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

  Kehrle: “They should be killed slowly, not shot.”

  ‘Let’s Kill 20 Men so We Can Have Some Peace and Quiet’

  The story Lance Corporal Sommer tells about a lieutenant whom he served under on the Italian front shows how common it was to terrorize the civilian population:

  Sommer: “Even in Italy, whenever we arrived in a new place, he would always say: ‘Let’s kill a couple of people first!’ I could speak Italian, so I always got special tasks. He would say: ‘Okay, let’s kill 20 men so we can have some peace and quiet here. We don’t want them getting any ideas!’ (laughter)Then we staged a little attack, with the motto: ‘Anyone gives us the slightest trouble and we’ll kill another 50.’”

  Bender: “What criteria did he use to select them? Did he just pull them out at random?”

  Sommer: “Yeah, 20 men, just like that. ‘Come here,’ he’d say. Then he’d line them up on the market square, pick up three MGs—rat-a-tat-tat—and there they were, dead. That was how it happened. Then he would say: ‘Great! Pigs!’ He hated the Italians so much, you wouldn’t believe it.”

  Part 4: ‘We Threw Her Outside and Shot at Her’

  Hardly anyone is immune to the temptations of “unpunished inhumanity,” as the philosopher Günter Anders once aptly described unbridled terror. Where the door is opened to violence, even good family men quickly shed their inhibitions. Nevertheless, armies differ in their methods, as was the case in World War II.

  The Red Army was hardly inferior to the Wehrmacht in terms of its propensity for violence. In fact, the pronounced culture of violence on both sides led to a disastrous radicalization of the war in the East. The Anglo-Saxon forces behaved in a far more civilized way, at least after the first phase of the fighting in Normandy, in which the Western allies also took no prisoners.

  The way a body of soldiers proceeds in the regular use of violence is not dependent on the individual. Putting one’s faith in self-restraint would be to misunderstand the psychodynamics of armed conflicts. What is in fact critical is the expectation of discipline that comes from above.

  War crimes occur in almost every prolonged armed conflict, as evidenced recently by the photos taken by an American “kill team” in Afghanistan, which shocked the public when the images were published two weeks ago. Everything depends on whether these crimes are also seen as crimes by the military leadership and if the perpetrators are then punished accordingly. Even before the war against the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht leadership established that there was no need to punish soldiers for attacks on Russian civilians, and that Red Army officers were to be shot immediately.

  Trading Stories Like Sex Tourists

  A side of the daily routine during war that is understandably left out of military letters and memoirs is the soldiers’ sex life, even though sexuality plays an important role in every army. According to the research literature, the generals had great trouble keeping the men’s sex drives under control with brothels. Sexually transmitted diseases were so widespread in the military that entire companies were routinely required to undergo treatment.

  The record of a bugged conversation from June 1944 reveals the importance of womanizing among the men. The transcriber decided to summarize the discussion instead of noting the men’s exact words:

  “18:45 Women

  19:15 Women

  19:45 Women

  20:00 Women.”

  When the people listening in on the conversations took the trouble to transcribe everything that was being said, the talk, predictably enough, revolved around where the best girls were to be had, how much they cost and what other sexual opportunities there were behind the front. In one such conversation, the men trade stories like experienced sex tourists.

  Wallus: “In Warsaw, our troops had to wait in line in front of the building’s door. In Radom, the first room was full while the truck people stood outside. Each woman had 14 to 15 men per hour. They replaced the women every two days.”

  Niwiem: “I have to say that we weren’t nearly as respectable in France sometimes. When I was in Paris, I saw our soldiers grabbing girls in the middle of a bar, throwing them across a table and—end of story! Married women, too!”

  Readily Available Sex

  Today, we easily forget that the majority of the Wehrmacht soldiers went abroad for the first time as a result of the war. When the Nazis came into power, less than 4 percent of Germans in the Reich had passports. For these men, the charms of life in another country, far away from their wives and children, included exotic food and the excitement of armed conflict, as well as the enjoyment of readily available sex. It’s no accident that many tended to romanticize their memories after the fact.

  Müller: “When I was in Kharkov (in present-day Ukraine), everything was destroyed except the center of the city. A wonderful city, a wonderful memory. All the people there spoke a little German, which they had learned in school. And in Taganrog (in Russia) there were wonderful cinemas and wonderful beach cafés. I went everywhere in a truck. And all you saw were women doing compulsory labor.”

  Fausst: “Oh, my God!”

  Müller: “They were building roads, drop-dead gorgeous girls. So we drove by, pulled them into the truck, screwed them and them threw them out again. Boy, they sure cursed at us.”

  While accounts of mass rape provoked at most a mild rebuke from their conversation partners, a number of soldiers clearly still felt that the sexual violence at times reached a limit which should be respected, even in the locker-room environment of the POW camp.

  Sadistic Sexual Violence

  The material contains a series of descriptions of acts of sexual violence so sadistic that modern-day readers would find them difficult to bear. As a rule, they are told in the third person, a tactic that the teller uses to distance himself from the story he is telling. Sometimes he also makes it clear that what he saw or heard disgusts him.

  Reimbold: “In the first officers’ prison camp where I was being kept here, there was a really stupid guy from Frankfurt, a young lieutenant, a young upstart. There were eight of us sitting around a table and talking about Russia. And he said: ‘Oh, we caught this female spy who had been running around in the neighborhood. First we hit her in the tits with a stick and then we beat her rear end with a bare bayonet. Then we fucked her, and then we threw her outside and shot at her. When she was lying there on her back, we threw grenades at her. Every time one of them landed near her body, she screamed.’ And just think, there were eight German officers sitting at that table with me, and they all broke out laughing. I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I got up and said: ‘Gentlemen, this is too much.’”

  The outrage some felt over the sexual practices of some of their comrades had exceptions, however. When it came to stories of sex with Jewish women, there were no limits. As a rule, all sexual contact with Jews was forbidden, even in the Wehrmacht. The military leadership gave no quarter to “racial defilement.” But this didn’t stop the soldiers from sexually assaulting Jewish women, or to claim to offer protection in return for sex. Many of the women were shot afterwards to prevent them from incriminating the soldiers.

  Part 5: Wehrmacht Soldiers Knew about the Holocaust

  How much did the Wehrmacht soldiers know about the Holocaust? Noticeably more than they were later willing to admit. To this day, the Wehrmacht’s participation in the Holocaust remains disputed. The exhibition “War of Extermination. The Crimes of the Wehrmacht,” which the Hamburg Institute for Social Research took to several German cities between 1995 and 1999, consistently triggered angry protests. Some critics claimed that the entire undertaking was a sham because a few images had not been displayed in the correct chronological order.

  The Holocaust is generally mentioned peripherally in the conversations between German soldiers that have now been viewed in their entirety for the first time. It is only mentioned on about 300 pages of the transcripts, which, given the monstrosity of the events, seems to be a very small number.

  One
explanation could be that not many soldiers knew about what was happening behind the front. Another, much more likely interpretation would be that the systematic extermination of the Jews did not play a significant role in the conversations between cellmates because it had little news value.

  When conversations do turn to the extermination process, the emphasis tends to be on questions of practical implementation. There are hardly any passages in which the listeners are surprised by what they are hearing. Almost no one indicates that the stories being told are somehow unbelievable or that he is hearing them for the first time. “It can be concluded that the extermination of the Jews is common knowledge among the soldiers, and to a far greater extent than recent studies on the subject would lead one to expect,” write Neitzel and Welzer.

  Details of the Holocaust

  The transcripts contain comprehensive details about the exterminations, including the mass shootings, the killings with carbon monoxide in specially prepared trucks, and the later disinterment and incineration of the bodies as part of “Operation 1005,” with which the SS sought to eliminate the traces of the Holocaust starting in 1943.

  Hardly any soldier says that he was directly involved, but many talk about what they saw or heard. The accounts are often astonishingly detailed and, in any case, much more precise than the information German investigators could later glean from witness testimony. In April 1945, Major General Walter Bruns describes what happened during a typical “Jew operation” he witnessed.

  Bruns: “The trenches were 24 meters long and about 3 meters wide. They had to lie down like sardines in a can, with their heads toward the middle. At the top, there were six marksmen with submachine guns who then shot them in the back of the neck. It was already full when I arrived, so the ones who were still alive had to lie on top, and then they got shot. They had to lie there in neat layers so that it wouldn’t take up too much space. Before this happened, they had to turn in their valuables at another station. The edge of the forest was here, and in here there were the three trenches on that Sunday, and here there was a line that stretched for one-and-a-half kilometers, and it was moving very slowly. They were standing in line to be killed. When they got closer, they could see what was going on inside. Roughly at this spot, they had to hand over their jewelry and their suitcases. A little farther along, they had to take off their clothes, all except their shirts and underpants. It was just women and little children, like two-year-olds.”

  Of the around 6 million victims of the Holocaust, no more than half died in the death camps. About 3 million people died in the ghettoes or were killed by hand, often by a shot to the back of the neck, which made it necessary to create special firing squads. In principle, soldiers in the Wehrmacht were exempt from performing these tasks, which were handled by special SS units and police battalions.

  No Attempt to Keep It Secret

  Many of the reports revolve around the unreasonable demands imposed on the marksmen, the monotony of the work, in which the firing squads had to be relieved every few hours “because of overexertion,” and the special challenges of this type of piecework. The shooting of small children was seen as problematic, not for ethical reasons but because they wouldn’t stand as still as the adults did.

  Many Wehrmacht soldiers became witnesses to the Holocaust because they happened to be present or were invited to take part in a mass shooting. In one cell conversation, army General Edwin Graf von Rothkirch und Trach talks about his time in the Polish town of Kutno:

  “I knew an SS leader pretty well, and we talked about this and that, and one day he said: ‘Listen, if you ever want to film one of these shootings? …I mean, it doesn’t really matter. These people are always shot in the morning. If you’re interested, we still have a few left over, and we could also shoot them in the afternoon if you like.”

  It takes some sense of routine to be able to make such an offer. The fact that the people involved did not try to keep their activities a secret demonstrates how much the perpetrators took for granted the “mass shootings of Jews,” as one of the POWs in Trent Park called it. In fact, something resembling execution tourism developed in the conquered territories. In addition to soldiers who were stationed nearby, local residents also came to witness the killings, sometimes even bringing along their children.

  Part 6: A Terrifying Social Experiment

  War is the most comprehensive social experiment people are capable of engaging in, when the circumstances to which they must conform change. It doesn’t even take an order or the special command structure of an army for people to be able to shoot at anything that moves. All it takes is for the benchmarks of what is considered appropriate and correct to change.

  Not everything can be blamed on the circumstances. Even under conditions of extreme violence, there are always individuals who defy the prevailing morality of the group. In most cases, and for good reason, it is outsiders who display the kind of behavior one would expect from people with a normal upbringing.

  In one of the best-documented cases of a war crime, the massacre in the Vietnamese village of My Lai by American GIs in March 1968, it was a helicopter pilot who kept his fellow soldiers from committing even more murders. It was only when Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson threatened to have his men shoot at their fellow GIs that they stopped their killing spree.

  The proportion of people in the Wehrmacht with a nature proclivity for violence or sadism was presumably about 5 percent, just as it is in all social groups. According to researchers, this is the percentage of the population whose sociopathic tendencies are kept in check during peacetime by the threat of punishment. From 1939 onwards, at the latest, the composition of the Wehrmacht reflected the average male population, that is, ordinary Germany.

  Not Perceived as Barbaric

  It is altogether astonishing, and depressing, to realize how quickly the Nazis’ concept of racial superiority could replace the ideas and norms of the democratic prewar period. Only six years passed between the 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws, which deprived all Jews of their rights of citizenship, and the subsequent deportation and extermination.

  The fact that the systematic persecution of a group that made up less than 1 percent of the German population was possible without any recognizable resistance is not evidence of the sudden immorality of mainstream society. On the contrary, this exclusion was only possible because the majority of the population did not perceive it as an act of barbarism. The persecuted group had long been perceived as no longer being a part of German society, so that their oppression was no longer seen as an issue that affected the morality of the national community, as Neitzel and Welzer argue in their book.

  “From 1941 onward, the same people who had reacted with skepticism to the Nazi takeover in 1933 watched the deportation trains departing from the Grunewald train station (in Berlin),” the authors write. “Quite a few of them had already bought ‘Aryanized’ (ed’s note: seized from Jews) kitchen fittings, living room furniture and artworks. Some ran businesses or lived in buildings that had been taken away from their Jewish owners. And they felt that this was completely normal.”

  Changing Morality

  Of course, what appears to us today as a colossal shift in social norms also applied to the Wehrmacht and its way of conducting the war. At any rate, there is much more evidence to support the assumption that most German soldiers felt they were fighting for a just cause than there is for the opposing assumption that they secretly questioned their actions.

  Even some members of the firing squads at the mass graves must have perceived their work there as the fulfillment of a “sacred obligation,” as it was dubbed in the emotionally charged language of the Nazis. The same sentiments were behind Heinrich Himmler’s famous words that the SS, which he commanded, could be proud, despite all criticism, of having “remained decent.” What seems like the height of cynicism to postwar generations is in fact an expression of the conviction of serving a higher morality. In this case, it was one that saw itself scientifically
legitimized in its murderous biological determinism.

  This is, as it were, the disturbing insight one reaches after reading the transcripts about killing and dying: The morality that shapes the actions of people is not rooted in the people themselves, but in the structures that surround them. If they change, everything is basically possible—even absolute evil.

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  Document ID: cdbd69d1-3d77-4841-9d3e-5a59fa236a4b

  Document version: 1

  Document creation date: 25 April 2012

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  http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,755385,00.html

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