This might be an indication that describing one’s own “good” behavior wasn’t bound to increase one’s popularity. In situations where killing is regarded as both an everyday practice and a social duty, charitable behavior toward Jews, Russian POWs, and other groups deemed inferior would have represented a violation of the norm. Even after World War II, it took years until stories of that nature elicited greater approval than the sorts of deeds the soldiers usually recounted in the surveillance protocols. Only later did Germans begin to give their recollections other nuances. So the relative infrequency of stories in which German soldiers show pity or empathy with prisoners, or simply treat them decently, might be due to the fact that such behavior was considered antisocial at the time and thus conversationally off-limits. Or perhaps the frame of reference in which others and their behavior were categorized simply did not admit of a category like empathy. In any case, the fact that stories in which soldiers boast of their own inhumanity rarely elicited any criticism suggests that such stories, and not the humane ones, reflected the normal everyday reality of World War II.

IN THE CAMPS

Most Red Army POWs did survive for a few days after being captured. But their martyrdom began as soon as they began making their way to prisoner of war camps:

Soviet POWs resorting to cannibalism is a recurring topic in the protocols. A First Lieutenant Klein, for instance, recounts: “When one of them died the Russians often ate him while he was still warm. That’s a fact.” ¹⁷⁵ Lieutenant General Georg Neuffer and Colonel Hans Reimann recalled a POW transport in 1941: