Armin Scheiderbauer: Adventures in My Youth

On 10 May I was operated on and after about a fortnight discharged back to Mörchingen. Of my fellow-patients I remember a Feldwebel who had a sliver of bone from his lower thigh transplanted into his lower arm in order to make the arm more mobile. The Feldwebel was a teacher and had an education to match. He played chess, and so we were able to pass the time playing chess and in conversation. Nevertheless, I was impatient, and would not accept my fate. I would much rather ‘be in Russia in the worst muck’, as I wrote to Mother. She and Aunt Lotte, she said, had ‘little natural tendency or talent to be mothers of German heroes’. However, my letters spoke of little else. There was not even loving raillery, but a few reproaches that she had not written. It was rather a restrained kind of tenderness with frequent assurances that I was thinking a lot of her and my sisters and was ‘her thankful son’.

In one Christmas present, the little book Wie die Pflicht es befahl , ‘As Duty Commanded, Words from our War Poets’, the editor’s foreword states that “in this struggle all Germans are animated by a single belief. It is belief in the mission of the Führer and in the eternal nature of the Reich . There is a single certainty that Germany shall live, even if we must die”. To the quotations from works of the war poets Walter Flex, Ernst Jünger, Baumelberg and Zöberlein, etc. was added the then well-known poem An die Mutter by a certain Irmgard Grosch. Its last verse runs:

Such proud mourning, as was displayed in many death announcements at that time, would certainly have been beyond my Mother. I am also unable to say how she took the news of the death of my brother. He was killed in action, as late as April 1945. But the poem had little effect on me. Naturally its heroic tone, all the more so in the poetic art form, appealed to me. But the thought that it could be I who was being mourned like that did not occur to me. I never suffered from premonitions of death, but carried the conviction that it would never happen to me. I was even then looking forward with confidence to the longed-for test of the front, and left for the field with a light heart.

The Reich was in danger. It was not Germany that had declared war on England and France, but they that had declared war on Germany. But, as far as the Soviet Union was concerned, there was no doubt about what the Reich government had written, in its declaration of war, to the Soviet government: ‘The German Volk is conscious that it is called to save the whole civilised world from the deadly dangers of Bolshevism, and to lay the way open for a true process of social advancement in Europe’. That extract from the declaration was printed in small print on the upper edge of many field postcards. Who among us could have doubted the truth of what was said there? Who could have proved it to be wrong?

From 15 October 1942 Infanterieregiment 7 was a Grenadierregiment, a unit in the Prussian tradition. It served in the First World War as Grenadierregiment König Friedrich Wilhelm II (1. Schlesisches) Nr 10. After reorganisation and reformation it had participated from 1935 to 1939 as Infanterieregiment 7 in the campaign in Poland. In 1939 and 1940 it fought in the campaign in the West. Within the unit of the 28th Infanteriedivision , to which it had belonged since the beginning of the war, it was prepared for the attack on the Soviet Union in the Suwalky sector in East Prussia.

It served in the following actions in Russia, 1941–42:

- 22–27 June 1941: breakthrough of the ‘Bunker Line’

- 29 June–9 July 1941: Bialystok-Minsk encirclement battle

- 10 July–9 August 1941: advance and fighting at Smolensk

- 10 August–1 October 1941: defensive fighting on the Popij, before and around Jarzewo

- 2–14 October 1941: the Vyazma battle

- 15 October–18 November 1941: the Regiment was released from the 28th Infanteriedivision and placed under the command of the 252nd Infanteriedivision

- 19 November–4 December 1941: the attack on Moscow

- 5 December 1941–15 January 1942: retrograde movements into the Rosa-Stellung and trench fighting

- 16–25 January 1942: the Winterreise , or the winter journey (Translator’s note – the term Winterreise ironically echoes the 19th century poet Heinrich Heine’s sequence of poems under the same title, and also Franz Schubert’s subsequent musical arrangement of Heine’s poems)

- 26 January–28 February 1942: widespread defensive fighting to the east of Gschatsk.

It was in the Gschatsk-Stellung , some 150km west-south-west of Moscow, that I joined the regiment. On 2 July, in St Avold, I had begun my journey which, as a straggler following my comrades, I had to make on my own. The journey passed through Berlin and Warsaw. At first I was in trains carrying men back to the front from leave. But from Warsaw to Smolensk through West Prussia, Kovno, Vilna, Dünaburg, Polotzk, Vitebsk, I was in an empty hospital train. On 4 July I sent to my Mother and sisters ‘very best wishes from the German-Russian frontier’. From Vyazma I wrote on 8 July that I was ‘very impressed’ by the Russian landscape and by what I had seen on the journey, and that I was hoping to arrive at my unit ‘the day after tomorrow’.

At last, on 10 July, I wrote my first letter as a ‘sender’, with field post number 17638 C, from the 6th Company of Infanterieregiment 7. From Gschatsk onwards, to which goods trains were travelling, I had to march with my knapsack. At the regimental command post the commander ‘even shook my hand to welcome me’. Then there was a further march via the battalion command post to the company, which was commanded by Oberleutnant Beyer. I was immediately assigned my post as MG-Schütze , Machine-Gunner 1. The company had just been resting for some days in the woods close to the regimental command post and the baggage-train village of Shabino. We were to go back up the line the following night and relieve another company. As the 7th Company was being relieved I met Jochen Fiedler and his section leader Kräkler, our block seniors from St Avold. Fiedler said that of ‘the eleven’ of us only six were with Infanterieregiment 7, the others had joined Infanterieregiment 232 or 235.

The relief had proceeded smoothly so that the sections, at intervals of several minutes, and of course in single file, marched away, to avoid making any noise and alerting the enemy. In the trenches during the day it was more or less quiet. The Russians fired off some shells only now and then and those were only of light calibre. By contrast, during the night the Russians did not trust the calm. So the nights were dominated by a perpetual, blind cacophony of explosions. At midnight, when the summer night was at its darkest, for the first time I went alone on sentry duty. Somewhere else and under other circumstances I might have thought of Lenau’s night, ‘whose dark eye was resting on me, solemn, gentle, dreamy and unfathomably sweet’ (translator’s note: Nikolaus Lenau, German lyric poet, 1802–50).

But then I had a redoubled sense of loneliness. I did not know my way about the positions, which were strange to me, and I had not yet seen them in daylight. I did not know where the enemy was, and could only guess where my fellow-sentries were. I only knew the way from the sentry-post to the bunker. For a short time I was overcome by a feeling of being deserted. It seemed to bode ill for my probation at the front that the company ‘sarge’, immediately after I arrived in the baggage-train village, had ordered that I get my hair cut. Then, at the field church service in the full glare of the sun, when I was wearing my Stahlhelm , I had felt ill. I felt completely alone. I had no view in the direction of the enemy, since our trenches were behind an incline. The only thing that happened during those first two hours on sentry duty was the tour of inspection by the company commander. I scarcely heard his approach. Eyes directed forward, I quietly made the regulation report: ‘Nothing unusual to report’.