Armin Scheiderbauer - Adventures in My Youth

…Now you have your own independent profession. This gives you the authority to make your own independent decisions in forming your future life. I most fervently wish you one thing, that it will always be given to you to make use of this freedom in a wise and appropriate way. A great deal is demanded of you for your age. I also hope just as fervently that in the future you may also not disdain the advice of your parents. Of course, the plans and thoughts of parents can also be wrong and we must leave it in the hands of God to whom, of all those involved, he grants the best thought. From my experience, however, I can tell you one thing, that in my life something has always gone awry whenever I forgot, from time to time, to pray regularly. May this never happen to you! Especially in these present times that will bring many serious dangers for you. Don’t forget to pray, and to pray for better days! Perhaps in some way you will have to go through again the whole process of choosing and preparing for a career. I do wish that you might be spared that. But God alone knows. My blessing and prayers will always be with you!

The Christmas leave passed off harmoniously, even if the atmosphere was really not Christmas-like. There was no snow on the ground. I had missed Father. He had been given a short period of special leave from his post because his brother, my Uncle Erich, had been killed in action, on 29 November, by Lake Ilmen in the Northern sector of the Russian front. Thus he was able to visit his brother’s widow, Anneliese. She was in Eisting, near Schwertberg, with her three small children, Theja, Harald, and Ute. He also visited his mother who lived in Hadersdorf-Weidlinggau.

I got angry about grumbling townspeople who were losing nothing and from whose families no-one had joined up, but who still grumbled about the situation. From my class Iwan Wagner, who was also an infantry Leutnant , as well as Erhard Hameter and Friedl Schiffmann, both Fähnriche in the Navy, were all on leave. With Friedl Schiffmann’s sister, Heidi, I struck up a fleeting and short-lived friendship. However, by the summer Herta had turned away from me. Admittedly, I visited the Henk house. When I was visiting one afternoon I left my officer’s cap, overcoat and dagger in the hall. That ‘con-man’ Ewald took possession of the uniform and had his photograph taken, dressed in it, in his father’s studio.

The course at the War College was followed by a company commanders’ course at the Infantry School in Döberitz near Berlin. I arrived there after New Year. Popovsky and I were given a double room together in the bleak barracks. There, in contrast to the luxurious conditions in Dresden, unfavourable conditions prevailed. The barracks were unheated and therefore ‘perishing cold’. The food was ‘terribly little, bad, and cold’. At night we had to sleep in our underwear, pullovers, and training kit, or else the cold would have ‘done you in’. We were allowed to go to Berlin only on Saturdays and Sundays. I immediately suffered a bout of angina, which when I was young I got almost every winter.

On my birthday, 13 January 1943, which I designated as the saddest in my life up till then, while in a foul mood, I wrote a letter to Rudi. Like me he wanted to become an active officer. I asked him whether he had sent off his application, because if not, he should think it over very carefully. I said that at such a young age one could not always make 100% correct decisions, i.e. decisions that affected one’s entire life. I told him there was nothing worse than a life that was ruined by choosing the wrong profession. I said there was one thing he had to give particular thought to, something that I unfortunately had realised too late, and that was the mostly spiritual hollowness and emptiness of the service. For that reason I doubted whether the profession would satisfy my brother. With me this was, I confessed, not the case, and perhaps after the war I would still change professions in some way.

Aunt Lilli, Father’s eldest sister, had at that time been living in Berlin with her family. Uncle Leopold Pohl was a clergyman in the Neukölln area of the city. In fact I turned up at their house, to the horror of my Mother. My parents had quarrelled with the Pohls over Grandmother. However, I was cordially welcomed, and they were obviously glad I had taken the step, especially as the argument had been Uncle Pohl’s fault. Against Mother’s reproaches I justified myself – not very seriously – by saying that it was of because of our need for heating that I had been directed to them, but also said that Uncle Pohl had lent me an immersion heater and had offered an electric heating stove. I said that I would therefore prefer if they began to get along together again, even if only under the motto of ‘coals of fire’. In actual fact the contact with my relatives was a gain for me, since I could spend the night there from Saturday to Sunday.

One Saturday I heard in the Neukölln parish hall the lecture of a Rostock university professor on the subject of ‘The Johannine Testimony to Christ’. The lecture took place in the air-raid shelter because of a British air-raid. We felt like the first Christians in the catacombs in Rome. During the lecture the anti-aircraft shells were crashing outside and there was a hail of shrapnel on the roofs. The following Sunday I was at the service in Uncle Pohl’s church. After a long absence it was spiritually edifying for me. I was able to sit down at the piano and to play as my fancy took me. The two Pohl lads, at that time 15 and 13 years old, were not at home. Wolfgang had not changed schools when they moved to Berlin, and was visiting his grammar school in Schleusingen. He was at boarding school there and only came home in the holidays. Helmut had been taken out of the city with the so-called Kinderlandverschickung .

Only Ilse was in the house with her parents. She sang with the Philharmonic Choir. Son afterwards, a performance of the ‘St Matthew Passion’ took place in the Berlin Garrison Church, she took part and I listened to the concert. In the row in front of me there happened to be sitting Grossadmiral Raeder and his wife. At that time Raeder was Supreme Commander of the Navy.

One Saturday evening, my uncle treated us to a bottle of wine. It had been given to him as a present, shortly after the war began, by a former member of his confirmation class. He had, in the meantime, been killed in action. We drank the wine, as Uncle Pohl said, ‘ in memoriam Eduardi Feldmann’.

Rudi took many photographs and even, by using an automatic shutter release, did his own portrait studies of himself. In those pictures he showed an inclination to clowning and to elegance. My classmate Novak wrote to me that Rudi was one of the ‘best-dressed, most charming, and thus also one of the most popular’ young men in Stockerau.

The work was hard. On Saturdays we worked till noon. On the other weekends we worked nine to ten hours a day. Of course, infantry matters were in the foreground, i.e. how to lead a platoon was then followed by how to lead a company. We had instruction in tactics, combat, weapons instruction and firing. Once again the officer-instructors were excellent people. The head of the Inspektion was a sensitive, seemingly vulnerable aristocrat, Hauptmann von Koenen. One of the tactics instructors was a young holder of the Knight’s Cross, Hauptmann Johannsen, and our Inspektion officer was a Viennese, Oberleutnant Brucker. (I also recall another Austrian, Major Watzek, whom I happened to meet after the war in the street in Vienna. He ended his career as the Austrian General und Kommandant of the Vienna Neustadt Military Academy.)

Once we took part as spectators in a production of the Infanterie-Lehr-Regiment . It portrayed the attack of a reinforced infantry battalion, supported by a battery of light field howitzers, i.e. 10.5cm, four assault guns and aircraft. Heavy and light infantry guns, i.e. 15 and 10.5cm, also supported the attack. The exercise was completely true to life. Naturally the shooting was accurate and the system of command of classical precision! In the audience were twenty Army Generals, five from the Waffen-SS and three from the Luftwaffe . There were some 100 staff officers and some 20 Luftwaffe Leutnants to whom the spectacle was completely new. With their Leicas and other cameras, they all snapped simultaneously every exploding shell.