It is difficult to say to what degree the Holocaust generally occupied soldiers’ thoughts. If we assume that the Allied officers in charge of the surveillance would have been interested in learning about the annihilation of European Jews, conversations about that topic would have been disproportionately recorded. The 0.2 percent of stories that centered on the Holocaust seems surprisingly small, especially considering the fact that the narratives encompass the full spectrum of activities associated with anti-Jewish persecution, from ghettoization to executions and mass murder using gas. The shock felt after the end of the war—and today—at the images from Bergen-Belsen or Buchenwald should not lead us to conclude that all German soldiers necessarily participated in or actively knew about the Holocaust. They knew what they did from scenes they had witnessed or registered, largely passively, and from hearsay. The project of eradicating Europe’s Jews was not German soldiers’ central task, although they sometimes provided logistical support or collegial assistance, and some soldiers certainly participated in the killings of their own free will. “Jewish actions” were mainly organized by storm trooper units, reserve police battalions, and local groups, and they took place in occupied territories well behind the advancing front lines. Troops actively engaged in battle could thus logically not have had much to do with these acts of mass murder.
Regardless of whether individual soldiers found those acts right or wrong or simply surreal, the Holocaust was not a central part of their world in the way it has been ascribed to them by the German and broader European culture of memory in the past thirty years. Knowledge that mass murders were taking place was widespread. It could hardly have been otherwise. But what did that knowledge have to do with the work of war the soldiers were charged with? In far more innocent eras, a lot of parallel events happen without people taking active notice of all of them. Modern reality is complex. It contains a plethora of “parallel societies.” Thus the Holocaust might not have been central even to the consciousness of SS men. To take one notorious example: in his “Posen speech,” SS leader Heinrich Himmler openly referred to the destruction of European Jews, but the topic only occupied a few minutes of an address that went on for three hours. This fact often gets overlooked in our sheer horror at some of Himmler’s statements, such as “Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when 500 lie there or when 1,000 are lined up.”
Our source material has led us to conclude that while soldiers were aware of the Holocaust and knew a fair amount about how it was being carried out, that knowledge did not interest them very much. The percentage of conversations dealing with the Holocaust is very small compared to the endless gabbing about weapons and air raid techniques, military honors, ships sunk, and planes shot down. It was clear to the soldiers that the extermination was happening, and the extermination was integrated into their frame of reference. But it remained quite marginal in terms of what commanded their attention.
On the other hand, relatively rare as they are, soldiers’ discussions of the Holocaust are usually very detailed and considerably more precise than the painstaking reconstructions made by postwar prosecutors. The surveillance protocols are both more frank and temporally more proximate to the atrocities. Much of what soldiers discussed had taken place in the very recent past and, even more significantly, had not been subjected to the filters of postwar interpretation. As a result, the protocols are far more direct than postwar testimonies or memoirs, which are typically influenced by the authors’ desire to exculpate themselves.
The protocols confirm all the facts about the Holocaust that have thus far been established by historical research, criminal investigations, and survivors’ testimony. But here, the ones doing the reconstructing are perpetrators or at least observers of the crimes and members of the perpetrating society:
