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BRUHN: Then they dug their graves and then they picked up the children by their hair and then simply killed them. The SS did that. The soldiers stood there, and besides that the Russian civilian population stood 200 m. away and watched as they were killed there. He [Kittel] proved how vile the whole thing was by the fact that an out-and-out SS man who was employed on his staff later succumbed to a nervous-breakdown and from that day cowards kept saying that he couldn’t carry on any longer, it was impossible; he was a doctor. He couldn’t get over it. That was his first experience of such things actually being done. A cold shudder ran through SCHAEFER (PW) and me when we heard that, and then we said to KITTEL: “What did you do then? You were lying in bed and heard that, and it was only a few hundred metres away from your house. Then surely you must have reported that to your GOC [general officer commanding]. Surely something was bound to be done about it?” He replied that it was generally known and was quite usual. Then sometimes he also interspersed remarks such as: “There wasn’t anything particularly bad about it either,” and “they were to blame for everything anyhow,” so that I almost assumed at that time, that it hadn’t even mattered very much to him personally.²⁰³