MÜLLER: In a village in RUSSIA there were partisans, and we obviously had to raze the village to the ground, without considering the losses. We had one man named BROSICKE, who came from BERLIN; if he saw anyone in the village, he took him behind the house and shot him, and with it all the fellow was only nineteen and a half or twenty years old. The order was given that every tenth man in the village was to be shot. “To hell with that! Every tenth man. It is perfectly obvious,” said the fellow, “that the whole village must be wiped out.” We filled beer bottles with petrol and put them on the table and, as we were going out, we just threw hand grenades behind it. Immediately everything was burning merrily—all roofs were thatched. The women and children and everyone were shot down; only a few of them were partisans. I never took part in the shooting unless I was sure that they were proved to be partisans; but there were a lot of fellows who took a delight in it.147
At the end of his story, Müller distances himself from the action by claiming he never fired a shot at innocents. But he still offers a detailed description, in the first-person plural, of how his unit burned down Russian houses. Stories like this illustrate what the soldiers regarded as crimes and what not, and how porous the boundary was between the two. Müller considered executing women and children a crime insofar as it was unclear whether they truly were partisans. Burning down a village, on the other hand, was not.
Müller also conspicuously includes a figure in his story, Brosicke, from whom he can positively distinguish himself. Brosicke’s behavior, in Müller’s telling, is unambiguously criminal, as is that of those for whom killing was fun. Müller’s own behavior, by contrast, is not criminal. This is a typical and significant element in the protocols. By differentiating himself from others, the typical storyteller was able to find a space within a larger criminal endeavor in which he himself could not be accused of behaving immorally. Yet as we have already observed in the various different groups that took part in the mass executions and other anti-Jewish initiatives, individual interpretations of one’s own role and duties ultimately helped the killing as a whole to proceed smoothly.148 Individual attitudes and decisions are not usually overridden by “group pressure” and social influence in the way some sociologists would have us believe. On the contrary, internal differentiation within a group makes it capable of acting as a whole. To adapt a phrase coined by German scholar Herbert Jäger, what we have here is a case of individual action in collective states of emergency.149
One good example of this phenomenon occurs in a detailed description by a Private First Class Franz Diekmann about how he combated “terrorists” in France:
