Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying – the Secret WWII Transcripts of German POWs
By Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer | Scribe | $35
Evil Men
By James Dawes | Harvard University Press | $34.95
“MIRROR, mirror, on the wall, who is the baddest of them all?” It is easy to imagine Tony Blair, Kevin Rudd or many another recent Western leader thus interrogating his image, while wondering each day whether his country should bomb this, that or the other recalcitrant anti-Western dictator, “totalitarianist” or fundamentalist. Certainly the international political discourse of our times is full of moralising about “our” opponents, those whom the ineffable George W. Bush damned as “bad guys.” It is they who are to blame for turning our happy dreams of the hegemonic market to nightmares. Only they are responsible for that fearfulness which inescapably nibbles into our lives. If only we can extirpate them, surely we can all bask in the eternal, global and globalised pleasure of the “end of history”?
To be sure, there are omissions in these hopes. Few of today’s neoliberal imperialists care to remember Joseph Conrad’s devastating image, in his novella Heart of Darkness (1899), of a European gunboat up some fetid African river, firing explosives of the latest technology into the jungle again and again and again. Such activity might seem too near the drones that waft above some bad guy’s home in Yemen or Baluchistan, or the Cruise missiles that “degrade” an enemy’s weapons’ store either from sea or air, while necessarily inflicting collateral damage – the key euphemism among the many of our age – by killing or maiming those family, friends or other bystanders unlucky enough to stand or sleep within range. After all, the key foreign policy ambition of any “Western” politician in our era is to achieve salutary violence with no “boots on the ground,” no losses among our military. The killings that we have persuaded ourselves we need are not to be seen up close, except as recorded on some computer screen. It will “scientifically” measure “success” or “failure” but no brain matter, blood or other bodily liquid will splatter over us. As Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer put it in Soldaten: “We can only maintain our faith in modernity if violence is not considered part of the normal daily functioning of modern society. For that reason we see ourselves as nonviolent and ostentatiously demonstrate our shock when an act of violence is committed and immediately begin searching for an explanation.”
The new government in Australia has begun its own discourse with a backwoods attack on the humanities and the “useless” and expensive university research financed through the Australian Research Council. It may well be that the functioning of the ARC needs rigorous review. But the idea that purist conservatives or purist neoliberals can simply look to the bottom line without reference to history, philosophy, psychology and the rest is ludicrous in the extreme. Rare indeed is the policy decision that is not justified by overt or covert reference, however slapdash or error-ridden, to one or other of the humanities, with history always in the van. As David Lowenthal phrased it in a book title, we are indeed “possessed by the past.”
When it comes to our preventive wars – our interventions in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and the rest – one “lesson of history” is all but certain to be recalled. It is the lesson of the greatest and most costly of twentieth-century conflicts, the second world war, that genuinely global event during which up to one hundred million people, more than half of them civilians, went to their premature deaths. This holocaust, we have come to believe, was caused by the failure of the righteous to oppose the “mad” dictator, Adolf Hitler, early enough. During the 1930s, the lamentable determination of Neville Chamberlain and others to appease the German führer made the eventual war bloodier and more costly than it needed to have been. If only Winston Churchill’s advice to stand up to evil had been followed, all could have been well. Among the pasts that circle through our memories, this (highly questionable) version of the second world war takes pride of place.
If the Nazi dictator survives in our minds as the ultimate epitome of evil (not for nothing, when he was still advocating the urgent bombing of Syria, did John Kerry label Bashar al-Assad “another Hitler”), the abyss of human wickedness was entered during the wartime killing of European Jewry. Hell, we know, lies behind the gates of Auschwitz, where the science of gas and the bureaucracy of modern administration combined to erase a whole people from the face of the earth. It was indeed the Holocaust, the first and worst of all the genocides. It must never happen again.
Soldaten and Evil Men each aim to persuade relatively cultivated readers, not merely fellow scholars in the academy but perhaps excluding the most hayseed of Australian senators, to re-examine the practice and meaning of evil with a historical reference that embraces the present and the past and especially the second world war. Both books are also interdisciplinary ventures. Sönke Neitzel is a historian and Harald Welzer a social psychologist, while James Dawes is a professor of English in St Paul, Minnesota, where he is the “Director of the Program of Human Rights and Humanitarianism at Macalester College.” Your reviewer is a historian and you will find in my coming remarks an uneasiness with outsiders’ work in my field. Interdisciplinarity can bring enlightenment, but sometimes at a cost.
I noted above how present-day war is meant to avoid casualties on our own side. Given the complexity of imposing our rules on others, however, a few deaths will always occur within the vast military forces of the United States and its various allies, including its “deputy sheriff in the Pacific,” Australia. What is striking about these deaths on the multiple frontiers of the “war against terror” is the way that the men and women are posthumously represented as heroes. Press and politicians join in proclaiming each a pure and peerless knight for the nation. Somewhere in the sceptical mind might lurk the view that those who join armed forces are mainly poor sods who, whether for social or personal reasons, have not found satisfaction and purpose in civilian life. But it is not a suspicion to be expressed publicly. Even less to be mentioned is the case, given eloquent voice in Joanna Bourke’s An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (1999), that all military are trained to kill and quite a few come to enjoy what they do.
Neitzel and Welzer do make one brief reference to Bourke’s book. But the context of Soldaten is contemporary Germany; and the key bibliographical background is Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996) with its thesis that a whole nation had long been programmed to kill Jews, and the exhibition, Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944 (War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944), organised in Hamburg in 1995 to give public evidence that German soldiers and not just Nazis killed without mercy on the eastern front.
Each of the authors commences with a personal preface. In his, Neitzel tells a romantic historian’s tale of how one lucky day in the British Public Record office he stumbled on “secret” files recounting the conversations of German POWs imprisoned in Britain, most of them airmen or sailors. As he puts it, “you could practically hear the soldiers talking, gesticulating, and arguing among themselves” about what they had done and how they had done it. Moreover, Neitzel soon learned, to his pleasure, that the United States held twice as much further material of this kind. A book was on. Welzer adds that the men’s words give “unique insight into the mentalities of the Wehrmacht and perhaps of the military in general.” In their prison they were, at the most immediate level, speaking “without an agenda.” But, he adds confidently, his social-psychological skills will enable him to determine their unspoken “frames of reference.”
Thereafter, Soldaten tells an often horrific tale. At times I did wonder whether among the authors’ unspoken assumptions was the hope that they could sell as many copies as did Goldhagen; despite its considerable flaws, Hitler’s Willing Executioners was taken up by the international Murdoch press and much of the German media. Any study of Nazi Germany edges near the borders of the pornography of violence, and Neitzel and Welzer certainly quote in detail the POWs’ happy memories of strafing civilian families in cars, their ready adoption of the metaphors of hunting when recounting a successful attack on a children’s transport, and their enjoyment of the rape of “beautiful Jewish girls” and their post-coital murder, adding ironically that imprisoned listeners often reacted to such stories in a “voyeuristic” manner and with a request for still more detail.
About three-quarters of Soldaten is occupied with such recounting. It is amplified by some analysis, not all of it convincing or consistent. Is it fully true, for example, as the authors maintain, that “the character of the fighting in Russia was completely different from that in Poland, Greece, or Yugoslavia”? Different it doubtless was, given the crusade against Judeo-Bolshevism (the authors are modishly stronger on the Holocaust than they are on anti-communism, while “class” is not a category that they use despite the detail they have accrued from airmen who, in every country, were socially superior to poor bloody infantry men). But was it “completely different”? I doubt it. They also echo the cliché that “totalitarian rule” creates “a mental lack of alternatives and makes people fully dependent on the charismatic leader, to whom they stay true even when their mutual downfall is inevitable,” despite the fact that their argument urges that soldiers were soldiers first and foremost and Nazis only after. After all, the authors have assured us, the POWs only rarely talked about Jews (although they did in great part know what was going on in the Judeocide), preferring the topics of “weapons and air-raid techniques, military honours, ships sunk and planes shot down.”
Even more troubling are the comparisons that are made, first as asides, and, at the end of the book, more systematically, if still briefly. In my capacity as a historian of modern Italy, I found odd and inadequate a section that the authors devote to the military failings of the Germans’ Italian allies. A diversion into the nature of the Waffen-SS similarly does not get far and omits all its non-German members. But the main parallels are with the Americans in Iraq and Vietnam as Neitzel and Welzer, with seeming reluctance, drift to their conclusion that “to perpetrate atrocities… soldiers did not need to be racist or anti-Semite.” Instead they killed and even enjoyed killing, or took it as normal, because of “the military value system and their immediate social environment” (what an Australian would call mateship; but not class). “As a rule German soldiers were not ‘ideological warriors.’” If anything, they were “apolitical,” implementing a “banality of violence.” For them, war was hell, while also being work; they felt pride in the fruit of their labour, although it was death and destruction. “Modernity’s faith in its distance from violence is illusionary,” the two authors state in their last paragraph. “People kill for various motives. Soldiers kill because it is their job.” The “terms of reference” of social psychology, 1, your reviewer is tempted to score, the particularity of the Nazi German crusade against Judeo-Bolshevism, the “real Second World War,” 0.
WHERE Neitzel and Welzer assume that their intellectual partnership works, James Dawes spends much of Evil Men in self-examination and self-anguish, in moralising about moralising. “What will happen [to you, gentle reader] when you read this book?” is the portentous, concluding, sentence of his preface. In the main text, few pages pass without Dawes wondering whether he should be examining what he is examining, whether he should be believed or approved, whether we shall ever really know the truth or find the right path. Chacun à son goût is undoubtedly the best advice to all readers. But as I turned Dawes’s pages, I cringed at the soft emotion of it all. I tended, perhaps unfairly, to blame a certain variety of American liberalism as my “frame of reference,” and decided not to enrol in a course on human rights and humanitarianism at Macalester College.
The first impulse of Dawes’s exploration of evil comes from his interviews with aged surviving members of Unit 731 of the imperial Japanese army, long notorious for their appalling wartime atrocities, notably their medical experimentation on their prisoners (an estimated 10,000 of them) as though they were white rats. (Their own euphemism for them was “logs” of wood. Dawes opts for his own euphemisms; when one of his interviewees dies, we are told that he had “passed away.”) Dawes, who must have had generous research funding, seems not to be equipped with Japanese and used multiple interpreters and translators in his work; he does not forbear to describe (and moralise about) what he and the interpreters did together on their nights off.
His book is not broken into chapters but rather proceeds in a stream of consciousness manner with recurrent issues: horrible-but-not-new stories about Unit 731’s activities (with recurrent half-parallels being drawn to contemporary American deeds abroad); Dawes’s worries about what he, his readers and his interviewees are doing; and rapid placements of the thought of a vast variety of major thinkers from St Augustine to Hannah Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman to Judith Butler, Sigmund Freud to Michel Foucault, and Simon Wiesenthal to Slavoj Žižek. A longish passage recounts the Milgram experiment in 1960 (it also gets a mention in Neitzel and Welzer) and that of Philip Zimbardo at Stanford in 1971, where subjects were randomly assigned the position of “prisoner” or “guard.” There are also generalisations: “We are creating a collective moral archive of our time for future generations.” “We think poorly when we think together.” “Acquiring a taste for violence is a gradual process.” “All writing is a kind of manipulation, but sometimes it is a manipulation the author is not fully in control of or does not know he [sic] intends.”
Towards the middle of his book, Dawes does come up with ten rules on how to avoid evil. Typically, he evinces no irony in the number of his commandments. Anyway, he soon backs off what might look like certainty to conclude, “The vision of a fully realised international human rights movement is both the latest incarnation of American utopian promise and its dystopic nightmare.” That sounds a tad nationalist to me, as though Dawes indeed lives after the end of non-American history. As for human evil, I fear it is always with us and always mingled with other qualities. It may be best resisted by a democratic determination to subject our rulers to continuous criticism and by a conclusion that certainly the life of Adolf Hitler and perhaps the Holocaust (or the actions of Unit 731) carry no absolute and timeless messages. Rather than starkly delineating ultimate evil, the humanities may do better when they seek to explore the interplay of the crimes, follies and tragedies of humankind. •
