Killing others in battle was so commonplace that it hardly merited discussion. Moreover, except in cases like those of solo fighter pilots,94 battle is a heteronomous undertaking that depends more on factors like group strength, equipment, the tactical situation, and the enemy than on the doings of any one individual soldier. Individual soldiers have little influence over whether they kill anyone and, if so, whom, or whether they themselves get killed. Anecdotes about that possess little amusement value and would have required soldiers to talk about emotions like fear and desperation. It was taboo, within the masculine culture of the military, to admit that one had wet one’s pants, vomited in fear, or anything of the kind. Moreover, rehashing things that everyone knows and has experienced for himself (or at least claims to know and have experienced for himself) isn’t good conversation. In normal civilian society, one doesn’t discuss the minutiae of one’s daily work routine or describe the egg one ate for breakfast. A central criterion for a good story, one worth telling and hearing, is something extraordinary, be it especially irritating or welcome, witty, horrible, or heroic.95 People spend very little time talking about normal everyday life. Why should they? Things that were part of the normal lives of soldiers—including death, killing, and injuries—were background that was taken for granted and
But commonplace routine was only one of the things the soldiers didn’t talk about. Another was emotions, especially those of fear or threat, uncertainty, desperation, or sheer concern for one’s own survival. Such topics rarely crop up in the surveillance protocols, and previous research has shown that soldiers in general filter them out of their conversations.96 Soldiers don’t like talking about death. It’s too real to them. Moreover, just as they only very rarely discuss the all-too-realistic possibility of being killed or wounded themselves, death as a general phenomenon or process seldom occurs in their conversations. In soldier-speak, people are mowed or shot down, drop out of sight, or are simply gone. Obviously, if soldiers were to imagine their own deaths they would have to imagine how they died, and the phenomenon of death, which many of them had experienced often, directly in front of their own eyes, would seem very near. Thus soldiers’ conversations about death and killing revolve around violence of all sorts without ever explicitly mentioning death or killing. Navy men, for instance, describe the success of their efforts in numbers of dead or tonnage of ships sunk. But they rarely speak of who or what it was that they sent to a watery grave.
Descriptions of killings like those related by Lieutenant Pohl occur frequently in the protocols with similar frankness and a likewise matter-of-fact tone, although most of them are less detailed. Apparently, soldiers did not fear that their interlocutors would react with confusion, condemnation, or protest when they told of gunning down others. We can likely put that down to the fact that the speakers under surveillance were all men with similar horizons of experience communicating in the same frame of reference. They were all members of the German military and had all waged the same war for the same reason. They didn’t need to explain to one another the whys and wherefores of things that readers of the protocols seventy years later might find puzzling. In fact, the character of their conversations is much like the sorts of chats people have at parties or occasions when people with similar experiences happen to come together. They swap stories, asking questions and interjecting remarks of their own. They exaggerate and are keen to show that they all belong to the same group, the same experiential community.
The topics of conversation among soldiers may be different, but the structure of their conversations isn’t. Luftwaffe members tend to tell hunting tales, not surprisingly, since many of them were fighter or bomber pilots tasked with destroying specific targets like enemy planes or ground installations. As of 1942, they were also charged with spreading general terror among civilian populations. The tales the men tell are adventure stories that focus on their own flying skill and ability to produce destructive results. Here is one typical example:
