A young SS man named Röthling fought in an armored grenadier regiment, where he came into contact with the veterans of the “Leibstandarte” Division: “Our ‘Zugführer’ said that in RUSSIA they always assembled about a hundred Russian PW and then made them march ahead over the mine-field. They made them blow up their own mines.”817 In France, they had been forced to make do with cows, Röthling then joked. Discussing his experiences in Normandy, Röthling described his superior to a fellow POW, a regular army private first class:
RÖTHLING: If the people here know what we have done to their PW we shouldn’t live much longer either. [The PW] was first interrogated a bit. If he said anything that was all right; if he didn’t say anything, that was all right too. They would let him go, and then fire fifty rounds with the MG when he was ten paces away, and that would be the end of him. Our CO always used to say: “What am I to do with the swine? We haven’t got enough to eat for ourselves.” Our CO had to pay dearly for all his sins against us. He died a miserable death by being shot in the stomach on the last day.818
Röthling did not see himself as a perpetrator of war crimes. On the contrary, he says that his superior had sinned “against us.” This curious narrative moment can perhaps be explained by the fact that war crimes were usually not carried out by seventeen-year-old new recruits to the “Hitler Youth” Division, but by the veteran officers.
Röthling’s stories are not the only narrative evidence of the crimes of the “Hitler Youth” Division in Normandy. Even by Waffen SS standards, this division had a reputation for being not only particularly courageous, but especially brutal. “These were boy-scout types and the sort of swine who think nothing of cutting a man’s throat,” Lingner remarked in February 1945.819
Even more explicit were descriptions of fighting partisans in southern France, as told by an SS man to an army paratrooper:
FÖRSTER: They had it in for us, “Division Das Reich,” because in the TOULOUSE (?) region we had killed more partisans than we took prisoner. We may perhaps have taken twenty of them prisoner and they were only for interrogation. Then we tortured these twenty too, so that they died.
Then when we marched up north, we marched via TOURS. They completely wiped out a “Wehrmachtskompanie” (?) there…… we caught one-hundred-and-fifty at one go and hanged them in the street.
BÄSSLER: But then I can’t understand how they could kill off one-hundred-and-fifty at once.
FÖRSTER: We saw them lying there with their eyes poked out and their fingers cut off. With those one-hundred-and-fifty partisans, whom we hanged, the knots were tied in front, not behind. If the knot is behind, the spine is broken immediately, but in this way they suffocate slowly. That tortures them.
BÄSSLER: The SS know everything; they have already tried everything out.
FÖRSTER: Just think of it. If they kill one-hundred-and-fifty of our fellow soldiers, then we know no quarter. That was the only time that I was in favour [of killing anyone]. We don’t do anything to anyone, but if anyone does anything to us, then we are…820
