'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



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



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.



But unbeknown to them, British and U.S. intelligence were secretly eavesdropping on their private chats.



Horrors of war: Secretly recorded conversations between German prisoners of war reveal the darkest corners of the Nazi psyche. Here soldiers walk terrified Polish women into the woods to be needlessly shot



Innocent victims: A machine gunner aboard a German He 111 bomber flies over a Polish city in September 1939. In one recorded conversation Nazi airmen are heard boasting about targetting women with prams

Transcripts made from the astonishingly candid recordings sat gathering dust on the shelves of the National Archives in Kew, all but forgotten until they were picked up by historian Sönke Neitzel in 2001.

His subsequent 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 reads as a chilling examination of how war changes man, in this case the deep metamorphosis it wreaked 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, shatrtering the myth that excesses in wartime were the responsibility of a few fanatical party members.



The overheard conversations not only provided high-grade military intelligence - they also aided their British captors in trying to fathom what made 'honourable' warriors into killers no better than the S.S. or Gestapo.

What the captured men boasted of was not the betterment of professional soldiers, the thrill of a victory over fellow men-at-arms in a fair fight.

Their conversations betray how deep the Nazi state corrupted the military code, and in doing so, the men who considered themselves honourable - men like Oberleutnant Hans Hartigs from fighter squadron.

Execution: Nazi troops shoot civilians from a small Polish village in 1941. Accounts from German soldiers have revealed how they revelled in killing innocent people

Sadism: The transcripts reveal how ordinary German soldiers revelled in massacres during the Second World War. Here a soldier poses next to civilians shot dead in Yugoslavia

16 which won 26 Knights Crosses in combat on all fronts during the war.

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.

Brutal: German soldiers search Russian soldiers. The east was where the Nazis committed their worst crimes

The scent of blood: Nazis backed by tanks descend on a burning Russian village during the Soviet invasion that saw tens of thousands of innocent people murdered

'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.

A travelling exhibition in Germany that started in 1995 which explored the relationship between Wehrmacht - army - units and the S.S. killing squads in places like Russia, the Baltics and Poland, has already made the nefarious link between the two. But in their own words, the soldiers imprisoned at the Trent Park detention centre north of London told the British in real time, as the killing was taking place, what they had seen and what they had done.

Major General Walter Bruns was one of them. He recalled a 'typical Jewish action' that he witnessed one day in Russia.

'The trenches were 24 metres long and roughly three metres wide. They had to lie like sardines in a tin, heads towards the middle. Above, six machine gunners delivered the neck-shots. When I arrived, the trenches were pretty full already and the living had to lie on top before they got the neck-shot. They were all arranged beautifully so not too much space was wasted.

'They had already been robbed before they got here. On this Sunday I saw a half-kilometre long queue shuffling forward step by step, the line up for death. As they got nearer, they saw what awaited them.

Atrocity: A mass execution near Vinnitsa, Ukraine, 1942, helps shatter the myth of an honourable Wehrmacht

Around about here they had to give up their suitcases and their sacks of valuables. A little further on, they had to strip, and they could only keep on a shirt or a slip. They were mostly women and children, not much older than two.'

Of remorse, regret or sorrow about what he had seen, there was not an inkling.

The authors record how the transcribers of these conversations were told to brace themselves for 'terrible things.' They said; 'The extermination of the Jews was known in the world of the soldier far more than recent investigations of the topic have suggested.'

Because of access to these recordings, no-one can now claim their's was false testimony given under duress; these are the words of soldiers at ease, unaware of the silent recording gizmos capturing their every damning word.

Some tapes picked up the same theme time and time again; for example, that it was a recurring problem for the S.S. killing squads in Russia to shoot children. The listeners wondered if this was a moral dilemma - if, in fact, long subsumed humanity was breaking through.

Then one day they listened into a conversation that revealed why killing children was such a problem; it was because they wouldn't keep still.

The recordings also picked up on another theme - 'execution tourism.'

It turned out that many German soldiers serving in Russia or Poland sought out either friends or contacts in the S.S. murder squads and made appointments to go along to witness what was done.

Former camp: The transcripts were made at Tent Park PoW Camp, Enfield - now a Middlesex University campus

The splendidly named General Edwin Graf von Rothkirch und Trach explained to a fellow inmate; 'I knew an S.S. leader in Kutno, Poland, and we chatted about this and that and he said; 'God, when you want to film something, why didn't you say so?



'I mean, timewise, it doesn't matter. We shoot them in the mornings, but if that is inconvenient, we have others that we can always shoot in the afternoon.'

'Murder by appointment, as if it were a Thomas Cook tour,' said one German critic.

Lieutenant Mueller-Riezenburg, in a transcript made on Christmas Day 1943, said; 'The S.S. invited us over for a Jew-shoot. The whole troop went off with their weapons and joined in. Everyone was allowed to pick which one they wanted to shoot.'

It is clear that the vortex of war, the total, unrelenting 'war without rules' which Hitler had preached would be fought on the eastern front, had become commonplace, everyday - mundane, even - for those who were there.

But it was not only on the killing fields of the Steppe that the accepted and time-honoured rules of war were abandoned.



Corporal Dieckmann told his pal in captivity of action in France in 1940; 'In the streets, the doorways, the alleyways and sidestreets I shot everything that showed itself. My dear, if a few innocent ones fell, well, I don't give a s**t.'

Another report picked up on a soldier boasting of his actions in Salonika when civilians had barricaded themselves inside a church. 'So we had no choice but to burn them out, did we? I mean, it was their decision to do that, wasn't it?'

The men who marched off to gain the 'Living space' for Hitler's Reich in 1939 were part of that great mass of Germans who had never been beyond their own borders; at the start of the war just four percent of Reich citizens possessed a passport.



Let loose in these strange lands, told that their own conscience did not matter, they morphed from provincial burghers into willing executioners, happy in the knowledge that the man they promised to serve with an oath binding them to him until death, would take on all the humans responsibilities and concerns they suppressed.

In Italy, as in France, in Russia, in Poland, it was the same, terrible corruption that allowed men who, before the war would never have kicked a dog or struck a child, to behave with the barbarity of Mongol hordes instead of the discipline of an army reared in a country which gave the world Schiller and Schubert, Goethe and Beethoven.

Senior corporal Sommer epitomised this degradation of human decency when he was caught by the electronic devices talking about the terror he was instructed to instill in Italian villagers.

'In every place we got to the order was the same; kill a couple of locals. Or one day; 'Get rid of 20 so we will have some peace and quiet here and they won't get any stupid ideas!' Before we knew it we had offed 50.

'It was easy to round them up. We just said, come here, and got them all into the marketplace and he (unidentified) came along with his machine gun and da-da-da-da and...that's how it happened. Then he said; 'Excellent!' He called the Italians pigs. He had an incredible rage against the Italians, you wouldn't believe it.'

Many refused to believe it, long after the guns fell silent and the soldiers went home, keeping their secrets about what they truly did in the war. But, damned by the tongues of the fathers, the Germans can no longer retreat to the comfort zone of deniability about what was done in their name by so-called honourable men.