Not all the men took such occurrences for granted, however. “At the moment I am experiencing horrible days,” wrote Lieutenant A.B. of railroad construction company 115 in October 1942. “Every day 30 of my prisoners die, or I must allow them to be shot. It is certainly a picture of cruelty…. The prisoners, only partially clothed, partly without coats, could no longer get dry. The food is not sufficient, and so they collapse one after the other….When one sees what a human life really means, then an inner transformation in your own thinking happens. A bullet, a word, and a life is no more. What is a human life?” In the war in Russia, certainly, precious little.43
The burden of atrocity weighed even more heavily on other Landsers because of an inner recognition of the brutality of their own actions. “The world has seen many great, even violent wars,” despaired Kurt Vogeler, “but probably at no time in its existence has there been a war that can be compared with this current one in Eastern Europe…. The poor, unhappy Russian people! Its distress is unspeakable and its misery heart-rending…. This era… knows nothing more of humanity. Brutal power is the characteristic of our century…. What an unfortunate war is this human slaughter in Eastern Europe! A crime against humanity!” Similarly, Heinz Küchler shuddered at the brutality of the Russian war, where “all evidence of humanity appears to have disappeared in deed and in heart and in conscience.” In response to complaints from home about the destruction of German cities, Johannes Huebner tellingly replied from Russia, “Death is the wages of sin.” Harry Mielert shared the sentiment: “The quintessence appears to me to be that there is a punishment for a person…who does evil to others.” Private L.B. merely issued a stark warning. “None,” he wrote, “will remain unpunished by this war, each will get his just desert, in the homeland as at the front.”44
In the heat of battle, however, at the moment of wild release and furious excitement, some atrocities seemed almost natural acts. In a crisis of battle, the collapse of one side into fear and panic seemed to goad men to commit brutalities; sensing weakness and fear on the other side apparently provoked some into an enraged ruthlessness. Guy Sajer recalled that following a failed Russian attack in which a number of his comrades had been killed and mutilated,
the sound of firing and the groans of the wounded incited us to massacre the Russians…. An attacking army is always more enthusiastic than an army on the defensive….
Much later that night we witnessed a tragedy that froze my blood…. A prolonged and penetrating cry rose from the hole on my left…. Then there was a cry for help….
We arrived at the edge of a foxhole, where a Russian, who had just thrown down his revolver, was holding his hands in the air. At the bottom of the hole, two men were fighting. One of them, a Russian, was waving a large cutlass, holding a man from our group pinned beneath him. Two of us covered the Russian who had raised his hands, while a young Obergefreiter (corporal) jumped into the hole and struck the other Russian a blow on the back of his neck with a trenching tool…. The German who had been under him… ran up to ground level. He was covered with blood, brandishing the Russian knife with one hand… while with the other he tried to stop the flow of blood pouring from his wound.
“Where is he?” he shouted in a fury. “Where’s the other one?” In a few bounding steps he reached the… prisoner. Before anyone could do anything, he had run his knife into the belly of the petrified Russian.45
“It isn’t easy to kill a man in cold blood,” Sajer concluded on another occasion, after having shot a partisan face to face, “unless one is entirely heartless or, as I was, numb with fear.” Indeed, it almost seemed that acts of cruelty performed in the midst of personal fury were necessary for one’s own well-being, to purge the constant fear and “refresh” oneself psychologically. Atrocities often took place under conditions of severe physical and psychological strain. After three days of nearly continuous battle during which they had witnessed scenes of unimaginable horror and brutality and had had virtually no sleep, Sajer and his group “were so exhausted that we stood up only when our fire had subdued the isolated and hopeless resistance from some entrenched hole,” he recollected.
Sometimes one or two prisoners might emerge from their hideout with their hands in the air, and each time the same tragedy repeated itself. Kraus killed four of them on the lieutenant’s orders; the Sudeten two; Group 17, nine. Young Lindberg, who had been in a state of panic ever since the beginning of the offensive, and who had been either weeping in terror or laughing in hope, took Kraus’s machine gun and shoved two Bolsheviks into a shell hole. The two wretched victims… kept imploring his mercy…. But Lindberg, in a paroxysm of uncontrollable rage, kept firing until they were quiet….
We were mad with harassment and exhaustion…. We were forbidden to take prisoners…. We knew that the Russians didn’t take any, …[that] it was either them or us, which is why my friend Hals and I threw grenades… at some Russians who were trying to wave a white flag.
Extreme exhaustion, the strain of seeing their friends killed, and simple fear all combined to cause young men to commit actions that under less trying circumstances would have revolted them. As the battle came to an end, Sajer admitted,
we began to grasp what had happened…. We tried to blot out the memory of the…. tanks driving heavily over that moving mass of human flesh…. We suddenly felt gripped by something horrible, which made our skins crawl…. For me, these memories produced a loss of physical sensation, almost as if my personality had split, …because I knew that such things don’t happen to young men who have led normal lives….
“We really were shits to kill those Popovs…,” [Hals said].
He was clearly desperately troubled by the same things that troubled me…. “[That’s] how it is, and all there is,” I answered…. Something hideous had entered our spirits, to remain and haunt us forever.46
In this instance, human beings had responded to the overweening pressure of war with spontaneous acts of violence they later regretted. Almost certainly, however, the great majority of atrocities resulted from the ideological nature of the war in Russia, from deliberate action on the part of German authorities and their executioners, the ordinary men of the German police forces and army. In an order issued in May 1941, even before the German attack on the Soviet Union, Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel, the titular head of the German armed forces (OKW), stressed that the upcoming campaign was to be a war against the Jews and Bolsheviks and that the Wehrmacht should move ruthlessly against these alleged enemies of Germany. To arouse the necessary ardor, he absolved soldiers from the jurisdiction of military courts if they should engage in atrocities against Russian civilians, and he approved measures of “collective reprisal.” As Christopher Browning has noted, the order amounted to a license to kill, a license that was renewed by the infamous Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) decree of December 1941, also issued by Keitel.47
The average Landser, moreover, betrayed little sense of shock or outrage at such orders. The world was seething with death, and its proximity evidently stifled many a soldier’s compassion. War became a job, casual labor, common work, and whom or how one killed didn’t seem to make a great difference. Furthermore, the rank and file of the Wehrmacht were probably more thoroughly Nazified than has heretofore been acknowledged; indeed, average Landsers were consistently among Hitler’s strongest supporters. As a consequence, their letters and diaries disclose, there existed among the troops in Russia such a striking level of agreement with the Nazi regime’s view of the Bolshevik enemy and the sort of treatment that should be dealt them that many soldiers willingly participated in murderous actions.48