“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 Günter 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. Everything depends on whether these crimes are also seen as crimes by the military leadership and if the perpetrators are then punished accordingly. Even before the war against the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht leadership established that there was no need to punish soldiers for attacks on Russian civilians, and that Red Army officers were to be shot immediately.
Trading Stories Like Sex Tourists
A side of the daily routine during war that is understandably left out of military letters and memoirs is the soldiers’ sex life, even though sexuality plays an important role in every army. According to the research literature, the generals had great trouble keeping the men’s sex drives under control with brothels. Sexually transmitted diseases were so widespread in the military that entire companies were routinely required to undergo treatment.
The record of a bugged conversation from June 1944 reveals the importance of womanizing among the men. The transcriber decided to summarize the discussion instead of noting the men’s exact words:
“18:45 Women
19:15 Women
19:45 Women
20:00 Women.”
When the people listening in on the conversations took the trouble to transcribe everything that was being said, the talk, predictably enough, revolved around where the best girls were to be had, how much they cost and what other sexual opportunities there were behind the front. In one such conversation, the men trade stories like experienced sex tourists.
Wallus: “In Warsaw, our troops had to wait in line in front of the building’s door. In Radom, the first room was full while the truck people stood outside. Each woman had 14 to 15 men per hour. They replaced the women every two days.”
Niwiem: “I have to say that we weren’t nearly as respectable in France sometimes. When I was in Paris, I saw our soldiers grabbing girls in the middle of a bar, throwing them across a table and—end of story! Married women, too!”
Readily Available Sex
Today, we easily forget that the majority of the Wehrmacht soldiers went abroad for the first time as a result of the war. When the Nazis came into power, less than 4 percent of Germans in the Reich had passports. For these men, the charms of life in another country, far away from their wives and children, included exotic food and the excitement of armed conflict, as well as the enjoyment of readily available sex. It’s no accident that many tended to romanticize their memories after the fact.
Müller: “When I was in Kharkov (in present-day Ukraine), everything was destroyed except the center of the city. A wonderful city, a wonderful memory. All the people there spoke a little German, which they had learned in school. And in Taganrog (in Russia) there were wonderful cinemas and wonderful beach cafés. I went everywhere in a truck. And all you saw were women doing compulsory labor.”
Fausst: “Oh, my God!”
Müller: “They were building roads, drop-dead gorgeous girls. So we drove by, pulled them into the truck, screwed them and them threw them out again. Boy, they sure cursed at us.”