Read Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying Online
Authors: Sonke Neitzel,Harald Welzer
Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (23 page)
A streetcar traveling through the
Warsaw
ghetto in 1941. (Photographer: Joe J. Heydecker; Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin)
Taumberger’s description of the labor camp is basically historically accurate. Kruse’s incredulity is apparently directed at the detail that inmates were used as guards, although that is open to interpretation. He could have been expressing doubt at the entire story or the role of the
capos, or he might simply have not wanted to hear anything,
although Taumberger responds by going into more detail about the capos. Strikingly, he stresses his own moral contempt for people he considers “Judases”—as though they were acting entirely of their own free will.
Postwar family reminiscences do feature occasional instances of Germans who seem to have unambiguously
rejected the murder
of Jews. An interviewee named Doetsch, for instance, recalled: “In
Lvov, I once saw a so-called Jew transport … Suddenly there was a lot of movement in the ranks. Up at the front, the SS were
beating people up. It was … the SS, and they’d gotten drunk. They lined them up in front of anti-tank trenches. The first had to take their place, then
machine gun fire, and down they went. The next ones had to push them into the trench before they themselves went down. They weren’t even dead. Dirt was shovelled. The next ones … can you imagine that? Women and children and old people. I knew exactly what was going on. Someone told me. ‘We had orders,’ he said, ‘but I couldn’t watch.’ Germans nailed children to the walls. They did
that
.”
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The protocols do not just contain descriptions of
mass executions, but of exterminations using
car exhaust fumes. A POW named
Rudolf Müller at Fort Hunt in the United States told the following story:
M
ÜLLER
: I was brought up in front of a military tribunal in Russia for refusing to obey orders. I was in charge of the motor pool, but the fellow who was supposed to be in charge had fallen, and I was the second highest ranked person in the garage. I was supposed to adapt a truck by installing rubber inserts. I didn’t know what for, so I did it. The truck was sent
out and placed at the disposal of the local command. That was the end of the matter for us. When the driver returned, he was pale as a ghost. I asked him what was wrong, and he said he would never forget what we had experienced that day. He said, ‘They loaded civilians into the back. Then they stuck a tailpipe back into the truck and sealed up the back. Next to me in the front sat a SS man with a pistol on his lap who ordered me to drive.’ He was only 18. What was he supposed to do? He drove off. After a half an hour, they arrived at a pit. The back was full of bodies with some chlorine between them. He reversed and opened the hatch, and they tumbled out. Dead from the exhaust fumes. The next day, I received orders to deliver the truck to the local
command. I said the truck wasn’t going anywhere. So I was brought up before a military tribunal for disobedience. They intentionally loaded in people and killed them with exhaust fumes.
R
EIMBOLD
: Dear God.
M
ÜLLER
: They forced the driver. There was a fellow with a pistol next to him. And they hauled me up on charges.
R
EIMBOLD
: And that’s happening in the name of Germany. No telling what’s going to happen to us.
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This dialogue is one of the scant bits of direct evidence we have of the gassing of Jews using carbon monoxide fumes. It is also unusual in that the narrator clearly abhors the events he describes—an
attitude he was forced to answer for in front of a military hearing. The listener also seems shocked. Apparently, he had previously heard nothing about these kinds of murder.
Let us summarize. German descriptions of all aspects of the Holocaust—from the
ghettos to the mass executions to the
extermination camps—not only characterized but judged the behavior of those involved. The same was also true for stories
about Jewish capos, even though they were not acting of their own free will. The trope of
“
blaming the victim”
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is well known from studies on the psychology of prejudice and functions by blotting out the circumstances under which people act, reducing behavior entirely to personality factors. This mechanism is active in all sorts of
prejudices against underprivileged or
discriminated groups, so it is hardly surprising that it should have played a role in a situation of such completely one-sided violence and extreme social stereotyping. It occurs in descriptions of how women were
raped or how those about to be executed behaved. Past experiences are narrated as though the storyteller were describing an experiment on lab animals, without mentioning the conditions under which the experiment was carried out.
This perspective, which completely ignored the conditions one side created in explaining the behavior of their victims, can be related back to a frame of reference in which “the Jews” belonged to a completely different social universe to the tellers of the stories.
Auschwitz commandant
Rudolf Höss, for instance, was excellently informed about the conditions under which his inmates died—he himself created them. Yet even Höss assumed this perspective in his recollections when he
spoke of so-called
special commandos—camp inmates forced to bring victims to the
gas chambers and take them back out again once they had died:
H
ÖSS
: Equally bizarre was the entire behavior of the special commandos. They all definitely knew that, after the action was over, they would suffer the same fate as the thousands of their racial comrades whose extermination they had aided. Yet they diligently participated, much to my amazement. Not only by never telling the victims about what was about to happen, but by offering them help in the removal of
clothes or by using violence against those who resisted. Then there was the leading away of those who didn’t remain calm and physical restraint during executions. They led the victims in such a way that the latter could not see the soldier standing ready with his weapon, so that the soldier could level it, unnoticed, at the back of their heads. They acted much the same with the ill and the feeble, who could not be brought to the gas chambers. Everything was done as a matter of course, as though they themselves were the executioners.
245
OLUNTARY
K
ILLERS
Let us move on now to two aspects of soldiers’ behavior that have thus far been largely ignored by the literature on the Nazi war of annihilation and the Holocaust. Wehrmacht soldiers from various units and of divergent ranks occasionally took part in mass executions, even though they were not ordered to and formally had little to do with “
Jewish actions.”
Daniel Goldhagen, writing about one of the few known cases of this sort, concluded that Germans in general were
motivated by a kind of exterminatory anti-Semitism. Goldhagen focused on a
Berlin police unit, consisting of musicians and performers, that was sent to the front to entertain troops in mid-November 1942. They asked the commander of a reserve police battalion in the German town of
Luckow if they could take a turn shooting Jews at an upcoming execution. Their request was granted, and the
entertainers spent the following day amusing themselves by murdering people. Holocaust historian
Christopher Browning also mentions this incident.
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But the question
remains: did the Germans in question need anti-Semitic motivation to find killing fellow human beings an entertaining pastime?
Their real motivation was probably a lot more trivial. The
police officers in question enjoyed doing things they would never have been allowed to under normal circumstances. They wanted to experience what it felt like to kill without fear of consequences, to exercise total power and do something extraordinary and monstrous, free from the possibility of any negative consequences. This is what
sociologist
Günther Anders has called the “chance for unpunished inhumanity.” For some people, senseless murder was apparently a temptation that could hardly be resisted. Violence of this nature needs neither a motive nor a reason. It is its own motivation.
The surveillance protocols also contain descriptions of how German soldiers took part in mass
executions, voluntarily or after having received an invitation to do so.
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These episodes, mind-boggling as they may be to us today, indicate that Nazi
genocide by no means took part in secrecy and was not always viewed with horror and disgust. On the contrary, curious onlookers—local people, Wehrmacht soldiers, and members of the civilian administration—regularly turned up at the execution pits, turning exterminations into a semipublic
spectacle with a high amusement value. In fact, in July 1941, Higher SS and Police Leader
Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski was forced to ban spectators at mass executions. His order read: “All male Jews between the ages of 17 and 45 who have been found guilty of
plundering are to be shot in accordance with military procedure. The executions will be carried out at a distance from cities, villages and roadways. Their
graves are to be leveled in such a fashion that they cannot serve as sites of remembrance. I expressly forbid
photographs or spectators. Executions and graves are not to be made public.”
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Nonetheless, people continued to flock to executions, taking photographs, probably delighting in the obscene spectacle of helpless, naked
women, and offering advice to and cheering on the shooters.
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The lure of a good show proved stronger than people’s fear of violating rules or disobeying commands. A
Major Rösler described “soldiers and civilians … pouring in from all directions” to witness one execution: “Police were running around in dirty uniforms. Soldiers, some clad only in bathing trunks, congregated in small groups. And civilians, among them women and
children, looked on.” At the conclusion of his report, Rösler declares that while he had experienced
no shortage of unpleasantness in his life, he had never seen anything like this sort of bloodbath carried out in public on what amounted to an open-air stage. Something of that nature, Rösler complained, ran contrary to German values and ideals.
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But no amount of commands and instructions, it seems, could put an end to the problem of
execution tourism. A conference of military administrators on May 8, 1942, decided that the murder commandos should make “amicable adjustments” and if possible carry out executions at night and not during daytime. But such measures had little effect.
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An SS man shoots a civilian in
Vinnitsa,
Ukraine, in 1942 in front of an audience. (Photographer unknown; Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin)
It is useless to
speculate about what may have attracted individual onlookers to defy the prohibitions and attend executions. Their motivations probably varied. Some probably sought out the thrill of witnessing a
spectacular and surreal event that would have never been allowed to happen in normal life. Others were likely drawn by
horror
and disgust, perhaps mixed with a feeling of satisfaction that one was exempt from the fate others were suffering. What is more significant in the present context is the sheer phenomenon of audiences witnessing the mass murders. People being
gunned down wholesale didn’t elicit the sort of repulsion that made people try to avoid witnessing it.
Voyeurism and satisfaction at observing others’ misfortune are well-documented psychological phenomena that also occur in contexts other than the Holocaust. This is probably also the explanation for the prominence of descriptions of
genocide in the surveillance protocols. If one could not witness an execution oneself, one could at least enjoy the vicarious thrill of a detailed description of what it was like.
A navy mechanic and POW named
Kammeyer watched an execution in summer 1941 in
Liepaja in today’s
Latvia, while he was deployed on the Baltic coast:
