Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

Even the dreaded Russian winter could cause some Landsers to marvel, as did Walther Weber, at the “broad, snow-covered land spanned by a star-spangled sky such as no one in Germany knows.” And Guy Sajer, standing solitary guard duty on Christmas night 1942, could remember it as “the most beautiful Christmas I had ever seen, made entirely of disinterested emotion and stripped of all tawdry trimmings. I was all alone beneath an enormous starred sky, and I can remember a tear running down my frozen cheek, a tear neither of pain nor of joy but of emotion created by intense experience.” “Today was a wonderful day,” rejoiced Harry Mielert in the midst of winter’s grip, “clear as glass in the farthest direction, cold winter sun, unreal silver blue of the river, …and the desolation of the barren landscape with the cut-up ravines protruding even sharper.” A month later, Mielert marveled at “the crystal clear nights… with the constellations twinkling like diamonds against the dark backdrop of the sky.” And on yet another of those frigid nights in the eastern Ukraine near Kharkov, Mielert was again struck by the natural drama taking place in the skies. “The crescent of the moon lay like a boat that swayed in a deep blue heavenly sea,” he wrote in February 1943. “A shimmering, silvery reddish glimmer appeared on the horizon. The entire sky was starlit…. A totally silvery shine lay on the vertex of the sea… and there above on the vertex swayed a golden moon ship, half-sunk in the gleam…. It was a marvelous sight.” Similarly, in the midst of the harrowing retreat out of the Caucasus, Prosper Schücking noted, “It was very cold, but a magnificent starry night. In the early morning hours we arrived at an empty clearing; in the distance the Black Sea shimmered and the entire eastern sky sparkled in the sunrise.” And, amazingly, with the Stalingrad cauldron closing in around him and certain catastrophe approaching, another Landser could remark that “the soil here is very rich and soft…. Four days ago I lay in a hole a yard deep, and all day long I observed the soil.” 54

Some men even felt a sense of comfort and security as their daily existence came to depend on that soil and their reworking of it. “I’m crouching here in a rather miserable slit trench,” complained Harry Mielert, “in which exactly two men can sit across from each other at a table made from a crate if the third man lies down. So we change between sitting and lying, just as long as we’re in the hole.” As Mielert knew well, burrowing into the earth offered virtually the only protection against the myriad flying objects trying to do in the Landser. “We are again under enemy pressure, for the time being only artillery fire and bomber attacks that make little impression on us,” he wrote later. And why was this? “Because they have yet to hit our tiny holes in the great Russian earth.” Mielert proceeded to reflect on the symbiotic relationship the Landser maintained with the ground around him: “We blast ourselves ever deeper… and soon with all our men have disappeared from the face of the earth. We infantrymen are regular moles…. These bunkers are on average 2.5 to 3 meters large, have a pair of wooden planks and a table. The Landser are indefatigable in their skill and inventiveness in building… within the shortest time the most charming bunkers. The walls are hung with strips of canvas. So many men sit around together that therefore it’s not even cold inside.” 55

These bunkers could seem, in fact, almost like home, a comparison explicitly made by Mielert a few months later. “Every once in a while we go out into the Russian positions,” he wrote to his wife, “that is, we creep and crawl behind bushes, through furrows, and instinctively feel the wild person in us. But it is certainly not nice…. When, totally filthy, you ‘come home’ to the warm bunker you just feel utterly happy.” Guy Sajer, too, retained a powerful image of the bunker as a place of relative comfort and security in the storm of war. “The troops passed the time as best they could,” he noted, “either sunk in sleep despite the discomfort, or playing Skat, or writing home with a pen precariously balanced between numbed fingers. The candles… were stuck into empty tins which caught the melting wax, prolonging their lives by as much as four or five times. The memory of those bunkers buried in the wildness of the steppe still haunts my memory, like a legendary tale heard in childhood.” 56

Some firsthand observers even made a study of the variety and individuality of the Landsers excavations. “Foxholes, slit-trenches, living relatives of the last hollows of the earth that have taken us in,” mused Claus Hansmann:

Primitive earth architecture of the soldier, a mirror of his soul. One of them, the eternally wary, digs a deep cellar with vaults in which he feels safe in his skin, into whose snoring mouth the crumbling earth falls when above the noise of the front he is permitted to sleep with full enjoyment. The other creates a sober four-cornered hole after the army service manual… and he lies flat with somewhat drawn-up knees, in the consciousness that he has completed the day in a soldierly fashion. With a sharp glance the crafty one scouts his surroundings and finds the bumps in the earth that with a few stabs of his spade allows him to prepare a suitable asylum, and he sleeps for a long time while the others, sweating, are still shoveling and digging. The individualist, on the other hand, wants a homestead: one that exactly fits his body, that becomes a lounge chair out of earth with special hollows for a cup of tea…. and for the pack of cigarettes with matches. Another values above all a roof over his head and covers it with a tent-half…. The parasite lies in wait until someone receives an order to go to the rear and is happy to get a cheap hole. Each prepares his nest like a bird…. And so we dig daily…, we birds of passage. 57

Harry Mielert noted not only the way men transformed nature in order to gain a bit of protection from the deadly metal flying above but also how technology seemed to mimic nature. “Early in the morning today two fiery suns suddenly stood next to each other on the horizon,” he recounted to his wife, “both enveloped in smoke, but the one thundered and roared and spewed fire like a thunderstorm.” The rage bursting forth from the barrels of artillery proved a worthy imitation of heavenly fury, for as Mielert added, probably unnecessarily, “I knew that it was going to be a difficult day.” Friedrich Grupe marveled as well at the entwining of nature and war. “In the evening as we lie in a valley in our foxholes, encrusted in the thick dust of our march,” he recorded in his diary, “the sky… in front of us is blood red. This time it is not the impressive picture of a sunset, but rather the sinister backdrop of a burning munitions dump. It is a hellish conceit, a bursting, cracking, and roaring. In the face of this inferno we drop off to sleep, exhausted and conscious of the fact that we have survived this day.” 58

He had survived this particular day, but the Landser knew that evidence of the relationship of man, nature, and technology often revealed the tragic. “First the dawning day brought clarity,” reflected Claus Hansmann in his diary.

Everything wrapped in the mantle of the night…, what the ears could only guess at, …slowly gained its frightful contour…. The morning began to breathe; in its shrouded twilight stretch the great expanses of snow, and ever more mercilessly the hesitant brightness gives certainty to the nightly atrocities…. Your glance slides over a small body, two hands pressed together in a violent loss of life, a profile full of clarity, gilded by the first rays of sunlight. The bullet hole, a dark red spot high on the forehead…. Not all die so softly as the young man on the snowdrift…. In places the snow is churned up, blood red, widely strewn weapons and hand grenades, lost gloves and fur hats. And red tracks lead to others: the bronze of their skin is pale, on their rigid corpses stand fiery signs of the war. Unreal eyes pop out of unshaved faces; cramped, bent limbs speak of war dead and polar cold…. Already snow crystals are gathering in the painfully wrinkled brows, fill the eye sockets, comers of the mouth, and uniform creases…. Only here and there is there still an arm, a thigh drawn up in the death throes jutting out of the glittering cover, last reminders of a night battle, on a segment of a gigantic front of death. 59