because there is no entertainment value to be had in despair or fear of death. In the soldier’s world, admitting that one is not able to cope with an extreme situation is generally seen as evidence of weakness. Admittedly, that is no different with civilians, who are equally loath to confess, except perhaps to very close friends, that they were so afraid they almost wet their pants or had to vomit.
No Distinctions
Men love technology, a subject that enables them to quickly find common ground. Many of the conversations revolve around equipment, weapons, calibers and many variations on how the men “whacked,” “picked off” or “took out” other human beings.
The victim is merely the target, to be shot and destroyed—be it a ship, a building, a train or even a cyclist, a pedestrian or a woman pushing a baby carriage. Only in very few cases do the soldiers show remorse over the fate of innocent civilians, while empathy is almost completely absent from their conversations. “The victim in an empathic sense doesn’t appear in the accounts,” the authors conclude. Many of the bugged Wehrmacht soldiers also do not distinguish between civilian and military targets. In fact, just a short time after the beginning of the war, such distinctions did not exist except on paper. Following the attack on the Soviet Union, no distinctions were made at all.
Some soldiers are even particularly proud of having killed as many civilians as possible. In January 1945, Lieutenant Hans Hartigs of Fighter Wing 26 talks about a raid over England in which the goal was to “shoot at everything, just nothing military.” “We mowed down women and children in baby carriages,” the officer reports with satisfaction.
In March 1943, Solm, a seaman on a submarine, tells a cellmate how he “knocked off a children’s transport” in which more than 50 children drowned. The transport he mentions was most likely the British passenger ship
“Did they all drown?”
“Yes, they’re all dead.”
“How big was it?”
“6,000 tons.”
“How did you know that?”
“Via the radio.”
Lack of Moral Qualms
War does not eliminate the importance of moral categories, as one might expect, but it does alter their range of validity. This also applies to the battles of World War II. As long as the soldier operates within the limits he considers necessary, he perceives his actions as legitimate. This can easily encompass acts of extreme brutality. This is why the soldier seems to have no particular moral qualms about engaging in behavior that would trigger revulsion in times of peace.
When morality is not abrogated but merely suspended, rules continue to exist. Pilots who have been shot down and are still hanging from their parachutes were not legitimate targets, whereas the crews of wrecked tanks were given short shrift. Partisans were always shot on the spot, the logic being that anyone who ambushed one’s fellow soldiers deserved nothing better. Executing large numbers of women and children by firing squads was considered savage in the Wehrmacht, which doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen repeatedly.
In October 1944, radio operator Eberhard Kehrle and SS infantryman Franz Kneipp had a casual conversation about the practice of fighting partisans.
Kehrle: “In the Caucasus, when one of us got killed there was no need for any lieutenant to tell us what to do. We just pulled out our pistols and shot everything in sight, women, children, everything…”
Kneipp: “A partisan group once attacked a convoy carrying the wounded and killed everyone inside. We caught them half an hour later near Novgorod. We put them in a sandpit, and then everybody started firing at them with MGs (machine guns) and pistols.”
Kehrle: “They should be killed slowly, not shot.”
‘Let’s Kill 20 Men so We Can Have Some Peace and Quiet’
The story Lance Corporal Sommer tells about a lieutenant whom he served under on the Italian front shows how common it was to terrorize the civilian population:
Bender: “What criteria did he use to select them? Did he just pull them out at random?”
Sommer: “Yeah, 20 men, just like that. ‘Come here,’ he’d say. Then he’d line them up on the market square, pick up three MGs—rat-a-tat-tat—and there they were, dead. That was how it happened. Then he would say: ‘Great! Pigs!’ He hated the Italians so much, you wouldn’t believe it.”
Part 4: ‘We Threw Her Outside and Shot at Her’
Hardly anyone is immune to the temptations of “unpunished inhumanity,” as the philosopher Gunter Anders once aptly described unbridled terror. Where the door is opened to violence, even good family men quickly shed their inhibitions. Nevertheless, armies differ in their methods, as was the case in World War II.
The Red Army was hardly inferior to the Wehrmacht in terms of its propensity for violence. In fact, the pronounced culture of violence on both sides led to a disastrous radicalization of the war in the East. The Anglo- Saxon forces behaved in a far more civilized way, at least after the first phase of the fighting in Normandy, in which the Western allies also took no prisoners.
The way a body of soldiers proceeds in the regular use of violence is not dependent on the individual. Putting one’s faith in self-restraint would be to misunderstand the psychodynamics of armed conflicts. What is in fact critical is the expectation of discipline that comes from above.
War crimes occur in almost every prolonged armed conflict, as evidenced recently by the photos taken by an American “kill team” in Afghanistan, which shocked the public when the images were published two weeks ago.
