I am a German soldier: Kill these civilians or be executed

I’ve been standing in the snow for twenty minutes. My feet no longer smell nothing. The wind comes from the east, it stings the cheeks, [music] it stings the eyes. In front of me, 23 people are lined up against a gray wooden barn wall. A elderly man shaking [music] too much so that it is only the cold. A woman who uses a child against her, the hand on the back of his neck, eyes closed.

 A old woman, she looks directly at me without looking down. Behind me, the inn turns fury Kessler speaks for three minutes. I no longer hear the words. I look at the old woman, he stops. The silence lasts 2 seconds [music] and in these two seconds, the birds do not make noise. The wind stops and I just hear breathing of the man to my left.

Kessler approaches me. He hands me my rifle. Fisher, you shoot first or you take their place. I’m 22 years old. My wife’s name is Hild. She is pregnant for this month and I have not learned the carpentry to get there. I My name is Carl Fisher. Before the war, I lived on the third floor of a building in Oxbourg, rue des taneurs.

 My father had a carpentry workshop in ground floor. The smell of safety, noise of the jack in the morning, that’s all what I knew. I had married Hild in April 1940, [music] 3 weeks before France fell. We thought that it would be finished before winter. We was wrong. I was incorporated [music] in the fall of 1940.

 Vermarthe, infantry, no choice. I am not a voluntary, I am not a fanatic of the party. I’m a conscript like millions more. An ordinary man who was dressed as a soldier and sent to is when needs have increased. Summer 1941, Operation Barbarossa begins. Millions of men cross the Soviet border June. Progress is rapid, so fast that no one really understands the extent of what is happening.

 We says it’s a war of liberation against Bolshevism. We are told that It will last 6 weeks. In December, we is still [music] there and he goes – 20. My unit is not a unit of classic combat. I was assigned to this called a security unit rears. This term means nothing for me when they tell me. I gradually understand what means.

 That means we don’t fight not against the Red Army. We take care civilians. We arrived in the Minsk region in October. The Occupied Belarus, it is a landscape of flat forests [music] and villages scattered connected by roads land which becomes quagmires as soon as the first rains. Autumn smells like mud and smoke. The villages are silent in a way that doesn’t resemble not to normal silence.

 The [music] people are silent when we arrive, they lower their heads, they return to their house. The first weeks, we carries out excavations, we look for weapons, hidden food stocks, [music] men of fighting age who would have avoided mobilization Soviet. It’s tense but it’s understandable. In my head The time is war.

 We secure the territory then the reports arrive. Two German soldiers found dead 5 km away within the week passed. Slit throat left in a ditch under the snow. The supporters operate in these forests. This is real. [music] Armed men who stay behind Soviet lines and attack our convoys, our lines of communication, our isolated patrols.

Kessler receives the retaliatory order. He explained it to me this morning with the same voice he would use to talk about logistics. 100 civilians [music] for every German soldier killed. This is the directive. It’s signed by very above him. Two dead soldiers. The calculation makes 20 civilians.

 We are in a village of 130 inhabitants. What I know that morning, standing in this snow, [music] this village may have no connection with the two died in the ditch. There is no no investigation. There was no proof. check. There was an order and [music] a map with a village on it. What I also know, I am not not alone.

 There are eight other soldiers with me. Franz on my left, who vomited in the bushes at the entrance to the village and who now holds his rifle two hands so that we don’t see that he trembles. Ein Hinrich to my right who look at the Grange wall with eyes empty since we arrived. eyes from someone who has done this before. My refusal will change nothing for the 23 people in front of me.

 [music] Kessler will tell Franz to take my place. Franz will obey because Franz is afraid of Kessler or fear of appearing cowardly or afraid of something I don’t understand still quite. What I owe decide in the next few seconds, This is what I am ready to do and this that I’m ready to be for the rest of my life. There are two paths before me.

 Neither one neither is clean. I obey, I raise my gun, I shoot. [music] Concretely, what does that mean? This means that in the next 10 seconds, I aim at the person that Kessler tells me and I press the trigger. That means that the old woman whoever looks at me stops looking at me. This means that I am returning to the cantonment with the others this [music] evening, that someone takes out a bottle and no one talks about Borky.

 The advantages, if we can call it that that are simple and concrete. I stay in my unit. I’m going back to Munich when the war is over. I see again Hild. I hold my child’s hand when he is born. I’m taking over the workshop my father, rue des taneur. And I live until a respectable age. The risks are of another nature, not physical, not immediate, but real.

 There are men who made this choice and who have spent the next five years not sleep. Men who could never explain to their grandchildren what that they had done during the war. Not because they were afraid of justice, but because they did not have the words, [music] or rather because the words existed and that it didn’t want to pronounce them.

 In July 1942 in the Polish village of Joseph the commander of police battalion 101 reserve gathers its men before an operation against the Jews of village. They are police officers bourgeois, middle-aged men, not hand-picked [music] SS, not fanatics trained in hatred. The Commander’s name is Willelm Trap. He cries while giving them the order and he [music] explicitly tells them that those who do not feel capable of participate can withdraw.

 Out of 500 men, less than 12 raise their hands. The others participate in the shooting, not because they risk being executed in refusing. Trap just showed them that no, not because they are monsters. The historian Christopher Browning who examined the testimonies of these men decades later arrives at a deeply disturbing conclusion.

 They obey mainly so as not to to appear cowardly in front of their comrades, so as not to let the others do the dirty work [music] at their place to stay in the group ordinary men, exactly like me. I refuse, I put down my gun. I returns to Kessler. Concretely, I say no. not by shouting, not by doing a speech, just by lowering my gun and holding Kessler’s gaze until he understands that I don’t I won’t shoot.

 [music] What happens next is not probably not what most people imagine. I am not shot on the field. Military archives Germans are clear on this. None soldier of Vermarthe was executed [music] for refusing to participate in shootings of civilians. None. What awaits me is something else thing.

 A disciplinary procedure, a degradation, an assignment first line on the Eastern Front or in a disciplinary battalion. A life that becomes dangerous and difficult. Not the certain death. But nothing comfortable neither. And above all, the three people in front of me die when [music] same. Kessler turns to Franz. Franz obeys.

 My action is moral and without effect on this barn wall. I leave with a lighter conscience and the same 23 dead behind me. It’s that’s hard to swallow. Not the courage it takes to refuse, but the uselessness of refusal [music] for those who are lined up against this wall. A officer of the same battalion. 101 His name is Heinz Bookman.

 He refuses systematically participate in actions against civilians. He says it to his superiors clearly. [music] He requests to be assigned to other tasks whenever possible. His comrades find it strange, few reliable. [music] It is not executed. He returned to Hamburg after the war. Further in the east, a sergeant from the Vermarthe based in Vilnius is doing something something different.

 Anton Schmith passes several months of providing false papers and military trucks to Jews who are fleeing the massacres. He helps them to join resistance networks. He was denounced in the spring of 1942 and shot in April. He saved dozens of lives and he died for it. Two men who said no to the order. one [music] survived by refusing to participate without ever preventing anything whatever.

 The other died while acting really. And then there is the third path, the one that no one mentions loud voice. I obey in appearance, I raise my rifle, I press the trigger, but I aim badly intentionally, a little too high, a a little too far to the left. [music] It exists in the testimonies, survivors of shootings that owe their lives to a soldier who failed.

 [music] Deliberately or not, no one can check the intention. A man who shivers in the cold can miss for ten different reasons, [music] but it’s only for a few people in this row. And that assumes that Kessler does not notice, that no one check the bodies, may luck be my side this morning is a bet and the people who bet on this sort of thing don’t always win.

If I obey, the next 20 minutes are mechanical. That’s what the people say testimonies. [music] not horror in the sense cinematographic, no dramatic collapse, sort anesthesia. [music] The body does what it is told while something else somewhere behind the eyes closes with key. We group the bodies together.

 Cessler account. He checks something in a notebook. We head back towards the cantonment by the same forest road as at the driveway and the snow covers our tracks in two hours. In the evening, Franz goes out actually a bottle of schnapps. [music] Heinrich drinks without speaking. Someone makes a joke that I don’t really hear.

 I eat my ration. I lie down on my bunk. I stare at the ceiling of the hut until until the light goes out. [music] And there, in the dark, the old woman returns not like a nightmare, like a fact. She was there, [music] she told me looked and now she is no more there because of me. This is not the guilt as we imagine it in the films.

 It’s not a cry interior. It’s quieter than that and more permanent. [music] Running out eventually, my life continues. Others villages, other orders and some subtle thing happens that I don’t don’t notice at the moment. Every time, it’s a little less difficult, not because that I become someone else, because that the human brain is built [music] to adapt to what he experiences, to normalize what is repeated.

 The psychologists call it desensitization. [music] Me, I don’t call it nothing. I don’t even realize doesn’t count. I write to Hild twice a year week. I talk to him about the cold, the bad food, comrades. I never talk to him about Borky. I don’t give him will never talk about Borky. [music] There now has a space in my life that I’m going to spend fifty years following ones not to watch.

 The problem with the spaces we don’t look at, it’s because they don’t disappear. They wait. The war ends. Let’s put that I survive. Statistically, many men in my position survive. I’m going back to Augsburg. My father’s workshop is half destroyed by bombing, but walls still stand. Hild is there with a three year old child looking at me without knowing who I am.

 I take one normal life. That’s the most strange. We can thousands of men who did what I did in Borquy return to normal life. [music] They go to mass on Sunday. They take their children to school. They drink a beer with the neighbors Friday evening. Many are never judged. The Nurember procedures attack the heads, [music] not the hands.

 Some live up to four years. Their grandchildren ask them questions about the war. What is this What did you do? Where were you? [music] Have you seen any fights? And these men answer those they can answer [music] or they don’t answer not where they invent a version more clean. the version where they were far away from the front, where [music] they were driving trucks, where they didn’t know really what was happening.

 The question which remains and [music] which we do not put down out loud, is a normal life after Borky is [music] still very much lead a normal life? Where does she looks like a normal life the outside [music] and that the interior is a room from which we lost the key? I refuse. The seconds who follow my refusal are the most long of my life.

 Kessler looks at me not with rage, with something colder than that. From disappointment maybe or just surprise that a man like me chose this complication. He turns to Franz without a word. Franz raises his rifle. His hands are trembling. Less than I would have believed it. Lesing people die anyway. I’m here, I see. My refusal did not protect them.

 He just shifted the responsibility [music] from one pair of hands to another. It’s that’s what no one says when we talk about moral courage. Moral courage in a situation like this does not save person. He only saves the one who exercise it. Is this enough? I don’t know how to answer that. Kessler writes his report.

 Private Fisher refused to obey an order in situation operational. The machine administration gets underway with a quiet efficiency. I am escorted to the rear during the day. There is a procedure, forms, an officer who explains the options to me with his voice from someone who does this regularly. In the following weeks, depending on time, depending on the commander who deals my file, according to the pressure of the front at this precise moment, my fate can take several forms: degradation [music] and front-line assignment. Where

the losses [music] are the most high, where life expectancy is counts during the week. Battalion disciplinary where men are sent that the army no longer really wants [music] but she hasn’t decided. to free either. In the cases the more lenient, transfer to a unit support away from operations security.

 What I don’t risk, and it is capital, it is to be shot for my refusal. The archives are formal on this. [music] None German soldier was executed for having refused to participate in civilian shootings. The threat exists in the heads. She does not exist in fact. Hild receives no more letters for three weeks.

 [music] She doesn’t know why. If I survive the war afterwards my refusal and the eastern front in first line, it’s far from being guaranteed, I come home with something different in luggage. No peace. I don’t believe there is peace possible for someone who saw what I saw in Borki, whether he is fired or not, but something else, an answer to a question that my son or daughter will ask me one day.

 The old me looked, I didn’t shoot. Does is that enough? Does that change anything something for her? She died anyway. Franz did what I didn’t do and the result on the Grange wall is identical. But in 40 years, when my little child ask what I did during the war, I would have an answer that I can say it out loud.

 [music] It’s little and at the same time, it is perhaps all that remains when the rest has disappeared. Villages like Borky, there had hundreds, not hundreds figuratively, [music] hundreds real, documented, with names on maps and lists in archives. In Belarus, occupied between 1941 and 1944, more than 620 villages have been completely destroyed, their inhabitants killed on the spot or deported.

 [music] Some of these villages have never been rebuilt. It remains today in Belarus places where a stelle rises in a clearing with names engraved in it and no house around because there is no one left to inhabit them. [music] It’s not the exclusive work of the SS is the work ordinary soldiers from Vermarthe, reserve police officers, auxiliaries requisitioned premises, men who before the war repaired shoes, drove wefts, taught mathematics in provincial high schools.

 The directive of collective retaliation, without civilians for every German soldier killed, [music] is not an invention of commanders premises which would have slipped. [music] It is a formalized policy signed by generals integrated into the rules of engagement of the operation Barbarosa from June 1941. Marshal Willelm Kaitel signs it personally.

 It is transmitted by the chain of command down to field units with the same routine administrative than an order of refueling. The men on the field do not invent it, they receive. Which does not mean that they had no choice. [music] We’ll come back to it. But that means that Carl Fischer in Borkiy in December [music] 1941 is not facing an officer who improvise.

 [music] He is facing a working machine exactly as it was designed to work. This is where the story becomes uncomfortable in a way different. Historians who have examined the post-war testimonies, disciplinary files, internal reports, notably Christopher Browning [music] for the battalion without dwarf, Harald Wellzer for all units involved in the massacres in the East, all arrive at the same conclusion.

 The refusals were possible, not without consequences, not without risk, but possible. And in the documented cases, men who have refused to participate in the shootings not been executed. None, not a single case verified for execution for refusal to participate in shootings of civilians [music] in the units of Vermarthe or reserve police.

 what the refusals have concrete cost, damage, mutations, contempt on the part of comrades, [music] of assignments difficult, for some, a war more dangerous but not death. Browning, in his interviews with the survivors of battalion 101 pose directly the question [music] to men who participated in the massacre. Did you know you could refuse? Most say yes.

 Some say [music] that he thought that the consequences would be more serious. But when Browning digs, he discovers that belief in mortal punishment is often a reconstruction after suddenly, a way of giving yourself a reason [music] that holds up 40 years later in front of his children. It’s not a judgment, that’s what the documents show.

 Heinz Buchman, the man who said no and went home. Buchman is an officer in the battalion 101. From the first operations against civilians, in 1942, he informed his commander that he cannot participate. He doesn’t make speeches, he does not pose as a hero. He says simply that he is not capable of do that and he asks to be assigned to other tasks during its operations.

His commander does not accept every time times. not in friction, but he accepts. Bouchman spends the war sailing between the orders he executes and those that he refuses according to what he can negotiate in his position. It does not prevent nothing on the scale of the battalion, but it don’t shoot civilians.

 He returns to Hamburg, he resumes his life. He testifies after the war with precision and an honesty [music] that Browning note explicitly. Because Buchman has nothing to hide about his own actions. He can describe those of others without defend himself. Anton Schmith, the man who said no and died for that.

 [music] Schmith is a sergeant from Vermarthe to Vilnius from the fall of 1941. What he sees in this city pushes him to do something that Bushman didn’t not done. Not just refusing to participate, but act actively in the other direction. For several months, he provides false military documents to Jews hunted. He puts trucks of the army at their disposal for get out of town.

 He helps them to join networks of supporters in the surrounding forests. He doesn’t do it not for money. The testimonies of those who helped him, collected after the war, describe a man who acted with a kind of calm [music] practice as if helped was the thing normal and it was the world around of him who had gone off the rails.

 He is denounced at the beginning [music] 1942, arrested, tried, shot in April 1942. [music] Anna Harent, who followed the trial at Jerusalem in 1961 mentions Schmith in [music] his reports. She writes that her story was welcomed in the room audience by a particular silence, the silence of people [music] who realize that someone had done this that they all would have liked to believe that they would have [music] done.

 Schmidth has saved dozens of people. He is died at age 38. What it means for Carl Fischer in Borki, [music] the two German soldiers found died in the ditch 5 km from the village. Historical research on this type of operation show that the link [music] between the targeted village and the act that motivates the retaliation is rarely seriously established.

 Units receive a quota and an area. They choose a village on a map. [music] The investigation doesn’t really exist. She would slow down a mechanism which is designed to be fast and visible, to hit hard enough so that the surrounding populations understand what hidden from the supporters cost. The three people from Borky may have hosted resistance fighters.

 They may have gave bread to armed men who passed through their forest in exchange for not to be killed by them. They have maybe nothing at all. The archives do not allow us to know this. The archives did not allow Kessler to know more. He checked a box in his notebook and he is returned to the cantonment. In Belarus, today there is a memorial national in Catine, a village whose 149 residents were burned alive in their barn in March 1943 by a unit which included auxiliary Ukrainian police officers and German soldiers. Among the soldiers

Germans that day, men of all ages, of all origins, [music] of any level of indoctrination. To Catine, there are no executioner names on the [music] plates. There are the names of dead, 149 names. I came back to where I started. The snow, the wall gray wooden barn, the wind coming from the east [music] and the old woman who looked without looking down.

 I had 22 years old, a pregnant woman in Munique, [music] a father who had a workshop carpentry rue des taneurs, eight comrades behind me, some of whom had said already done that and one who vomited in the bushes at the entrance of the village. I wasn’t a monster. [music] That’s the hardest thing to hear. Not an exception, not an extreme case straight out of a history textbook.

 a man ordinary in a situation that no one had taught him how to cross with ten seconds to decide who he really was. The story we tell over this period, it is often the history of the big names, the [music] orderers, ideologues, architects. Nuremberg judged generals and [music] ministers. This that we say less is that the mechanics did not work without the Carl Fisher, without the Franz, without the Heinrich with empty eyes who had already did that and were going to do it again.

 Of hundreds of thousands of men ordinary people held this mechanism [music] in working order. Not by fanatical conviction for the most part, out of habit, [music] for fear of the gaze of comrades, for this strange ability that beings have humans to separate what they do from who They are, returning in the evening, eating their ration and sleep.

 [music] Browning calls it the banality of participation. It is not the same thing as banality of evil by Ana [music] Harent. It’s even closer, closer daily, more difficult to watch in face because it doesn’t look like evil, [music] it looks like fatigue and social pressure. [music] And now I ask you the question. not so that you feel good, not so that you can tell yourself that you would have do otherwise and close this video with a clear conscience, but because it’s the only question that account when we look at this period in

face, really face, without the distance comfortable manuals and documentaries. You’re here, it’s [music] December 1941, you are 22 years old, a woman pregnant and Kessler handing you your rifle. Eight men behind you who watch what you’re going to do. The old woman in front of you who does not lower her eyes.

 [music] And you, what would you have done? Take the time to answer them honestly. [music] Not the answer you want to give, answer that you would really give there in this cold with his eight father gods in the back. Because Browning posed this question to men who had lived [music] that and most of they thought before that they would have refuse.

 Nobody really knows what what he would do. Person. Tell me in the comments what you would have chosen. [music] And be honest, it’s the only rule. I will read every response. If This kind of dilemma interests you, not clean and linear story of Emmanuel, but the story such that it was truly experienced inside, in the mud and the cold and the impossible choices.

 [music] Subscribe. Every week I put you faced with a situation that you will never forget not. History is not what happened, that’s what you would have done. Mr.

 

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