Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

Friedrich Grupe exhibited a yearning for companionship as well, noting in his diary that some “young, attractive French girls came by [the post]. Could a starved Landser simply let them pass? What a wonder that some of the young women stopped for more than a half hour.” While training in East Prussia in the spring of 1941, Grupe again revealed this yearning not for sex but for affection: “I made friends with a young BDM [ Bund deutscher Mädel, Association of German Girls] leader and spent many unforgettable hours with her.” Doing what? Nothing so tawdry and brusque as sexual indulgence. “In the evenings we sat in a cafe in Allenstein and observed the people dressed in their spring clothes.” It was the companionship he sought and received that was important, and that he missed when the time came to leave. “We took leave of Arys with a heavy heart,” he confessed. “I carry the picture of an East Prussian girl with me, on this path into uncertainty.” 21

Along with unfulfilled sexual desires and the gnawing yearning for affection, some Landsers also had to cope with the specter of jealously and its often ugly consequences. “Thanks a lot for that ‘lovely’ letter which I received today,” complained Karl Fuchs to his wife shortly before his death. “The person who wrote these words is a stranger to me…. I’m faced with enough nonsense out here every day that I’d just as soon not receive any from home…. Apparently you’ve grown indifferent to me. I suppose the main thing is, though, that you’re leading a dazzling life and are becoming more beautiful from day to day.” 22Here Fuchs voiced the fear of many Landsers , that while they languished on the edge of death their wives or sweethearts back home were enjoying the good life. To them, it seemed the ultimate act of betrayal.

“I hope,” wrote an anonymous soldier in April 1940 to his fiancée, shortly before he was to be granted wedding leave, “that I will find you happy and cheerful and not in such a state as you were in when you wrote your last letter to me.” And what was the reason for the foul state of mind? His fiancée obviously had gone against his wishes and was working despite his injunctions. “If only you were my wife already and we had moved into our home,” he continued, “you would naturally be under my care and would have to obey my orders precisely. I can just not understand that despite your promise not to do it, you are still slaving away at the shop. You know that it is not good for you and that I will no longer tolerate it, and should nothing change you will get to know the other side of me. I’m letting you know now for the last time.” The authoritarian tone here betrayed a fear that he was losing influence, that his fiancée had grown away from him in some important way. Indeed, some marriages did fail to survive the strains of war. “Now that I know where I stand,” a Landser wrote bitterly from Stalingrad, “I release you from your vow…. I looked for a wife with a generous heart, but it wasn’t supposed to be that generous…. I advise you to choose good grounds for divorce and,” he added perhaps unnecessarily, “speed up the procedure.” 23

Separation from loved ones proved difficult for all involved, for it was not only front soldiers who felt the pangs of loneliness and jealousy. “Now again I have here a letter that a widow of a fallen soldier wrote me,” Harry Mielert complained to his wife. “She wants to know precisely the details of his death, be informed about his suffering and last words…. These wives cause me terrible pain. They cling with the greatest obsession to everything which remains mortal and earthly.” To write letters to grieving widows was an onerous duty, certainly, for it served to heighten fears of one’s own mortality. In the massive uprooting caused by war, however, women whose husbands or lovers were at the front suffered equally the desperate longing for love. “It appears to me,” Mielert reassured his wife in March 1943, “that you fear that if I fall you also will be quickly forgotten…. Should I have to be in life-long imprisonment in Siberia, I would never give you up, never, and I also think that if I lay in a grave and my spiritual being had another existence I would not forget you, so that one day you must also come to me, to an absolute unification. That is the achievement of love. It goes beyond all borders.” 24

Such a pledge of undying love was harmless enough in itself, but emotion could get the best of a Landser . As Mielert also noted: “The real contact [with their husbands] that so many wives seek to get through fantasies such as newsreels, radios, and newspapers” failed to satisfy, so that an unresolved yearning remained on both sides. “You are so dear to me!” he confessed. “Have I deserved it? Yet as an impulsive woman you can rage and stamp your feet that I’m not attempting by all means to come to you.” This anger, though, often had dire consequences, as Mielert was well aware, for he knew “some men who deserted out of love.” Amid all the ironies of the battlefield, perhaps this was the greatest, that some soldiers reached the breaking point not from fear but out of love. As Mielert concluded in September 1943, what “we rough warriors… lack is love. That’s why we’re all so lonely among ourselves.” 25

In his loneliness and fear the Landser often sought solace even in the intangible. Ironically, that age-old staple of all armies, spreading rumors (what the Landsers called Latrinenparole , or latrine talk), evinced a reassuring tone, since the rumors most often concerned an end to the war or at least one’s impending removal from the front lines. Despite the bustling commotion in preparation for the attack on the Soviet Union, activity that could have only one purpose, Alfred Opitz recalled that many Landsers chose to believe the rumor going round that “a great undertaking in the direction of the east was imminent, however not against the Soviet Union… but against England, which would be attacked in the Middle East. For this purpose the Soviet Union agreed to a transit march of seven German divisions through south Russian territory in the direction of the Caucasus-Iran. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union would remain neutral.” On the eve of Barbarossa, Wilhelm Prüller too heard that Stalin would “let us march through voluntarily.” Friedrich Grupe picked up the same gossip. Despite the fact that “the company had already been given instruction about Russia [and] that the Cyrillic alphabet had been learned,” Grupe noted that “the strangest rumors were swirling around the camp: that German troops had supposedly gotten the permission of the Soviet regime… to travel through Russia in order to come to grips with the Tommies in India. Then our troops supposedly will link up with Rommel in the Caucasus.” In similar fashion, Lieutenant H.H. related, in a letter of late May 1941, “The wildest rumors about Russia are circulating here. The one says that we have leased the Ukraine for 90 years and have received permission for a transit march toward Turkey and Iraq. The other asserts that the danger of war has been averted because of Stalin’s attitude…. Each latrine races after the other [in rumors].” 26

Amid the appalling hardships and severe conditions of the winter war of 1941–42, who could be surprised that Prüller day after day in his diary related the latest gossip about being relieved and sent to the south of France, or Rumania, or Turkey, or anywhere warm. In the midst of the bitter fighting of February 1942, Corporal R.M. relayed a hot rumor:

The southern army will break through the Caucasus to the Caspian Sea and divide itself into two parts. The one will move to the mouth of the Volga, the other through the Caucasus in a southerly direction…. Turkey will emerge from its heretofore strong neutral position to our favor and with its weapons will help force the victory…. In Africa at a suitable point a great offensive will be started with the goal of connecting with the comrades coming out of southern Palestine. An invasion of England will come in the course of the summer of 1942…. Between these battles… Japan ought in the meantime to have given the death blow to the English and Americans in the Pacific and India.