Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

Even routine daily tasks such as eating, bathing, and relieving oneself assumed monstrous proportions when undertaken in the midst of a biting Russian winter. “Those who could still eat,” noted one Landser , “had to watch the axe rebounding as from a stone off the frozen horse meat, and the butter was cut with a saw.” Still another claimed, “One man drawing his ration of boiling soup at the field kitchen could not find his spoon. It took him 30 seconds to find it, but by then the soup was lukewarm. He began to eat it as quickly as he could… but the soup was already cold and soon it would be solid.” Indeed, with the breakdown of the supply system under the strain of the savage conditions, hunger loomed as a constant problem. “No trace of the mess convoy,” Wilhelm Prüller recorded in his diary. “We bake our bread… using captured flour stores. Now we are getting used to the second, unpleasant side of the war.” 21

Gnawing hunger threatened constantly, and to the average Landser seemed more than merely disagreeable. “Something must be cooked,” noted Claus Hansmann in his diary, “even if it’s only a pot of water…. Only water, but even that already involves all the possibilities of what can be cooked in it. A pair of potatoes or some tea, a piece of meat or even a whole chicken…. The thoughts in our hungry brains produce bubbles already…. We think we smell the odor of bouillon…. We dream already of the pleasant activity of gnawing at the cooked chicken…. We glance wistfully at the knives and forks.” As Hansmann knew only too well, however, often neither securing nor eating a meal proved easy:

We are suddenly all hunters. On wary soles we creep toward the sound…. A quick grabbing for the knife: feathers fly, a hen, a goose lashed out with its wings, shrieking shrilly and was finished off…. Someone else has already dug after potatoes… and soon, mixed with cheerful clouds of smoke, certain odors float out.

I cook in a small barn on a ladder standing in a square entrance over a four-meter-deep cellar, for the smoke will not remained unnoticed for long. They out there are hellishly attentive, and their mortars will begin soon. The others sit underneath in a bricked cellar vault and give advice to me up above. They indulge in recipes and reminiscences…. A whistling sound…. Shrapnel slams into the boards. Then I surface again, concerned that something has happened to the food…. Now I take the pan with me when I must disappear. All around the courtyard creep the detonations of the light mortar. Peter crashes in between two explosions, breathless and happy that he has brought his onions with him…. But what wouldn’t one do for such a meal? Warnings of danger appear laughable to us…. Finally we sit down. A stout soldier’s knife cuts succulent pieces, and happy eyes full of expectation like those of children receiving Christmas presents follow the carving…. Excitement fills the room. The initial hunger gives way at last to blissful satiety. But when is such a soldier’s stomach ever at its limit? 22

A feast could indeed lift the spirits of even the most bedraggled Landser , providing both a sense of physical comfort and psychological uplift. Even in the midst of the fierce Russian cold, Guy Sajer remarked how “a large hot meal… produced an almost unbelievable sense of well-being, and raised our spirits to a remarkable degree.” 23

For many Landsers , though, getting enough—or anything—to eat was a constant struggle. “Food was our most difficult problem,” asserted Sajer. “We became hunters and trappers and nest robbers…. Our eyes gleamed, like the eyes of famished wolves. Our stomachs were empty, our mess tins were empty, and the horizon was devoid of any hope. Murderous sentiments lurked behind our eyes, which glittered with hunger. Hunger produces a curious frame of mind.” Sajer, in fact, witnessed a bizarre scene of famished Germans who “were no longer fighting for any spiritual motive, but were like wolves, terrified of starvation…. These men, who no longer distinguished between enemies and friends, were ready to commit murder for less than a quarter of a meal…. These martyrs to hunger massacred two villages to carry off their supplies of food…. Men were ready to commit murder for a quart of goat’s milk, a few potatoes, a pound of millet…. Men died for very little, for the possibility of a day’s food…. Like hunted animals intent on self-preservation, each man thought only of himself.” 24

Hunger could cause a Landser to engage in once unthinkable behavior, extending even to thoughts of cannibalism. Following a leg amputation, lying helplessly in a cattle car used for medical evacuations, the war nearly at an end and supply lines completely broken down, Hans Woltersdorf recounted:

Here my war without weapons became a war without rations as well…. There was simply nothing at all to eat…. Rase still had all his limbs and was constantly out and about…. He brought leaves, grasses, and herbs and… knew what could be done with them…. Rase sized up my good leg and drew to my attention what a waste it was that I had not brought along the sawn-off leg as a reserve supply…. There would certainly have been a usable joint of some kilos left above the knee…. And so the only bit of hope remaining for me and Rase was that when the follow-up amputation was done on my leg, some extra kilos of flesh could be cut off and saved for consumption. 25

Reduced by hunger and despair to the most primitive of states, Woltersdorf and his companion sustained themselves through the hope of eating amputated human flesh.

Even while the supply system was functioning, the quantity and quality of rations brought many Landsers close to despair. “The supply situation is again fairly normal,” wrote Harry Mielert in August 1943. “Unfortunately the water is still polluted. The coffee tastes like piss, but it is still welcome.” Likewise, Prosper Schücking complained in November 1943, “War and action by no means make you as tired as the strain of this uncomfortable foxhole, in which you cannot properly lie or sit, with lice and filthy blankets and cold coffee… and each evening potato or cabbage soup, for which you still must be very thankful.” Of these “gluey soups,” Guy Sajer commented drily that they “were nauseating but effective” at keeping them alive. Still, as the war wound down in the autumn of 1944, the quality of food deteriorated further: “Cellophane sausages stuffed with soybean puree, one for every two men. It goes without saying that these were cold.” During the retreat back into East Prussia, Sajer witnessed “towns overflowing with starving refugees. People with the faces of madmen were wolfing down the flour which was the only food distributed to them…. Soldiers also had to stand in interminable lines, to receive, finally, two handfuls of flour apiece, and a cup of hot water infused with a minute portion of tea.” Little wonder, then, that many Landsers often complained they had “too much food in order to die, but too little in order to live.” 26

Moreover, if the simple act of eating was a strain, relieving oneself at the front in winter proved at best irksome, at worst deadly. “The blizzards and the bitter cold seemed to stop most of our natural functions,” noted a Landser , “but when it became necessary then a ravine, a dip, even a low snow wall would give that protection from the wind which was essential…. We had had, in that first year, also many cases of cystitis and the inability to urinate quickly as well as the intense burning sensation which accompanied the act…. Out of fear of frostbite most men wrapped that part of the body in a thick cloth that was used over and over again. Together with all the odors produced by unwashed bodies, feet and clothing, you can imagine that we did not smell very sweet.” “Any desire to piss,” Sajer remembered, “was announced to all present, so that hands swollen by chilblains could be held out under the warm urine, which often infected our cracked fingers.” Indeed, General Heinz Guderian recorded that, as a result of the cold, “many men died while performing their natural functions.” 27