Theatre Preview - The silence of the damned

'A QUESTION: Do you think I'm capable of murder? No, huh? Well, I slipped back into it every time. Though I did get discouraged every once in a while! But if it was over at seven and dinner was at eight, I ate along with the rest. So personally, it didn't affect me either. I was never scared of close combat. I never dreaded it."

This chilling, rather blasé account of killing may read like an extract from the diary of a serial killer, but in fact it's part of the testimony of a young Dutchman who fought with the SS during the Second World War. He was not alone. History records there were many people in Holland who, for whatever reason, chose to support Hitler's regime. During the 1960s the Dutch writer and painter Armando recorded the stories of 80 ordinary people who became Nazi collaborators in the 1940s. Accounts by two of them form the backbone of a compelling work at the Edinburgh International Festival by Belgium's provocative and challenging Muziektheater Transparant, and the Collegium Vocale Gent ensemble.

Ruhe – which means silence – takes its name from the beautiful Schubert lieder with which these disturbing testimonies are juxtaposed. Just as Armando passes no judgement on these people, merely recording their stories, Muziektheater Transparant presents these lengthy monologues untreated, leaving the audience to make up their own minds.

This particular story of a young Dutchman, who is not named, is told by actor Dirk Roofthooft. Finding himself in a country with high unemployment, the young man takes the advice of the government to seek work in Germany. Attracted by fascism's sense of consistency and cohesion, he joins the National Socialist Party and eventually the SS to "fight for a better life for us all".

Despite the hardship of training, he finds his true vocation as an SS soldier, taking pride in surviving freezing temperatures, lack of food, lice and killing. Sent to the eastern front he discovers that fighting isn't anything like it is in the movies. He maintains that if the movies were to show war as it really was, there would never be another war.

"The front itself isn't awful. It's 80 per cent noise, five per cent corpses, and the rest wounded. If you can stand the noise, you've got it made... During one of those close-combat attacks, you're actually in a kind of daze. You're not really there. Your head is empty. No thoughts. No anything... You can feel your opponent's breath, right?"

He has occasional nightmares, but is otherwise unaffected by the violence he sees and perpetrates daily. Even his war wounds – he was shot in the leg, back and lost half of a thumb – don't affect his attitude although immediately after the war he is "spooked" by having to behead a chicken.

During periods of leave, the soldier longs to get back to the front and counts the 12 years he was in the SS – from 1937-1949 – as the best of his life. Looking back, at the age of 49 when this testimony was recorded in the 1960s, the man has no regrets and is still a committed National Socialist. He appears to suffer no remorse and is critical of the sentencing in Germany of those who "fought for their ideals". "If the war had lasted another year and Germany's industrial capacity had been greater, things would have been very different. If Germany had dropped the atom bomb, well, there would have been hell to pay, but America used it against Japan, and that was all right!"

Comparison with later conflicts, particularly Vietnam, is a common theme in many of the testimonies. Even given the perspective of time, Gretchen still can't understand why what she did was so wrong. "I don't get it. To think that my son would have to fight against communism in Vietnam while even now people still point accusing fingers at me – me, who saw the dangers of communism early on... I mean, that's something we'll never be able to understand. Why is it okay to fight communism now, when it wasn't back then? I still find that incomprehensible."

Actress Carly Wijs tells the story of Gretchen, whose father was a secret member of the Nazi Party and as a naval officer fought with the Allies after the Occupation. As a 20-year-old she goes to work at the SS hospital Hohenlychen in Germany which specialised in amputations. She describes the appalling injuries of the soldiers and their distress, not just from the loss of a limb, but when the letters came from fiancées breaking off engagements. Himmler would come to the hospital regularly – he even signed Gretchen's furlough passes – and even Hitler once visited.

"I still remember the time – it was around Hitler's birthday – that Hitler came from Berlin and met with Himmler for the last time. I went and took a peek. We weren't allowed to get close, but I did catch a glimpse of Hitler. He'd aged a lot, compared to his pictures. He was more stooped, I guess. Not quite so ramrod straight."

At the end of the war Gretchen escapes from Germany and hides in her grandmother's house only to be dumbstruck to see her father coming to arrest her. "So he was still working for the Allies, even though he was the one who'd turned us into National Socialists." Only the intervention of some Canadians prevented her arrest, but she was caught six months later and jailed for nine months.

Reactions to this production have varied from country to country, says Guy Coolen, co-artistic and company director of Muziektheater Transparant. "We did the first production in Belgium where some of the problems we have from the war are still not over. A few people thought we should say this is bad, but most have said it's good to bring this up now and to keep on telling these stories. In Holland it was very emotional because many people knew it was about their parents and a lot of them were in tears."

In France the reaction was polite, with Le Monde asking why the Flemish people go on about the war but conceding it was perhaps a good idea to talk about collaboration. Yet staging the production in Germany was nerve-wracking, admits Coolen.

"People were quiet and looked very angry... there was initially no applause so we were relieved when they did start to clap. Afterwards they said they would never dare to touch this topic and were grateful that, for the first time, we were talking about Dutch people not Germans."

Everyone would like to think that, in similar circumstances, they would do the right thing, back the right side. But, Coolen asks, what might have happened in Scotland if the Germans had won the Second World War?

"If they had reached Scotland, people in Edinburgh would have experienced the same thing. But that is something we never think about. Of course we were the good ones."

• Ruhe is at the Hub, 21-24 August, in the International Festival.