DETTE: When were you in DENMARK? Two years ago?
SCHÜRMANN: I was there in January and February of last year.
DETTE: What were the Danes like, friendly?
SCHÜRMANN: No, they beat up many a man. You can’t imagine what scum those Danes are, incredibly cowardly, a horrible people altogether. I can remember the following quite well: an Oberleutnant shot a Dane in the tram and he was later court-martialled for it. I can’t understand it, the Germans are certainly much too good-natured. It happened like this. The tram started up and a Dane threw him out; he fell flat on his face. He lost his temper—Leutnant SCHMITT always was a hot-tempered man; luckily he just managed to jump on to the second carriage of the tram, then he changed into the first one at the next halt and shot the fellow without turning a hair.287
German soldiers, as we have seen throughout this book, cited even the most trivial reasons for putting people to death:
ZOTLÖTERER: I shot a Frenchman from behind. He was riding a bicycle.
WEBER: At close range?
ZOTLÖTERER: Yes.
WEBER: Did he intend capturing you?
ZOTLÖTERER: Certainly not, I just wanted the bicycle.288
Fantasies and flights of imagination, difficult as they are to identify empirically, are part of the world in which we feel we exist. It is impossible to deny the enormous destructive force of Germans’ mental images of Jews, regardless of whether they were based on quasi-objective sources or merely common stereotypes and biases. Fantasies are not bound to empiric reality. Nonetheless, they can trigger actions that permanently change things in real life, the obvious example being the imaginary universe of Germans in which the Aryan race was superior and thus destined to rule the world. There are too few studies of the opaque area of imagination in the context of the Third Reich. One of them, Charlotte Beradt’s compilation of dreams people had during the period, hints at the central role the Führer and other leading Nazis played in the German subconscious.289 Another source that sheds light on this otherwise obscure aspect of the reference frame of the Third Reich is the love letters written to Hitler. Eight thousand in number, they contain the unrealistic fantasies of women who wanted nothing more than some sort of intimate contact with the Führer.290
The surveillance protocols contain little fantasy material. That’s likely because the British and American officers in charge of the operation didn’t think that conversations of this kind were worth preserving. But the protocols do contain significant information about a topic related to fantasy: rumor. Rumors crop up a lot in the soldiers’ tales, especially in the context of the Holocaust, an initiative that was supposed to be kept secret and was felt to be monumentally transgressive. Such rumors sometimes took the form of fantasies about how people were killed or particularly bizarre events.
Sometimes, things the POWs had actually experienced seemed like the products of fantasy. In conjunction with “Action 1005,” for instance, Rothkirch related:
