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

To Lance Corporal Heinz Grumann from his father in Schönwiese:

You write that you do not want the Russians to get into East Prussia, but now we are being overwhelmed by aircraft. They have almost completely done Königsberg in, and after Königsberg it will be the turn of other cities.

To Lieutenant Willi Wüsthoff from a friend in Elbing-Danzig (East Prussia):

Just a little more and we will have won the war. We lost the 1914–18 war, and we will also win this one [sic], but perhaps our children will get to see at least something of the good times we were, and still are, being promised. I have no doubt we are yet going to endure times more cruel than Germany has ever known before. To be or not to be, that is the question.

It was at this time that Bertolt Brecht wrote:

These are the cities where we bawled our ‘ Heils ’ in honour of the world’s destroyers. And our cities are now just some of all the other cities we have destroyed.

In September, and later, people were still harbouring hopes of Hitler’s promised ‘miracle weapon’, said to be all but ready for action, and set to turn the course of the war in Germany’s favour.

‘In the homeland everything is facing east and everyone is waiting to see if some decisive weapon will be put into action to stop the Russians’ advance,’ Senior Lance Corporal Damm writes from Küstrin to Sergeant Major Fritz Nowka.

To Lieutenant Willi Wüsthoff, from a friend in East Prussia:

The day is not far off when the Führer will press the button. For now we need only to play for time and soon the new weapon will do its job.

But there are already signs of mistrust and sarcasm. Senior Lance Corporal Karl Stein’s wife writes to him from Munich-Kochel,

The enemy is advancing ever closer. In places they are already at the Rhine, but when that new weapon is launched everything will be fine. Have you heard what it is? It is a tank with a 53-man crew: one to steer, two to shoot, and fifty to push because we’ve run out of petrol. Today’s jokes are absolutely terrifying.

‘What do you think about our new amateur militia, the Volkssturm?’ a soldier’s father asks. ‘Great idea, isn’t it? They say that is the new weapon.’ ‘I just want to see how this will all finish,’ his mother writes. ‘A horrible end or horror without end. Our thoughts are always with you all, there in the trenches. Our only prayer is that God protects you.’

As I worked through that sack, reading the letters, that abstract concept ‘the enemy’, stuck in there behind the walls of the besieged fortress, began under the pressure of the different voices in these letters to separate out into the blurred figures of all these Ludwigs and Willis, Karls and Hanses. Meanwhile, the German front was retreating ever further to the west, and the transport planes were seen less and less frequently above the citadel.

An order was issued to the Wehrmacht from its commander-in-chief, A. Hitler, that soldiers who were captured, ‘if they had not been wounded or in the absence of evidence that they fought to the last,’ were to be executed and their relatives arrested.

My work on the letters was drawing to a close. I had got to the end of those dated September. Although they had not been delivered to their addressees, they had been written in response to news received from the front, with which there had still been a live connection. Increasingly, however, the western regions of Germany were being occupied by British and American troops. The names of certain cities disappear and the stream of letters becomes a trickle. Some time in October, the reciprocal contact ends, presumably because the unit is surrounded. They are getting no news from their loved ones at the front but parents, fiancées and girlfriends continue hopefully to write, perhaps from superstition, sharing their woes.

To Lance Corporal Fritz Karpanyk from his mother in Hindenburg:

15 October. I can find no respite from the sorrow and torment, and your lives are a path of martyrdom that you must travel. I am alone, and repeat to myself, ‘God, just let me have my children back!’

Everyone must buckle down because enemies have crossed the German border, the newspaper says… The house is full of Russians but nobody is getting down to work, nothing is being done. God is nowhere to be found in a house where there is no master, and that is how it is now in our house. I can’t believe you have as much to put up with as I do.

There were no letters dated December, but there is one, just one, dated January. This solitary letter, written as if into the void (‘I do not know if this will reach you’), is addressed to a son with a disillusioned final injunction.

Jacob Paur from Rosenheim (near Munich) is writing in the evening of 8 January 1945 to his son, Senior Lance Corporal Lothar Paur:

I got up today at 5.00, and by 6.00 was already on my way to Munich. I was there at 14.00 but there was nothing I could do. I pulled a bicycle from the rubble of our stockroom… From the East Station I headed over Ludwigsbrücke to the Stock Exchange… This route to the city centre passes through ruins… A bulletin from the command reports that the Royal Court Theatre and the Maximilianeum etc. have been destroyed, but these buildings were already so badly damaged that there was virtually nothing left to destroy. The chamber of the Regional Economic Administration is on fire, the Exchange has been razed to the ground by direct hits, the upper part of the city is burning, the Regina is ablaze, the Continental having already been burnt down. The Hotel Leinfelder has collapsed, but one wall of the Bitzig banking house has miraculously survived. The Nuncio’s House no longer exists, the Central Credit Bank is in flames, the Turkish Barracks are in flames… The Chinese Tower has vanished and the nearby buildings are burning, and the railway line has been blown up as far as Pasing Station… Everything is very disheartening and sad, especially when you look at the people who have been subjected to this cruel ordeal. I saw many houses in flames. Many streets are impassable for vehicles and you can make your way along them only through narrow paths. In all parts of the city and its environs a terrible number of blockbuster mines have been dropped and everywhere the destruction is immense. I do not want to look any more. I have seen quite enough in the places I am obliged to visit.

I am insisting that your mother should go to Mellek. I will then lead a vagrant lifestyle, or rather, the life of a gypsy. At all events, as soon as the roads allow it, I will cycle off. I have already written so much to you about all this, although there is nothing we can change. Enough. We are allowed only to remain silent, but you can still think what you please. For that reason I cannot answer your question about the end. But again I say to you – remain patient and calm and try to get out of all this horror alive. Dear Lothar, there is much more that should be written and said, but we will leave it at that and take ourselves patiently in hand. I will run my business for as long as circumstances allow, and you do what you are instructed to do, and that will be right because then you will have nothing to reproach yourself with. If I, too, am personally complicit in disaster and grief, I regret it with all my heart, even if my guilt is only that, like the rest of us, I did not rise up against everything, and allowed it to go the way it went, and has rebounded.

I wish you luck so far away. Perhaps your years will pass less disturbingly than they began in your first decades.

The Polish population of Poznań resurrected its city, its laws and dignity with extraordinary vitality and resilience, somehow managing to disregard the citadel, although there were feverish rumours the Germans were sneaking out through underground passages, murdering whoever they come across for their civilian clothes and then, disguised, melting away in the streets with plans for murder and sabotage. There was a more straightforward version that had the same underground passages, only the Germans materialized in the streets already disguised and Poles were capturing them and taking them to military headquarters. Perhaps that was so, but none were brought to our headquarters.