SCHRÖDER: Yes, well, the Japanese are swine the way they treat their prisoners. They executed that crew which they shot down during the first attack on TOKYO, a week or two later, after a court-martial. That’s a dirty business.
HURB: If I come to think of it, that is the only right way, we should have done likewise.
SCHRÖDER: And what of yourself, if you were to be executed here?
HURB: Well, let them go ahead.
SCHRÖDER: That’s not a soldier’s point of view.
HURB: Of course it is. It was the best thing they could do. If, after the first and second air-raid, we had done it with the Americans and English, at any rate the lives of thousands of women and children would have been spared, because no more crews would have flown on an attack.
SCHRÖDER: Of course they would have continued.
HURB: But not attacking towns. If the airforces had been used only for tactical warfare, that is to say, at the front, and if at the very beginning an example had been made in that request—TOKYO hasn’t in fact been attacked again since. Thousands of women and children’s lives have been saved by the mere fact of executing twenty men.259
Hurb’s view that murdering enemy pilots is a legitimate means of preventing attacks on civilian targets is not only naïve. It also reflects the general Wehrmacht belief that brutal measures could be used to dictate the enemy’s behavior. Schröder disagrees for both empirical reasons and because such “swinish” behavior runs contrary to what he sees as soldiers’ honor. Significantly, he does not argue that such executions violated the Geneva Convention. His views are based on his military ethos.
Similar sorts of arguments, often with the same choice of words, occur in conversations between army men. Colonel Hans Reimann, for instance, thought it was “swinish” that the SS reconnaissance unit “Hitler Youth” executed eighteen Canadian soldiers in Normandy. For him, such behavior was inexcusable. Nonetheless, the topic of what should be allowed rarely led to serious debates among the POWs. Most often, a reference to the excessively brutal SS or the “inhuman” war on the Eastern Front sufficed to establish consensus and allow the conversation to turn to other topics. The discussion between Schröder and Hurb was one of the few that featured two obviously different ethical stances. Most soldiers were simply concerned with establishing points of agreement and avoiding any far-reaching conclusions that could have caused them to question their own actions and views.
German POWs were far more interested in the qualitative and quantitative dimensions of war crimes, and this influenced their perceptions. Reports about Soviet prisoners dying en masse in German POW camps elicited far more outrage than tales of soldiers being executed at the front. What happened in the camps was, in the view of one Luftwaffe sergeant, “a downright disgusting bit of work.”260 Two men named Ernst Quick and Paul Korte agreed that the treatment of Red Army soldiers was “dreadful.”261 Georg Neuffer spoke of “ghastly business,”262 while a private named Herbert Schulz went even further, saying the war was a point of cultural shame and the greatest crime in human history.263 As early as September 1940, “terrible things” were being told, for instance of the entire male population of a village being executed after someone fired shots at German occupying troops from a house.264 A First Sergeant Doebele asked himself: “Why do we do all these things? It’s not right.”265
A translator who was deployed with German troops in occupied Italy was also outraged at how Wehrmacht soldiers had treated the civilian population:
