Read Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying Online
Authors: Sonke Neitzel,Harald Welzer
A translator who was deployed with German troops in occupied Italy was also outraged at how
Wehrmacht soldiers had treated the civilian population:
B
LAAS
: At
B
ARLETTA
they called the population together and told them that they were going to distribute food and then they fired into them with
machine guns. Those were the sort of things they did. And they snatched watches and rings off people in the street, like bandits. Our soldiers themselves told us how they carried on. They simply entered a village and if there was anything they didn’t like, they just shot down a few people, just like that. They told us about it as though it were quite in order, and as though it were the natural thing to do. One man boasted of how they broke into a church and put on the priest’s vestments and committed sacrilege in the church. They behaved like
Bolshevists there and then they were surprised when the people turned against them.
266
The striking thing is that SS Sonderführer Blaas refers to his soldiers not just as bandits but Bolshevists, one of the National Socialists’ archenemies. Talking about crimes that had occurred only a few days previously
also reawakened memories of the
Eastern Front. “And then the things they are doing in
Russia!” Blaas exclaimed. “They
massacred thousands of people, women and children. It was frightful!”
267
Blaas’s experiences in Italy and Russia merged into a kind of orgy of violence that left him deeply disturbed. Significantly, references to the SS as the perpetrators, which normally allowed the speakers to disassociate themselves from the violence depicted in their stories, are missing here.
The crime that called forth the greatest
outrage was the murder of women and children:
M
EYER
: I saw the SS destroy a village in R
USSIA
, including the women and children, just because the partisans had shot a
German soldier. The village was not in any way to
blame. They burned the village down root and branch, and shot the women and children.
268
This statement by army lieutenant
Meyer is unusual insofar as, in the speaker’s eyes, the death of a single German soldier did not justify the act of
retribution. Atrocities committed against women and children were frequently described as “appalling” or “horrible”
269
deeds that made one’s “blood boil.”
270
Soldiers usually quickly distanced themselves from the
war crimes they described and then changed the subject. Yet on occasion, stories about the execution of prisoners or the mass murder of Jews did provide food for moral thought. Germany’s youth had lost all respect for humanity, one POW complained, referring to the relatively young average age of those who perpetrated crimes against humanity.
271
A soldier named
Alfred Drosdowski called his fellow soldiers “swine” who had given Germany a bad name for decades to come.
272
A
Sergeant Czerwenka even declared: “I have often felt ashamed of wearing German uniform.”
273
After hearing a cell mate relate details about a mass execution in the town of
Luga in the Leningrad oblast,
Franz Reimbold responded: “I tell you. If that’s the way things are, I’ll stop being German. I don’t want to be German any more.”
274
When Colonel Ernst
Jösting learned from his wife about the conditions under which Jews were
deported from
Vienna, the two agreed: “That’s bestial, unworthy of a German.”
Helmut Hanelt came to much the same conclusion when a comrade named
Franz Breitlich described
in detail how thirty thousand Jews had been executed: “It makes you ashamed of being German.”
275
Higher-level ranks were notably more prone to reflect on what conclusions should be drawn from the prevalence of war crimes. For example, Colonel
Eberhard Wildermuth opined:
W
ILDERMUTH
: If only ours were a young and immature people, but they have been infected to the depth of their moral fibre. I must tell you that I have considered this question really seriously; a nation which has accepted such a rule of lies, brute force and crime, in the main without raising any objection, is simply not a people; a people in which the murder of mental defectives was possible and where intelligent people could still say: “That wasn’t at all an idea of theirs” should be liquidated. Such bestiality has never been seen in the world before. One might just as well get rid of all consumptives or all suffering from cancer.
276
Lieutenant General
Friedrich von Broich was likewise frank in his assessment:
B
ROICH
: All we’ve achieved is that our reputation as soldiers and Germans has been completely besmirched. People say: “You carry
out all the orders when people are to be shot, whether it is right or wrong.” No one objects to the shooting of spies, but when whole villages, the entire population, including the children, is wiped out, or the people are sent away, as in P
OLAND
or R
USSIA
, then, my God, one can say it is pure murder, it is exactly what the Huns of old did. But then of course we are the most civilised people in the world, aren’t we?
277
Broich was also one of the few German officers to object on moral grounds to the
Kommissarbefehl,
Hitler’s order that all
Soviet political commissars should be immediately executed: “The shooting of the commissars—I have not been able to discover in any war, except in the dimmest past, that orders like that have been issued by the highest authority. I have seen (?) these orders personally. That is a sign that like a God, that man has simply disregarded everybody and all pacts which exist, and exist on both sides—that is megalomania.”
278
Broich’s views were exceptional. Most German officers welcomed
the
Kommissarbefehl
.
279
Broich’s moral reflections were made in the
Trent Park officers’ POW camp. There, distance from
Germany and an abundance of free time led to a number of extraordinary conversations:
B
RUHN
: If you were to ask me: “Have we deserved victory or not?” I should say: “No, not after what we’ve done.” After the amount of human blood we’ve shed knowingly and as a result of our delusions and also partly instigated by the lust of blood and other qualities, I now realize we’ve deserved defeat; we’ve deserved our fate, even though I’m accusing myself as well.
280
We have no way of knowing what personal reasons might have led individual POWs to be critical of Wehrmacht
war crimes. Some probably found what German soldiers were ordered to do simply too horrible, while others may have maintained deeply entrenched moral beliefs. Yet significantly, such criticism was constantly advanced from the perspective of the noninvolved observer, powerless to change anything. Rarely did POWs raise the possibility of their own culpability, and the protocols contain almost no evidence of any of them engaging in active resistance. One exception was Colonel
Hans Reimann, who told of having approached his superior officer during the Polish campaign in an effort to halt the SS execution of Polish intelligentsia. “He wouldn’t think of doing so,” Reimann reported his superior saying. “His position and salary meant far more to him.”
281
Breaking the cons
traints of
conformity seemed impossible to most German soldiers, no matter how gruesome the crimes they observed. In this respect, a story told by a
Major Arp from the
Army Field Command 748 is typical. When Arp was a first lieutenant in Russia, a mother begged him to protect her two children from the Wehrmacht countersabotage secret field
police. The next day he saw them shot to death, lying on the ground. He does not tell of an effort on his part to save these people, launching instead into a description of the
mass executions in
Kaunas,
Lithuania. When Arp’s interlocutor asks if he had tried to prevent the murders, Arp becomes evasive.
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Thus, it is hardly astonishing that the surveillance protocols contain exactly one account of an act of
rescue, the truth of which cannot be determined:
B
OCK
: In
B
ERLIN
I saved
Jewish girls, who were to be sent to the concentration camp. I also got a male Jew away, all by train.
L
AUTERJUNG
: All by the special train?
B
OCK
: No. I was with the
Mitropa. At the back we had some of those steel cupboards where we kept our stock and I put the Jew and the Jewess in there! Afterwards I had the Jew under the carriage in a box. Of course he came out afterwards at B
ASLE
looking like a nigger. He is living in
S
WITZERLAND
and the girl is down in S
WITZERLAND
too. I took her as far as Z
URICH
and she went down to
C
HUR
.
283
Despite the atrocities they described and their knowledge of the mass murder of Jews and the appalling treatment of Soviet prisoners, the soldiers lived in a moral universe in which they felt like good people—people who, in
Himmler’s words, had remained “morally upright.” The National Socialist ethos of
respectability focused on the idea that fighters were not to engage in crimes like murder, rape, and
plunder to benefit themselves, but for the sake of a higher cause. This ethos allowed Germans to justify actions that were absolutely evil in terms of Western,
Christian morality and to integrate them as unavoidable necessities into their own moral
self-image. National Socialist morality contained the idea that the perpetrators of atrocities might themselves suffer from the “dirty work” they did.
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The trope of
sacrifice, too, allowed Germans to kill without feeling
guilty. Ideologists of
annihilation like Himmler or practitioners like
Rudolf Höss continually stressed that destroying human lives was an unpleasant task that ran contrary to their “
humane” instincts. But the ability to overcome such scruples was seen as a measure of one’s character. It was the coupling of murder and morality—the realization that unpleasant acts were necessary and the will to carry out those acts
in defiance of
feelings of human sympathy—that allowed the perpetrators of
genocide to see themselves as “respectable” people, as people whose hearts, in Höss’s words, “were not bad.”
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The autobiographical material left behind by perpetrators—diaries, interviews, and interrogations—has one very conspicuous feature. Even when the people in question showed absolutely no comprehension of the enormity of what they had done, they were very concerned to appear not as “bad people,” but as individuals whose moral fiber remained intact despite the extreme nature of the actions. It could
be that such statements were shaped by the contexts in which they were made. Autobiographical documents are always
self-justifications in which the narrator tries to bring the stories he tells into harmony with the image he has of himself and wants others to have of him. The case of interrogations also features a further legal, complicating component. The perpetrator wants to portray himself as moral
and
avoid incriminating himself.
The situation is different with the surveillance protocols. In them, the speakers do not address their statements to any external moral arena. At the time their conversations were recorded, the POWs did not know how the war was going to turn out or that the “Jewish actions” and other crimes
against humanity would attract near universal moral condemnation. In other words, they did not have to define “
respectability” or assure one another that they were indeed respectable people.
Only when they refer to foreign countries do the soldiers explicitly talk about “respectability.” In those cases, they usually claim to have been more respectable than was actually required:
E
LIAS
: The German soldier himself, who does not belong to the S.S., has been far too
decent.
F
RICK
: That’s true, one is often too decent.
E
LIAS
: I was down there on my first leave at Christmas, 1939. I was coming out of a restaurant and a Pole came along. He said something or other to me in Polish and bumped into me. I turned round—I knew what was going to happen—and hit him between the eyes with my fist: “You Polish swine.” He was thoroughly drunk and lay where he fell. I was cleaning my hand—I was wearing chamois leather gloves, you know—when, suddenly a
policeman arrived without his helmet. He said: “What’s happening here, my friend?” I replied: “This swine of a Pole just jostled me,” “What,” he said, “and the swine is still living? There are too many of them about.” He looked at him: “Well, brother, we’ve been waiting for you for a long time. I’ll count up to three and if you haven’t gone by then, something will happen.” He counted “one” and the fellow was up and away. Then he placed himself in front of me: “It would have been better if you’d attacked straight away, if you’d run him through with your bayonet.” Well, I walked around the town for a little—it was about four o’clock on a winter’s afternoon—when suddenly
I heard a couple of reports. “What’s happened?” I wondered. That same evening I heard there had been some slight trouble … he had come to blows with the policeman who wanted to arrest him and he tried to escape—he was shot whilst escaping. What had happened was that the policeman, who had said “too many damned people around,” also said: “Make-off,” and then followed him and killed him, “shot whilst trying to escape.”
286
It wasn’t necessary for members of the enemy group—be they partisans, terrorists, or just people who had gotten a bit drunk—to do anything in particular to incur the wrath of German
soldiers. The act of “decency” around which this story revolves is simply that the speaker did not immediately kill the
“swine of a Pole.” The person in question had done nothing more than brush up against the soldier on the street. Nonetheless, it was considered a mark of decency to let the Pole get away with his life, if not for long.