Читаем Soldaten полностью

I was supposed to carry out measures against one village. I told my CO: “I’m not going to do it.” “Why not?” I didn’t want to say: because I am too soft-hearted, but I really am; I couldn’t do it. So the…. was called off… I was the most harmless fellow in the “Bataillon.”⁸³⁶

Schwarz may, of course, have been trying to cover his tracks, but there are some indications that his story was true. In summer 1944, Schwarz’s division was indeed ordered to carry out reprisals against civilians. But the battalion commander passed that task on to another division, perhaps after Schwarz’s protest.⁸³⁷

Yet despite the presence of men like Woelcky and Schwarz, assuming their self-descriptions were accurate, the general tendency was that the core of Waffen SS leaders and officers were more radical than their Wehrmacht counterparts. Another indication of this is the fact that they maintained faith in ultimate German victory far longer than their regular army equivalents. An example is Untersturmführer Pflughaupt of the “Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler” division, who was captured by the British in fierce fighting around Caen in July 1944. He was deeply impressed by British artillery superiority, yet believed nonetheless that “the FÜHRER needs four to six weeks for mounting the reprisal weapon, which can fire accurately, so as to eliminate the (enemy) artillery, and that we must just hold out that long, and then we could go over to the attack.”⁸³⁸ Although he himself had seen how an offensive by three SS divisions was stopped within a kilometer, he could not imagine that the Führer would not have an ace up his sleeve. Given that he had experienced the massive British counteroffensive Goodwood, it is hard for us to see how he could conclude: “As soon as the English artillery is eliminated… the English retreat.”

By this point in the war, no Wehrmacht officer was comparably optimistic.⁸³⁹ Indeed, of the eighty Waffen SS officers interned in British and American POW camps, none thought the war had been lost before February 1945. Nor did they make any remarks critical of Hitler or his regime. Even more remarkably, none of the two hundred SS men of all ranks who were interned ever made critical statements about Wehrmacht war crimes, even though that sort of criticism hailed down in the other direction. It is hardly plausible that members of the SS knew nothing of Wehrmacht atrocities—the two wings of the military worked together far too closely for that. It appears that the frame of reference for what was considered normal, necessary, and encouraged differed from one group to the other. Within the Wehrmacht, there was a consciousness that certain acts were criminal, although that knowledge was not sufficient motivation for refusing to carry them out. There were a number of social and pragmatic reasons for continuing even when one realized standard boundaries were being transgressed. As a result Wehrmacht soldiers developed a number of social and personal strategies for reducing the resulting cognitive dissonance.