Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

Given the constant elemental anxiety, the bleak sense that killing had assumed a life of its own, and the lurking fear that “only if I die will the war be over,” even a moment spent in combat stamped a Landser for a lifetime. “In spite of the confusion swirling around the soldier in combat,” claimed Siegfried Knappe,

he still retained a clear sense of his own strength and the strength of the men beside him; he felt an almost palpable sense of solidarity with his fellow soldiers. This was the brotherhood of the combat soldier.

Improbable as life in combat was, after a while it became the only reality, and the combat soldier soon found it difficult to remember anything else. He would try to remember the face of a loved one and he could not. The soldier on his left and on his right became the only reality and now, in truth, the only loved ones. To the combat soldier, life became an endless series of hard physical work, raw courage, occasional laughter, and a terrible sense of living out a merciless fate.

At the front, all shared this forlorn view. “I had often thought that if I managed to live through the war I wouldn’t expect much of life,” Guy Sajer admitted. “Terror had overturned all my preconceptions, and… one no longer knew what elements of ordinary life to abandon in order to maintain some semblance of balance…. I had already sworn to myself during moments of intense fear that I would exchange anything, fortune, love, even a limb, if I could simply survive.” The very act of survival itself often seemed a daring blow against fate. “Who speaks of victory?” Harald Henry wondered bitterly in November 1941. “Survival is everything.” Some Landsers , in fact, saw survival as the ultimate act of heroism. “In your last letter you thought I was a hero and even called me a hero,” a twenty-three-year-old company commander chastised his wife. “Please don’t write that again, for… I imagine a hero differently, and up to now I have still not met a man who was a hero; or, all of our soldiers here at the front are heroes.” Each Landser , concluded Corporal O.S. sardonically, “should get the Iron Cross, but along with it most also get the wooden one.” 59

The hardships created by their daily existence and the capriciousness of death led many Landsers to adopt a certain fatalistic resignation that represented a way of coping with their situation. War, to Wilhelm Rubino, created “hard hours, where one stood small and helpless before a fate that decided your existence and nonexistence.” Similarly, Bernhard Beckering despaired, “We stand time and again helpless and apprehensive before death.” Gottfried Gruner put it more succinctly, remarking with pure resignation that “everything goes along because it must.” Harry Mielert agreed, noting that it was “strange how you can occasionally let yourself be overwhelmed by lassitude. In actuality, it perhaps takes a threat to your life alone to overcome this debility.” 60

Still, this sense of fate as an independent creature, of having no control over one’s destiny, of being in a situation where “the fate of the individual lay in the hands of blind chance,” could be strangely comforting to some. “Fate is difficult, often incomprehensibly hard,” explained Hans Pietzcker, “[but] we who often look death in the face wherever we go have learned to walk opposite him with composure. Certainly he will come sooner or later.” Siegfried Knappe had “become fatalistic about [death] and assume[d] that eventually it would happen to me and there was nothing I could do to prevent it. I did not wait for it to happen… but I knew that I was going to be killed or badly wounded sooner or later…. I accepted my eventual death or maiming as part of my fate. Once I had forced myself to accept that, I could put it out of my mind and go on about my duties.” Similarly, Lieutenant K. had come “to confront [death] with a manly courage, that is, with a quiet but steady resolve and a clear consciousness of the danger.” Helmut Vethake believed that standing before the hard fate of death taught one “pure, total humility, …humility that compels me to contemplate the infinite purity, perfection, and patience of every plant and flower.” 61

Other Landsers seemed almost to glory in the strange mystery of chance. “The front lines, the entrenched riflemen have greatly impressed me,” wrote Hans-Heinrich Ludwig in October 1941, “especially their attitude. These fellows are fabulous. A complete submission to fate.” To Heinz Küchler there was no sense to the war—indeed, “its sense lay in its senselessness”—yet he maintained that “our greatness must lie in the ability not to master fate but rather to maintain our personality, our will, our love in defiance of fate and, unbowed, to be a sacrifice.” Sacrifice and suffering as transcendent glory was a theme also emphasized by Siegbert Stehmann in September 1944: “How the horror of these times has affected us, that we accept the omnipresence of terror with an equanimity that we never could have imagined! The German people has almost surpassed the legendary capacity for suffering of Russia. Perhaps this is the greatness of its hour. ‘Whoever tramples on his misfortune stands taller.’… For have we soldiers not already made the highest and last inner farewell and humbly take each day… as a gift of grace?” Willi Huber valued the fact that “this war, even as gruesome and atrocious as it is, has given us once again splendid examples of decent and upright men who sacrifice themselves.” Trapped in Stalingrad, exhausted by the bitter fighting and lack of food, and nearing the end of his resistance, Lieutenant H.H. could still assert: “To maintain your loyalty with death before your eyes is a service that must prove us worthy,” and Captain H. claimed to be “extremely proud to have participated in this unique heroic epic of history.” Sacrifice, then, was seen as noble, especially because “individuals die, while the Volk lives on.” After all, as many Landsers had been told, sacrifice was natural, because “an individual called to a heroic death was ‘thereby furthering life itself.’” 62

To Harald Henry, however, fate and the notion of a hero’s death seemed merely a pathetic justification for continuing this “fight for our naked existence…. Only the absolute inevitability of our fate compels us to bear what otherwise would never be bearable.” Likewise, Helmut Pabst raged against the capriciousness of death and those who said, “‘It was fate, it was destiny.’ But is that actually right? Is it not a miserable attempt to give a meaning to each event only because we are too cowardly to stare the senselessness of it in the face…? War strikes without choice, and if it knows a law it is that the best are struck down…. Here no one surrenders to his fate. We are not lambs of God, but rather we protect ourselves, …and our confidence lies not in God but in the calm and attention with which we do what is necessary.” 63

This existential anguish, these “cries of damned souls,” as Pabst put it, betrayed an almost desperate desire to believe, to give the war some sort of meaning. With frightening directness, Bernhard Beckering in his last letter confronted this loss of faith. “It is a lingering farwell. The gods have abandoned me. I have a frightful understanding… of what a central problem is the experience of being deserted by the gods.” Within the week, Beckering was killed. When, as Harry Mielert declared, “anger roars through all the cracks in the world,” it was a rage based on fear that the war had no purpose. Still, Mielert insisted that there had to be some design to the war, even if he could not consciously grasp it. “I feel always clearer,” he wrote, “that even my unconscious being and actions stand under the direction of positive values.” Other Landsers too sought desperately to find some meaningful pattern. “Out of the chaos of terror I am building piece by piece concrete pictures,” Günter von Scheven asserted. “The essential thing is that the inner structure remains solidly outlined.” 64