The laconic nature of the above exchange is what makes it so remarkable. While Bassus looks for reasons for the destruction of European Jews, Lieutenant Thöne repeatedly points out that the phenomenon needs no justification. Hatred is enough of a spark, without any further motivation such as the alleged danger represented by Jews or their purported hatred for Germans. Even more astonishing is Thöne’s assertion that German hatred is not a reason, but a sheer fact. It’s hard to imagine a clearer formulation of what autotelic violence is, and it points up one finding about the deep psychological effect of National Socialist ideology on the soldiers subjected to surveillance. Ideology was not prominent among the things that occupied soldiers’ minds. Many soldiers may have been perfectly willing to use violence to solve the alleged “Jewish question,” but an astonishing number of them were explicitly against it. But for all of them, the existence of the question was a given, regardless of whether they as individuals thought the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies were good or bad, right or wrong.
In April 1943, after reading the nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine, First Lieutenant Fried remarked: “They say that the Jews weren’t able to master the German language in literature and so on. But the ‘Journey through the Harz’ is marvellous.”528
A few months earlier a low-level officer named Wehner* declared: “When I meet a Jew I could shoot him out of hand. The number of Jews we killed in POLAND! We did them in mercilessly.”529
Both statements were made around roughly the same time by two members of the same branch of the military, the Luftwaffe. So is it fair to say that Fried represented humanistic Germany whereas Wehner was an anti-Semitic ideological warrior? Our material provides no evidence that enjoying Heine’s “Journey Through the Harz” was any indication of whether or not someone was capable of murdering Jews. Conversely, of course, we can conclude that Wehner was fanatic enough to refuse to read books by Jewish authors (his other statements confirm this). The juxtaposition of these two excerpts indicated the spectrum of opinion expressed in the protocols about Jews and racism in general. On the one hand, the transcripts contain praise for Heine and Jewish doctors, chemists, and physicists as well as emotional rejections of the Holocaust and the persecution of Jews in general. 530 On the other, the protocols are also full of theories about a global Jewish conspiracy, including “Jewified” England and America, as well as tales of glee after killing Jews.531 In short the transcripts contain just about everything under the sun. Moreover, contradictory opinions were not only expressed by two or more POWs in dialogue. As we saw in the section on the Holocaust, single individuals often used seeming mutually exclusive arguments and expressed diametrically opposed perspectives. “The Nazis are worse swine than the Jews,”532 remarked one POW, while another opined, “The Japanese are the Jews of the east.”533
Some statements indicate how far the anti-Semitic imagination was given free rein:
ERFURTH: I always disliked seeing the Jewish women from GERMANY who had to clean the streets in RIGA. They still kept on speaking German. It was revolting! That should be forbidden, and they should not be allowed to speak anything but Yiddish.534
Other utterances were nothing short of absurd: “I am the ping-pong champion of Western Germany. But I am out of practice. I gave up the game after a typical Jew-boy—sixteen years old—had beaten me. Then I said to myself: ‘That is certainly not real sport!’”535 Conversations about racial issues or “the Jews” have the same basic structure as other exchanges. Remarks are interjected, and stories told, before the POWs change the subject. Such conversations aimed primarily at establishing consensus and did not admit of one side insisting on a point, doggedly asking questions, or arguing. In the main, a unity of perspective and political evaluation was quickly established, and in any case soldiers did not see topics dealing with Jews as particularly important. If the topics were broached, soldiers usually had an opinion, but no one seems to have been particularly eager to bring them up.
