Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

The home front as a real “front” had an irony to it that some Landsers understood more than others. “On Easter Sunday I lay in my swimming trunks with a comrade in the warm spring sun,” wrote Sergeant K. in May 1943, “and we talked back and forth about what we would do if we were at home…. And a few days ago I found out that just at the same time as we dreamed of home, the rubble was smoking in my home city of Mannheim. What a bitter irony!” But Corporal E.G. failed completely to see the irony of German methods turned against the Reich itself. “I regret extraordinarily that you there have to suffer so from the English aerial terror actions,” he raged:

[My] thoughts are tormented that the beautiful city of Düsseldorf is also fallen victim to a vile British terror attack, [that] immense art, cultural, and material treasures are annihilated with brutal force and the criminal war methods of the Tommies have caused nameless suffering…. Even innocent German men, women, and children were killed in the most barbarous manner…, accomplished only through the… brutal attack methods of a predatory state which once wanted to be the representative of the so-called “civilized world(!)[sic].” Now we actually know only too well what Churchill and his infamous clique of British… war criminals mean by the concept of “civilization”!

Nor did Sergeant H.K. doubt the “criminal” methods used by the British in waging war against the German home front: “It is not decisive for the war if the Cologne Cathedral or the Hans Sachs house are turned into ruins…. These pigs… think they can soften us up in that way. But that is a mistake, a mistake. Ah, if only the Führer would send a pair of Estonian, East Prussian, Franconian divisions to England. They would deal a death dance that would give the devil himself the creeps. Oh, I have a rage, a wild hatred.” 35

In the earlier days of the war it had been possible for Harry Mielert to write to his wife, “You should know everything, and I cannot revive the eternal lie that I am cheerful and happy. I also regard this belief, that the home front should not know what happens here, as false. If one has no confidence at all in the psychological powers of resistance of the homeland, then it is in a bad way.” Now total war had so transformed the face of battle that not only was the civilian population experiencing the reality of war, but letters from the fighting front were considered vital to maintaining morale on the home front. A constant theme of Mitteilungen für die Truppe , a front newspaper distributed to every German unit, was the important task that Feldpostbriefe (letters from the field) performed in supporting the mental and spiritual well-being of those at home. Indeed, it characterized letters as “weapons” whose worth and value played a key role in sustaining the “attitude and strength of nerve” of the average civilian. Issue after issue screamed that “the field postal service is a weapon,” that “letters are also weapons,” even that they represented “a type of vitamin for the spirit” which would “lift tired hearts high again.” They were compared to “important nerve fibers that [ran] from the exterior to the interior of the great body of the German nation,” to the “blood circulation of a body.” So important had letters from the front to home become that in August 1943 the commander of the third Panzer Army issued an order to his men that “the soldier must therefore be in his letters…. a blood donor for the belief and will of his relatives.” And an order emanating from Army Group B decried, “It is necessary that every front soldier in his letters home radiate strength, confidence, and trust.” 36In what must have seemed to the Landser the ultimate irony of the war, then, in addition to his own concerns and anxieties he also had to help master those of the home front. Death knew no boundaries, and the task of coping while in the grip of overwhelming forces now encompassed the Heimat as well as the front.

Inevitably, as the war ground on and the various armies found themselves locked in a nervous embrace like wrestlers struggling for the final advantage, the strain of this everyday life of killing took its psychological toll. For at its most concrete, this was a war not of open combat but of waiting, hiding, creeping, brawling—a contest between small groups of men, each group trying to kill the other before they in turn were killed. In this continuous personal confrontation with death, every Landser —“we who are playing the walk-on parts in this madness incarnate,” as one put it—had a breaking point. “The sight of comrades screaming and writhing through final moments of agony had become no more bearable with familiarity,” Guy Sajer confessed, “and I, despite my longing to live or die a hero of the Wehrmacht , was no less an animal stiff with uncontrollable terror.” All Landsers , the most seasoned veteran or a frightened replacement, felt a constant sense of anxiety and had to conquer themselves anew each day. As Harry Mielert noted, “Everything is agitated and in me there is only restless tension and anticipation. We must maintain our nerves…. Each second decides our existence.” “The war, whose thin end we have behind us and whose thick we have before us, weighs very heavily on me,” confessed Lieutenant W.T. in January 1944. “In moments of clarity” there was something “ghostly” about it, he admitted. “Although the facade still holds, how easily one can disintegrate at night.” 37

Many Landsers would have seconded the conclusion of an anonymous soldier at Stalingrad that the “suffering is greater than the possibility of assuaging it.” During the Russian counterattack in December 1941, Corporal H.M. noted that the “retreat has really shattered us, the continually overstrained nerves sometimes want no more.” In seeking a release, some men even turned to thoughts of suicide. “I have already thought often of making an end to my life,” confessed Sergeant W.H. in January 1942. “And as a young man just to force myself to overcome this bridge from life into death costs inner strength that has nothing to do with courage or bravery.” Some Landsers proved unable to refuse to cross the bridge between life and death. Admitted Sergeant K.H. ruefully in February 1942, “Unfortunately there are many men who cannot summon the energy to resist… and therefore face a certain death.” As Harry Mielert well knew, “Here [at the front] you must be either brazen or shattered.” And brazenness he defined as merely an “instinctive, egoistic self-defense,” because you could have “no other attitude.” 38

For others, the strain of combat left them not so much resigned to death as simply indifferent, numb, and only occasionally roused to anger or hope or joy. “From time to time one of us would emerge from torpor and scream,” recalled Guy Sajer. “These screams were entirely involuntary: we couldn’t stop them. They were produced by our exhaustion…. Some laughed as they howled; others prayed. Men who could pray could hope.” “Even death has lost all its horror,” admitted Claus Hansmann. “It has become mundane… banal.” Mielert betrayed the same indifference in May 1943, admitting to his wife, “My concerns are impersonal…. That here and there comrades lie dead or wounded is a part of everyday life.” Later, he confessed, “I hardly know myself anymore…. I am so alone with my feelings, I cannot communicate them to anyone.” And shortly before his death Mielert wrote, “The feeling will not go away from me that I am now an old man and have an illness that will accompany me until death.” Similarly, Klaus Löscher confided in his diary that he “lacked concentration… because the feeling paralyzes me that after all, everything is in vain, without sense, without value. I once again have the strong feeling that I’m not coming back…. A vague listlessness has gripped me and immobilizes every activity.” 39Löscher fell three weeks later.