Soldaten ( Soldiers)

Historian, Sönke Neitzel made sensational discovery in British and American archives. While researching the submarine war in the Atlantic in 2001, he discovered the transcripts of covertly recorded conversations between German officers in which they talked about their wartime experiences with an unprecedented degree of openness. These recordings were made using special equipment that the Allies used to secretly listen in on conversations between German prisoners of war in their cells starting in 1939 and it offers an inside view of World War II. In doing so, the myth of a once “clean” Wehrmacht has been destroyed.

These chilling confessions of PoWs captured by the British have laid bare the brutality and excesses of ‘ordinary’ German soldiers in the Second World War. A new book entitled Soldaten (Soldiers) has been published by S. Fischer Verlag and the book “has the potential to change our view of the war.” The book reveals how the honour of its old army was lost amid the frenzy to be ‘perfect, pitiless Nazis’. In the interrogation transcripts, the German soldiers speak of the ‘fun’ and ‘pure enjoyment’ of massacring innocent civilians and enemy troops. In “Soldiers,” which is subtitled “Transcripts of Fighting, Killing and Dying,” the soldiers talk about their views of the enemy and their own leaders, discuss the details of combat missions and trade astonishingly detailed accounts of the atrocities they both witnessed and committed.

The words from soldiers are reprinted without an interest to create a voyeuristic collection of stories about what these men did. This book is a landmark on the road to understand what man is able to do depending the society he is part of.

 

Sadism: The transcripts reveal how ordinary German soldiers revelled in massacres during the Second World War. Here a soldier poses next to civilians shot dead in Yugoslavia

Execution: Nazi troops shoot civilians from a small Polish village in 1941. Accounts from German soldiers have revealed how they revelled in killing innocent people

Historians Soenke Neitzel and Harald Welzer have used the interrogations of 13,000 German military prisoners as the basis of Soldiers: Diaries Of Fighting, Killing and Dying – or Soldaten in German.

The exchanges were covertly recorded by British intelligence at a Trent Park detention centre north of London in an attempt to find out whether they held strategic information useful to the Allies.

The 150,000 sides of transcripts, dating from 1940 to 1945, reveal how the Wehrmacht was little better than the S.S. in its outlook, the book concludes.

Their views were not confined to the Eastern Front, the most barbarous theatre of war, but also in raids on Britain, Italy, France and North Africa.
War murders: Merciless Nazi soldiers walk terrified Polish women into the woods to be needlessly shot after storming their village

Budde: “I flew two spoiling attacks. In other words, we shelled buildings.”

Bartels: “But not destructive attacks with a specific target, like what we did?”

Budde: “No, just spoiling attacks. We encountered some of the nicest targets, like mansions on a mountain. When you flew at them from below and fired into them, you could see the windows rattling and then the roof going up in the air. There was the time we hit Ashford. There was an event on the market square, crowds of people, speeches being given. We really sprayed them! That was fun!”

 

 

 

By Sonke Neitzel & Harald Welzer

 

Book review by Jan Peczkis

Valuable Information. Includes Firsthand Accounts of Anti-Slav Racism and Genocidal Policies

The Allied interviews of captured German soldiers are revealing. They defy the stereotype of heel-clicking automatons.

The authors do not elaborate upon the centuries of German chauvinism and militarism. However, they briefly touch upon these matters as they write, “The Prussian-led wars from 1864 to 1871 that created the unified German nation had rooted military values deep within German society, and even many of those critical of the state shared them.” (p. 35).

Considering all the attention given to the Nazi animus against Jews, and of the presumed extent of Nazi indoctrination of German society, the reader may be surprised at the fact that politics or Nazi ideology was seldom the focus of the thinking of the German POWs, and even that was a patchwork of diverse and contradictory statements. (p. 234). In fact, the vast majority of topics, among the captured Germans, had centered upon mundane and soldier-related matters. (p. 319).

Even so, the Wehrmacht was actively involved in the murders of Jews not only in individual cases, but also in virtually all large-scale Jew-killing operations, such as that at Babi Yar. (p. 100). In addition, Neitzel and Welzer cite historian Wolfram Wette, who estimated that, among the 17 million members of the Wehrmacht, there were only 100 attempts to rescue Jews. (p. 100).

When German racism was verbalized by the German POWs, it was directed not only against Jews. The Germans consistently looked down on Slavs as beneath them. (p. 90; 379, #351). One German POW regretted that the Germans and the English were fighting each other instead of jointly fighting the Slavs. (p. 237). Not mentioned is the fact that, in his earlier years, Hitler had entertained similar thoughts.

German racism against Slavs was very relevant to murderous and genocidal German acts against Slavs. (p. 90). One German, Pohl, involved in the bombing and strafing of Polish civilians in 1939, expressed regret only over the death of horses. (p. 45). The Germans demonized and murdered Polish POWs (p. 304), systematically murdered Polish intelligentsia (p. 148), killed individual Poles for the most trivial of offenses (pp. 150-151), and destroyed entire villages (with all their people) in massive, collective reprisals. (p. 147).

Unlike the Holocaust of Jews, the Nazi German genocide of Slavs was often indirect. About 2.5 million to 3.3 million of the 5.3-5.7 million Soviet POWs, (that is, 45-57%), in Nazi German captivity, died because of deliberate genocidal starvation. (p. 90). To put the foregoing figures in perspective, only about 1-3% of Anglo-American POWs died in German captivity. (p. 332). The genocide of Russian POWs was ameliorated only by the later German need of workers for forced labor. (p. 96). [The same, of course, held in the case of the genocide of Jews.]

Let us now consider another topic. In a surprising number of cases, German soldiers exploited Jewish and non-Jewish women sexually before murdering them. (p. 118, 165-175). This is in spite of the Nazi concept of RASSENSCHANDE (racial shame), or perhaps out of fear of being exposed for engaging in it.

Neitzel and Welzer cite a wealth of interesting information. For instance, during WWII, only 146 American soldiers were put to death for desertion as against some 20,000 German soldiers and approximately 150,000 Soviet soldiers. (p. 272).

The authors clarify Milgram’s famous experiment. This experiment has been used to prove that “ordinary” people are liable to commit the most heinous acts if some authority figure tells them that it serves some higher good. However, it turns out that subjects are much less likely to be unilaterally obedient to authority figures if these figures are close to them socially. (p. 357).

 

http://www.amazon.com/Soldaten/product-reviews/3596188733/ref=cm_cr_dp_see_all_btm?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=recent

 

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Book review  by Jan Peczkis

 

Nowadays, most Holocaust materials treat the Nazis as if they were faceless aliens from another planet that landed in the 1930s and departed in 1945. In contrast, this gem of a book shows the deep roots of Nazism in centuries of German thinking. Citing hundreds of prominent Germans, it clearly shows that “Nazi” themes (such as German supremacism, imperialism, racism, genocide, drive for expansionism, anti-Semitism, etc.) were in fact held by hundreds of respected German thinkers long before Hitler.

This work is not only of historical interest. Many of the themes related to German hegemony are embodied today, in non-military form, in the European Union. It can be thought of as the Fourth Reich. For further details read my review of THE TAINTED SOURCE, by John Laughland.

NAZISM WAS FUNDAMENTALLY AND ESSENTIALLY GERMAN

The fact that Nazis and Germans can in no sense be dichotomized is made obvious by Coole and Potter, (quote) Hitler did not create this soul, for it would be impossible for any one man within a few brief years to fashion the soul of a nation from nothing. The conceptions, principles and plans at the base of National Socialism are but a new and ampler expression of the German soul…Again and again we come upon the one LEITMOTIV: Pangermanism. The Nazi revolution is no more than the fruition of inherited conceptions which find expression in varying forms in the works of Fichte, Hegel, Dietrich von Bulow, Arndt, Jahn, Friedrich List, Friedrich Ratzel, Karl Lamprecht, Prince Bismarck, Treitschke, Langbeln, Konstantin Franz, Ludwig Woltmann, Josef Ludwig Reimer, Albrecht Wirth, Friedrich Lange, Albert Ballin, Hugo von Stinnes, Kardorff, Thyssen, and hundreds of others. In their speeches and writings these men elaborated many conceptions which are today part of National Socialism, such as the racial theory, the lust for world hegemony, the HERRENVOLK thesis, the fight against Anglo-Saxon influences, the desire to create an essentially German religion, the ethic of ruthlessness and cruelty, the right of the superior German race to LEBENSRAUM (“Living-space”), the principle of exterminating the native populations of conquered territories and colonizing them with Germans. (unquote). (pp. xxxi-xxxii).

HITLER ANTICIPATED

The following statements by the authors are almost chilling, (quote) In his work GERMANIEN UND EUROPA, the notorious Pangermanist Ernst Moritz Arndt wrote in 1802 that Germany, then vacillating between Prussia and Austria, ought to be molded into one whole, and that this could be achieved if a Deliverer were to be found, “a great tyrant and military genius who would conquer and exterminate nations” (EROBERND UND VERDERBEND). Hitler is this Messiah: Arndt’s dream given its practical fulfillment 140 years later. (unquote). (p. xxxii).

PRE-NAZI GERMAN RACISM AND GENOCIDAL IDEATION

Interestingly, for all the nowadays-tendency to treat Nazi hatred of Jews as something special, pre-Nazi German racial theories often linked the Slavs and the Jews together as objects of contempt:

In 1903, Ludwig Woltmann said that, (quote) “It is susceptible of anthropological proof that all European civilization, even in the Slavonic and Latin lands, is a product of the German race.” (unquote). (p. 144).

In 1907, Captain Eberhard Meinhold commented, (quote) “Not until racial consciousness has revived within us, not until we have conquered our national incompleteness and lack of dignity, will we energetically overcome racial and mixed race questions, such as Ultramontanism, Socialism, Jews, Poles, and the Negro question.” (unquote). (p. 145).

In 1912, Wilhelm Schwaner warned, (quote) “And if the Germans do not soon protect their blood against Latin, Jewish and Slav importations—of blood and the spirit—then Europe will produce nothing but a racial and cultural mob.” (unquote). (p. 145).

The authors then quote this 1905 statement by Joseph Ludwig Reimer, (quote) “It would be decidedly the simplest thing in the area of the Reich’s territory, if the expansion of the Germans could be balanced by the extinction of the non-Germans.” (unquote). (p. 123).

“GOD” IN TERMS OF NAZI RACIAL REDEFINITION

In their section on religion, the authors make it obvious that the Nazis tried to co-opt Christianity in accordance with their ideology. It is sometimes argued that the Nazis were not atheists because they frequently referred to God. However, it is obvious that they did not mean a traditionally-believed transcendent Supreme Being! For example, Baldur von Schirach, in a speech in April 1939, said, (quote) “We serve God by being loyal to our Fuhrer and fulfilling our duty towards the Fatherland. We are a God-believing youth, since we serve the divine hand which is Germany.” (unquote).(p. 18). In another instance, Martin Hieronimi, writing in VOLK IM WERDEN (September 1935) stated, (quote) The Front refuses to call itself Christian. It presents itself especially to the German youth as the German Faith Front, and claims that the knowledge of God based on Blood and Race is the only form which is truly suited to the German people.” (unquote). (p. 14).

At other times, the Nazis were more explicit in their enmity towards Christianity. For instance, an article in NORDLAND (March 1939) stated that German acts must be in service to their own people. Furthermore, (quote) “There is no need to give such acts any religious foundation, based on belief in the hereafter.” (unquote)(p. 14). In 1938, Alfred Rosenberg said that both the Catholic and Evangelical Churches, as they exist in present form, must vanish from the lives of the German people. (p. 18).

In May 1936, there were a series of destructions of wayside crucifixes and statues, in the German countryside, done by neo-Pagans. These also included various profanations of religious objects. (p. 15).

GERMAN GOALS AND THE EVENTUAL EUROPEAN UNION

The belligerent aspects of German rule over Europe, during WWI and WWII, have tended to obscure the fact that such German rule need not be realized with military force. Back in 1914, Erich Marks remarked, (quote) A new Central Europe under German leadership rises before us, as an image, as a picture, as a possibility; not one dominated by Germany, but over-topped and protected by Germany, with Germany, the German National State, which will remain such, as its core and mainstay…” (unquote). (p. 126).

Also in 1914, Maximilian Harden commented, (quote) “Germany has the right to extend her area of sovereignty according to her requirements, and the might to enforce that right against all opposition.” (unquote). (p. 127).

In 1915, Fritz Bruggemann wrote, (quote) “A federative union of Europe, through a free economic link-up under German leadership, such as that of the Middle Ages—this ought at some future time to be a goal that should not appear too high to the German people in return for the enormous sacrifices in blood and treasure which it is obliged to make in the present war.” (unquote). (p. 126).

In 1916, Karl Kumpmann opined that, (quote) “Germany, more than any other country, is predestined to be the bearer of the idea of federation (Central European Federation); it is the duty of all nations who are interested in the free development of the world to join us.” (unquote). (p. 134).

The authors provide a map (p. 339) of the “MITTELEUROPA” Economic Space. It encompasses Germany and Austria, the Netherlands, southern Scandinavia, the Baltic States, Poland, the western USSR, and southeast Europe. Shades of the modern European Union!

THE DRANG NACH OSTEN

Let us go back further in time. The authors write, (quote) The Germans of the Nibelungen legends, the Eastern Germans of medieval times who put the Slavonic peoples east of the Elbe to fire and sword and created the province of Brandenburg out of the land which they had reduced to an enormous graveyard, the Teutonic Knights, the Germans of the Sack of Rome, of Frederick the Great, of Bismarck, of Wilhelm II and Stesemann—these are the true ancestors of the Third Reich. Let them speak for themselves! (unquote). (p. xxi).

 

http://www.amazon.com/Thus-Spake-Germany-W-Coole/dp/B000P1QOQI?ie=UTF8&ref_=cm_cr-mr-title

 

 

 

 

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