WILDERMUTH: If only ours were a young and immature people, but they have been infected to the depth of their moral fibre. I must tell you that I have considered this question really seriously; a nation which has accepted such a rule of lies, brute force and crime, in the main without raising any objection, is simply not a people; a people in which the murder of mental defectives was possible and where intelligent people could still say: “That wasn’t at all an idea of theirs” should be liquidated. Such bestiality has never been seen in the world before. One might just as well get rid of all consumptives or all suffering from cancer.276
Lieutenant General Friedrich von Broich was likewise frank in his assessment:
BROICH: All we’ve achieved is that our reputation as soldiers and Germans has been completely besmirched. People say: “You carry out all the orders when people are to be shot, whether it is right or wrong.” No one objects to the shooting of spies, but when whole villages, the entire population, including the children, is wiped out, or the people are sent away, as in POLAND or RUSSIA, then, my God, one can say it is pure murder, it is exactly what the Huns of old did. But then of course we are the most civilised people in the world, aren’t we?277
Broich was also one of the few German officers to object on moral grounds to the
Broich’s views were exceptional. Most German officers welcomed the
BRUHN: If you were to ask me: “Have we deserved victory or not?” I should say: “No, not after what we’ve done.” After the amount of human blood we’ve shed knowingly and as a result of our delusions and also partly instigated by the lust of blood and other qualities, I now realize we’ve deserved defeat; we’ve deserved our fate, even though I’m accusing myself as well.280
We have no way of knowing what personal reasons might have led individual POWs to be critical of Wehrmacht war crimes. Some probably found what German soldiers were ordered to do simply too horrible, while others may have maintained deeply entrenched moral beliefs. Yet significantly, such criticism was constantly advanced from the perspective of the noninvolved observer, powerless to change anything. Rarely did POWs raise the possibility of their own culpability, and the protocols contain almost no evidence of any of them engaging in active resistance. One exception was Colonel Hans Reimann, who told of having approached his superior officer during the Polish campaign in an effort to halt the SS execution of Polish intelligentsia. “He wouldn’t think of doing so,” Reimann reported his superior saying. “His position and salary meant far more to him.”281
