Читаем Soldaten полностью

^{Soviet prisoners of war en route to a POW camp, July 1942. Southern section of Eastern Front. (Photographer: Friedrich Gehrmann; BA 183-B27 116)}

Many German soldiers seemed to have been aware of the dimensions of a conflict in which millions of POWs were dying. For example, Freitag, a Luftwaffe sergeant, remarked in June 1942: “In any case we had taken 3½ million prisoners, up to Christmas. And then there were certainly as many, if not more, killed, ‘as many more again’ said the communiqué. And if as many as a million of the prisoners survived the winter, that’s a lot.”¹⁷⁹ First Lieutenant Verbeek of Artillery Regiment 272 expressed his outrage to a comrade: “Do you know how many Russian PW died in GERMANY in the winter of 1941/42? Two million actually died, they didn’t get anything to eat. Offal was brought from the slaughter-house to the camp for them to eat.”¹⁸⁰

The racist belief in innate German superiority that prevailed among the Eastern Army no doubt encouraged soldiers to liquidate Soviet prisoners, “mow down” enemies in battle, and carry out mass executions in revenge for assassinations. German soldiers’ proclivities toward violence were promoted by a mentality that saw the Russians as “an inferior people,”¹⁸¹ indeed “animals”¹⁸² and “members of a foreign race, Asians.”¹⁸³ Nonetheless, the tales of mass death in the POW camps were by no means completely free of empathy, be it only as an undertone that the treatment of prisoners was unjust and cruel.

The propagandistic picture of the bestial Red Army soldier incited by Jews and Bolsheviks gradually gave way to a more multifaceted view that included respect for Russian soldiers’ military performance. Living in the country probably also altered occupying German soldiers’ perspectives on Russian culture and the lifestyles of a populace that had to deal with a relatively rough climate. German soldiers’ perceptions of Russians became more differentiated and positive. Moreover, some one million Russians also fought alongside the Wehrmacht as volunteers—a fact that must have revised many Germans’ opinions of what “the Russian” was like.¹⁸⁴

On the other hand, some soldiers in British POW camps felt that Russian prisoners had been treated too humanely. Lieutenant General Maximilian Siry, for instance, opined on May 6, 1945: