Rape, Murder and Genocide: Nazi War Crimes as Described by German Soldiers Read online

  Rape, Murder and Genocide: Nazi War Crimes as Described by German Soldiers

  Jan Fleischhauer

  The myth that the Nazi-era German armed forces, the Wehrmacht, was not involved in war crimes persisted for decades after the war. Now two German researchers have destroyed it once and for all. Newly published conversations between German prisoners of war, secretly recorded by the Allies, reveal horrifying details of violence against civilians, rape and genocide.

  Rape, Murder and Genocide

  Nazi War Crimes as Described by German Soldiers

  By Jan Fleischhauer

  Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

  Part 1: Nazi War Crimes as Described by German Soldiers

  It is March 6, 1943, and two German soldiers are talking about the war. Fighter pilot Budde and Corporal Bartels were captured by the British a few weeks earlier. The war is over for them, and it’s time to share memories.

  Budde: “I flew two spoiling attacks. In other words, we shelled buildings.”

  Bartels: “But not destructive attacks with a specific target, like what we did?”

  Budde: “No, just spoiling attacks. We encountered some of the nicest targets, like mansions on a mountain. When you flew at them from below and fired into them, you could see the windows rattling and then the roof going up in the air. There was the time we hit Ashford. There was an event on the market square, crowds of people, speeches being given. We really sprayed them! That was fun!”

  Two other pilots, Bäumer and Greim, also had their share of amusing experiences, which they described in a conversation with other soldiers.

  Bäumer: “We had a 2-centimeter gun installed on the front (of the aircraft). Then we flew down low over the streets, and when we saw cars coming from the other direction, we put on our headlights so that they would think another car was approaching them. Then we shot them with the gun. We had a lot of successes that way. It was great, and it was a lot of fun. We attacked trains and other stuff the same way.”

  Greim: “We once flew a low-altitude attack near Eastbourne. When we got there we saw a big castle where there was apparently a ball or something like that being held. In any case, there were lots of women in nice clothes and a band. We flew past the first time, but then we attacked and really stuck it to them. Now that, my dear friend, was a lot of fun.”

  Disconcerting Tone

  It is an unfamiliar and disconcerting tone that soldiers Budde, Bartels, Bäumer and Greim use in these conversations. It has little to do with the tone one encounters in television documentaries or memoirs about the war. But it’s the way soldiers talk when they are together and chatting about their experiences.

  The public discourse about war is characterized by contempt for the bloody sides of the military profession, a contempt to which soldiers themselves conform when they are asked to describe their experiences. But there is also another view of war, one in which it is not only an endless nightmare, but also a great adventure that some soldiers later remember as the best time of their life.

  In World War II, 18 million men, or more than 40 percent of the male population of the German Reich, served with Germany’s military, the Wehrmacht, and the Waffen-SS. Hardly any other segment of time has been as carefully studied in academia as the six years that began with Germany’s invasion of neighboring Poland in September 1939 and ended with the total capitulation of the German Reich in May 1945.

  Even historians find it difficult to keep track of the literature on the deadliest conflict in human history. The monumental “Germany and the Second World War,” which was completed three years ago by the Military History Research Institute in Potsdam near Berlin and is seen as the standard German work on the war, encompasses 10 volumes alone.

  Every battle in this monstrous struggle for control over Europe has its fixed place in the historical narrative today, as does, of course, the horrible violence that left 60 million dead around the world, including the suffering of the civilian population, the murder of the Jews and the partisan war in the East.

  Sugarcoating Reality

  But how the soldiers experienced the war, how the constant presence of death and violence changed them, what they felt and feared, but also enjoyed—all of this tends to be marginalized in historical accounts. History was long suspicious of the subjective view of the events it considers, preferring to stick to verifiable dates and facts.

  But this also has to do with the incompleteness of sources. Military letters, reports by contemporary witnesses or memoirs provide a sugarcoated version of reality. The recipients of these personal accounts were the wives and families of soldiers or the broader public. Descriptions of the daily business of war, in which soldiers just happened to massacre the residents of a village or “brush” a few girls, as rape was called in the troops’ jargon, had no place in these accounts.

  It isn’t just that the recipients’ expectations stood in the way of soldiers providing truthful accounts of what had actually happened—the time that had passed since the war also distorted the soldiers’ views of their experiences. In other words, anyone who wants to obtain an accurate picture of how soldiers see a war must gain access to them and gain their trust as early as possible, so that they can speak openly without the fear of being called to account afterwards.

  What already seems hardly feasible for current military operations like the war in Afghanistan is nearly impossible when it comes to an event that happened so long ago as World War II. Nevertheless, two German historians have managed to produce precisely such a documentary of perceptions of the war using live historical recordings.

  In Their Own Words

  The material that historian Sönke Neitzel uncovered in British and American archives is nothing short of sensational. While researching the submarine war in the Atlantic in 2001, he discovered the transcripts of covertly recorded conversations between German officers in which they talked about their wartime experiences with an unprecedented degree of openness. The deeper Neitzel dug into the archives, the more material he found. In the end, he and social psychologist Harald Welzer analyzed a total of 150,000 pages of source material. The result is a newly published book with the simple title of “Soldaten” (“Soldiers”), published by S. Fischer Verlag. The volume has the potential to change our view of the war.

  The recordings, which were made using special equipment that the Allies used to secretly listen in on conversations between German prisoners of war in their cells starting in 1939, offer an inside view of World War II. In doing so, they destroy once and for the myth of a “clean” Wehrmacht.

  In “Soldiers,” which is subtitled “Transcripts of Fighting, Killing and Dying,” the soldiers talk about their views of the enemy and their own leaders, discuss the details of combat missions and trade astonishingly detailed accounts of the atrocities they both witnessed and committed.

  There are always reasons given for killing. Sometimes the reason can be as simple as someone not walking to the other side of the street quickly enough or not handing over an item right away.

  Zotlöterer: “I shot a Frenchman from behind. He was riding a bicycle.”

  Weber: “At close range?”

  Zotlöterer: “Yes.”

  Heuser: “Did he want to take you prisoner?”

  Zotlöterer: “Nonsense. I wanted the bicycle.”

  Part 2: Allies Hoped to Discover Military Secrets

  By the spring of 1945, about a million members of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS had been captured by British or American forces. Most were place
d into normal POW camps after being captured. But between September 1939 and October 1945, more than 13,000 German prisoners were transferred for closer “observation” to special facilities that the Allies had initially established in England, at the Trent Park manor north of London and at Latimer House in Buckinghamshire, and at Fort Hunt in the US state of Virginia starting in the summer of 1942.

  The purpose of the special camps was to extract military secrets from the soldiers. The Allies hoped to win information that would give them a strategic advantage. In addition to the cells being bugged with hidden microphones, a number of informers were planted among the prisoners whose assignment was to guide the conversations in the desired direction.

  It can be assumed that most of the prisoners were not aware that they were being spied on, and even if they were, they quickly abandoned all caution in their conversations with fellow soldiers. The human need to converse is noticeably stronger than the fear that the enemy could be listening in.

  Thousands of Transcripts

  The archives contain an impressive volume of material obtained in this manner. The British prepared 17,500 transcripts, ranging from half a page to more than 20 pages each. The Americans have also preserved thousands of verbatim transcripts of the secretly recorded conversations in German, most of which included an English translation.

  The decision to transfer POWs to Trent Park or Fort Hunt was made by Allied intelligence officers who selected suitable candidates in a multistage interrogation process. While the British focused their attention on higher-ranking officers and thus the Wehrmacht elite, the Americans were more likely to listen in on the conversations of regular combat troops. About half of the inmates at Fort Hunt were ordinary soldiers, especially from the army, a third were non-commissioned officers and only a sixth were higher-ranking officers.

  The sheer diversity of the voices describing their own experiences provides an almost comprehensive view of the war from the soldier’s perspective. The bugged prisoners included soldiers from almost every part of the military, from combat swimmers in a naval unit to a general. The material also covers an astonishingly wide range of operational areas. Almost all of the prisoners who ended up in the special camps were captured on the Western Front or in Africa, but because most soldiers fought on various fronts during the course of the war, there are also many accounts of the war in the East, which differed markedly from the Western Front.

  Scientists and academics have always been interested in the question of how quickly perfectly normal people can turn into killing machines. The material Neitzel and Welzer uncovered for their book suggests that the answer is simple: very quickly indeed.

  ‘I Felt Sorry for the Horses’

  It makes sense that war brutalizes people. Anyone who is exposed to extreme violence over an extended period of time eventually loses his inhibitions and becomes a perpetrator of violence himself. This is the view held by academics that study violence from a socio-psychological point of view. It’s a view that is supported by the autobiographical literature, where men appear to go from stroking their children’s hair one moment to being cold-blooded killers the next.

  But anyone who reads the wiretapping transcripts that Neitzel and Welzer have analyzed is forced to conclude that it doesn’t take much to convince men in uniform to kill others. In many cases, it appeared to take just a few days before the soldiers lost their inhibitions about taking lives. In fact, more than a few even openly admitted to enjoying the act of killing.

  The use of violence is an appealing experience, and it is one that comes much more easily to people than we have become accustomed to believing after 65 years of peace in Europe. Sometimes all it takes is a weapon or an airplane, as the following conversation between a German pilot and a reconnaissance soldier on April 30, 1940 reveals:

  Pohl: “I had to drop bombs onto a train station in Posen (Poznan) on the second day of the war in Poland. Eight of the 16 bombs fell in the city, right in the middle of houses. I didn’t like it. On the third day I didn’t care, and on the fourth day I took pleasure in it. We enjoyed heading out before breakfast, chasing individual soldiers through the fields with machine guns and then leaving them there with a few bullets in their backs.”

  Meyer: “But it was always against soldiers?”

  Pohl: “People too. We attacked convoys in the streets. I was sitting in the ‘chain’ (a formation of three aircraft). The plane would wiggle a little and we would bank sharply to the left, and then we’d fire away with every MG (machine gun) we had. The things you could do. Sometimes we saw horses flying around.”

  Meyer: “That’s disgusting, with the horses…come on!”

  Pohl: “I felt sorry for the horses, not at all for the people. But I felt sorry for the horses right up until the end.”

  Part 3: Boasting about Their Exploits

  When soldiers talk about the war, words like “death” and “killing” are hardly ever used. And why should they be? It’s obvious that the important thing is the result, not the work itself. A construction worker, as Neitzel and Welzer point out, wouldn’t talk about stone and mortar during his lunch break.

  Many of the transcribed conversations have the feel of party banter. The prisoners aren’t interested in having heart-to-heart talks with each other. They seem surprisingly composed, given the horrors they have experienced. Instead, they seek to entertain and even amuse each other. As is often the case when men recount their exploits to each other, there is also a boastful aspect to their stories.

  At least as revealing as the stories the prisoners tell each other are their reactions to what they are hearing. Where certain things are taken for granted, there is no sense of confusion, argument or protest. That also reveals what these men considered to be normal, and what they felt was a violation of the norms.

  The soldiers seldom talk about dying, and they rarely discuss their own feelings or fears. Perhaps that is because there is no entertainment value to be had in despair or fear of death. In the soldier’s world, admitting that one is not able to cope with an extreme situation is generally seen as evidence of weakness. Admittedly, that is no different with civilians, who are equally loath to confess, except perhaps to very close friends, that they were so afraid they almost wet their pants or had to vomit.

  No Distinctions

  Men love technology, a subject that enables them to quickly find common ground. Many of the conversations revolve around equipment, weapons, calibers and many variations on how the men “whacked,” “picked off” or “took out” other human beings.

  The victim is merely the target, to be shot and destroyed—be it a ship, a building, a train or even a cyclist, a pedestrian or a woman pushing a baby carriage. Only in very few cases do the soldiers show remorse over the fate of innocent civilians, while empathy is almost completely absent from their conversations. “The victim in an empathic sense doesn’t appear in the accounts,” the authors conclude. Many of the bugged Wehrmacht soldiers also do not distinguish between civilian and military targets. In fact, just a short time after the beginning of the war, such distinctions did not exist except on paper. Following the attack on the Soviet Union, no distinctions were made at all.

  Some soldiers are even particularly proud of having killed as many civilians as possible. In January 1945, Lieutenant Hans Hartigs of Fighter Wing 26 talks about a raid over England in which the goal was to “shoot at everything, just nothing military.” “We mowed down women and children in baby carriages,” the officer reports with satisfaction.

  In March 1943, Solm, a seaman on a submarine, tells a cellmate how he “knocked off a children’s transport” in which more than 50 children drowned. The transport he mentions was most likely the British passenger ship City of Benares, which was sunk in the north Atlantic on Sept. 17, 1940.

  “Did they all drown?”

  “Yes, they’re all dead.”

  “How big was it?”

  “6,000 tons.”

  “How did you know that?”<
br />
  “Via the radio.”

  Lack of Moral Qualms

  War does not eliminate the importance of moral categories, as one might expect, but it does alter their range of validity. This also applies to the battles of World War II. As long as the soldier operates within the limits he considers necessary, he perceives his actions as legitimate. This can easily encompass acts of extreme brutality. This is why the soldier seems to have no particular moral qualms about engaging in behavior that would trigger revulsion in times of peace.

  When morality is not abrogated but merely suspended, rules continue to exist. Pilots who have been shot down and are still hanging from their parachutes were not legitimate targets, whereas the crews of wrecked tanks were given short shrift. Partisans were always shot on the spot, the logic being that anyone who ambushed one’s fellow soldiers deserved nothing better. Executing large numbers of women and children by firing squads was considered savage in the Wehrmacht, which doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen repeatedly.

  In October 1944, radio operator Eberhard Kehrle and SS infantryman Franz Kneipp had a casual conversation about the practice of fighting partisans.

  Kehrle: “In the Caucasus, when one of us got killed there was no need for any lieutenant to tell us what to do. We just pulled out our pistols and shot everything in sight, women, children, everything…”

  Kneipp: “A partisan group once attacked a convoy carrying the wounded and killed everyone inside. We caught them half an hour later near Novgorod. We put them in a sandpit, and then everybody started firing at them with MGs (machine guns) and pistols.”