Read Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying Online
Authors: Sonke Neitzel,Harald Welzer
Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (10 page)
The initially surprising discovery that not all German soldiers needed a phase of
brutalization is supported by the empirically recorded rise in violence against the
civilian population directly after Germany’s invasion of
Poland. Women were
raped, Jews harassed, and
businesses and private homes
plundered, much to the consternation of the German
military leadership, which issued a number of largely unsuccessful new regulations on conduct.
92
For example, on October 25, 1939, less than two months after the
start of World War II, the commander in chief of the army, General
Walter von Brauchitsch, threatened “all those officers who continue to disobey orders and enrich themselves” with dishonorable discharge. “The achievements and success of the
Polish campaign,” he wrote,
cannot blind us to the fact that a part of our officer corps lacks a stable internal deportment. There are a considerable number of cases of officers illegally driving people from their homes, confiscating items without permission, enriching themselves by failing to report or stealing goods, mistreating or threatening their inferiors, partly in states of excitement and irresponsible drunkenness, failing to carry out orders with grave consequences for the troops under their command, and committing sexual offenses against married women. The image that results is that of a pack of marauding mercenaries who cannot be reprimanded sharply enough. Whether they are acting consciously or not, these officers are parasites who have no business in our ranks.
Despite this warning, however, Brauchitsch continued to see the need to issue further regulations aimed at maintaining “manly discipline” until the end of 1939.
93
The same things true of society at large were also true of the army.
People differ, and what for someone like Pohl might have been a source of pleasure could be alien, if not repulsive, to someone like
Meyer. Yet because both came from the same institution, the Luftwaffe, and found themselves in the same situation as prisoners of war, their social similarities outweighed their individual differences. Even if Meyer thought his comrade Pohl was a reprehensible swine, Meyer would have likely found Pohl’s anecdotes suitable subject matter for later conversations, along the lines of: “I was interned together with this guy who told of how much he enjoyed hunting down human beings …”
DVENTURE
German soldiers rarely used the
words “death” and “kill” in their conversation. That may seem surprising since killing is one of soldiers’ central duties and the production of dead enemies is a main result to be achieved. But precisely for this reason, death and killing were rarely subjects of discussion. Just as construction workers tend not to discuss bricks and mortar during their breaks, soldiers seldom talked about killing.
Killing others in battle was so commonplace that it hardly merited discussion. Moreover, except in cases like those of solo fighter pilots,
94
battle is a heteronomous undertaking that depends more on factors like group strength, equipment, the tactical situation, and the enemy than on the doings of any one individual soldier. Individual soldiers have little influence over whether they kill anyone and, if so, whom, or whether they themselves get killed. Anecdotes about that possess little amusement value and would have required soldiers to talk about emotions like
fear and desperation. It was taboo, within the masculine culture of the military, to admit that one had wet one’s pants, vomited in fear, or anything of the kind. Moreover, rehashing things that everyone knows and has experienced for himself (or at least claims to know and have experienced for himself) isn’t good conversation. In normal civilian society, one doesn’t discuss the minutiae of one’s daily work routine or describe the egg one ate for breakfast. A central criterion for a good story, one worth telling and hearing, is something extraordinary, be it especially irritating or welcome, witty, horrible, or heroic.
95
People spend very little time talking about normal everyday
life. Why should they? Things that were part of the normal lives of soldiers—including death, killing, and injuries—were background that was taken for granted and
seldom
discussed.
But commonplace routine was only one of the things the soldiers didn’t talk about. Another was emotions, especially those of fear or threat, uncertainty, desperation, or sheer concern for one’s own
survival. Such topics rarely crop up in the surveillance protocols, and previous research has shown that soldiers in general filter them out of their conversations.
96
Soldiers don’t like talking about death. It’s too real to them. Moreover, just as they only very rarely discuss the all-too-realistic possibility of being killed or wounded themselves, death as a general phenomenon or process seldom occurs in their conversations. In soldier-speak, people are mowed or shot down, drop out of sight, or are simply gone. Obviously, if soldiers were to imagine their own deaths they would have to imagine how they died, and the phenomenon of death, which many of them had experienced often, directly in front of their own eyes, would seem very near. Thus soldiers’ conversations about death and killing revolve around violence of all sorts without ever explicitly mentioning death or killing. Navy men, for instance, describe the success of their efforts in numbers of dead or tonnage of ships sunk. But they rarely speak of who or what it was that they sent to a watery grave.
Descriptions of killings like those related by
Lieutenant Pohl occur frequently in the protocols with similar frankness and a likewise matter-of-fact tone, although most of them are less detailed. Apparently, soldiers did not fear that their interlocutors would react with confusion, condemnation, or protest when they told of
gunning down others. We can likely put that down to the fact that the speakers under surveillance were all men with similar horizons of experience communicating in the same frame of reference. They were all members of the
German military and had all waged the same
war for the same reason. They didn’t need to explain to one another the whys and wherefores of things that readers of the protocols seventy years later might find puzzling. In fact, the character of their conversations is much like the sorts of chats people have at parties or occasions when people with similar experiences happen to come together. They swap stories, asking questions and interjecting remarks of their own. They exaggerate and are keen to show that they all belong to the same group, the same experiential community.
The topics of conversation among soldiers may be different, but the structure of their conversations isn’t.
Luftwaffe members tend to tell
hunting tales, not surprisingly, since many of them were fighter or bomber pilots tasked with destroying specific
targets like enemy
planes or ground installations. As of 1942, they were also charged with
spreading general
terror among civilian populations. The tales the men tell are
adventure stories that focus on their own flying skill and ability to produce destructive results. Here is one typical example:
F
ISCHER
: Quite recently I shot down a Boston, I put the rear-gunner out of action first, he had three
machine-guns, you could see him firing quite plainly, from the tracers from his machine-guns. I was in a “190” with two machine-guns. I pressed the button for a very short burst. He crumpled up—that’s all, not another shot, the barrels were sticking right up. Then I put a short burst into the starboard engine, which caught fire; I then turned my cannons on to the port engine. The pilot very probably got hit at that moment—I kept my thumb on the button the whole time—it went down in flames. There were twenty-five Spitfires after me; they had followed me inland as far as A
RRAS
.
K
OCHON
: Where did you land?
F
ISCHER
: On my own aerodrome. They had to turn back, as they couldn’t fly so far for lack of fuel. I then returned to S
T
. O
MER
. I shot down Bristol Blenheim in a similar manner. I first fired at the side of the tail unit, and the rear-gunner kept firing past us on either side. I swerved to the right and started to fire, and he fired at me like a madman. I swerved right over to the left, and as I was doing so I pressed the button and his cupola flew off, for in pressing the machine-gun button I pressed that of the cannon too. It was knocked to bits, and he was lying dead inside. I kept firing into the tail unit and the tail broke off, with bits of the fin, and the aircraft crashed.
97
Motorcyclists and
extreme-sports enthusiasts tell structurally similar tales. In the soldiers’ stories, those killed are mentioned simply by way of providing colorful detail. Victims never have personal attributes. Their role in the anecdotes of German airmen is much the same as that of enemies in
video games, particularly of the ego-shooter variety, a half century later. This comparison is hardly anachronistic. In both
air combat and video games, the process itself is more important than a clearly defined result. The airman/game player’s activity revolves around skill and reflexes, and the results are measured in “counts,” the number of various types of targets destroyed. A significant component of the reference frame here is competitive sports, coupled with a typical male fascination with
technology. The victim is insignificant either as an individual or part of a collective.
The complete absence of distinguishing details concerning targets makes it apparent that the storytellers aren’t concerned with whom they hit. The main thing is
that
they hit their targets, and that the stories they can tell about it afterward are entertaining:
B
IEBER
*: What kind of targets do you attack in the daytime?
K
ÜSTER
*: It all depends. There are two sorts of war-flight. First of all there are those pirate raids in which factories engaged in war industries and so on are attacked.
B
IEBER
: But always by single aircraft?
K
ÜSTER
: Yes. And then there are these nuisance raids when it doesn’t matter a damn whether you smash up a fishing village or a small town or something else of the sort. You are given some target or other: “You will attack such-and-such a town.” And if you don’t get it, you just drop your
bombs somewhere else.
B
IEBER
: Do you feel that these pirate raids and nuisance raids are worth while?
K
ÜSTER
: The pirate raids are. We made ours on
N
ORWICH
; it was great fun.
B
IEBER
: Do you mean you simply smashed up a town?
K
ÜSTER
: Yes. Actually we were to have attacked a certain factory, but …
B
IEBER
: Are you told exactly which factories—?
K
ÜSTER
: Yes.
B
IEBER
: What is there at N
ORWICH
?
K
ÜSTER
: There is an aircraft component parts factory there.
B
IEBER
: Oh, that was what you were supposed to attack?
K
ÜSTER
: Yes. We had flown over and all at once it began to rain; you could only see about 200 metres. Suddenly we were over the main railway station at N
ORWICH
; it was too late; we should have turned off to the left somewhat sooner. As it was we
should have had to bank steeply at an angle of 30º to 95º. There was no point in it, they would have known what we were after. So we flew straight on; the first thing I saw was a funny sort of factory building and I released my
bombs. The first bomb fell in that building and the others in the factory. That was in the morning at about 3 o’clock to 8-30.
B
IEBER
: Why didn’t you drop your bombs on the station?
K
ÜSTER
: We saw the station too late. We flew in from the east and the station is right at the approach to the town. We didn’t fire on the people at the station; there wouldn’t have been any point in it until we had got rid of our bombs. But afterwards we shot up the town; we fired at everything that was there, at cows and horses, it didn’t matter what. We fired at the trams and everything; it’s great fun. There was no A.A. there.
B
IEBER
: What happens, are you told about a target like that the day before?
K
ÜSTER
: The actual target is not announced beforehand at all. Everyone plans in advance what he is going to attack; whatever appeals to him. It’s left to the crew. And then when the weather is favourable in a given district, each crew is asked: “Have you any particular target?”
98
The listener in this excerpt from the protocols, Bieber, was a German stool pigeon working for British
intelligence. That is why he poses questions, ostensibly out of specialist interest, about the details of German air raids. The storyteller, Lance Corporal Küster, was a gunner on a German bomber. The anecdote is from January 1943.
The anecdote does not touch on a lot of details that might be of interest to civilians. Instead the questions that drive the dialogue between the two airmen are: why wasn’t the train station attacked, and when was the target set? The conversation produces entertaining insider-oriented stories structured around three aspects: an action, its execution, and the fun that was had. Questions like why was the mission flown and was it legally and morally justifiable play no role whatsoever. Nor do airmen discuss the dramatically changing strategic and operational framework of air combat.
From the perspective of Luftwaffe fighters, there was no difference between a raid against a military target in the strict sense, an attack intended to terrify civilians, or a bombing mission aimed at a group of partisans:
W
INKLER
: We had to deal with partisans down there, you can’t imagine it … suddenly retrained the torpedo pilots to use bombs, dive
bombing in the “88.” It was wonderful. But it wasn’t counted as a warflight.
W
UNSCH
: Not even as an operational flight?
W
INKLER
: No it was only a game. We always carried as many 10 kg.
fragmentation bombs as possible. The mission lasted 15 minutes and we took off repeatedly throughout the day, from dawn to dusk, we dived—swish—and dropped the bombs. Then we returned, reloaded, took off, dived and dropped our bombs again. It was fun.
W
UNSCH
: Had they no defenses?
W
INKLER
: Don’t say that, the fellows had AA guns … The CO carried 50 kg. bombs. The CO took off first, made a quick survey, “Aha, there’s a house with a few motor vehicles.” He’s a pilot himself,
ssst,
the old “88” dives at an angle of 80 degrees, he presses the little button, banks quickly and makes for home. PWs were brought in the next day by the SS and by a Cossack unit; we had a Cossack unit, and they landed paratroops in there too … everywhere swarming with partisans … fired every night with tommy guns. They took some prisoners and what do you think the CO had hit? A whole staff with nothing but high officers, including an English General who had been landed there just a few days before.
99
