Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

Like Hansmann, Harry Mielert was struck again and again by the connectedness of the icy, black, sparkling night and the weapons. “Another world, also truly strange to me, reveals itself in these… impressions of ice and iron, metal and stars, black sky and white-covered earth.” 60

Whether they were struck by its beauty, by the incongruity of images of death alongside pristine panoramas, or by its awesome power, for most Landsers nature intimated something both substantive and mysterious. “Yesterday evening there was a wonderful sunset to see,” Mielert brooded, “and around midnight the slender crescent of the moon stood almost theatrically translucent between two brown wisps of clouds… like a miraculous apparition, a delightfully wistful reflection of my own yearning…. I have become so full of longing and melancholy at heart.” Surveying the summer beauty of southern Russia just before the fearsome slaughter at Kursk, Helmut Vethake noted reverently, “Flowers and grasses, and the blooming, growing, and ripening of the harvest: [nature] is a part of my day, my thoughts, constantly full of new experiences, of deep astonishment, and of a harmony and fulfillment as I have hardly ever so quickly and so strongly felt.” Wolfgang Döring claimed simply, “No one can feel the beauty of nature as a soldier can.” The unexpected impact of the natural world was perhaps best summarized by Horstmar Seitz, who asserted, “Even if we lose everything in this war—home, innocence, virtue, our boldest dreams and ideas—we have still found something, to be sure not gods and worlds, rather that which we can grasp with our hands, sense with our eyes: the damp earth, the light, the sun, a solitary pine or the laugh of a young woman. Those who face death learn to love life…. This truth is the maternal pain of nature.” 61

Largely unaccustomed to the ways of nature, intrigued by its mystical essence but harassed by the suffering it inflicted upon them, both awestruck and frightened by its power, the typical Landser would likely have agreed that the hardships and frustrations produced by nature often seemed more onerous than the rigors of combat. “This primitive existence,” concluded Günter von Scheven, expressing a thought likely shared by many others, “imparts a new oneness with nature, you are continually exposed to the wind, sun, and all the elements.” But, he hastened to add, “don’t let yourself be frightened by what I’ve said; for us who experience it, it is normal.” 62

Through long hours of boredom and loneliness, deprivation and hardship, horror and agony, the Landser soon became familiar with many of the myriad faces of war. Still, as Günter von Scheven observed, “This endless, sinister war brings the deepest layers of our being into turmoil.” Conscious of “an enormous… change,” Scheven wrote that “individual fates evaporated in the limitless expanses [of Russia].” But this, he added pensively, was both “a painful and yet a pleasant experience.” For the anonymous soldier, the real war was intensely personal, tragic yet ironic, agonizing but also magnificent, a frightful harvest of emotions, and, above all, deeply sensory. “We are branded in our strengths and passions,” noted Siegfried Roemer in December 1941, “by war and its demands.” 1

Fear was the real enemy of most Landsers: fear of death or of cowardice, fear of the conflict within the spirit, or, echoing Montaigne’s claim, a simple fear of showing fear. Men felt haunted, hollowed on the inside by pockets of fear that would not go away, caught in the grip of something enormous about to overwhelm them. Still, the notion that combat constituted a test in which mistakes were counted in blood, and which one dreaded to fail, served as a motivating force for countless soldiers. “We fought from simple fear,” Guy Sajer maintained, “which was our motivating power.” Whether assured (“I go into battle confident, happy, and undaunted and take up the test of life with pride”), hopeful (“These tests must have a blessed effect on us”), or doubtful (“Who among us knows if he will pass the test”), many Landsers would have agreed with Karl Fuchs, who maintained that “a man must prove himself in battle.” In a letter written to his wife on the eve of his initiation into combat, Fuchs claimed: “A man… has two souls in difficult times; indeed, he must have two: The one soul expresses the sincere wish to be home with his beloved; the other soul wants to be engaged in battle and to be victorious. This feeling for battle and victory must be the more important in a man Life, by definition, means struggle and he who avoids this struggle or fears it is a despicable coward and does not deserve to live.” 2

A harsh, Nazified social Darwinism, perhaps, although most Landsers would have agreed with the more prosaic judgment of a captain who ruefully admitted that it “would certainly be easier to experience the war from at home, but I would be ashamed of myself if I were not here.” Similar thoughts were betrayed by Harry Mielert. “If I have to be in the war,” he concluded, “I want… to belong to the frontmost men, to the little men who carry on the real war with only their weapons and physical strength.” Still, he acknowledged, “it is difficult to preserve oneself.” 3

Most men knew full well which foe they had to steel themselves against. Preparing for his first action, Guy Sajer watched his closest friend “trying to build up his nerve. In reality everyone feels considerable emotion…. The idea of war terrifies us.” Similarly, on the eve of the invasion of the Soviet Union, Claus Hansmann observed: “Interwoven desires, fears, and uncertainties are the content of this night…. There on the border bridge is the first man that this day will demand. We know already how long his life is still to be measured.” Others feared not war in general so much as their specific response to it. “Anxiety often seizes me,” Ernst Kleist admitted in May 1940, “not anxiety about battle or death. But events have grown so gigantic that I feel myself much smaller than nothing.” “I will not be a coward, so I pray a lot to God,” wrote Walther Happich. “I know against which opponent I have to fight.” In the last lines written in his diary, Klaus Wilms asserted, “There must be fighting and searching in life; fighting for the necessities of life, yes, even with the dark powers within yourself.” Friedrich Grupe, before going on patrol in a dense thicket teeming with Russians, found it necessary to struggle with his fear, “to overcome the inner Schweinehund” As Private H.S. put it succinctly, “We must often conquer ourselves.” 4

This was a conflict of the spirit, “a frightful fact that must be endured,” as Harry Mielert put it. “The battlefield constantly provokes a shudder in me,” he wrote. “I would like no longer to see the dead and the squirting, streaming blood. But I must hold out next to that like one who has been given this as a task.” In eerily Nietzschean tones, Eberhard Wendebourg tried to come to terms with this spiritual struggle by asserting, “When the spirit and body are healthy, suffering can only make one stronger and harder.” Less positively, Günter von Scheven maintained, “The essential thing is to keep one’s inner structure firmly outlined.” Sergeant W.H., however, knew precisely what this internal struggle cost: “It is no stroll, to make war here in Russia; rather, hardship follows hardship. I myself saw my life more than once hanging by a thread…. I have already thought often of ending my life. And just to force myself to overcome this bridge from life into death as a young man costs inner strength that has nothing to do with courage or bravery.” 5