Читаем Soldaten полностью

FELBERT: I don’t know at whose instigation that was done—if it came from HIMMLER then he is the arch-criminal. Actually you are the first general who has told us that himself. I’ve always believed that these articles were all lies.

KITTEL: I keep silent about a great many things; they are too awful.¹⁹⁹

In these POWs’ view, the “state apparatus” should be censured for making Wehrmacht generals into tools of Nazi crimes, for which other groups, most prominently the German Security Service, are actually responsible. Bruhn and Felbert are worried that they will be held culpable for things in which they were not involved. Bruhn’s macabre statement that one’s children might have to pay with their own blood for the crimes their parents committed shows how far the normative frame of reference he operated in deviated from today’s standards. Felbert agrees that the parties truly responsible need to be identified. And Kittel concludes the discussion with what reads almost like a Freudian slip: “I keep silent about a great many things.”

The interlocutors then move on to discuss in detail the anti-Jewish measures that preceded the Holocaust. In conclusion, Felbert turns the topic back to the mass executions, posing a somewhat bizarre question:

KITTEL: I didn’t bother about that. I only found that they did become more reasonable. At least they had concentration camps for the Jews at CRACOW. At any rate, from the moment I had chosen a safe place and I built the concentration camp, things became quite reasonable. They certainly had to work hard. The women question is a very shady chapter.

FELBERT: If people were killed simply because their carpets and furniture were needed, I can well imagine that if there is a pretty daughter who looks Aryan, she would simply be sent somewhere as a maid-servant.²⁰⁰

By 1944, Kittel had been made the defensive commandant of Krakow, and the facility he refers to is the Plaszów concentration camp, where commandant Amon Göth used to shoot inmates from the veranda of his house, and where the industrialist Oskar Schindler negotiated the deals that allowed him to save more than one thousand Jews.²⁰¹ Kittel was far less outraged by anti-Jewish repression in Krakow than in Daugavpils because the technical aspects were far better organized. Felbert, on the other hand, remains captivated by the lurid topic of what was done with Jewish women, although the group resists this conversational strand.

The group then returns to the topic of who should truly be held responsible for the Holocaust, chiefly Himmler’s Security Service: