topics: |  war | military | psychology |

This is a book based on the private discussions that German soldiers had amongst themselves after they had been captured by Allied forces. The conversations were surreptitiously recorded - (is this allowed by Geneva Convention?) - and now all these transcripts have been declassified.

The work is not a history, but more a sociology, of war. One of the main points, wwith which many people in the Anglo-American world may feel uncomfortable, is that there was nothing that different about the Nazi soldiers - they were just operating within a "frame of reference" - a theoretical construct in sociology, sort of like "worldview", which was not that much different from many soldiers in many other wars.

There are some vague demarcation for four "orders" in the frame of reference, from the first order (very broadly shared) to the fourth, which is specific to an individual. [Harald Welzer is a social psychologist]

The authors seek to find the worldviews that were shared among the soldiers, and if there were some aspects specific to Nazi Germany. Many actions, unacceptable in normal times, need to be permitted in war, and attitudes toward killing in general has to be different. Hwever, some others, including the holocaust, were not quote so readily accepted.

The overall argument seems to be that despite the excesses of the war,
much of this was a matter of scale - quantity rather than quality,
Comparing with other wars, such as Vietnam, reveal many similarities.
One of the sources cited is Bernd Greiner's War Without Fronts: The USA in
Vietnam, a 2010 work based on extensive research and unprecedented access
to US Army archives, wshich identifies many forms of war crimes perpetrated
by the US.

Wilileaks Collateral Murder

Late in the book, the authors describe the video Collateral murder,
released by Wikileaks, whe US soldiers in an Apache helicopter are shown
killing 18 people in all, including two Reuters reporters who are carrying
cameras with big lenses.  These are mis-identified as rocket-propelled
grenade [RPG], and the reporters, as well as many bystanders including two
children in a van, are killed.

	US SOLDIER 2: Sorry, hahaha, I hit ’em — Roger. ...
	US SOLDIER 1: Oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards.
	US SOLDIER 2: Nice. Good shootin’.

And many more in a similar vein.  At the time, this caused wide revulsion
and raised the stock for Wikileaks.

However, this type of behaviour is not very uncommon during wars.

One of the commentaries on the video came from Josh Stieber, a conscientious
objector who was then assigned to the same Company (Bravo 2-16) :

	Not to justify what they did, but militarily speaking, they did
	exactly what they were trained to do...If we’re shocked by this
	video, we need to be asking questions of the larger system, because
	this is how these soldiers were trained to act....
 	I’m told that doing these things is in the best interest of my own
	country.

	I think about one exercise. Some of my leaders would ask the younger
	soldiers what they would do if somebody were to pull a weapon in a
	marketplace full of unarmed civilians. And not only did your response
	have to be that you would return fire, even if you knew it was going
	to hurt innocent civilians, ... the answer had to be yes, but it had
	to be an instantaneous yes. So, again, these things are just hammered
	into you through military training.
		- democracynow.org

This comment comes very close to the points made at the heart of the
analysis of these conversations among German solciers.  Clearly, they see
nothing wrong in discussing many of their acts with their mates.  The book
makes a case very similar to that of Josh Stieber, invoking the notion that
each of these soldiers was playing a social role in terms of what others
around him expected him to do.  This, together with the overall situation
of war, created the various frames of reference within which each person
operated.

Thus, within their frames of reference, many things like having sex with
jewish women whom they themseovles would soon shoot, was ok.  However,
some things - including the holocaust - were not.

    AMBERGER: I once spoke to a Feldwebel who said: “This mass-shooting of
	Jews absolutely sickens me. This murdering is no profession!
	Hooligans can do that.”

As we see below, the German frame of reference also did not condone the
treatment of the Russian POWs, some 50% of whom were starved to death by
the Wehrmacht, (whereas the mortality of Anglo-American POWs was only
about 2%).

Troublesome questions about today's wars

In the end the book asks some deeper questions about the mental attitudes
in war.

What questions can we ask of the "larger system" behind wars?

In trying to see how to answer this, let me digress for a moment on the
personal experience of violence.  In his Violence: six sideways reflections
Slavoj Zizek ruminates on how systemic violence becomes invisible, "like
the notorious 'dark matter' of physics".

Early on in this book, the authors make remark on "the extraordinary
abstinence from violence in modern society" - this is in contrast to the
widespread state violence in pre-modern times, where it was licensed by the
aristocracy.

State violence in modern times

I can't help quote this fascinating example of state violence, from
recent decades.  This is a story of the Tumandar, or chief, of
the Baloch people, who live in the semi-desert regions of Baluchistan (and
Turkmenistan).  The Tumandar, until he was killed by the Pakistan army in
2006, was the Oxford educated Nawab Akbar Bugti.

In the 1960s, he had a conversation with Sylvia Matheson, who reports it
in her "Tigers of Balochistan" (1967).  At one point, he calmly states
how he had killed his first man at the age of twelve.  Later, Matheson
returns to this bald comment:

   SM: “About this man you killed — er, why?”

   AB : “Oh that!” he responded as he sipped his tea, “Well, the man
	annoyed me. I’ve forgotten what it was about now, but I shot him
	dead.  I’ve rather a hasty temper you know, but under tribal law of
	course it wasn’t a capital offence, and, in any case, as the eldest
	son of the Chieftain I was perfectly entitled to do as I pleased in
	our own territory. We enjoy absolute sovereignty over our people and
	they accept this as part of their tradition.

Living in the 21st century, it is hard to imagine an era when the state had
such a monopoly on violence.  During war, we reach a point that is closer
to these experiences of the past.  "Collateral" deaths become a way of
life.

Guerilla wars - from Chhattisgarh to Kashmir to Afghanistan

Undoubtedly, the arguments in this book apply to thousands of conflicts -
including the behaviour of our own soldiers against the civilians in
Kashmir and elsewhere.

With the rise in cross-cultural violence, from the Naxal Santhals to
insurgents in Kashmir and in Iraq, violence is everywhere.

And we hide in our pastel-painted drawing rooms, and pay for "soldiers" to
do the dirty work and maintain our order in the universe.

Are they following civilized rules?  Of course not.

The way out does not seem to be to change how armies work, for they are
designed to kill. The only thing that will resolve this would be to work
for greater inclusion of the have-nots in the wealth of the world.

There are a million acts of violence that our state (and our world)
perpetrates on the underprivileged, on those that think differently.  It is
time we listened to the Taliban and the Naxals and the Palestinians and all
the others, and tried to understand their problems, instead of letting
loose an army on them.

Maybe the world is listening, maybe it is not.

Excerpts

Prologue - Sonke Neitzel: The POW converssations

Over the course of the war, the British intelligence service had
systematically subjected thousands of German and hundreds of Italian POWs to
covert surveillance, recording passages from conversations they found
particularly interesting on wax records and making protocols of them.

The protocols had survived the war in their entirety and had been
declassified in 1996. But in the years that followed, no one had recognized
their value as historical source material. Undiscovered, they were left
hibernating on the archive shelves.

In 2003, I published the first excerpts, and two years later a book edition
followed containing some two hundred protocols from conversations among
German generals. But I had still only made scant progress in evaluating and
interpreting this source material. A short time later, I discovered a similar
collection of material—some 100,000 pages’ worth, twice as extensive as the
British files—in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. It was clear that
there was no way I could process this seemingly infinite quantity of material
on my own.

Prologue : Harald Welzer

I was speechless when Sönke Neitzel called me and told me about the source
material he had found. Previously we had been forced to base our research on
perceptions of violence and the willingness to kill on very problematic
sources: official investigations, letters from the field, eyewitness reports,
and memoirs. The shortcoming of all these statements, reports, and
descriptions was that they were consciously composed and addressed to someone
specific: a prosecutor, a wife at home, or an audience the authors wanted to
win over. When POWs spoke among themselves in the camps, they did so without
any such agenda.

1 What the Soldiers Discussed

    MÜLLER: When I was at KHARKIV the whole place had been destroyed, except
	the centre of the town. It was a delightful town, a delightful
	memory!  Everyone spoke a little German—they’d learnt it at
	school. At TAGANROG, too, there were splendid cinemas and wonderful
	cafés on the beach. We did a lot of flying near the junction of the
	Don and the Donetz.… It’s beautiful country; I travelled everywhere
	in a lorry. Everywhere we saw women doing compulsory labour service.
    FAUST: How frightful!
    MÜLLER: They were employed on road-making —- extraordinarily lovely
	girls; we drove past, simply pulled them into the armoured car, raped
	them and threw them out again. And did they curse!
	[continues describing his travel experiences]

The two soldiers protocolled here, a Luftwaffe lance corporal and a sergeant,
at times describe the Russian campaign like tourists, telling of “delightful”
towns and memories. Then, suddenly, the story becomes about the spontaneous
rape of female forced laborers. The sergeant relates this like a minor,
ancillary anecdote, before continuing to describe his “trip.”

... human beings are never unbiased. Instead, they perceive everything
through specific filters. Every culture, historical epoch, or economic
system—in short every form of existence—influences the patterns of perception
and interpretation and thus steers how individuals perceive and interpret
experiences and events. The surveillance protocols reflect, in real time, how
German soldiers saw and commonly understood World War II.

Frames of reference vary drastically according to historical periods and
cultures. Orthodox Muslims, for instance, categorize suitable and unsuitable
sexual behavior within a completely different framework from that of secular
inhabitants of Western society. Nonetheless, no member of either group is
able to interpret what he sees outside references not of his own choice or
making.

Thus when we want to explain human behavior, we first must reconstruct the
frame of reference in which given human beings operated, including which
factors structured their perception and suggested certain conclusions. Merely
analyzing objective circumstances is inadequate.

Breadth within the Frames of reference

Frames of reference of the first order are the broad sociohistorical
	backdrop against which people of a given time operate. They include
	categories of good and evil and true and false, what is edible and
	what is not, how much distance we should maintain when speaking to
	one another, and what is polite or rude.

Frames of the second order are more concrete in a historical, cultural,
	and often geographical sense. They comprise a sociohistorical space
	that, in most respects, can be clearly delimited — for instance, the
	length of a dictatorial regime or the duration of a historical entity
	like the Third Reich.

'Frames of the third order are even more specific. They consist of a
	concrete constellation of sociohistorical events within which people
	act. They include, for example, a war in which soldiers fight.

Frames of the fourth order are the special characteristics, modes of
	perception, interpretative paradigms, and perceived responsibilities
	that an individual brings to a specific situation. This is the level
	of psychology, personal dispositions, and individual decision making.

This book analyzes second- and third-order frames of reference since that is
primarily what our source material allows us to best approach.

History can't be recognized

On August 2, 1914, Franz Kafka in Prague wrote in his diary: “Germany
declared war on Russia—afternoon: swimming lessons.” This is just one
particularly prominent example of events that later observers learn to see as
historic not being perceived as such in the real time in which they come
together.

Only in retrospect do historians determine which events from a massive
inventory of possibilities were “historical,” i.e., significant for the
eventual way things turned out...

Psychologists call this phenomenon “shifting baselines,” e.g. the radical
alteration of normative standards under Nazism show how powerful they can be.
... People were under the impression that everything had basically stayed the
same, even though fundamental change had occurred.  Only in retrospect does a
slow process, at least one perceived as slow, such as the breakdown of
civilization, congeal into an abrupt event.

For the same reason, many Jewish Germans did not recognize the dimensions of
the process of exclusion of which they would become the victims. Instead many
viewed Nazi rule as a short-term phenomenon that “one will have to get
through, or a setback that one could accept, or at the worst a threat that
restricted one personally, but that was still more bearable than the
arbitrary perils of exile.”
		[Raul Hilberg, Täter, Opfer, Zuschauer: Die Vernichtung der
		Juden, 1933–1945 (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1992), p. 138.]

Attitudes towards Violence

The extraordinary abstinence from violence in modern society,
the fact that the public and to a lesser degree the private spheres are
relatively free from force, is the result of the civilizing influence of
separation of state powers and the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of
force. These achievements have allowed for the enormous sense of security
that is an integral part of modern societies.

In premodern periods, people were far more likely to become the victims of
direct physical violence than now.  Violence was also far more present in
the public sphere, for example, in the form of public punishments and
executions.

roles: gender, age, social origin, and education.
	People expect a different sort of behavior from an elderly lady than
	from a young male, even though there is no specific catalogue of dos
	and don’ts, to say nothing of laws. As members of society, all of us
	“know” such rules implicitly.

Soldiers do not just learn how to use weapons and negotiate various types of
terrain. They are taught to obey, to subjugate themselves to hierarchy, and
to act on command at a moment’s notice. Total institutions establish a
specific form of socialization, in which group norms and responsibilities
have far more influence on individuals than under normal social conditions.

What is real?

On October 30, 1938, CBS Radio in the United States interrupted its regular
programming with a special announcement that there had been a gas explosion
on the planet Mars and a cloud of hydrogen was speeding toward the
earth. Then, during a radio reporter’s interview with an astronomy professor,
aimed at clarifying the potential dangers, another announcement was made
about a seismic catastrophe of earthquake strength, presumably the result of
a meteor hitting our planet. A barrage of news flashes followed. Curiosity
seekers at the site of impact reported being attacked by aliens who emerged
from the crater. Further objects were said to be striking the earth’s
surface, and hordes of little green men from Mars were pressing on with their
attacks. The military had been deployed, with little success. The aliens were
marching on New York. Warplanes took to the air. People began fleeing the
danger zone. Panic was breaking out.

At this point a change in frame of reference occurred. Up until the episode
about the warplanes, the news reports were simply following the script of a
radio play Orson Welles had adapted from H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the
Worlds. But the people fleeing in panic were real. Among the six million
Americans who had tuned in to Wells’s radio broadcast, two million of them
believed every word they heard. Many of them hastily packed their things and
ran out into the streets to escape the alleged alien gas attacks. Telephone
lines were jammed for hours, and it took hours more until news got around
that the whole thing was fictional.

[NYT, 31 October 1938: “Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact,”
reported an incident in which an entire block’s worth of people fled their
apartments.]

This legendary event, which established Orson Welles’s fame, vividly
illustrated the truth of sociologist William I. Thomas’s 1917 theorem: “If
men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” No
matter how objectively wrong or irrational people’s estimation of reality
may be, the conclusions they draw create new realities.

[Such interpretations occur in a frame of reference]

4 Frame of Reference: Annihilation

A complex interaction regarding the killing of Jews:

   BENTZ: When the Germans asked us if it was true about the atrocities in
	POLAND, we had to say that it was only a rumour. I am convinced that
	it’s all too true. It’s a shameful blot on our history.
   FRIED: Yes, the persecution of the Jews. ...
	I once took part in it myself, and it left rather an impression
	of—towards on [sic] me as an officer; during the Polish campaign, and
	I was making transport flights there. I had my midday meal with the
	Waffen S.S. battalion who were stationed there. An S.S. captain or
	whatever he was said: “Would you like to come along for half-an-hour?
	Get a tommy-gun and let’s go.” So I went along. I had an hour to
	spare and we went to a kind of barracks and slaughtered 1,500
	Jews. That was during the war. There were some twenty men there with
	tommy-guns. It only took a second, and nobody thought anything of
	it. They had been attacked at night by Jewish partisans and there was
	a lot of indignation about those damned Poles. I thought about it
	afterwards — it wasn’t very “pleasant.”
   BENTZ: Were they only Jews?
   FRIED: Only Jews and a few partisans.
   BENTZ: They were driven past?
   FRIED: Yes. When I think about it here—it wasn’t very “pleasant.”
   BENTZ: What—you fired, too?
   FRIED: Yes, I did. Some of the people who were inside there said: “Here
	come the swine,” and swore and threw stones and things at them. There
	were women and children there, too!

Clearly, Bentz feels that Germany took the "wrong attitude", whereas Fried,
who agreed to participate in one event, is much more equivocal.

However, though he participated willingly, the event is not completely
acceptable even within his frame.  He feels the need to justify it in terms
of partisan attacks the night before.  But in the end the frames of
reference for these two soldiers are quite diffferent.

the authors comment that:

	Fried's laconic remark that this was not “pleasant” might have meant
	that he didn’t enjoy killing as much as he thought he would. Or it
	might simply reflect the fact that he notices his interlocutor is
	critical of Jewish persecution.

	As is the case with the presence of picture-snapping tourists, the
	phenomenon of soldiers being invited, either alone or in groups, to
	execute Jews suggests that the people concerned required no period of
	adjustment before carrying out the most brutal kinds of acts.

5. Sex

	“I was in an SS quarters -- [In a] room, there was an SS man lying on
	the bed, without his tunic but with his pants still on. Next to him,
	on the edge of the bed, was a very pretty young woman, and I saw her
	stroke the SS man’s chin. I heard her say: “You’re not going to shoot
	me, are you Franz?” The girl was still very young and spoke German
	without an accent -- I asked the SS man whether this girl was really
	going to be taken out and shot. He answered that all Jews were going
	to be shot. There were no exceptions -- He also said something to the
	effect that it was a bitter reality. Sometimes they had the chance to
	hand over these girls to another execution commando, but mostly there
	wasn’t the time. They had to do it themselves.”

Sexual violence is a war crime people like to ascribe to the enemy. The mass
rapes of German women by Red Army soldiers at the end of World War II are a
standard element of Germans’ recollections of that conflict. The same,
however, cannot be said of sexual crimes committed by the SS and the
Wehrmacht. In this area, the myth of the honorable German fighter remains
intact.

Sociologist Regina Mühlhäuser has recently investigated the various sexual
facets of the German invasion of the Soviet Union.  They include not just
sexual violations of women as the Wehrmacht occupied towns and villages and
in the run-up to mass executions, but also the swapping of sex for favors and
the relationships between soldiers and Ukrainian women, some of which
resulted in pregnancies or marriages.

It is hardly surprising that sex plays such a major role in war. Sexuality is
one of the most important aspects of human existence, especially male human
existence. ... Wartime soldiers are by and large youngish men who have been
separated from their real or would-be partners and freed from many social
restraints.  When stationed in occupied areas, they are given the sort of an
individual power they would never enjoy in civilian society.

Moreover, the sexual opportunities presented by this situation occur within a
reference frame of masculine camaraderie, in which bragging about sexual
prowess is a normal part of everyday communication.

After the above conversation, the speaker is asked:

	HARTELT: I bet she let you sleep with her too?
	MINNIEUR: Yes, but you had to take care not to be found out. It’s
		nothing new; it was really a scandal, the way they slept with
		Jewish women.

[Its interesting how the last sentence is in third person.]

It seems to have been common, accepted practice to execute Jewish women
after sex so that soldiers would not have to worry about sanctions
following a “racial crime,”

In a study of the German occupation of parts of the Soviet Union, historian
Andrej Angrick has determined that officers of SS Einsatzgruppe Sk 10a
habitually raped Jewish women to the point where they fell unconscious. 

Atrocities in the Russian front

While only 1 to 3 percent of Anglo-American POWs died in German captivity, 50
percent of Red Army prisoners perished — a figure that exceeded even the
high numbers of Allied soldiers who died in Japanese captivity.

German anecdotes about Soviet brutality stoked the violence already being
perpetrated with the power of imagination. A Lieutenant Leichtfuss reported
seeing six German soldiers nailed to a table through their tongues, ten hung
up from meat hooks in a slaughterhouse, and twelve to fifteen who were thrown
down a well in a small village and then stoned to death. In retaliation:

LEICHTFUSS: These incidents were taken for a reason for repaying it tenfold,
	twenty and hundredfold, not in that crude and bestial manner, but
	simply in the following way. When a small detachment of about ten or
	fifteen men was captured there, it was too difficult for the soldier
	or the “Unteroffizier” to transport them back 100 or 120 km. They
	were locked in a room and three or four hand grenades were flung in
	through the window.165

[although it was not exactly known at the time, It is estimated that 90
to 95 percent of German POWs captured in Russia in 1941 also died. Most of
them were executed directly at the front.  This was an oft-repeated statement
among the German soldiers - Christian Hartmann, Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg. Munich,
2009., p.542-9]

The Wehrmacht decision to let Russian POWs starve to death, which soldiers
discussed in the surveillance protocols, was something that went beyond the
normally accepted boundaries of war and can only be understood in the context
of the Nazi campaigns of annihilation. That is the reason why German POWs
were disgusted at how Russian prisoners were being treated and even
sympathized with them.

GRAF: The infantry said that when they took the Russian P/W back, they had
    nothing to eat for three or four days and collapsed. Then the guard would
    just go up to one, hit him over the head and he was dead. The others set
    on him and cut him up and ate him as he was.17

War Without Fronts: The USA in Vietnam

The murder of POWs, the execution of civilians, massacres, forced labor,
plunder, rape, the perfection of deadly technology, and the mobilization of
society were all characteristics of World War II. But they were not new. New
were the dimensions and the quality of these phenomena, which went beyond
anything previously experienced in human history. In terms of the modern age,
new was the revocation of limits on violence, culminating in the
industrialized mass murder of European Jews.

[But was the soldiers' mental frame much different than in otherr wars?
Turns to the Collateral Murder video (Baghdad 2007). ]

The video caused a sensation when it was illegally made public in 2010, since
it depicted American GIs killing a group of defenseless civilians from the
air without being in any real danger.

Group thinking and mutual confirmation of what is perceived replaced the
factual situation with an imagined one. Viewers watching the video now don’t
see what the soldiers see. But the viewer doesn’t bear the burden of having
to make decisions.Group thinking and mutual confirmation of what is perceived
replaced the factual situation with an imagined one. Viewers watching the
video now don’t see what the soldiers see. But the viewer doesn’t bear the
burden of having to make decisions.

Every suspicion... carries a fatal tendency to be confirmed by further
indications.

Vietnam war

The other side’s casualties are almost always regarded as fighters,
partisans, terrorists, or insurgents. We recall here the rule among
U.S. troops from the Vietnam War "If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s
Vietcong," [Berd Greiner, _War Without Fronts: The USA in Vietnam
(2010).

The “Collateral Murder” video clearly illustrates how violence transforms a
murky situation, in which men suffer from a lack of orientation and don’t
know what to do, into something crystal clear. When all the targets are dead,
order has been restored.  

Greiner cited a series of examples of the “self-evident” identification of
enemies.  The simplest one was that anyone who tried to flee was
automatically an enemy who should be shot. The attempt to escape confirmed
suspicions that an individual was a Vietcong.

Somewhat more complicated is the discovery of “evidence.” When examining
the surveillance protocols, we highlighted the story of the presence of
ammunition being used to distinguish supposed partisans from civilians. The
same procedure, however illogical it was, was applied in the Vietnam War,
where GIs sometimes razed villages in which they had previously deposited
Soviet-made ammunition as proof of a Vietcong presence there. The U.S. 9th
Infantry Division killed a total of 10,899 people but only secured 748
weapons.  That suggests that 14 civilians were murdered for every true
Vietcong eliminated.

Disorientation in guerilla war

A guerilla war, where attacks can come suddenly from the most unexpected
quarters, is disorienting.

It was difficult for American soldiers in Vietnam to precisely identify
enemies since the Vietcong waged a guerrilla war. Not knowing whether they
were confronted with incognito fighters, men and women, or harmless
civilians, created a huge challenge.

The loss of orientation underscores the soldier's uncertainty.

Fatally, violence is precisely the means by which orientation can be regained
most simply, quickly, and unambiguously. A successful act of violence removes
the gray areas.

[This is why the Americans in Vietnam indulged in such excesses.  ]
But this was [also[ the reason why the Wehrmacht most often engaged in acts
of extreme violence against innocent civilians in the context of fighting
partisans.

Contents

   Prologue								vii
   Author's Note   							x

 1 What the Soldiers Discussed  					3
 2 The Soldiers World							26
 3 Fighting, Killing, and Dying  					44
 4 Frame of Reference: Annihilation					120
 5 Sex  								164
 6 Technology								176
 7 Faith in Victory							193
 8 Ideology								228
 9 Success								274
10 Frame of Reference: War						317
11 How National Socialist was the Wehrmacht's War? 			321
12 War as Work  							334

   Appendix: The Surveilliance Protocols				345
   Acknowledgments							353
   Notes								355
   Bibliography  							397
   Index								413

author bio

Sönke Neitzel is currently Chair of International History at the London
School of Economics. He has previously taught modern history at the
Universities of Glasgow, Saarbrücken, Bern, and Mainz.

Harald Welzer is a professor of transformation design at the University
of Flensburg, teaches social psychology at the University of Sankt Gallen,
and is head of the foundation Futurzwei.

from Review - "Frames of Mind" : Arudra Burra

	Indian Express Nov 17 2012


This absorbing and disturbing book is based on transcriptions of secretly
recorded conversations between Prisoners of War (POWs) in special
"interrogation centres" set up by British and American intelligence during
World War II.  More than 10,000 German, Italian, and Japanese POWs passed
through these centres between 1939-45. The resulting "surveillance
protocols", discovered unexpectedly in 2001 by the German historian
Sönke Neitzel, amount to some 90,000 printed pages.

Neitzel and his co-author, the social psychologist Harald Welzer, use them
to provide a fascinating, if grim, picture of how members of the German
armed forces (the Wehrmacht) saw themselves and the world in which they
fought. The authors also discuss the application of their findings to the
understanding of military violence more generally — for instance in the
context of the notorious "Collateral Murder" video, whose release made
Wikileaks famous in 2010.

The authors insist that to understand the conditions under which people do
violent things we must attempt to reconstruct their "frames of reference":
the set of beliefs, expectations, filters and categories through which
people perceive and interpret the world, and in terms of which they orient
themselves and their actions. The adequacy of surveillance protocols as
sources for such a reconstruction is another matter. For as the authors
point out, the context in which a conversation takes place can limit or
constrain what is talked about and how. The fact that soldiers rarely
talked about emotions such as fear, uncertainty, or desperation, may tell
us little about their emotional lives, if (as seems plausible) these were
difficult topics to discuss with their interlocutors.

Though death and killing occupied a large portion of their lives and
thoughts, these POWs rarely use words like "death" and "killing" in their
conversations. Instead, the language in which these topics are discussed
involved many different registers —"fun" and "amusement", for instance; also
adventure, hunting, and competitive sport. As the authors put it, the
structure of these discussions mirrors that of video-game players, for whom
the primary focus of activity revolves around skills and reflexes, and the
results are measured in numbers — like number of kills and targets destroyed.

The book's main argument is that the frames of reference which enabled
soldiers to perpetrate so much violence had little to do with any explicit
ideological orientation, whether anti-Semitic or National Socialist. Most
soldiers were apolitical, and ideological positions didn't do much to predict
or constrain their actions. What animated them were local frames and
pressures — a sense of duty towards one's comrades and superiors, diligence
to one's work regardless of its content, and a conception of honour and
bravery — not abstract conceptions such as the "global Jewish conspiracy" or
the National Socialist Volk. While extreme violence may seem an aberration,
the qualities which enable it are, for the most part, unremarkable and widely
shared. The rather chilling moral which the authors draw from this fact is
that we should have less faith in our distance from violence: all groups are
potential "communities of annihilation".

The writer is a Visiting Associate Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing
Societies (CSDS), Delhi

Amazon review - "Mark R." : Unrealized Potential

		October 22, 2012, http://www.amazon.com/review/R3SZGB6HOAW4LH

I was ready to give the book a four or five star rating until I began reading
the final three chapters. Chapter 10 consists of a mere five pages that try
to place a cultural context on conflict "writ large" rather than the German
military during World War II. A significant chunk of Chapter 11 deals with
the author's thoughts on the Wikileaks video of an AH-64 Apache engaging
insurgents in Baghdad. I had a hard time making the connection between the
Wehrmacht's behavior in Russia, for example, and US Army attack helicopters
operating in the Iraqi capital during the height of the "Surge." The sheer
difference in scale, for one thing, is a legitimate cause for concern when
making such comparisons. Chapter 11 also discusses Americans in Vietnam where
the authors would perhaps once again have been better served by focusing on
German soldiers in World War II. Explain THEIR actions rather than trying to
put them into "context" by comparing them to American soldiers in more recent
conflicts.

[clearly, the American view would rather not see the US role in Vietnam or
Baghdad compared with the Nazis. ]