Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

Some Landsers failed in this struggle to preserve their inner spirit, glimpsing, as did Kurt Reuber, only “anxiety, fear, and terror, …a life without return along with terror without an end.” “The heart is overwhelmed,” as Gerhard Meyer put it, at the unbearable thought that “the smell of dead bodies is the beginning and end and ultimate sense and purpose of our being.” Horstmar Seitz spoke of “a powerful loneliness,” of “always being on the edge of despair.” “The war,” he concluded, “strikes wounds to my soul that perhaps will never again be healed.” Harry Mielert noted the “uncultivated primitive self within each man: “Here now… I am again experiencing my own particular primitive self even up to a simple inner scream. I must think of poor R.M. Rilke, as he began his Elegies…, ‘Who, when I scream, will hear me then!’” Nor did Mielert have any illusions that this inner struggle would not remain a constant concern, writing later, “I must sit here in this unsurpassed filth, this abhorrent cruelty, this psychological strain One must wait, sit, plan, and do the worst, act mechanical and hard, look at and watch the inhuman, without flinching.” “The war experience,” he concluded, “has put my nature into a turmoil. Never have I so energetically reflected over and fought the evil in myself as in this year.” 6

Although few could express their despair as well as Mielert, the ordeal of war pushed many men to the edge of desperation. In hauntingly stark words, Private K.P. observed simply, “I have forgotten how to laugh,” and a fellow Landser trapped at Stalingrad remarked mournfully, “During the last few nights I have wept so much that it seems unbearable even to myself.” Most distressing, those who uttered what Helmut Pabst termed the “cries of damned souls” at the landscape of horror and death could find little internal relief, for according to Ansgar Bollweg, “The realm of destruction was no longer restricted to the front but extended… even to within ourselves. Where is the realm where the demons can no longer reach us?” For many who had already made an “inner farewell,” who sat in “the dark fires of hell,” the damage to their souls was complete; they “lay as in a sarcophagus,” said Siegfried Roemer, “but were still alive.” “Russia,” concluded another Landser , “is like a cold iron coffin.” 7

All men wrestled with this primal fear, struggled, as did Meinhart Freiherr von Guttenberg, with a “turmoil of emotions, feelings, even knowledge, which attempt to assault one’s psychological balance, which must be mastered.” Will Thomas also emphasized the mental strain that fear exacted, writing, “The psychological load presses harder than the burden of the almost superhuman physical exertions,” admitting that only “a piece of me remained which could not be changed by the horror and suffering.” Harry Mielert spoke in similar tones of the “enormous amount [of] psychological strength demanded of each individual soldier. The physical is the smallest part of the strain.” Kurt Reuber noted that “everything suffers, body and soul. I must tap some psychological and physical reserves.” As Harald Fliegauf put it, this was “a test of endurance.” 8

Inner conflict proved debilitating for many Landsers. The worst things were “not death that is lurking around you, not the fatigue and discouragement that accompany you,” according to Siegfried Roemer, “but rather the standing before a cold, dark eternity, daily, hourly, in order to win a little piece of finiteness in which your yearning and love have a sense and goal, beginning and end.” Indeed, the effort to conquer the inner self could be achieved only at great price, for as Harald Henry noted, it “demanded an enormous strength, something like heroism.” “There is as yet no name for that which is sweeping over us, happening to us,” puzzled Max Aretin-Eggert in his last letter. “We stagger in a whirlpool whose force is not stirred up by a human power.” This power might have been inhuman, but it had human consequences: “I see [nervous collapse] in many simple men… who lacked the mental strength of a stoic self-consciousness,” wrote Harry Mielert. “These are very dangerous hours for themselves and for their comrades.” “There are some,” noted Wolfgang Döring, “who simply hide away in animalistic anxiety.” In more prosaic language, Sergeant Steiner, the protagonist of Willi Heinrich’s novel The Cross of Iron , declared: “We’re all miserable bastards…. We’re all sick to death of it and scared to death, all of us.” As Harald Henry put it, with frightening directness, “I am broken in every fiber.” 9

Nor did one ever become accustomed to the fear. The continual confrontation with death or mutilation left many men on the edge of nervous collapse. “Our fear reached grandiose proportions” during a Soviet tank attack in February 1945, admitted Guy Sajer, himself a veteran of three torturous years on the eastern front, “and urine poured down our legs. Our fear was so great that we lost all thought of controlling ourselves.” “I had never really known anxiety before,” claimed a Landser in August 1944. “But a few days ago our company was led into a rye field, and shortly thereafter the Russians pounced on us from all sides. Since then my entire body shakes if I only hear the Russians coming. It is dreadful. I was so far gone that I wanted to stay lying on my belly and let myself be taken prisoner.” Returning to the Russian front from home leave, Klaus Löscher felt “a strongly symbolic experience” when his troop crossed, in the moonlight, from one bank of a river to the other, from “the joy of the spent days of furlough to the uncertainties and dangers of the future. Who among us,” he added somberly, “might again cross the bridge in the reverse direction? And how?” Löscher’s gloom was well-placed: two weeks later, on his mother’s birthday, he was killed. 10

Writing to his wife in April 1943, Harry Mielert attempted to explain the power and the intricacy of this fear: “You often admire my strength… but you probably don’t know the whole, what I allow to build up, erupt, and inundate me in the miserable nights like tonight, when the howling storm swept over the raven-black heights, when it lured me out… against the Russian positions, because there a real danger threatens, there life and death are demarcated by a thin line. You cannot know how my heart then wailed and cried…. It is not easy to live life as I must live it.” Even the veteran like Heinrich’s fictional Steiner could succumb to the omnipresent terror:

Cautiously he climbed up the other side of the trench, clambered over the rampart and waited until the next flare came. When it faded, he straightened up and tensed his body. His heart suddenly began to pound like mad, and he sank back on the ground. “Stand up, you son of a bitch,” he told himself, “stand up!” His legs were trembling violently; he panted, gasped for air and dug his fingers into the soft earth. For a few seconds he fought desperately against his fear, against the sheer terror that pinned him to the ground…. His face was contorted and he stared wide-eyed…. He groaned between clenched teeth; he tried to force his body into motion…. [Fear] constricted his throat until he felt that he was choking; a sound like a death rattle emerged from his mouth, and spittle trickled from his lips onto his hands. 11

Moreover, this fear could surface at any time. The anticipation of an enemy attack, for example, could leave a Landser trembling. “Wild animals, even ferocious ones, always flee armed men,” Guy Sajer reflected on the eve of a massive Russian attack in the winter of 1943. “We all felt extremely nervous…. Some of the very strong had even managed to persuade themselves that since no man is immortal… the hour of death was unimportant…. Others, strong but not that strong, lived to delay that moment…. The rest, which is to say the majority, were pouring with a cold sweat…. Those men were afraid with an intense fear that reduced every conviction to nothing…. They were afraid before every operation, …assailed by fear as persistent as the daylight.” 12