Читаем Soldaten полностью

At the end of his story, Müller distances himself from the action by claiming he never fired a shot at innocents. But he still offers a detailed description, in the first-person plural, of how his unit burned down Russian houses. Stories like this illustrate what the soldiers regarded as crimes and what not, and how porous the boundary was between the two. Müller considered executing women and children a crime insofar as it was unclear whether they truly were partisans. Burning down a village, on the other hand, was not.

Müller also conspicuously includes a figure in his story, Brosicke, from whom he can positively distinguish himself. Brosicke’s behavior, in Müller’s telling, is unambiguously criminal, as is that of those for whom killing was fun. Müller’s own behavior, by contrast, is not criminal. This is a typical and significant element in the protocols. By differentiating himself from others, the typical storyteller was able to find a space within a larger criminal endeavor in which he himself could not be accused of behaving immorally. Yet as we have already observed in the various different groups that took part in the mass executions and other anti-Jewish initiatives, individual interpretations of one’s own role and duties ultimately helped the killing as a whole to proceed smoothly.¹⁴⁸ Individual attitudes and decisions are not usually overridden by “group pressure” and social influence in the way some sociologists would have us believe. On the contrary, internal differentiation within a group makes it capable of acting as a whole. To adapt a phrase coined by German scholar Herbert Jäger, what we have here is a case of individual action in collective states of emergency.¹⁴⁹

One good example of this phenomenon occurs in a detailed description by a Private First Class Franz Diekmann about how he combated “terrorists” in France: