Book Review: "Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying" by Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer (2011)

March 2024

We are the war. Because we are soldiers.

I burnt all the cities.

Strangled all the women

Beaten all the children

Taken all the plunder from the land.

I have shot millions of enemies,

destroyed all the fields, destroyed the cathedrals,

devastated the souls of men,

shed the blood and tears of all mothers.

I did it, - I did

nothing. But I was a soldier.

- Willy Peter Reese, 1943

This poem by Willy Peter Reese, a German Wehrmacht soldier who fell on the Eastern Front in 1944, is part of a confession he wrote while on home leave. Such personal insights into the deeds of German soldiers, and their reflections on them, are very rare. With their 2011 book Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying – The Secret Second World War Tapes of German POW, military historian Sönke Neitzel and social psychologist Harald Welzer have provided a valuable addition to this sparse field. In their book, the authors present remarkable in-depth insights into the mentality and thoughts of German soldiers during the Second World War. In doing so, they teach us about war itself. 

Based on what must have been one of the most rewarding archival discoveries of the past decades—150,000 pages of secretly recorded conversations between German prisoners of war—Neitzel and Welzer take a deep dive into the inner workings of German soldiers from all ranks, social classes, and across all theatres of war. The supposed confidentiality with which the prisoners exchange information suggests a far greater degree of sincerity than expected in interrogations or memoirs. Thus, enlisted soldiers and field marshals alike happily share their views and perceptions on national socialism and the Führer, the extermination of Jews and other war crimes, military values, camaraderie and adventure, as well as on military secrets and the advantages of this or that plane engine. On some 530 pages, the authors succeed in organising these sometimes confusing, often overlapping parts of conversations in a comprehensible way, placing them in their respective historical and sociological contexts and linking them to each other. This results in a comprehensive and, despite the diversity of views, quite coherent picture of life and death as a German soldier in the Second World War. 

While the conversations on which the study is based are a product of their time and rooted in totalitarian ideology and toxic masculinity at its finest, Neitzel and Welzer take great care to compare their findings to war and conflict today. Quotes by German Bundeswehr soldiers in Afghanistan (“Latest after the second bunker alarm, even the greatest philanthropist develops a desire for revenge”) and excerpts from the 2007 Apache attack in Baghdad (“Oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards”) are used as examples of how the omnipresence of violence and death shapes the views and distorts moral values of soldiers, and can lead to very different perceptions of right and wrong. By contrasting features unique to Nazi Germany with the ‘ordinary’ abyss of war, the authors provide us with a clear message: it doesn’t need an all-encompassing totalitarian ideology and a decade of targeted propaganda to transform human beings into willful perpetrators—it just needs war. Neitzel and Welzer’s book thus serves as a warning of how easily the veil of 'civilisation' can fall in wartime and signals an important message to democratic societies: while war might be inevitable, the way it is fought is not. 

Sönke Neitzel & Harald Welzer (2011). Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying. Fischer.