Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

Martin Lindner, a university student from Vienna, speculated in July 1942 on an advance

over Stalingrad toward Astrakhan and then rolling up the Caucasus…. After this isolation of inner Asia, Japan and we will take action against the Anglo-Saxons…. The Mediterranean must be totally controlled by us, naval control of the Mediterranean excludes an advance from Africa against Europe. Then Europe will have more peace, raw materials, and time to prepare itself for a clearing action in the East. The East will secure our freedom of foodstuffs and in addition from there comes oil, coal, and iron ore in substantial quantities. You will see how everything is resolved; in any case, somehow we will be finished with our enemies. 27

Such fantasties corresponded in many cases to Nazi dreams of Lebensraum. But in addition, they allowed the common soldier to believe that the war with Russia would not take place or, if it did, that Germany had powerful allies whose help would soon produce a conclusive victory. These rumors gave the Landser hope, a commodity often in short supply at the front: hope that the war would soon be over, hope that Germany would be victorious, hope that in the end all would be well.

Still, since hope and courage often proved inconsistent, and Landsers suffered under a constant threat of breakdown in combat, the Wehrmacht attempted to strengthen the morale and stiffen the resolve of its forces in a number of ways. One was to stress camaraderie and peer pressure by grouping friends together. Returning to the front after a stay in a military hospital, Guy Sajer was returned not only to his old unit but to his old rifle squad. “I’ll take you to your friends,” his captain said. “I know that being with friends can make up for the lack of a comfortable bed, even for the lack of food…. I always try to group my men as friends.” And, Sajer recalled, “I suddenly felt the full strength of my attachment to all the friends… nearby, an emotion which struck me as… profound.” 28

Another way to brace men at the front was through constant action, the almost inevitable attacks and counterattacks for which the Wehrmacht was legendary. Nothing could be more demoralizing to a soldier than sitting immobile in the face of danger, nursing a feeling of helplessness. “In the morning enemy trench mortars begin to fire at us,” Wilhelm Prüller noted in his diary, “and we suffered some losses. The more passively we react to it, however, the worse our losses are…. There’s only one answer in this situation, too: attack.” This Flucht nach vorn (flight to the front) was thus designed to capitalize on a soldier’s inclination, while under stress, to take action to escape the situation. “There is only one thing,” exclaimed Franz Rainer Hocke in July 1944, “always through, never back. Who slinks away before bombs and shells runs toward death.” One Landser claimed that constant action was “perhaps the best part of a soldier’s life”; another reveled in the “hurried rush forward. That type of war brings joy.” Even a retreat could bring with it a strange sense of comfort and satisfaction. “The journey back was an experience,” wrote a Landser in August 1943. “This war of movement is still more fun than the war of position; it’s only a shame that it’s backward instead of forward.” As a common saying of German soldiers going into Soviet captivity had it, “Heads high, comrades, we’re going forward again.” 29

Whether they were advancing or retreating, mail from home proved to be a lifeline for many Landsers , helping them cope with the constant harsh reality of death, reminding them that they had survived and still lived, and reassuring them that another world not demarcated by combat did exist. “Days in which no mail comes are not days at all,” complained Harry Mielert in January 1943. “A few lines can throw a rosy, invigorating light in this desolate realm…. When I still think of October–November 1941, where we occasionally would go a week without receiving mail, how did we hold out?” Indeed, Mielert wrote to his wife later, “You can’t imagine what so delighted me today: yesterday evening we withdrew over our latest battlefield, across riddled horses and Russians, horses, cows, and people rolled flat by tank columns…. We marched into a village, and in the prepared quarters lay on a table a whole pile of letters for me!” Amazingly, with his nerves strained to the breaking point by savage fighting in the late autumn of 1941, Private H.M. declared that the lack of mail was “his greatest worry.” 30

Through letters the Landser sought to preserve a sense of another life, a world not defined by death and destruction. “Your letter from home tore me away from the mean indifference into which the immediacy of war, without connection to home and neighbors, so easily drags us,” reflected Mielert, “and I again have great joy in life.” Taking a walk on a sunny day in a birch forest with his comrades, Friedrich Grupe noted “horse cadavers, destroyed equipment, dead Red army soldiers lying around.” Little wonder that mail, for Grupe, represented “greetings from a no longer existing world,” or that he wrote bitterly in his diary: “Some Landsers are yet writing a greeting home. What should they write? ‘All is going well with me….’ But what will become of me tomorrow?” At the front, after all, there were only “the dead or the dead to be.” This fear that the war would not be over until you yourself were dead infected other men as well. Still, the great majority of Landsers would have agreed with Martin Pöppel, who noted in his diary in January 1942, “another large delivery of post, which cheers everyone up to no end.” For Pöppel, as for most soldiers, mail had mystical properties. “Post from home, that magic word, that dream, made reality again by letters…. Naturally everyone dives on the post whilst the work, well that can wait until morning.” After all, if only for a brief time, it was “a little bit of home in this miserable existence.” 31

As the war continued, however, even letters from home lost some of their ability to bring cheer. As Pöppel noted in his diary: “My wife wrote to me: ‘Today we are worn out after this terrible hail of bombs. To be hearing the howling of these things all the time, waiting for death at any moment, in a dark cellar, unable to see…. Everything gone…. Is everything going to be destroyed…?’ No, here at the front we mustn’t think about it either…. We understood the feelings of the people at home, suffered with them and feared for our loved ones who had to bear terror bombing.” 32

The Allied aerial bombardment of Germany piled another layer of concern on top of the Landsers’ almost insurmountable daily struggle just to stay alive. The reason for this transformation was duly noted by many Landsers. A feeling of impotence about the destruction of German cities pervaded their letters, for they now worried, as did Prosper Schücking, about “the terrible air attacks at home. A fellow back from leave told me that Hannover is 91 percent destroyed, Herrenhausen is also annihilated, a true shame.” “How wonderful to be allowed to sleep in a bed again!” exclaimed Martin Lindner while on his last leave. “Only the people have become so different,” he mused, “they are driven by a great unrest. It is as if they are all rushing toward a catastrophe, like a train racing over a precipice.” 33

Because of the heavy volume of mail between home and front, and as a result of the occasional home leaves, the Landsers remained fully informed of the horrific events in the homeland. “Before we in our gypsy life again resume our further pull-back, a quick greeting to you on the Berlin ‘front,’” wrote Max Aretin-Eggert with self-conscious irony. “In the event, now the dead of the great cities are themselves being dissolved in flames…. Does the god of war rule… in a blind rage?” Even the hardships of the Russian front seemed to pale in comparison with the difficulties at home. “A third year of the Russian campaign looms,” despaired Jürgen Mogk in September 1942, “but that means nothing when one considers the wider future. It is not the insufficient bread that is wearing down the German people, but rather something far more terrible: the bombardment of German cities by the English! Each of us would rather go hungry than lose his house and home, and yes his loved ones.” 34