Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (19 page)

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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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