Soldaten полностью

This dialogue brings together a number of things that interested many soldiers about the “Jewish actions” (a term they themselves did not use). One primary interest is in the procedure, which is described in detail. The soldiers also noted that women, too, were executed, even pretty ones. In this case, the teller of the anecdote even appears to have had personal contact with one of the victims, who had done forced labor at his military camp. Hartelt seems to assume that attractive forced laborers were required to service soldiers’ sexual desires. Minnieur confirms that this was, of course, the case, but points out that German soldiers had to be careful not to get caught in acts the Nazis considered a defilement of racial purity. Minnieur continues by referring to the practice of Jewish women being shot after sex so that they could not inform on soldiers. Clearly the mass executions opened up an arena for violence in which a variety of acts were permissible. If people were going to be eradicated one way or the other, one was allowed to do otherwise impossible or impermissible things to them before they were murdered. It is striking that these two men, whose use of the formal form of address implies that they did not know one another well, could speak completely frankly about an otherwise delicate topic. Stories of sexual abuse were part of the routine inventory of soldiers’ conversations and were not greeted with any sort of moral objections.

The conversation then continues casually. Minnieur reports that the victim went to university in the German city of Göttingen, causing Hartelt to remark that she was sleeping around. Formulations like that exemplify the specific attitudes the soldiers have toward sexual violence. They don’t see anything particularly objectionable about rape. They take what they would call a “human” interest in victims who are attractive and feel personally involved in the latter’s fate. But in light of the massive number of victims, which Minnieur puts at 75,000, an individual tragedy such as that of a pretty Jewess has no significance.

For the soldiers, murder is destiny, as though some sort of higher power had preordained that select people—whether well educated, attractive, and stylishly dressed or not—had to become victims. That demonstrates the frame of reference in which the mass eradication of Jews was interpreted. In this excerpt from the protocols, Hartelt and Minnieur do not just discuss mass murder. They also indirectly communicate that they do not consider mass murder to be unjust, immoral, or indeed negative in any sense. Directly witnessing the killings might, as Minnieur put it, cause a feeling of horror. But murder per se is part of the universe of things that simply happen.

The strongest indicator that a frame of reference is functioning is the bewilderment an individual feels at other people seeing things differently than he does. Puzzlement about how members of other nations could regard Germans as “swine” also tells us a lot about what the Holocaust meant in ordinary soldiers’ lives. The gravity of the atrocity by no means caused Germans to question their self-appointed status as the bearers of high culture. There may have been an undertone in the protocols suggesting an awareness that limits had been transgressed. But National Socialist moral codes had convinced many soldiers that Jews represented an objective problem that needed to be solved. This was part of the reference frame in which they interpreted the events they described to one another. The frame of reference was why soldiers tended to criticize the way mass murder was taking place, but not the fact that it was happening.

For example, a W/T (wireless telegraph) operator, who was shot down in a Junkers 88 bomber over northern Africa in November 1942, recalled: