BRUHN: Then they dug their graves and then they picked up the children by their hair and then simply killed them. The SS did that. The soldiers stood there, and besides that the Russian civilian population stood 200 m. away and watched as they were killed there. He [Kittel] proved how vile the whole thing was by the fact that an out-and-out SS man who was employed on his staff later succumbed to a nervous-breakdown and from that day cowards kept saying that he couldn’t carry on any longer, it was impossible; he was a doctor. He couldn’t get over it. That was his first experience of such things actually being done. A cold shudder ran through SCHAEFER (PW) and me when we heard that, and then we said to KITTEL: “What did you do then? You were lying in bed and heard that, and it was only a few hundred metres away from your house. Then surely you must have reported that to your GOC [general officer commanding]. Surely something was bound to be done about it?” He replied that it was generally known and was quite usual. Then sometimes he also interspersed remarks such as: “There wasn’t anything particularly bad about it either,” and “they were to blame for everything anyhow,” so that I almost assumed at that time, that it hadn’t even mattered very much to him personally.203
Conversations like this are often like games of Chinese whispers. Researchers in the fields of narrative and memory research have determined that stories necessarily change as they are retold.204 Details are constantly invented, characters substituted, and settings exchanged according to the needs and wants of the storyteller. Retellers of previously heard stories rarely make these changes consciously. Modifications and embellishments simply seem to be an integral part of the storytelling process, with the content being made to fit the teller’s perspective and current situation. For that reason, stories shape and don’t just reflect events. Stories also reveal what concerns are most important to both tellers and their audience, as well as what knowledge both groups possess and what historical facts and myths are familiar to them. On the basis of such stories, we can determine the extent to which the events connected with the Holocaust were part of the soldiers’ communicative arsenal. This particular story shows how outraged Bruhn was at the coldheartedness of Kittel, who he believes was relatively indifferent to the executions.
