Читаем Soldaten полностью

We can no longer reconstruct the exact details of this incident. But Gromoll’s story suggests that German soldiers did not need to find any weapons to conclude that what could have been ordinary card players were terrorists. They could have thrown their weapons in the canal, the logic runs. Legalistic reasoning of this sort suggests that, for some soldiers, it was important to justify killings in terms of a formal structure, a framework that would legitimate their actions, even if those actions really amount to little more than indiscriminate murder.

There was a similar unwritten rule among U.S. troops in Vietnam: “If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s a Vietcong.” Private First Class Diekmann tells a story in precisely this mode about a series of executions carried out in France after the Allied invasion of Normandy: