There are lots of books by people imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, but are there any written by people that were actually Nazi soldiers in the camps? Are there any accounts from people who were actually once Nazi soldiers? I’m curious to know how the normal Nazi soldier felt after the war or even now even sixty years later. Did any feel that what they were doing was wrong? Many of the German soldiers sort of had to do it. I hear so much over here about how vets feel over here, but I want to know the experience of the normal Nazi soldier, maybe even the mental struggle involved.
I realize that the OP is asking for first-hand accounts, and unfortunately I don’t know of any. But Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen contains much second-hand evidence about how German soldiers perceived their participation in the Nazi regime. The title implies a bias, however, for which the book has been widely criticized.
Too Young To Be A Hero by Rick Holz.
He wasn’t SS, or in a concentration camp, but it does deal with his experiences from participating in the Hitler Youth group, signing up to “fight for his beloved Furher” and then having a change of heart as a regular soldier at Stalingrad.
Not exactly what you’re after, but I thought I’d mention it in case you find no autobiographies written by ex-concentration camp Nazis, and this was the closest you could get.
I am acquainted with an amazing man who flew fighter airplanes in WWII, Korea and Vietnam. He spent quite a bit of time in Germany immediately after the German surrender. He said that he met dozens, maybe hundreds of people all of them claimed that they were never a Nazi. There aren’t books like that because of lies and denial.
Haj
Even Nazis don’t hold up to generalizations. Oscar Schindler was a Nazi.
I was wondering something similar just the other day. We treat our precious few remaining WWII veterans as heroes over here. They proudly wear their uniforms and medals and often come to schools to give speaches and educate kids. Quite often they’re interviewed for documentaries…etc.
How do the Germans treat their WWII vets? Would a German school ever have one as a guest speaker? Would they ever dream of wearing their uniform or their medals in public? Are people proud that their Great-Grandfather/Grandfather/Father fought in the war like they are here?
I’m not sure if you’re interested in Nazi memoirs in general or just those from camp guards. If the former, some of the higher-ups who escaped execution at Nuremburg published autobiographies, prison diaries, and the like during or upon their release from Spandau. Albert Speer, chief architect of the Nazi regime, was certainly the most prolific, having produced at least two bestsellers (The Spandau Diaries and Inside the Third Reich). I’ve read all of the former and about half of the latter, and they’re both fascinating books giving you insight into the minds of the top party leadership. (Of course, critics charge that Speer paints himself in an overly flattering light, even though he was the only defendant to admit guilt at Nuremburg.)
Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s right-hand man until his abortive flight to Britain, was never released from Spandau, but his wife has published one or more books of his letters from prison. They’re probably less political and philosophical than what you get from Speer; I haven’t read them myself and I don’t think an English translation has been published. I believe Dönitz, Admiral of the Nazi navy and Hitler’s eventual successor, has also published memoirs, though again I don’t know if they’ve been translated.
If it’s just the camp guards you’re after, you can see some hidden-camera interviews with them in the 9-1/2-hour documentary Shoah. The interviewer is rather relentless in getting them to admit everything they did and how it made them feel.
Try Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich by Alison Owings. I read this a couple of years ago. It is a series of interviews with different types of German women – upper class, lower class, women who were Nazis and/or Nazi supporters, and women who were against the Nazi regime. There was one interview with a former concentration camp guard and at least one interview with a Jewish woman. I believe there was one interview with a resistance fighter, also. Fascinating.
Rudolf Hoess, the commander of Auschwitz, wrote an autobiography before his execution. It’s somewhat self-serving, of course.
I think if you look, you can also find diaries of S.S. camp guards that have been published, but I can’t tell you where to find them.
re: the OP, please don’t confuse the term “Nazi soldier” with “soldier” or “german”. In fact, I’m not sure that there was such a thing as a “Nazi soldier”. That would be like saying there are “Republican soldiers” and “Democrat soldiers” or “Communist soldiers”. Political parties don’t field armies, nations do.
I always had the impression that the concentration camp guards weren’t regular soldiers, but people who were impressionable and indoctrinated into the system (“Nazis”) and chose that duty for whatever reason. I could be wrong of course. It wouldn’t make sense to take an unknown quantity like an ordinary military soldier and put them into a situation in which they had no stake and which would make them question their government (if they hadn’t been already). Most people in the army (“soldiers”) weren’t Nazis. Many of them were draftees.
While he wasn’t a camp guard, Carl Sager’s The Forgotten Soldier gives a stark view of life as a Nazi soldier. He was a French SS volunteer who fought mostly in Russia, and lucked out near the end by getting himself captured by American troops shortly after D-Day.
Check out “Ordinary Men” by Christopher Browning. Although the author was not a German soldier, it is chock full of accounts from such soldiers (well, policemen, actually) on the Eastern Front. The relationship between the SS, German police battallions and the Nazi Party is described in detail, and the emphasis is on the role of German police battallions in the Holocaust (both in rounding up Jews for deportation as well as in execution squads).
A bit more elaboration: “Ordinary Men”, as the title suggests, is an account of the experiences of the average work-a-day participant in the Holocaust, in particular, German police battallion soldiers. German police battallions were quasi-military groups, formed typically from police departments in Germany’s larger cities with oversight from both the regular German Army and the SS. Think of them as being sort of similar to highway patrolmen, armed roughly as well as a regular German infantryman. And one of their most important jobs was dealing with Jewish populations after the advance of the regular army…
The book details accounts of such “ordinary men”, in particular relating to execution squads and deportations, and attempts to provide as much insight as possible into what was going through their heads at the time, why they did it, and how they are currently dealing with it. It’s a fascinating book and extremely well written, and is furthermore about as even-handed as one could hope for. The author isn’t trying to describe the horrors of the Holocaust, his interest is in the motivations and experiences of “ordinary men.” Although it doesn’t address the folks that worked in concentration camps, I think it does address the sort of issues you’re interested in.
I cannot recall reading of any concentration camp guards going ahead and publishing an honest autobiography postwar. People usually are not keen on committing social suicide.
The prevailing public opinion up to about the 70s in (West) Germany was: Nazi leadership (party and high state officials) plus SS esp. concentration camp guards = criminals; armed forces and lowly state bureaucrats = normal people who could not help being where and when they were. In the last few decades the role of everyone who was an adult in the Third Reich has come under more and more scrutiny and criticism, but admitting to having been a concentration camp guard had been most inadvisable from the beginning. I am sure, though, that a few have published accounts of doing something else entirely at the time.
cisco:
A veteran would definitely not been invited in that role. If that would happen there’d be a nationwide outcry. If someone has kept his complete Wehrmacht uniform he would probably commit a criminal offence by wearing it in public (due to the swastikas in the insignia). Even deswastikaed people’s reaction to the uniform would probably viscereal dislike (which side do you think today’s German TV viewers root for when watching the 35th rerun of an Hollywood war film? Hint: the same side as you.)
I can’t exclude the possibility that veterans might have been invited to schools in the 50s and 60s, when the general picture of the armed forces having been innocent dominated. Today, definitely not. Whom schools occasionally do invite for talks are concentration camp survivors.
I have listened to quite a few relatives and elderly friends and acquaintances telling about their war. When they bragged it was about being insignificant and contributing nothing, really, to the war effort. That’s the publicly acceptable narrative and the biography to be proud of (if you got in trouble with the authorities it’s of course a big plus).
(what the above does not cover, of course, are private meetings of the diehard far right. I am sure there is and has been bragging about martial prowess there).
(the following is more for GD. Sorry.)
An aside on “Nazi soldiers”: Rusalka hits the nail on the head. Equating “Nazi” (= an adherent of the ideology of Nazism) and “German soldier” is an usage that annoys the hell out of Germans - annoys them the more, the more they abhor Nazism themselves. “Nazi” ranks formost among “fighting words” for Germans, to hear it applied as a synonym for “German soldier” is like a punch in the gut for someone like e.g. me who is aware that it is not by any merit of mine but by the grace of God that I was born in 1962 rather than 1922. When I read some veterans’ tales in English-language publications about fighting Nazi troops I tend to think “so they had a political discussion beforehand, then?”.
I can understand how that generation came to talk like this, though. People involved in a bitter war don’t go in for fine distinctions.
As a slight tangent to the OP, does anyone know of any groups. museums, libraries etc that would be interested in a collection of books about WWII focusing on the war against Germany (as opposed to Japan) and what happened in the concentration camps.
My mother, who was a young women during the war, gathered a large collection of non-fiction on this topic with many books that deal with the concentration camps and the third reich. (Her fascination (for lack of a better word) had much to do with the fact that she was horrified at the brutality/inhumanity of what happened without the world taking note at the time. She was a young women in a garrison town in Canada where the British boys trained and she had no clue of the horrors that were happening in Germany.)
I recently had to clean out my parents house (now that mum is dead and dad in a nursing home) and I have her collection. I don’t want to keep it, yet I don’t want to throw it away or give it to a second hand book store. Is there any place that would be interested in her collection of books?
Amethyst: I’m sure your local public library or university library would be glad to have them, especially if they have a strong history section.
I lack first-hand knowledge, but this makes perfect sense to me. “I Was An Aushwitz Camp Guard” sounds like the type of memoir sure to invite unwelcome attention from German police, or even the Mossad.
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Well, yes and no. From my understanding of history, the equation of “German soldier” with “Nazi” was pretty common even while the war was going on. Hitler and the Nazis were blamed with starting the conflict and considered to be villains even before the Holocaust became public knowledge.
I always thought this was one of the strengths of “Saving Private Ryan.” The American soldiers did refer a bit to “the Nazis,” but the conflict on the ground is presented more clearly as two groups of men ordered to kill each other.
The most recent edition is Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz, ed. by Steven Paskuly (Da Capo, 1996). Excerpts specifically relating to the camp are reprinted in KL Auschwitz Seen by the SS (Interpress, Warsaw, 1991). This is a volume of contemporary SS accounts, published by the State Museum in Oswiecim (i.e. the Auschwitz museum), and probably the closest to what the OP’s looking for. It also includes an account written by one Pery Broad, an SS man seconded there who joined the camp equivalent of the Gestapo. He volunteered the document to the British after the war, though no doubt to ingratiate himself. He wound up serving 4 years in prison. The third document it includes are extracts from the diary of Johann Paul Kremer, one of the German camp doctors. He served 10 years in prison after the war.
There are also a number of significant interviews voluntarily conducted with camp functionaries. Franz Stangl, the commandant at Treblinka, was interviewed at length in prison by the British journalist Gitta Sereny, the result being her excellent Into That Darkness (Andre Deutsch, 1974). Robert Jay Lifton also interviewed various medical personnel for The Nazi Doctors (Basic Books, 1986).
Beyond such accounts, you’re into the likes of trial testimony. Since both have been mentioned, it should be noted that both Browning (Ordinary Men) and Goldhagen (Hitler’s Willing Executioners) were using the same material about the same unit, the same events and the same trials. Since they draw somewhat different conclusions, they’re worth reading in conjunction.
While I’ve never specifically had reason to look them out, I suspect there are actually quite a lot of German military memoirs from WWII, ranging from those of generals to privates. But what they’re likely to have in common are protestations, honest or otherwise, that “I was only a professional/conscripted soldier and knew nothing about politics. Here are my good/exciting/important war stories …”
A lot of the soldiers they were fighting with in that movie were Nazis, though; Waffen SS, the military wing of the SS. German soldiers swore an oath to Germany; members of the SS swore an oath directly to Hitler.
The Nazi party was definitely distinct from the German Army, which predated it and had an aristocratic tradition. Hitler had to do a lot of wheeling and dealing to get in bed with the upper echelons of the German Army and gain control of it, and a lot of the regular army folks felt no particular loyalty to him. A lot of old-school Prussian generals especially found der Corporal distasteful; Hitler occasionally found it necessary to expose/make up infidelities or homosexual encounters to alienate them when a shot in the dark wouldn’t have been politic, even though the same shot wouldn’t even have raised an eyebrow if directed at Nazis who had fallen out of his favor.
Well, having spoken to a German WWII ace at a model airplane convention, I can tell you that the normal, non- “nazi” german war “heroes” are treated with respect, and get speaking gigs and the like. And- he did claim to have done quite a bit for “the war effort”- he shot down a lot of Allied planes. The American Ace who was also there did not seem to have any resentment of this, in fact they spent some time over in a corner, making airplanes with their hands & airplane noises, telling “no shit, there I was” stories to each other, apparently the best of buddies. And, since he was awarded the Knights Cross, he was technically a “Nazi”, even though he admited he started to have grave doubts later in the war.
Admiral Canaris, and the other conspiritors who tried to overthrow Hitler, and etc- were also to a large extent “Nazis”. Most of them, including Canaris, were hung by piano wire in the last days of the war by the SS.
However, you can be excused for calling anyone in the SS or SA a “Nazi soldier”. Both technically & literally correct.
The story of the Atlantis- a Kreigsmarine Raider- not only made the best seller list, but also was made into a movie “Under Ten Flags”- read both versions of the book, haven’t seen the movie.
So, yeah- if they were just fighting- and trying to do so within the Rules of War- they don’t get a hard time. They can still be heroes. But not so the camp guards & the like- war criminal scum.