Armin Scheiderbauer - Adventures in My Youth

In the forester’s house, in which a few days before Oberst Dorn had been based and where the orders had been given for the counter-attack which had been called off, I set up my command post. It is true that we were in the cellar, whereas the Oberst had been on the ground floor. I looked at the room in which the meeting had taken place. A hole, one metre wide, was gaping in the wall. When it hit, it had caught the Oberst in the head and shoulder. In the cellar a Russian command post had already been operating. Telephone equipment and half-empty American meat conserves with Cyrillic labels were lying about. And then the room was permeated by the almost indescribable smell of the Russian common soldier, which I can still smell today, but do not think I could begin to analyse. It could be a mixture of damp leather, horse shit, but also possibly the smell of the unwashed.

The main line of resistance had been maintained for two or three days in front of Schwenten. After the departure of General Meltzer, the Divisional commander was Generalleutnant Drekmann. At noon he visited my command post. In broad daylight he came driving up to the forester’s house, along the road, in full view of the enemy, with the red flashes on his overcoat. Outside the house he stopped. It was only with difficulty that he could be persuaded to come down into the cellar. At first I thought, because of the grand way in which he had arrived, that he was over-excited. But the reason for his behaviour soon became clear. He had obviously been knocking back too much cognac. His initial briskness soon passed over into joviality. Then he adopted a patronising and encouraging tone as far as the situation was concerned. When the opportunity presented itself, I mentioned that I was the Regiment’s ‘last horse in the stable’, namely the last Schützenkompanie commander to have survived from 14 January. That made no impression on him and he soon drove off again.

Walter shouted loudly after him the wish that a Ratschbum would get him. That would teach him the meaning of fear. But luckily for all of us that did not happen. On the contrary, the same afternoon a similarly careless attitude had the result that little Hauptmann Hein was not so lucky. He had been called Freund Hein , in 1943, by Oberst von Eisenhart. Like many others he had also been a friend to me. It was said that, in the school of the neighbouring village, the Divisional commander had held a large officers’ meeting. The Russians must have noticed. They radioed to their firing position with the result that there were several dead and wounded including Hauptmann Hein. The careless General, however, had remained uninjured.

On 7 February the Russians had pushed us out of the village. I had given up the command post in the forester’s house and withdrawn 500 metres up the road to the Maierhof. There a man from the 14th Panzerabwehrkompanie , had put paid to a ‘Stalin’ tank with a Panzerschreck. The main line of resistance then ran along the front of a brick-red so-called Insthaus . At the rear were the entrances to the living quarters of the estate workers, the Instleute . I lived in the kitchen of that squalid dwelling. Facing the doors to those dwellings was a ramp a metre high, to which I owed my life.

To get some air I stepped through the door on to the ramp, leaving the door open. Every now and then a mortar shell exploded close by. But the ramp was in the blind corner of the building. It seemed to give cover against shell splinters that came from above and also against the dangerous splinters from mortar shells that flew out horizontally. Then, suddenly, a shell exploded very close by. A blow on my chest flung me through the open door back into the room. The men leapt up and surrounded me, helped me up and asked if I was wounded. At first I did not know. Then I saw and could feel that my limbs were in one piece, I could move them and I was not bleeding anywhere.

What had happened? A shell splinter, just the size of a fingernail, had gone through my winter overcoat. It then bored through the 32 page map, which had been folded 16 times, stuck between my winter clothing and my field tunic. The paper of the map, folded many times, had so reduced the momentum of the shell splinter that it had been slowed down before it went through my field tunic. The shell, as it fell, had passed within 20 centimetres of me and the slope of the ramp. The ramp had caught all the shrapnel flying in my direction apart from the one shell splinter that I pulled out of my coat. However, my intention to send home, as war mementoes, the shell splinter and the map that saved my life was fruitless. At that time the post was no longer functioning properly.

The following night I was ordered to lead an attack in order to move the main line of resistance forward a little. Nobody knew where the enemy was. A Russian Maxim machine-gun was popping at us from the rising ground to the east of the forester’s house. However, there was to be no preparatory barrage. We were to report and then to drive out the enemy with a shout of Hurra . It was a well-known fact that the Russians avoided fighting at night. But the high-ups had evidently forgotten that we too were no longer the heroes of the first years of the war. In spite of everything we went forward.

There was impenetrable darkness. Soon it took all our efforts to keep the leading man in sight. We were shadows and outlines creeping over the snow-covered terrain towards the chattering machine-gun. Every one of the soldiers no doubt felt, as I did, the pounding of his own heart. After a while the enemy machine-gun ceased firing. We got as far as the forester’s house, but it too had been abandoned. The enemy had evidently withdrawn of their own accord. We had by then reached the southern edge of the Tucheler Heide . With differing degrees of intensity, the enemy went about driving us out of the wooded terrain.

By 11 February we had spent three days and three nights in the woodland and in the snow. We had been without a roof over our heads and without sleep. On the first day the Russians were still trying to advance into the woodland, but then had given up. I had not heard for quite some time the rattling and twittering of infantry weapons in the woodland. Sometimes, when a ricochet whistled into a certain corner of the woodland, it sounded just like singing. ‘The little birds in the wood, they sing so wonder-wonderfully’ was the line that occurred to me, in romantic longing. But it was not at all romantic just very serious when one of the ‘singing’ bullets slashed open the flapping leg of my winter trousers. In snowy hollows we tried to snatch a quarter or half an hour of sleep. We did not manage to sleep for longer because, as time passed, the cold, 10 degrees below zero, penetrated our ragged uniforms. In my case there was the added misery that my feet, which had otherwise been warm with walking, threatened to freeze to the soles of my boots. They had turned to ice.

On the evening of 12 February we crept into the Mischke forester’s house. It was the only house for miles around. At night it was packed full of soldiers from various units. Following Hauptmann Wild’s orders I tried to get my people, insofar as they were not outside on sentry duty, together in one room alone. My attempt failed. So I had to go round trying to free up at least a few corners of rooms for us. It was important, because the forester’s house was on the front line in our sector. At any moment an enemy assault unit could attack. To be able to repulse it, the unit commander had to have his people together at all times ready for combat at the shortest notice. That, however, was not guaranteed if the members of a large number of different units were lying about, mixed up in the numerous rooms.