Read Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying Online
Authors: Sonke Neitzel,Harald Welzer
Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (22 page)
This rare instance of inside access to the Holocaust not only allows us to hear a mass murderer in his own words. It also highlights the difficulties of organizing mass executions and the rewards and strategies used to overcome them. The assumption that, because of their experience with violence, all veteran frontline soldiers would be suitable for executions proved false. If Swoboda is to be believed, some of them lost their nerve when called upon to kill women. He even admits that in the beginning he himself had to steel himself, and that there were special rewards for carrying out this particularly tough form of duty.
Soldiers also mentioned cases in which the corpses of murdered Jews were exhumed and burnt. The operation took place under the command of SS Standartenführer
Paul Blobel in summer 1942 and was given the code name
“Action 1005.” In it, Jewish
concentration camp inmates were forced to dig up the
bodies and
burn them. In order to destroy the victims’ remains more efficiently, Blobel came up with special types of
bonfires and devices for
grinding up bones. The idea was to destroy evidence of the mass murders, but the
secret still got out:
M
ÜLLER
-R
IENZBURG
: At L
UBLIN
the fellows told us they were in a blue funk that the foreign powers would hit upon their
communal graves, so they dug out the corpses with dredgers. Near L
UBLIN
there’s another of those large burial grounds.
B
ASSUS
: German burial grounds?
M
ÜLLER
-R
IENZBURG
: Yes. It reeked of human flesh for weeks. Once they had to fly over there in an aircraft and they actually smelt the smell of burning in the
air.
B
ASSUS
: Was that near L
UBLIN
?
M
ÜLLER
-R
IENZBURG
: At some
concentration camp or other in P
OLAND
.
D
ETTE
: He (IO) said: “Do you know how many Poles have been shot? Two million.” That may be true.
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Other soldiers speaking on different occasions also discussed the details of the extermination of European Jews:
R
OTHKIRCH
: The
gas facilities were all in Poland near
L
EMBERG
.
230
There are large gas facilities there. I know that, but I don’t know anything else. Look here, gassing isn’t the worst thing.
R
AMCKE
: I’ve only heard of such things here in the
POW camp.
231
R
OTHKIRCH
: I’m an “Administration General” and the people here have already interrogated me. It was near
L
VOV
. Actually we washed our hands of it all because these atrocities took place in a military area. At L
VOV
in particular I was always receiving reports of these shootings and they were so bestial that I wouldn’t care to tell you about them.
R
AMCKE
: What happened?
R
OTHKIRCH
: To start with the people dug their own graves, then ten Jews took up their position by them and then the
firing squad arrived with
tommy-guns and shot them down, and they fell into the grave.
Then came the next lot and they, too, were paraded in front of them and then fell into the grave and the rest waited a bit until they were shot. Thousands of people were shot. Afterwards they gave that up and gassed them. Many of them weren’t dead and a layer of earth was shovelled on in between. They had packers there who packed the bodies in, because they fell in too soon. The SS did that, they were the people who packed the corpses in.
232
Children represented a particular problem at mass executions because they often didn’t follow instructions or die quickly enough.
233
The descriptions of the executions of children are among the most grisly events recorded in Holocaust literature and research. It is no wonder, therefore, that Edwin Graf von Rothkirch expresses his disgust.
At a somewhat later point in time, he continues his story with a further episode:
R
OTHKIRCH
: Yes; I was at
K
UTNO
,
234
I wanted to take some
photographs—that’s my only hobby—and I knew an SS-leader there quite well and I was talking to him about this and that when he said: “Would you like to photograph a
shooting?” I said: “No, the very idea is repugnant to me.” “Well, I mean, it makes no difference to us, they are always shot in the morning, but if you like we still have some and we can shoot them in the afternoon sometime.” You can’t imagine how these men have become completely brutalised.
235
This description shows how normal executions seemed to the perpetrators. The SS man’s offer to postpone the killings as a favor to a photographer speaks volumes not only about how routine executions had become but also about how openly they were carried out. In this case, no attempt seems to have been made to keep the mass murder secret.
Rothkirch, who talks in dramatic and detailed fashion about the various levels of the extermination process, sees this as a sign of brutalization. But it would again be a mistake to conclude that the speaker himself objects to the extermination of Jews per se:
R
OTHKIRCH
: Just think of it some of these Jews got away and will keep talking about it. And the craziest thing of all: how is it possible for pictures to get into the press? For there are pictures in this paper (Welt-woche?). They even filmed it and the films, of course, have got abroad; it always
leaks out somehow. At
L
VOV
, just like people catching fish with a net, ten SS men would walk along the street and simply grab any Jews who happened to be walking along. If you happened to look
Jewish, you were just added to their catch (laughs). Sometime the world will take
revenge for that. If those people, the Jews, come to the helm and take revenge, it will of course be terrible. But
I think it doubtful whether the enemy will permit them to get there, for most of the foreigners, the English, the French and the Americans, are also quite clever about the
Jews. It won’t be like that. They’ve allied themselves with the devil in order to beat us; just as we concluded that alliance with the
Bolsheviks for a time, they are doing the same thing. The important question is: which
ideology would gain the upper hand in the world? And whether they will trust us? One must now work to that end so that they will trust us and we must steer clear of everything which will arouse them afresh so that we first show them: “Friends, we want to cooperate in creating a sensible world.”
236
This statement is another bewildering conjunction of seeming contradictions, including
Rothkirch’s outrage at the way the executions are carried out, the laconic attitude of the executioner, and the arbitrary process by which victims are selected. Rothkirch’s anti-Semitism is also unusual. He is one of the few POWs to have spoken of “Jewish Bolshevism.” He is also someone who fears Jewish revenge. The frame of reference within which he argues, however, admits the possibility that Germans can regain the international trust they have lost and that Germans will be allowed to play a part in “creating a sensible world.”
We should resist the temptation to shake our heads at these astonishing disparities between perception, interpretation, and argumentation. What appears hopelessly contradictory today was not necessarily so six decades ago. People who supported anti-Semitic policies could
criticize how they were put into practice without any inherent contradiction. Indeed, they could even regard anti-Semitic practices as a mistake that would cause considerable trouble. Hostility toward Jews did not automatically mean that people wanted to be excluded from the circle of nations that would shape the world of the future. Rothkirch’s belief that anti-Jewish policies were implemented in the wrong way does not call into question the racist worldview that formed his frame of reference. Nor did it shake his faith that Germans should be full-fledged members, worthy of trust and equal in status to others, in world politics. Rothkirch’s views may appear, ex post facto, to be the products of hubris, naïveté, or sheer stupidity. But they reveal the contours of the frame of reference within which he acted at the time.
The dilemma is the same one that left many Germans, at least until the 1970s, unable to comprehend that what they had done or tolerated
in the
Third Reich could have been utterly wrong. This resulted from what we today might call an absolute incompatibility of the
frame of reference “Third Reich” with the political and normative standards that applied in
democratic,
post–World War II
Germany. This incompatibility is at the root of the frequent, heated debates and scandals surrounding the past in
post-Nazi German society.
237
Incompatibility also occurs in the protocol excerpt cited at the beginning of this section, in which a
German POW wonders how others could see Germans collectively as “swine,” when they were the people of Liszt or Wagner. In another dialogue, a low-ranking artillery officer and a foot soldier search for an explanation:
H
ÖLSCHER
: It’s very strange that they are always against us.
V
ON
B
ASTIAN
: Yes, it’s very, very strange.
H
ÖLSCHER
: As A
DOLF
said, it’s possibly all due to the Jews.
V
ON
B
ASTIAN
: Both E
NGLAND
and A
MERICA
are under the
influence of the Jews.
H
ÖLSCHER
: For instance, he now abuses A
MERICA
more than he does E
NGLAND
. He says A
MERICA
is the arch-enemy.
V
ON
B
ASTIAN
: Yes.
H
ÖLSCHER
: American high finance,
Jewish finance. Only after that does he speak
about E
NGLAND
.
238
Within the frame of reference of the Holocaust, beliefs about the negative traits and enormous influence of
Jews are so securely anchored that Jewish treachery can serve as an explanation for practically anything. That explains soldiers’ reflexive tendency to cite Jewish stereotypes, even in those anecdotes that begin with someone expressing a modicum of sympathy for the plight of Jews:
Q
UEISSER
: You could only go through the Jewish quarter by
tram. A
policeman always used to stand on the platform to see that nobody got off. Once the tram stopped and we looked to see what was happening and there was someone lying right across the lines.
W
OLF
: Dead?
Q
UEISSER
: Yes. They had thrown some fellow down in the road. Oh, I shouldn’t like to go through that Jewish quarter again. It was awful. The first time I was there I saw some nice looking
children running about with the
Jewish star on them—pretty girls among them. The soldiers did some lively
bargaining with the Jews. There were Jews working out by the aerodrome, too, they used to bring us gold goods and we gave them bread in return, only so that they could have something to eat.
239
Especially significant here is Queisser’s use of the phrase “lively bargaining” to describe Jews swapping gold for bread. Even if the narrator found it unpleasant to travel through the “Jewish quarter” (i.e., ghetto), he could not pass up the opportunity to engage in such a lucrative transaction himself. This excerpt provides further evidence of the structure of temporary
opportunities that opened themselves up to Wehrmacht soldiers in the course of German persecution and extermination of Jews.
Another story revolves around the role of so-called
capos in a
forced
labor camp. It is one of the few dialogues in which a listener expresses doubt as to what the narrator, in this case a pilot, is telling him:
240
T
AUMBERGER
: I myself once saw a column of people in a concentration-camp. I got off somewhere near
M
UNICH
(?) …
They are constructing something for the secret
weapons in the hills there; that’s where the new weapons are being produced. These people were employed for that purpose. I once saw them marching by. Those starving creatures in the S
OVIET
U
NION
are well fed by comparison. I spoke to someone who was supervising there. They were working inside a chain of sentries, working at a terrific pace, without a break, for twelve hours without stopping—then a twelve hours rest, but there was really no question of rest. They only had about five hours sleep in twenty-four hours. They were prisoners; they wore black caps. They were dashing about among them with clubs this size; they hit them over the head or on the back. They collapsed.
K
RUSE
: Dry up, old man!
T
AUMBERGER
: Don’t you believe me? I can give you my word of honour that I saw it myself—they were … prisoners who
beat each other up in that way. The supervisors with black caps got cigarettes. They also received full rations and
money, paper money. They never got silver money. They were able to buy some extras with that. In this way they were kept up to the
mark; they received bonuses. Each foreman was in charge of about forty or fifty prisoners. They were employed by firms; that’s to say they were working for certain firms. The more work that was done, the more piece-work, the more bonuses those Judases got. They therefore beat them up to make them work more. The pipes for the turbine-installations for the reservoir and the hydro-electric plant were fitted there. The supervisor and the bookkeeper had an agreement, stating that three pipes were to be built in daily. For that the supervisor received a certain bonus amount. He received still more money himself if, in two days time, he managed to get one pipe more than was agreed upon built in. I stopped there for about forty-eight hours before continuing my journey, I saw it all on that occasion.
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