Perhaps a week later, I happened to come upon an execution of three French Resistance partisans, as I was passing by the village cemetery. They had, as the young SS lieutenant in charge of the SS soldiers who herded them off a truck told me, been caught with German weapons under the floorboard of their Citroen. Two were men, but the owner of the car was a young woman physician who had attempted to drive them into Germany disguised as foreign workers. Although I knew that the possession of weapons by any citizen of an occupied country meant almost certain death, I thought the SS officer was bluffing, perhaps to gain further information; there had been several incidents of sabotage on the rail line leading into France.
Within seconds, however, the three were submachine-gunned by the soldiers, while the officer calmly watched, smoking a cigarette. The woman was only wounded, and the lieutenant turned to me with a curse. “Damn,” he said, “I have to do everything myself.” With that he pulled his pistol, stepped over the woman, who was lying on her back with her eyes open and softly moaning, and shot her between the eyes. The top of her head came off and I began to gag. He found this quite amusing. “What’s the matter?” he inquired sarcastically, “can’t you stand the sight of blood?” He then marched off with his men, back to the truck.
I had, in fact, seen much death and destruction by that time, mostly when my unit was used to dig out survivors after air raids on our cities. But the casual brutality of the execution of handcuffed prisoners was overwhelming. Instead of continuing to the construction site, I turned back in to the village to Lieutenant Leiwitz’s office. I recited with some agitation what I had seen, but he merely shrugged. “Listen,” he said, “why do you get worked up over three partisans who got what they asked for?” He grinned sardonically: “Even the Americans shoot saboteurs, you know.”
I stared at him, and he continued softly, “Do you know that we are slaughtering tens of thousands of Jews back in Poland each day?”
“What do you mean?”, I said, taken aback. “What for?”
“What for?” he mimicked me, and suddenly he shouted: “Hasn’t it occurred to you yet, Herr Gefolgschaftsführer, that you and I are serving a mass murderer?”
“Who?”, I asked, dumbfounded. “Who? Who?” he repeated sneeringly. “Our glorious Führer, of course, the greatest leader of all time.”
I left then, slamming the door behind me. There was no Gestapo office anywhere near the village, and I, as the senior Hitler Youth leader, could hardly report Leiwitz to myself. I decided to mention his outburst in my next written report, but fortunately he realized the danger he was in. By late afternoon, he came riding out to the construction site. “I think we had better talk,” he said. I never did denounce Lieutenant Leiwitz.
During our next two months in the village, we met nearly every evening. A couple of times we got drunk together on French cognac. We didn’t always talk about Germany, but Leiwitz was the first man of authority who tried to make me see reality. I never believed his claim that Hitler was killing all the Jews, but I could not discount his eyewitness account of the mass execution of thousands of Jews near Kiev. The murder of civilians deeply offended his sense of honor as a German officer. More than that, though, he resented Hitler’s refusal to make peace after Stalingrad and the loss of North Africa. He believed the war was lost. When I pointed out to him that within four miles of our village V-2 “buzz-bombs,” the flying missiles, were launched every day, and would eventually destroy all Allied supply bases as well as England, he laughed bitterly. “You fool, do you really think these gadgets can change the tide of war? Have you looked at the sky lately? It’s filled with thousands of American bombers that are rapidly pulverizing our cities, and where the hell is your intrepid Luftwaffe? The only sensible way out is an armistice, just like 1918.”
Leiwitz risked his life to tell me the truth, and in retrospect I think that he brought an end to my blind zealotry. But he could never turn me against Hitler. Nor could he himself break his oath to the extent of deserting. After the war, I was stunned to learn that he had been executed by the Gestapo just four weeks before the collapse of Germany. His commanding officer, a colonel, had been implicated in the attempt on Hitler’s life. Leiwitz’s name was apparently on a secret list made out by the colonel, in which he described Leiwitz as actively anti-Hitler.
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