BLAAS: At BARLETTA they called the population together and told them that they were going to distribute food and then they fired into them with machine guns. Those were the sort of things they did. And they snatched watches and rings off people in the street, like bandits. Our soldiers themselves told us how they carried on. They simply entered a village and if there was anything they didn’t like, they just shot down a few people, just like that. They told us about it as though it were quite in order, and as though it were the natural thing to do. One man boasted of how they broke into a church and put on the priest’s vestments and committed sacrilege in the church. They behaved like Bolshevists there and then they were surprised when the people turned against them.266
The striking thing is that SS Sonderführer Blaas refers to his soldiers not just as bandits but Bolshevists, one of the National Socialists’ archenemies. Talking about crimes that had occurred only a few days previously also reawakened memories of the Eastern Front. “And then the things they are doing in Russia!” Blaas exclaimed. “They massacred thousands of people, women and children. It was frightful!”267 Blaas’s experiences in Italy and Russia merged into a kind of orgy of violence that left him deeply disturbed. Significantly, references to the SS as the perpetrators, which normally allowed the speakers to disassociate themselves from the violence depicted in their stories, are missing here.
The crime that called forth the greatest outrage was the murder of women and children:
MEYER: I saw the SS destroy a village in RUSSIA, including the women and children, just because the partisans had shot a German soldier. The village was not in any way to blame. They burned the village down root and branch, and shot the women and children.268
This statement by army lieutenant Meyer is unusual insofar as, in the speaker’s eyes, the death of a single German soldier did not justify the act of retribution. Atrocities committed against women and children were frequently described as “appalling” or “horrible” 269 deeds that made one’s “blood boil.”270 Soldiers usually quickly distanced themselves from the war crimes they described and then changed the subject. Yet on occasion, stories about the execution of prisoners or the mass murder of Jews did provide food for moral thought. Germany’s youth had lost all respect for humanity, one POW complained, referring to the relatively young average age of those who perpetrated crimes against humanity. 271 A soldier named Alfred Drosdowski called his fellow soldiers “swine” who had given Germany a bad name for decades to come.272 A Sergeant Czerwenka even declared: “I have often felt ashamed of wearing German uniform.”273 After hearing a cell mate relate details about a mass execution in the town of Luga in the Leningrad oblast, Franz Reimbold responded: “I tell you. If that’s the way things are, I’ll stop being German. I don’t want to be German any more.”274
When Colonel Ernst Jösting learned from his wife about the conditions under which Jews were deported from Vienna, the two agreed: “That’s bestial, unworthy of a German.” Helmut Hanelt came to much the same conclusion when a comrade named Franz Breitlich described in detail how thirty thousand Jews had been executed: “It makes you ashamed of being German.”275
Higher-level ranks were notably more prone to reflect on what conclusions should be drawn from the prevalence of war crimes. For example, Colonel Eberhard Wildermuth opined:
