Soldaten

Having been kind to sociologists on 14th December I am now at it again, having finished a skim of 'Soldaten' from Neitzel & Welkzer, first published in Germany in 2011. An account drawn from extensive & covert recordings made of the conversations of  German prisoners of war both in the UK and the US, extensive transcripts of which had survived in national archives to be stumbled on by Neitzel some fifty years later.

I say skim rather than read because I did find it all rather heavy going, while not achieving the heights of death by dullness achieved by Elkins (see July 23rd). But the matter was, as was hers, important.

We start with the crude way in which airmen - perhaps fighter pilots who have smashed up columns of traffic on crowded roads - perhaps civilian traffic - talk among themselves about killing and the antics of those being killed. While unpleasant, perhaps an inevitable product of putting young men in such positions. Perhaps also a defence mechanism, a device for neutralising the experience. I was reminded of the way that soldiers talk in Švejk.

But then we move onto the way in which all kinds of German soldiers talked about the German atrocities, mainly but not all in eastern Europe or western Russia, in which many of them had been minor participants. This, to my mind, is the important part of the book, showing how young men who started out much the same as the young men you might have found, at the same time, as English prisoners of war in German camps came, not only to participate in dreadful things (which would, perhaps, have been hard for them to avoid, without peril to themselves) but also to boast about it afterwards (in a context in which it would have been easy for them to avoid. Silence, if not repentance was an option). A warning of how easily a state founded on ignorance, brutality and violence can project its values into its subjects - bearing in mind that many of these prisoners were young enough to have been raised in Nazi Germany and were not among that half of the population which voted against on the last occasion on which they were asked. I wonder how much better - if better at all - this second group behaved.

In Russia I learn that there was some mitigation. From the outset the Russians fought with a savagery which took the Germans by surprise - and they retaliated in kind, for the first year or so from a position of strength.

There is also the difficult question of the appropriate response to partisan activity by an occupying army - activity which they might not unreasonably call terrorism. As I have said here before, a country that surrenders while continuing the fight, however much it is the good fight, cannot expect to be handled too gently.

Last wonder is whether such covert recordings of the conversations of prisoners of war are allowed under the Geneva Conventions, as revised for the electronic age. And what about the use of stool pigeons?