Читаем Soldaten полностью

In German soldiers’ eyes, there was nothing criminal about their behavior toward the Red Army, even though it, too, clearly violated international law. Soviet misbehavior was justification enough for German troops to execute prisoners, and almost no one, it seems, saw any alternatives.

Thus, within the first weeks of Nazi Germany’s campaign against the Soviet Union, new customs of war that flouted international law were established. The exercise of violence was not static, but rather constantly in flux—depending on structural, personal, and situational conditions. In the fall of 1941, for example, the extreme violence of the summer receded. But no sooner had the Eastern Army been compelled to beat a chaotic retreat in the winter of 1941–42, than they once again began regularly executing POWs who could not be transported.¹⁷¹ Phases of escalation and de-escalation would continue until the end of the war.

The surveillance protocols contain scattered instances in which soldiers describe refusing to commit war crimes against prisoners. An SS Second Lieutenant (Untersturmbahnführer) named Schreiber recounted one such story, including a description of his shock at a prisoner’s murder:

Significantly, the interlocutor here—Navy Lieutenant Bunge—expects a different end to Schreiber’s story, one in which the SS man does indeed end up “putting down” the Russian POW. Killings of that sort were common in soldiers’ conversations, and it was far more unaccustomed when they did not occur. Sergeant Grüchtel had a similar tale to tell:

We have no way of knowing whether stories of this kind are true or not, but they occur very rarely in the protocols. This fact should not be mistaken for evidence that humane treatment of POWs or occupied populations happened any more or less frequently in real life than it did in soldiers’ conversations. It merely documents that behavior which today would be considered humane played a very minor communicative role among the POWs. Stories relating what we consider inhumane acts, often told in the first person, were much more frequent than ones describing what would be deemed “good” behavior under contemporary norms.