Soldaten

I was speechless when Sönke Neitzel called me and told me about the source material he had found. Previously we had been forced to base our research on perceptions of violence and the willingness to kill on very problematic sources: official investigations, letters from the field, eyewitness reports, and memoirs. The shortcoming of all these statements, reports, and descriptions was that they were consciously composed and addressed to someone specific: a prosecutor, a wife at home, or an audience the authors wanted to win over. When POWs spoke among themselves in the camps, they did so without any such agenda. None of them ever imagined that the stories they told would become a “source,” to say nothing of being published. Moreover, with investigations, autobiographies, and interviews with historical witnesses, the people concerned know how a period of history has turned out, and that ex post facto knowledge obscures how they experienced and saw things at the time. In Sönke Neitzel’s sources, men were talking live, in real time, about the war and their attitudes toward it. It was a discovery that would give unique, new insight into the mentality of the Wehrmacht and perhaps of the military in general. I was electrified, and we agreed to meet immediately. It was obvious that as a social psychologist without a profound knowledge of the Wehrmacht, I would never be able to interpret the material historically. Conversely, someone with a purely historical perspective would never be able to decode all the communicative and psychological aspects of the protocols. Both Sönke Neitzel and I had worked intensively on the Third Reich, yet we viewed the dialogues among the POWs from very different perspectives. Only by combining our disciplines, social psychology and history, would we be able to do justice to the material as a source for reconstructing a particular mentality and arrive at a revised perspective on soldiers’ behavior. We were then able to convince the Gerda Henkel Foundation and the Fritz Thyssen Foundation to support our attempts to start a major new research project. Not long after our initial meeting, we had the financial means to put together a research team to immediately tackle this mind-boggling amount of material.¹ We were able to digitalize all of the British documents and most of the American material and sort through it with the help of content-recognition software. Now, after three years of work, in which we learned a lot that was new and in which we were forced to question a number of truisms our sources failed to bear out, it is time to present the first results of our research.

AUTHORS’ NOTE

In the excerpts from the surveillance protocols, British and American intelligence agencies used parentheses to indicate omissions. They also indicated garbled names and places with question marks. Authors’ clarifications are indicated with brackets.

What the Soldiers Discussed [1]