In 2001, spurred by a nagging curiosity over a transcript of a secretly recorded conversation he had come across in his research on the German U-boat wars, historian Sönke Neitzel paid a visit to the British national archives. He had heard of the existence of recorded interrogations of German POWs, but never about covert recordings taken within the confines of the holding cells, bedrooms, and camps that housed the prisoners. What Neitzel discovered, to his amazement, were reams of untouched, recently declassified transcripts totaling nearly eight hundred pages. Later, Neitzel would find another trove of protocols twice as extensive at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.Though initially recorded by British intelligence with the intention of gaining information that might be useful for the Allied war effort, the matters discussed in these conversations ultimately proved to be limited in that regard. But for Neitzel and his collaborator, renowned social psychologist Harald Welzer, they would supply a unique and profoundly important window into the mentality of the soldiers in the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the German navy, and the military in general, almost all of whom had insisted on their own honorable behavior during the war. It is a myth these transcripts unequivocally debunk.Soldaten closely examines these conversations, and the casual, pitiless brutality omnipresent in them, from a historical and psychological perspective. What factors led to the degradation of the soldiers' sense of awareness and morality? How much did their social environments affect their interpretation of the war and their actions during combat? By reconstructing the frameworks and situations behind these conversations, and the context in which they were spoken, a powerful, unflinching narrative of wartime experience emerges. The details of what these soldiers did, after all, are not filtered the way they might be in letters to family, or girlfriends and wives, or during interrogations by the enemy. In Soldaten, Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer offer an unmitigated window into the mind-set of the German fighting man, potentially changing our view of World War II.Review"Unique—and essential to any understanding of German mentalités in the Hitler era."—Kirkus"Celebrated narrator Simon Prebble does a masterly job solemnly conveying this powerful, dramatic material…. Essential for university history and military/World War II research collections."—Library JournalReview"These extraordinary bugged conversations reveal through the eyes of German soldiers with stark clarity and candor the often brutal reality of the Second World War, providing remarkable insight into the mentality and behavior of the Wehrmacht."—Sir Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler: A Biography"The myth that Nazi–era German armed forces [were] not involved in war crimes persisted for decades after the war. Now two German researchers have destroyed it once and for all…. The material [they] have uncovered in British and American archives is nothing short of sensational…. [Soldaten] has the potential to change our view of the war."—Der Spiegel (Germany)"This should be required reading for all those who believe that wars could be done cleanly."—Martin Meier, Neues Deutschland"A significant contribution on the mental history of the Wehrmacht… The authors have written an incredibly readable book."—Die Zeit"An equally fascinating and shocking book about the everyday madness of the Nazi war of extermination, which once again confirms Hannah Arendt's thesis about the 'banality of evil'… A scholarly sensation."—Goethe Institut
It was a typical November day in England: a blanket of clouds, misty rain, eight degrees Celsius. As I’d often done before, I’d taken the District Line to Kew Gardens, getting out at the picturesque tube station in South London and hastening to the British national archives to immerse myself in old documents. The rain was even more unpleasant than usual and made me quicken my pace. As always, at the Archives entrance there was an impressive number of security personnel who gave my bag a cursory search. I passed by the small bookshop and went to the coatroom, then proceeded up the stairs to the reading room, where the garish green carpet convinced me that nothing had changed since the last time I’d been here.
In autumn 2001, I was working as a visiting lecturer at the University of Glasgow and was on a short visit to London. A few weeks previously, I had stumbled across Michael Gannon’s book about the turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic in May 1943. It contained several pages of minutes of discussions among German U-boat crewmen, and that had made me curious. I was aware of the existence of reports about interrogations of German POWs, but I had never heard anything about reports based on covert surveillance, and I wanted to follow up the lead. I wasn’t expecting anything much. What could such reports consist of? A couple of pages of random conversations, recorded by someone somewhere. Countless times before, promising indications of potential new sources had led to dead ends.
But this time it was different. At the desk I’d been assigned, I found a thick bundle of files, perhaps totaling eight hundred pages, held together only by a string. The thin sheets of paper were still immaculately organized. I had to be one of the first people to have ever held them in his hands. I glanced over seemingly endless protocols of German navy men, mostly U-boat crew members, transcribed word for word. If such reports existed for September 1943, I reasoned, there would have been similar ones for October and November 1943 as well. And what about the rest of the war? Indeed, as I discovered, there were thick bundles covering other months as well. Gradually, I realized that this was only the tip of the iceberg. In my excitement, I kept ordering more and more documents and found that not only submarine crews but captured members of the German air force and army had been subjected to covert surveillance as well. I delved into their conversations and was sucked in by the internal world of war that unfolded before me. You could practically hear the soldiers talking, gesticulating, and arguing among themselves. What most surprised me was how openly they talked about fighting, killing, and dying. I flew back to Glasgow with some interesting photocopied passages in my bag. The following day, I bumped into Professor Bernard Wasserstein at the Department of History and told him about my discovery. This was a brand-new source, I related, and would probably make a good topic for a dissertation for someone else. “You want to give it away?” he asked in amazement. The question burned itself into my head. He was right. I myself had to excavate this particular buried treasure.
I kept going back to London and gradually began to comprehend what I had stumbled upon. Over the course of the war, the British intelligence service had systematically subjected thousands of German and hundreds of Italian POWs to covert surveillance, recording passages from conversations they found particularly interesting on wax records and making protocols of them. The protocols had survived the war in their entirety and had been declassified in 1996. But in the years that followed, no one had recognized their value as historical source material. Undiscovered, they were left hibernating on the archive shelves.
In 2003, I published the first excerpts, and two years later a book edition followed containing some two hundred protocols from conversations among German generals. But I had still only made scant progress in evaluating and interpreting this source material. A short time later, I discovered a similar collection of material—some 100,000 pages’ worth, twice as extensive as the British files—in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. It was clear that there was no way I could process this seemingly infinite quantity of material on my own.
