One could almost imagine Diekmann as one of the “many pals” from Müller’s story, who had “lots of fun” killing, but the two men were describing entirely different situations. What stands out from Diekmann’s story is the personal motivation he ascribes to his deeds: the desire to exact revenge for a fallen comrade. Despite the sympathy he shows for the four or five children of that comrade, he doesn’t transfer that empathy to his victims, whom he executes completely at random. We do not know which anti-partisan operation Diekmann is referring to here, but it was common for German soldiers to “go wild” and indiscriminately shoot people after a lone incident in which one of them had been killed. On the other hand, the POWs don’t always mention motivations and rationale when they tell stories like these. Their common horizon of experience makes that unnecessary. The detail of the fallen comrade could just be a narrative element Diekmann chose to make his story seem more interesting and well rounded.
From June to September 1944, with the Allies on the offensive, Wehrmacht violence against civilians escalated even in France and Belgium. The extent of German war crimes reached a new dimension. So it’s hardly surprising that a number of stories which relate atrocities come from these three months:
BÜSING: We had a lieutenant LANDIG (?), and one of our Oberjäger was shot by the French. How the old boy cursed!
JÄGER*: That was where you were deployed?
BÜSING: It was just a little while ago. We arrived, and the Oberjäger was shot by the partisans. The old boy said nothing, but his jaw was working. Then suddenly he said, “Destroy everything!” So we set out through the entire village. The old boy says: “If you fellows leave a single one of them alive, I’ll kill [you] too.” We enter the village. Everyone was sleeping in the grey light of dawn. We knocked—nothing. We smashed in doors with the butts of our rifles. There were the women, with short shirts on, nightshirts or pyjamas. “Out, out!” we told them and had them line up in the middle of the street.
JÄGER: Where was that?
BÜSING: In LISIEUX—BAYEUX, up north.
JÄGER: Right at the beginning of the invasion?
BÜSING: Yes, of course. We mowed down everything, everything. We dragged men, women and children from their beds. He knew no mercy.151
Jäger was likely a stool pigeon for MI19, but Private First Class Büsing, a paratrooper, seems to have had no idea of this and freely answered his questions. In his own eyes, Büsing’s experiences were so commonplace that he doesn’t think of holding anything back. As far as he’s concerned, his story, brutal as it is, falls clearly within the bounds of what was to be expected. Indeed, German POWs who listened to similar anecdotes were neither shocked nor revolted. The fact that the POWs could remain absolutely unemotional while relating the acts of violence they perpetrated speaks volumes about the violent nature of the world they inhabited. Soldiers were intimately familiar with crimes of all sorts.
Not even stories about killing women and children elicit emotion. A second paratrooper related:
ENZIEL: Oberjäger MÜLLER from BERLIN was a sniper, he shot the women who went to meet the English soldiers with bunches of flowers, but he… exactly… found something like that, he took aim and shot civilians in completely cold blood.
HEUER*: Did you shoot women too?
ENZIEL: Only from a distance. They didn’t know where the shot came from.152
