It was a one-sided perspective but happily, for me at least, in the mid-1960s a long-felt need at last began to be met: books on WWII written by Germans started appearing in the Indian market.
Paul Carell (pseudonym), an Obersturmbannfuhrer in the civilian SS, wrote about Rommel's desert war as also the war against Russia. Adolf Galland, head of the German air force's fighter wing, wrote about the air war during 1939-42 and how Hitler preferred Goering's advice to that of the professionals and lost the Battle of Britain. Heinz Guderian wrote about the panzer battles.
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General Warlimont's book was about Hitler's headquarters during 1939-45 and Heinz Knoke's diary, a fighter pilot. Albert Speer's memoirs also came on the market (and later his jail diaries), as did his wonderful biography by Gitta Sereny. Leni Riefenstahl, the photographer and Goebbels' film-maker, also published her autobiography. There were many others as well.
But on the whole, British books available in India outnumbered the German ones by a margin of perhaps 1,000 to 1. These German accounts are among my most prized possessions.
As more papers were declassified, British academics got into the act. But they wrote fat and tedious books seeking to reconstruct things from official papers rather than personal accounts.
Voyeur's delight
But a few weeks ago, I came across an utterly fascinating book by two Germans, Sonke Neitzel and Harald Welzer. It is called Soldaten and is about the secretly taped conversations of German prisoners of war. (Yes, the Brits were also snooping in prisoner of war, or POW, camps.) It is a voyeur's delight.
Being academics, the two professors have offered a lot of opinions that you can take or leave. But the translations of the actual transcripts, which apparently run to 48,000 pages, are fascinating, because of not just what was said but also the manner in which the POWs talked amongst themselves about killing, whether in cold blood or in the heat of battle.
Not all POWs were taped, of course - only a select few numbering around 10,000. They used to be taken to special facility where everything they said to each other was recorded, transcribed and studied. A conversation between two senior German officers helped England with its defences against the V1 and V2 rockets that were used against London in 1944.
But this seems to have been the only genuinely useful piece of information. The rest was just soldier talk, much of it shocking as when one soldier describes lining up the Jews, shooting them a hundred at a time, and watching them fall into the trench that other Jews had dug. It seems the soldiers firing the machine guns used to get very tired, especially their fingers. In another conversation, a submariner says they never tried to save anyone from the ships they had torpedoed. "We waited for them to drown," he says.
Many of the prisoners made highly self-incriminating statements. But the British and the Americans never submitted the transcripts to the Nuremberg authorities who had tried so many Germans for war crimes.
The conversations between the POWs slowly start becoming more pessimistic. By 1944 many of them have lost all hope of winning the war. One or two go so far as to say it was foolish to have started the war against three of the most powerful countries - England, America and Russia.
What gets you is the casual way they all talk about raping and killing. That's what war does to people presumably - turn them into pre-programmed killers who only need the appropriate trigger to kill. Nothing illustrates this better than the conversation between two US helicopter crews in Baghdad in 2003, which the authors have reproduced from WikiLeaks. It's all about pack behaviour or group thinking.
No exceptions
No one seems exempt from this mentality. The British in their day were just as bloodthirsty, as has been shown by Rudrangshu Mukherjee in his Spectre of Violence about 1857. The standing orders were no different from Himmler's in Lidice: not one tree between Allahabad and Kanpur was to be without a body hanging from it. It was obeyed fully. Another English officer wrote in his diary how wonderful he felt when the blood of those who had been tied to the mouths of cannons and blown away rained down on him.
Pity no one was there to tape the rest of them for posterity.