Schaumann: ‘Ja – they were brought in, questioned, then I’d hear…’
Interviewer: ‘Where were they taken?’
Schaumann: ‘To the battalion or regimental commander or division commander, and then I’d hear shots and knew they had been executed.’
Interviewer: ‘Did you see that too?’
Schaumann: ‘I did.’
Interviewer: ‘Did you participate?’
Schaumann: ‘Do I have to answer that? Spare me this one answer.’(33)
Peter Petersen remembered an old school friend, an SS Untersturmführer, on leave from the front. He had received ‘a terrible bawling out’ from his superiors for his reluctance to shoot prisoners. His personality, Petersen observed, had completely changed from his school days.
‘He was told that he would learn this was no Kindergarten war. He would be sent to take command of a firing squad where he would be shooting partisans, German deserters, and who knows what else. He told me that he had not had the courage to refuse to obey this order, since he would have been shot.’(34)
An atmosphere of uncertainty reigned behind the front. Soldiers felt beleaguered and isolated. Korück 582 – a rear-area security unit operating behind Ninth Army – was responsible for 1,500 villages over an area of 27,000sq km. It had only 1,700 soldiers under command to execute this task. No support was forthcoming from Ninth Army, which had been 15,000 men short at the start of the campaign. Partisan activity encompassed 45% of its operational area. These security units were often commanded by old and incompetent officers aged 40–50 years, compared to a front-line average age of 30 years. Korück 582 battalion commanders were almost 60 years old and their soldiers were poorly trained. Feelings of vulnerability and prevalent danger existed in these zones which, paradoxically, could be as active and dangerous as the front line.(35)
Walter Neustifter, an infantry machine gunner, said, ‘you always had to keep partisans in mind’. Atrocity fed on atrocity.
‘They had fallen upon the whole transport and logistic system, undressed the soldiers, put their uniforms on and passed all the captured material around with a few rifles. So, to frighten them, we hanged five men.’(36)
Peter Neumann, an officer in the 5th SS Division ‘Wiking’, following a revenge massacre after partisan atrocities against German soldiers, explained:
‘We of the SS may be ruthless, but the partisans also wage an inhuman war and show no mercy. Perhaps we cannot blame them for wishing to defend their own land, but all the same, it is clearly our duty to destroy them… where does true justice lie? If such a thing even exists.’(37)
‘When we marched into the Soviet Union,’ declared Hans Herwarth von Bittenfeld, a junior infantry officer, ‘we were regarded initially as liberators and greeted with bread and salt. Farmers shared the little they had with us.’ All this changed with the self-perpetuating vicious circle of atrocities and revenge attacks. Villages were caught helpless in the middle. ‘The disaster was the Nazis succeeded in driving people who were willing to co-operate with us back into the arms of Stalin,’ he said. Von Bittenfeld’s view was ‘we lost because of the bad handling of the Soviet populace’. Russian ‘Hiwis’ that worked with the Wehrmacht were not all pressed labour. ‘The idea originated,’ he explained, ‘from the soldiers, not the General Staff.’(38)
Atrocities were an inescapable fact of life on the Eastern Front. Leutnant F. Wilhelm Christians also spoke of being ‘greeted with real enthusiasm’ in the Ukraine. ‘But behind the Panzers came the SD Security troops’ which was ‘a very sad and grim experience’. In Tarnopol, Christians recalled, ‘Jews were driven together, with the help, I must also say, of the Ukrainians, who knew where their victims lived. ‘My general’s reaction when I reported this to him was that it was forbidden, with immediate effect, for any member of his division to participate in these measures.’(39)
There were a myriad factors that caused German soldiers to participate in or ignore excesses. They were isolated in a strange land, beset by numerous pressures and had of course to enact the disciplined violence expected of soldiers at war. Most had never left Germany or even been beyond their home districts before. They were then subjected to a form of group insanity. War corrupts, whatever the political beliefs, and a high level of culture is not necessarily a guarantor of civilised values. SS officer Peter Neumann with the 5th SS Division ‘Wiking’ recalled how a friend dispassionately executed a group of Russian ITU civilians. (These were Isspraviteino Trudovnoie Upalvelnnie – the Central Administration of Corrective Training – responsible for sending people to concentration camps.) He shot them with his Mauser rifle. Neumann observed:
‘These characters were by no means saints, and probably had no hesitation in sending any poor devil guilty of some minor offence off to the mines in Siberia. But all the same I stopped for a moment rooted to the spot by Karl’s amazing coldbloodedness. His hand didn’t even tremble.
‘Is it possible that this is the same fellow I once saw, in short pants, playing ball on the sands down by the breakwaters of the Aussen-Alster in Hamburg?’(40)
Most soldiers would say that only those who were there truly understand the dilemma. The same men would have been labelled the ‘boys next door’ by their contemporaries. Police Battalion 101, responsible for grim excesses, was manned by unremarkable and ‘ordinary men’.(41) After a soldier has killed, it is correspondingly easier the next time. There are criminal types in any cross-section of society that form part of the dark inexplicable make-up of human kind. Soldiers are not excluded. Indeed, condoned violence on the battlefield presents opportunities to those emotionally susceptible to evil and destructive acts. Artillery Obergefreiter Heinz Flohr saw mothers obliged to witness the execution of their own children at Belaja-Zerkow in the summer of 1941. ‘I had to ask myself,’ he said, visibly moved, ‘are these human beings committing such acts?’ Rape was also not always ideologically repulsive. Gefreiter Herbert Büttner stopped a medical Feldwebel molesting a Russian girl, but the same Feldwebel humiliated a group of Jews later by shaving half their beards and hair during a forcible eviction.(42)
Dehumanising the enemy provided an emotional safeguard of sorts. If the enemy are not people but Untermenschen (sub-human), it matters less what happens to them. Soldiers adrift in a sea of violence within a lethal environment were answerable only to their company commanders and those immediately in charge nearby, nobody else. Perhaps it is unrealistic to expect combat troops to make moral choices. Faced with impossible human dilemmas, it is invariably easier to obey orders. Those unable to recognise there was a choice were ideologically and frequently officially absolved of the responsibility.
Dr Paul Linke, an infantry medical officer, had always thought the commissar shooting order a ‘latrine house rumour’ until his battalion commander ordered his close friend, Leutnant Otto Fuchs, to shoot one. Fuchs, a lawyer in civilian life, had his stuttering ethical protest silenced by his superior officer. ‘Leutnant Fuchs, I do not wish to hear another word,’ he said. ‘Get out and carry out the order!’ The quick-thinking doctor offered to accompany his hapless friend in his sad duty, and promptly led him to the corpse of a Soviet soldier he had earlier discovered in a ditch nearby. The Russian commissar was encouraged to change clothes and bury the corpse in his commissar uniform and then allowed to slip back to his own lines. Two pistol shots fired into the earth disguised the act. Linke ‘hoped it was clear to the [commissar] that both of us would be shot should this ruse ever be discovered’. The Russian gratefully disappeared into the night. The young doctor ‘felt the risk to maintain his honour as an officer was worth it – we do not shoot defenceless prisoners,’ he said. Fuchs had to report to his battalion commander and confirm the execution order had been carried out. ‘I’m sorry Fuchs,’ he admitted. ‘I did not want it either. In the final analysis I delegated my responsibility for the order to you.’(43) Common decency in the final resort was a matter of personal inclination. Some soldiers actually relished the culture of violence, but for the majority, the main bonding factor was the solidarity of the group with whom they lived. Survival depended upon one’s comrades. Right and wrong was not the issue, rather that there were variations in the degree of wrong.