Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying by Harald Welzer, Sönke Neitzel Read Free Book Online Page A

hand.
    “This is what aPolish city looks like from the nose gunner’s position of a warplane.” Propaganda photograph from anHe 111, September 1939. (Photographer: Roman Stempka; BA 183-S52911)
    In this conversation, one of the parties clearly feels the need to communicate something about himself, while the other tries to analyze whom he’s talking to and what the conversation is really about. We don’t know how often Meyer spoke with Pohl or whether he knew him well. But he seems somewhat revolted at his cell mate’s statement that he’d have liked to have directly shot and killed another human being. He comments:
    M EYER : Onebecomes dreadfullybrutal in such undertakings.
    P OHL : Yes, I’ve already said that on the first day it seemed terribleto 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, thehorses screamed. I hardly heard theplane, 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 thenPohl expounds on the advantages ofmachine-gun-equipped warplanes. Because the planes are highly mobile, one can hunt down victims instead of waiting for them to come into range:
    P OHL : 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.
    M EYER : Didn’t they defend themselves from the ground? Didn’t they use A.A. machine guns?
    P OHL : 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 thestart 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 thedrastic escalation of violence that came withGermany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. It is beyond doubt that German soldiers committed crimesagainst humanity in their campaign against Poland, including the murder of civilians and the execution ofJews. 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 beingideologically motivated when he describes bombarding cities andgunning 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.
A UTOTELIC V IOLENCE
    In the