Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

“Today, as I went over unprotected slopes and came under the fire of a… Russian heavy machine gun,” wrote Harry Mielert to his wife in April 1943, “I involuntarily had to think about your observation that in war shots are fired in order to kill people…. Then I also had to think: the man over there… was after my blood and without doubt would have been happy if he had bumped me off.” This amazing observation from a Landser who had been at the front for almost two years illustrates that combat is the goal toward which all the activities of an army are directed, yet actual battles often take place less frequently than supposed, and the number of troops on “the sharp end of war” may be only a relatively small proportion of the soldiers in an army. 1As incredible as it seems, then, a soldier might occasionally forget the purposes for which he was trained.

For the Landser, combat consisted of a thousand small battles, a daily struggle for existence amid terrible confusion, fear, and suffering. Combat meant fighting in small groups, in sinister blackness or in cold, lonely bunkers, in crowded houses from room to room, on windswept steppes against steel monsters, with each unit and each man—confused men with a need for one another—fighting for their lives, longing to escape their fate, leaving a trail of torn, mutilated, and dead flesh in their wake. At the front, the Landser lived in a complex world, one both physically unstable and emotionally chaotic. He might spend much time in the front line as little more than an apprehensive spectator, then suddenly be thrust into the vortex of raging events. His horizon necessarily limited to the small area immediately opposite him, he rarely knew much of the larger events of the war. His daily life consisted of alternate bouts of boredom, panic, anger, fear, exultation, bewilderment, sorrow, and perhaps even courage. 2Dreading isolation, he desperately sought community with his fellow soldiers. Above all, he saw himself not as a cog in a grand military machine but as an individual who very much wanted to survive. The Landser thus had a personal, if ironic, relationship to combat. He wanted to avoid death yet felt a blow to his pride if kept out of battle. Life seemed fleeting as fate, that elusive and fickle creature, teased the Landser by juggling events just out of his control.

“The time appears to have come…. We lie in front of our tents, write letters and worry a bit,” Friedrich Grupe recorded in his diary of the last days before the German attack on the Soviet Union:

The last quiet night, the night of 21 June. The noise of the motors has subsided…. In a wide square the battalion stands before its commander…. Then he reads the Führer’s appeal…. “Soldiers of the eastern front, you are about to embark on a difficult and portentous struggle….” The soldiers stand quiet and serious. For many tomorrow will be the baptism of fire; for some, the last passage… No one is inclined to talk.

Night comes…. We dig in and lie in the foxholes…. It’s almost 2:00 A.M. In little more than an hour hell will break loose.

3:00 A.M. Helmets are put on, hand grenades in the belt, rifles loaded. Everyone stares ahead, nerves outwardly strained. Then the first barrage cracks out behind us!

Now the earth rumbles and shakes, before us flashes the glow of fires…. The time of the infantryman is here. We race forward. 3

Although Grupe’s account resonated with suppressed tension even as he tried to maintain a certain matter-of-factness about the whole business, other Landsers betrayed different emotions on the eve of battle: they noticed that their initial enthusiasm for the great test waned and a sickening sort of apprehension increased. Before the attack on France, Siegfried Knappe observed that among his comrades “spirits [were] quite high… although [we] were tired of waiting and eager to move out. If they were afraid of the prospect of combat, I could not detect it. They were joking and playing around.” Still, Knappe admitted, “all the reserve officers we talked to who had experienced trench warfare during the World War were very concerned about what was going to happen.” Similarly, Wilhelm Prüller recorded in his diary just before the assault on Poland, “We’re sitting on our lorries and telling dirty jokes.” But as the time for actual combat neared, the tenor of his diary entries changed: “If only this waiting were over,” he noted just fifteen minutes before the attack was to commence. “If only something would happen…. One’s thoughts go in a circle, as if they wanted to turn a huge mill-stone. Everything on edge.” To Wolfgang Döring the twenty-four hours before his first attack “belonged to the most unforgettable and really most stirring and beautiful of my life.” Helmut Pabst, on the other hand, wrote that he had seen men before their first attack “white in the face… [and] trembling.” The eve of initiation into battle could indeed be stifling. “The air was thick to the point of suffocation,” recalled Alfred Opitz just before the assault on Russia. “It smelled of something enormous.” 4

As battle approached, many Landsers began to realize that something immense—a “monster that is crushing the world,” as one put it—had been loosed. Apprehensive, anxious, restless, silent, withdrawn, they waited uneasily for their baptism of fire, the stress increased by the uncertainty of what was to come and the fear of their reaction to it. Once in combat, they experienced a wide range of emotions, from surprise to shock to a sense of transformation. His first encounter with the death and destruction of battle caused Harry Mielert to reflect in a letter to his wife, “We live such a strange life, so removed from all time…, so without law, so concerned of necessity only with our bare lives that one cannot say anything of the details.” Similarly, Ernst Kleist remembered the confusion of his first battle more than anything else; he called it “ghastly” but found it “almost impossible to create a true picture of the situation. You actually understood only that it moved inexorably forward in a tempo not seen until now…. What can you compare it to?… This war is just a crazy inferno, …a drama of destruction.” “Battle now has a property to it,” Kleist decided two weeks later. “One can only just act, one can no longer think.” To Kurt Reuber, war seemed “a chaos in which everything goes except customary laws,” while Meinhart Freiherr von Guttenberg concluded bleakly that “war is a hemorrhage.” Rudolf Halbey likewise could see in combat nothing but “chaos and screams bullets whistling…, orders, shots, …hand grenades.” Even for those who escaped that swirling confusion, impressions were often limited. “Already on the second day I got my baptism of fire,” wrote an anonymous soldier. “I must say, though, that I did not behave notably. [I] was pretty much totally moving around in dust and had my head stuck in that crap.” This sense of bewildered detachment struck Hans-Friedrich Stäcker as well: he admitted to a certain dizziness in battle as “a hot wave of blood shot through the heart and pulled me forward.” 5For many, combat produced just such a sense of unreality, of events shrouded in a dream.

Others, however, would have agreed with Harald Henry that combat proved only too real. His first encounter with battle led him to observe that it made a “shattering impression… of enormous destruction.” For Henry, combat produced no grand exhilaration, merely “tears of helpless rage, …[of] despair and pain.” If Henry’s baptism of fire resulted in a general sense of desolation, some recalled the gruesome face of war in more detail. “We were familiar with the dust and the smells of burned powder and gasoline from maneuvers,” noted Siegfried Knappe,