Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

As Sajer admitted and thousands of other Landsers would confirm, before every attack, no matter how large or small, the same welling fear made an appearance: “A heavy sense of foreboding settled over us, and the knowledge that soon some of us would be dead was stamped on every face…. In fact, none of us could imagine his own death. Some would be killed, we all knew that, but… no one… could think of himself lying mortally wounded. That was something which happened to other people…. Everyone clung to this idea, despite fear and doubt…. And each of us was obsessed by the particular question: ‘How shall I come through this time?’” Indeed, Sajer insisted, experience of combat lent scant comfort. “The sight of comrades screaming and writhing through final moments of agony had become no more bearable with familiarity, and I… was no less of an animal stiff with uncontrollable terror.” “The experience of the battle itself,” he concluded, “had been as always, more fear.” Everyone was afraid, awash in a sea of anxiety. “What might Ivan be thinking?” Harry Mielert wondered in late March 1943, then answered his own question: “We all have the same [fears].” 13

Sajer also noted another common manifestation of fear: “When anyone is afraid, he thinks of his family, especially of his mother, and as the moment of attack drew closer, my terror was rising. I wanted to confide something of my anguish to my mother.” Some men found comfort in these thoughts of home. “We could not ward off our anxieties,” noted Friedrich Grupe before an assault. “Who will get it tomorrow…? Images whirled through my thoughts: my hometown, the old castle high on the sandstone cliff, the colorful fields of flowers on the edge of the city, my father and sister at home…. My heart is pounding into my neck. I again turn my thoughts to home…. In the next minutes there will be no more sentimental thoughts.” 14

As unbearable as the prospect of an attack could be, for many Landsers the nights—those “frightful…, terribly long nights,” as Harry Mielert called them—proved even more agonizing. “The nights are the most taxing,” said Mielert, for as he noted in another letter. “One has the feeling that a wild animal is menacing us.” “The nights are the worst,” confirmed Friedrich Grupe. “To be sure the guns are then silent, to be sure it is uncannily still, but this stillness tugs at the nerves, because each knows that the enemy lies only a few meters before us. The continual crowing of roosters… makes us even more nervous, for we hold these noises to be the communication signals of the Russians.” Action carried out in darkness was equally fearsome. “There is nothing more terrifying than moving at night through a piece of wooded or bushy country,” Sajer asserted, adding that the experience “kept us in a state of prolonged tension.” Wilhelm Prüller agreed: “A battle in the woods [at night] is the worst possible thing.” Martin Pöppel commented more colloquially in his combat diary, “Everybody is frankly shit-scared in this eerie night, and I have to curse and swear at them to get them to move.” “One must have nerves in this modern war,” Martin Lindner concluded, “nerves like steel!” 15

If not totally broken by the general fear of battle, the Landser struggled daily with the worry that he might be permanently maimed. Corporal A.K. expressed the concern of many to “make a strong effort to come out of this affair and to be sure with healthy bones, for I would not like to eke out a living after the war by going with an organ and begging.” Harry Mielert commented on a sergeant “so badly burned that his head resembled more a skull than that of a living person. An officer was also just as badly burnt. These injuries are actually seen with more fright than many wounds. These men are married. How will they put it to the wives…? These are probably the worst cases that the war can bring about.” 16

The sight of the dead and wounded often frightened men more than being wounded themselves. In a letter in early December 1941, Harald Henry matter-of-factly dismissed his own wound, noting dispassionately, “The thing looked so gruesome, my coat was so ripped to pieces and splashed with blood, [but] nothing happened, it was only a small flesh wound.” Similarly, Siegfried Knappe noted, “The first time I had been wounded… I had been surprised, but when it happened the second time I just thought, ‘Okay, it has happened again and I am still alive.’” 17Henry and Knappe, in surviving, found their sense of invincibility reinforced.

But the stark realization that his comrades lay dead or wounded forced the Landser to confront his doubt and fear. Richard Holmes has pointed out that the sight of a corpse provoked feelings akin to that somber message often chiseled on medieval gravestones: “As you are now, so I once was; As I am now, so will you be.” As Hans Woltersdorf remarked laconically, “It wasn’t good to look into the [destroyed] tank…, to look at the gruesome reality. One always sees oneself sticking to the walls in a thousand pieces like that, without a head.” Although death remained a commonplace occurrence, many Landsers never got accustomed to the sight of it. Hans-Friedrich Stacker confessed that a “dizziness again and again flashes through me when I see dead comrades.” “The pictures of fallen comrades move before my eyes,” wrote Günter von Scheven. “Covered by gray coats, prematurely stiffened by the cold, silent and lifeless they lay there, with their faces decomposed from the frost and their lifeless eyes…. [It is] a merciless, hard death. After many days of battle long rows lie next to each other…. What we see here is the face of the Russian war.” 18

“We marched by a strange place,” noted Friedrich Grupe of his first encounter with the sight of large numbers of German dead, “where in the faded twilight German Landsers lay in rows under their tent halves, out of which only their stiff feet showed. Everywhere graves were being shoveled out. That shocked me and made me feel cold. Go on, just go on. Don’t think.” Numbness also gripped Harry Mielert, who noted dispassionately after a night attack: “No tears flowed for our [fallen] comrades. They were laid on the stretchers and transported rearward…. It is a strange sight, when the men from the burial units come trembling to the front, always at dawn, to pick up the fallen. Quickly, a bit too quickly, they then stagger back to the rear…. It has something of the theater about it, it is done with many gestures and formal expressions [but] few words.” This detached attitude, however, proved hard to maintain. “Under the snow melting away appear more and more corpses of fallen Russians. When you see these cadavers,” Mielert later admitted, “you involuntarily think… that you yourself could also look like that.” Indeed, Mielert betrayed the secret fear of every Landser: “When my comrades fall or are wounded, I am always surprised and ask: ‘when will it be me?’” Two weeks later, Mielert got his answer: he was killed in action in southern Russia. Imagining these scenes today, one could well understand what Friedrich Böhringer meant when he wrote, “Death is perhaps not the worst thing, but we must suffer it!” 19

Prevalent always, of course, was this fear of death, a “fear that had been with [Sergeant Steiner] for so long that it had become a living part of himself [and] was gradually smothered by dull indifference.” So wrote Willi Heinrich in The Cross of Iron. For others, however, the fear took a more active form. Even before his first encounter with the enemy, Friedrich Grupe wrote in his diary, “A premonition of death on the battlefield overcame me, of mutilated bodies that could only be identified by their identity tags.” “I suddenly felt terribly afraid,” recalled Guy Sajer of an episode in the autumn of 1943. “It would probably be my turn soon. I would be killed, just like that, and no one would even notice. We had all grown used to just about everything, and I would be missed only until the next fellow got it…. As my panic rose, my hands began to tremble. I knew how terrible people looked when they were dead. I’d seen plenty of fellows fall face down in a sea of mud, and stay like that. The idea made me cold with horror.” 20