Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

Given the agonizing nature of combat, some Landsers not surprisingly proved unequal to the task of describing the monstrous actualities they experienced. Helmut von Harnack attempted in a letter to his father to express the reality, but words failed him. “The picture will only really be completed,” he maintained, “when the simple front fighters of this campaign come home on leave and again find the power of speech.” Another soldier admitted that he would like to unburden himself, “would really like to tell you all the experiences I’ve participated in. But we cannot and may not write everything.” Rembrand Elert tried to portray the savagery of the German retreat from Russia during the winter of 1944, faltered and then concluded, “One who was not a participant can have no conception [of what it was like].” Likewise, Wilhelm Prüller confided to his diary, “Those who haven’t fought on the front don’t know what war is.” Whether from lack of language skills, fear of the censor, or simply because they despaired that people at home could not understand, many Landsers found it impossible to convey the reality of their world—even though, as Walther Weber conceded while on convalescent leave in March 1942, “these two months of the Russian winter war are an experience whose severity has been stamped into me and which stays with me.” 13

Still, despite the horrors to which they were subjected and the limited horizons of the front fighter, many soldiers provided an amazingly urgent and concrete picture of combat. For some, it seemed almost a living organism and the battlefield a startlingly personal place where danger and death prowled, always seeking more victims. As Harry Mielert remarked, “One has the impression that a wild animal is menacing us,” a sensation doubly shared by Kurt Reuber, caught as he was in the Stalingrad vise: “Can you imagine an animal stalked by death,” he wrote to his wife in late December 1942, “that after running for its life, thrashing about wildly, then finds itself placed in a life and death struggle.” It was a struggle against stacked odds, since, as Friedrich Grupe noted of one especially menacing area of the front, “Death lurked everywhere.” 14

To be sure, a grim fate constantly threatened any front soldier. “The worst was four days ago,” Mielert confessed to his wife in October 1943 of the savage fighting around Gomel,

when I had to defend a place with four men against five… tanks with Russian infantry aboard, and then was ordered not to leave this position until receiving an arranged signal. It was awful…. I lay with the…. men in a forlorn post…. At close range we fought the infantry…, but the threatening steel colossi roared on past us, shooting from all barrels…. Amid the dust and dirt and din I saw the green star-cluster signal flare, the arranged signal that I should now withdraw. Now began a race for our lives. The tanks pursued us over two kilometers, constantly firing and blocking the way. With a rifleman I succeeded as the only ones to make it back to our own lines. The others were overrun, trampled, or shot to pieces. These minutes have extracted the last reserves from me.

Nor did that sense of being stalked, of being under personal siege, leave Mielert. “They were horrible days,” he wrote two months later, just two weeks before his death. “None but the participants can understand what happened here…. I have been hunted as one would only hunt a wounded animal, have sat five hours in a swamp, in ice cold water up to my stomach, under continuous fire from a tank.” 15

Little wonder, then, that Mielert professed bitterly that the world had always been a cruel place. “Only now,” he noted, “the wolf howls and drinks blood openly.” Nor did he leave any doubt as to who the wolves were. “We have bitten our way through,” he observed. “In the process we have acquired hard teeth.” Hard indeed; in dispassionate tones, Mielert said of street fighting in Russia, “The city is burning. In the market square stand a pair of tanks that are shooting wildly in all directions. We wait until they have no ammunition left, then ‘crack’ them. We threw the penetrating Russian infantry back into the cold river. Only a few saved themselves. We are pitiless. Now it is just as comfortable, as romantic, as it is dangerous here.” Pitilessly, dangerously romantic, men stalking other men in a perilous contest of chance where only death proved triumphant. As Mielert and most other Landsers knew, “the luck of war swung daily… [as] every second determined our being.” 16

In this game of chance perhaps nothing seemed so terrifying or personally dangerous as having to go on night patrol behind enemy lines. After one of the seemingly endless night skirmishes with the Russians, Claus Hansmann and his comrades sat in their foxholes, regrouping, taking notice of who had been killed and wounded, when the dreaded happened. “Above on the embankment appeared a shadow. It is Karl. ‘You Claus,’ he whispered furiously. ‘[We] have to go forward to fetch the Lieutenant [who had been killed]…. Three Pioneers are also going out to look for a flame thrower that’s lying out there. The commander also thinks it’s nonsense, but it’s orders from battalion.’” 17In the sardonic jargon of the Landser, Hansmann had just been ordered on a Himmelfahrtskommando (trip to heaven) or suicide mission in order to engage in a little Knochensammlung (bone gathering) of dead comrades.

Weary, fearful, and staggering under the burden of lonely despair, Hansmann nonetheless stole out into the sinister night:

I creep forward. Lightly veiled moon…. The others wait in the shadow of the houses. A last cigarette, hasty puffs, we speak to each other softly…. “Nah, it makes no sense, but let’s go…!”

Slowly we slip through the grass fresh with dew…. Singly, we creep past a bare spot, then we reach the clover field…. The heavy silence is suspicious, oppressive. Finally some bursts of fire in the distance…. Dear God, all of this for a dead lieutenant and a shot-up flamethrower. The moon suddenly peeks out of the edge of a cloud. We lie petrified with pounding hearts…. In front of us, perhaps forty meters…, we hear voices. A couple of Russians are conversing,…, then two Russians come hunched out of a trench towards us. They must discover us! In a split second the hopelessness of this undertaking dawns on us: If we actually find the corpse, how are we supposed to bring it back through the enemy lines? Crawling, we could hardly hold onto the dead guy, and finally, he is in fact dead…! Therefore, the only salvation: hand grenades! The first, then others: explosions, crashes, screams….

We quickly throw what we have and take to our heels, simultaneously shooting in short bursts…. We race along, whistling bullet bursts overtake us, behind us their impact. Then finally our bunkers. Everyone unhurt? The last one slides into the trench. Nothing happened. O.K., good night. 18

Nothing happened—not physically, at least—but patrols such as these appeared to the Landser a taunt directed at good fortune and his personal well-being, as each feared the vulnerability, isolation, and helplessness of being exposed in no-man’s-land, the psychological torture of being suspended between security and danger, with only the blackness of the night as a comfort.

Leopold von Thadden-Trieglaff illustrated well that sense of having, during combat, an intimate relationship with death. “I am standing before the door of heaven and wait outside to see Ernst-Dietrich [his fallen brother],” he wrote in March 1943. “The most terrible night and the hardest battle of my life lay behind me…. During the night the enemy attacked us in a width of six kilometers with overwhelming strength… [and] broke through on my right flank…. I myself dashed forward in order to direct the firefight…. I knew that must mean death for me, but God stood next to me. They were terrible, indescribable minutes until I was able to gather thirteen men and place them in a hole in the ground that was supposed to be a bunker.” But Thadden-Trieglaff’s personal torture had barely begun. “Deep darkness,” he noted of the sinister night.