![]() I was sitting in the 'chain' (a formation of three aircraft). Meyer: "But it was always against soldiers?" We enjoyed heading out before breakfast, chasing individual soldiers through the fields with machine guns and then leaving them there with a few bullets in their backs." On the third day I didn't care, and on the fourth day I took pleasure in it. Eight of the 16 bombs fell in the city, right in the middle of houses. Pohl: "I had to drop bombs onto a train station in Posen ( Poznan) on the second day of the war in Poland. Now that, my dear friend, was a lot of fun." We flew past the first time, but then we attacked and really stuck it to them. In any case, there were lots of women in nice clothes and a band. When we got there we saw a big castle where there was apparently a ball or something like that being held. Greim: "We once flew a low-altitude attack near Eastbourne. We attacked trains and other stuff the same way." Then we flew down low over the streets, and when we saw cars coming from the other direction, we put on our headlights so that they would think another car was approaching them. We really sprayed them! That was fun!"īäumer and Greim, also pilots, perhaps also on the same date?īäumer: "We had a 2-centimeter gun installed on the front (of the aircraft). There was an event on the market square, crowds of people, speeches being given. When you flew at them from below and fired into them, you could see the windows rattling and then the roof going up in the air. We encountered some of the nicest targets, like mansions on a mountain. In other words, we shelled buildings."īartels: "But not destructive attacks with a specific target, like what we did?"īudde: "No, just spoiling attacks. Budde, a pilot, talks about operations over Britain:īudde: "I flew two spoiling attacks. This conversation was recorded on 6 March 1943. I've extracted those particular transcripts from the article. It's more unusual to see evidence of the war crimes carried out by the men of the Luftwaffe. But as far as the German army is concerned, the details of the war crimes committed in the East and elsewhere, while shocking, aren't all that new. They would have talked about many things, but the article focuses on the war crimes which the soldiers, sailors and airmen discuss quite candidly among themselves, as perhaps they never did again in their lives. It's based on the transcripts of secret recordings made of the conversations of German POWs captured by British and American forces in the Second World War. Der Spiegel has a lengthy article based upon a new book by historians Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer called Soldaten (no English version yet, unfortunately).
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