KAMMEYER: Nearly all the men there were interned in large camps. I met a fellow one evening and he said, “Some of them are going to be shot tomorrow. Would you like to see it?” A lorry went there every day and he said, “You can come too.” The Kommandeur of… execution there belonged to the Naval Artillery. The lorry arrived and stopped. In a sort of sandpit there was a trench about twenty metres long. There was a man there… they threw him out and he called out in broken German that he wasn’t one and so on. I didn’t know what was happening until I saw the trench. They all had to get into it and were hurried into it with blows from rifle-butts and lined up face to face; the Feldwebel had a tommy-gun… there were five of them, they (shot) them one after the other. Most of them fell like that, with their eyeballs turned up, there was a woman among them. I saw that. It was in LIBAU.252
But watching an execution paled in comparison to actually taking part in one. Luftwaffe Lieutenant Colonel von Müller-Rienzburg recalled:
MÜLLER-RIENZBURG: The SS issued an invitation to go and shoot Jews. All the troops went along with rifles and… shot them up. Each man could pick the one he wanted. Those were… of the SS, which will, of course, bring down bitter revenge.
BASSUS: You mean to say it was sent out like an invitation to a hunt!
MÜLLER-RIENZBURG: Yes.253
It is unclear in this excerpt whether Müller-Rienzburg accepted the invitation or not, although he unambiguously says that others did. Bassus immediately imagines a hunt but does not express any special amazement or surprise at what he’s just heard.
A Lieutenant Colonel August von der Heydte also reported—albeit in secondhand fashion—that executions resembled hunts:
HEYDTE: The following is a true story told me by BÖSELAGER (?), who managed to get the “Swords” before being killed. Oberstleutnant Freiherr von BÖSELAGER (?) was a comrade from my “Regiment.” He experienced the following. It must have happened in 1942 or 1941 or whenever it was, sometime at the beginning of the show, I believe in POLAND, when an “SS-Führer” was sent there as a civilian commissar.
GALLER*: Who?
HEYDTE: The “SS-Führer.” I believe BÖSELAGER (?) had just been awarded the “Oak-leaves.” He was having dinner and after dinner the former said: “Now we’ll have a look at a little…” They then drove out in a car and—it sounds like a fairytale but it is a fact—shot guns were lying about, ordinary ones, and thirty Polish Jews were standing there. Each guest was given a gun; the Jews were driven past and every one was allowed to have a pot shot at a Jew. Subsequently they were given the coup de grace.254
