Soldados del Tercer Reich : testimonios de lucha, muerte y crimen (original 2011; edition 2012)

>the transcripts of conversations between German prisoners of war, secretly recorded by the British and American intelligence services, offer a vivid and at times surprising insight into the mentality of the German military.

>Between 1940 and 1945, in camps specifically set up for this purpose, the British and Americans bugged about 13,000 German and several hundred Italian soldiers of all ranks and services. The goal was to discover military secrets of potentially strategic importance. Selected stretches of conversations were transcribed verbatim and also recorded. Altogether, the tape transcripts come to 150,000 pages, which, even after their declassification in 1996, continued to slumber largely undiscovered in American archives.

Be still, my bearing heart. Just the thought of all of those records is astonishing. My inner historian is drooling.

This is a fascinating book with an odd premise. One of the authors, in the course of research, stumbled across the little-known fact that during World War II both the British and Americans bugged their POW camps, and transcribed tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of pages of conversations between the inmates. This was done during the War for intelligence purposes, and after the conflict the transcripts were filed away in archives. This resource is a treasure trove for historians and has, and no doubt will continue, to spawn scholarly monographs such as this one.

What Neitzel and Welzer have done with the material is to explore whether there was a particularly National Socialist way of making war, or whether the German Army was the same as the other fighting forces of the time.

Something that the authors don't address until the final part of the book, but which seemed obvious to me from the opening chapter was the problem of who is supplying the evidence. The inmates of the camps were by no means a simple cross-section of German Troops - Naval and Air forces were disproportionally strongly represented for much of the War, as the Allies were taking more of them than ground troops prisoner. Of course all of the subjects were taken on the Western, Italian or Middle-Eastern fronts, and while some of them had experience of war in the USSR and Eastern Front, it was by no means representative of the whole of the German combat forces.

There are of course other problems with the provision of evidence of this sort as well - the Allies didn't record every conversation, only the ones that they were interested in keeping, and of course the prisoners may have been telling less than the truth one way or the other, either to put off their captors, or to boast to their fellow inmates.

This doesn't make any of the transcripts any less fascinating for the insights they do provide us. And a lot of those insights are fairly gruesome. It seems many troops were aware of the Final Solution, and many of them had been involved in, or had witnessed mass shootings of Jews. While each soldier is more or less comfortable with what they saw or did, none of them really question the fact that it's taking place. The horrendous actions against partisans also cause little conflict amongst the POW, with troops sometimes expressing happiness over the actions they undertook. In fact what comes out from many of the transcripts is that many troops thought they pretty much had a licence to commit whatever crimes took their fancy.

Many of the troops were also cavalier with any prisoners they took, with some stories here from Normandy of Germans killing GI prisoners because they were Black, or "looked Jewish".

These stories stand out amongst the others in the book that refer to decorations, equipment, superior officers, and the other more mundane aspects of life in a military world.

What surprised me more, after reading the work, was that the authors conclusion is that there was nothing particularly Nazi in the way these soldiers, sailors and airmen fought. While it is fairly clear from the transcripts in the book that there were not many active Nazis in the forces, certainly the stories they told, that they acquiesced to or took part in do actually indicate that the German Armed Forces in World War II were engaged in a different sort of war than the other combatants. We haven't heard stories of Allied troops engaging in mass atrocities against a particular ethnic group (even the Russians didn't kill all the Tatars), we don't hear of other armies murdering POW as a matter of course, and certainly in the US and British armies many troops would have rebelled if they'd been asked to do so. Obviously there were circumstances where these other armies committed atrocities, and got away with it, but in the German Army these were committed as a matter of course, under superior orders.

I find the last chapter disturbing as well - "War as work", which describes in detail the footage provided by Wikileaks showing an ISAF gunship identifying a group of civilians as combatants and killing them. The authors use this to show how easy it is to make a mistake on the battlefield when working in the frame of reference of a firefight. I had the feeling (and this could just be me) that the authors were trying to equate many of the crimes described by the POW earlier in the book to this phenomenon. I think the transcripts they quote show in the vast majority of cases that there is no similarity between many things discussed by the POW and this incident.

With all my reservations, I found this still to be a book well-worth reading, with a lot to say about how the war was fought, what German Soldiers thought, and the lengths the Allies went to in gathering information. ( )

Most oral history is tainted by two biases. Firstly, the time elapsed between the retelling and the action told may change the narrative. Secondly, the interviewer subtly influences how and what the interviewee tells. The sources for this book do not suffer from these problems. These are secretly recorded conversations among German WWII POW in Allied prison camps. Some of the conversations were triggered by agents provocateurs, but mostly it is soldiers and officers talking amongst themselves. The authors have sifted through 150.000 protocol pages and arranged the material into topical bundles. I wish the authors had included more statistical data about their process, offering some quantitative measures to their qualitative method, It remains unclear to me how typical or atypical some of the topics of discussion were.

Another element of their source deserves to be mentioned: The composition of German POW in Allied camps is highly skewed torwards Luftwaffe and navy personnel. Only in 1943/1944 did the Allies capture German infantry in sizable numbers. The soldier's experience between these groups is very different. The impersonal (almost video game-like) killing done by pilots and submariners is not comparable to the gritty hands-on butcher's work of the infantry.

The authors' main message is that soldiering is a trade like any other, with a bloody twist. Like other tradesmen, the soldiers like to discuss the tools of the trade, boast about their successes and lament about their failures. Like a butcher killing hogs, the soldiers express admiration for a job well done or dismay for a botched action. The casual acceptance and perpetration of war crimes is shocking but well explained by the author's use of different "frames of reference". What I didn't know about was the high level of sexual violence and forced prostitution perpetrated by the Wehrmacht. A topic that seldom reaches the history books but was a favorite topic among the POWs - to the frustration of the note takers interested in military secrets not sexual peccadillos.

One interesting finding is that offering the perpetrators wide leeway in choosing their role facilitates war crimes, as opponents and bystanders can rationalize their guilt by performing tangential jobs. A high level division of labor dilutes overall responsibility - a fact used today by the corporate use of Chinese factories with atrocious working conditions.

Overall, a very interesting book that did not quite live up to its potential. ( )