The POWs in the surveillance protocols never refer to the idea of a war crime, or the Geneva Convention and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. Their decisive reference point was the customs of war, the things soldiers normally did in combat. From the onset of World War II, both sides engaged in unlimited submarine warfare, and tens of thousands of merchant marines lost their lives, even though they were not, strictly speaking, enemy combatants. Submarine crews generally offered them little assistance, since to do so would have been dangerous, and many navy men were indifferent to others’ fate. Nonetheless, it was a general rule not to kill sailors whose ships had been sunk—only a few exceptions are known. Prior to 1942, the German Luftwaffe was officially forbidden from launching “terror attacks” against exclusively civilian targets. But as we have seen, for bomber crews, the distinction between military and civilian targets had long been blurred. Everything was a potential target, even if that idea ran contrary to the official policy of the Luftwaffe high command. The exercise of violence modified the rules of combat and extended the boundaries of what was considered permissible. Tens of thousands of British civilians may have been killed in German air raids, and hundreds of British pilots shredded by German machine gun fire, but it was still taboo to kill a pilot who had ejected from his plane while he was parachuting to the ground. Tank crews who had abandoned their vehicles, on the other hand, were usually gunned down. Different rules applied in the air and on the ground, and though there were occasional violations, those rules retained their force. And since rules and customs of war were interdependent, international laws concerning war crimes were not completely ineffective. They still represented something of a frame of reference.
Rules are least applicable in ground combat. Wherever soldiers take prisoners, secure occupied territories, and battle partisans, particular forms of logic dominate. Often, that logic revolves around troops’ security or the satisfaction of material and sexual desires. Individually perpetrated violence, such as rape or killing, becomes more possible and likely. In other words, war opens up a social space that is far more violence-friendly than peacetime. Force becomes expected, accepted, and normal. The conditions under which instrumental violence—the taking of territory, the pilfering of the vanquished, and the rape of women—is allowed to change together with the dynamics of the war itself. The same is true of autotelic violence. The borders between the two types of violence are so permeable that distinctions between legitimate and criminal force in battle become exceedingly tenuous. A lot of what the German POWs relate in the surveillance protocols is typical less of crimes committed by the Wehrmacht specifically than of war crimes in general.
The killing, wounding, and raping of civilians is as much a part of the everyday reality of war as the murder of prisoners, the illegal bombardment of nonmilitary targets, and the strategic terrorization of populaces. The Wehrmacht wasn’t the only army to execute prisoners. Both Soviet and U.S. troops did so as well—and not just in World War II. General Bruce Palmer, former acting chief of staff of the U.S. Army, revealed a little bit more than he intended when he wrote: “Americans did indeed commit war crimes in the course of the protracted Vietnam War, but no more in proportion to the number of people involved than have occurred in past wars.”137 Palmer made explicit what is always assumed about military prohibitions of illegal actions. No one believes that they will
