[The following takes place during the last days of World War II in Europe.]
In the last weeks of the war, the murder of ‘others’ became almost fortuitous, an action demanding little thought. To take one example, an account of an almost routine act of murder in the Ruhr region:
At the beginning of April 1945, as American troops already stood at the Rhine-Herne-Canal near Oberhausen, the miner C, and a certain K, were in a bunker in Oberhausen. A woman appeared and said that a flat in the Ruhrorstraße was being looted by Russian workers. C., K. and a few other men went to the flat, but found no one there. A Russian worker was discovered on a railway embankment nearby. He was seized by C. and K. and brought to the police. They [the police] claimed that the matter was not their affair. No one seemed concerned about whether the Russian worker had been looting or not. A Wehrmacht officer declared that he did not have any people available to shoot the Russian. K. showed a real desire to kill the worker: ‘…the Russian must be shot; if the Wehrmacht does not do it, then he, K., would do it himself.’ Subsequently C. and K. went with the Russian worker, whom they held by the arms, to the Sports Ground Concordia. They were accompanied by ‘other people, especially by adolescents’. K. shot the alleged looter in the sports grounds in front of a bomb crater.
Vigilante action, not just against foreign labourers but also what the Nazi leadership referred to as ‘popular justice against Anglo-American murderers’ – the lynching of British and American bomber crews who bailed out over German territory – reflected both the diminishing reach of the state and the brutalization of everyday life.
Source:
Bessel, Richard. “Murder and Mayhem.” Germany 1945: From War to Peace. New York, NY, HarperCollins, 2009. 58-9. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Quoted in Rusinek, “Maskenlose Zeit”, p. 189.
See Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand. Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945 (Munich, 2002), pp. 488-489.
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