“As a rule, the Russian prisoners were used to bury the dead,” noted Guy Sajer, “but it seemed they had taken to robbing the bodies…. In fact, I think the poor fellows… were probably going over the bodies for something to eat. The rations we gave them were absurd…. On some days, they were given nothing but water. Every prisoner caught robbing a German body was immediately shot. There were no official firing squads for these executions. An officer would simply shoot the offender on the spot.” This sort of casual cruelty was repeated endlessly throughout the vast expanse of Russia. “Once in winter,” remembered Max Landowski, “a [Russian] deserter came over. He was well clothed…. He had felt boots, …a Steppe coat, and a good fur hat. And as the deserter stood there, we began to take an interest in his things. Someone took the hat away from him, another pulled his boots off, a third needed his coat. In fact, the fellow finally stood there only in his underwear. Then the lieutenant said he should be taken back for interrogation…. A short time later there was a bang, and then the [German] came back. He reported, ‘Order carried out.’ He had shot him.” “We’re drawing ever closer to Moscow,” wrote Private H. in July 1941. “Everywhere there is the same picture of destruction…. All of whatever Commissars etc. [sic] are taken prisoner or grabbed are shot immediately. The Russians don’t do it any differently. A cruel war here.”49 Cruel indeed, but the noteworthy aspect was not the savagery of the war, but rather the commonplace attitude displayed by this soldier. “We take some prisoners, we shoot them, all in a day’s work”: this outlook recurred frequently in the Landsers’ correspondence, betraying an unspoken agreement with Nazi ideological goals.
“Someone has totally persuaded… the Russians that the Germans were slaughtering all prisoners,” Captain F.M. of the Seventy-third Infantry Division wrote incredulously, “and they also believed it.” But why shouldn’t the Russians believe it? After all, as Private A.V. admitted in a letter, “sometimes we also see someone who has been hanged. Those are people who have violated the property of the army or who hung around in the woods as partisans and committed terrorist actions. They remain hanging as a deterrent for two or three days.” The war against the partisans proved especially cruel, perhaps because it degenerated into a chaotic affair in which neither side respected the conventions of war. “The Feldwebel [sergeant] was staring at something in the ruins of the cabin,” Guy Sajer recalled of a nasty incident in the autumn of 1942.
We could see a man leaning against the wall. His face, half covered by a wild, shaggy beard, was turned toward us…. His clothes… were not a military uniform…. His left hand… was soaked with blood. More blood was running from his collar. I felt a twinge of unease for him. The Feldwebel’s voice brought me back to reality.
“Partisan!” he shouted….“You know what you’re going to get…!” We carried the partisan outside…. The lieutenant looked at the bearded man, who was clearly dying. “Who’s this?”
“A Russian, Mein Leutnant, a partisan….”
“Do you think I’m going to saddle myself with one of those bastards….”
He shouted an order to the two soldiers who were with him. They walked over to the unfortunate man lying on the snow, and two shots rang out.50
This kind of casual brutality occurred frequently across occupied Russia. “The partisans make it difficult for us to keep the railroads operating, so that we must act with the strongest methods,” Railroad-Inspector K.S. confided almost nonchalantly, as if recounting a trip to the local market. “In case of attacks a number of people are picked out of the local population, especially Jews, and are shot there on the spot and their houses set on fire…. Recently you could observe hardly 50 meters away… how a group of prisoners of war were simply shot down by the guards.” Because of the daily reports of German soldiers found killed, and since the countryside was so unsafe, confessed Private H.T., “anyone found at night wandering around in the woods or on the main roads without identification from the competent authority is—.” Perhaps because of fear of the censor this Landser left the punishment to his correspondent’s imagination. But as Sergeant A.R. conceded, the most brutal measures proved acceptable in the war in Russia. “Above all, here we must reckon with a small war of bandits,” he wrote. “Just yesterday in a neighboring place a German officer was shot by Russians in civilian clothing. Because of that, though, the whole village was set afire. This eastern campaign is quite a bit different from the western campaign.” Corporal H.G. summed it up:, “This is not exactly a struggle of country against country, but rather one between two fundamentally different ideologies.”51 Again, what made such letters remarkable was the widespread acceptance by average soldiers of these harsh and brutal measures, indeed the almost complete absence of any sense of moral or personal outrage.
In fact, indifference can itself be seen as an expression of support for the ideological goals of the Hitler regime. The testimony of one soldier was perhaps not atypical. “It was near Velikie Luki,” Private Landowski remembered. “We were on the march…. The road ran through a ravine…. We made a noontime rest, and then all of a sudden shooting broke out. The SS there in that ravine had driven together around 300 Russian prisoners and shot all of them…. It was barely 500 meters away from us, where we had taken our rest. But I saw the dead…. [They lay] all one on top of the other…. I assumed that they had somehow been driven together in a small group, because they stood fairly close together. And then they were aimed at from both sides. With machine guns.” And how had he reacted to seeing Russian prisoners shot by the SS?
It was already clear to us that it would have repercussions. That our prisoners [in Russian hands] would be treated in the same way…. Oberst [Colonel] Blunk was certainly a good officer. He had received high decorations, he was also not so nervous. I had experienced how he himself went forward into the first position and fired a rifle and threw grenades. And this man let a woman be hanged. I saw the woman hanging there…. It was a Russian woman, and the Oberst had ordered her to bake bread…. Now it may be that she had replied, “no flour.”… But despite her having done nothing else, she was just hanged. She hung on a kind of barn directly next to the street, and then in Russian it was written on a placard why she hung there. A young woman.52
But he had not done anything to intervene. After all, a “good officer” had done it, and as Friedrich Grupe noted after the war, “We marched… always conscious that as good soldiers we had to fulfill our hard duty.”53 Left unspoken, of course, was the fact that it was hard duty in service of the Nazi regime.
Offhand brutality was no unusual occurrence. Matthias Jung remembered the consequences for Russian civilians after eighteen German soldiers had been killed in a partisan attack: “The whole place, everything [was destroyed]! Totally! The civilians who had done it, all the civilians who were in the place. In each corner stood a machine gun, and then all the houses were set on fire and whoever came out—In my opinion with justice!” The civilians not incinerated had obviously been shot to death, but such was the nature of the war in Russia that this unwarranted violence seemed justified to an average soldier. Fritz Harenberg remembered an incident of gratuitous brutality in Sarajevo: There was a Jewish cemetery close to his quarters, he recalled, and one day “there arrived among us the Waffen-SS… and the Gestapo. And then somebody revealed to the Gestapo that buried in the Jewish cemetery were money and valuable things. The Gestapo drove the Jews together, they had to dig it up. Hauled a lot out of there, found a lot.”54 In front of his eyes Jews were gathered together and forced to dig up their own cemetery, certainly a painful form of degradation. And yet Harenberg condoned it, accepted the official explanation that valuables were buried there, recollected it as nothing more than a part of everyday army life, the normal routine.