?: Yes – barbarity.
?: There has never been anything like it except the Thirty Years’ War. In the Thirty Years’ War it wasn’t so conspicuous because conditions were different then, but nowadays it is damned conspicuous.
?: We have shown clearly that we are completely incapable of ruling other people.
?: Yes, such a ‘ruling class’…
?: How could a thing like that last? And quite apart from states further away, just think of BOHEMIA and MORAVIA alone – do you think that could have gone on for a few more years?
?: POLAND – they would continually have killed off our local leaders.
?: We can’t compare ourselves with ENGLAND in the slightest degree. Ask the people in South-West (AFRICA). They think they’re very well off under English rule.
?: I mean, at the beginning ENGLAND used quite different means when establishing her world empire, from those she uses now.
?: Yes, we wanted to establish a world empire only four years after we had introduced general conscription!
?: No, this is how I look at it. Owing to the war there is no doubt that measures have become more severe – but they had to.
?: Well, nobody objects to the fact that everybody plays his part in the war and so on, but I am convinced that no educated, thinking person considers it right the way we have behaved towards the Jews, the Poles and the Czechs and towards the people of opposite views in the concentration camps.
?: But that German-speaking Germans at DANZIG should be forbidden to join GERMANY simply because some arrogant English government forbids it – that they feel unhappy there and—
?: Quite right, but that is very different from trying to exterminate whole peoples.
?: Well, I don’t think that was our intention.
?: Well, perhaps we didn’t intend it, but we have done it. When somebody tells me that at LODZ or the devil knows where, eighteen thousand Jews have been killed in one morning—
?: Well, say its eighteen hundred. Do you think that’s right – or even one-hundred-and-eighty? Even if it’s eighteen, if they haven’t committed any crime! What right have we to indignation about the massacres of KATYN? Heaven forbid, if the Russians ever open these mass-graves! They are now claiming – of course it can’t be checked up – that we killed seventeen thousand at KIEV alone.[226] The Russians are thirsting for revenge.
?: Well, at any rate the Russians who are in our service consider themselves well off, because they are treated decently, as human beings.[227]
?: The Germans are decent fellows; that’s the tragic part of it. The unfortunate thing is that the Germans show themselves to others in quite a different light and not as they really are. Quite the contrary, make enquiries in the former occupied territories that we held in the years 1914–18. The people there still hold the German soldiers in high esteem, as I was able to prove time and time again when we were there this time. But I shouldn’t like to go twenty years hence to the districts which have been… by the SS and the SA. These press-gangs – oh, no! A tragedy to live to see such things!
BOES: On the other hand you only need to ask our people in the RHINELAND how they were treated.
?: But that’s quite different! I admit they shot SCHLAGETER, because he carried out sabotage on the railway but he’s the only one we can produce.[228]
?: Yes, but there are sure to have been others who weren’t executed but… in prisons.
?: Good God, but we’ve massacred people in their thousands. There’s no comparison. At least there were proper courts, before which they appeared. In my opinion, if hundreds or thousands had been shot, we should certainly know about it, they would be… as martyrs. Those six or seven or twelve martyrs of the movement![229]
BOES: The point is that one is the struggle for a new order in EUROPE – opposing it stands a world empire, that won this world empire for itself perhaps hundreds of years ago. The one has still to win its empire; that costs sacrifices; while the other one has already passed that stage.
?: We shall never win it by these means; on the contrary, by these means we have shown that if it’s possible for anyone to have the leadership in EUROPE, it must in no circumstances be us. Then the whole of EUROPE would rise as one man against us as far as they have any feelings of decency left – that is what we have achieved. For that is what they are without any doubt, EUROPE’s birth-pangs – whether the child will be still-born, we do not yet know; this uniting of great areas into a single empire – that is in process of creation and will come one way or the other. Who will predominate is not yet known. I am afraid that we have shown, unfortunately that we could never exert a predominance like that because we are simply not morally in a position to do so – no longer in a position, because everything which used to be admired in a German has been changed to the opposite in the course of the last fourteen, or rather ten years. There is no longer any justice, there is no longer any decency; there is nothing but force and brutal suppression of opinion and of the right to live and think and so on. A tyranny such as ours has hardly ever existed before, and I am convinced that, however the war had ended, the next generation, at least would, figuratively speaking, have gone about with daggers in their pockets. The young people would not have put up with it in the long run either, for no country has ever had a tyranny like this. To modify it – that can’t be done, because that is the curse of the wicked deed – they could no longer do that because by then there would be many too many who wanted to avenge themselves.
BOES: Have you experienced this tyranny yourself, Sir, or your family?
?: Well, comparatively little, because I am a soldier and they have not dared to come near us. In one small case I have experienced it, where such difficulties and scenes were made for an officer’s wife, simply because she had unwittingly bought a few glasses from a Jewish household, and was then denounced by a maid. She was said also to have criticised the regime at home, while in fact she was an ardent National Socialist – she won’t be one any longer.
?: We soldiers are by far the best off in this respect. From what I have heard from my friends who have not enjoyed the protection of being a soldier, their treatment is very different. Even now, I am still a good National Socialist, but in the… sense. Those are no National Socialists.
?: The FÜHRER’s greatest fault is that he does not think like normal people do.
?: Oh, I think he does, but he believes that people are too good.
?: If any man tells me that he prays to God that, if a war must be waged, he should be there to wage it, that in itself is a sign of megalomania.[230]
?: One is always trying to find reasons why things aren’t going well now. One has a perfect right to do so, for in the long run you can’t live on faith alone. The only people who work on ‘faith’ – but far more skilfully than the National Socialists – are the Roman Catholic Church. While here they always want to prove to me that what has turned into its opposite within three or six days must still be believed in, I can’t have any part in that. For that purpose God gave me a mind. It may, perhaps show a lack of character, but I cannot overcome my reasoning. When I see everything that – not in the newspapers, but what I personally know because I have seen it personally, if I put all that into the scales and weigh it, then I am compelled to say: ‘Nothing can excuse it, nothing at all.’ If you… a pact of friendship, quite apart from the political side – the way we have broken our pact with RUSSIA is in my opinion scandalous.[231] That is something else that had never happened before. You will argue: ‘In wartime only that is right which is of advantage to the people!’ In the long run that is no advantage. The shooting of the Commissars – I have not been able to discover in any war, except in the dimmest past, that orders like that have been issued by the highest authority. I have seen (?) these orders personally.[232] That is a sign that like a God, that man has simply disregarded everybody and all pacts which exist, and exist on both sides – that is megalomania. We saw the result in the fury with which the Commissars have fought.
226
This is a reference to the mass murder of 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar near Kiev between 29 and 30.9.1941. See Rüss, ‘Babij Jar’, pp. 483–508.
228
Albert Leo Schlageter (12.8.1894–26.5.1923) attempted to blow up a stretch of the Duisburg – Düsseldorf railway track during the Ruhr disturbances. Arrested by the French, he was condemned to death on 8.5.1923 and executed on 26.5.1923. The Schlageter case caused an uproar, although he was by no means the only victim of French and Belgian repressive methods in the Ruhr. Up to 1.8.1924 141 Germans had been killed there. Franke, ‘Der erste Soldat’, p. 33; Zwicker, ‘Nationale Märtyrer’.
229
The speaker refers here to the 16 men killed during the Hitler putsch of 9 November 1923.
230
This is a reference to Hitler’s conviction that only he could lead Germany to ‘greatness’ in a war. Kershaw, ‘Hitler, 1936–1945’, p. 320; Heer, ‘Glaube des Adolf Hitler’, pp. 293, 319.
231
The speaker alludes here to the German – Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 23.8.1939, a relationship that brought Germany major economic benefits in the period to 21.6.1941. Ahmann, ‘Hitler-Stalin-Pakt’; Weinberg, ‘Eine Welt in Waffen’, pp. 222–7.