Review: Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying

Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying, by Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, translated from the German by Jefferson Chase, McClelland & Stewart, 2012

In 2001 historian Sönke Neitzel, a visiting lecturer from Germany at the University of Glasgow, was reading a book on the Battle of the Atlantic when was surprised to come across several pages reporting the secretly recorded conversations of POWs from German U-boats. Reports based on interrogations were well known to him, but not transcriptions of private conversations recorded by hidden microphones in POW camps. Intrigued, although expecting very little, he took a trip to London and requested the documents at the British national archive. A large bundle of 800 pages was delivered to his desk, covering September 1943. As he read through them, he wondered, Were there similar reports for October and November? For POWs from the army and the Luftwaffe? For the rest of the war years? By the end of his investigation, Neitzel turned up 48,000 pages of surveillance protocols in Britain and over 40,000 in the U.S., documenting the intimate conversations of tens of thousands of German POWs. The Allies had kept them classified for fifty years in order to keep their intelligence methods secret, not even providing them to prosecutors in war crimes trials. From the day they were declassified in 1996 until Neitzel unearthed them in 2001, they had lain forgotten in the two national archives.

Even though he specialized in World War II studies, Neitzel recognized that it would take more than a historian to tease out the complete meaning of the documents, so he partnered with Harald Welzer, a social psychologist with a background in the study of perceptions of violence and the willingness to kill. Working together they produced Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying, an extraordinary study of soldiers at war chatting unguardedly—to each other, not to interrogators; while the war was still in progress, not afterwards with the benefit of hindsight and attempting to justify their actions.

By way of background the authors describe in some detail the world of the soldier and analyze the “frames of reference” of the conversations. For particular conversations they often provide analysis of the social setting and of the interpersonal dynamics. But at the heart of the book are the transcriptions themselves. Some chapters focus on the soldiers’ thoughts about their role as soldiers, about technology, about their knowledge of or participation in the Holocaust, their faith in victory, the extent of their belief in Nazism, and so on, all quite interesting. But most fascinating of all, fascinating in its horror, is the longest chapter, entitled “Fighting, Killing, and Dying.” We know the clichés such as “War is hell,” and think we know something of war from history books, novels, memoirs, and movies like “Saving Private Ryan,” but what we read in Soldaten can still come as a shock, as much for the soldiers’ attitudes as for the brutality of the deeds themselves.

MULLER: . . . near the junction of the Don and the Donetz . . .. It’s beautiful country; I travelled everywhere in a lorry. Everywhere we saw women doing compulsory labour service.

FAUST: How frightful!

MULLER: They were employed on road-making—extraordinarily lovely girls; we drove past, simply pulled them into the armoured car, raped them and threw them out again. And did they curse!

SOLM: We sank a children’s transport.

WILLE: Were they drowned?

SOLM: Yes, all are dead.

WILLE: How did you know that just this ship out of the 50 had the children on board?

SOLM: Because we have a big book. This book contains all the ships of the English and Canadian steamship lines. We look them up in that.

ENZIEL: Muller from Berlin was a sniper, he shot the women who went to meet the English soldiers with bunches of flowers . . . He took aim and shot civilians in completely cold blood.

HEUER: Did you shoot women too?

ENZIEL: Only from a distance.

It’s often said that it takes time and effort to change a peace-loving civilian into a killer. Not always.

POHL: On the second day of the Polish war I had to drop bombs on a station at Posen. Eight of the sixteen bombs fell on the town, among the houses. I did not like that. On the third day I did not care a hoot, and on the fourth day I was enjoying it. It was our before-breakfast amusement to chase single soldiers over the fields with machine-gun fire and leave them lying with a few bullets in the back.

Even in our most gritty movies, soldiers appear grim-faced or fierce in their killing. We rarely see the joy of killing.

BAUEMER: . . . we played a fine game in the “111.”  We had a 2-cm canon built into it in front. Then we flew at low level over the streets, and when any cars came toward us we put on the searchlights and they thought another car was coming toward them. Then we turned the canon on them. We had plenty of success like that. That was grand, we got a lot of fun out of it.

Küster: We didn’t fire on the people in the station; there wouldn’t have been any point in it until we had got rid of our bombs. But afterwards we shot up the town; we fired at everything that was there. At cows and horses, it didn’t matter what. We fired at the trams and everything; it’s great fun.

BUDDE: I’ve taken part in two intruder patrols attacking houses . . . Whatever we came across; country houses on a hillside made the best targets. You flew up from below, then you aimed—and crash! There was the sound of breaking windowpanes, and the roof flew off . . . At the marketplace, there were crowds of people and speeches were being made. They ran like hares! That’s great fun! It was just before Christmas.

Soldaten is a study of the mentality of the German POWs and includes few references to other conflicts. In a passage dealing with the lack of concern about killing the innocent, we learn that “There was an unwritten rule among U.S. troops in Vietnam: ‘If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s a Vietcong.’” But throughout the book the reader constantly has in mind My Lai, the Canadian Airborne Regiment, YouTube videos out of Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, and so on.

V.GREIM: We once made a low-level attack near Eastbourne. When we got there, we saw a large mansion where they seemed to be having a ball or something; in any case we saw a lot of women in fancy-dress, and an orchestra. . . . We turned round and flew toward it. The first time we flew past, and then we approached again and machine-gunned them. It was great fun!

Wouldn’t such sentiments come easily out of the mouth of some Tom Cruise-like Top Gun pilot? And how do soldiers in any conflict deal with captured or surrendering enemy when it is impractical or impossible to deal with them according to the Geneva Conventions?

LEICHTFUSS: When a small detachment of about ten or fifteen soldiers was captured there, it was too difficult for the soldier or the Unteroffizier to transport them back 100 or 120 km. They were locked in a room and three or four hand grenades were flung in through the window.

There aren’t any other books like Soldaten. It offers insights, mostly ugly ones, into what can really happen in war, less biased than a memoir, more vivid, even more frank, than a veteran’s reminiscences recounted to you face to face.