Armin Scheiderbauer - Adventures in My Youth

On 4 November the new commander arrived. He was a Major Walter Premrou from Steyr in Upper Austria, who had previously commanded the so-called assault battalion of the 78th Infanteriedivision . Their insignia was the iron fist of Götz von Berlichingen. As fellow-countrymen we immediately liked each other and I was pleased with my new superior officer. Like Major Beyer, however, Premrou too was killed in action in February 1945.

On 10 November, to my great surprise, I received orders to attend a course at the Infantry School in Döberitz from 20 November to 10 December. I immediately saw the opportunity of jumping ship, i.e. of returning to Regiment 7. I made farewell calls to people in the battalion and celebrated my departure with Helmut Christen, my especial comrade, from the retreat we had just made. We were in agreement and cursed about the unfair treatment in the ‘472nd’. The regimental adjutant, Leutnant Wix, junior in length of service, who had made the retreat with the baggage-train, had just become an Oberleutnant . At five minutes to 10pm we heard once again ‘Lili Marlene’, the song that was broadcast every day at the same time from the soldiers outside Belgrade. It had long since become a legend. Even I, who had at first disliked the song as I had disliked other hits, had to surrender my resistance. The voice of the singer Lale Andersen and the simple text, the contents of which every soldier had already experienced for himself, had won me over. Even irreverent parodies – I recall one cruel one concerning the first Russian winter of 1941/42 – could not take away the magic from the melody.

Major Premrou had spoken with the regimental commander and asked that before the beginning of the course I might be allowed a few days’ leave. I was lucky and I could scarcely believe that in a short time I would be at home. In the last hours before I left I was overcome with such a state of nerves that I felt I was physically shivering. I was afraid that at the last moment orders would be given for a total block on leave and travel, or that the notorious direct hit would strike.

Arrived at the baggage-train, I got into a wooden washtub and took a purifying bath. Then the driver, Alois Wörz, a Tyrolean, took me to the station at Nasielsk. There I waited for the regular train to Thorn. I felt like a man in a dream. In the compartment were sitting two German girls who came from a farmstead near to the front. Their parents had sent them back to relatives in western Germany. Everything was so wonderful and, after this exciting summer, so incomprehensible. The burden of all responsibility was lifted from me and tiredness overcame me. Leaning against the older of the two girls, I fell asleep. In Thorn our ways parted.

Of my journey home and my arrival there I no longer have any recollection. I gather, from a later letter from Mother, that she was startled by the doorbell at 9pm, and there I was standing at the door. She and little Liesl were quite well, but completely surprised. My week’s special leave flew by, but none of my classmates was at home. They were all scattered at the fronts in distant garrisons and even my girls, with whom I had been friendly – Herta Henk and the Skorpil-Mädi – had been drafted in to war work. That too was also what had happened to Gisela. She was somewhere in Saxony where I could not reach her, because she herself would certainly have not been allowed out. Only Hermi Eckart had been temporarily spared from work service because of diphtheria. She was in an isolation hospital.

I had a vague friendship with her brother Hans. At that time he was an Untersturmführer in the SS . Hans, whom I met again later during my studies, at that time said to me that he was ‘working for the Americans’. In 1949 he was kidnapped in Stockerau by the Soviet secret police. He had to spend six long years, until the treaty, in captivity, among other places in Vorkuta.

So my only company was classmates of Rudi’s, namely Ernst Vogl and Egon Papritz, who went by the name of ‘Kitty’. Papritz was an officer cadet Unteroffizier in the Infanterieregiment Grossdeutschland , and was on leave. Vogl was a gifted pianist, the son of a factory owner. As a Hitler Youth leader he had his military service deferred. Vogl later took over his father’s pump factory and in addition became a well-known contemporary composer. Papritz on the other hand was, like so many others from Rudi’s class, killed in action in 1945. So with those two I’d got together a few times in the ‘Vogl-Villa’ and one evening joined a game of poker. Being no poker player, and as such not favoured by luck, I was the evening’s loser and at the end had gambled away my entire monthly salary of a Leutnant , 300 Marks. The next day I had to go to the bank and withdraw money from my savings to pay my debt of honour. In the meantime my savings had grown to about 4000 Marks.

On 18 November the plan was that I should travel to Berlin. Allied terror air-raids on the 17th and the 18th on Vienna had caused railway disruptions. The Northern Railway Bridge was damaged so that my departure was delayed until 19 November. I wrote of it in a letter of the 18th to Rudi in which I also told him that ‘Kitty’ and I had naturally paid honour to the Rubik Asylum with the daughter Gerlinde Rubik. I said I had met my schoolmate Herbert Weyr, whose mother continued to be ‘the centre of discontent’. Julius Zimmerl, I said, had been taken prisoner in Italy in August, and the previous day had written from America, to the great joy of his relatives.

Arrived in Döberitz, I wrote to Mother and Rudi that the train had only departed at 2am from Floridsdorf. Hopefully, I wrote, Mother had got used to solitude again, but for me, on the other hand, it was fairly difficult. We could console ourselves, I said, that all unnatural circumstances and also the present conditions would all come to an end someday.

The course on which I had been sent was evidently intended to provide, not only leave, but some sort of winding-down period. It was for people like myself who had survived the heavy defensive fighting in the East, the West, but also in Italy and in the Balkans. As always, here too I was one of the youngest, but we had all commanded companies and there was nothing in the way of theory that they could have taught us. We had all experienced things for real without theory. Differently from the beginning of the previous year, we had our quarters not in poor barracks, but in the ‘Olympic Village’. There were individual rooms for each of us.

I lived in the ‘Weimar house’. The second apartment was occupied by a Fallschirmjäger Leutnant , whose right arm was decorated by two Panzervernichtungsstreifen , i.e. tank destruction badges, and who had just become, for the second time, father of a little girl. From my Division Leutnant Edion from Regiment 461 was there. He held the silver Nahkampfspange . Later, in January 1945, he was killed in action. Another comrade on the course for company commanders of all frontline units was Oberleutnant von Rohr, the owner of a Klitsche in Pomerania and, as it turned out, a cousin of the Benigna von Rohr whom I had got to know in the house of Graf Keyserling. Of the training officers I can still well remember Oberleutnant Brucker, a fellow Viennese, the Knight’s Cross holder Hauptmann Johanssen and Major von Dewitz. To Major von Dewitz I must have looked particularly young, because he repeatedly asked me ‘how old are you, Scheiderbauer?’ And my answer, ‘Twenty’, amazed him every time.

At that time a large part of Berlin had already been destroyed by bombs. One night, not far from the Olympic Village, a land mine went off with a massive explosion. But the air-raid sirens did not prevent us from going as often as we could into the town and, as far as possible, having a bit of fun. I recall two pretty Latvian girls from Riga whom Leutnant Edion had turned up. One of them had known the fighter pilot Novotny, who, a fairly long time ago, after 251 victories, was himself shot down. As a Viennese, he had been given a hero’s grave in the City of Vienna, in the Vienna central cemetery.