They Seized Three Year Old Children and Shot Them: Darkest Atrocities of the Nazis Laid Bare

Nazis lead Polish women to slaughter

Nazi machine gunner over a Polish city. They bragged of targeting mothers with strollers. 

"They Seized Three Year Old Children and Shot Them: Darkest atrocities of the Nazis laid bare in the secretly recorded conversations of German prisoners of war"

From the Daily Mail.

Bestselling German book to be published in English next week
Chilling insight into what turns an ordinary soldier into a monster
Dispels the idea that it was only a few who committed such horrors

By Allan Hall

16 September 2012

Some of the most brutal and horrifying atrocities of the Nazis at war are laid bare in secretly recorded conversations of captured German soldiers published in Britain for the first time today.

The prisoners, mostly ordinary soldiers, sailors and airmen as opposed to SS hardliners, are overheard bragging about shooting women and children for sport as well as raping and slaughtering innocent civilians.

Historian Sönke Neitzel's 2001 book 'Soldiers; diaries of fighting, killing and dying', caused a sensation when it was published in Germany last year. And next week it will be published in English for the first time.

It shows the impact of war on…40 per cent of German men between the years of 1939 and 1945 - the nearly 20 million who donned a uniform for their Fuehrer.

Both the ordinary German soldier, and the self-regarding officer corps, are condemned in their own words in the secret recordings, shattering the myth that excesses in wartime were the responsibility of a few fanatical party members.

One man, Hartigs was speaking of the targets he liked to go for - unarmed civilians - when the microphones were switched on one day in January 1945.

'I used to shoot at everything,' he said laconically, 'certainly not just military targets. We liked to go for women pushing prams, often with children at their sides. It was a kind of sport really.....'

Or this from another unnamed Oberleutnant of the Luftwaffe, captured on July 17 1940 after baling out from his aircraft over Kent; 'It became a need in me to drop bombs. It tingles me, gives me a fine feeling. Just as beautiful, in fact, as shooting at someone.'

This banishment of morality, of ethical behaviour, is apparent in transcript after transcript. Hitler had boasted in the early days of the regime of turning the youth of Nazi Germany into 'magnificent beasts of prey.' But even wild beasts never killed for sport, like radio operator Eberhard Kehrle and infantryman Franz Kneipp.

Kehrle; 'In the Caucasus, when one us went down, we didn't need a lieutenant giving the orders, telling us what to do. Pistols out, women and children, everything you saw...cleansed.'

Kneipp; 'With us, one time, a partisan band had overrun a convoy of our wounded. They offed everyone. Half an hour later they were caught near Novgorod. They were brought into a sandpit and then, from all sides, we let rip with the machine guns and the pistols....'

Kehrle; 'That was too good for them. They deserved to die slowly, not to be killed by shooting!'

In WW2, in a pre-Internet age, pre mobile-phone age - a time when a German soldier could be executed for taking a camera into combat - they were, by and large, confident that their excesses would never be detected.....rape being one of them.

Germany has long castigated the leadership of the Red Army and Stalin himself for turning a blind eye to the mass rapes carried out by the conquering armies of Zhukov and Rossokovsky when they hit German territory in 1945. But, in reality, it was payback on a massive scale for crimes carried out by men like Sgt. Mueller.

'When I was in Kharkov,' he said dreamily, clearly remembering happier times, 'everything in the old town was destroyed. It was a wonderful town with wonderful memories. All the people spoke a little German that they had learned in school.

'Also in Taganrog, wonderful cinemas and beautiful beach cafes. I went everywhere in the car. You saw nothing but women.'

His friend Fausst says; 'Oh, you bastard!'

Mueller went on; 'They were working to repair things, these deadly beautiful girls. We simply drove by them, tore them into the car, lay them down, and then chucked them out when we had finished. Man, did they fly!'

Indoctrinated since their childhood by Nazi propaganda into believing they were supermen who could take what they wanted, defeat and capture had clearly not tilted their world view one bit.

One junior officer boasted of what he and his men did to a woman they thought was a Russian spy: 'We beat her on the tits with a stick, clobbered her on the arse with a pistol, then all eight of us had her, then we threw her out and as she lay there, we threw grenades at her.

'She didn't half scream when they went off!' Even one fellow German officer, Reimbold, was sickened by the telling of the tale and said; 'Gentlemen, this is too much to bear.'

Aside from the depravity of individuals, the transcripts reveal that which the war generation, and in many ways the one that followed it, tried to deny: direct knowledge of the extermination programme of the Jews...


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