Armin Scheiderbauer - Adventures in My Youth

Father’s concern for Mother was something I shared, as much as I could, at 20 years old. She was by then 45 years old. As a result of the war she had been separated for four years from our father, to whom she was happily married. Even today I can remember how she suffered from the fact that she, facing the menopause, was separated from Father. She had neither relatives nor female friends nearby and there was no community life. She had never been particularly well able to manage, and had always relied on the help of servants or friendly neighbours. She was just not up to the adversities of life in the fifth and sixth years of the war. It is true that she also had the worry about the welfare of Father and of us, her sons. Father, until then had not been in physical danger. Rudi had only been so recently. She still trembled for me whom she knew to be in constant danger whenever I was at the Eastern Front.

She and Father always had an idea where I was. With the help of the Wehrmacht reports, together with the scanty news concerning the situations in which I found myself, and from the tone of my letters, they could build a picture of how things were going for me. In August 1944, she went for a few weeks to her sisters in Dresden with little Liesl. She thought of staying there longer and told us what she intended to do. In exchanging letters Father, Rudi and I had trouble talking her out of the idea. I understood the reasons, namely the ‘total war effort’ that had just been announced in a spectacular way by Josef Goebbels. I said that our flat should not remain empty under any circumstances. Someone else would simply be put in there instead. The block on leave, which was in force again just at that time, would soon, I said, come to an end, and then we would have no proper home to return to. I said that she should write to me as often as she could, that the post was our only connection with home, and that without it I would get no news at all from Stockerau. From Schweidnitz, on the other hand, from Gisela, I received post regularly.

In the event, it was advisable that Mother went back home again. She failed to get through the official medical examination and was not drafted in to war work. But a part of the flat, two closets, was requisitioned, which she had to clear. ‘Like a lioness’ she fought to keep our lads’ room. On 2 October I had written to her that she should just ask the gentlemen in the offices whether we, who were laying our heads on the block at the front, were actually ‘homeless’. Was our room to be taken away from us for the reason that we were ‘always at the front and there is no leave’. Then I tried to console her, because there was ‘no point in cursing’, I said. ‘Be patient for just a few more months, then the war will be over, for a little while longer you must just bite on the bullet, then we will all be coming home in person’.

It was fortunate that Father was able to get special leave and it was also fortunate that Rudi, too, after 13 months, had got leave in September. He wrote to me on the last day of his leave and quoted in his letter ‘it is all so deeply sad’, words whose source I can no longer remember. In my letter of 9 October, from right in the midst of the action on the Narev, I asked Mother to excuse the fact that I had not managed to get round to writing. ‘Really, I had no spare time and had no time to collect my thoughts. But in spite of this I am more than ever with you in my thoughts, dear old Mother, and I hope, at least in spirit, to be able to make the difficulties of the time somewhat easier for you. How much I would want to help you, if only I could. But then we are all hoping that very soon there will be a fundamental change in fortune that must come. My nerves are again a bit ‘below par’. But I always very much enjoy your dear letters and those of my dear girl from Schweidnitz’.

In a letter of 11 October to Father I wrote: ‘I am on the lower Narev in a quite lousy district. The little book Im Streite zur Seite , ‘In the conflict at your side’, which you sent to me, is very good and has really been of value to me. It’s true that it cannot be disputed, at least I cannot, that often it is not possible to go on by your own strength and your own consolation. So I pray, and hope, that we will all happily meet together soon’.

At the Narev bridgehead around 20 October, the battalion was pushed back some kilometres to the south. We had set up the command post in one of the separately built cellar vaults usual in that district. It was high enough for you to be able to stand up and to walk around. It was getting on for eight metres long and three metres wide. By our standards, then, an apartment. Incidentally, in that billet there were also rats. One of the runners almost caused a disaster by firing his rifle in fury and shock at a gigantic specimen that emerged in full daylight. There was a crack as if we had received a direct hit. The bullet ricocheted, shattering the chimney of the petroleum lamp that stood in front of me on the table. Then it struck the wooden door that a fraction of a second later was opened by a wireless operator coming in.

On 24 October Hauptmann Schneider was transferred. He was to go first to the Feldersatzbataillon , the training unit with the ‘large’ baggage-train of the Division. It was somewhere to which he was better suited than he was to a combat unit. He was a good-natured man of stolid stature and it was not easy for him to say farewell. He thanked me for the help that I had been to him during the time in which he had commanded the battalion. So it was he, at least, in this regiment who found a word of recognition for me. As he did so I remembered Raseinen. When, to my objection that the Hauptmann was not there and that I could not transfer him, Major von Garn had answered, ‘Then you’ll just have to lead the battalion’. A few days before Schneider left, something happened to us that made his farewell easier.

One day towards noon we had wanted to have a look around the positions of Leutnant Christen’s anti-tank guns. The crew of a Ratschbum must have seen us. They had us in their sights, but fortunately we were in a field whose flat furrows offered us some slight cover. Nevertheless, the fellow shot so precisely that I felt the suction and pressure of the shell that hurtled only centimetres above me. With great clarity I felt my hair actually stand on end. After a very long two or three minutes, during which the enemy gunner had fired off about 10 shots at us, I managed to leap into another furrow. It seemed to be deeper. A little bit further on, Schneider also lay there. After the Russians had fired about 50 shells at us they finally stopped. Nevertheless we continued to lie still for a while longer, so that the enemy would just think that we were dead. Then we jumped up and ran to some bushes about 50 metres away and that at least offered us some cover. When we got there we saw that the sweat of fear was running down our faces. As men used to say, ‘yea’!

Until the new commander arrived, the battalion was taken over by my old company commander from 1942, Beyer, who in the meantime had become a Major . The command post was then moved into a single house that had a view of the frontline and thus also lay in the direction of fire of the Ratschbum . No light, and no smoke was therefore to become visible. I found that Beyer was telephoned at night by his wife, who was serving as a signals auxiliary in the Oberkommando des Heeres . It reminded me of the wood at Shabino, when Beyer sang to the encamped company the well known and popular Berlin song of the krumme Lanke , on which a lover sat with his Emma uff der Banke, ‘Emma on the bench’. Beyer sat in stoical calm at the table playing patience. While he was doing so he whistled with gusto the best-known melody from the Millionen-des-Harlekins , da capo , over and over again.