Armin Scheiderbauer - Adventures in My Youth

After an hour of wading through the snow we reached the road. Firelight shone from farmhouses. They were already occupied by the enemy. While the men, distributed in the nearest hollows, were under cover, Küllenberg and I stalked our way forward to the road. The broad tracks of the enemy T-34 tanks had left deep tracks in the snow. On the road there was no traffic. The opportunity was favourable, we brought up the men and our crossing was successful.

On the other side of the road we began afresh the process of creeping up between the farms. We approached to within only 50 metres of one of them. In the light of a fire Russians were making themselves comfortable. They were cooking and roasting, making a noise and felt quite safe. We, on the other hand, refrained from doing anything that would give us away, in order not to endanger our goal of reaching the German lines.

Almost two hours later we found ourselves to the south-west of the town. We had almost described a semicircle around it when a village came into sight. According to the distance and the noise of the fighting during the day, the Russians could have only got this far. We halted once again, and Küllenberg and I crept alone into the village. In a ditch at the side of the road we took cover and waited until we saw people, friend or foe. We waited a while and consulted in whispers.

Suddenly two chaps came along the road, in fur caps and snow jackets with telephone equipment round their neck, evidently Russians. Since they had to pass quite close to us and would anyway see us in the light of the snowy evening, there was only one thing left for us to do, namely to let them come to within a few metres of us and then take care of them. Walking side by side they approached us, suspecting nothing and without a care in the world. When they were quite close we jumped up, our assault rifles at the ready, and shouted Ruki wjerch ! The two of them were completely taken by surprise and raised their hands in the air. Then one of them, when he had recovered from the shock, said, ‘Oh God, Herr Leutnant , you didn’t half give me a fright!’

So we relaxed a bit! The two of them were Strippenhengste , i.e. signals troops from our artillery regiment. They had to check the telephone lines to an advanced observer, who was supposed to be somewhere further forward, that is, where we had come from. That meant that without noticing it we had successfully crossed the lines with our 80 men. Both sides had, in view of the darkness evidently ‘called it a day’ with the occupation of farms and houses. Hauptmann Wild and the other half of the battalion were soon found.

After such adventures it was the greatest pleasure to put the first cigarette in your mouth. Inhale the first pull at it, then to the able to breathe out again. I had begun to smoke when I was at grammar school, and Father, who was a nonsmoker, had had no objection to it. On the contrary, and this reinforced my habit, he had spoken of comrades in the First World War who were smokers and who in critical situations kept or found their calm with the help of tobacco.

That night there were still a few hours’ rest to be had on a German estate. I was sitting with some men in the library of the house and found there Stefan Zweig’s Sternstunden der Menschheit . I read for a little while, sitting in an armchair, until my eyelids closed and my head sank backwards.

In order to relieve the strain of the winter retreat, we received orders to requisition farm vehicles. Affected by this were the Polish farmers who had remained on their farmsteads, while the Germans with their heavily loaded carts had already fled. The farmer from whom I had taken two nags together with his light vehicles complained a lot. The unit commander, in accordance with the Hague Convention on land warfare, had to issue a written receipt for the requisitioned goods. But it was no use to the poor farmer. Nor was it of any help to him that the interpreter told him that the whole of Poland, when the Russians occupied that country, would long to be back with the Germans. We, however, if we were not actually in combat, could load machine-guns and boxes of ammunition on the vehicles and now and again one of us could rest his weary body.

On 23 January Oberleutnant Küllenberg was shot in the stomach. Apart from the commander, I was then the last officer in the battalion. As we were withdrawing during the day in open order I had fallen through the ice while crossing a frozen stream. The water had got into the felt lining of my boots. I either marched along in wet boots, with my feet to a certain extent warm, or if I was not moving they got cold and threatened to freeze to the soles.

The following night brought me the craziest experience of that winter retreat. I had received orders to take over command of the rearguard. Who else could have done this, since there was no other officer there anyway. I had bent over the Hauptmann’s map, the only one in the battalion, and with clammy fingers had dug out of the map case a pencil and a little slip of paper. Out loud to myself I had spelled out the unpronounceable Polish place names and written them on the slip of paper. A few lines, an arrow pointing north, and the sketch was ready. The runner Buck had similarly had to look at the sketch and then I reported my departure. ‘ Auf Weidersehen , Herr Hauptmann , Leutnant Scheiderbauer reporting his departure’, I had said, in a fairly unmilitary fashion, and Wild had replied ‘Go with God, my boy, go!’

The company of only 14 remaining men, sat in the overheated room of a farmhouse warming themselves before the 20 kilometre night march, or rather, journey. The 14 chaps comfortably fitted on the vehicles, so that it was clear that their feet could be protected. The entire battalion was ‘motorised’ in this way with the help of 10 such ‘combat vehicles’. The head of the column set off, and I remained behind with two vehicles as rearguard. It was a dark, almost mild night, and we were not freezing to any great extent. No wonder that the men dozed and dropped off, and seemingly the horses did too.

Then suddenly the penultimate vehicle had driven into a ditch and the men on it, woken up with a shock, were only just able to jump down from the vehicle as it tipped over. ‘Dopey sod!’ they cursed the driver, and ‘wretched nag’ was how he cursed his horse. Of course the men pushed the vehicle back out of the ditch again, loaded the ammunition boxes back on to it, pulled up their hoods and sat back on it. They were annoyed about the 10 minutes the accident had lost, and the fact that by then they had lost touch with the battalion.

We drove on and the men dozed on. But I stayed awake, lit up my sketch with the glowing tip of my cigarette, took compass bearings, and waited for the left-hand fork in the road leading westwards. But it didn’t come. We drove past a brightly-lit farmhouse in front of which a lorry was standing. ‘So we’re not last’, said one of the men. The situation slowly began to seem suspicious to me, because we had already gone too far northwards. But suddenly we heard vehicles in front of us that must come from the battalion. Out of the darkness the outlines of houses emerged. It was doubtless a village in which the battalion was waiting for its rear-guard. The distance became less and less, and the outlines of buildings, trees and vehicles became clearer and clearer. These must also come from other units. We overtook some, until an obstacle brought us to a halt. I jumped down in order to look with the runner for Hauptmann Wild.

We passed figures shrouded in white and were suddenly asked, in Russian, ‘Well, who are you?’ I assumed that the man asking the question was a Russian Hilfswilliger , many of whom served with our baggage-train, and had paid no more attention to him. But then the chap had moved his hand in a suspicious way and was holding a weapon in it. My runner, the medic, suddenly planted one on his chin. Bellowing loudly and falling backwards he shouted ‘ Germanski, Germanski !’ Shots cracked out and shouts rang out.