Scenario : you happen to have be a resident of Nazi germany and the right age and gender to be drafted. You don’t particularly support the party, you just live there because your parents did.
After infantry training, you’re detailed to an assignment guarding a prison camp. You have a pretty good idea what’s going on in the camp, but you just stand in your watchtower and do your duties. You hear through the grapevine that if you ask to be transferred, it’s straight to a frontline combat unit on the Eastern front.
After reading stories like thisone, I wondered about this. The fact is, this isn’t much of a choice. You can choose near certain death or to participate in a monstrously evil act that you had no part in approving or organizing.
This man would not likely have lived to be prosecuted in his 90s had he chosen combat duty instead. 3.6 million German soldiers died. Odds are pretty solid he’d have been one of them.
Easy question, for me. I’d go to be a guard at a POW camp, as,
a) I love German shephards
b) I think I could get away with a lot of slack work under our camp’s Commandant, Col. Wilhelm Klink
c) Seeing the wacky antics of those POWs under the command of that charming Col. Robert e. Hogan would really brighten my day
d) I’d be subordinate to Sgt. Schultz - I could be sneaking out to meet my hot fraulein whenever, as that guy sees nuthink, and knows nuthink
I’d like to imagine I’d be doing a lot of sabotage and subversion, and I’d last a lot longer doing so as a camp guard. There’s only so many times you can “accidentally” frag your entire squad or return from combat as the only “survivor” before raising a lot of eyebrows.
From a “save your own skin” perspective, the camp guard seems like the right choice, but I think the guilt would make it hard to keep from eating a bullet.
That said, I wonder if there were any camp guards that did their best to make the short lives of the inmates pleasant, or if that was a one-way ticket to the eastern front anyway.
If I’m getting drafted, war zone for me. I may not support the government or believe as it preaches but I do believe in the poor slob in the uniform next to me. I have half-decent skills and maybe I can help us both survive to rebuild once the wars over and lost or won.
Sadly, if my time as “just a guard” was definitely finishing and I were given the choice of 2 assignments; Eastern front or having to become actively involved in the mass slaughter of jewish prisoners. I would probably take the latter.
Not every camp was a death camp or even a concentration camp. I think I could get away without killing too many people in a British or American POW camp.
Yeah, I’m all about the desertion option. Surrender first chance I get to join British troops, and give them as much information as I possibly can, including about the camp I was at. Any loyalty imposed on me by my fellow Germans with guns is totally bogus and not worth paying attention to.
For the record, nobody was drafted into being a concentration camp guard. The SS guarded the camps and they were a volunteer organization. (The SS did begin drafting people late in the war but they were all drafted directly into combat units. There were no draftees at a camp.)
So the question is whether you would volunteer to work in a concentration camp in order to avoid being sent into a dangerous combat zone. Would you kill other people to save yourself? I’d like to say I wouldn’t but I can’t claim I’ve ever had to face a decision on that level.
I’ll take the Eastern Front and service in a regular army unit, despite it having little upside. The problem with this whole scenario is that choosing the Eastern Front option in no way means that you won’t end up being involved in one atrocity or crime against humanity or another. It just means that you won’t be a cog in a machine that does exclusively that, day in and day out.
Seriously, though, even with that option, I’d choose the eastern Front. I’ve got a survival instinct, sure, but not to live a life of misery, and I cannot imagine any untainted pleasure left in a life after being a guard for a Nazi death camp. I’d hope I could desert to British or American forces, but if I can’t, I’ll do my best with Soviet forces.
My paternal grandfather and one of his brothers came to America shortly before WWI. Their two elder brothers remained in Germany. Several of my father’s German cousins fought for Germany in WWII, one of them failed the physical and was put to work in one of the detenion camps as a cook. Of the five cousins who went to war, three returned. Two from the ground forces at the front and the one who was a camp cook. The two infantrymen lived long and apparently satisfying lives. The camp cook became an alcoholic after the war, eventually killing himself when he hit a tree while driving drunk at a high speed. We don’t know that he was attempting suicide, but there were suspicions.
My father was an American born citizen and was a medic in the war. He was in the initial medical corps that was sent in to Dachau. He was never able to talk about what he’d seen there. It haunted him until the day he died. I can only imagine how it was for his cousin who, although we don’t believe he actively took part in any atrocities, has to have sanctioned them daily by his silence. How you would live with that on your conscience, I can’t imagine. Clearly he couldn’t.
Give me a relatively honorable death at the front any day.
I’d pick the Eastern Front. My reasoning: The moment you’re tagged it’s a death sentence, either way. As a German I’d rather die trying to keep the Soviets away from my home than be directly responsible for genocide.