Елена Ржевская - Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter - From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler's Bunker

In my first days in Poznań German aircraft were busily dropping supplies to the besieged. There was no sign of our own fighter planes. We had no anti-aircraft guns here and, although we shot at the planes, they were fairly free to fly in and back at will. Periodically leaflets were dropped over the citadel, which rotated slowly in the air before landing in the fortress. Some of them blew our way.

1945 will bring us victory and our reward. Of this our soldiers are profoundly sure, their faith is rock hard. Our valorous homeland expects feats of unexampled heroism from us this year. Loyalty and fortitude in the name of our Führer and Fatherland – let that be our watchword in 1945. Heil Führer!

There were other leaflets along much the same lines, and one that was not quite what we might have expected:

To German soldiers on the front line!

The Modern History Publishing House announces that the High Command has published the following booklets for 1945:

Victory over France, 4 marks 80 pfennigs; 1939: Against England, 3 marks 75 pfennigs; Victory in Poland, 3 marks 75 pfennigs. Orders taken.

Such persistent marketing! ‘Orders taken’, so everything is hunky-dory in the Fatherland. Right then, back to more victories! This primitive drivel, designed to flatter the soldiers’ vanity by playing up earlier battles, was now being dropped, with a remarkable lack of tact, on troops irremediably holed up in the Poznań citadel. It was the height of absurdity, not immediately distinguishable from an act of derision.

Initially the aircraft were also dropping mail, to judge by the postbag sealed with wax and packed with letters that was misdelivered to our sector. It contained letters dating from the autumn. Our surmise, subsequently confirmed, was that the unit to which they were addressed had been straying about for months in one of the ‘mobile cauldrons’ before breaking out of encirclement and joining up with the German troops in Poznań. There it was finally located by the German forces’ post office and its correspondence forwarded when the opportunity arose, albeit with a substantial delay.

We greatly valued enemy correspondence at the front, because letters often contained significant information, sometimes unexpectedly important, and this all contributed to our intelligence effort. Letters also contained information about morale, facts, the climate, events, hopes, circumstances, anxieties, threats, hardship and changes – everything, in fact, that constituted our adversary’s world at the front and at home. They were studied at the level of the front headquarters, in whose operational section I was temporarily working in Poznań. I was instructed to compile a summary of these letters.

Most of them were from relatives in the western regions of Germany. That told us where the main contingent of soldiers in the unit had been recruited: on the territorial principle, as was often the case. Also that later, having suffered losses, the unit had been reinforced with soldiers from other regions.

During those months the western regions of Germany were being mercilessly bombed by the British Royal Air Force. Tales of intolerable suffering and despair were raining down from home on these front-line soldiers. But letters from the front, as we read in the soldiers’ answering correspondence, also conveyed the soldiers’ despair. Family members wrote very openly, not sparing each other, or perhaps their sufferings were already such that they were beyond being able to conceal them. Or it may be that a merciless lack of empathy was part of the way the Germans viewed the world during the war.

I still have some of the letters from that sack. Here are some excerpts:

Uncle Otto writes from Berlin to private soldier Gerhard:

September 1944

Much has happened during this time. On 20 July our Führer nearly departed this life. Then Romania deserted and Finland followed. Bulgaria is looking much the same. You poor soldiers at the front are suffering more as a result, I do not doubt for a moment, though, that in the end, in spite of everything, we will cope with all this, because the German soldier is the best in the world. We believe that after the counter-attack victory will be ours. We have nine girl soldiers quartered in our extension near Berlin. People here call them noknapsack soldiers.

‘My dear René,’ his wife writes to Grenadier Renatus Coulognie,

I can’t possibly ask for you to come on leave, telegraphing that I’m in bed and about to give birth when it simply isn’t true. You are being completely crazy, because no leave has been given for ages, let alone to Alsace-Lorraine when they’re already so near. I only wish myself that you could be here instead of stuck out there. If only it could all be over. It’s enough to drive a person out of their mind. The fighting is going on now on German territory and they still won’t stop. ‘To the last man!’ Air raids day and night, and now we can even hear gunfire. They are advancing so quickly. They’re already in Holland and Luxembourg. Another 2–3 days and they’ll be here. We’ll be all right, but what about you at the front?

To Lieutenant Spiller:

I am writing to you in the hope that you are alive. I spent a lot of time in hospital but still am not right after the last wound I got in Crimea. I have no idea where to look for my unit. We have left Crimea, but we will be back there again. That land, soaked with German blood, belongs to us Germans. If I am not able to return there, I lay the duty on my son to take it back and make it German once and for all, this land studded with our graves, made fertile with our blood. Crimea is ours! We have left it but we will return, and if not we, then our next generation. I swear it on my life!

To Senior Lance Corporal Ludwig Ruf, from his girlfriend:

Do not be angry about the long silence. I thought that after the assassination attempt on our beloved Führer he would bring the war to an end, but everything is going topsy-turvy. The Tommies fly here frequently. We have air raid alarms almost every night. Our dear, wonderful Munich – what have they done to it?

‘Our Prince von Baruth is also behind bars in connection with the 20 July Putsch,’ Sergeant Ernst Ditschke was informed in a letter from his sister in Halbe. Another correspondent wrote:

Dear Paul, That you are in hell out there we can well imagine. It is terrible, but it is no better for us here. And you have so much tobacco there, and here there is so little. And we cannot get a parcel from you! We can only wish and hope it will soon be over. The main thing is for you to stay healthy and stop being in such despair. Remember the song: ‘Everything will pass away: after winter comes the May.’ Day after day we wait for news of Kurt, but there is none. It is so dreadful.

Oh, Ludwig, Ludwig, your schoolfriend Delp has died, too, of wounds received in Russia. He was a sergeant major. Helmuth Bott lost an arm in Italy, and his brother Willi has been showing no signs of life for a long time. In Bensheim a lot of people have been arrested, why I do not know. Maybe something to do with 20 July. And Spranger’s wife, too, you remember her, a fat woman. They had lost their son as well. Jürgen Hein has been killed, and so it will go on and on until there is no one left. It is so terrible.

To Senior Lance Corporal Hans Stressner from his wife in Hof on Saale:

I’ve just come back from church – today’s sermon was very authoritarian. The basic message was that we live by the grace of the Lord and have absolutely no rights of our own. Just what I wanted to hear!

Only yesterday, when I read an article in the Völkischer Beobachter [People’s Observer] and the war correspondent’s final words were, ‘Victory really is close at hand,’ I was beginning to feel more cheerful.