Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

The cries of “Hurrah” from almost all sides by the attacking Russians; shouts, screams, …withering fire…. We dished it out to the mass of Russians who had penetrated the position on my right… [and] answered their cries of “Hurrah” with mocking shouts…. We stood like oaks with the consciousness of impending death.

Finally at 2:30 A.M. the enemy broke through on my left…. We knew that… we were now completely destitute, isolated, and deserted….

We held out through the night. I knew that Captain M. would get tanks through to me and haul me out…. In the meantime, I had the first wounded in the small band. The first-aid packets were soon used up. I felt so sorry for the poor fellows…. With morning the situation became even more frightening. 19

Frightening indeed, for with the first light the Russian assault would inevitably resume. “As the morning dawned… a hail of fire rained on us, from right, from left,” confirmed Thadden-Trieglaff. “In a few minutes our bunker was full of wounded and I struggled to quiet the poor fellows…. Screams and groans, and singing. I had to strain every nerve in order to remain as calm as before…. In this moment of deepest despair… I discovered that the neighboring company… had withdrawn…. I myself sat about six hundred meters behind the present Russian lines…. Had they given up on us?” In a moment of anguish and despair Thadden-Trieglaff feared that he and his men had been abandoned to a harsh fate. But no: “About 6:00 A.M…. finally German ‘Hurrahs’ were to be heard. German tank motors roared; German machine gun fire and flak guns resounded…. We were rescued…! As I returned to my command post in the village I gaped at the dead comrades. I was so shaken that I almost cried…. When might this hideous defensive struggle come to an end? When will spring finally come? Deep snow, daily radiant sunshine…. At night it is icy cold in this wretched region. We struggle to get into the ground.” 20For the twenty-year-old Thadden-Trieglaff the appalling fighting and his ironic struggle to get into the ground came to an end all too soon. He was killed the next day.

Combat could be an amazingly personal and lonely experience. In the latter stages of the war, German recruits were taught to destroy a Russian tank by letting it roll over their foxholes and attaching a magnetic mine as it passed, or by emerging and firing a shot into the tank’s rear with a Panzerfaust. In theory, most efficient; in practice, potentially agonizing. “The first group of T-34’s crashed through the undergrowth,” recalled one Landser of such an incident:

I heard my officer shout to me to take the right hand machine…. All that I had learned in the training school suddenly came flooding back and gave me confidence…. It had been planned that we should allow the first group of T-34’s to roll over us….The grenade had a safety cap which had to be unscrewed to reach the rip-cord. My fingers were trembling as I unscrewed the cap… [and] climbed out of the trench…. Crouching low I started towards the monster, pulled the detonating cord, and prepared to fix the charge. I had now nine seconds before the grenade exploded and then I noticed, to my horror, that the outside of the tank was covered in concrete…. My bomb could not stick on such a surface…. The tank suddenly spun on its right track, turned so that it pointed straight at me and moved forward as if to run over me.

I flung myself backwards and fell straight into a partly dug slit trench and so shallow that I was only just below the surface of the ground. Luckily I had fallen face upwards and was still holding tight in my hand the sizzling hand grenade. As the tank rolled over me there was a sudden and total blackness…. The shallow earth walls of the trench began to collapse. As the belly of the monster passed over me I reached up instinctively as if to push it away and… stuck the charge on the smooth, unpasted metal…. Barely had the tank passed over me than there was a loud explosion…. I was alive and the Russians were dead. I was trembling in every limb. 21

For Guy Sajer, too, the intimate nature of battle resonated vividly, with soldiers shouting personal oaths at each other in the heat of the moment. “The Russians pressed their attack, bringing on their tanks,” he remembered. “Our cries of distress were mingled with the screams of the two machine gunners and then the shouts of revenge from the Russian tank crew as it drove over the hole, grinding the remains of the two gunners into that hateful soil…. The treads worked over the hole for a long time, and… the Russian crew kept shouting, ‘Kaputt, Soldat Germanski! Kaputt!’” Surveying a battlefield, Claus Hansmann noted not only the familiar scenes of carnage, “the horse corpses smothered in a flood of blood, the broken wheels, shattered shafts, …widely strewn mountains of munitions of all calibers, weapons,” but also something more hauntingly personal: “the laundry and the pitiful personal effects of the dead thrown into the swamp. Yellowed prints of family photos and the faded ink trails of letters once written with warm hearts, primitive shaving gear and the tragic still-life of mementos become impersonal spill out of the packs and pockets of unknown men. In a muddy tide the water laps over wetly glistening carcasses and washes blood from the corpses.” 22

If Sajer and Hansmann depicted the personal horror of combat, Wilhelm Prüller recorded an episode that conveyed the presense of the absurd in battle. “The C.O.’s jeep… got stuck again,” he noted. “As the driver was trying to decide how to get the jeep going, he saw that the car was sitting over a hole out of which the barrel of an enemy trench mortar was protruding. He had to leave the jeep and saved himself only by galloping like a wild boar over the numerous Russian holes, each one full of Russians and well camouflaged. It is,” Prüller concluded with some understatement, “a nice story.” Fighting his way into Kursk in November 1941, Prüller found a more personal danger, now far from funny: “Every second a bullet wings past us. You never know where it comes from. Pressed flat against the house walls, bent down, your gun ready to shoot, your grenade in the other hand, you creep along.” But a month later Prüller chronicled an incident in which a Russian tank “play[ed] hide and seek around the house corners with our men.” 23

Bernhard Beckering too noted the often ludicrous nature of personal experiences of combat. “The villages in which we were located were attacked. During the rescue of the American wounded we were attacked in an open field from the air by four [American] machines. This opaque muddle is almost comical.” Absurd, yet for others, like Prüller, there were also daily reminders of the very dangerous small war within the larger struggle. “Once we took fire from all sides,” recalled Werner Paulsen of an intensely personal moment. “In front of us. Behind us. It rang out everywhere…. We absolutely didn’t know where the firing came from…. Where was it best to run…? I ran into a cornfield and there I remained lying…. I heard only Russian [voices]…. When it was dark I… crawled back…. toward the road I was totally alone there. The next day Germans came. Tanks came driving down the road. And then I hopped aboard these tanks.” It was an intimate and ominous brush with death: from Paulsen’s platoon of fifty men, only four returned. 24

Hans Werner Woltersdorf had a similar experience of being the prey in a deadly game of cat and mouse. Cut off with five other men by a Russian attack near Zhitomir on the day before Christmas 1943, Woltersdorf’s squad groped its way through dense woods searching desperately for a way back to German lines. Emerging from the woods, Woltersdorf noticed “open terrain, farmland, and after that, a good kilometer away, a village…. Who occupied it? Our troops, surely…. We had no choice but to go over the open terrain…. After fifty meters the first shot was fired. We darted from side to side, and they shot at us as if it were a rabbit hunt…. Fifty meters ahead of us… was a ditch, a life-saving ditch!” Although his men reached the ditch one had been hit in the ankle by Russian fire. Dragging the wounded man along, Woltersdorf struggled through the thick muck. “Was this to be my end?” he wondered. “I imprinted the date of my death in my mind…. I aimed a couple of shots at the group [of Russians]… and drove them under cover…. Only fifty meters up ahead our ditch led into a cross-ditch, which was wider, deeper, and filled with brown water.”