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Herbert Selle remembered that at a public execution of Jews in August 1941 in Zhitomir, soldiers were “sitting on rooftops and platforms watching the show. The execution was arranged as a form of popular entertainment.” Another soldier detailed the incident:

One day a Wehrmacht vehicle drove through Zhitomir with a megaphone. Over the loudspeaker we were informed… that at a certain time that day Jews would be shot in the market-place…. Upon arriving there I saw that fifty to sixty Jews (men, women, and children) had assembled…. There were also, of course, members of the Wehrmacht among the onlookers…. Finally all of the Jews assembled there had to get on to the truck…. Then an announcement came over the loudspeaker that we should all follow the lorry to the shooting….

There was a ditch, filled with water…. SS men stood at either side of this ditch. One by one the Jews had to jump over the ditch…. Those who fell in the ditch were beaten with various types of blunt instruments by the SS men and driven or pulled out of the ditch….

About thirty meters behind the ditch I saw a stack of logs…. This wooden wall was used as a bullet butt…. There must have been five or six people lined up there each time. They then received a shot in the neck from the carbines. Row upon row were shot in the same way. The dead from each row were dragged away immediately…. I stood about twenty meters from the ditch and about fifty meters from the wood-stack.55

Not even beatings and mass murder as public spectacle was unusual. Another Landser, also in the vicinity of Zhitomir, recalled that one afternoon in late July 1941, hearing rifle and pistol fire, he investigated and found executions being carried out behind an embankment. “In the earth was a pit about seven to eight meters long and perhaps four meters wide…. The pit itself was filled with innumerable human bodies, …both male and female…. Behind the piles of earth dug from it stood a squad of police…. There were traces of blood on their uniforms. In a wide circle around the pit stood scores of soldiers from the troop detachments stationed there, some of them in bathing trunks, watching the proceedings. There were also an equal number of civilians, including women and children.”56

Not only did some Landsers witness the shootings as grand entertainment, but on occasion they actively assisted the police in the grisly business. One member of an Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squad) claimed after the war that “on some occasions members of the Wehrmacht took the carbines out of our hands and took our place in the firing-squad.” Little wonder, then, that after watching the murder of four-hundred Jews by execution squads in Lithuania, one Landser remarked, “May God grant us victory because if they get their revenge, we’re in for a hard time.”57 So much had the perceptions of many Landsers been shaped by Nazi ideology and propaganda that the unthinkable became banal. These men did not think of the innocent human beings who were being killed but worried instead about the consequences to them personally. Atrocities were being committed, but it was just a job, after all, so pick the best weapons and get on with it.

Certainly, the depersonalization of the enemy, whether civilian or soldier, was a common tendency in combat. “As a soldier, you don’t think [of the enemy] as an individual at all,” Harry Mielert reflected. “You shoot at ‘profitable targets’; that the guy out there is a man with a family, perhaps is even happy at the news that he has become a father…. and soon should get a leave…, you don’t think of that at all.” This dehumanization of the enemy was especially pronounced on the eastern front, where the Russians were portrayed as subhuman foes not only of Germany but of Western civilization. From the outset, the Nazi regime alternately depicted the war as a product of an alleged Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy to destroy Germany or as a crusade against the subhuman “Asiatic” hordes of Bolshevik Russia, propagandistic lines that intersected at various points. More remarkable, however, was the fervor with which many Landsers embraced the twin themes of this ideological crusade. Asiatic hordes, beasts, a universal plague—over and over in their letters many Landsers parroted the Nazi line. The process of depersonalizing and dehumanizing the enemy certainly made it easier for the average soldier to break the social and cultural taboo against killing. Observed Corporal L.K., “They are no longer people, but wild hordes and beasts, who have been bred by Bolshevism in the last twenty years. One must not allow any sympathy to grow for these people.”58

For most Landsers, though, the enemy—however depersonalized—came to be not merely an abstract concept but a real and constant presence that had to be taken seriously. Helmut von Harnack, in a letter to his father in January 1942, acknowledged “the extreme modesty of the personal needs of the Russian soldier, who in his mixture of doggedness and toughness possesses an enormous power of resistance.” Private M.S. claimed, “I have never yet seen such tough dogs as the Russians.” After marveling at the “often superhuman, purposeless resistance of encircled groups” of Russian troops, Private R.L. conceded that “the Russians are really tough,” an admission that came only grudgingly, since he also referred to them as “a people that requires long and good schooling in order to become human.” Another Landser found “something diabolical” in the fanatic Russian resistance.59

The furious, often savage Soviet assaults stunned many Landsers. In one minor action “the number, duration and fury of those attacks had exhausted and numbed us completely. Not to hide the truth they had frightened us. Our advance had been… an ordinary move on a fairly narrow sector, and yet they had contested it day after day and with masses of men…. How often, we asked ourselves, would they attack and in what numbers if the objective was really a supremely important one? I think that on that autumn day in 1941 some of us began to realize… that the war against the Soviet Union was going to be bigger than we had thought, …and a sense of depression… settled upon us.” “Their attacks are quite desperate and quite hopeless,” echoed another soldier of the savage fighting at the Kiev pocket in September 1941. “They are driven back with such losses that one wonders how they can find the courage… to keep coming on. Some of the dead have been out there for weeks and are badly decomposed. The sights and smells are bad enough for us, but they have to attack across this carpet of their own dead comrades. Do they have no feeling of fear?”60