Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

Everything, even the earth, seemed to be burning. “We ride into the uncertain night that is filled with the droning of motors,” noted Helmut Pabst in August 1942 while on the move toward the Volga. “The earth shudders under powerful blows, incendiary bombs glitter…, violent flashes in the darkness…. The scene is framed with continually changing crescents of trembling flares: ‘Here we are comrades, here we are!’ That is the mute cry of the outermost limits that has something strangely unreal about it. We ride toward this frontier…, amid the ruins of the dead city in which only the fire lives with its insipid, sweet smell.” Six months later, retreating back across the Volga, that river of fate, Pabst painted a picture of bleak and still fiery destruction: “In the streets yawn gaping holes…. The flames beat red in the hollows of a stone building, powerfully they shoot through the roof. The area has become desolate in these days: houses and spires, the last milestones, stand no more…. Flashes twitch behind us and fill the space from horizon to horizon. The muffled detonations roll back to us. It is a drama of horribly beautiful power.” In this “landscape of horror and death” the completeness of the destruction stunned even hardened veterans such as Pabst, who admitted that what he witnessed “was only a part of the destruction, a laughably small part.” As another Landser wrote in March 1943, “Today we had to take all of [the males] from the village that were left behind last time…. You can imagine the wailing of the women as even the children were taken from them…. Three houses in a village were set on fire by us, and a woman burned to death as a result. So it will be uniformly along the front in all the villages…. It was a fantastic sight for the eye to behold, as far as you could see, only burning villages.” 39

It was an example of the wanton cruelty and destruction, added to the horrors of battle, that accompanied the Wehrmacht in Russia. Christopher Browning has pointed out that for the average German in Eastern Europe, the mass murder policies of the Nazi regime were hardly exceptional or aberrational but a routine part of everyday life. “A partisan group blew up our vehicles,” noted Private H.M., a member of an intelligence unit, “[and]… shot the agricultural administrator and a corporal assigned to him in their quarters…. Early yesterday morning 40 men were shot on the edge of the city…. Naturally there were a number of innocent people who had to give up their lives…. One didn’t waste a lot of time on this and just shot the ones who happened to be around.” 40Such executions occurred almost daily. Claus Hansmann has left a remarkably vivid image of an execution of Soviet partisans:

“In a gray, war-torn street in Kharkov. Agitated, expectant faces in pale misery. Businesslike, the men of the field police emerge and tie with oft-practiced skill seven nooses on the balcony railing and then disappear behind the door of the dark room…. The first human package, tied up, is carried outside. The limbs are tightly bound…, a cloth covers his face. The hemp neckband is placed around his neck, hands are tied tight, he is put on the balustrade and the blindfold is removed from his eyes. For an instant you see glaring eyeballs, like those of an escaped horse, then wearily he closes his eyelids, almost relaxed, never to open them again. He now slides slowly downward, his weight pulls the noose tight, his muscles begin their hopeless battle. The body works mightily, twitches, and within the fetters a bit of life struggles to its end. It’s quick; one after the other are brought out, put on the railing…. Each one bears a placard on his chest proclaiming his crime….: Partisans and just punishment…. Sometimes one of them sticks out his tongue as if in unconscious mockery and immoderate amounts of spittle drip down on the street…. Then a few laugh, jokes meant to reach those yet above. 41

And why this seemingly callous reaction? “You are pleased at the death of another,” explained Hansmann, certainly aware of a soldier’s relief that the gods of war had passed him by this time. “You laugh, an unexpected little play…, laugh somehow relieved.” And then it is over. What next? “The dead are boring,” Hansmann mused. “They accuse the living only in silent reproach. The streets become empty. The people move on, you turn toward the market square, in order to buy onions and garlic. You have shown them the last bit of attention, you are hungry!” A sudden human drama, a bit of diversion, and then off to eat: a commonplace sequence in the everyday life of war. As Hansmann observed elsewhere, “In death all are the same…. Equally stiff, equally silent, and the same clods of earth weigh heavily on them.” 42

Not all the men took such occurrences for granted, however. “At the moment I am experiencing horrible days,” wrote Lieutenant A.B. of railroad construction company 115 in October 1942. “Every day 30 of my prisoners die, or I must allow them to be shot. It is certainly a picture of cruelty…. The prisoners, only partially clothed, partly without coats, could no longer get dry. The food is not sufficient, and so they collapse one after the other….When one sees what a human life really means, then an inner transformation in your own thinking happens. A bullet, a word, and a life is no more. What is a human life?” In the war in Russia, certainly, precious little. 43

The burden of atrocity weighed even more heavily on other Landsers because of an inner recognition of the brutality of their own actions. “The world has seen many great, even violent wars,” despaired Kurt Vogeler, “but probably at no time in its existence has there been a war that can be compared with this current one in Eastern Europe…. The poor, unhappy Russian people! Its distress is unspeakable and its misery heart-rending…. This era… knows nothing more of humanity. Brutal power is the characteristic of our century…. What an unfortunate war is this human slaughter in Eastern Europe! A crime against humanity!” Similarly, Heinz Küchler shuddered at the brutality of the Russian war, where “all evidence of humanity appears to have disappeared in deed and in heart and in conscience.” In response to complaints from home about the destruction of German cities, Johannes Huebner tellingly replied from Russia, “Death is the wages of sin.” Harry Mielert shared the sentiment: “The quintessence appears to me to be that there is a punishment for a person…who does evil to others.” Private L.B. merely issued a stark warning. “None,” he wrote, “will remain unpunished by this war, each will get his just desert, in the homeland as at the front.” 44

In the heat of battle, however, at the moment of wild release and furious excitement, some atrocities seemed almost natural acts. In a crisis of battle, the collapse of one side into fear and panic seemed to goad men to commit brutalities; sensing weakness and fear on the other side apparently provoked some into an enraged ruthlessness. Guy Sajer recalled that following a failed Russian attack in which a number of his comrades had been killed and mutilated,

the sound of firing and the groans of the wounded incited us to massacre the Russians…. An attacking army is always more enthusiastic than an army on the defensive….

Much later that night we witnessed a tragedy that froze my blood…. A prolonged and penetrating cry rose from the hole on my left…. Then there was a cry for help….

We arrived at the edge of a foxhole, where a Russian, who had just thrown down his revolver, was holding his hands in the air. At the bottom of the hole, two men were fighting. One of them, a Russian, was waving a large cutlass, holding a man from our group pinned beneath him. Two of us covered the Russian who had raised his hands, while a young Obergefreiter (corporal) jumped into the hole and struck the other Russian a blow on the back of his neck with a trenching tool…. The German who had been under him… ran up to ground level. He was covered with blood, brandishing the Russian knife with one hand… while with the other he tried to stop the flow of blood pouring from his wound.