Bragging about raping women, executing civilians and strafing children from a fighter plane was nothing more than locker room banter for German prisoners during World War II.

But these surreptitiously recorded conversations show the average Nazi was no different than any soldier, even American or Canadian forces serving in Afghanistan today, says the author of a new book that analyzes the newly discovered discussions between Nazi PoWs in British and American camps.

“They speak about mass violence like a bricklayer talks about building a house,” said German historian Sonke Neitzel, who combed through 150,000 pages of transcripts of everyday conversations between captured German infantry, pilots, seamen and officers secretly recorded by their captors.

“A lot of what appears horrible, lawless and barbaric about war crimes is actually part of the usual frame of reference in wartime,” Neitzel writes in his book Soldaten, released in Canada last month. “It’s time to stop overestimating the effects of ideology. Ideology may provide reasons for war, but it does not explain why soldiers kill or commit war crimes.”

War is just a job, and most soldiers simply want to be good at it, Neitzel says. He estimates that 90 per cent of German soldiers in WWII were either anti-Nazi or apolitical but that did not prevent them from killing civilians, raping women or torturing prisoners.

This isn’t to parade out the old excuse that they were just following orders, Neitzel says, but to say evil becomes banal when you’re surrounded by it all the time.

When asked whether this explains American soldiers’ torture of Iraqis in the 2000s or Canadian soldiers’ torture of a Somali 10 years earlier, Neitzel was unequivocal.

“In a war, when you regard your opponent not as being on the same level — and you have combat stress — even well-educated Canadians can do this,” he says. “It’s not that what they were doing was right, but that it was normal.”

Conditions in the camps for the captured German soldiers were comfortable and they spoke freely to one another about their weapons, their victories and their views of the war. Realizing the incredible wartime intelligence at their disposal, British and American spies bugged parts of the camps and recorded thousands of hours of conversations on wax records — selections of which were transcribed and kept classified for up to 50 years.

Neitzel, who currently lectures at the London School of Economics in England, stumbled across a short conversation between PoWs in his research and made a request for more at the British Archives, expecting a few pages at most. What he got turned out to be more than 50,000 pages of transcribed recordings of casual conversation between everyone from generals and non-commissioned officers to SS members and regular conscripts. He added 100,000 more pages when he went to the National Archives in Washington.

Many Nazi prisoners expressed dismay when women and children were executed, though when they were killed in the course of battle, soldiers accepted it as part of war.

“We were ordered to fire at everything except military targets. We killed children and women with prams,” said First Lieutenant Hans Harting from the Luftwaffe’s Fighter Wing 26.

“We sank a children’s transport,” said submarine Corporal Solm, “which gave us great pleasure.”

Neitzel writes that most Wehrmacht, or regular army soldiers, who dominate the taped conversations, knew about the Holocaust. Very few, however, would have seen a concentration camp as they were far away on the front lines. This puts them in stark contrast to the Waffen SS, ideologically driven elite troops, who had a much smaller presence in the surveillance and were more wanton in their brutality against Jews and other civilians.

In fact, some captured Nazis abhorred the Holocaust. Colonel Ernst Josting agreed that the Jews had to be gotten rid of, but he saw mass slaughter as “bestial, unworthy of a German.”

“If you were to ask me: ‘Have we deserved victory or not?’ I should say: ‘No, not after what we’ve done,” postulated a Nazi officer only identified as Bruhn. “I now realize we’ve deserved defeat; we’ve deserved our fate, even though I’m accusing myself as well.”

Throughout the conversations, brutality is discussed frankly and openly in an unfiltered way that interrogations and postwar memoirs hardly ever produce. Realizing the transcripts provided a new untapped perspective on the war, Neitzel recruited social psychologist Harald Welzer to help him interpret them.

“We all know that the Wehrmacht was a criminal institution,” he said. Reams of research on the scale of their crimes have already been carried out. A new generation of scholars must go further, Neitzel said, not simply to see Nazis as a caricature of evil — as in an Indiana Jones movie — but to understand why these men committed such atrocities.

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Neitzel and Welzer sought to reconstruct the reality from the perspective of the soldiers, who didn’t know how the war would end.

“We just want to explain why brutality, why war crimes were so normal for them.” This teaches us something about the “grammar” of war, he said, meaning the lessons learned don’t only apply to World War II, but to all wars — and the similarities are bigger than they thought.

“I can’t see the difference between a German Special Forces sniper in Afghanistan and a German sniper of the Wehrmacht. They do their work; they are happy if they can kill,” he said.

Soldaten was released in Germany in 2011 and it quickly became a bestseller. But the German public was reluctant to make the connection between the 70-year-old transcripts and the wars being fought today.

“Germans think that you can fight a clean war if the rules of engagement are hard enough. But my argument is: that’s not war,” he said.

The public there, as here, is sold war under the pretense that it is about helping women go to school. No one wants to face the dirty reality that “war is about fighting, killing and dying.”

“We always think atrocities are the big exceptions,” Neitzel says, “but I think on the everyday battlefield it’s much more common.”

in their own words

• “They were employed in 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!” — Luftwaffe Sergeant Muller.

• “We fired (machine guns) into the midst of thirty Belgian women.” — Private First Class Franz Diekmann

• “We once made a low-level attack near Eastbourne. When we got there, we saw a large mansion where they seemed to be having a ball or something; in any case we saw a lot of women in fancy-dress and an orchestra. . . The first time we flew past, and then we approached again and machine-gunned them. It was great fun!” — Luftwaffe pilot V. Greim.

• “We mowed down everything, everything. We dragged men, women and children from their beds. (They) knew no mercy.” — soldier only identified as Busing.

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