In the East I suggested once to the “Korps”—thousands of PW were coming back, without anyone guarding them, because there were no people there to do it. It went quite well in FRANCE, because the Frenchman is so degenerate that if you said to him: “You will report to the PW collecting point in the rear” the stupid idiot really did go along there. But in RUSSIA there was a space of 50–80 km., that is to say a 2 to 3 days’ march, between the armoured spearheads and the following close formations. No Russians went to the rear, where they could live all right. So I said: “That’s no good, we must simply cut off one of their legs, or break a leg, or the right forearm, so that they won’t be able to fight in the next four weeks and so that we can round them up.” There was an outcry when I said one must simply smash their legs with a club. At the time, of course, I didn’t really condone it either, but now I think it’s quite right. We’ve seen that we cannot conduct a war because we’re not hard enough, not barbaric enough. The Russians are that all right.¹⁸⁵

ANNIHILATION

“Yes, but that’s inevitable. Every individual makes mistakes.”¹⁸⁶

From 1995 to 1999, an exhibition titled “Crimes of the Wehrmacht” sparked one of the most intense historical debates in postwar German society. Compiled by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, this collection of documentary material about war crimes committed by the German army and its complicity in the Holocaust toured museums throughout Germany, often to the dismay of older visitors, many of whom had themselves served in the armed forces during the Third Reich. The exhibit is widely regarded as having marked the end of the myth of the “clean” Wehrmacht. One striking thing to emerge from the debates was how vehemently German veterans rejected any suggestion that the armed forces had been involved in the Holocaust. As the surveillance protocols show, this was not a case of either repression or denial. Many of the crimes we today consider part of the Nazi campaigns of annihilation and the Holocaust were seen very differently in the 1940s, for instance, as a battle against partisans. The debates reflected the collision of two frames of reference, today’s versus that of the past.