GROMOLL: We once captured four terrorists in FRANCE. They are first taken to an interrogation camp where they are asked where they got their arms from etc., and then they are shot quite indiscriminately. A woman came along who said that terrorists had probably been lying hidden in a house for ten days. We immediately got a troop ready and rushed off there—it was correct, there were four men in the house. They were playing cards and so on. We arrested them because they were presumably terrorists. You can’t just shoot them in the middle of a game of cards. Then they looked for arms and they were in the canal, I believe. They had thrown them into the canal.156
We can no longer reconstruct the exact details of this incident. But Gromoll’s story suggests that German soldiers did not need to find any weapons to conclude that what could have been ordinary card players were terrorists. They could have thrown their weapons in the canal, the logic runs. Legalistic reasoning of this sort suggests that, for some soldiers, it was important to justify killings in terms of a formal structure, a framework that would legitimate their actions, even if those actions really amount to little more than indiscriminate murder.
There was a similar unwritten rule among U.S. troops in Vietnam: “If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s a Vietcong.” Private First Class Diekmann tells a story in precisely this mode about a series of executions carried out in France after the Allied invasion of Normandy:
