Read Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying Online
Authors: Sonke Neitzel,Harald Welzer
Moreover, we can speculate that intervals identified only as “idle talk” would have been partly about women and sex as well. There’s no way of verifying this, but the proportion of sex talk that did find its way into the protocols suggests that the subject was very important to the POWs.
Conversations of this nature tended to revolve around where the action was, i.e., where one could find the prettiest girls and the most
sexual opportunities. Often the tone is reminiscent of tourists discussing attractions they had seen:
G
ÖLLER
: I’ve been to
B
ORDEAUX
. The whole of B
ORDEAUX
is one big brothel. There is nothing to beat B
ORDEAUX
. I always said to myself, wait till you get to P
ARIS
; it’s supposed to be still worse in P
ARIS
. It can’t be worse in any other place, I thought. But the contrary is true. In B
ORDEAUX
the reputation of
Frenchwomen is worst of all.
H
ERMS
: In P
ARIS
you only need to sit down in a bar where there’s a girl sitting at a table, and you may be quite sure that you can go home with her. The place is appalling, you find girls in thousands. You don’t have to take the slightest trouble. It’s just the right sort of life for many people.
334
Ironically, POWs often complained that the so-called
blitz girls,
Blitzmädel,
German women assigned to assist the
Wehrmacht, were all too willing to engage in a bit of sexual fun. In this area, conventional norms of sexual behavior were maintained in wartime.
What soldiers regarded as the legitimate exploitation of opportunity when foreign women were concerned becomes “repulsive” when practiced by German women—although no small amount of projection may also have been at play:
S
CHÜRMANN
: Most “Blitzmädels” say “yes” without much ado. Just think of those “Blitzmädels” in P
ARIS
. They all run around in civvies and one is quite prepared to be accosted by one of them suddenly in German. It’s nothing unusual for them to behave promiscuously with the French. They really are some of the worst. They don’t give any points to the French whores in any way. The NO we had—I got on very well with him; he was from C
OLOGNE
, and came to us from V
ILLACOUBLAY
—was transferred to a general hospital in P
ARIS
. He said it was nothing unusual to have more women there with V.D. than soldiers. It was an actual fact, he said, that it was not the soldiers who were infecting the girls but the other way round, and that some of the “Blitzmädels” had caught it from the French. He
once had women suffering from V.D. in another institution in P
ARIS
; he said twenty of them had
gonorrhoea and more than ten of them had
syphilis, five of them being already incurable. They then examined all the girls in P
ARIS
and sent so-and-so many home right away; a certain number were infected without being ill themselves, they were carriers and were infecting the soldiers! It must be a scandalous state of affairs in P
ARIS
. I’m inclined to think that the women who volunteer as “Blitzmädels” do so primarily for that one reason, some of them anyway.
335
A twenty-four-year-old U-boat crewman named
Günther Schramm reported on a particularly spectacular example of moral lassitude among German “girls”:
S
CHRAMM
: The things I saw myself at
B
ORDEAUX
were frightful. Once I had to go to the medical station and there I was taken through various departments and saw a lot of German girls in the corridors—it was a shocking sight! They were completely mad, there were three of them who bore the typical signs of syphilis in their faces and they were screaming—they were completely crazy. They made noises and cried: “Only by a nigger!” and so on. They had been associating with negroes. They behave worse than the French women.
336
Sometimes, POWs acted like connoisseurs, boasting that they knew where to get value for money:
D
ANIELS
: I paid 60 francs in a brothel at
B
REST
.
W
EDEKIND
: Go on with you! At B
REST
, at G
RÜNSTEIN’S
, on the corner there, you don’t pay more than 25 francs—that’s the usual charge.
337
On occasion, soldiers also mildly criticized the behavior of some members of their own units:
N
IWIEM
*: I must say, sometimes we didn’t behave too well in F
RANCE
. In P
ARIS
I have seen our soldiers seize girls in the middle of a restaurant, lay them over the table and …! Married women too!
338
Higher-ranking officers, in particular, were prone to
condemn the excesses of men under their command:
M
ÖLLER
: I, as “Gruppenkommandeur” sometimes have to take action in connection with
venereal diseases. On the day I was shot down one of my best pilots reported sick with venereal diseases. This man had just returned to the “Gruppe” from 4 weeks marriage-leave. I said to him “you are a swine”! He’ll be glad that I did not return from the flight for I’d certainly have held him responsible.
339
Complaints of this sort were hardly infrequent. Navy Captain
Hans Erdmenger, commodore of the
8th Destroyer Flotilla, remarked bitterly in a 1943 disciplinary report about his unit: “The use of French bordellos has assumed an intensity that violates a healthy development of soldierly personality. Above all, the bordellos are being frequented not just by the younger generation, the 18- to 20-year-olds, but increasingly by lower-level officers. The sense of hygiene, the
behavior due toward women and the understanding of the importance of healthy family life for our German people are suffering under this.” Erdmenger, a National Socialist true believer, was shocked when the first thing two of his soldiers did after returning from marriage leave was to visit a bordello.
340
Massive
sexual violence caused even greater outrage among many soldiers than visits to the local bordello:
R
EIMBOLD
: One thing I can tell you directly, there’s no rumor about it. In the first officers’ quarters where I was held prisoner, there was a very stupid young lieutenant from Frankfurt, a real snot-nose. Eight of us were sitting around a table talking about R
USSIA
. And he said: “We got hold of a female spy who was running around in the area. We hit her on the noggin with a stick and then flayed her behind with an unsheathed bayonet. Then we fucked her, threw her out, shot at her and, while she was lying on her back, lobbed
grenades. Every time we got one close, she screamed. In the end, she died, and we threw her body away.” And imagine this! There were eight German officers sitting at the table with me all laughing their heads off. I couldn’t stand it. I got up and said, “Gentlemen, this goes too far.”
341
Reimbold claims to be outraged by a story he attributes to an external person of reference. Events of this sort of brutality are usually narrated secondhand. Some further examples:
S
CHULTKA
: The things that are happening today are really beyond the pale. For example, some paratroopers stormed a house in Italy and killed both of the men there. They were both fathers, and one had two daughters. They screwed both of them, really gave them a going over, and then killed them. The house had those wide Italian beds. They tossed the daughters on the bed, stuck the men’s dicks in and gave them another real screwing.
C
ZOSNOWSKI
: That’s inhuman. But it’s common for guys to tell stories about things they never really did. They’re colossal braggarts.
S
CHULTKA
: Then there’s the one about the tank trenches in
Kiev. There was a guy from the
Gestapo, a high-ranking SS leader, who had a
Russian, pretty as a picture. He wanted to screw her, but she didn’t let him. One day later, she was standing in front of the trench. He mowed her down himself with his MP and then screwed her when she was dead.
342
Even if some of the
sexual
horror stories were, as the listener in this excerpt suspected, made up, atrocities of this sort did take place in reality.
343
Reports of
rapes rarely elicited surprise, to say nothing of condemnation. Even rapes of German women by the enemy were accepted, as the following story illustrates:
L
ANGFELD
: Near
B
ABRUYSK
, it happened that a bus containing 30 female news agency assistants was attacked by partisans. The bus was driving through the woods, and the partisans shot at it. Tanks arrived but too late. They got the bus, the girls and the partisans. But in the meantime, the girls had all been gone through, given a real good screwing. Some of them were dead. They’d rather spread their legs than get killed, that’s understandable. It took three days until they were found.
H
ELD
: They sure had a lot to fuck.
344
At this point enough has been said about the reports of
sexual violence. The stories recorded in the surveillance protocols clearly
reveal the omnipresence of sexual desires and sexual violence in the war. The previous two excerpts, from protocols made in the United States, speak volumes about soldiers’ view of women as mere means of satisfying sexual desires. Soldiers not only took for granted that sexual opportunities should be used. Talking about it was also nothing unusual or out of the ordinary:
K
OKOSCHKA
: There was this disgrace of a private who held a pistol to an Italian girl’s head so that she’d fuck him.
S
AEMMER
: Yeah, that’s what privates are like.
345
The technology of war plays only a very minor role in academic discourse, and in this book, too, we are primarily interested in perceptions beyond any sort of technology. Technical topics rarely occur in conversations between army
POWs—not surprisingly since the equipment used by infantrymen barely changed in the six years of World War II.
German soldiers at the end of the war still used the same standard-issue rifle, the
K98, with which they had invaded
Poland in September 1939. There were only two types of standard
machine guns employed in World War II, and the situation was similar with
other infantry and artillery weaponry.
Tanks underwent the greatest innovation, but once soldiers had gotten used to new types of armored vehicles, their operation quickly became routine. A Tiger tank was a Tiger tank. The technological framework in the German army changed little. All in all, equipment remained constant, and infantry weaponry in particular consisted of mass-produced items that scarcely merited discussion. On the battlefields of Europe, the technical quality of
rifles,
tommy guns, and machine guns was quite comparable, with neither side enjoying a decisive advantage.
The situation was completely different in the
Luftwaffe, where the quality of technology was far more important than in the army. Aerial warfare was a technological arena, and innovations came fast and furious over the course of the war. Improvements were made in all areas, from aircraft performance to navigation technology to onboard weaponry. The
Messerschmitt 109 of 1939 had little to do with the same model plane in 1945.
Nighttime aerial warfare added a new dimension to the conflict.
British Bomber Command perfected the technique of aerial bombardment in darkness, forcing the Luftwaffe to constantly develop new strategies for defending against such attacks. One result of this give-and-take was the rise of highly sophisticated
radar and navigation technology.
In 1939 a race began to develop the fastest fighter jets, the most precise radar stations, and the most exact navigation procedures. In World
War I, mistakes could be relatively quickly corrected. This was no longer the case in World War II, since the effort needed for development and production was so much greater. Huge amounts of resources—for example, 41 percent of armaments capacity in 1944—were invested in the air industry. By comparison, Germany invested only 6 percent of its resources in
tank production in 1944.
346
Nonetheless, in the course of 1942, Britain and the United States gained a decisive advantage over the
Luftwaffe, and the German air force was never able to close the gap. With Germany losing ground both quantitatively and qualitatively, the Luftwaffe was deprioritized at the end of 1944. The consequences for the Wehrmacht were devastating and could be felt in every arena of the war.
Technology was a constant, unavoidable element in the lives of pilots, reconnaissance specialists, and aircraft gunners.
347
In aerial warfare, whoever had faster, more maneuverable planes with better
weapons survived, while those who fell behind
technologically died, regardless of their skill as airmen. Technology thus determined the lives of Luftwaffe troops. It also dominated their perception of the war and the formation of their frame of reference.
The surveillance protocols reflect the importance of technology for each branch of the German armed forces. There is a lot of material of this sort in conversations between Luftwaffe men, somewhat less among German sailors, and only around a tenth as much in discussions between army soldiers. For that reason, this section will be primarily concerned with the Luftwaffe. Especially interesting is what the POWs discussed when they talked about technology, and how technology dominated and changed their perception of the war.