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KITTEL: Yes.

FELBERT: Was that carried out quite systematically?

KITTEL: Yes.

FELBERT: Women and children—everybody?

KITTEL: Everybody. Horrible!

FELBERT: Were they loaded onto trains?

KITTEL: If only they had been loaded onto trains! The things I’ve experienced! I then sent a man along and said: “I order this to stop. I can’t stand it any longer.” For instance, in LATVIA, near DVINSK, there were mass executions of Jews carried out by the SS or Security Service.¹⁸⁹ There were about fifteen Security Service men and perhaps sixty Latvians, who are known to be the most brutal, when I kept on hearing two salvoes followed by small arms fire. I got up and went out and asked: “What’s all this shooting?” The orderly said to me: “You ought to go over there, sir, you’ll see something.” I only went fairly near and that was enough for me. 300 men had been driven out of DVINSK; they dug a communal grave and then marched home. The next day along they came again—men, women and children—they were counted off and stripped naked; the executioners first laid all the clothes in one pile. Then twenty women had to take up their position—naked—on the edge of the trench, they were shot and fell down into it.

FELBERT: How was it done?

KITTEL: They faced the trench and then twenty Latvians came up behind and simply fired once through the back of their heads. There was a sort of stop in the trench, so that they stood rather lower than the Latvians, who stood up on the edge and simply shot them through the head, and they fell down forwards into the trench. After that came twenty men and they were killed by a salvo in just the same way. Someone gave the command and the twenty fell into the trench like ninepins. Then came the worst thing of all; I went away and said: “I’m going to do something about this.”¹⁹⁰

Lieutenant General Heinrich Kittel recounted these events on December 28, 1944. In 1941, he was a colonel in a reserve unit of the Army Group North in Daugavpils, Latvia, where some 14,000 Jews were shot to death between July and November. His own role in the executions has never been historically established. He himself spoke from the perspective of an outraged observer, but as a high-ranking officer he would have had considerable opportunities to intervene in the course of events. Unlike ordinary soldiers, Kittel did not have to remain in the role of the passive spectator. He could have done something.

The narratives in the surveillance protocols are often told from an observer’s perspective, which obscured the fact that the storyteller may have participated in the events described. The narrators position themselves in the innocuous role of the reporter—a tendency that historical eyewitnesses frequently maintain even today. The detail Kittel uses to relate past events is also nothing unusual. Executions made for good conversation, offering numerous opportunities to weigh up questions of guilt and responsibility.