Read Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying Online
Authors: Sonke Neitzel,Harald Welzer
Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (14 page)
Rules concerning retaliatory measures were even more problematic and contradictory. Article 50 of the Hague Convention allowed collective punitive measures against a
civilian population if a connection between partisans and their general environment could be proven. This rule was open to widely divergent interpretation. In the legal discussion of the interbellum years, no international consensus emerged, and the
taking
of hostages was deemed legitimate everywhere but in France. Opinions differed on whether they could be killed, with German military lawyers taking the hard-line position that the continued existence of “an arena of battle” justified such measures of retribution. This disagreement appeared one last time in the
war crimes
trials after
World War II. The judges in
Nuremberg ruled that the main defendants had acted illegally in ordering the killing of hostages, but in subsequent trials, defendants were deemed to have acted within the scope of the law. Convictions in the latter cases were based solely on the excessive ratios (1 to 100) German occupiers had applied when executing hostages.
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Even the pre-Nazi
Reichswehr believed that partisans had to be combated with extreme force. A potential wildfire, so the logic ran, needed to be extinguished at the first spark. And although this approach proved ineffective, in some regions the German struggle to put down resistance movements led to an unprecedented spiral of violence. Before long the killing of hostages and innocent victims, and the razing of whole
villages, was part of everyday routine. This did not differ dramatically from practices maintained in the
Napoleonic Wars or World War I. What was new were the dimensions. The rigor with which German occupiers pursued alleged partisans was one reason that 60 percent of the casualties in World War II, an unprecedented proportion, were civilians. Distinctions between military combatants as legitimate targets of attack and civilian noncombatants, who should have been protected, basically dissolved.
The surveillance protocols offer a number of paradigm examples of how Wehrmacht soldiers viewed the war against partisans, and they
show that German
military leaders and their troops basically saw eye-to-eye. Drastic measures were justified by
psychological deterrence:
G
ERICKE
: In R
USSIA
last year a small German detachment was sent to a
village on some job or other. The village was in the area occupied by the Germans. The detachment was ambushed in the village and every man was killed. As a result a strafing party was sent out. There were fifty men in the village; forty-nine of them were shot and the fiftieth was hounded through the neighbourhood so that he should spread abroad what happens to the populations if a German soldier is attacked.
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Franz Kneipp and
Eberhard Kehrle also related how German occupiers answered attacks with
brutal forms of violence. They saw nothing unethical about this. On the contrary, they both felt that partisans deserved to die horrible deaths:
K
NEIPP
: There was a lot going on there.
Oberst Hoppe …
K
EHRLE
: Hoppe is well known. He has a
Knight’s Cross?
K
NEIPP
: Yes, he took S
CHLÜSSELBERG
. He issued the commands. “As you to us, we to you,” he said. They were supposed to confess who had hung Germans to death. Just a hint, and everything would be all right. None of them said even that they didn’t know anything. Then it was, “All men, exit to the left.” They were driven into the woods, and you heard brr, brr.
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K
EHRLE
: In the
Caucasus, with the
1. GD [Mountain Division], when one of us had been killed, no lieutenant needed to give any orders. It was: pistols drawn, and women, children, everything they saw …
K
NEIPP
: With us, a group of partisans attacked a transport of wounded soldiers and killed them all. A half-an-hour later they were caught, near N
OVGOROD
. They were thrown in a sandpit, and it started from all sides with MGs and pistols.
K
EHRLE
: They should be killed slowly, not shot. The
Cossacks were great at fighting partisans. I saw that in the Southern Division.
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Interestingly, Kehrle and Kneipp had diametrically opposed attitudes toward the military in general. Kehrle found the primitive life of the army “idiocy” and “absolute shit,” while for Kneipp it was a form of
“education.”
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Yet despite that, and the inherent differences between a radio operator and an
SS infantryman, they completely agreed on the methods needed to deal with partisan warfare.
The practical rules of warfare often established norms deviating from
international law. That is why the POWs spoke of
war crimes in matter-of-fact terms and rarely showed signs of outrage. What offended them most was the behavior of
occupied local populaces. The soldiers thought it was essential to take action against any and every form of noncooperation. Such
attitudes prevailed as early as October 1940, as illustrated in this exchange:
U
RBICH
: But there one sees how the
Gestapo takes up every little thing. Especially how it is working in P
OLAND
now.
H
ARRER
*: In
N
ORWAY
too. In N
ORWAY
they have had a lot of work recently.
S
TEINHAUSER
: Really?
H
ARRER
: Yes, someone told me … (int.)
U
RBICH
: Killed a number of Norwegian officers …
H
ARRER
: I’m certain that even when we have actually occupied E
NGLAND
we shall not be able to walk about (unmolested) as in F
RANCE
.
S
TEINHAUSER
: I don’t think so. There will be the first attempts. But when every tenth man in a town is executed it will soon stop. That is no problem at all, A
DOLF
will use all means to nip any franc-tireur activity in the bud. Do you know how they work in P
OLAND
? If only one shot is fired there is trouble. Then the procedure is as follows: From whatever town or district of a town shots have been fired all the men are called out. For every shot fired during the following night, in fact during the following period, one man is executed.
H
ARRER
: Splendid!
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Reflections about the rectitude or proportionality of such forms of extreme violence against
civilian populations do not occur in the POWs’ conversations. The soldiers do not think to question their behavior. Their task is to take care of the necessities: “work,” “extreme measures,” and “retribution.” They focus on achieving results, not finding reasons.
Stories about war crimes were part of soldiers’ everyday communication
with one another in the same way that tales of shooting down planes and sinking ships were. In and of themselves, atrocities were nothing unusual. Only unusual actions or individual forms of behavior merited telling. One example focused on the
mass executions carried out after SS leader
Reinhard Heydrich was
assassinated in Poland:
K
AMMBERGER
: In Poland the soldiers were excused from duty so they could attend the executions, which were public. After the H
EYDRICH
affair twenty-five to fifty people were executed daily. They stood on a stool and had to put their heads through a noose, and the one behind had to kick the stool away, with the words: “You don’t need that stool, brother.”
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The appeal of this story for the soldier in question rested not in the killings themselves, but in how they were staged. Soldiers were given time off so they could witness the
spectacles, and the executions were accompanied by a ritual of
humiliation designed especially for the occasion.
Together with tales revolving around unusual acts of violence, stories concerning individuals who distinguished themselves in some way or another also made for good telling. One example is an anecdote related by
Private First Class Müller:
M
ÜLLER
: In a
village in R
USSIA
there were partisans, and we obviously had to raze the village to the ground, without considering the losses. We had one man named
B
ROSICKE
, who came from B
ERLIN
; if he saw anyone in the village, he took him behind the
house and shot him, and with it all the fellow was only nineteen and a half or twenty years old. The order was given that every tenth man in the village was to be shot. “To hell with that! Every tenth man. It is perfectly obvious,” said the fellow, “that the whole village must be wiped out.” We filled beer bottles with petrol and put them on the table and, as we were going out, we just threw hand grenades behind it. Immediately everything was
burning merrily—all roofs were thatched. The women and children and everyone were shot down; only a few of them were partisans. I never took part in the shooting unless I was sure that they were proved to be partisans; but there were a lot of fellows who took a delight in it.
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At the end of his story, Müller distances himself from the action by claiming he never fired a shot at innocents. But he still offers a detailed description, in the first-person plural, of how his unit burned down Russian
houses. Stories like this illustrate what the soldiers regarded as
crimes and what not, and how porous the boundary was between the two. Müller considered executing women and children a crime insofar as it was unclear whether they truly were partisans.
Burning down a village, on the other hand, was not.
Müller also conspicuously includes a figure in his story,
Brosicke, from whom he can positively distinguish himself. Brosicke’s behavior, in Müller’s telling, is unambiguously criminal, as is that of those for whom killing was
fun. Müller’s own behavior, by contrast, is not criminal. This is a typical and significant element in the protocols. By differentiating himself from others, the typical storyteller was able to find a space within a larger criminal endeavor in which he himself could not be accused of behaving immorally. Yet as we have already observed in the various different groups that took part in the
mass executions and other anti-Jewish initiatives, individual interpretations of one’s own
role and
duties ultimately helped the killing as a whole to proceed smoothly.
148
Individual
attitudes and
decisions are not usually overridden by “group pressure” and social influence in the way some
sociologists would have us believe. On the contrary, internal differentiation within a group makes it capable of acting as a whole. To adapt a phrase coined by German scholar
Herbert Jäger, what we have here is a case of individual action in collective states of emergency.
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One good example of this phenomenon occurs in a detailed description by a Private First Class
Franz Diekmann about how he combated “
terrorists” in France:
D
IEKMANN
: I have a lot of terrorists on my conscience, but not so many English soldiers, only one tank commander, a lieutenant or something, whom I shot in his tank when he was opening the cover to have a look out of sheer curiosity. Otherwise, of course, I can’t remember what happened in battle, but I went for the terrorists like mad. If I saw one, whom I suspected, I let fly at him immediately. When I saw a comrade of mine bleeding to death, whom they had treacherously shot, I swore to myself: “Just you wait!” At
H
ILAY
, on the way back, I was marching gaily along the street, with them, we didn’t suspect anything,
when a civilian came along, drew a pistol out of his pocket, fired and my mate collapsed.
H
AASE
: Did you get him?
D
IEKMANN
: Not a hope! By the time we realised that things were in such a state in
B
ELGIUM
, before the English had even arrived, he had already half bled to death; all I could do was to close his eyes. He just said: “F
RANZ
, avenge me!” The “Kompanie” came after us and requisitioned lorries. My MG was mounted on one—I had the
MG 42—front, right at the top, and we fired into the windows. First of all I gave the order: “Close all windows, everyone must leave the street.” We didn’t give them time for that. The “Hauptfeldwebel” said: “Wait, don’t shoot yet, they’re not ready yet!” But he hadn’t finished saying this before I pressed the trigger and the MG began rattling away. We covered the windows and anything which showed in the street. I kept on firing across the streets, you know, right into all the side streets. Of course a number of innocent people were killed, but I didn’t give a damn for that. Those dirty dogs, to kill an old, married man so treacherously, who had about four or five children at home. You couldn’t show any consideration after that, it was out of the question. We would have set all the
houses on fire if another shot had been fired.
We fired MGs into the midst of thirty Belgian
women. They wanted to raid the German supply dump. But they were chased away in no uncertain manner.
H
AASE
: They ran away then, did they?
D
IEKMANN
: No, they were all dead.
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One could almost imagine Diekmann as one of the “many pals” from Müller’s story, who had “lots of
fun” killing, but the two men were describing entirely different situations. What stands out from Diekmann’s story is the personal
motivation he ascribes to his deeds: the desire to exact
revenge for a fallen comrade. Despite the sympathy he shows for the four or five children of that comrade, he doesn’t transfer that
empathy to his victims, whom he executes completely at random. We do not know which anti-partisan operation Diekmann is referring to here, but it was common for German soldiers to “go wild” and indiscriminately shoot people after a lone incident in which one of them had been killed. On the other hand, the POWs don’t always mention
motivations and rationale when they tell stories like these. Their common horizon of experience makes that unnecessary. The detail of the fallen comrade could just be a narrative element Diekmann chose to make his story seem more interesting and well rounded.
