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Postwar family reminiscences do feature occasional instances of Germans who seem to have unambiguously rejected the murder of Jews. An interviewee named Doetsch, for instance, recalled: “In Lvov, I once saw a so-called Jew transport… Suddenly there was a lot of movement in the ranks. Up at the front, the SS were beating people up. It was… the SS, and they’d gotten drunk. They lined them up in front of anti-tank trenches. The first had to take their place, then machine gun fire, and down they went. The next ones had to push them into the trench before they themselves went down. They weren’t even dead. Dirt was shovelled. The next ones… can you imagine that? Women and children and old people. I knew exactly what was going on. Someone told me. ‘We had orders,’ he said, ‘but I couldn’t watch.’ Germans nailed children to the walls. They did that.”²⁴²

The protocols do not just contain descriptions of mass executions, but of exterminations using car exhaust fumes. A POW named Rudolf Müller at Fort Hunt in the United States told the following story:

REIMBOLD: Dear God.

MÜLLER: They forced the driver. There was a fellow with a pistol next to him. And they hauled me up on charges.

REIMBOLD: And that’s happening in the name of Germany. No telling what’s going to happen to us.²⁴³

This dialogue is one of the scant bits of direct evidence we have of the gassing of Jews using carbon monoxide fumes. It is also unusual in that the narrator clearly abhors the events he describes—an attitude he was forced to answer for in front of a military hearing. The listener also seems shocked. Apparently, he had previously heard nothing about these kinds of murder.