V. BASTIAN: Our racial policy is excellent, also the Jewish question, and the entire legislation for preserving the purity of German blood. That law is really first-class.

Today, the argumentative mix found in the protocols is dumbfounding. One reason is the very nature of everyday conversations. As the nineteenth-century German author Heinrich von Kleist already sensed, much of what we think only gets “finished” in the act of speech.⁵³⁹ Opinions and attitudes do not simply exist a priori of concrete social interactions, like objects in a drawer that one can take out at will. Often, thoughts first coalesce in conversation, one word following the other, and they do not exist for very long. Under the influence of mood, a need for consensus, or a misapprehension, or because the conversation is just idle chatter, people sometimes try out opinions or thoughts that they will discard the next time they converse with someone. For that reason, real arguments are rare in the protocols, despite the fact that the men concerned did not come together of their own free will, and the amount of time they were forced to spend together would otherwise encourage conflicts. Of course, there were a few genuine arguments of the “I beg to differ” variety⁵⁴⁰ and at least one running feud of the sort that can happen between people sharing an apartment.⁵⁴¹ This shows that arguments were in fact recorded and thus happened very rarely. As in all other everyday conversational situations, soldiers might agree with an opinion only to reject it in their next conversation, and the desire to establish a relationship was often far more significant than the content of what was said.

COHERENT PICTURES OF THE WORLD

The vagaries of human conversation make it difficult to determine how deeply anchored bits of National Socialist ideology were in the consciousness of POWs. We can only say for sure that ideology played a role in absolutely unambiguous statements. An example is this one by nineteen-year-old navy midshipman Karl Völker: