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

individuals who distinguished themselves in some way or another also made for good telling. One example is an anecdote related byPrivate First Class Müller:
    M ÜLLER : In avillage in R USSIA there were partisans, and we obviously had to raze the village to the ground, without considering the losses. We had one man namedB ROSICKE , who came from B ERLIN ; if he saw anyone in the village, he took him behind thehouse and shot him, and with it all the fellow was only nineteen and a half or twenty years old. The order was given that every tenth man in the village was to be shot. “To hell with that! Every tenth man. It is perfectly obvious,” said the fellow, “that the whole village must be wiped out.” We filled beer bottles with petrol and put them on the table and, as we were going out, we just threw hand grenades behind it. Immediately everything wasburning merrily—all roofs were thatched. The women and children and everyone were shot down; only a few of them were partisans. I never took part in the shooting unless I was sure that they were proved to be partisans; but there were a lot of fellows who took a delight in it. 147
    At the end of his story, Müller distances himself from the action by claiming he never fired a shot at innocents. But he still offers a detailed description, in the first-person plural, of how his unit burned down Russianhouses. Stories like this illustrate what the soldiers regarded ascrimes and what not, and how porous the boundary was between the two. Müller considered executing women and children a crime insofar as it was unclear whether they truly were partisans.Burning down a village, on the other hand, was not.
    Müller also conspicuously includes a figure in his story,Brosicke, from whom he can positively distinguish himself. Brosicke’s behavior, in Müller’s telling, is unambiguously criminal, as is that of those for whom killing wasfun. Müller’s own behavior, by contrast, is not criminal. This is a typical and significant element in the protocols. By differentiating himself from others, the typical storyteller was able to find a space within a larger criminal endeavor in which he himself could not be accused of behaving immorally. Yet as we have already observed in the various different groups that took part in themass executions and other anti-Jewish initiatives, individual interpretations of one’s ownrole andduties ultimately helped the killing as a whole to proceed smoothly. 148 Individualattitudes anddecisions are not usually overridden by “group pressure” and social influence in the way somesociologists would have us believe. On the contrary, internal differentiation within a group makes it capable of acting as a whole. To adapt a phrase coined by German scholarHerbert Jäger, what we have here is a case of individual action in collective states of emergency. 149
    One good example of this phenomenon occurs in a detailed description by a Private First ClassFranz Diekmann about how he combated “terrorists” in France:
    D IEKMANN : I have a lot of terrorists on my conscience, but not so many English soldiers, only one tank commander, a lieutenant or something, whom I shot in his tank when he was opening the cover to have a look out of sheer curiosity. Otherwise, of course, I can’t remember what happened in battle, but I went for the terrorists like mad. If I saw one, whom I suspected, I let fly at him immediately. When I saw a comrade of mine bleeding to death, whom they had treacherously shot, I swore to myself: “Just you wait!” AtH ILAY , on the way back, I was marching gaily along the street, with them, we didn’t suspect anything,when a civilian came along, drew a pistol out of his pocket, fired and my mate collapsed.
    H AASE : Did you get him?
    D IEKMANN : Not a hope! By the time we realised that things were in such a state inB ELGIUM , before the English had even arrived, he had already half bled to death; all I could do was to close his eyes. He just