Armin Scheiderbauer - Adventures in My Youth

To my delight, the hospital train travelled to Wernigerode in the Harz, a lovely spa town. In its situation, and because of the Harz landscape, it reminded me of Sonneberg and the Thuringian Forrest. On the way, some of the wounded were unloaded in Halberstadt. I have no recollection of the town, but I certainly do recollect that a Gigant flew over it. That was the Wehrmacht’s new large transport aircraft. A tank or a whole company of soldiers could be transported in it. The gigantic plane with its six engines, three on each wing, made a lasting impression on us wounded men, particularly because of the noise it made. It seemed to us to be a sign that the power of the Reich was anything but broken.

Wernigerode was the earlier residence of Prinz Stolberg-Wernigerode. His great castle was situated above the town and towered over it. Noble hotels and old half-timbered houses were characteristic of the town. It was a home to a series of sanatoria, into one of which I was sent. It was the house called ‘Dr Kaienburg’. Evidently it was named after a doctor, but was run by his widow. In it 20 officers were accommodated whose wounds were not particularly serious and who were all capable of walking. The doctor came every day on his rounds from a military hospital. A full sanatorium regime prevailed. To me it was an unaccustomed ‘feudal’ environment. There was a radio in the room, a balcony with a view on to the Brocken, and billiards in the billiard hall. The food was good, but there were ‘only a few cigarettes’, I complained in a letter to Father.

Of my officer comrades, of all ages, I still remember three. My room-mate was an Augsburg clergyman’s son Leutnant Uttmann. After me he was the youngest. A cavalry Oberleutnant of the Bamberg cavalry was Herr Langen from Munich. He was from the publishing family ‘Langen and Müller’, and very cultivated. A friendly man was the reserve Oberleutnant Dr Wutzl. He was a German scholar and an art historian. He was from the 45th Infantry Division, the Linz Division. He later received the Knight’s Cross and after the war was a Hofrat in the office of the Austrian provincial government.

To get from the sanatorium into the town, we travelled one stop on the Brocken railway, a narrow-gauge railway. It travelled from the Wernigerode main station to the Brocken, the highest mountain in the Harz. We often went to the café in the afternoon or evening. Once we even went up the Brocken thinking, as we did so, of Goethe’s Faust and the witches on the Blocksberg. In a letter of 5 December, from Wernigerode to Father, I note that I had been at home in Stockerau on a short special leave. I told him of a fine performance of La Traviata in the State Opera. However, I added that the only problem was that the tenor had been rotten, ‘as is almost always the case in Vienna’.

But I did not like at all what was going on around my family at home. I liked it so little that I often said ‘you would really like to punch them’. It was the moaners on the home front that I cursed in a Christmas letter to Rudi. ‘Their ‘lordships’ do not deserve the sacrifices made at the front’, I wrote. ‘It has the effect of throwing me into a screaming rage! Then I begin to mock them. So I get dreadfully on the nerves of many people, especially girls!’

I told Rudi that I had been together a lot with two of his classmates, Egon Papritz, nicknamed Kitty, but who was later killed. The other was Ernst Vogl, nicknamed Avis. After the war he became a factory owner and a well-known contemporary composer. With those two friends I joined in one evening in a poker game. But I was a beginner! In fact I gambled so badly that at the end of the evening I had lost an entire month’s salary. The main complaint of my letter was about the fact that my girl was ‘not there for me’. I closed the letter asking when we would see each other again, ‘because I had the feeling that the war would only last another year at most – God willing’.

In Wernigerode I had another letter from the company clerk, Unteroffizier Wolf. In it he told me about what had happened to my company after I left. Wolf wrote that, in accordance with my letter, the recommendations had been made for decorations for the men, namely the two medics. In the barrage fire in front of the cemetery at Asorowo they had heroically done their duty. It was the chaplain, Unteroffizier Jaschek, whom I had put in for the Iron Cross First Class, and Obergefreiter Beuleke whom I had recommended for the Iron Cross Second Class. Wolf continued:

…after the heavy casualties of 15 October, the company was topped up again. At the end of November we were taken back by rail to Nevel. From 8 November we had more heavy casualties, 20 dead and 50 wounded! Leutnant Ludwig, who had taken over command of the company, was also wounded. Major Brauer and the battalion Adjutant, Leutnant Buksch, were killed in action.

I wish the Herr Leutnant a really good convalescence and I hope to see you again soon. Company leaders of your calibre, with a fresh and daring spirit and filled with concern about the welfare of the men in the trenches, do our people good. Then it will be easier to master the difficult tasks that face us.

In Wernigerode I had already found out that, after my Christmas leave, I would be sent on a course for convalescent officers. Such courses were held in all Wehrkreise . The Silesian course, the one appropriate for me, took place in Freiwaldau-Grafenberg. Freiwaldau, at that time in the Sudetenland, is in the Altvater mountains, and it is also a spa. We were therefore quartered in the Altvater sanatorium, otherwise a tuberculosis sanatorium. We had duties in the morning for only three to four hours in the form of lectures or sand table war games. On the course I met the very comradely young Hauptmann Hein. Since the spring he had been in command of the second company as an Oberleutnant . From Hein I learned that of the 40 officers in the regiment, at the beginning of the enemy offensive on 6 August, only three were still with the regiment. All the others were dead or wounded. All the battalion commanders had been killed in action, as were many other good comrades. On 11 January I wrote to Father, quite shaken. ‘In March we will be off to Russia again. Sometimes it gives me the shudders, but I put my trust in God’.

In the sanatorium there were skis. So some of us went skiing when the weather permitted and the snow was right. The mountain countryside offered many opportunities for skiing, and also for walking. I remember one trip, on which we came through the long Strassendorfer Oberlindewiese and Niederlindewiese . Their names were as quaint as was the landscape. ‘The food’, I wrote to Mother, ‘was not particularly copious, but we discovered the existence of a decree. According to it those under 21 years of age were entitled to 200 grams of sausage, per man, per day, in addition to their other rations! The flabbergasted paymaster immediately authorised the addition!’

Freiwaldau was not so noble a spa as Wernigerode. It offered no diversions at all. After dinner, Hein and I, together with the artillery Oberleutnant Sylvester von Glinski from our Division, stayed together for a while, and then went to bed. The almost superhuman exertions that had gone on for weeks and months resulted in an enormous need to sleep. Sometimes, after I had slept 10 hours during the night, I went to bed again after lunch and slept another four hours until dinner. So the actual purpose of the course, our convalescence, was achieved. At least in my case!