Germany and National Socialism

Everyone knows: soldiers kill people. The book “Soldaten. Protokolle vom Kämpfen, Töten und Sterben” (Soldiers. Transcripts on Fighting, Killing and Dying) by Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer can teach us that they often even like doing this. The two researchers have evaluated tape transcripts of German POWs from the Second World War and come up with some unsettling findings.

It must have been an exciting moment when the historian Sönke Neitzel recognized the scholarly importance of the batch of documents that staff of the British National Archive in London put on his desk on a rainy November day in 2001. The originally only vague hope that transcripts of Allied eavesdropping on German POWs might constitute new, even perhaps spectacularly new, source material, solidified into certainty after a quick perusal. The result was an in-depth preparatory study, whose fruits were first presented to the public in 2005 in a book entitled Tapping Hitler’s General. Transcripts of Secret Conversation, 1942-1945 (Abgehört. Deutsche Generäle in britischer Kriegsgefangenschaft).

Six years later, we now have the main work. The 500 page study is a collaboration between Neitzel and the Essen psychologist Harald Welzer, and bears the simple title Soldaten – soldiers. Its focus is not the chats of high German army officers, but rather the conversations of ordinary soldiers. It is an equally fascinating and shocking book about the everyday madness of the Nazi war of extermination, which once again confirms Hannah Arendt’s thesis about the “banality of evil”.

Between 1940 and 1945, in camps specifically set up for this purpose, the British and Americans bugged about 13,000 German and several hundred Italian soldiers of all ranks and services. The goal was to discover military secrets of potentially strategic importance. Selected stretches of conversations were transcribed verbatim and also recorded. Altogether, the tape transcripts come to 150,000 pages, which, even after their declassification in 1996, continued to slumber largely undiscovered in American archives.

These transcripts are in fact a scholarly sensation – historians investigating the Second World War now have an “authentic” source, first person documents “in historical real-time”. The bugged soldiers did not know of course that they were being recorded and, since they were speaking to their peers, from soldier to solider, it may be assumed that they exercised no restraint in their conversations. Unlike writers of letters from the front, war diaries and memoirs, they talked openly about their war experiences, without political, ethical or moral considerations, uncensored, unsparing, and often so as to boast.

“That was fun”

The authors use the transcripts in two ways: first, to find out what the German grunt really did and, above all, thought; and then to seek answers to the fundamental question of how inhuman and devastating violence arises – how quite ordinary men, mostly fathers of families, could within the shortest space of time (this is one of the shocking findings of the book) become brutal killers who killed not only other fathers of families but also women and children without pity or scruple.

Not only the reported details and particularly the extreme level of violence that comes to expression in the personal testimonies are shocking, but also the pleasure, the enjoyment and the fun that Wehrmacht soldiers obviously felt in the mass killings. One example of many: “We once did a strafing near Eastbourne. We flew up and saw a big castle; there seemed to be a ball or something – anyhow a lot of ladies in evening dress and a band. The first time we flew past; then we attacked and kept at it. Boy oh boy, was that fun!” Another: “I loved dropping bombs. It makes you feel all tingly, a great feeling. It’s as good as shooting someone down.” Not least shocking is the almost total lack of contradiction or criticism on the part of the listeners: moral concerns are rarely voiced, the speakers reckon with agreement.

The logic of war

This general agreement points, in the view of the authors, to the answer to the question of how such (pleasurably experienced) excesses of violence are possible. For the soldiers, acts of violence are part of their everyday life, something natural, normal. Their conversations are conversations about everyday life, about their work. And this work is or was war. Soldiers therefore feel no guilt, no remorse: in their view, despite the exceptional circumstances, they have done nothing out of the way, but rather only their normal, if bloody, job.

The book’s conclusion: “Soldiers kill because it is their job”. And they strive to perform this work as well as possible – not only because this increases their chances for survival, but also because performance and success are rewarded with recognition. Decisive for the destructive behavior of Wehrmacht soldiers, therefore, was not Nazi ideology, as might be suspected, but rather the logic of war. War brings forth monsters: it devours civilian morality, brutalizes soldiers, makes fathers of families into murderers.

Neitzel’s and Welzer’s achievement consists in this, that they refrain from moralizing and instead seek to understand. They present not only a sensitively commented interior view of the German soldier, but also a history of mentalities in the Second World War that permits the distinction between the specific features of the Nazi campaign of extermination and the general characteristics of war, without of course relativizing the horror of the latter. The cited documents prove it and the authors themselves leave no doubt that the soldiers knew of the extermination of Jews and were, in many cases, actively involved in this extermination. The notion that the Wehrmacht remained “clean” throughout the war is at any rate out of the question. For that reason, too, Soldaten is an important book.