Читаем Soldaten полностью

In the main, soldiers saw the persecution and even annihilation of Jews as sensible while criticizing the means of carrying it out, and that sort of logic also extended to people like Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss²¹⁶ and Holocaust planner Adolf Eichmann.²¹⁷ The participation of people in a variety of functions and at a variety of hierarchical levels was key to the Holocaust—as was the willingness of myriads of others to tolerate what they had witnessed. Marksmen at the shooting grounds where mass executions were carried out²¹⁸ or concentration camp doctors²¹⁹ charged with selecting who would be killed immediately and who was deemed fit for work were concerned with methods of killing, not with justifying its necessity. The same applies to countless others who were directly or peripherally involved in the Holocaust.

The eradication of European Jews was simply not part of German soldiers’ emotional world, even though they sometimes used expressions of horror and even regret when talking about it:

Then came that period of mass arrests and the S.S. commandant simply sent my father a chit saying: “By midday to-day so-and-so many Jews must be named.” My father said that it was dreadful for him. They were simply shot. The order came: “So-and-so many shootings are to be reported by such-and-such a date.” The S.S. leader, a Sturmbannführer, rounded up the Jews, when there were no more, he sent the Jewish council a… “By 1430 hours to-day so-and-so many pounds of meat, fats, spices, etc. must be produced.” If it wasn’t there by then, one them was shot. But many of the Jews poisoned themselves.

My God, if we ever have those people on top of us again!²²⁰

Lieutenant Priebe may have feared that Jews would avenge themselves someday, but that wasn’t the core of his argument. He objected to the treatment of Jews because even a self-proclaimed Jew hater like his father was upset about how he was ordered to deal with them and suffered under what he was allegedly forced to do.