Armin Scheiderbauer - Adventures in My Youth

In front of the sector of our neighbour to the left on the Dubysa, the Corps had ordered an assault unit to be prepared. It was to be carried out by our battalion, since they did not to have confidence in the Volksgrenadiere to achieve success. The officer selected for that duty, Leutnant Blatschke, was furious that, as he said, he had to snatch foreign chestnuts out of the fire. We went across to our neighbour and had a look round the sector.

On the way Blatschke told me that in a house directly behind the frontline of his company’s sector there was a Blüthner grand piano. The house was visible to the enemy and stood empty. To judge by the way it was furnished its owners must have been educated people. After Blatschke left, I went with Walter into the darkness. The windows had been shattered by fire. Because it was visible to the enemy, we were not able to use a light, but the moonlight gave light enough. From time to time flares blazed up and you could hear rifle bullets chirping as they whizzed by. In the glimmer of the moonlight (‘thou fillest again bush and valley…’ as Goethe wrote) I sat down at the grand piano and played and sang, even though I could not do it perfectly, from Schumann’s Mondnacht . For a while I actually had the illusion that the heavens were kissing the earth to sleep. Then I went on, because I knew it better, to Matthias Claudius’ ‘The Moon is risen…’

On the way back to the command post I reflected on the great good fortune which I had encountered since 22 June. Thinking about what had happened to those who returned from behind the Soviet lines, and other scattered troops who came back over the lines near us and elsewhere, I wondered what I myself would do in similar circumstances. After my experience in swimming the Ulla, I would try to get through by night as far as the Memel, that is about 80 kilometres further southwards. Then I would let myself be floated down river on a piece of wood to the Baltic. It would then have still been warm enough to do it.

On 24 September it was announced that the Division would be withdrawn from its positions and relieved by the 95th Infantry Division. An advance party set off. By rail, the first part of the Division travelled on 29 September through Tilsit and Insterburg to Zichenau (Cziechanow), where they were unloaded. The Division was then out of the command area of the 3rd Panzerarmee and the IX Armeekorps , under whose command it had been for more than two years. Henceforth it was joined to the 2nd Army ( Generaloberst Weiss) under the command of the XX Armeekorps ( General der Artillerie von Roman). The troop units which then arrived were allocated quarters in the area to the south of Zichenau.

At the end of September the units of the Division went into assembly areas to the south-east of Nasielsk. The task of the Division was to eliminate a larger bridgehead that Soviet troops had formed across the Narev between Serock and Pultusk (Ostenburg). In the 2nd Army sector the enemy had formed several bridgeheads over the Narev. They could be considered as jumping-off points for a large-scale enemy attack, especially as they could be expected to expand them at any time. Hauptmann Schneider and I learned of the position at the regimental command post. It was clear to us that we were to come into a new future hotspot. We consoled ourselves with the assumption that sooner or later the ‘old magic’ would work again, even in Raseinen.

In the evening, in my capacity as battalion adjutant, I drove out to the baggage-train in order to be at the Vidukle railway station early in the morning. Since the whole Division was to be unloaded within two days, even with the danger of air-raids, day time had also to be used. This required not only the greatest possible haste but also familiarity with the local conditions. I arrived at the baggage-train, and enjoyed the advantage of being able to sleep alone in a room, in a good barracks bed on a straw mattress. The soldiers of the baggage-train had unhesitatingly placed the room at my disposal as their chief. They had quickly cleared the bed in the empty room on the side facing the enemy, but that did not trouble me just for the one night.

On 26 September the battalion was unloaded in Zichenau. A look at the map showed that we were behind the most southerly of the two bridgeheads on the Narev. The short journey through German East Prussia had, depressingly, made clear to us the extent to which we were already fighting ‘along the inner line’. For parts of the way we travelled attached to a regular passenger train. Civilians got into the staff compartment, even a Hoheitsträger from the Party in his brown uniform. He did all the talking and expressed really confidently the simple message that ‘the Führer will soon sort things out’.

In Deutsch-Eylau where the branch line led southward into Polish territory, there was a longer stop. In the orderly surroundings of that German railway station, that looked clean swept, the transports with our ‘mob’ presented a really strange picture. The companies were loaded by platoons into cattle trucks. Other wagons were loaded with horses and old vehicles from the baggage-train. Among it all straw was everywhere, there was baggage-train equipment, and even live cattle and pigs. There were also Russian women with their headscarves, who worked as washerwomen and on other jobs for the baggage-train. We were there too in our shabby uniforms. I wore a pair of deep yellowish-brown Lithuanian riding breeches that Walter had found for me on the way, together with boots. The boots fitted well and saved my rubber boots. Yellow lice had first to be removed from the trousers before I could wear them. Then there was the disciplined yet free atmosphere. I addressed as du the staff runners, telephonists, and wireless operators of whom I had become fond. At the beginning of the sixth year of the war, it seemed that in our frontline units, all human relationships had been reduced to a certain essential core.

After the unloading, Hauptmann Schneider and Leutnant Degering remained behind in Zichenau. They wanted to find a cafe and ‘to be able to talk once again with German women’, as Schneider said. Meanwhile, the battalion set off on the march towards the village that had been assigned as our destination. As we marched through the village, in ranks of three, we sang lightheartedly, in a way we had not had the opportunity for in a long time. It ended on the popular ‘Honolulu’ song: Ich ging einmal spazieren, um mich zu amüsieren… ‘I once went a-walking to have a bit of fun’. The simple content of the song is that a soldier follows a girl who then rebuffs him with the answer: ‘I’m married, I’ve been married a long time, and what you can do, young man, my husband can do too’.

I drove out from the end of the village on the motorbike and sidecar. After branching off from the highway there was not much more chance of driving. The region of Polish sand was beginning. The motorbike, the driver and I, pushing the bike sank to our knees. The sand and the pines stirred up memories in me of the Hasenheide in Döberitz, on which two hundred years ago, der Alte Fritz had exercised his Grenadiers. Just two years previously on the company commander’s course, I had lang gemacht i.e. ‘served my time’ there, as the phrase went, bei Preussens or ‘in Prussian times’.