There was something of the same aversion to surrender in the German army. When the American psychologist Saul Padover interrogated Lieutenant Rudolf Kohlhoff after his capture in December 1944, he elicited a revealing response to his question about the possibility of a German defeat:
But I tell you Germany is not going to be defeated. I don’t know how long it will take to achieve victory, but it will be achieved. I am convinced of it, or I would not have fought. I have never entertained thoughts of losing. I could not tell you how victory will come but it will. Our generals must have good reason to fight on. They believe in the Endsieg [final victory]. Otherwise they would not sacrifice German blood… The Wehrmacht will never give up. It did not give up in the last war either. Only the civilians gave up and betrayed the army. I tell you, the Americans will never reach the Rhine. We will fight to the end. We will fight for every city, town and village. If necessary we will see the whole Reich destroyed and the population killed. As a gunner, I know that it is not a pleasant feeling to have to destroy German homes and kill German civilians, but for the defence of the German Father land I consider it necessary.
Another prisoner, a young parachutist, told the same interrogator that he was ‘deeply humiliated for having permitted himself to be captured’ and felt he ‘should have died “on the field of honour”’. Such attitudes were obviously more prevalent among those troops who had been most thoroughly indoctrinated by the regime. As American troops neared Marienbad in the Sudetenland in April 1945 Günter Koschorrek, a disillusioned veteran of the Eastern Front, had no doubt that ‘in thisendgame, some brain-damaged troop leaders… [would] follow Hitler’s orders to the letter and fight to the last round of ammunition’. Yet even self-consciously unpolitical professionals were influenced by Hitler’s orders to fight to the death. When Martin Pöppel, an experienced paratrooper, found his unit surrounded by the Gordon Highlanders in April 1945, he and his men found the decision to surrender far from easy:
I discussed the situation with the last Unteroffizier. The Fü hrer order was very much in my mind: ‘If a superior officer no longer appears in a position to lead, he is to hand over command to the nearest rank below.’ Personally, I was ready to surrender – me, who had been a paratrooper from the very first day of the war. Yet although the struggle was completely hopeless, men came to me in tears. ‘As paratroopers, how will we be able to look our wives in the face, if we surrender voluntarily.’ A phenomenon, incredible… Then, after long silence, they said that if the ‘Old Man’… thought we should surrender, then they would follow me. [Pöppel was 24.]
One American corporal noted that ‘the Krauts always shot up all their ammo and then surrendered’ – unlike (by implication) American soldiers, who would surrender when in a hopeless situation. It was exceedingly hazardous to try to parley with Germans who still had bullets left to fire, even if they were surrounded.
In the final analysis, however, it was not only the fear of disciplinary action or of dishonour that deterred German and Japanese soldiers from surrendering. More important for most soldiers was the perception that prisoners would be killed by the enemy anyway, and so one might as well fight on. The Germans were of course the ones who had started killing prisoners on the Eastern Front. At the time, a number of officers and ordinary men sensed that this was not a wise policy. Guy Sajer recalled how he and his comrades had reacted after they had thrown grenades at surrendering Russians:
[Later] we began to grasp what had happened… We suddenly felt gripped by something horrible, which made our skins crawl… For me, these memories produced a loss of physical sensation, almost as if my personality had split… because I knew that such things don’t happen to young men who have led normal lives…
‘We really were shits to kill those Popovs [Russians]…’ [Halssaid.]
He was clearly desperately troubled by the same things that troubled me.
‘[That’s] how it is, and all there is,’ I answered… Something hideous had entered our spirits, to remain and haunt us forever.
Quite apart from its illegality, some Germans saw the folly of prisoner killing, and not just because of the value of prisoners as intelligence sources. Wolfgang Horn, who admitted to shooting ‘cowardly’ Russians himself if they were too slow to raise their hands, nevertheless deplored the decision of the lieutenant commanding his unit to shoot prisoners. It was not only ‘unchivalrous’ but also ‘stupid’ because ‘Russians hiding in the forest might have seen the prisoners being shot and so they might fight better the next time.’ Alfred Rosenberg fore saw as ‘an obvious consequence of [the] politically and militarily unwise treatment [of prisoners]… not only the weakening of the will to desert but a truly deadly fear of falling into German captivity’. Officers in the 18th Panzer Division came to the same conclusion: ‘Red Army soldiers… are more afraid of falling prisoner than of the possibility of dying on the battlefield.’ So did the commander of the Gross deutsch land Division, who appealed to his men to ‘understand that the ultimate result of the maltreatment or shooting of PoWs after they had given themselves up in battle would be… a stiffening of the enemy’s resistance, because every Red Army soldier fears German captivity’. Orders against ‘senseless shootings’ went largely unheeded by soldiers on the ground, however. Indeed, the practice of prisoner killing became routine: ‘We take some prisoners, we shoot them, all in a day’s work.’
The fear of retaliation helps to explain why many Germans found the prospect of surrender unpalatable even when their position had become patently hopeless. Ordinary soldiers were plagued by fear ‘of falling into the hands of the Russians, no doubt thirsty for revenge’. By no means exceptional was the intransigent officer who declared after the capitulation at Stalingrad: ‘There’ll be no surrender! The war goes on!’ and then shot a Russian officer. In July 1944 the lieutenant in charge of Eduard Stelbe’s unit shot himself rather than fall into the hands of the Red Army. Gottlob Bidermann’s description of the 132nd Infantry Division’s surrender provides further evidence of the extreme reluctance of some front-line officers to obey direct orders to capitulate, even as late as the war’s end on May 8, 1945. One officer shot himself through the head; another ran back screaming ‘No surrender!’ to the next German line, where he tried to force the commander of a self-propelled gun to engage the enemy. He had to be knocked out with a rifle butt. ‘Why did you continue to fight?’ asked the Red Army colonel who accepted Bidermann’s surrender. His answer was: ‘Because we are soldiers.’ But this was not a sufficient explanation. A large part of the reason was that, having committed war crimes themselves, Wehrmacht troops expected no quarter from the Red Army. Günter Koschorrek knew full well that the Soviets did not ‘treat their prisoners in accordance with the terms of the Geneva Convention… We have fought against the Soviets – we can imagine what awaits us in Siberia.’ The dread of defeat was compounded by the involvement of the Wehrmacht in massacres of civilians. ‘If we should lose tomorrow,’ wrote Guy Sajer, ‘those of us still alive… will be judged without mercy… accused of an infinity of murder… spared nothing.’ One soldier who had witnessed the slaughter of thousands of Jews in Lithuania could say only: ‘May God grant us victory because if they get their revenge, we’re in for a hard time.’ Those Japanese who were aware of their own side’s brutal mistreatment of prisoners – in particular, the medical experiments conducted by Unit 731 in Manchukuo – may have felt similar apprehensions.
Retribution was not slow in coming. ‘We have badly mistreated our [own] people,’ a Soviet prisoner told his German interrogators, ‘in fact so bad that it was almost impossible to treat them worse. [But] you Germans have managed to do that… Therefore we will win the war.’ ‘Do not count days, do not count miles,’ thundered Ilya Ehren-burg in the Red Star army newspaper. ‘Count only the number of Germans you have killed. Kill the German – this is your mother’s prayer. Kill the German – this is the cry of your Russian earth. Do not waver. Do not let up. Kill.’ The Soviet streated the Germ
ans precisely as the Germans had treated them. Prisoners were frequently shot immediately after interrogation, a practice explicitly justified as retaliation for German treatment of Soviet prisoners. Zinaida Pytkina, a SMERSH interrogator, recalled how she personally despatched a German officer with a shot in the back of the neck:
It was joy for me. The Germansdidn’t ask us to spare them and I was angry… When we were retreating we lost so many 17-, 18-year olds. Do I have to be sorry for the German after that? This was my mood… As a member of the Communist Party, I saw in front of me a man who could have killed my relatives… I would have cut off his head if I had been asked to. One person less, I thought. Ask him how many people he killed – he did not think about this?
The wounded at Stalingrad were simply finished off after the German surrender. In turn, German troops on the other side were ‘told that the Russians have been killing all prisoners’. Ruthenians drafted into the Wehrmacht would have deserted in larger numbers had they not ‘believe[d] the officers’ stories that the Russians [would] torture and shoot them’. Eduard Stelbe was genuinely surprised when the first words of the Russian officer to whom he surrendered were simply: ‘Does anyone have a cigarette?’ When some female soldiers pointed their pistols at him and his comrades as they trudged to captivity, he fully expected them to fire; in fact the pistols had been emptied. It was just, he recalled, ‘a little show of sadism’.
It was not only on the Eastern Front that a cycle of violence manifested itself. In the Pacific theatre, too, ill treatment and murder of prisoners were commonplace. It is clear from many accounts that American and Australian forces often shot Japanese surrenderers. It happened at Guadalcanal, especially after twenty Marines fell victim to an apparent Japanese surrender that turned out to be an ambush. The Marines’ battle cry on Tarawa was ‘Kill the Jap bastards! Take no prisoners!’ At Peleliu, too, American troops had no compunction about bayoneting Japanese soldiers who had just surrendered. On New Guinea in 1944 Charles Lindbergh heard it ‘freely admitted that some of our soldiers tortured Japanese prisoners and were as cruel and barbaric at times as the Japs themselves. Our men think nothing of shooting a Japanese prisoner or soldier attempting to surrender. They treat the Japs with less respect than they would give to an animal, and these acts are condoned by almost everyone.’ This behaviour was not merely sanctioned but actively encouraged by Allied officers in the Pacific. An infantry colonel told Lindbergh proudly: ‘Our boys just don’t take prisoners.’ Nor was this a peculiarity of American forces. The testimony of Sergeant Henry Ewen confirms that Australian troops killed prisoners at Bougainville ‘in cold blood’. When Indian soldiers serving with the British in Burma killed a group of wounded Japanese prisoners, George MacDonald Fraser, then an officer in the 14th Army, turned a blind eye.
Killing prisoners was sometimes justified as retaliation. The orderly of a popular Marine company commander who had been killed at Okinawa ‘snatched up a submachine gun and unforgivably massacred a line of unarmed Japanese soldiers who had just surrendered’. British troops, too, killed Japanese prisoners in revenge for earlier atrocities against Allied wounded. However, there is evidence that ‘taking no prisoners’ simply became standard practice. ‘The [American] rule of thumb,’ an American PoW told his Japanese captors, ‘was “if it moves, shoot it”.’ Another GI maxim was ‘Kill or be killed.’ The war correspondent Edgar L. Jones later recalled: ‘We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats… finished off the enemy wounded.’ War psychologists regarded the killing of prisoners as so commonplace that they devised formulae for assuaging soldiers’ subsequent feelings of guilt. Roughly two-fifths of American army chaplains surveyed after the war said that they had regarded orders to kill prisoners as legitimate. This kind of thing went on despite the obvious deterrent effect on other Japanese soldiers who might be contemplating surrender, making it far from easy to distinguish the self-induced aversion to surrender discussed above from the rational fear that the Americans would kill any prisoners. In June 1945 the US Office of War Information reported that 84 per cent of interrogated Japanese prisoners had expected to be killed by their captors. This fear was clearly far from unwarranted. Two years before, a secret intelligence report said that only the promise of free ice cream and three days’ leave would induce American troops not to kill surrendering Japanese.
This brings us to one of the most troubling aspects of the Second World War: the fact that Allied troops often regarded the Japanese in the same way that Germans regarded Russians – as Untermenschen. General Sir Thomas Blamey, who commanded the Australians in New Guinea, told his troops that their foes were ‘a cross between the human being and the ape’, ‘vermin’, ‘something primitive’ that had to be ‘exterminated’ to preserve ‘civilization’. ‘The Japs…had renounced the right to be regarded as human,’ recalled Major John Winstanley, who fought with the Royal West Kent Regiment at Kohima. ‘We thought of them as vermin to be exterminated.’ To Lieutenant Lintorn Highlett of the Dorsetshires, they were ‘formidable fighting insects’ – an echo of General Slim’s description of the Japanese soldiers as ‘part of an insect horde with all its power and horror’. Wartime cartoonists often portrayed the Japanese as monkeys or apes. ‘A searing hate arises in me whenever I see a Nip,’ wrote Edward Dunlop in his diary of the Death Railway. ‘Disgusting, deplorable, hateful troop of men – apes.’ Such sentiments were even more wide spread among Americans, where the popular reaction to Pearl Harbor (‘Why, the yellow bastards!’) built on preexisting racial prejudices. On May 22, 1944, Life magazine published a picture of a winsome blonde gazing at a humans kull. A memento mori perhaps, in the tradition of the Metaphysical poets? On the contrary:
When he said goodby [sic] two years ago to Natalie Nickerson, 20, a war worker of Phoenix, Ariz., a big, handsome Navy lieutenant promised her a Jap. Last week Natalie received a human skull, autographed by her lieutenant and 13 friends, and inscribed: ‘This is a good Jap – a dead one picked up on the New Guinea beach.’ Natalie, surprised at the gift, named it Tojo.
Boiling the flesh off enemy skulls to make souvenirs was a not uncommon practice. Ears, bones and teeth were also collected. In April 1943 the Baltimore Sun ran a story about a mother who petitioned the authorities to let her son post her a Japanese ear so that she could nail it to her front door – an unusual alternative to tying a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree. The United States had already all but embraced the command economy. Now the war against totalitarianism had forced Americans to adopt another of totalitarianism’s defining characteristics: they had dehumanized the enemy in order more easily to annihilate him. The Chairman of the War Manpower Commission, Paul V. McNutt, declared in April 1945 that he was in favour of ‘the extermination of the Japanese in toto’. Polls revealed that at least 13 per cent of Americans shared his view.
Thus, when American met German in the battle fields of Western Europe after the invasion of Italy, both had experience of lawless racial war, even if the scale of the German experience was vastly greater. Not surprisingly, prisoner killing was carried over into the new European theatres. Perhaps the most notorious example was the murder of seventy-seven American prisoners at Malmédy by the SS Battle Group Peiper on December 17, 1944. That taught Allied troops to fear Waffen-SS units more than regular Wehrmacht units. Yet such atrocities were committed by both sides. On July 14, 1943, for example, troops of the American 45th Infantry Division killed seventy Italian and German PoWs at Biscari in Sicily. Sergeant William C. Bradley recalled how one of his comrades killed a group of German prisoners captured in France. On June 7, 1944, an American officer admitted that US airborne forces did not take prisoners but ‘kill them as they hold up their hands coming out. They are apt in going along a road with prisoners and seeing one of their own men killed, to turn around and shoot a prisoner to make up for it. They are tough people.’ Stephen Ambrose’s study of E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, suggests this was not wholly without founda
tion. As one British diplomat noted:
American troops are not showing any great disposition to take prisoners unless the enemy come over in batches of twenty or more. When smaller groups than this appear with their hands up, the American soldiers… are apt to interpret this as a menacing gesture… and to take liquidating action accordingly… There is quite a proportion of ‘tough guys’, who have experienced the normal peace-time life of Chicago, and other great American cities, and who are applying the lessons they learned there.
As in the Pacific theatre, American troops often rationalized their conduct as retaliation. The tenacity of German troops, their reluctance to surrender and their ability to inflict casualties until their supplies of ammunition were exhausted were intensely frustrating to Americans certain of victory, who saw such resistance as futile. However, prisoner killing continued to be overtly encouraged by some American officers. General George Patton’s address to the 45th Infantry Division before the invasion of Sicily could not have been more explicit:
The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred Page 66