The surveillance protocols reveal that many soldiers were astonishingly well aware of the specific details of the extermination of European Jews. Indeed, on occasion the POWs discuss aspects of the Holocaust that have remained undiscovered by historical research. The soldiers generally do not draw connections between what they know and their own behavior, although it was no secret during World War II that the Wehrmacht had indeed committed a great number of war crimes and was involved in the murder of Jews throughout occupied Europe in a number of ways: as executioners, witnesses, accomplices, support workers, and commentators. On very rare occasions, individual Wehrmacht officers disrupted the mass killings by registering complaints, saving victims, or, in one unusually spectacular instance, threatening the SS with violence in order to hinder the murder of a group of Jews.187 Naturally, such occasions were exceptions to the rule. Historian Wolfram Wette has estimated that there were only one hundred attempts at rescuing Jews among the 17 million members of the Wehrmacht.188
None of the large-scale executions such as Babi Yar, where more than thirty thousand people were shot to death in two days, took place without Wehrmacht involvement. Moreover, the knowledge of the mass executions in Russia and the smaller-scale ones that had preceded them in Poland went far beyond the circles that directly participated in or witnessed those atrocities. The spreading of rumors is an effective means of communication, especially when the subject matter is inhuman, secrecy is supposed to be maintained, and information is restricted. In the surveillance protocols, the topic of crimes against humanity perpetrated upon Jews only occurs explicitly in 0.2 percent of the conversations. But the absolute numbers are of limited relevance, especially since the concept of the war crime played such a minor role in the soldiers’ frame of reference. The soldiers’ conversations make it clear that practically all German soldiers knew or suspected that Jews were being murdered en masse.
What’s surprising for contemporary readers is, above all, the way in which soldiers discussed crimes against humanity:
