said: “One ceases to be a human being; that’s got nothing more to do with warfare.” I once had the senior chemist for organic chemistry from
IG F
ARBEN
as my adjutant and because they had nothing better for him to do he had been called up and sent to the front. He’s back here again now, though he got there quite accidentally. The man was done for weeks. He sat in the corner the whole time and wept. He said: “When one considers that it may be like that everywhere!” He was an important scientist and a musician with a highly strung nervous system.
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Now it’s Felbert’s turn to steer the conversation in a different direction:
F
ELBERT
: That shows why F
INLAND
deserted us, why R
OUMANIA
deserted us, why everyone hates us everywhere—not because of that single incident but because of the great number of similar incidents.
K
ITTEL
: If one were to destroy all the
Jews of the world simultaneously there wouldn’t remain a single accuser.
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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:
F
ELBERT
(very excited and shouting): It’s obvious; it’s such a scandal; it doesn’t need to be a Jew to accuse us—
we ourselves must bring the charge
; we must accuse the people who have done it.
K
ITTEL
: Then one must admit that our State system was wrongly built.
F
ELBERT
(shouting): It is, it’s obvious that it’s wrong, there’s no doubt about it. Such a thing is unbelievable.
K
ITTEL
: We are the tools …
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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:
B
RUHN
: If you come along to-day as a German general people think “He knows everything; he knows about that, too,” and if we then say: “We had nothing to do with it,” the people won’t believe us. All the hatred and all the aversion is a result purely and simply of those murders, and I must say that if one believes at all in divine justice, one deserves, if one has five children, as I have, to have one or two killed in this way, one does not deserve victory; one has deserved what has now come to pass.
F
ELBERT
: I don’t know at whose instigation that was done—if it came from
H
IMMLER
then he is the
arch-criminal. Actually you are the first general who has told us that himself. I’ve always believed that these articles were all lies.
K
ITTEL
: I keep silent about a great many things; they are too awful.
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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:
F
ELBERT
: What happened to the young, pretty girls? Were they turned into a harem?
K
ITTEL
: I didn’t bother about that. I only
found that they did become more reasonable. At least they had
concentration camps for the Jews at
C
RACOW
. At any rate, from the moment I had chosen a safe place and I built the concentration camp, things became quite reasonable. They certainly had to work hard. The women question is a very shady chapter.
F
ELBERT
: If people were killed simply because their carpets and furniture were needed, I can well imagine that if there is a pretty daughter who looks
Aryan, she would simply be sent somewhere as a maid-servant.
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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.
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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:
K
ITTEL
: When H
IMMLER
formed his state within the state, the Security Service was founded like this: they took 50% good
police officials who were not politically tainted, and added to them 50%
criminals. That’s how the Security Service arose. (Laughter.) There’s one man in the criminal department in
B
ERLIN
, in that famous
“Z” section, whom I frequently used when espionage cases were being held by us in the Ordinance French; and the question then arose of nationality and of whether they had not already got a file, whether the man had not cropped up somewhere before. There is the so-called “Z” section “K.” After 1933 he said to me: “We have been sifted through now. The politically tainted officials of the State Police have been got rid of and have either been pensioned off or put into positions where they can no longer do any harm. The sound nucleus of police officials, which every State needs, is now intermingled with people from the underworld of B
ERLIN
, who, however, made themselves prominent in the Movement at the right time. They have now been put to work with the others.” He said straight out: “50% of us are decent people and 50% are criminals.”
S
CHAEFER
: I think, if such conditions are permitted in a modern State, one can only say that the sooner this pack of
swine
disappear, the better.
K
ITTEL
: We fools have just watched all these things going on.
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