Paradoxically, though, when such killings are subjected to legal scrutiny, they are treated as exceptions to the rule. The misconception thus arises that, by and large, war adheres to international law, and violations of that law are the deeds of rogue individuals. Autotelic violence, so the logic goes, is not a systematic aspect of war, but a regrettable deviation. But the surveillance protocols show that once the floodgates of violence are opened,
“What shall we do with all these men? We must shoot them, they won’t last long anyway.”159
Ever since antiquity, the mistreatment and murder of prisoners has been an example of extreme wartime violence. But with the mass armies of the modern age, the phenomenon of the POW took on entirely new dimensions. In World War I, there were some 6 to 8 million POWs.160 In World War II, that number was 30 million.
It was always difficult to feed and house millions of prisoners adequately. Even in World War I, some 472,000 Central Powers soldiers died in Russia.161 Those numbers increased dramatically in World War II, and the gravest crime of the Wehrmacht was the mass murder of Soviet POWs. Of the 5.3 to 5.7 million Red Army soldiers captured by the Wehrmacht, some 2.5 to 3.3 million died. The estimates vary, but the percentage of Soviet POWs who died in German custody is somewhere between 45 and 57 percent. Most perished in camps for which the Wehrmacht was responsible: 845,000 in military-administered territory near the front lines, 1.2 million in civilian-administered areas further back from the fighting, 500,000 in the so-called General Gouvernement of Poland, and 360,000 to 400,000 in camps located within the German Reich proper.162
The main cause for the horrifying numbers of casualties was the German military leadership’s cynical decision to abandon POWs to the fate of starvation, making little to no effort to provide them with adequate nourishment. German military leaders never ceased reminding common soldiers that they were fighting “an enemy race and culture of inferior nature,” which one was to encounter with a “healthy feeling of hatred.” In this battle, German soldiers were not supposed to show “any bleeding-heart sentiments or mercy.”163
From the onset of the Third Reich’s war with the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, it was clear that the perennial calls for German soldiers to show steely hardness would have consequences. The Wehrmacht immediately began fighting with unusual brutality. There were numerous reports of “the bodies of countless [Soviet] soldiers lining the roads, without weapons and with their hands raised, showing unmistakable signs of having been shot in the back of the head.”164 One significant factor in the extreme violence was that German predictions about the terrible tactics employed by the Red Army were quickly confirmed. From the first day of the war onward, Soviet forces fought in ways violating international law and foreign to Western European custom.
German anecdotes about Soviet brutality stoked the violence already being perpetrated with the power of imagination. A Lieutenant Leichtfuss reported seeing six German soldiers nailed to a table through their tongues, ten hung up from meat hooks in a slaughterhouse, and twelve to fifteen who were thrown down a well in a small village and then stoned to death. This leads his conversation partner to ask: “Were those soldiers dead who were hanging on the meat hooks?”
LEICHTFUSS: Yes. The ones with nails through their tongues were dead too. These incidents were taken for a reason for repaying it tenfold, twenty and hundredfold, not in that crude and bestial manner, but simply in the following way. When a small detachment of about ten or fifteen men was captured there, it was too difficult for the soldier or the “Unteroffizier” to transport them back 100 or 120 km. They were locked in a room and three or four hand grenades were flung in through the window.165
