Armin Scheiderbauer - Adventures in My Youth

In Döberitz at the entrance to the buildings of the infantry school I found that three-verse poem, the last verse of which will move me as long as I live. It is also the motto under which the last years of my youth were set:

During the infantry course, to Mother’s great delight, Father got a period of special leave to sort out the problems ‘on his home front’. While I was pleased for Mother, yet I was sorry that I had not been able to see him. I had not seen him since the spring of 1942, nor Rudi since April 1943. Anyway, on 30 November Leutnant Edion and I had a great surprise. A telegram from our Division told us that we had been given 20 days’ special leave ‘for bravery’. That happened in accordance with an order which permitted a unit to send not more than two per cent of its current establishment on leave ‘for bravery’, irrespective of any block on leave which was then in force.

Mother was very pleased, as she wrote to me on 5 December. ‘So at least at Christmas we shall not be completely alone… Yesterday Father went away again – I am dreadfully upset and have no idea what to write to you’. To Rudi, too, I sent the happy news and wrote to him that he should see whether, on his way to war school, which was imminent, he could not arrange to meet me at home. In my Christmas letter to him of 18 December I complained that this time nobody was here.

Around the 15th Mother had gone with Liesl, who was still only attending school irregularly and very seldom, to Aunt Lisa Scheiderbauer in Aisting near Schwertberg to get supplies for Christmas and to ‘really treat me’ to the Geselchte (salted and smoked meat) she had promised me. In my letter of the 18th I also wrote that in the OKW report the sober announcement had just been made that in the West a German offensive was under way. ‘I think this is the dress rehearsal. God willing!’ Even today I can remember how, while that announcement was being read out, the tears sprang to my eyes, so much was I hoping, one last time, for a change in fortune. But it was in vain, and after only three days all hope was gone. But the fact that we did hope for a change in fortune, will show the present day reader what irrational feelings guided us, in assessing a strategic situation long since become hopeless.

Everyone who knew me envied me my leave. ‘In any event’, I wrote, ‘it’s stirred up all kinds of dust, from those who are happy about it and from those who envy me!’ Unfortunately I arrived eight days too late to be able to see Father. I would set off again on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. He then wrote to me under the field post number of my old regiment 08953. I was looking forward to that, because with the help of the Regimental Adjutant, my friend from Schweidnitz, Klaus Nicolai, I had managed to arrange that I got back into the ‘7th’.

The really great happiness of my leave, however, was that Rudi arrived home quite unexpectedly for two or three days. If as children we had quarrelled from time to time, from my sixteenth year truly brotherly harmony had reigned between us, even if each of us had his own friends. Since he had joined up in August 1943, contact between us had dropped off, but the ties of feeling had become even stronger.

At the bridgehead of Nettuno near Naples he had an experience that left its mark on him. It also made a great impression on me, almost as if I had gone through it myself. He had been at night with seven comrades in a barn and had been asleep when the impact of an incendiary bomb at point blank range left the hut in flames. Rudi was the only one who had the courage to dash through the flames out into the open. While his comrades horrifically burned to death, he had only singed his face and his hair. After a short spell in hospital he had new pink fresh skin. He was home, again as good as new. We walked proudly side by side through our home town. In his smart black Panzer uniform of the élite unit Hermann Göring, with its white collar tabs, tall and slim, he was the very image of a fine young man.

I had no idea that I was never to see him again. He on the other hand, as I later realised, had a premonition of his early death. In March 1945 he once again passed through Stockerau and said farewell to the people who knew him with the remark, ‘Now they’re scratching around for heroes and then we’ll be sent out to the slaughter’. In his papers we found Josef Weinheber’s ode Den Gefallenen , ‘To the Fallen’. It was handwritten on a loose sheet of paper. For one last time, after Christmas 1944, he had taken photographs of us both. I remember Mother’s admonition from the proverbs of Solomon, which she had often quoted to us and which had now become reality: ‘O, how good and joyful a thing it is, when brothers dwell together in unity’.

His look on that photograph, his last, became my favourite. Later his portrait was painted from it. He seems to be looking into the camera lens, but far beyond it, right through the observer and out into the unknown.

However bleak I found the difficulties of everyday life at home, and however much I actually longed to be back at the front and with my comrades, it was still hard for me to say goodbye. As always at the end of the leave, Mother had not come with me to the station. I could not bear our feelings, especially those of my dear mother, to be watched by strangers. Mother knew that. She always swallowed her tears and stayed behind at home. With a bag of freshly washed clothes in my hand, I left the house. Mother waved to me from the window for a long time. In Vienna I struggled to get from the North West Railway Station to the Northern Railway Station. The platform, as I was used to by then, was full of soldiers, women and children, all saying goodbye. Throughout the entire journey from Stockerau, I had an anxious New Year’s Eve feeling. Vienna’s formerly peaceful appearance, where only blackout precautions reminded you of war and danger from the air, had been lost. It had become a city behind the lines. The front ran through Gran and by Lake Balaton. As the leave train slowly moved out from the platform, I was depressed by the tears, and the pain of farewells, that I saw around me.

In the dark New Year’s night my thoughts raced ahead into the New Year and what it might bring. The Reich was gripped by its enemies on its Eastern and Western borders. In East Prussia the Russians had touched the soil of the Reich and committed unimaginable atrocities. During my leave, almost daily, hundreds of American bombers had flown over our small town, down the Danube, towards Vienna. Standing at the doors of their houses, many inhabitants had watched the great aircraft taking their course, unopposed, with imposing equanimity. Father, in his Christmas letter to Mother, had told her if the worst came to the worst to stay where she was. Rudi and I had pressed her to flee in any event if the Russians came. We had even put together, for her and for little Liesl, some light baggage for that eventuality. A stroke of good fortune let our Father return home just at the right time. That removed from her the responsibility for taking a decision, and both parents did the right thing in not fleeing.

In Thorn I left the leave train. It was going on to Königsberg. I changed to the passenger train to Sichelberg (Sierpc). There, Leutnant Brinkel the first orderly officer of the Regiment got on. By profession he was a Protestant pastor in Silesia. At midnight he had heard the Führer’s address promising ‘victory to our armed forces’. It was full of optimism.