ROTTLÄNDER: They annihilated whole villages there. Whole villages of Jewish people were driven out mercilessly: holes were dug and then they had to shoot them. He said it was difficult enough at the beginning, but afterwards his nerves were absolutely shattered. They had to cover the bodies over afterwards and some of them were still moving in the hole, children and all. He said: “Even though they were Jews, it was dreadful.”
Rottländer’s listener, Lieutenant Borbonus, has an immediate response: “Well, what on earth can you do if it is ordered by higher authority?”549
When there was sufficient distance between the speaker and the events described, POWs related news of atrocities in much the same tone that people today talk about child soldiers in Africa or bestial deeds of the Taliban. We may find certain acts terrible, but our frame of reference for atrocities is abstract and doesn’t have much to do with our own lives or those of our interlocutors. An engineer who designs mobile phones does not perceive himself as being connected with the fact that coltan, essential to modern telecommunications, is strip-mined in war-torn Congo. Likewise, soldiers were not personally affected if Jews were being slaughtered
SKRZIPEK: Cripples ought to be put out of the way painlessly. They wouldn’t know everything about it and in any case they don’t get anything out of life. It’s just a question of not being sensitive! After all we aren’t women! It’s just because we are sensitive that we get so many blows from our enemies… And exactly the same with mental-defectives and half-wits. Because the half-wits are the very people who have very large families and for one mental-defective you could feed six wounded soldiers. Of course you can’t please everybody. Several things don’t suit me, but it’s a question of the good of the people as a whole.550
Even if most of the racist stereotypes used in the protocols are anti-Jewish, the things POWs said reflected the entire spectrum of Nazi prejudice. Stereotypes are applied to Germany’s allies (“Those yellow monkeys aren’t human beings; they are still animals”;551 “The Italians themselves don’t know what they want. They’re a stupid race”552) and its enemies (“I can’t even look on a Russian as a human being”;553 “Poles! Russians! There’s a lousy crowd working in there”554) alike.
Racism could even serve as the basis for a surprisingly melancholic statement on the postwar future: “One thing is obvious: EUROPE will perish, regardless of whether the Germans or the English are beaten, as these two races are the props of culture and civilisation. It is tragic that such prominent races should have to fight each other instead of fighting Slavdom together.”555 Stereotypes and prejudices are constant elements of cultures, and they shape individuals’ orientation and group social practice.556 In a society in which categorical inequality directs state policy, is considered a scientific standard, and is bolstered by massive propaganda, collective stereotypes are cemented. Nonetheless, as our sources show, this did not happen to the extent that Goebbels, Himmler, or Hitler would have liked and that Holocaust research long declared it did. Ideology is merely the basis of attitudes, and we know little about whether those attitudes in fact inspired action.
Conversely, we can say that the ideology of fundamental human inequality made antisocial behavior toward oppressed groups seem acceptable and even desirable. That is why sympathy with adversaries and victims, although present in protocols, was the exception and not the rule.
