Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

“A Russian, Mein Leutnant , a partisan….”

“Do you think I’m going to saddle myself with one of those bastards….”

He shouted an order to the two soldiers who were with him. They walked over to the unfortunate man lying on the snow, and two shots rang out. 50

This kind of casual brutality occurred frequently across occupied Russia. “The partisans make it difficult for us to keep the railroads operating, so that we must act with the strongest methods,” Railroad-Inspector K.S. confided almost nonchalantly, as if recounting a trip to the local market. “In case of attacks a number of people are picked out of the local population, especially Jews, and are shot there on the spot and their houses set on fire…. Recently you could observe hardly 50 meters away… how a group of prisoners of war were simply shot down by the guards.” Because of the daily reports of German soldiers found killed, and since the countryside was so unsafe, confessed Private H.T., “anyone found at night wandering around in the woods or on the main roads without identification from the competent authority is—.” Perhaps because of fear of the censor this Landser left the punishment to his correspondent’s imagination. But as Sergeant A.R. conceded, the most brutal measures proved acceptable in the war in Russia. “Above all, here we must reckon with a small war of bandits,” he wrote. “Just yesterday in a neighboring place a German officer was shot by Russians in civilian clothing. Because of that, though, the whole village was set afire. This eastern campaign is quite a bit different from the western campaign.” Corporal H.G. summed it up:, “This is not exactly a struggle of country against country, but rather one between two fundamentally different ideologies.” 51Again, what made such letters remarkable was the widespread acceptance by average soldiers of these harsh and brutal measures, indeed the almost complete absence of any sense of moral or personal outrage.

In fact, indifference can itself be seen as an expression of support for the ideological goals of the Hitler regime. The testimony of one soldier was perhaps not atypical. “It was near Velikie Luki,” Private Landowski remembered. “We were on the march…. The road ran through a ravine…. We made a noontime rest, and then all of a sudden shooting broke out. The SS there in that ravine had driven together around 300 Russian prisoners and shot all of them…. It was barely 500 meters away from us, where we had taken our rest. But I saw the dead…. [They lay] all one on top of the other…. I assumed that they had somehow been driven together in a small group, because they stood fairly close together. And then they were aimed at from both sides. With machine guns.” And how had he reacted to seeing Russian prisoners shot by the SS?

It was already clear to us that it would have repercussions. That our prisoners [in Russian hands] would be treated in the same way…. Oberst [Colonel] Blunk was certainly a good officer. He had received high decorations, he was also not so nervous. I had experienced how he himself went forward into the first position and fired a rifle and threw grenades. And this man let a woman be hanged. I saw the woman hanging there…. It was a Russian woman, and the Oberst had ordered her to bake bread…. Now it may be that she had replied, “no flour.”… But despite her having done nothing else, she was just hanged. She hung on a kind of barn directly next to the street, and then in Russian it was written on a placard why she hung there. A young woman. 52

But he had not done anything to intervene. After all, a “good officer” had done it, and as Friedrich Grupe noted after the war, “We marched… always conscious that as good soldiers we had to fulfill our hard duty.” 53Left unspoken, of course, was the fact that it was hard duty in service of the Nazi regime.

Offhand brutality was no unusual occurrence. Matthias Jung remembered the consequences for Russian civilians after eighteen German soldiers had been killed in a partisan attack: “The whole place, everything [was destroyed]! Totally! The civilians who had done it, all the civilians who were in the place. In each corner stood a machine gun, and then all the houses were set on fire and whoever came out—In my opinion with justice!” The civilians not incinerated had obviously been shot to death, but such was the nature of the war in Russia that this unwarranted violence seemed justified to an average soldier. Fritz Harenberg remembered an incident of gratuitous brutality in Sarajevo: There was a Jewish cemetery close to his quarters, he recalled, and one day “there arrived among us the Waffen-SS… and the Gestapo. And then somebody revealed to the Gestapo that buried in the Jewish cemetery were money and valuable things. The Gestapo drove the Jews together, they had to dig it up. Hauled a lot out of there, found a lot.” 54In front of his eyes Jews were gathered together and forced to dig up their own cemetery, certainly a painful form of degradation. And yet Harenberg condoned it, accepted the official explanation that valuables were buried there, recollected it as nothing more than a part of everyday army life, the normal routine.

Herbert Selle remembered that at a public execution of Jews in August 1941 in Zhitomir, soldiers were “sitting on rooftops and platforms watching the show. The execution was arranged as a form of popular entertainment.” Another soldier detailed the incident:

One day a Wehrmacht vehicle drove through Zhitomir with a megaphone. Over the loudspeaker we were informed… that at a certain time that day Jews would be shot in the market-place…. Upon arriving there I saw that fifty to sixty Jews (men, women, and children) had assembled…. There were also, of course, members of the Wehrmacht among the onlookers…. Finally all of the Jews assembled there had to get on to the truck…. Then an announcement came over the loudspeaker that we should all follow the lorry to the shooting….

There was a ditch, filled with water…. SS men stood at either side of this ditch. One by one the Jews had to jump over the ditch…. Those who fell in the ditch were beaten with various types of blunt instruments by the SS men and driven or pulled out of the ditch….

About thirty meters behind the ditch I saw a stack of logs…. This wooden wall was used as a bullet butt…. There must have been five or six people lined up there each time. They then received a shot in the neck from the carbines. Row upon row were shot in the same way. The dead from each row were dragged away immediately…. I stood about twenty meters from the ditch and about fifty meters from the wood-stack. 55

Not even beatings and mass murder as public spectacle was unusual. Another Landser , also in the vicinity of Zhitomir, recalled that one afternoon in late July 1941, hearing rifle and pistol fire, he investigated and found executions being carried out behind an embankment. “In the earth was a pit about seven to eight meters long and perhaps four meters wide…. The pit itself was filled with innumerable human bodies, …both male and female…. Behind the piles of earth dug from it stood a squad of police…. There were traces of blood on their uniforms. In a wide circle around the pit stood scores of soldiers from the troop detachments stationed there, some of them in bathing trunks, watching the proceedings. There were also an equal number of civilians, including women and children.” 56

Not only did some Landsers witness the shootings as grand entertainment, but on occasion they actively assisted the police in the grisly business. One member of an Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squad) claimed after the war that “on some occasions members of the Wehrmacht took the carbines out of our hands and took our place in the firing-squad.” Little wonder, then, that after watching the murder of four-hundred Jews by execution squads in Lithuania, one Landser remarked, “May God grant us victory because if they get their revenge, we’re in for a hard time.” 57So much had the perceptions of many Landsers been shaped by Nazi ideology and propaganda that the unthinkable became banal. These men did not think of the innocent human beings who were being killed but worried instead about the consequences to them personally. Atrocities were being committed, but it was just a job, after all, so pick the best weapons and get on with it.