Read Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying Online
Authors: Sonke Neitzel,Harald Welzer
K
AMMEYER
: Nearly all the men there were interned in large camps. I met a fellow one evening and he said, “Some of them are going to be shot tomorrow. Would you like to see it?” A lorry went there every day and he said, “You can come too.” The Kommandeur of … execution there belonged to the Naval Artillery. The lorry arrived and stopped. In a sort of sandpit there was a trench about twenty metres long. There was a man there … they threw him out and he called out in broken German that he wasn’t one and so on. I didn’t know what was happening until I saw the trench. They all had to get into it and were hurried into it with blows from rifle-butts and lined up face to face; the Feldwebel had a
tommy-gun … there were five of them, they (shot) them one after the other. Most of them fell like that, with their eyeballs turned up, there was a woman among them. I saw that. It was in L
IBAU
.
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But watching an execution paled in comparison to actually taking part in one. Luftwaffe Lieutenant Colonel von
Müller-Rienzburg recalled:
M
ÜLLER
-R
IENZBURG
: The SS issued an invitation to go and shoot Jews. All the troops went along with rifles and … shot them up. Each man could pick the one he wanted. Those were … of the SS, which will, of course, bring down bitter revenge.
B
ASSUS
: You mean to say it was sent out like an invitation to a hunt!
M
ÜLLER
-R
IENZBURG
: Yes.
253
It is unclear in this excerpt whether Müller-Rienzburg accepted the invitation or not, although he unambiguously says that others did.
Bassus immediately imagines a hunt but does not express any special amazement or surprise at what he’s just heard.
A Lieutenant Colonel
August von der Heydte also reported—albeit in secondhand fashion—that
executions resembled hunts:
H
EYDTE
: The following is a true story told me by
B
ÖSELAGER
(?), who managed to get the “Swords” before being killed. Oberstleutnant Freiherr von B
ÖSELAGER
(?) was a comrade from my “Regiment.” He experienced the following. It must have happened in 1942 or 1941 or whenever it was, sometime at the beginning of the show, I believe in P
OLAND
, when an “SS-Führer” was sent there as a civilian commissar.
G
ALLER
*: Who?
H
EYDTE
: The “SS-Führer.” I believe B
ÖSELAGER
(?) had just been awarded the “Oak-leaves.” He was having dinner and after dinner the former said: “Now we’ll have a look at a little …” They then drove out in a car and—it sounds like a fairytale but it is a fact—shot guns were lying about, ordinary ones, and thirty
Polish Jews were standing there. Each guest was given a gun; the Jews were driven past and every one was allowed to have a pot shot at a Jew. Subsequently they were given the coup de grace.
254
In another conversation, a soldier actually admitted accepting the invitation to take part in an execution. Surprisingly, the story related by Luftwaffe
First Lieutenant Fried calls forth unmistakable uneasiness in his interlocutor, Infantry
First Lieutenant Bentz:
B
ENTZ
: When the Germans asked us if it was true about the atrocities in P
OLAND
, we had to say that it was only a
rumour. I am convinced that it’s all too true. It’s a shameful blot on our history.
F
RIED
: Yes, the persecution of the Jews.
B
ENTZ
: In principle, I think we’ve adopted the wrong attitude to the whole of this racial question. It’s utter nonsense to say that the Jew has nothing but bad qualities.
F
RIED
: I once took part in it myself, and it left rather an impression of—towards on [
sic
] me as an officer; that was when I came into contact with the war myself, during the Polish campaign, and I was making transport flights there. I was at R
ADOM
(?) once and had my midday meal with the Waffen S.S. battalion who were stationed there. An S.S. captain or whatever he was said: “Would you like to come along for half-an-hour? Get a
tommy-gun and let’s go.” So I went along. I had an hour to spare and we went to a kind of barracks and slaughtered 1,500 Jews. That was during the war. There were some twenty men there with tommy-guns. It only took a second, and nobody thought anything of it. They had been attacked at night by Jewish partisans and there was a lot of indignation about those damned Poles. I thought about it afterwards—it wasn’t very “pleasant.”
B
ENTZ
: Were they only Jews?
F
RIED
: Only Jews and a few partisans.
B
ENTZ
: They were driven past?
F
RIED
: Yes. When I think about it here—it wasn’t very “pleasant.”
B
ENTZ
: What—you fired, too?
F
RIED
: Yes, I did. Some of the people who were inside there said: “Here come the swine,” and swore and threw stones and things at them. There were women and children there, too!
B
ENTZ
: They were inside as well?
F
RIED
: They were there, too—there were whole families, some were screaming terribly and some were just stupid and apathetic.
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These two POWs talk past one another somewhat. Their basic outlooks differ considerably, and neither immediately registers that fact. Whereas Bentz rejects the mass murder of Jews and believes that Germany has “the wrong attitude to the whole of this racial question,” Fried says he accepted an invitation to
execute Jews during Germany’s campaign against Poland. At first, Bentz failed to comprehend that Fried was among the executioners. Only when Fried adds that the experience was unpleasant, does Bentz realize whom he’s talking to. Fried, though, doesn’t let Bentz’s obvious dismay disrupt his story.
He continues to relate how he shot not just Jews and partisans, but “women and children” as well. His laconic remark that this was not “pleasant” might have meant that he didn’t enjoy killing as much as he thought he would. Or it might simply reflect the fact that he notices his interlocutor is critical of
Jewish persecution.
As is the case with the presence of picture-snapping tourists, the phenomenon of soldiers being invited, either alone or in groups, to execute Jews suggests that the people concerned required no period of adjustment before carrying out the most brutal kinds of acts. Fried steps up as a
shooter just as immediately as the police entertainers in
Goldhagen’s and
Browning’s studies. They killed for entertainment and amusement. They didn’t need to be acclimatized.
The openness with which the hosts issued their invitations indicates that they saw nothing unusual about their activities and did not expect them to disconcert or repulse people. We can assume, then, that soldiers participating voluntarily in executions, either by invitation or at their own request, was just as common as spectators attending them for their own amusement. That implies that mass executions did not fall outside the bounds of the soldiers’ frame of reference or fundamentally run contrary to the way they viewed the world.
These conclusions are supported by a number of statements in the protocols in which POWs explicitly endorse the annihilation of Jews. One of them is a conversation between two young submarine officers, First Lieutenants
Günther Gess and
Egon Rudolph:
R
UDOLPH
: It’s dreadful to think of our poor chaps in R
USSIA
, with a temperature of 42˚ below zero (Centigrade).
G
ESS
: Yes, but they know what they’re fighting for.
R
UDOLPH
: Quite—the chains must be burst once and for all.
G
ESS
AND
R
UDOLPH
(singing loudly): “When Jewish blood spurts from the knife, O then twice happy is our life.”
G
ESS
: The swine! The low-down dogs!
R
UDOLPH
: I hope the F
ÜHRER
will grant us prisoners our wish and give each of us a Jew and Englishman to slaughter; to cut into little pieces with a big knife, that will be easy. I’ll commit “harakiri” on them. Stick the knife in their belly and twist it round in their entrails.
256
“No honorable soldier wants to have anything to do with it.”
257
Stories about crimes
against humanity were nothing new for most of the soldiers. Tales of
horror were scattered throughout narratives about other topics: fighting on the front lines, for instance, or being reunited with friends while on leave, although stories about extreme violence were relatively infrequent. They called forth, by today’s standards, scant
outrage. As we have seen, it was very unusual for soldiers to feel repulsed out of
principle
. Even more rare were instances in which first- or secondhand knowledge of
brutality prompted soldiers to reflect on the moral character of the war. Their most common response when confronted with tales of mass murder was to ask, with
voyeuristic curiosity, for more details.
It is striking that soldiers never discuss the legal dimension of what was going on. They showed no interest whatsoever in interpretations of the
Hague or
Geneva Conventions—the documents scarcely crop up in the surveillance protocols. “The whole question of what is allowed or not is finally a question of
power,” one first lieutenant opined. “If you have the power, everything is permissible.” Yet this speaker also distinguished between what forms of violence
could
be carried out and what forms
should
. “In spite of that, our troops should not
massacre
civilians who do not shoot (at them),” the lieutenant said.
258
It’s worth directing our attention now at what acts the POWs did see as evil, awful, or repulsive.
German soldiers considered executing captured partisans as nothing short of a dictate of common sense, beyond question, since partisans did not enjoy the status of combatants. Stories about regular prisoners killed on the front lines were also accepted without commentary since that was everyday practice, particularly on the
Eastern Front. Narratives had to depart from standard operating procedure in a massive quantitative or qualitative sense to call forth an intense reaction.
One example is a conversation between Lieutenant
Kurt Schröder and a lieutenant named
Hurb* from Bomber Wing 100 about the
execution of pilots who had been shot down. The discussion was prompted by the news that the
Japanese had killed U.S. airmen captured during the first American aerial bombardment
of
Tokyo:
S
CHRÖDER
: Yes, well, the Japanese are swine the way they treat their prisoners. They executed that crew which they shot down during the first attack on T
OKYO
, a week or two later, after a court-martial. That’s a dirty business.
H
URB
: If I come to think of it, that is the only right way, we should have done likewise.
S
CHRÖDER
: And what of yourself, if you were to be executed here?
H
URB
: Well, let them go ahead.
S
CHRÖDER
: That’s not a soldier’s point of view.
H
URB
: Of course it is. It was the best thing they could do. If, after the first and second air-raid, we had done it with the Americans and English, at any rate the lives of thousands of women and children would have been spared, because no more crews would have flown on an attack.
S
CHRÖDER
: Of course they would have continued.
H
URB
: But not attacking towns. If the airforces had been used only for tactical warfare, that is to say, at the front, and if at the very beginning an example had been made in that request
—T
OKYO
hasn’t in fact been attacked again since. Thousands of women and children’s lives have been saved by the mere fact of executing twenty men.
259
Hurb’s view that murdering enemy pilots is a legitimate means of preventing attacks on
civilian
targets is not only naïve. It also reflects the general Wehrmacht belief that
brutal measures could be used to dictate the enemy’s behavior. Schröder disagrees for both empirical reasons and because such “swinish” behavior runs contrary to what he sees as soldiers’
honor. Significantly, he does not argue that such executions violated the
Geneva Convention. His views are based on his military ethos.
Similar sorts of arguments, often with the same choice of words, occur in conversations between army men. Colonel
Hans Reimann, for instance, thought it was “swinish” that the SS reconnaissance unit “
Hitler Youth” executed eighteen
Canadian soldiers in
Normandy. For him, such behavior was inexcusable. Nonetheless, the topic of what should be allowed rarely led to serious debates among the POWs. Most often, a reference to the excessively brutal SS or the “inhuman” war on the
Eastern Front sufficed to establish consensus and allow the conversation to turn to other topics. The discussion between Schröder
and Hurb was one of the few that featured two obviously different ethical stances. Most soldiers were simply concerned with establishing points of agreement and avoiding any far-reaching conclusions that could have caused them to question their own actions and views.
German
POWs were far more interested in the
qualitative and quantitative dimensions of
war crimes, and this influenced their perceptions. Reports about
Soviet prisoners dying en masse in
German POW camps elicited far more
outrage than tales of soldiers being executed at the front. What happened in the camps was, in the view of one Luftwaffe sergeant, “a downright disgusting bit of work.”
260
Two men named
Ernst Quick and
Paul Korte agreed that the treatment of
Red Army soldiers was “dreadful.”
261
Georg Neuffer spoke of “ghastly business,”
262
while a private named
Herbert Schulz went even further, saying the war was a point of cultural shame and the greatest crime in human history.
263
As early as September 1940, “terrible things” were being told, for instance of the entire male population of a village being executed after someone fired shots
at German occupying troops from a
house.
264
A First
Sergeant Doebele asked himself: “Why do we do all these things? It’s not right.”
265