'They seized three-year-old children and shot them': conversations of German prisone
Interesting read :
Some of the most brutal and horrifying atrocities of the Nazis at war are laid bare in secretly recorded conversations of captured German soldiers published in Britain for the first time today.
The prisoners, mostly ordinary soldiers, sailors and airmen as opposed to SS hardliners, are overheard bragging about shooting women and children for sport as well as raping and slaughtering innocent civilians.
But unbeknown to them, British and U.S. intelligence were secretly eavesdropping on their private chats.
Their conversations betray how deep the Nazi state corrupted the military code, and in doing so, the men who considered themselves honourable - men like Oberleutnant Hans Hartigs from fighter squadron.
16 which won 26 Knights Crosses in combat on all fronts during the war.
Hartigs was speaking of the targets he liked to go for - unarmed civilians - when the microphones were switched on one day in January 1945.
'I used to shoot at everything,' he said laconically, 'certainly not just military targets. We liked to go for women pushing prams, often with children at their sides. It was a kind of sport really.....'
Or this from another unnamed Oberleutnant of the Luftwaffe, captured on July 17 1940 after baling out from his aircraft over Kent; 'It became a need in me to drop bombs. It tingles me, gives me a fine feeling. Just as beautiful, in fact, as shooting at someone
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