WW2 study shows how Troops become Killing Machines

a new book has been published in Germany, based on a secret Allied interrogation program conducted during WW2:

between September 1939 and October 1945, more than 13,000 German prisoners were transferred for closer "observation" to special facilities that the Allies had initially established in England, at the Trent Park manor north of London and at Latimer House in Buckinghamshire, and at Fort Hunt in the US state of Virginia starting in the summer of 1942.

The purpose of the special camps was to extract military secrets from the soldiers. The Allies hoped to win information that would give them a strategic advantage. In addition to the cells being bugged with hidden microphones, a number of informers were planted among the prisoners whose assignment was to guide the conversations in the desired direction.
It can be assumed that most of the prisoners were not aware that they were being spied on, and even if they were, they quickly abandoned all caution in their conversations with fellow soldiers. The human need to converse is noticeably stronger than the fear that the enemy could be listening in.

Scientists and academics have always been interested in the question of how quickly perfectly normal people can turn into killing machines. The material Neitzel and Welzer uncovered for their book suggests that the answer is simple: very quickly indeed.

Hardly anyone is immune to the temptations of "unpunished inhumanity," as the philosopher Günter Anders once aptly described unbridled terror. Where the door is opened to violence, even good family men quickly shed their inhibitions. Nevertheless, armies differ in their methods, as was the case in World War II.

The Red Army was hardly inferior to the Wehrmacht in terms of its propensity for violence. In fact, the pronounced culture of violence on both sides led to a disastrous radicalization of the war in the East. The Anglo-Saxon forces behaved in a far more civilized way, at least after the first phase of the fighting in Normandy, in which the Western allies also took no prisoners.
The way a body of soldiers proceeds in the regular use of violence is not dependent on the individual. Putting one's faith in self-restraint would be to misunderstand the psychodynamics of armed conflicts. What is in fact critical is the expectation of discipline that comes from above.

War crimes occur in almost every prolonged armed conflict, as evidenced recently by the photos taken by an American "kill team" in Afghanistan, which shocked the public when the images were published two weeks ago.

Everything depends on whether these crimes are also seen as crimes by the military leadership and if the perpetrators are then punished accordingly.

spiegel .de/international/germany/0,1518,755385,00.html