Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (15 page)
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Authors: Sonke Neitzel,Harald Welzer
From June to September 1944, with the Allies on the offensive, Wehrmacht violence against civilians escalated even in France and
Belgium. The extent of German
war crimes reached a new dimension. So it’s hardly surprising that a number of stories which relate atrocities come from these three months:
B
ÜSING
: We had a
lieutenant L
ANDIG
(?), and one of our Oberjäger was shot by the French. How the old boy cursed!
J
ÄGER
*: That was where you were deployed?
B
ÜSING
: It was just a little while ago. We arrived, and the Oberjäger was shot by the partisans. The old boy said nothing, but his jaw was working. Then suddenly he said, “Destroy everything!” So we set out through the entire
village. The old boy says: “If you fellows leave a single one of them alive, I’ll kill [you] too.” We enter the village. Everyone was sleeping in the grey light of dawn. We knocked—nothing. We smashed in doors with the butts of our rifles. There were the women, with short shirts on, nightshirts or pyjamas. “Out, out!” we told them and had them line up in the middle of the street.
J
ÄGER
: Where was that?
B
ÜSING
: In
L
ISIEUX
—B
AYEUX
, up north.
J
ÄGER
: Right at the beginning of the invasion?
B
ÜSING
: Yes, of course. We mowed
down everything, everything. We dragged men, women and children from their beds. He knew no mercy.
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Jäger was likely a stool pigeon for MI19, but
Private First Class Büsing, a paratrooper, seems to have had no idea of this and freely answered his questions. In his own eyes, Büsing’s experiences were so commonplace that he doesn’t think of holding anything back. As far as he’s concerned, his story,
brutal as it is, falls clearly within the bounds of what was to be expected. Indeed, German POWs who listened to similar anecdotes were neither shocked nor revolted. The fact that the POWs could remain absolutely unemotional while relating the acts of violence they perpetrated speaks volumes about the violent nature
of the world they inhabited. Soldiers were intimately familiar with crimes of all sorts.
Not even stories about killing women and children elicit emotion. A second paratrooper related:
E
NZIEL
:
Oberjäger M
ÜLLER
from B
ERLIN
was a sniper, he shot the women who went to meet the English soldiers with bunches of flowers, but he … exactly … found something like that, he took aim and shot civilians in completely cold blood.
H
EUER
*: Did you shoot women too?
E
NZIEL
: Only from a distance. They didn’t know where the shot came from.
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We have no way of knowing where the difference resided between the “cold-blooded” actions of the sniper Müller and Enziel’s long-range
gunning down of women, but he apparently thought it was significant. Heuer was another British spy, which is why he tries to tease out information about
war crimes with his questions.
Like Enziel and Private First Class Müller,
Private First Class Sommer also built a reference person, his first lieutenant, into his narrative:
S
OMMER
(re his “Oberleutnant”): In I
TALY
too, wherever we arrived, he always said: “Let’s first bump a few people off!” I know
Italian too and always had to carry out the special tasks. He said: “First of all we’ll kill twenty men in order to have peace here, to prevent them getting ideas!” (Laughter.) Then we put up a little notice saying: “At the least signs of stubbornness fifty more will be killed!”
B
ENDER
: From what point of view did he pick then, just at random?
S
OMMER
: Yes, just twenty men like that: “Just come here.” They were all taken to the market-place and someone appeared with three MG’s—rrrr—and there they lay. That’s how it was done. Then he said: “Excellent! The swine!” You can’t imagine how he loathed the Italians. There were a few pretty girls in the district where the “Bataillionsstab” was quartered. He didn’t touch any civilians
there
. He never hurt anyone where he lived, on principle.
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Their shared laughter indicates that neither Sommer nor Bender saw anything fundamentally immoral about the deeds related in Sommer’s story. Bender’s reaction was hardly surprising. He was a member of the navy
Special Commando 40, a unit whose whole identity was based on a cult of macho
toughness.
One interesting detail in this anecdote is the fact that the commanding officer did not want any
war crimes committed in the immediate area in which he was quartered. Apparently, he did not want to jeopardize the chance for sexual encounters with local women by behaving brutally toward civilians. Sommer continues his story with an episode that happened in France:
S
OMMER
: The Oberleutnant says: “Go get me all the civilians together.” It was armored reconnaissance. “The Americans will be here in no time,” he said. “It’s going to be a circus anyway. So I’m going to organize this thing. Here you make two groups. All the civilians have to be brought here in two groups.” Imagine collecting a small city of 5000 to 10,000 inhabitants! It was on the main road to Verdun. So here comes the entire population. They drove them out of their cellars. None of them were partisans or terrorists. The old boy says to me: “Kill the men. Every one, no matter what.” There were at least 300 of them. I searched four of them and said “Raise your hands. Anyone who doesn’t, gets shot.” On two of them, kids around 18 or 19, I found some ammo, packs of it. I say: “Where’d you get that?” “It’s a souvenir.” “Three packs per man?” I say. I separated them out and—teng, teng, teng—three shots and they dropped to the ground. The others were taken aback. I say: “You’ve seen that we didn’t act unfairly. They had ammunition. What are civilians doing with three packs of ammunition?” Always so that I had cover. They admitted everything. Maybe … they said “You swine” and such, but I said: “Thank you. That’s the reason people are getting shot now. We have to protect ourselves. If I let them go with ammunition, and they know where more of it is, then they might kill me. Before I let them shoot me, I’ll shoot them and have the others searched. It’s good that you don’t have any ammunition. You can now leave with your women. Go down there three kilometers.” They were satisfied and left. I never asked to take part. I’ve done every kind of shit, but never because I said: “I want to!” Not me.
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Sommer’s unit,
Panzergrenadierregiment 29, had previously been involved in a number of
crimes in Italy. The French story refers to atrocities committed in the
Robert Espagne region of
Lorraine. There, on August 29, 1944, Sommer’s unit murdered eighty-six French civilians.
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Sommer adopts a position of distance to the events he recounts in two respects. In contrast to his first lieutenant, he tries to find a legitimate reason for the execution of civilians, arriving at the fact that they had ammunition on them. This attempt at legitimation is directed both externally and internally. Apparently, Sommer felt the need to justify what he did, assuring himself that his actions did not amount to mere murder. Moreover, he stresses that he did not act of his own free will. He may have participated in every sort of “shit,” but he didn’t volunteer to do so. This recalls the sort of differentiation we found in
Müller’s story. Among those who committed crimes, there were more and less willing executioners, and most of the perpetrators wanted to be seen as part of the latter category.
An anecdote told by
Sergeant Gromoll contains an example of
legalistic justifications for violence:
G
ROMOLL
: We once captured four
terrorists in F
RANCE
. They are first taken to an interrogation camp where they are asked where they got their arms from etc., and then they are shot quite indiscriminately. A woman came along who said that terrorists had probably been lying hidden in a
house for ten days. We immediately got a troop ready and rushed off there—it was correct, there were four men in the house. They were playing cards and so on. We arrested them because they were presumably terrorists. You can’t just shoot them in the middle of a game of cards. Then they looked for arms and they were in the canal, I believe. They had thrown them into the canal.
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We can no longer reconstruct the exact details of this incident. But Gromoll’s story suggests that German soldiers did not need to find any
weapons to conclude that what could have been ordinary card players were terrorists. They could have thrown their weapons in the canal, the logic runs. Legalistic reasoning of this sort suggests that, for some soldiers, it was important to justify killings in terms of a formal structure, a framework that would legitimate their actions, even if those actions really amount to little more than indiscriminate murder.
There was a similar unwritten rule among U.S. troops
in
Vietnam: “If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s a Vietcong.” Private First Class
Diekmann tells a story in precisely this mode about a series of executions carried out in France after the
Allied invasion of Normandy:
B
RUNE
(referring to first days after invasion): Why did the
terrorists attack your position?
D
IEKMANN
: They wanted to interfere with our instruments; that was their task. We captured several terrorists alive and killed them on the spot. Those were our orders.
I myself once shot a French Major.
B
RUNE
: How did you know that he was a Major?
D
IEKMANN
: He had papers. There was
shooting during the night. He came along on a bicycle. Our people were still firing into the
houses down in the village with MGs. The whole village was full of them.
B
RUNE
: Did you stop him?
D
IEKMANN
: There were two of us, including an “Unteroffizier.” He got off his bicycle and we searched his pockets immediately and found some
ammunition, which was enough for us. Otherwise I couldn’t have done anything to him; you can’t simply shoot a man for nothing. The “Unteroffizier” asked him whether he was a terrorist, but he didn’t say anything. Then he asked him whether he had any last request—nothing. Then I shot him from behind through the head. He was dead before he knew.
We once shot a woman spy at our position too. She was about twenty-seven years old. She used to work for us in the kitchen.
B
RUNE
: Was she from the village?
D
IEKMANN
: Not actually from the village, but she had been living there latterly. The infantry brought her in in the morning, and in the afternoon they stood her up
against the Bunker and shot her. She confessed that she was working for the British Secret Service.
B
RUNE
: Who gave the order, your Chief?
D
IEKMANN
: Yes, he could do that as CO. I didn’t take part in the execution myself; I only watched it.
Once we caught thirty terrorists, there were women and children among them. We put them into a cellar.… Stood them against the wall and shot them.
157
In Diekmann’s narrative, the killing of the French major requires a
legalistic justification, his carrying
ammunition. That identifies the officer as a terrorist. Notably, Diekmann also does not hesitate to include children among the “terrorists” who are placed
against a wall and shot.
Fantastic delusions about what sorts of people might belong to the enemy are by no means unique to German soldiers. Similar incidents have been documented among U.S. troops
in
Vietnam, who sometimes even claimed babies were
members of the
Vietcong. This is not a sign of insanity. It marks the shifting of a frame of reference so that group membership is more important than all other
defining characteristics, including age, in determining who the enemy is.
Joanna Bourke, a scholar who has studied soldiers’ perceptions of killing in various wars, has argued that such skewed frames of reference do not prove that soldiers personally enjoyed murder. Instead, Bourke suggests, the cold-blooded killing of people categorically defined as belonging to the enemy is part of the normal, everyday practice of warfare.
158
Paradoxically, though, when such killings are subjected to legal scrutiny, they are treated as exceptions to the rule. The misconception thus arises that, by and large, war adheres to international law, and violations of that law are the deeds of rogue individuals.
Autotelic violence, so the logic goes, is not a systematic aspect of war, but a regrettable deviation. But the surveillance protocols show that once the floodgates of violence are opened,
anything
can provide an impetus and justification for soldiers to start shooting.
RIMES
A
GAINST
POW
S
“What shall we do with all these men? We must shoot them, they won’t last long anyway.”
159
Ever since antiquity, the mistreatment and
murder of prisoners has been an example of extreme wartime violence. But with the mass armies of the modern age, the phenomenon of the POW took on entirely new dimensions.
In World War I, there were some 6 to 8 million POWs.
160
In World War II, that
number was 30 million.
It was always difficult to feed and house millions of prisoners adequately. Even in World War I, some 472,000 Central Powers soldiers died in Russia.
161
Those numbers increased dramatically in World
War II, and the gravest
crime of the Wehrmacht was the mass
murder of
Soviet
POWs. Of the 5.3 to 5.7 million
Red Army soldiers captured by the Wehrmacht, some 2.5 to 3.3 million died. The estimates vary, but the percentage
of
Soviet POWs who died in
German custody is somewhere between 45 and 57 percent. Most perished in camps for which the Wehrmacht was responsible: 845,000 in
military-administered territory near the front lines, 1.2 million in civilian-administered areas further back from the fighting, 500,000 in the so-called
General Gouvernement of Poland, and 360,000 to 400,000 in camps located within the German Reich proper.
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