That impression is confirmed by a detailed analysis carried out by Alexander Hoerkens, who examined the role of ideology in two thousand pages of transcripts from the protocols. He determined that less than one fifth of the excerpts concerned political, racial, or ideological topics.536 The everyday routine of the war was far more important to POWs. With a few notable exceptions, the “Jewish” topic was just another subject of conversation, and it was treated as such by both hard-core anti-Semites and enthusiastic exterminators and those who were generally repulsed by Nazi crimes. When the talk did turn to the mass executions, the conversation was often about fears of reprisals: “Don’t you think that the shooting of all those Jews, of women and children, will be avenged? My brother, who is an infantryman, has told me a lot about how they were pushed into the graves before they were really dead.”537
Just as there were some committed National Socialists who thought the persecution of Jews was a historical mistake, there were also clear anti-Nazis who thought anti-Semitism was the party’s only reasonable policy. Two soldiers, for instance, got quite hot under the collar when discussing “the Nazis”:
HÖLSCHER: It is obvious that from the very first, from 1933, they were preparing for war. And even if they said in their speeches a score of times: “We don’t want any war, ask the mothers, and ask the wounded”—those were HITLER’s words—what I say to myself, what I believe, is that that was a sheer lie. He lied! He, who so often said he didn’t want war!
V. BASTIAN: What I always said was, then why does he talk so much about it; it’s perfectly obvious that we Germans don’t want war at all, that we aren’t at all in a position to conduct a war, and that we’re fed up with it.
HÖLSCHER: He meant exactly the opposite, he wanted war. I can’t help laughing when I hear them abusing each other about who’s responsible for the war… HITLER was already well-known for his brutalities through his S.A. and S.S. men, through their brawls at public meetings. They accomplished everything by beating people up. HITLER says himself: “National Socialism means fighting.”
V. BASTIAN: Yes, fighting, that’s what it means.
HÖLSCHER: That means they never stop fighting, it’s a perpetual fight, an ever-lasting brawl. The individual counts for nothing, the Fatherland is everything. They said to themselves: “We’ll just show the fools of 1919 what can be made of GERMANY.” Say what you like, the man’s crazy. What he does can only be done by a man who has terrific nerve and exceptional stamina and who has absolutely no regard for losses…
V. BASTIAN: At any rate, I have still no idea of where the Nazis are going to land us in the end. That swine with his brown shirt!538
From this excerpt one would expect such frank critics of the Nazi regime to be against the party’s anti-Semitic policies. But the conversation takes the following turn:
