Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

Certainly, the depersonalization of the enemy, whether civilian or soldier, was a common tendency in combat. “As a soldier, you don’t think [of the enemy] as an individual at all,” Harry Mielert reflected. “You shoot at ‘profitable targets’; that the guy out there is a man with a family, perhaps is even happy at the news that he has become a father…. and soon should get a leave…, you don’t think of that at all.” This dehumanization of the enemy was especially pronounced on the eastern front, where the Russians were portrayed as subhuman foes not only of Germany but of Western civilization. From the outset, the Nazi regime alternately depicted the war as a product of an alleged Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy to destroy Germany or as a crusade against the subhuman “Asiatic” hordes of Bolshevik Russia, propagandistic lines that intersected at various points. More remarkable, however, was the fervor with which many Landsers embraced the twin themes of this ideological crusade. Asiatic hordes, beasts, a universal plague—over and over in their letters many Landsers parroted the Nazi line. The process of depersonalizing and dehumanizing the enemy certainly made it easier for the average soldier to break the social and cultural taboo against killing. Observed Corporal L.K., “They are no longer people, but wild hordes and beasts, who have been bred by Bolshevism in the last twenty years. One must not allow any sympathy to grow for these people.” 58

For most Landsers , though, the enemy—however depersonalized—came to be not merely an abstract concept but a real and constant presence that had to be taken seriously. Helmut von Harnack, in a letter to his father in January 1942, acknowledged “the extreme modesty of the personal needs of the Russian soldier, who in his mixture of doggedness and toughness possesses an enormous power of resistance.” Private M.S. claimed, “I have never yet seen such tough dogs as the Russians.” After marveling at the “often superhuman, purposeless resistance of encircled groups” of Russian troops, Private R.L. conceded that “the Russians are really tough,” an admission that came only grudgingly, since he also referred to them as “a people that requires long and good schooling in order to become human.” Another Landser found “something diabolical” in the fanatic Russian resistance. 59

The furious, often savage Soviet assaults stunned many Landsers. In one minor action “the number, duration and fury of those attacks had exhausted and numbed us completely. Not to hide the truth they had frightened us. Our advance had been… an ordinary move on a fairly narrow sector, and yet they had contested it day after day and with masses of men…. How often, we asked ourselves, would they attack and in what numbers if the objective was really a supremely important one? I think that on that autumn day in 1941 some of us began to realize… that the war against the Soviet Union was going to be bigger than we had thought, …and a sense of depression… settled upon us.” “Their attacks are quite desperate and quite hopeless,” echoed another soldier of the savage fighting at the Kiev pocket in September 1941. “They are driven back with such losses that one wonders how they can find the courage… to keep coming on. Some of the dead have been out there for weeks and are badly decomposed. The sights and smells are bad enough for us, but they have to attack across this carpet of their own dead comrades. Do they have no feeling of fear?” 60

The Landser initially held a contemptuous view of British and American soldiers as well. “We had no respect whatever for the American soldier,” claimed Heinz Hickmann. Another Landser thought “the Americans…. liked a little bit too much comfort.” Adolf Hohenstein was puzzled by the American reluctance to exploit their successes. “We felt they always overestimated us,” he said. “We could not understand why they did not break through [at Normandy]. The Allied soldier never seemed to be trained as we were, always to try to do more than had been asked of us.” Similarly, Martin Pöppel, in his first encounter with the British in Sicily, thought they were “certainly not eager to fight, and their equipment looks fairly pathetic…. In my opinion their spirit is none too good. They tend to surrender as soon as they face the slightest resistance.” After interrogating a Canadian prisoner taken in Italy in September 1943, Pöppel noted in his diary, “He claims they are by no means hungry for battle and don’t know why they are fighting.” 61

This contempt for what he saw as stupidity and poor training gradually changed as Pöppel engaged in fiercer fighting with Allied units. Confronting Americans in Normandy, he initially professed admiration only for their medical equipment and rations, but when an SS battalion deployed next to his unit, Pöppel wrote in his diary: “The SS think they can do it easily [break through American lines], they’ve arrived with enormous idealism, but they’ll get the surprise of their lives against this enemy, which is not short of skill itself.” As the western campaign unfolded, Pöppel found himself more and more impressed with Allied skill and especially Allied equipment. Following his capture, he noted with bitterness, “We drove past kilometer after kilometer of Allied artillery positions, thousands of guns. With us it was always ‘Sweat Saves Blood,’ but with them it was, ‘Equipment Saves Men.’ Not with us. We didn’t need the equipment, did we? After all, we were heroes.” 62

Even for “heroes,” the pressures of gruesome atrocities and the daily dehumanization that so characterized the war, especially on the eastern front, added to the dreary aspects of the battlefield; the shattering noise, the sight of charred, smoking bodies, and the odor of rotting corpses all took their emotional and psychological toll on the Landser. The feeling of helplessness under artillery attack, for example, could reduce the strongest man to a quivering mass of nerves. “Here and now the Russian artillery fire again pushes me into the deepest corner of my foxhole,” acknowledged Harry Mielert in July 1941, “and teaches me the prayer of distress: Lord, have mercy upon us…! The last fatalism, the feeling of being completely in the hands of God and therefore surrendered to His mercy, I still don’t have.” 63

Others too were driven to near despair by the strain of being shelled. “We have suffered here greatly under Russian artillery fire,” complained Corporal W.F., “and we must live day and night in our foxholes in order to gain protection from shrapnel. The holes are full of water. Lice and other types of vermin have already snuck in.” Lamented Corporal M.H., “We… are constantly being heavily attacked by the Russian artillery. I don’t know how long our nerves can yet stand up.” Dieter Georgii, under Russian air attack, wrote, “The ears hurt from the air pressure; it is difficult to keep control over your nerves. Since Friday no sleep and no food…. A moment of despair comes over us.” As Helmut Wagner put it with self-conscious understatement, “Artillery and fighters ‘get on our nerves.’” 64

Artillery and air attacks could easily trample the nerves, and the will, of the strongest and toughest men. “Russian shells were coming over in profusion,” recalled Guy Sajer of a Soviet attack on the Dnieper:

With a cry of despair and a prayer for mercy, we dived to the bottom of our hole, trembling as the earth shook and the intensity of our fear grew. The shocks… were of an extraordinary violence. Torrents of snow and frozen earth poured down on us. A white flash, accompanied by an extraordinary displacement of air, and an intensity of noise which deafened us, lifted the edge of the trench…. Then with a roar, the earth poured in and covered us.