The narrator Priebe has no difficulty incorporating even the most contradictory aspects into a single story. The mass destruction of Jews is presented as a ghostly rumor in which Jews simply disappear in a flooded reservoir. In the same breath, Priebe criticizes the SS for stealing Jewish jewelry and “their uncontrolled sexual activities” and assures his listeners that he himself wouldn’t have been capable of killing Jews, at least not women and children. The only positive is that the SS and not the military proper is responsible. This view is reminiscent of Major General Kittel, who objected to the location but not the practice of mass killings per se.
Soldiers were only interested in carrying out their tasks, not questioning them. With that in mind, we must acknowledge that there was a certain empiric basis to the following complaint of Himmler’s in his Posen speech of October 4, 1943:
It is one of those things that is easily said: “The Jewish people is being exterminated.” Every Party member will tell you, “perfectly clear, it’s part of our plans, we’re eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, a small matter.” And then along they all come, all the 80 million upright Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. They say: all the others are swine, but here is a first-class Jew. And none of them has seen it, has endured it.223
Himmler’s speech is often seen as the height of cynicism and the incarnation of moral corruption. But it can be read more productively as evidence of the moral standards Himmler presumed his high-ranking SS officers would maintain and of what comprised the ethical frame of reference of National Socialism. Aspects of this frame of reference appear throughout the surveillance protocols. They include the rhetorical figure of Germans suffering under the “poor” realization of the “proper” aim of persecuting and even killing Jews, or questions of how one could have better implemented the Holocaust as a central project of National Socialism.
The frame of reference encompassing the mass executions and the extermination camps represents an idiosyncratic amalgamation of anti-Semitism, support for genocide, delegated responsibility, and horror at practical implementation. Excerpts from the protocols show that the soldiers perceived the Holocaust as something unprecedented and even terrible. Their complaints could be summarized in the formula: what must be must be, but not in this form. In Priebe’s narrative, that is exactly the perspective of the father as a reference figure: a self-professed Jew hater who objects to how Jews are being treated.
In both the surveillance protocols and postwar testimony about the Holocaust, Germans emphasized the extreme brutality of the native inhabitants of countries Germany occupied, distancing themselves in the process from the crassest examples of “inhumanity.” But this, too, only suggests that the criminal nature of the entire endeavor had little to no significance in their frame of reference. In fact, when observed empirically, what historians and sociologists refer to by way of shorthand as annihilation, genocide, or the Holocaust dissolves into an array of countless individual situations and actions. That was how the soldiers perceived events. It was the basis of their interpretation and the source of their answers and solutions to problems. Human beings in general behave according to particular rationales, and it is fundamentally false to imagine that they clearly see universal contexts when acting. For that reason, social processes always produce unintended results, outcomes no one desired but everyone helped to bring about.
Another individual who drew clear distinctions between the historical mission of the Holocaust and its unsatisfactory practice was Colonel Erwin Jösting, commander of the Mainz-Finthen military airfield. In April 1945, he related:
