Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

The most elemental of natural conditions—rain, mud, cold, snow, heat, dust—formed a leitmotif of the entire war for many soldiers. There were, of course, men from a farming background, working men accustomed to long hours of hard physical labor, and men who came from a wretched background of poverty for whom the physical conditions of war differed little from the grinding harshness of their everyday civilian lives. Most, however, would have agreed with Harry Mielert, who noted bitterly, “I sleep day and night in the same uniform, on the same plank bed, wrap myself in the same wool blanket…; clay also hits me on the head and falls into my mess kit after each mortar round.” Nor was this necessarily the worst of it. “We attempted to clean ourselves up,” he wrote on another occasion. “In my cardigan I found after the first boiling 37 lice, thick and fat. The mud was removed from our uniforms first with knives, then with wire brushes and last through washing.” Wrote Mielert three days later, “I know from experience that I am like an animal that can live as dead in a different element a year long and then be resurrected to a new life when put back into your own element.” 1The reality of the new environment experienced by most Landsers was made more difficult precisely because it seemed so alien, so out of touch with their normal circumstances.

One of the commonest complaints, perhaps because in their everyday civilian lives it had seemed so innocuous, centered on the persistent problem of rain. Especially in Russia, where paved roads were few, the rasputitsa —that wet period in the spring and autumn when drenching rains and melting snow turned the countryside into a swampy sea of mud—brought with it unending misery. “We spent the night in the open,” lamented Wilhelm Prüller in July 1941. “We made ourselves dugouts and covered them with sailcloth. After midnight it began to rain, and we couldn’t stand it much longer in these holes. Wet and shivering with the cold, we wait[ed] for morning.” Just three days later, Prüller again expressed amazement at Russian weather: “When I see even at this time of year how our vehicles, after it’s rained a little, can barely make the grade, I just can’t imagine how it will be in autumn when the rainy period really sets in.” But well before autumn, in late July, he noted, “Yesterday it began to rain, and it hasn’t stopped yet. It’s enough to make you desperate.” The Russian rains impressed Friedrich Grupe as being of biblical dimensions. “The Landsers have built frames, laid pine branches and blankets on top in order to protect themselves to some extent against the dampness,” he wrote. “So like a Noah’s Ark emerged wood bunker after wood bunker in the swamp.” 2

Virtually every Landser in Russia, it seemed, complained of and suffered from the rain. “The constant thunderstorms have turned into a steady downpour,” moaned Harry Mielert in July 1941. “Everything has become a sodden black mush. The swamps stink even more, filled up with carcasses and corpses, and the woods are awful.” “The roads here are incredibly bad,” wrote Corporal W.E., “at times of rainy weather hardly passable; fatiguing for man and horse. In general, you cannot get through any more with a motorcycle or auto.” Little more than a year later, deep in Russia, Corporal H.T. complained, “The day before yesterday it rained the entire day and night, and all the afflictions have come to light today: rheumatism, aches [ Reiβen ] and above all, that which rhymes with the latter [ Scheiβen , the shits].” 3

Helmut Pabst noted similar discomforts in October 1942: “I’m in the back seat of the radio truck, holding my injured foot in the air, and watching how their clothes cling to the bodies of my comrades. Rain and snow beat against their faces, and an icy wind strikes sluggishly at the wet tents. The drivers on the box seats of the baggage carts sit with numb hands, with painful grimaces and heads held to one side. So they drive their wagons… through water and mud like tragic ships, clumsy, laborious and burdened, pitching and rolling in the holes and ruts of the highway…. That is the highway…, a fruit of tough and continuous all-out effort and work.”

Pabst’s depiction almost perfectly exemplified conditions in Russia: a strenuous effort just to hang on while besieged by the harsh elements. And as if to prove that rain caused considerable misery elsewhere, Walther Happich wrote from Holland in November 1944: “With the incessant rain great demands are made on us. There are not enough adequate positions here; in a few water stands a foot deep.” Forced by the war to live outdoors for the first time, many Landsers would readily have agreed that Henri Barbusse’s comment from the First World War applied equally to the Second: “Dampness rusts men like rifles, more slowly but more deeply.” 4

Added to the rain was the monotonous horror of the mud it produced, a seemingly omnipresent, bottomless, glutinous concoction that clung tenaciously to everyone and everything it touched. Siegfried Knappe noted: “In late September [1941] it began to rain, and mud started to become a problem for us…. Everything turned to mud, …the earth was simply a quagmire of mud. Great clumps of mud clung to our boots and every step produced a smacking suction noise. It played havoc with [us].” Marching toward Moscow in late October 1941, Heinrich Witt was also taken aback by the all-consuming nature of the Russian mud. “The roads were again thawing,” he noted, “so much so that the vehicles just sank down into it, so that each one had to be dragged out. We had to haul them out in snowy weather for two whole days, until the regiment had marched the pair of kilometers through the mud.” To Hans-Heinrich Ludwig “the maddening mud” of Russia was “inconceivable” to anyone who had not experienced it—although Ernst Kleist might well have challenged that assertion, observing that “the Flemish mud is of course also famous.” Ironically, the mud of “sunny” Italy proved perhaps most disconcerting and disheartening to the front soldier. “Everything is filthy,” complained Helmut Wagner from Italy in late October 1943. “The mud clings in cakes to your hands, boots, pants and coat, as a heavy weight to your shoes. For the last five days I have not had dry feet.” 5

Still, it was the oozing mud of Mother Russia that inspired the most horror. Writing from Russia on the day he died in April 1944, Klaus Löscher referred to the hardship of the rasputitsa: “The mud in the trenches reaches to midcalf, and yet thick layers of ice still lie under the excavated dirt of the trenches. But at the same time yesterday there was the murkiest rainy weather. The sentries couldn’t see their hands before their eyes.” Similarly, Rembrand Elert described the Russian countryside during the rasputitsa as a

sea of mud often stretching out for many hundreds of meters. Once [our vehicle] got stuck in it. Then all of us had to wade in water up to our calves and push, the men partially covered from top to bottom by clumps of mud…. It poured down in buckets, and the wind whipped through the treeless steppe.

About 2:00 A.M. we finally got stuck for good. Each wrapped himself as well as he could in coats and blankets and attempted to sleep. But your legs, covered up to their knees in totally wet things and layered in many centimeters of thick mud, turned slowly to ice. 6

In late October 1941, as the rainy season hit its stride, Wilhelm Prüller recorded: “The mud is now knee-high…. Many vehicles get stuck after the first few meters and can only be freed with the combined assistance of everyone present. Our drivers have now had experience in four campaigns. They mastered the plowed fields of Poland, the swift tempo in Holland, the breathless chase in France, the mountains of the Balkans; they drive in pitch darkness, without lights…. But the worst of the lot is undoubtedly the Soviet Union.” It was the seeming bottom-lessness of the Russian mud that inspired the sardonic joke about the man who is startled to discover a human face in the mud; the face tells him, “You’ 11 be even more surprised when you learn that I’m sitting on a horse and riding.” 7