To Jösting’s eyes, the campaign against Jews as it was being pursued seemed irrational because it squandered badly needed resources and thus worked against the ultimate goal of the final elimination of supposedly pernicious Jewish influence. Jösting feared that “the Jew” was already exacting revenge through the soon-to-be-victorious Allies. Moreover, he worried that Germans would be blamed for crimes they did not commit. He is particularly critical of the timing of actions aimed at exterminating Jews. After the war, he believes, the time would have been far more propitious.
Two other German soldiers saw the situation the same way:
AUE: Perhaps we didn’t always do right in killing Jews in masses in the East.
SCHNEIDER: It was undoubtedly a mistake. Well, not so much a mistake as un-diplomatic. We could have done that later.
AUE: After we had finally established ourselves.
SCHNEIDER: We should have put it off until later, because Jews are, and will always remain, influential people, especially in AMERICA.227
The surveillance protocols also contain firsthand descriptions of the murder of Jews. In one excerpt, SS Oberscharführer Fritz Swoboda discussed the difficulties of carrying out executions in Czechoslovakia with First Lieutenant Werner Kahrad:
SWOBODA: The executions were like an assembly line. You got a 12 marks bonus, 120 kroner per day for the shooting commandos. We didn’t do anything else. Groups of twelve men led in six men and then shot them. I didn’t do anything else for maybe 14 days. We got double rations because it puts a lot of strain on your nerves… We shot women, too. Women were better than men. We saw a lot of men, Jews, too, who started crying in their final moment. If there were weaklings there, two Czech nationals came and held them up in the middle… The man earned his double rations and 12 mark bonus, killing 50 women in half a day. In ROISIN we also carried out executions.
KAHRAD: There was a large airfield there.
SWOBODA: At the barracks, it was a treadmill. They came from one side, and there was a column of maybe 500 or 600 men. They came in through the gate and went to the firing range. There they were killed, picked up and brought away, and then the next six would come. At first you said, great, better than doing normal duty, but after a couple days you would have preferred normal duty. It took a toll on your nerves. Then you just gritted your teeth and at some point you didn’t care. There were some of us who got weak in the knees when shooting women, and we had selected experienced frontline soldiers. But orders were orders.228
This rare instance of inside access to the Holocaust not only allows us to hear a mass murderer in his own words. It also highlights the difficulties of organizing mass executions and the rewards and strategies used to overcome them. The assumption that, because of their experience with violence, all veteran frontline soldiers would be suitable for executions proved false. If Swoboda is to be believed, some of them lost their nerve when called upon to kill women. He even admits that in the beginning he himself had to steel himself, and that there were special rewards for carrying out this particularly tough form of duty.
