Read Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying Online
Authors: Sonke Neitzel,Harald Welzer
Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (17 page)
The mass
starvation of Russian
POWs was the result of the absence of adequate measures to feed them. It began in the summer of 1941 and reached its high point that winter, before relenting somewhat in the spring of 1942. By that time some two million Red Army soldiers were dead.
German
policies toward POWs changed as the German
wartime economy began to suffer from a labor
shortage, and the German leadership recognized the instrumental value of people it would have preferred to let starve. Nonetheless, the Wehrmacht brass never fundamentally changed their policy, even if isolated individuals did fight for POWs’ lives and protested, however unsuccessfully, against their abysmal treatment.
177
Reports of the horrible conditions in POW camps occur even more often than recollections of executions in the surveillance protocols. The mass deaths of tens of thousands of people were apparently something remarkable even to hardened veterans of the
Eastern Front. A soldier named
Freitag recalled:
There were 50,000 Russian Ps./W in the citadel in
T
EMPLIN
(?). It was crammed full—they could just stand—they could hardly sit down, the place was so full. When we arrived at T
EMPLIN
(?) in November, there were still 8,000 there, the others were already under the ground. At that time there was an outbreak of
typhus (Flecktyphus). A sentry said to us: “We’ve got
typhus in the
camp, it’ll last another fortnight, and then the Russian prisoners will all be dead and the Poles too and the Jews.” As soon as they noticed that somebody had typhus, they at once cleared the whole place out.
178
Soviet prisoners of
war en route to a
POW camp, July 1942. Southern section of
Eastern Front. (Photographer: Friedrich Gehrmann; BA 183-B27 116)
Many German soldiers seemed to have been aware of the dimensions of a conflict in which millions of POWs were dying. For example,
Freitag, a Luftwaffe sergeant, remarked in June 1942: “In any case we had taken 3½ million prisoners, up to Christmas. And then there were certainly as many, if not more, killed, ‘as many more again’ said the communiqué. And if as many as a million of the prisoners survived the winter, that’s a lot.”
179
First Lieutenant Verbeek of
Artillery Regiment 272 expressed his outrage to a comrade: “Do you know how many
Russian PW died in G
ERMANY
in the winter of 1941/42? Two million actually died, they didn’t get anything to eat. Offal was brought from the slaughter-house to the camp for them to eat.”
180
The
racist belief in innate
German
superiority that prevailed among the
Eastern Army no doubt encouraged soldiers to liquidate
Soviet prisoners, “mow down” enemies in battle, and carry out mass executions in
revenge for
assassinations. German soldiers’ proclivities toward violence were promoted by a mentality that saw the Russians as “an
inferior people,”
181
indeed “animals”
182
and “members of a foreign race, Asians.”
183
Nonetheless, the tales of mass death in the
POW camps were by no means completely free of
empathy, be it only as an undertone that the treatment of prisoners was unjust and cruel.
The propagandistic picture of the bestial
Red Army soldier incited by Jews and
Bolsheviks gradually gave way to a more multifaceted view that included respect for
Russian soldiers’ military performance. Living in the country probably also altered occupying German soldiers’ perspectives on Russian culture and the lifestyles of a populace that had to deal with a relatively rough climate. German soldiers’ perceptions of Russians became more differentiated and positive. Moreover, some one million Russians also fought alongside the Wehrmacht as volunteers—a fact that must have revised many Germans’ opinions of what “the Russian” was like.
184
On the other hand, some soldiers in
British
POW camps felt that Russian prisoners had been treated
too
humanely. Lieutenant General
Maximilian Siry, for instance, opined on May 6, 1945:
S
IRY
: One mustn’t admit it openly, but we were far too soft. All these horrors have landed us in the soup now. But if we’d carried them through to the hilt, made the people disappear
completely
—no-one would say a thing. These
half
measures are always wrong.
In the East I suggested once to the “Korps”—thousands of PW were coming back, without anyone guarding them, because there were no people there to do it. It went quite well in F
RANCE
, because the Frenchman is so degenerate that if you said to him: “You will report to the PW collecting point in the rear” the stupid idiot really did go along there. But in R
USSIA
there was a space of 50–80 km., that is to say a 2 to 3 days’ march, between the armoured spearheads and the following close formations.
No Russians went to the rear, where they could live all right. So I said: “That’s no good, we must simply cut off one of their legs, or break a leg, or the right forearm, so that they won’t be able to fight in the next four weeks and so that we can round them up.” There was an outcry when I said one must simply smash their legs with a club. At the time, of course, I didn’t really condone it either, but now I think it’s quite right. We’ve seen that we cannot conduct a war because we’re not
hard
enough, not barbaric enough. The Russians are that all right.
185
NNIHILATION
“The F
ÜHRER
has handed us a great deal abroad by his treatment of the
Jewish question. That showed a great lack of tact. You will see that when history comes to be written, the F
ÜHRER
will not get off without blame in spite of his great achievements.”
“Yes, but that’s inevitable. Every individual makes mistakes.”
186
From 1995 to 1999, an exhibition titled
“Crimes of the
Wehrmacht” sparked one of the most intense historical debates in postwar German society. Compiled by the
Hamburg Institute for Social Research, this collection of documentary material about
war crimes committed by the German army and its complicity in the
Holocaust toured museums throughout Germany, often to the dismay of older visitors, many of whom had themselves served in the armed forces during the Third Reich. The exhibit is widely regarded as having marked the end of the myth of the “clean” Wehrmacht. One striking thing to emerge from the debates was how vehemently
German veterans rejected any suggestion that the armed forces had been involved in the Holocaust. As the surveillance protocols show, this was not a case of either repression or denial. Many of the crimes we today consider part of the Nazi campaigns of
annihilation and the Holocaust were seen very differently in the 1940s, for instance, as a battle against partisans. The debates reflected the collision of two frames of reference, today’s versus that of the past.
The surveillance protocols reveal that many soldiers were astonishingly well aware of the specific details of the
extermination of European
Jews. Indeed, on occasion the POWs discuss aspects of the Holocaust
that have remained undiscovered by historical research. The soldiers generally do not draw connections between what they know and their own behavior, although it was no secret during World War II that the Wehrmacht had indeed committed a great number of
war crimes and was involved in the murder
of Jews throughout occupied Europe in a number of ways: as executioners, witnesses, accomplices, support workers, and commentators. On very rare occasions, individual Wehrmacht officers disrupted the mass killings by registering complaints, saving victims, or, in one unusually spectacular instance, threatening the SS with violence in order to hinder the murder of a group of Jews.
187
Naturally, such occasions were exceptions to the rule. Historian
Wolfram Wette has estimated that there were only one hundred
attempts at
rescuing Jews among the 17 million members of the Wehrmacht.
188
Lieutenant General
Maximilian Siry (BA 146–1980–079–67)
None of the large-scale executions such as
Babi Yar, where more than thirty thousand people were shot to death in two days, took place without Wehrmacht involvement. Moreover, the knowledge of the
mass executions in Russia and the smaller-scale ones that had preceded them in Poland went far beyond the circles that directly participated
in or witnessed those atrocities. The
spreading of
rumors is an effective means of communication, especially when the subject matter is inhuman,
secrecy is supposed to be maintained, and information is restricted. In the surveillance protocols, the topic of crimes
against humanity perpetrated upon
Jews only occurs explicitly in 0.2 percent of the conversations. But the absolute numbers are of limited relevance, especially since the concept of the
war crime played such a minor role in the soldiers’
frame of reference. The soldiers’ conversations make it clear that practically all German soldiers knew or suspected that Jews were being murdered en masse.
What’s surprising for contemporary readers is, above all, the way in which soldiers discussed crimes against humanity:
F
ELBERT
: Have you also known places from which the Jews have been removed?
K
ITTEL
: Yes.
F
ELBERT
: Was that carried out quite systematically?
K
ITTEL
: Yes.
F
ELBERT
:
Women and children—everybody?
K
ITTEL
: Everybody. Horrible!
F
ELBERT
: Were they loaded onto
trains?
K
ITTEL
: If only they had been loaded onto trains! The things I’ve experienced! I then sent a man along and said: “I order this to stop. I can’t stand it any longer.” For instance, in L
ATVIA
, near
D
VINSK
, there were mass executions of Jews carried out by the SS or Security Service.
189
There were about fifteen Security Service men and perhaps sixty
Latvians, who are known to be the most brutal, when I kept on hearing two salvoes followed by small arms fire. I got up and went out and asked: “What’s all this shooting?” The orderly said to me: “You ought to go over there, sir, you’ll see something.” I only went fairly near and that was enough for me. 300 men had been driven out of D
VINSK
; they dug a communal grave and then marched home. The next day along they came again—men, women and children—they were counted off and stripped naked; the executioners first laid all the clothes in one pile. Then twenty women had to take up their position—naked—on the edge of the trench, they were shot and fell down into it.
F
ELBERT
: How was it done?
K
ITTEL
: They faced the trench and then twenty Latvians came up behind and simply fired once through the back of their heads. There was a sort of stop in the trench, so that they stood rather lower than the Latvians, who stood up on the edge and simply shot them through the head, and they fell down forwards into the trench. After that came twenty men and they were killed by a salvo in just the same way. Someone gave the command and the twenty fell into the trench like ninepins. Then came the worst thing of all; I went away and said: “I’m going to do something about this.”
190
Lieutenant General Heinrich Kittel recounted these events on December 28, 1944. In 1941, he was a colonel in a reserve unit of the
Army Group North in
Daugavpils, Latvia, where some 14,000 Jews were shot to death between July and November. His own role in the executions has never been historically established. He himself spoke from the perspective of an outraged
observer, but as a high-ranking officer he would have had considerable opportunities to intervene in the course of events. Unlike ordinary soldiers, Kittel did not have to remain in the role of the passive spectator. He could have done something.
