This book, originally published in 2012, is based on the discovery of transcripts of covert surveillance of German prisoners of war in WW2, found initially in archives in Great Britain and latterly in archives in the USA.
Whilst in captivity, the British had secretly recorded the conversations POW were having towards gaining intelligence that may prove useful in the military campaigns to come. They had also sought to encourage more information to be forthcoming by planting “stool pigeons”, British agents who either were or could pass themselves off as German soldiers, to try to lead conversations towards getting more militarily useful information for the Allied war effort.
The sole use of these transcripts at the time was to discover any German military secrets. No effort was put in to understand the thinking or motivation of those taking part in the conversations.
Post-war, these transcripts were simply archived and forgotten about until Sönke Neitzel, on a short trip to London, put in a request at the Kew Gardens archive to see the files. He was astounded to be given access to 800 pages of transcripts seemingly unread since WW2. Neitzel published his initial research in 2003 before going on to discover a similarly untouched archive of 100,000 pages in the National Archive in Washington. Because of the sheer volume of material to read and analyse, he joined up with Harald Welzer, along with a student research team, to undertake the effort required to produce this book.
What the authors have done in this book is to try to get an understanding of how the ordinary German soldiers thought, what was their mindset that enabled them to fight and kill the enemies of the Reich, and to continue to wage war even when it was clear that it had been lost. Also, what motivated ordinary soldiers to participate in the criminal acts, massacres and systematic murders now known as “war crimes”.
It brings out the differences in thought processes between the different branches of the Wehrmacht: how Luftwaffe pilots behaved like hunters and wanted to act “honourably” towards their opponents by not shooting at Allied pilots hanging from parachutes; how Kriegsmarine sailors only saw their opponents in terms of what tonnage of shipping they could sink and had no real concern for the fate of any survivors. For the soldiers of the Heer, it was much more personal, for they were able to see their opponents’ faces and either had to kill or be killed, so to them the potential for a violent death was always there.
This is not an easy book to read because it is an English translation of a German academic book and so demands significant concentration and time to fully understand the analysis made by the authors and how they came to their conclusions. It is also not easy because it does contain graphic, first-person descriptions of atrocities undertaken by German soldiers on behalf of the NSDAP and the Third Reich.
Although these transcripts are uncensored by the authors or by the original transcribers (where the recorded speech was unintelligible, no attempts to fill in the gaps were made), and presumably the more candid ones took place without any expectation of being secretly recorded, as I have found with the “Feld Post” letters I translate, some of the more implicit meanings and nuances may have been lost in the translation for a wider audience. Also, the authors have deliberately selected specific transcripts to use in the book, so probably many would have been somewhat banal.
Understandably, the authors have focussed on why in particular “German” soldiers behaved like they did, and was it because of their background, upbringing, training, politics, military values or national character. They do draw some parallels with other wars, in particular the Vietnam War and the atrocities carried out by American soldiers against the Vietnamese.
An area of their analysis I found particularly interesting, given the times we now live in, is that of “autotelic violence”, that is, violence committed for its own sake rather than for any larger purpose or, for soldiers, military objective. You can, to some extent, understand how soldiers immersed in the brutalities of war at some point begin to commit what to outsiders could be seen as atrocities, but to them it is simply how it is and what you do to survive.
In their analysis, the authors propose that the potential for “autotelic violence” is there inherently within any society but is kept under control by the State having the monopoly on the legitimate exercise of force. If, however, the State gives up on the rule of law, then the inherent potential for autotelic violence within the population will come to the fore. I suggest, however, that the NSDAP used their monopoly on the legitimate exercise of force to ensure that any individual Wehrmacht soldier, when commanded to commit an atrocity, would not realistically have been able to refuse to take part. This also has a bearing on the examples given of where the local German populace took advantage of seeing mass murders for themselves. Was this a form of autotelic violence by proxy or the result of a totalitarian State’s influence on thought and behaviour?
The authors have tried to distinguish between actual events and how much of the conversations being recorded were simply soldiers “bullsh*tting” by trying to outdo each other in how extreme, heroic or outlandish their exploits, real or imaginary, had been.
They have also recognised that some everyday shared or common experiences, however violent, were omitted by the soldiers in conversation as it would not have been significant to them and so not worth talking about.
The SS are also covered in this book but, because of the way they volunteered, were selected, trained and indoctrinated by the NSDAP and the abnormal conditions that this created, I feel that they should have been given a separate analysis to the rest of the Wehrmacht. Including them in the overall analysis has, to my mind, potentially skewed the conclusions towards the more inherent tendency to autotelic violence than I suspect would have been within the general population.
It is worth reading all of the transcribed conversations and making your own mind up about whether the Wehrmacht soldiers were naïve, inherently evil, or were they corrupted by a totalitarian ideology that sought to control every aspect of the German people’s lives and, in particular, how they thought and behaved.
As well as getting a better understanding of the behaviour of the Wehrmacht in WW2, this book also raised for me the question of why the Italians, who also committed atrocities before and during WW2, particularly in North and East Africa, have not been exposed to the same sort of scrutiny, as they seemingly were given a free pardon as soon as they changed sides.
It also raises the question that, if similar recorded conversations existed for British or American soldiers, how would they have compared to those of the German POWs, especially as censorship of Allied atrocities was, and to some extent still is, in place.
A good book, worth finding a copy and reading it for an insight into why soldiers in WW2 may have behaved as they did then, and probably as they would still do today in similar circumstances.
© John Tull 2025
