Postwar family reminiscences do feature occasional instances of Germans who seem to have unambiguously rejected the murder of Jews. An interviewee named Doetsch, for instance, recalled: “In Lvov, I once saw a so-called Jew transport… Suddenly there was a lot of movement in the ranks. Up at the front, the SS were beating people up. It was… the SS, and they’d gotten drunk. They lined them up in front of anti-tank trenches. The first had to take their place, then machine gun fire, and down they went. The next ones had to push them into the trench before they themselves went down. They weren’t even dead. Dirt was shovelled. The next ones… can you imagine that? Women and children and old people. I knew exactly what was going on. Someone told me. ‘We had orders,’ he said, ‘but I couldn’t watch.’ Germans nailed children to the walls. They did
The protocols do not just contain descriptions of mass executions, but of exterminations using car exhaust fumes. A POW named Rudolf Müller at Fort Hunt in the United States told the following story:
MÜLLER: I was brought up in front of a military tribunal in Russia for refusing to obey orders. I was in charge of the motor pool, but the fellow who was supposed to be in charge had fallen, and I was the second highest ranked person in the garage. I was supposed to adapt a truck by installing rubber inserts. I didn’t know what for, so I did it. The truck was sent out and placed at the disposal of the local command. That was the end of the matter for us. When the driver returned, he was pale as a ghost. I asked him what was wrong, and he said he would never forget what we had experienced that day. He said, ‘They loaded civilians into the back. Then they stuck a tailpipe back into the truck and sealed up the back. Next to me in the front sat a SS man with a pistol on his lap who ordered me to drive.’ He was only 18. What was he supposed to do? He drove off. After a half an hour, they arrived at a pit. The back was full of bodies with some chlorine between them. He reversed and opened the hatch, and they tumbled out. Dead from the exhaust fumes. The next day, I received orders to deliver the truck to the local command. I said the truck wasn’t going anywhere. So I was brought up before a military tribunal for disobedience. They intentionally loaded in people and killed them with exhaust fumes.
REIMBOLD: Dear God.
MÜLLER: They forced the driver. There was a fellow with a pistol next to him. And they hauled me up on charges.
REIMBOLD: And that’s happening in the name of Germany. No telling what’s going to happen to us.243
This dialogue is one of the scant bits of direct evidence we have of the gassing of Jews using carbon monoxide fumes. It is also unusual in that the narrator clearly abhors the events he describes—an attitude he was forced to answer for in front of a military hearing. The listener also seems shocked. Apparently, he had previously heard nothing about these kinds of murder.
