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DIEKMANN: They wanted to interfere with our instruments; that was their task. We captured several terrorists alive and killed them on the spot. Those were our orders.

I myself once shot a French Major.

BRUNE: How did you know that he was a Major?

DIEKMANN: He had papers. There was shooting during the night. He came along on a bicycle. Our people were still firing into the houses down in the village with MGs. The whole village was full of them.

BRUNE: Did you stop him?

DIEKMANN: There were two of us, including an “Unteroffizier.” He got off his bicycle and we searched his pockets immediately and found some ammunition, which was enough for us. Otherwise I couldn’t have done anything to him; you can’t simply shoot a man for nothing. The “Unteroffizier” asked him whether he was a terrorist, but he didn’t say anything. Then he asked him whether he had any last request—nothing. Then I shot him from behind through the head. He was dead before he knew.

We once shot a woman spy at our position too. She was about twenty-seven years old. She used to work for us in the kitchen.

BRUNE: Was she from the village?

DIEKMANN: Not actually from the village, but she had been living there latterly. The infantry brought her in in the morning, and in the afternoon they stood her up against the Bunker and shot her. She confessed that she was working for the British Secret Service.

BRUNE: Who gave the order, your Chief?

DIEKMANN: Yes, he could do that as CO. I didn’t take part in the execution myself; I only watched it.

Once we caught thirty terrorists, there were women and children among them. We put them into a cellar…. Stood them against the wall and shot them.¹⁵⁷

In Diekmann’s narrative, the killing of the French major requires a legalistic justification, his carrying ammunition. That identifies the officer as a terrorist. Notably, Diekmann also does not hesitate to include children among the “terrorists” who are placed against a wall and shot.

Fantastic delusions about what sorts of people might belong to the enemy are by no means unique to German soldiers. Similar incidents have been documented among U.S. troops in Vietnam, who sometimes even claimed babies were members of the Vietcong. This is not a sign of insanity. It marks the shifting of a frame of reference so that group membership is more important than all other defining characteristics, including age, in determining who the enemy is. Joanna Bourke, a scholar who has studied soldiers’ perceptions of killing in various wars, has argued that such skewed frames of reference do not prove that soldiers personally enjoyed murder. Instead, Bourke suggests, the cold-blooded killing of people categorically defined as belonging to the enemy is part of the normal, everyday practice of warfare.¹⁵⁸