Read Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying Online
Authors: Sonke Neitzel,Harald Welzer
Stories of this sort were by no means restricted to Germany’s war in Eastern Europe. A similar situation also took place in
Denmark:
D
ETTE
: When were you in D
ENMARK
? Two years ago?
S
CHÜRMANN
: I was there in January and February of last year.
D
ETTE
: What were the
Danes like, friendly?
S
CHÜRMANN
: No, they beat up many a man. You can’t imagine what scum those Danes are, incredibly cowardly, a horrible people altogether. I can remember the following quite well: an Oberleutnant shot a Dane in the
tram and he was later court-martialled for it. I can’t understand it, the Germans are certainly much too good-natured. It happened like this. The tram started up and a Dane threw him out; he fell flat on his face. He lost his temper—
Leutnant S
CHMITT
always was a hot-tempered man; luckily he just managed to jump on to the second carriage of the tram, then he changed into the first one at the next halt and shot the fellow without turning a hair.
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German soldiers, as we have seen throughout this book, cited even the most trivial reasons for putting people to death:
Z
OTLÖTERER
: I shot a
Frenchman from behind. He was riding a
bicycle.
W
EBER
: At close range?
Z
OTLÖTERER
: Yes.
W
EBER
: Did he intend capturing you?
Z
OTLÖTERER
: Certainly not, I just wanted the bicycle.
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Fantasies and
flights of imagination, difficult as they are to identify empirically, are part of the world in which we feel we exist. It is impossible to deny the enormous destructive force of Germans’ mental images of Jews, regardless of whether they were based on quasi-objective sources or merely common stereotypes and biases. Fantasies are not bound to empiric reality. Nonetheless, they can trigger actions that permanently change things in real life, the obvious example being the imaginary universe of Germans in which the
Aryan race was superior and thus
destined to rule the world. There are too few studies of the opaque area of imagination in the context of the Third Reich. One of them,
Charlotte Beradt’s compilation of
dreams people had during the period, hints at the central role the Führer and other leading Nazis played in the German
subconscious.
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Another source that sheds light on this otherwise obscure aspect of the reference frame of the Third Reich is the
love letters written to
Hitler. Eight thousand in number, they contain the unrealistic fantasies of women who wanted nothing more than some sort of intimate contact with the Führer.
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The surveillance protocols contain little
fantasy material. That’s likely because the British and American officers in charge of the operation didn’t think that conversations of this kind were worth preserving. But the protocols do contain significant information
about a topic related to fantasy: rumor.
Rumors crop up a lot in the soldiers’ tales, especially in the context of the Holocaust, an initiative that was supposed to be kept secret and was felt to be monumentally transgressive. Such rumors sometimes took the form of fantasies about how people were killed or particularly bizarre events.
Sometimes, things the POWs had actually experienced seemed like the products of fantasy. In conjunction with
“Action 1005,” for instance,
Rothkirch related:
R
OTHKIRCH
: A year ago I was in charge of the guerrilla school where men were being trained in
guerrilla warfare; I went on
an exercise with them one day and I said: “Direction of march is that hill up there.” The directors of the school then said to me: “That’s not a very good idea, sir, as they are just
burning Jews up there.” I said: “What do you mean? Burning Jews? But there aren’t any Jews any more.” “Yes, that’s the place where they were always shot and now they are all being disinterred again, soaked in
petrol and burnt so that their
bodies shan’t be discovered.” “That’s a dreadful job. There’s certain to be a lot of loose talk about it afterwards.” “Well, the men who are doing the job will be shot directly afterwards and burnt with them.” The whole thing sounds just like a fairy story.
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R
AMCKE
: From the inferno.
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Events like the
digging up and burning
of Jewish corpses challenged the comprehension even of people like Rothkirch who were familiar with the Holocaust. But the Holocaust had
path dependencies and consequences of its own, including “Action 1005.” In 1941, none of the perpetrators reckoned that the bodies would later have to be disposed of, and the
horror this entailed crossed a further boundary of what they could
imagine. It’s thus no wonder that Rothkirch and
Ramcke use imaginary places as points of reference. Things like “Action 1005,” they both seem to be saying, cannot be part of their normal reality. They belonged on another nonearthly plane, that of the fairy tale or hell.
Here we see that for the soldiers the Holocaust demarcated a thin, permeable boundary between the real and unreal, the imaginable and unimaginable. The shifting nature of this border opened up space for
fantastic
rumors:
M
EYER
: In a city, I think it was
T
SCHENSTOCHAU
, they did the following. The district captain ordered the Jews to be evacuated. They gave them shots of
prussic acid. Prussic acid works quickly and then, the end. They took a few final steps and dropped to the ground in front of the hospital. Those are the harmless tricks.
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Rumors of this sort floated around freely and could be attached to a variety of events. But they remained uncanny, even as the roles of the actors, in this case Poles, changed.
A low-ranking Luftwaffe officer named Heimer told of Jews being killed by diverting
gas into train cars:
H
EIMER
: There was a large collecting place, the Jews were always brought out of the houses and then taken to the station. They could take food with them for two or three days, and then they were put in a long distance train with the windows and doors sealed up. And then they were taken right through to P
OLAND
, and just before reaching their destination they pumped in some sort of stuff, some sort of gas, cool gas or nitrogen gas—anyway some odourless gas. That put them all to sleep. It was nice and warm. Then they were pulled out and buried. That’s what they did with thousands of Jews! (Laughs.)
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Astonishingly, this story was told in late 1942, before the introduction of gas to
Auschwitz. It conflates two facts: the
deportation of Jews in trains heading eastward and exterminations using exhaust fumes of motor vehicles, which had been taking place in
Chelmno, in
Riga, and around
Poznan since the end of 1941.
The conflation of separate half-understood facts is a typical way in which rumors were started. Heimer’s laughter at the end of his anecdote indicates that he regards his story as something unbelievable, and in fact his interlocutor doubted its credibility:
K
ASSEL
: Surely, you can’t do that!
H
EIMER
: It’s quite simple. Why shouldn’t one arrange something like that?
K
ASSEL
: In the first place it’s not possible and secondly you just can’t do a thing like that for God’s sake!
H
EIMER
: All the same it was done.
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This is one of the rare instances in the protocols when a listener expressed disbelief and disgust at what he was hearing. But the listener in this case was a British stool pigeon who was trying to elicit further information from Heimer, a W/T [wireless telegraph] operator. That’s why he assumes the role of the disbeliever. Thus, even this exception confirms the rule that listeners usually didn’t consider even the most horrible of stories to be unlikely or improbable.
One recurring rumor was that the bodies of murdered Jews were
dissolved by acid:
T
INKES
: There were about five goods trains standing ready at the northern railway station and the Jews were fetched out of their beds. Those who could actually prove that they had been
French citizens for more than ten to twelve years were allowed to remain, but all the others who had integrated since then, refugees and foreign Jews, were taken away. The French police broke in on them suddenly, pulled them from their beds, packed them into lorries and off the goods trains went—off towards R
USSIA
; the lot of them were transported away to the East. Of course there were fantastic scenes; women jumping out of third-floor windows into the street and so on. Nothing was done on our side—it was all the French police, who did that, who carried out the whole business, none of us took part. I was told—I can’t know whether it is true or not, anyhow there was some garrison duty (?) man who had worked in a Russian P/W camp for a long time in the general “Gouvernement”—I once had a talk with him out there, we happened to meet in the train and the conversation came round to that subject. “Yes,” he said, “the transports arrived at our place. I was beyond W
ARSAW
, near
D
EBLIN
, and they arrived there and were de-loused and that was the end of it.” I said: “Why de-loused? If a man comes from
F
RANCE
, he doesn’t need to be de-loused.” “Well,” he said, “they are transit camps for soldiers coming from the eastern front, they are de-loused there and then go on leave; and the Jews from the West go to those
de-lousing camps too. There are large tanks there, only the Jews get a different de-lousing mixture in their bathing tanks. It takes perhaps a half an hour or an hour, when there are about 200 men in it, and then you can’t find anything but a few gold teeth, rings or something, everything else has been dissolved. That is drained off.… . camp.” That was the way they de-loused the Jew! They put them into these baths, he said and once they were all in, an electric current is passed through the whole thing; that knocks them over and then the acids are added which dissolved the whole damned lot completely. Of course it made my hair stand on end!
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This story weaves historically accurate details and
imaginary elements together into a rumor about how the bodies of victims were completely destroyed. The parts about
Jews being deported from
France
and deceived as to the purpose of the “
delousing” are based on fact. Victims heading into the
gas chambers were told they were going to be disinfected. The bits about baths with electric currents, into which acids are then poured, were a product of the sort of imagination typical of
rumors.
Rumors are an emotional form of communication, spreading a
feeling of something monstrous or uncanny. As such, they express an element that rarely occurs in the soldiers’ conversations: feelings.
It was extremely rare for soldiers to talk about negative emotions, at least not those that they themselves had felt. This reluctance is by no means unique to World War II. We find it in all modern wars. Being confronted with extreme violence, be it as a perpetrator, observer, or victim, likely changes individuals in ways that cannot be easily communicated. There may be discursive forms for talking about violence that one has committed oneself: the
adventure tales of
shooting down planes, “knocking over”
civilians, or
raping women. But there seem to be no formats for speaking about one’s own
fears, especially
fears
of death and dying. The reason for this, psychologically speaking, is probably simple: members of combat units are so close to violence and death that those things are constant, realistic possibilities, and the idea of one’s own death is as terrible and unreal for soldiers as it is for civilians. Even in normal social circumstances, people rarely enjoy talking about their own deaths. That reluctance is no doubt all the greater in situations where dying is far more likely, and the likely manner of death will be violent, brutal, painful, and usually lonely and dirty.
One of the few POWs to talk explicitly about his fears, in this case being burned
alive in a plane crash, was Luftwaffe
Sergeant Rott:
R
OTT
: Then I joined our unit.
Hauptmann M
ACHFELD
was there then. He was burnt to death at
B
IZERTA
—he was our first Gruppenkommandeur, he had the Knight’s Cross. On 26th November he landed in a [
Focke-Wulf] “190,” and ran off the runway into all those damned bomb craters, the aircraft turned over and caught fire; he screamed like an animal—it was horrible.
I was always terrified of being burnt to death, especially in the [
Messerschmitt] “109”—I’ve seen a great many of those aircraft turn over myself. Anyway, his aircraft was blazing, and you would hear his screams, in spite of the fact that there were aircraft warming up their engines. The mechanics themselves couldn’t bear to hear it, and they let the aircraft engines run at full speed, so that the screams couldn’t be heard. The fire service couldn’t do anything—the
ammunition was exploding.
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Fears about dying also resonated in soldiers’ irrational attempts to formulate “rules” about who would be
killed:
B
OTT
*: In our “Gruppe” there is the superstition that “Oberfeldwebel” are always shot down.
H
ÜTZEN
*: That’s curious. We, too, have the same superstition.
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Moreover, certain types of warfare were
unpopular because they were particularly dangerous.
Nighttime sorties were one example in the Luftwaffe, as two veteran bomber pilots made clear in November 1943:
H
ÄRTLING
*: I don’t like night bombing. When you come over at night you don’t really know where you are, and if you crash you don’t know what you are falling onto.
All the people in this camp are lucky devils who have still got away safely. The fighters’ bullets must have hit the bombs, as ricochets entered the machine, which could only have come in this way.
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L
OREK
: I could never sleep after a sortie if I came back about three o’clock. I swear by day-flying only, I detest night-flying. I far prefer day to night. That uncertainty; you may get it on the neck any minute. You can’t see the blighter.
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