Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

Helmut Pabst was similarly gripped by the beauty of battle. “To the south a gigantic fire threw slender beams of light straight up into the sky like a searchlight,” he marveled in March 1943. “The redness colored the snow soft and warm…. Fine snow crystals and broken tatters of clouds swirled against the clear sky of the sparkling night. At 20.30 some lightning flashed behind us and filled the area from horizon to horizon. The detonations rolled muffled over us. It was a drama of horribly beautiful power.” In one of his last letters, written in the midst of the appalling devastation during the German retreat toward Kiev in the autumn of 1943, Pabst again betrayed his fascination with destruction:

Two Pioneers [combat engineers] ran here and there, placing explosives under the rails, …[then] blew the white, thin beams out of the earth…. But that was only a part of the destruction, a laughably small part…. The villages burned. They burned with raging power. The embers covered the street. We went through in a gallop, our faces covered against the shower of sparks…. The smoke mingled with the thick dust to form a compound so thick that we were wrapped in a double coat. Long before evening the sun was already red, as it hung sick and thirsty over the march of destruction. The clouds over the army column, illuminated by a double light, gave the most splendid, beautiful colors that I have ever seen: it unfurled war in its whole terrible splendor. We saw houses in all stages of destruction…, the first outbreak of red flames that battled the black smoke clouds, the victorious dance of the red rooster over the roofs. We raced through the white-hot dying streets. 35

Harry Mielert perhaps best described the jumble of sensations produced by battle, the sense of pure exhilaration at the realization that all limits were off, that the normal range of human possibilities had expanded to include wanton destruction:

The Russians shot into [the town] with artillery, nearly all the houses were burning, in between large stores of munitions detonated and buildings and facilities were blown up by Pioneers. Everything roared, flamed, shook, cattle bellowed, soldiers searched through all the buildings, kegs of red wine were taken away on small panje wagons, here and there was drinking and singing, amid that again the explosions and the new fires roaring out…. But the strangest thing is the colorful confusion…. It is magnificent. All barriers are broken…. Anger roars through all the cracks in the world. 36

The sensory fascination with war was not limited to visual images; many Landsers remarked as well on the peculiar sounds and smells of their surroundings. “The roar of combat alone was enough to shatter a soldier’s will,” claimed Siegfried Knappe. “But combat was a great deal more than noise. It was a whirlwind of iron and lead that howled about the soldier, slicing through anything it hit. Even inside the roar of battle, strangely, the soldier could detect the whistle of bullets and the hum of slivers of shrapnel, perceiving everything separately: a shell burst here, the rattle of machine gun fire over there, an enemy soldier hiding behind cover in another place.” Günter von Scheven, too, was struck by the whirling tumult of sounds that characterized battle. “You could not have any idea of this landscape that is characterized by death,” he wrote in March 1942, “with cries and groans, jubilant cheers of the attackers and the wild, piercing roar of the enemy infantry. Nearby the reverberation of bombs dropped from softly droning airplanes; along with it the rumble of artillery. We live in bunkers in the trembling earth.” Hans-Heinrich Ludwig noted with fear and amazement the “crazy attacks” of the Russians, accompanied by “a wild choir of stormy Russian ‘hurrahs.’” The tendency of the Russians to trumpet their assaults with bloodcurdling screams unsettled many Landsers. Leopold von Thadden-Trieglaff, in his last letter, wrote of the terror of the “fanatical [Russian] cries of ‘hurrah’… which shattered us.” The sound of Russian partisans “yelping at us like pursuing hounds” also unnerved Hans Nicol. Still others recoiled from what Kurt Reuber, at Stalingrad, termed the “frightening din of annihilation.” Rudolf Halbey was struck by the profusion of sounds: “bullets whistling, screams, orders, shots.” while Harry Mielert was haunted by “the awful cries of the wounded, without echo in this wasteland.” 37

The cries of the injured could be especially unnerving. “Terrifying screams drowned the sounds of engines,” Guy Sajer recalled after one battle, “screams so prolonged and horrible that my blood froze…. We heard the sounds of gunfire and explosions coming closer, punctuated by bloodcurdling screams…. We felt petrified by fear.” In another engagement he noted “the cries of the wounded, of the agonized dying, shrieking as they stare at a part of their body reduced to pulp, the cries of men touched by the shock of battle.” On yet another occasion Sajer flinched at the “the death rattle of thousands of dying men, which filled the air with a horrible sound.” An anonymous soldier writing from Rumania in June 1944 described how “next to me lay comrades who had had it. They could no longer walk, and shrieked dreadfully, as I have never before heard humans scream…. You vacillated in your feelings and asked yourself if you should stay with the wounded, or should go on. To stay would be suicide and therefore I went on.” The screams of the wounded could shake even the strongest men; as Rudolf Halbey noted numbly in his diary, the “cries and groans of the wounded strain the nerves.” 38

Aside from human cries, the sounds of war seemingly became commonplace to some. Friedrich Grupe recorded in his diary that the Russian artillery “hammered at the edge of our positions. An unpleasant and threatening musical accompaniment,” but then remarked, “In the evening I sat in the battalion command post and listened on the army radio to music from home. In the course of this one forgets the reality, the gray earth, …the desolate villages, …the noise of battle.” “We have had heavy artillery fire for over twelve hours,” noted Walter Happich in a letter to his mother in February 1945, “but that doesn’t bother us…. These hours during the bombardment are sometimes quite nice…. They are the only hours of rest except for the meager sleep we get in the night.” 39

Some commented as well on the variety of rhythms produced by war. Grupe was struck by “the sharp crack of the hobnailed boots on the asphalt and cobblestones, the tramping of the horses, the clatter of their hoofs, and behind them the sounds of the rubber-treaded combat vehicles; now and then we just have to sing, then one of the old or new soldiers’ songs rings out from hoarse throats.” A few months later, Grupe again noted in his diary how “the resounding march rhythm of a thousand army boots on the cobblestone rang out” as his unit paraded through the streets of a town. On the day of the invasion of Poland, Grupe recorded the noise of “military march music on the radio,” the “continuous fresh cries advertis[ing] special editions,” the “national anthem ringing out of the loudspeakers.” Indeed, Grupe’s diary registered the cacophonous sounds of war in all their discord: “Rain drummed on our steel helmets”; “Motors drone on the forest paths”; “The steps of ten thousand men ring over the sodden earth. They move past like silent shadows…, disappear into the dark, accompanied by the patter of horses, the rattle of wheels, …then the loudspeaker clangs like something out of a far, far world…. Company after company stamps past, the melody wafts back over the soldiers, blows away, is swallowed up by the marching steps.” 40