Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying by Harald Welzer, Sönke Neitzel

wearing rudimentary uniforms, bearing their arms openly, having a clear command structure, and respectingthe laws of warfare, partisans were allowed to assist the armies of their homelands in defensivewars. But the Hague Convention made no mention of what should happen if partisans continued to fight after a state had been forced to capitulate or had been completely occupied. It thus lacked any provision for protecting the rights of resistance movements, even if they wore uniforms. 139
    Rules concerning retaliatory measures were even more problematic and contradictory. Article 50 of the Hague Convention allowed collective punitive measures against acivilian population if a connection between partisans and their general environment could be proven. This rule was open to widely divergent interpretation. In the legal discussion of the interbellum years, no international consensus emerged, and thetakingof hostages was deemed legitimate everywhere but in France. Opinions differed on whether they could be killed, with German military lawyers taking the hard-line position that the continued existence of “an arena of battle” justified such measures of retribution. This disagreement appeared one last time in thewar crimestrials afterWorld War II. The judges inNuremberg ruled that the main defendants had acted illegally in ordering the killing of hostages, but in subsequent trials, defendants were deemed to have acted within the scope of the law. Convictions in the latter cases were based solely on the excessive ratios (1 to 100) German occupiers had applied when executing hostages. 140
    Even the pre-NaziReichswehr believed that partisans had to be combated with extreme force. A potential wildfire, so the logic ran, needed to be extinguished at the first spark. And although this approach proved ineffective, in some regions the German struggle to put down resistance movements led to an unprecedented spiral of violence. Before long the killing of hostages and innocent victims, and the razing of wholevillages, was part of everyday routine. This did not differ dramatically from practices maintained in theNapoleonic Wars or World War I. What was new were the dimensions. The rigor with which German occupiers pursued alleged partisans was one reason that 60 percent of the casualties in World War II, an unprecedented proportion, were civilians. Distinctions between military combatants as legitimate targets of attack and civilian noncombatants, who should have been protected, basically dissolved.
    The surveillance protocols offer a number of paradigm examples of how Wehrmacht soldiers viewed the war against partisans, and theyshow that Germanmilitary leaders and their troops basically saw eye-to-eye. Drastic measures were justified bypsychological deterrence:
    G ERICKE : In R USSIA last year a small German detachment was sent to avillage on some job or other. The village was in the area occupied by the Germans. The detachment was ambushed in the village and every man was killed. As a result a strafing party was sent out. There were fifty men in the village; forty-nine of them were shot and the fiftieth was hounded through the neighbourhood so that he should spread abroad what happens to the populations if a German soldier is attacked. 141
    Franz Kneipp andEberhard Kehrle also related how German occupiers answered attacks withbrutal forms of violence. They saw nothing unethical about this. On the contrary, they both felt that partisans deserved to die horrible deaths:
    K NEIPP : There was a lot going on there.Oberst Hoppe …
    K EHRLE : Hoppe is well known. He has aKnight’s Cross?
    K NEIPP : Yes, he took S CHLÜSSELBERG . He issued the commands. “As you to us, we to you,” he said. They were supposed to confess who had hung Germans to death. Just a hint, and everything would be all right. None of them said even that they didn’t know anything. Then it was, “All men, exit to the left.” They were driven into the woods, and you heard