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FRICK: That’s true, one is often too decent.

ELIAS: I was down there on my first leave at Christmas, 1939. I was coming out of a restaurant and a Pole came along. He said something or other to me in Polish and bumped into me. I turned round—I knew what was going to happen—and hit him between the eyes with my fist: “You Polish swine.” He was thoroughly drunk and lay where he fell. I was cleaning my hand—I was wearing chamois leather gloves, you know—when, suddenly a policeman arrived without his helmet. He said: “What’s happening here, my friend?” I replied: “This swine of a Pole just jostled me,” “What,” he said, “and the swine is still living? There are too many of them about.” He looked at him: “Well, brother, we’ve been waiting for you for a long time. I’ll count up to three and if you haven’t gone by then, something will happen.” He counted “one” and the fellow was up and away. Then he placed himself in front of me: “It would have been better if you’d attacked straight away, if you’d run him through with your bayonet.” Well, I walked around the town for a little—it was about four o’clock on a winter’s afternoon—when suddenly I heard a couple of reports. “What’s happened?” I wondered. That same evening I heard there had been some slight trouble… he had come to blows with the policeman who wanted to arrest him and he tried to escape—he was shot whilst escaping. What had happened was that the policeman, who had said “too many damned people around,” also said: “Make-off,” and then followed him and killed him, “shot whilst trying to escape.”²⁸⁶

It wasn’t necessary for members of the enemy group—be they partisans, terrorists, or just people who had gotten a bit drunk—to do anything in particular to incur the wrath of German soldiers. The act of “decency” around which this story revolves is simply that the speaker did not immediately kill the “swine of a Pole.” The person in question had done nothing more than brush up against the soldier on the street. Nonetheless, it was considered a mark of decency to let the Pole get away with his life, if not for long.

Stories of this sort were by no means restricted to Germany’s war in Eastern Europe. A similar situation also took place in Denmark: