Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

Despite the chaos and confusion, Sajer had a vivid impression of how delicate even the bodies of tough men were, how they could be torn to raw chunks in a flash:

A huge tank rolled over the ground… which was overflowing with the bodies of Russian soldiers. Then a second and a third tank plunged through the bloody paste, and rolled on, their treads stuck with horrible human remnants. Our noncom gave an involuntary cry of horror at the sight [of]… this foul reality….

It is difficult even to try to remember moments… when there is nothing under a steel helmet but… a pair of eyes which translate nothing more than would the eyes of an animal facing mortal danger. There is nothing but the rhythm of explosions… and the cries of madmen…. And there are the cries of the wounded, of the agonizingly dying, shrieking as they stare at a part of their body reduced to pulp…. There are the tragic, unbelievable visions…: guts splattered across the rubble and sprayed from one dying man onto another; tightly riveted machines ripped like the belly of a cow which has just been sliced open, flaming and groaning; trees broken into tiny fragments…. And then there are the cries of officers and noncoms, trying to shout across the cataclysm to regroup their sections and companies.

The battle was not yet over, and the extreme tension it generated was almost unbearable…. During our advance, we crossed a frightful slaughtering ground…. Each step made us realize with fresh horror what could become of our miserable flesh…. We [encountered] an open-air hospital… from which the shrieks and groans came so thick and fast it sounded like a scalding room for pigs. We were staggered by what we saw. I thought I would faint…. We crossed the enclosure with our eyes fixed on the sky, seeing as if in a dream young men howling with pain, with crushed forearms or gaping abdominal wounds, staring with incomprehension at their own guts. 33

As with many other soldiers (Heinz Küchler claimed, “The pictures that you see border on delusions and nightmares”), the horrible scenes produced in Sajer a sense of unreality, but it was a nightmare that refused to end:

The Russians began a bombardment of unprecedented ferocity. Everything became opaque, and the sun vanished from our eyes…. Screams of fear froze in our constricted throats….

Suddenly a human figure crashed into our hole… [and] shouted to us…: “My whole company was wiped out….!” He carefully lifted his head just over the edge of the embankment as a series of explosions began to rip through the air beside us. His helmet and a piece of his head were sent flying, and he fell backward, with a horrifying cry. His shattered skull crashed into Hals’s hands, and we were splattered with blood and fragments of flesh. Hals threw the revolting cadaver as far as he could, and buried his face in the dirt. Nothing remains for those who have survived such an experience but a sense of uncontrollable imbalance, and a sharp, sordid anguish…. We felt like lost souls, who had forgotten that men are made for something else. 34

Sajer and his comrades had been into the realm of death, had smelled death, had witnessed firsthand the promiscuous, wholesale, anonymous death that accompanied combat, and it was an experience forever stamped into their being. Others, too, attested to the extravagant horrors, to what Wilhelm Prüller termed the “revoltingly wonderful” nature of warfare. Following a pitched battle with Russian tanks, Hans Woltersdorf noted, “Now we finally had the opportunity to take a look at the tank that only a shot in the track had stopped. Had the first grenades not pierced it? Indeed, they had. The men looked into the tank, and they were near vomiting, so they didn’t look further but instead went away, embarrassed. A headless torso, bloody flesh, and intestines were sticking to the walls…. It wasn’t good to look into the tank…. One always sees oneself sticking to the walls in a thousand pieces like that, without a head.” 35It was not good to look at, or to think too much about such sights, yet the distressing reality of combat intruded constantly. “Next to us barked the shots of another anti-tank gun,” Friedrich Grupe recorded in his diary of the abhorrent events all around. “The column divided, Russian soldiers sprang out of the trucks, were caught by the bursts of the machine guns, often remained hanging between the running board and the ground, burning bodies fell out of the vehicles.” And after a second skirmish: “In the roadside graves lie mountains of dead…. We discover completely charred corpses.” Another encounter left Grupe virtually numb as he viewed the tormented postures of the dead, left as a thousand bloody rags. “The remaining [Russians] we saw lying there when it became light,” he wrote with an uncomfortable sense of foreboding, “mowed down by our machine guns in long rows on a sled path, a whole company…. Man after man they lie mute and rigid. We swallow silently at this picture of horror.” Spring was blooming, Grupe concluded, “but death triumphed here.” 36

Harry Mielert recounted a “strange occurrence” to his wife in a letter in March 1943, only a small incident but one that well expressed the malignant atmosphere, the revulsion felt by many at the madness of battle:

In the last great mass attack on our position… a village in front of our main battle line was totally destroyed and all the cellars, which the Russians had defended stubbornly, were blown up…. Our combat outposts are now in the aforementioned village…. A cellar entrance appeared in the melting snow and a Landser … went inside and found four dead Russians. While he was attempting to turn two of them on their sides…, two of the dead rose up…. [They] groaned and with difficulty raised their hands. They were brought into the light of day, where they [told us]… the following: After the attack these four had crept into the cellar. German soldiers threw hand grenades inside…. Two men were killed by the hand grenades, these two wounded. They fed themselves on the potatoes which lay there by the hundreds. In this way they held out four weeks, together with two dead bodies, their own excretion, their feet… frozen, and yet they still wouldn’t venture out.

The anonymous terror, at least for a moment, had again been personalized, but Mielert tried to no avail to gain an insight into the nature of the abhorrent. “We tried in vain to glean some impressions from them,” he noted. “What they said was: cold and tired.” So common, so profane, so human. With disappointment, Mielert concluded merely, “You can see from this example what humans can withstand.” 37The deeper malignity of combat eluded even so reflective a soldier as Mielert. Here suffering seemed merely banal and sordid, not sweet or heroic. Perhaps the only real lesson to be learned was that even in the midst of war’s cruelties, life went on.

During the winter battles of 1941–1942 and again in the scorched earth retreat out of Russia, the Landser clung stubbornly to life amid devastation on a scale difficult to imagine. “It is not possible to give an impression of these ghostly weeks,” wrote Günter von Scheven in the midst of the bitter fighting of February 1942. “The horrors I have gone through hammer at me in my sleep.” Echoed Werner Pott, less than two weeks after the Soviet counteroffensive in front of Moscow, “For weeks we’ve been in action without let-up or rest, day after day…. marching in snow storms at -25 C, frozen noses and feet that make you want to scream when you have to take your boots off, filth, vermin, and other such unedifying things…. Next to all the personal exertions I feel sorry for the civilian population whose houses have been set afire in our retreat and who have been abandoned to famine. The complete cruelty of the war is obvious!” 38