Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

Sooner or later, however, fatigue would win out, often with serious consequences. “We slowly limp into the next place,” Wilhelm Prüller noted of the last exhausting days of the German advance in December 1941, “where we are assigned 3 small huts and 3 so-called Russian houses: one room for a platoon of 39 men. They can barely stand up inside, and that’s where they are supposed to spend the night…. This isn’t a war any more but a fight for billets… [with] no end in sight.” The result of this numbing fatigue soon became apparent, even to so ardent a soldier as Prüller. “Our people are kaputt,” he admitted on 19 December. “You’ve got to say it; and see why: one hour outside, one hour in the hut, watch, alarm sentry duty, listening duty, observer duty, occupy the MG posts, one thing after another. It wouldn’t surprise me to see some of them break down. This has been going on since 28 November, …for weeks and weeks one hour of sleep, then one hour of duty, what that means!” A week later Prüller wrote, “We really can’t take another march like this one…. We can hardly go on as it is. For the most part the men have only what they carry on their body…. All our shoes are ruined, our shirts and underclothes are black (they’ve not been changed for weeks). This is just a little hint of the way things are.” 35

The watch rotated in short intervals, of course, primarily because of the bitterly cold weather, but another reason noticeable to those at the front was stressed by Harry Mielert: the enormous casualties on the eastern front had so thinned the ranks that often not enough men remained to do the necessary tasks. “Every evening the Russians appear in front of our positions,” he wrote. “But even though we are all bleary-eyed and our eyes burn, until now they have achieved no more success. But unfortunately through illness and so forth we are constantly fewer, and if a pair of men then come as replacements they are poorly trained folk or some other kind of scum.” 36With few available bodies and even fewer reliable men, those left had to endure to the point of exhaustion the constant cycle of sentry duty, work details, patrol, and combat with virtually no respite.

Extreme fatigue ultimately made it impossible for some men to continue functioning. “We hadn’t yet encountered any of the real dangers of war,” acknowledged Guy Sajer of his experience in a supply unit, “and we were all exhausted by the lack of sleep, the cold, this endless journey, and by our revolting condition of almost unbelievable filth.” As Sajer noted, the initial effect of fatigue was more psychological than physical, for “the exhaustion we had been dragging about with us for days increased the fear we could no longer control. Fear intensified our exhaustion, as it required constant vigilance.” Very soon, however, this fatigue gave way to a condition in which they were “too exhausted to react, and almost nothing stirred our emotions.” Sajer and his comrades, in fact, soon reached a point of lassitude where “our overwhelming weariness was now affecting us like a drug,” so much so that they could barely stir themselves even under fire. This “condition of near torpor,” Sajer found, produced “the sensation of two simultaneous lives. Sleep and reality had become confused. I felt as though I were deeply asleep, dreaming of artillery fire, lost somewhere in time. My comrades went right on talking. I listened to them without really hearing what they were saying.” 37

Finally, even when he was not fighting, the Landser had to live in constant proximity to the same men, with little privacy or possibility of solitude. “Day and night standing guard, lying in ice and snow, defending against the attacks of the Bolshevik hordes, then for days no duty, no work, only a dull, introspective brooding, sleep and sleep again,” complained Lieutenant H.G. of the Fourth Panzer Division of the monotony of his life:

What, then, are you supposed to talk about time and time again? For the last few months we’ve lived together, know the other’s life history, his experiences, know his thoughts and feelings. This country doesn’t demand of us that we solve lofty intellectual problems. The only problem that we have to solve is the question of supplies…. This… makes us dull and shuts out all instinctive sentiments. Whoever at home occupied themselves with art or science now speaks here only of eating and drinking, of billets, of train connections, of supply provisions, and of mail. In the end is that all more important than dealing with an unworldly philosopher or a medieval singer or reading a poet?… Speaking with comrades of personal matters and feelings that concern you is not advisable though. You will be smiled at pityingly or mockingly comforted. Where, then, is there a person with whom you can share your sorrow and concerns, but also confide your small joys and happiness? 38

As not a few men discovered, then, actual combat was not the only affliction of life at the front, or necessarily the most debilitating. The everyday confrontation with physical hardships, living a rough and mean life—this often hidden side of war proved a constant challenge and torment as well.

Yet if many Landsers struggled with the extreme demands of the most basic elements of nature in their daily lives, they also found themselves exposed to new scenes, panoramas, and vistas that they could hardly have imagined possible. Ironically, the strange juxtaposition of gruesome horror with natural beauty and alien landscapes contributed to a sensuous fascination with war which could be especially acute for urban soldiers unfamiliar with nature. “I wonder about my feelings,” puzzled Harry Mielert in February 1943. “We have today a black day behind us [losing thirty men in an hour], and yet I am almost happier than usual because the sun is shining.” 39

This same sense of incredulity characterized many Landsers when surveying the landscapes around them, and none appeared more alien, and sinister, than Russia. “The steppes were wholly desolate and unpeopled yet filled with living menace,” wrote the acclaimed Polish novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz in With Fire and Sword. “Silent and still yet seething with hidden violence, peaceful in their immensity yet infinitely dangerous—these boundless spaces were a masterless, untamed country created for ruthless men.” A land filled with living menace, violent and dangerous, Sienkiewicz had written those words in the late nineteenth century, but they still resonated in Guy Sajer’s description of the steppe as “that horrible landscape, indifferent to suffering, death, everything. There was nothing we could do about it, the screams of fear, the groans of the dying, the torrents of blood soaking into the ground like a vile sacrilege, nothing.” “The swelling fruitfulness of the black earth,” noted Claus Hansmann of the baleful contrast between the teeming life emanating out of the steppe and the death sinking into it, “elicits only a sigh for how sterile our existence has become.” Not so blasé, Günter von Scheven concluded more pointedly that Russia was “a landscape characterized by death.” 40

But there was something else to the steppe as well, some inner spirit which fascinated men. “I ride on ugly wild panje horses over the steppe,” Harry Mielert exalted, “fog and cold, filth and hunger accompany me. Finally a land that is wild and bold, a life without beauty, without ideas of spirit…, without sensation; a pure, barren, alien land.” Russia—beguiling, capricious, heartless—represented to Mielert “a conflict between western spirit and eastern nature, but one that here does not result in a tension-filled but fruitful contradiction as with us, but rather in an incongruous phenomenon.” For Mielert, in fact, Russia seemed less a place than an idea, even though “the idea is only a formal means of realizing a temporal bliss. But how fragile is this bliss!” Fragile indeed, for as he emphasized repeatedly, there was “a discomfiting barrenness” about the Russian steppe: “The character of this landscape… was the highest stage of loneliness.” Still, Mielert admitted, “I am in a continual fierce struggle with this land and seek an inner contact [with it].” After almost two years in Russia, however, he was no longer so certain of his desire for a spiritual connection with the steppe, warning, “An evil spirit, demons hang over this land, which do not want to do evil to individual people, not you or me, but rather do evil in general We, with our peculiar exploring spirit of the Nordic people thirsting for danger, pushed our way in so as to fight it. Now we are embroiled in a howling, raging dance.” Finally, just a month before he died, Mielert concluded that the turbulent dance had produced only “a comfortless landscape. No women’s voices, no music, only the sounds of the front, detonations, artillery and machine gun fire.” 41It was a landscape, Mielert might have added, that made their hearts ache.