Armin Scheiderbauer - Adventures in My Youth

A person of a special kind was Walter, my batman. He regularly piled up my plate high, and when I said to him that it seemed that he would never become a fine man, he was honestly troubled. His hair was oiled and curled over his round face, from which he peered with a squint. He also wore a small Menjou beard. He had been unemployed for a long time and said that he had felt quite well during that period. From time to time he had knocked about in the backyards of Breslau as a ‘busker’, an occupation which must have been quite lucrative, until he was put to working on the autobahn. When Walter gave the best examples of his art, the whole Battalion staff enjoyed it. In one of his heartrending songs of an invalid there was the verse: ‘With both legs shot off and also my right hand, still I live on unresenting in my dear Fatherland’. No one could keep a straight face in the face of this. To me as his Leutnant he was loyally devoted. He asked me for my wristwatch, which had stopped, so I had to have a Wehrmacht watch brought from the baggage-train. I gave my old one to him not remembering that it was a confirmation present from my godfather, Erich Scheiderbauer, who was killed in action by Lake Ilmen in 1942.

In the Raseinen position there was regular post once again. On the 20 July I had written to Mother that, ‘after four weeks now our link home through the post has been re-established’. At the same time I asked for photos, since after my involuntary water journey in the Ulla my pictures ‘had been completely stuck together and had become unrecognisable’. On the 30 July I had written to her that I was not able to give any news, we were ‘just at war’. I said that our Division had been mentioned in the Wehrmacht reports on 21 July. She then looked through the local newspapers to find relevant news about it. I had time again for letters that were not simply ‘quite short’. I had to write to Mother, to Father, to Rudi, and of course, to Schweidnitz to Gisela, to whom my heart belonged. Father wrote that he was very eager for news from me, but that the main thing was that my mother should often hear from me. The only thing, he said, was that I should not be careless, because you can be as brave as you like, but still be prudent and careful. ‘Our prayers surround you. God will preserve you just as he has until now! So all the best and God protect you’!

If we had not realised what legendary good fortune had been granted us to have been able to fight the withdrawal from Vitebsk to Raseinen as an intact unit, we were reminded of it by the individual scattered men who reached our lines during those days. Many had been on the way for almost four weeks. An Oberst and his batman came through ‘in robbers’ clothes’. An artillery Unteroffizier , a native of Klagenfurt, wore full uniform together with his Iron Cross First Class. He had a full beard and badly inflamed swollen eyes. He had been lying for three days and nights behind the Russian trenches until he had got through on the fourth night.

In the light of such events, and the overall situation in the east, it was no wonder that an order, issued as a result of the events of 20 July, had not come through. According to it the Wehrmacht was from then on to salute with the deutscher Gruss, i.e. the Hitler salute. ‘The Reichsmarschall as the highest ranking soldier of the German Wehrmacht had asked that favour of the Fuhrer .’ The favour made us equal with the SS , the Party, and the State. Even today, however, it seems to me unheard of that we should be reminded of an order that we felt to be ominous, even as we received it.

Leutnant Blatschke had complained about an enemy Ratschbum that was giving him a hard time in his sector. I spoke about it with Helmut Kristen, who offered help with the following result. After hours of intensive observation, Helmut had discovered the well-camouflaged gun near to a solitary house about 300 metres behind the enemy lines. During the night he brought up two of his 5cm anti-tank guns into a good firing position. Nearby there waited under cover the company vehicles. As dawn was breaking the gunners aimed their guns and, just as the enemy anti-tank guns became visible in the light, for a full minute fired shot after shot on to the target. We watched it excitedly through our binoculars. The flames shot in the air, ammunition exploded, and the Ratschbum was silent from then on. Helmut Kristen and his men, however, packed up their anti-tank guns and drove away as if the devil was after them in order to escape the appropriate ‘blessing’ that the enraged Russians would bring down upon us, as indeed did happen.

Towards the end of August it had at last become quiet and we had made ourselves at home in the position. General Meltzer had just received the Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross for his achievements in commanding the retreat. One day he visited the battalion sector and was satisfied with it. Afterwards he sat with Oberleutnant Hrabowsky, his orderly officer, in the greenery that the staff runners had set up next to the bunker. He was cheerful and chatted in a friendly way. In general he directed his remarks to me, something that I felt to be a deliberate mark of distinction.

Then the adjutant’s clerical work claimed my attention again. All sorts of other decisions were piling up. Hauptfeldwebel Bierlein of the 5th Company came up with a letter from a neighbour telling him that Bierlein’s wife was ‘two-timing’ him. Bierlein got a week’s special leave to sort things out at home.

Oberleutnant Merkle, who for a short time had commanded the 5th Company, and had been killed in action, on the plain in the first Russian attack on Raseinen. His parents wrote asking about their son’s personal effects. The dead man who I had myself seen lying on the ground, was unable to be recovered. His body had been exposed for a week to the heat of the sun, but had been found after the town had been retaken. It had been stripped by the Russians. I would indeed have been unable to report to the parents that he was buried, but had had to say nothing about what became of his things and why his burial was delayed.

As had happened the previous summer in the Nemers positions, a fresh order warned of explosive ‘toys’. It said that the Russians had dropped fountain pens and lighters whose explosive charge would explode in the hand of the finder the first time they were used. It was a further development of the explosive shells that were known in the First World War under the name of Dum-Dums . They had been banned under the Geneva Convention. But what did a treaty mean in a war of ideologies, in that war against Bolshevism? In any case we did not even know if the Soviet Union had signed the treaty.

As the unit commander of the Battalion staff I also had to become involved with the task of the Divisional court martial. It had to punish a staff runner because he had contracted a venereal disease and thereby had weakened the armed forces. The Obergefreiter , so he told me, had been released one evening three weeks previously from the military hospital in Tilsit. He found that there were no more trains going to the front. Instead of spending the night on straw at the front control point, he preferred the soft bed of a woman of easy virtue. The result had been gonorrhoea. He then had to go back into hospital. Since he was a capable and reliable runner, I decided to put the matter on the back burner, because to judge by the overall situation, the case would perhaps resolve itself. Otherwise I would have had to send him to the penal company.

At that time, under the direction of pioneers, it was engaged in laying mines in the combat area in front of our main lines. The penal company was an Army unit. The ‘small sinners’ were sent there to do several days’ construction. Essentially, however, the penal units consisted of Luftwaffe and Navy soldiers who had been sentenced to longer terms of imprisonment for more serious crimes. The sentence had been commuted to one of proving themselves at the front. The crimes that had led to their sentences had in most cases been committed in the occupied districts in the West. The unit commander had an unenviable task.