The 'perfect, pitiless, Nazi': German soldiers' confessions reveal how troops driven by bloodlust killed innocent civilians for fun - 5th Apr 2011

Chilling confessions of PoWs captured by the British have laid bare the brutality and excesses of ‘ordinary’ German soldiers in the Second World War.

A book of transcripts to be published in Germany next week reveals how the honour of its old army was lost amid the frenzy to be ‘perfect, pitiless Nazis’.

In the interrogation transcripts, the German soldiers speak of the ‘fun’ and ‘pure enjoyment’ of massacring innocent civilians and enemy troops.

Historians Soenke Neitzel and Harald Welzer have used the interrogations of 13,000 German military prisoners as the basis of Soldiers: Diaries Of Fighting, Killing and Dying – or Soldaten in German.

The exchanges were covertly recorded by British intelligence at a Trent Park detention centre north of London in an attempt to find out whether they held strategic information useful to the Allies.

The 150,000 sides of transcripts, dating from 1940 to 1945, reveal how the Wehrmacht was little better than the S.S. in its outlook, the book concludes.

Their views were not confined to the Eastern Front, the most barbarous theatre of war, but also in raids on Britain, Italy, France and North Africa. Read More