Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (20 page)

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.

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.