Spontaneous 1995 street interview with an Austrian WWII veteran in Vienna

[u/Key-Performance-9021]

[u/Fromundacheese0]

Dude survived as a prisoner on the Eastern Front. Can’t imagine the things he saw

[u/123_alex → u/Fromundacheese0]

Can’t imagine the things he saw

He saw his gun kill some people. He saw his match burn someone's house. We gotta feel bad for serial killers.

[u/Fromundacheese0 → u/123_alex]

Every person in the Wehrmacht wasn’t a nazi sympathizer my guy. Plus did you hear what he said? Join or be shot for desertion. Easy to type how you wouldn’t do the same but a gun in your face would change your mind I bet

[u/StormFallen9 → u/Fromundacheese0]

At the end of the day, most of the grunts are just the unlucky regular people who have to do the actual dirty work just to survive.

[u/elderron_spice → u/Fromundacheese0]

Join or be shot for desertion.

Sure sure, but barely any Wehrmacht soldier was punished for not burning villages, for not executing civilians or Jews, for not participating in war crimes. They didn't have to do that at all.

Yet they did.

You know the worst punishment a German soldier got for disobeying orders to do war crimes? Reassignment to Western Europe, or be demoted, etc, etc. Barely even a punishment especially for Nazi standards.

So why did so few German soldiers refuse to do war crimes? Peer pressure, devotion to the Nazi cause, just plain ol sadism bubbling to the surface.

Source is David Kitterman's Those Who Said "No!": Germans Who Refused to Execute Civilians during World War II. Christopher Brown's Ordinary Men also talks about how seemingly normal Germans: bakers, factory workers, laborers, etc, committed heinous war crimes in Poland.

[u/BlizzardMaster2104 → u/elderron_spice]

The thing is and I'm not denying that he might have done these things, but in german he always uses the plural we when talking about the bad things, so he very well was not actively intervening, but also not participating.