This was the reason why the Wehrmacht most often engaged in acts of extreme violence against innocent civilians in the context of fighting partisans. It is beyond question that the POWs in the surveillance protocols operated under the assumption that in the battle against presumed partisans, one was allowed to kill, burn down villages, and terrorize civilians. The threatening chimera of the “Franc-tireur,” the irregular fighter, had already played a prominent role in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, and it was an established Wehrmacht doctrine to nip any incipient guerrilla activity in the bud with brute force.854 Thus, internalized cultural factors combined with objective uncertainty to make the use of “ruthless severity” seem unavoidable and normal.
It is unique to the conditions of war that the definition of the enemy justifies all acts taken as a result of that definition. In this respect, the way the Wehrmacht waged war was no different from the way many fighting forces have. This perspective applies equally to war between sovereign states and asymmetrical warfare. The parties at war have the right to define who is and isn’t an enemy. The perennial argument that one was only trying to defend oneself against an enemy bent on world domination or enamored of senseless violence is a standard element of war crimes trials or interviews and personal testimonies. It’s the excuse perpetrators use to justify why they did certain things. At the moment when violence occurs, though, it needs no justification. Or as the leader of a German mobile medical unit in Afghanistan formulated things: “You feel great rage in battle. You don’t have much time to think. That only comes later.”855
The decisive point in the example of the U.S. helicopter crews’ behavior is this: entirely unrelated to historical, cultural, and political circumstances, the definition of a specific situation and all the actors present in it establishes the frame of reference for everything that happens subsequently. Group thinking and the dynamic force of unfolding violence ensure that the ending is almost always deadly.
The analogy of killing can be extended by definition all the way to the level of genocide. The murder of Jews was also defined as an act of self-defense, at least by racial theorists and those who helped arrange the Holocaust. Only here the subject of the fear and aggression was a whole community and not an individual. It is no accident that Jews about to be killed were also described as partisans, that is: irregular enemies it was permissible to eradicate. As one Wehrmacht soldier remarked, “Where there’s a Jew, there’s a partisan.”856
Killing under the guise of self-defense also occurs in other cultural and historical contexts. The genocide carried out by the Hutu against Tutsi in 1990s Rwanda was preceded by forms of perception and interpretation that American historian Alison Des Forges vividly described as “accusation in a mirror.” In a kind of putative genocidal fantasy, one side accuses the other of planning to completely annihilate it. This schema of mirror-image accusations is not just a psychosocial phenomenon. It is also an explicitly promoted propaganda method. With the help of this technique, as one source quoted by Des Forges asserts, “the side actually terrorizing the other will accuse its enemy of terrorizing it.”857 The logical corollary to spreading fantastic fears of being threatened is to create a willingness for self-defense among the party that feels itself under threat. Every form of murderous attack and systematic annihilation can also be perceived as a necessary act of self-defense.
This emerges very tangibly in the motif of “revenge” that plays such a prominent role in narratives of war, irrespective of cultural, historical, or geographical context. Indeed, we have to speak of a narrative trope here. The basic story, as exemplified in countless novels, films, and oral war stories, begins with a soldier relating how a close friend died in battle in an especially horrible or treacherous way. From that moment on, the story usually concludes, the protagonist decided to pay the enemy back in kind. Occasionally this narrative figure is augmented with a promise made to the dying friend by the storyteller. In any case, personal trauma legitimizes the protagonist’s lack of mercy toward the enemy. It was in this sense that one American soldier in Vietnam told his father in a letter that total destruction was the only way to deal with the Vietcong and confessed that he could never have imagined feeling such hatred.858
