Read Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying Online
Authors: Sonke Neitzel,Harald Welzer
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:
P
RIEBE
: At
C
HELM
(?)—my father told me about it too, he is in
E
AST
G
ALICIA
, on excavation work. They also employed Jews to begin with. I don’t believe anyone could hate or oppose Jews more than my father did, but he also said that the methods they used were horrible. Above all, the works at G
ALICIA
employed Jewish labour only,
Jewish engineers and everything imaginable. He says that the people of German blood (Volksdeutsche) in the
U
KRAINE
are completely useless. The Jewish engineers were really damned clever. Then there were various types too. There was a Jewish council in the town which supervised the Jews. My father once spoke to one of his engineers, who said: “Yes, sir, when I look at the Jews en masse, then I can understand why there are anti-Jewish people.”
Then came that period of mass arrests and the S.S. commandant simply sent my father a chit saying: “By midday to-day so-and-so many Jews must be named.” My father said that it was dreadful for him. They were simply shot. The order came: “So-and-so many shootings are to be reported by such-and-such a date.” The S.S. leader, a Sturmbannführer, rounded up the Jews, when there were no more, he sent the Jewish council a … “By 1430 hours to-day so-and-so many pounds of meat, fats, spices, etc. must be produced.” If it wasn’t
there by then, one them was shot. But many
of the
Jews poisoned themselves.
My God, if we ever have those people on top of us again!
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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.
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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 Jews suffered badly during the
Russian advance, when the Russians were in P
OLAND
. A great many of them were shot by the Russians too. An old lawyer said to my father: “I would never have believed that things would come to that in G
ERMANY
.” All these things I know from my father, how the S.S. carried out their house to house searches; from the doctors that were there they took everything; all
jewellery, they didn’t even stop at
wedding rings. “What have you got there?” “A wedding ring.” “Give it here, you don’t need it.” Then there’s also the damnable fact that the S.S., in their uncontrolled
sexual activities, didn’t even stop at Jews.
E
AST
G
ALICIA
is now completely free of Jews. There’s not a single Jew left in E
AST
G
ALICIA
. Many Jews arranged to get papers and are still living in P
OLAND
; they’ve suddenly become
Aryan.
When they went to work in the morning—we always had to pass the place on our way to the bombing ground—each morning they came along, old
women and men, in separate parties. The women came along, all arm-in-arm; they were forced to sing their
Jewish songs. You couldn’t help noticing some very well-dressed women among them. There were some really attractive women there. You could really have called them “ladies.”
The story went round that they were simply driven into a sort
of
reservoir. Then water was let in and ran out again at the other end. By then there was nothing left of them at all. The number of young SS fellows who had nervous breakdowns simply because they could carry on with it no longer! There were some real thugs amongst them too. One of them told my father he didn’t know what he’d do when all the Jews were dead. He had got so used to it he could no longer exist without it. I couldn’t do that either. I simply couldn’t. I could kill fellows who had committed crimes, but women and children—and tiny children! The children scream and everything. The only good thing is that they took the SS and not the Armed Forces for that.
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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:
It is one of those things that is easily said: “The Jewish people is being exterminated.” Every Party member will tell you, “perfectly clear, it’s part of our plans, we’re eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, a small matter.” And then along they all come, all the
80 million upright Germans, and each one has his
decent Jew. They say: all the others are swine, but here is a first-class Jew. And none of them has seen it, has endured it.
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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:
Jösting: A great friend of mine whom I can trust implicitly, an
Austrian, still in
V
IENNA
, as far as I know, belonged to “
Luftflotte 4,” and was down at
O
DESSA
.
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When he arrived there some “Oberleutnant” or “Hauptmann” said to him: “Would you like to watch? An amusing show is going on down there, umpteen
Jews are being killed off.” He answered: “Good heavens, no.” He had to pass the spot, however, and witnessed the scene. He told me himself that the barn was bunged full of women and children.
Petrol was poured over them and they were burnt
alive. He saw it himself. He said: “You can’t imagine what their screams sound like. Is such a thing right?” I said: “No, it
isn’t
right. You can do whatever you like with them, but not
burn them alive or gas them or heaven knows what else! It’s not their fault. They should be
imprisoned
and after the war has been won you can say: ‘This people must disappear. Put them in a ship! Sail wherever you wish, we don’t care where you land but there is no room for you in G
ERMANY
from now on!’ ” We have made enemies galore! We killed them everywhere in the East and as a result people hardly believe the real
K
ATYN
story any longer, but say we did it ourselves.
No, if I hadn’t several proofs of that sort of thing I wouldn’t make such a noise about it, but in my opinion it was
utterly
wrong! What madness was that onslaught on
Jewish homes; I happened to be in V
IENNA
at the time, at B
AD
V
ÖSLAU
.
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We were then already short of
glass and everything else and then we go and smash all their windows! Those people could easily have been turned out and we could have said: “Well, this
business is now taken over by a
Christian, Franz
M
EYER
. They’ll be
compensated, whether well or badly makes no difference.” But we were short of everything and still everything was smashed and the houses set ablaze. I quite agree the Jews had to be turned out, that was obvious, but the
manner
in which it was done was
absolutely wrong
, and the present hatred is the result. My father-in-law, who certainly couldn’t stand Jews, always said: “That will not pass unpunished, say what you like!” I’d
be first to agree to getting rid of the Jews; I’d show them the way—out of G
ERMANY
! But why
massacre
them? That can be done
after
the war, when we can say “We have the power, we have the might; we have won the war; we can afford to do it!” But now! Look at the British government—who are they? The Jews. Who governs in A
MERICA
? The Jews. While
Bolshevism is Judaism in excelsis.
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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:
A
UE
: Perhaps we didn’t always do right in killing Jews in masses in the
East.
S
CHNEIDER
: It was undoubtedly a mistake. Well, not so much a mistake as un-diplomatic. We could have done that later.
A
UE
: After we had finally established ourselves.
S
CHNEIDER
: We should have put it off until later, because Jews are, and will always remain, influential people, especially in A
MERICA
.
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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:
S
WOBODA
: The executions were like an assembly line. You got a 12 marks
bonus, 120 kroner per day for the
shooting commandos. We didn’t do anything else. Groups of twelve men led in six men and then shot them. I didn’t do anything else for maybe 14 days. We got
double rations because it puts a lot of strain on your nerves … We shot women, too. Women were better than
men. We saw a lot of men, Jews, too, who started crying in their final moment. If there were weaklings there, two Czech nationals came and held them up in the middle … The man earned his double rations and 12 mark bonus, killing 50 women in half a day. In R
OISIN
we also carried out executions.
K
AHRAD
: There was a large airfield there.
S
WOBODA
: At the barracks, it was a treadmill. They came from one side, and there was a column of maybe 500 or 600 men. They came in through the gate and went to the firing range. There they were killed, picked up and brought away, and then the next six would come. At first you said, great, better than doing normal duty, but after a couple days you would have preferred normal duty. It took a toll on your nerves. Then you just gritted your teeth and at some point you didn’t care. There were some of us who got weak in the knees when shooting women, and we had selected experienced frontline soldiers. But orders were orders.
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