Soldaten

MEYER: One becomes dreadfully brutal in such undertakings.

POHL: Yes, I’ve already said that on the first day it seemed terrible to me, but I said to myself: “Hell! orders are orders.” On the second and third days I felt it didn’t matter a hoot, and on the fourth day I enjoyed it. But, as I said, the horses screamed. I hardly heard the plane, so loud did they scream. One of them lay there with its hind legs torn off.

At this point in the protocol, there is an interruption, and then Pohl expounds on the advantages of machine-gun-equipped warplanes. Because the planes are highly mobile, one can hunt down victims instead of waiting for them to come into range:

POHL: A plane with machine-guns is really fine. If you have a machine-gun posted anywhere, then you have to wait for the people to come along. A 57.

MEYER: Didn’t they defend themselves from the ground? Didn’t they use A.A. machine guns?

POHL: They shot down one. With rifles. A whole company fired at the word of command. That was the “Do 17.” It landed; the Germans kept the soldiers at bay with machine guns and set fire to the machine.

Sometimes I had 228 bombs, including 10 kg bombs. We threw them into the midst of the people. And the soldiers. And incendiary bombs in addition.

Meyer’s questions and comments tend to be technical in nature, although he does react with emotional dismay on two occasions: when Pohl tells of killing horses and when he confesses his desire to kill someone “with his own hands.” If Pohl’s own account is believed, he didn’t need an adjustment period to get used to violence. He was apparently able to call up violent impulses almost immediately, with little prelude. Strikingly, Pohl does not describe having gotten accustomed to violence. Instead, he repeatedly expresses regret for having perpetrated too little violence and a desire for more victims.

This conversation was recorded in the summer of 1940; the events that are its subject happened in September 1939, directly after the start of World War II. Even if we were to assume that Pohl had had months of combat experience before his exchange with Meyer, and that the experience may have brutalized his stories about his first days of war ex post facto, he was still taken out of the war long before the drastic escalation of violence that came with Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. It is beyond doubt that German soldiers committed crimes against humanity in their campaign against Poland, including the murder of civilians and the execution of Jews.⁸⁶ But Pohl was in the air force. He hunts down and kills people from the skies, and he does not give the impression of being ideologically motivated when he describes bombarding cities and gunning down people. His victims have no personal attributes by which he selects them. He doesn’t care which targets he hits, only that he hits targets. He enjoys killing and needs no other motivation. His behavior is not aimed at advancing a larger cause or purpose, but merely at achieving the best results possible. The senseless killing resembles a hunt, a sporting activity in which the only purpose is to be better than others, in this case, by hitting more people with bullets. That’s what most angers Pohl about getting shot down. It spoiled the end result of the hunt.

AUTOTELIC VIOLENCE