Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

They reached the deeper ditch, but the Russians kept advancing. At the point of giving up, Woltersdorf glimpsed a speck in the distance. “It was neither a tank nor a lorry, it was much too fast. It was a private car, a German one…. A hundred meters more. We got ready to jump. Forty meters more. Now we jumped on to the road, holding our submachine guns in front of us. The driver stopped…. ‘For God’s sake, don’t do anything stupid,’ he cried, ‘jump in; they’re coming.’” Shaken but alive, Woltersdorf reflected on his luck with the god of war: “In the following days, more than sixty men returned in similarly bizarre fashions; the rest…, those who had sat and sung and laughed, sitting on the wall of the Tude bridge—.” 25Left unspoken, Woltersdorf knew what the fate of the remainder had been. The real war was deeply personal, as each Landser fighting his own lonely battle understood.

On yet another occasion, Woltersdorf experienced again that sense of battlefield intimacy, of war reduced to isolated combat between individuals. “We had grown used to destroying tanks in close combat,” he noted, but on this occasion the destruction proved intensely personal:

We sneaked up to it through the wood from behind…. My heart was pounding…. I climbed carefully onto the tank from behind and approached the hatch cover…. Damn! How did one get the cover open? I braced myself against the turret with my thighs and tore at the cover until I realized that a bolt was fastened with a padlock.

So the crew was locked in…. They were riding in a sealed coffin…. I quickly withdrew my thigh from the close-combat opening and held firmly to the disc that closed it. Now what…? My hand grenade was too thick to fit through the hole.

Then I thought of my flare pistol…. Carefully I inserted the muzzle of the flare pistol into the hole…. Very quickly: muzzle in. They fired immediately, but I had the pistol out again already…. They were shouting, loud commands and shrill cries of fear…. Then there was a fearful thunderclap…. The turret rose a few centimeters, tilted to one side, and came crashing down…. I couldn’t get the men from the Moscow tank brigade out of my head. What a drama must have been played out in their coffin! 26

That same sense of a private struggle pervaded the thoughts of a German lieutenant fighting in Stalingrad:

We have fought during fifteen days for a single house, with mortars, grenades, machine-guns and bayonets. Already by the third day fifty-four German corpses are strewn in the cellars, on the landings, and the staircases. The front is a corridor between burnt-out rooms; it is the thin ceiling between two floors…. There is a ceaseless struggle from noon to night. From story to story, faces black with sweat, we bombard each other with grenades in the middle of explosions, clouds of dust and smoke…, floods of blood, fragments of… human beings. Ask any soldier what half an hour of hand-to-hand struggle means in such a fight…. The street is no longer measured by meters but by corpses….

Stalingrad is no longer a town. By day it is an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when night arrives, one of those scorching, howling, bleeding nights, the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately to gain the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell, …only men endure. 27

Only men persisted; the savagery of combat led twenty-year-old Hans-Heinrich Ludwig to a similar judgment: “Man is so tough,” he concluded a letter simply; no elaboration was necessary. 28

In these accounts one gets a sense of combat as a deeply private experience, as an individual encounter with life, fate, and suffering in the spaces that the larger war failed to fill. Battle could make a Landser feel forlorn and abandoned, with little but his weapon and his few comrades to comfort him. Many fought, indeed, with a quiet expectation of death. As Friedrich Leonhard Martius wrote despairingly from the eastern front, “We are still in our wolf’s den and some of us go out daily: weapons and iron for a mighty struggle against flesh and hearts.” Mused Max Aretin-Eggert, “The individual will always be consumed more and more by the war and the organizational machine. But even in this process of consumption there lies an unimaginable performance by our troops.” 29In a struggle that was personal to the end, some soldiers saw themselves as men with a trade, and in a strange way they were proud of it.

If some men functioned to the rhythm of the deadly machine, remote from anything but the need to feed it, they could not outlast it. For many Landsers, therefore, the defining characteristic of combat was its elemental destructiveness. “At 4.00 alarm is sounded,” recounted Wilhelm Prüller of one of the many Russian assaults in December 1941:

Supported by artillery, the Russians attack to the north of the railway…. I place [my] Platoon between the houses and spread out the carbines…. One MG (machine gun) is to shoot continually at the Russians lying in front of us… to keep them from advancing. The other MG’s and all those with carbines are to go into position. I shall have a white Verey light shot up, and in that moment we shall aim and shoot with all our various weapons…. For 9 seconds it’s like broad daylight, you can see the whole ground in front of us…. My boys are already shooting like mad….

Slowly it gets light and now the enemy is lying in front of us on a silver plate…. I yell at the top of my lungs to the Russians: …“Hands up! Surrender!” One by one the hands go up….

The prisoners are herded together into a house, but there aren’t as many as we’d expected. When we return, we discover the reason: the many enemy dead still there. All shot through the head….Some of the dead are still burning, set on fire by our Verey lights. Then we start counting: …150 dead. 30

Ferocious slaughter defined combat for a terrified Guy Sajer as well. “We were going to be part of a full-scale attack,” he remembered of the German assault at Belgorad in the spring of 1943. “A heavy sense of foreboding settled over us, and the knowledge that soon some of us would be dead was stamped on every face…. All of us were haunted by so many thoughts that conversation was impossible…. Sleep was [also] impossible… because of our anxiety about what lay ahead.” Apprehension and uncertainty preceded the battle, yet this was not the first experience of combat for these men. But as Sajer well knew, no one got used to traversing that thin line between life and death. Indeed, when cold steel could crack skulls like eggshells, the consuming passion was to dig deep into the ground—yet out they went into the night. “Our brains emptied, as if we had been anesthetized,” he noted. “Everyone grabbed his gun and, …sticking close together, followed the trench to the forward positions…. We moved out in good order, exactly as we’d been taught…. One by one, we left the last German positions, and crawled out onto the warm earth of no man’s land…. During such moments, even naturally reflective characters suddenly feel their heads emptying, and nothing seems to matter.” 31

Training, the comfort of a learned routine, enabled Sajer and his buddies to stifle their fear and negotiate their way into no-man’s-land. Still, no amount of training could adequately prepare a young man for the elemental terror of combat, the awful loneliness of confronting the hidden gun that lay ahead. “Our immediate surroundings… were shaken by a series of thunderous explosions,” Sajer recalled. “For a minute we thought that the whole mass of creeping soldiers we had seen just the minute before had been blown to pieces. Everywhere…. young men were jumping up and trying to rush through the tangles of barbed wire…. I could see what was happening only with the greatest difficulty…. Through the… smoke, we were able to observe the horrible impact of our projectiles on the lost mass of Red soldiers in the trench in front of us.” 32