Historians often dream of being able to eavesdrop on history, but few can hope to obtain such spectacularly direct access as that presented in this major addition to the literature on the second world war. Discovered in 2001 by the historian Sönke Neitzel, the transcripts of conversations between German prisoners of war, secretly recorded by the British and American intelligence services, offer a vivid and at times surprising insight into the mentality of the German military.
Organised into sections on various aspects of the wartime experience – "fighting, killing and dying", "sex", "technology" – the book focuses on reconstructing what the authors term the prisoners' "frame of reference". While Neitzel and Welzer – a social psychologist – quote extensively from the transcripts, much of the book is an analysis of the prisoners' fluctuating psychology.
The authors insist that what the transcripts document is not so much the historical facts (although discussions of troop movements and equipment were of considerable use to the allies) as the perception of these facts by the German military. Their study thus amounts to a lesson in hermeneutics: however repulsive rape and mass executions appear from a peacetime perspective, the tone of the conversations suggests that to most of the German soldiers, such things were simply the background to their lives. In order to understand their world view, condemnation is much less productive than a careful reconstruction of their attitudes and assumptions.
Particularly striking is the extent to which all combatants see themselves in terms borrowed from industrial labour. They focus on hitting "targets" and achieving "results", as an efficient way of rationalising violence and instrumentalising human casualties. Indeed, the authors conclude that the decisive factor in making atrocities possible was "a general realignment from a civilian to a wartime frame of reference". For many of the recruits, war was simply the continuation of work by other means.
This attitude extends to their view of the Holocaust. The transcripts prove once and for all that "practically all German soldiers knew or suspected that Jews were being murdered". The traditional argument, that it was only the SS who had any knowledge of the genocide, is simply untenable. However, the authors conclude that ordinary soldiers had strikingly little interest in the Holocaust, preferring to swap stories about medals and comrades.
Time and again, the prisoners display what the authors term "cognitive dissonance", whereby they hold seemingly contradictory views. The ever-more convoluted attempts to exculpate the Führer, despite the increasingly obvious fact that the war was lost, provide a striking example of this mechanism: the German military had simply invested too much emotional energy in Hitler to allow him to fail. The transcripts also suggest that some of the best-known cliches are unfounded: most of the soldiers needed no period of "brutalisation" – they simply transferred their work ethic to their new tasks. Nor do their discussions support the idea of a decline in morale towards the end of the war.
Deftly translated by Jefferson Chase, these transcripts constitute an invaluable historical document precisely because the prisoners did not know that they would become a "source". Unlike memoirs, interviews or legal records, there is no personal agenda, nor are these conversations prejudiced by the kinds of ex post facto knowledge that can distort retrospective discussions. Instead, they offer "live" commentary on how the war was unfolding from the German perspective. In this, they are a military counterpart to the civilian perspective recorded in the anonymous diaries published as A Woman in Berlin.
The psychological analysis offered by the authors, meanwhile, is insightful and largely persuasive. If the psychologists Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich famously diagnosed the postwar German "inability to mourn", this book presents an unprecedented source for understanding the ability to massacre.