As is the case with the presence of picture-snapping tourists, the phenomenon of soldiers being invited, either alone or in groups, to execute Jews suggests that the people concerned required no period of adjustment before carrying out the most brutal kinds of acts. Fried steps up as a shooter just as immediately as the police entertainers in Goldhagen’s and Browning’s studies. They killed for entertainment and amusement. They didn’t need to be acclimatized.
The openness with which the hosts issued their invitations indicates that they saw nothing unusual about their activities and did not expect them to disconcert or repulse people. We can assume, then, that soldiers participating voluntarily in executions, either by invitation or at their own request, was just as common as spectators attending them for their own amusement. That implies that mass executions did not fall outside the bounds of the soldiers’ frame of reference or fundamentally run contrary to the way they viewed the world.
These conclusions are supported by a number of statements in the protocols in which POWs explicitly endorse the annihilation of Jews. One of them is a conversation between two young submarine officers, First Lieutenants Günther Gess and Egon Rudolph:
RUDOLPH: It’s dreadful to think of our poor chaps in RUSSIA, with a temperature of 42˚ below zero (Centigrade).
GESS: Yes, but they know what they’re fighting for.
RUDOLPH: Quite—the chains must be burst once and for all.
GESS AND RUDOLPH (singing loudly): “When Jewish blood spurts from the knife, O then twice happy is our life.”
GESS: The swine! The low-down dogs!
RUDOLPH: I hope the FÜHRER will grant us prisoners our wish and give each of us a Jew and Englishman to slaughter; to cut into little pieces with a big knife, that will be easy. I’ll commit “harakiri” on them. Stick the knife in their belly and twist it round in their entrails.256
“No honorable soldier wants to have anything to do with it.”257
Stories about crimes against humanity were nothing new for most of the soldiers. Tales of horror were scattered throughout narratives about other topics: fighting on the front lines, for instance, or being reunited with friends while on leave, although stories about extreme violence were relatively infrequent. They called forth, by today’s standards, scant outrage. As we have seen, it was very unusual for soldiers to feel repulsed out of
It is striking that soldiers never discuss the legal dimension of what was going on. They showed no interest whatsoever in interpretations of the Hague or Geneva Conventions—the documents scarcely crop up in the surveillance protocols. “The whole question of what is allowed or not is finally a question of power,” one first lieutenant opined. “If you have the power, everything is permissible.” Yet this speaker also distinguished between what forms of violence
German soldiers considered executing captured partisans as nothing short of a dictate of common sense, beyond question, since partisans did not enjoy the status of combatants. Stories about regular prisoners killed on the front lines were also accepted without commentary since that was everyday practice, particularly on the Eastern Front. Narratives had to depart from standard operating procedure in a massive quantitative or qualitative sense to call forth an intense reaction.
One example is a conversation between Lieutenant Kurt Schröder and a lieutenant named Hurb* from Bomber Wing 100 about the execution of pilots who had been shot down. The discussion was prompted by the news that the Japanese had killed U.S. airmen captured during the first American aerial bombardment of Tokyo:
