Kratz’s perspective is clinical, as though he were describing just another of the many technical complications one might experience as a soldier, but at the end of his anecdote, he does point out that the execution was something out of the ordinary, something that, in his words, will be “avenged.” Descriptions of mass killings often conclude with bits of reflection like this. Many of the speakers seem aware that retribution might follow excesses that went far beyond conventional warfare and the sorts of crimes deemed normal and usual in wartime. Mass executions violated and deviated from wartime expectations to the extent that soldiers assumed that they would bring punitive consequences, if Germany lost the war.
Another dialogue revolving around a “Jewish action” in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius is worth citing at length because it superbly illustrates the contradictory but clinical ways in which soldiers observed atrocities. The dialogue also shows what details about the Holocaust particularly interested soldiers. The interlocutors were two navy men who were part of a U-boat crew, twenty-three-year-old mechanic Helmut Hartelt and twenty-one-year-old sailor Horst Minnieur, who witnessed the scene he describes while serving with the Reich Labor Service:
