Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

This tug of comradeship could be frighteningly powerful, especially, as Guy Sajer realized, in extreme circumstances. “I knew that the struggle was becoming more and more serious,” he wrote in the autumn of 1944, “and that we would soon be obliged to face appalling possibilities. I felt a strong sense of solidarity with my comrades, and I could think of my own death without too much flinching.” Shortly thereafter, feeling that he had trapped himself and his men in a situation from which there was no escape, overcome by the sense that he had failed his comrades, Sajer asked one of his companions to shoot him: “On that day, at a critical moment, I failed. I failed in everything I had hoped for, from others and from myself…. I shall never forgive myself for that instant.” 34In appearing weak and indecisive, Sajer not only suffered a blow to his own ego but, more significantly, feared the scorn of his comrades. To be judged a failure by your buddies counted as the ultimate blow, something for which you could never forgive yourself, something to which death might be preferable.

For many Landsers the strong cohesion of the battle group forged in the fire of combat served as the prime compensation for a life lived on the edge of death. As a consequence, an individual soldier could invest an astounding degree of loyalty and pride in his squad or company, which functioned as the focus of his world. Richard Holmes has referred to a sense of “group narcissism” whereby a soldier with doubts about his own ability submerged them beneath his devotion to his unit, thus producing both immense satisfaction for the individual and a stiffening of his resolve to fight on. Helmut von Harnack, writing from Russia in October 1941, exclaimed with pride that his unit was “a real fighting company, which had successfully come through the most engagements with the heaviest losses in the regiment. The young soldiers are overwhelmingly good guys… who… radiate a vital energy that is unshakable despite the bitter hours. Out of the eyes of these men speaks an invincible strength.” While describing fierce fighting around Vitebsk in January 1944, in which he was wounded for the third time, Klaus Löscher nonetheless wrote with barely concealed pride, “My good old company is badly battered, as in general is the proud regiment.” Writing from a field hospital a few days later, he could still proclaim his pride that “despite heavy losses my company achieved the greatest success.” All in all, he concluded, his men were “golden fellows and courageous soldiers.” 35

So intense could this feeling of pride become that it often verged on hubris. “The incredible pride we have simply doesn’t allow us to retreat,” Martin Pöppel bragged from Russia in early 1942, “and makes us a legendary force.” “I find it simply fabulous,” boasted a Landser similarly in a July 1941 letter from Russia, “that we are settling scores immediately with all our enemies. But of course the whole world must now also recognize how splendid and powerful our German Wehrmacht is. No other force in the world is a match for us.” This, of course, was written during the heady first days of triumph in the war on Russia, but amazingly, this intense pride persisted even in the latter stages of the war. An anonymous Landser trapped in the Falaise pocket at the end of the Normandy campaign wrote in August 1944, “It doesn’t look very good… but nonetheless there is no reason to paint too black a picture…. There are so many good and elite divisions in our near-encirclement that we must get through somehow.” In the same vein, Siegfried Roemer declared in March 1944, during the savage combat along the Dnieper, “When I look over the past week, the work, the exertions, the danger, sweat, blood, and privations, in the midst of the worst jams we still have the feeling of superiority. The mood of our soldiers was like a plant that always climbs to the light.” 36

And what was the light, the factor that could so elevate the morale of the Landser ? Often it was nothing more than a stubborn pride in resisting the fierce enemy assaults. “It is a mockery if one still speaks of us as the twenty-fourth Panzer Division,” grumbled Rembrand Elert, writing at roughly the same time as Roemer. “The whole division moves by foot. It has no more tanks, four whole SPW [armored scout cars], three laughable field guns with no ammunition, two anti-tank guns and [one anti-aircraft gun]. No more mortars, sMG [heavy machine guns], or IG [artillery]…. And yet our division kept its thrown-together units firmly under control, again and again formed a front, and in numerous battles smashed all enemy attempts at encirclement.” 37Despite the disintegration of his unit, Elert took deep satisfaction in its having stood the test. Overwhelming pride in his unit and in the men around him, a sense of membership in a special organization that was tenacious and proficient, satisfaction from performing a difficult task under onerous conditions—all of these things stiffened the resolve of the Landser and caused him to fight on even in desperate situations.

Helmut Vethake, amid the wreckage of the eastern campaign, expressed not the arrogance often generated by this fierce group loyalty but rather the support it provided in difficult moments. “We have gradually been forced into a renunciation of everything that was formerly valuable and important to us,” he mused. “Only a few simple things remain intact: pure dedication and a plain, loyal standing side-by-side and helping out in the common work: comradeship! We experience it most strongly as we are standing ready on the eve of a heavy attack. Then nothing else is worth more, not even one’s life, which each is willing to give up.” “Duty calls,” Siegbert Stehmann concluded in a letter in October 1943. “One must bear it and hold on to that which remains: the good spirit of comradeship which surrounds me with much love.” The sense of duty to one’s comrades not infrequently served as a motivation for fighting on, as an anonymous soldier revealed in June 1943: “Shoulder to shoulder we fulfill our duty, like the old comrades, and are firmly resolved to fight and to triumph, so that our models, the fallen comrades, will not be sacrificed in vain. Their death is my duty…. Better to fight honorably and die than to steal life.” 38

In the carnage and chaos of war, when many Landsers came to regard this camaraderie as the one true or pure relationship, the death of a comrade could be agonizing. “Tomorrow we have a sad job,” lamented an anonymous soldier. “We must bury a comrade from our company…. He is the first out of our midst. When you are together for almost a year, it is a real misfortune.” Bernhard Ritter was but one of many who noted a similar sense of loss: “In the march to the rear we went by the graves of [two] comrades who had been killed…. One now suddenly understood just what that meant: They stood by my side, as if they were a piece of me. One felt that totally unsentimentally, naturally, even when one barely knew them. The graves remain back there, and a piece of one’s self remains there as well. That is one of the secrets that the war has taught us, and it is all very simple.” 39

“It is serious,” agreed Claus Hansmann of the loss of a friend, “so terribly, inevitably pointed in the direction of one question: life or death…? The pain of our buddies comes alarmingly close to us, the eternal same thoughts of such an hour: why him, why not me?” And later, in reflecting on the death of a friend, Hansmann admitted, “I know and feel nothing but the old refrain: ‘as if it were a piece of me….’ Certainly a piece of me.” Another Landser , reading that a friend had been killed, remarked sadly, “As I read the lines, it was as if I myself had been struck.” Similarly, after seeing some of his comrades killed, Guy Sajer raged: