Breaking the constraints of conformity seemed impossible to most German soldiers, no matter how gruesome the crimes they observed. In this respect, a story told by a Major Arp from the Army Field Command 748 is typical. When Arp was a first lieutenant in Russia, a mother begged him to protect her two children from the Wehrmacht countersabotage secret field police. The next day he saw them shot to death, lying on the ground. He does not tell of an effort on his part to save these people, launching instead into a description of the mass executions in Kaunas, Lithuania. When Arp’s interlocutor asks if he had tried to prevent the murders, Arp becomes evasive.²⁸²

Thus, it is hardly astonishing that the surveillance protocols contain exactly one account of an act of rescue, the truth of which cannot be determined:

LAUTERJUNG: All by the special train?

BOCK: No. I was with the Mitropa. At the back we had some of those steel cupboards where we kept our stock and I put the Jew and the Jewess in there! Afterwards I had the Jew under the carriage in a box. Of course he came out afterwards at BASLE looking like a nigger. He is living in SWITZERLAND and the girl is down in SWITZERLAND too. I took her as far as ZURICH and she went down to CHUR.²⁸³

RESPECTABILITY

Despite the atrocities they described and their knowledge of the mass murder of Jews and the appalling treatment of Soviet prisoners, the soldiers lived in a moral universe in which they felt like good people—people who, in Himmler’s words, had remained “morally upright.” The National Socialist ethos of respectability focused on the idea that fighters were not to engage in crimes like murder, rape, and plunder to benefit themselves, but for the sake of a higher cause. This ethos allowed Germans to justify actions that were absolutely evil in terms of Western, Christian morality and to integrate them as unavoidable necessities into their own moral self-image. National Socialist morality contained the idea that the perpetrators of atrocities might themselves suffer from the “dirty work” they did.²⁸⁴ The trope of sacrifice, too, allowed Germans to kill without feeling guilty. Ideologists of annihilation like Himmler or practitioners like Rudolf Höss continually stressed that destroying human lives was an unpleasant task that ran contrary to their “humane” instincts. But the ability to overcome such scruples was seen as a measure of one’s character. It was the coupling of murder and morality—the realization that unpleasant acts were necessary and the will to carry out those acts in defiance of feelings of human sympathy—that allowed the perpetrators of genocide to see themselves as “respectable” people, as people whose hearts, in Höss’s words, “were not bad.”²⁸⁵

The autobiographical material left behind by perpetrators—diaries, interviews, and interrogations—has one very conspicuous feature. Even when the people in question showed absolutely no comprehension of the enormity of what they had done, they were very concerned to appear not as “bad people,” but as individuals whose moral fiber remained intact despite the extreme nature of the actions. It could be that such statements were shaped by the contexts in which they were made. Autobiographical documents are always self-justifications in which the narrator tries to bring the stories he tells into harmony with the image he has of himself and wants others to have of him. The case of interrogations also features a further legal, complicating component. The perpetrator wants to portray himself as moral and avoid incriminating himself.

The situation is different with the surveillance protocols. In them, the speakers do not address their statements to any external moral arena. At the time their conversations were recorded, the POWs did not know how the war was going to turn out or that the “Jewish actions” and other crimes against humanity would attract near universal moral condemnation. In other words, they did not have to define “respectability” or assure one another that they were indeed respectable people.

Only when they refer to foreign countries do the soldiers explicitly talk about “respectability.” In those cases, they usually claim to have been more respectable than was actually required: