Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

Home leave and a chance to get away from the misery of the front were certainly welcomed by the Landser , but the pull of the front remained irresistible. “There I sit now. Am I happy?” puzzled Hans Pietzcker in October 1942, while enjoying art exhibitions and Beethoven concerts in Berlin. “I have homesickness just now; but I yearn not to go home but out there; my comrades are out there in the Russian mud…. With my old companions I stood sentry in the evenings…. We talked of art, of music. The rain trickled over the mud. It was cold. It snowed, the winter came. Ah, forget, forget! But still, was it not beautiful?” Even though stationed in France, which was regarded almost wistfully by those in Russia as a radiant paradise, Reinhard Goes betrayed sentiments similar to Pietzcker’s: “I could no longer live any further in France amid this quiet and richness, I had to get back to my friends and brothers at the front. Perhaps it was the call of the dead comrades that compelled me to return here…. I am proud to be at the focus of the battle.” 48

Not even a wound would necessarily break the magic spell of the Fronterlebnis (front experience). Recovering at home near Munich, Martin Pöppel turned a deaf ear to all entreaties from friends and relatives and returned to the front with his arm still in a sling. “No, it’s better by far to be out there,” Pöppel recorded in his diary. “I had to get back to the front. I couldn’t bear to sit around… when I knew what my comrades were going through. I had to get back.” Klaus Löscher felt the same tug. He had already been wounded five times; he considered the war nonsensical and hideous; yet despite his never-ending fatigue and earnest conviction that he would not return alive, Löscher still delighted in being sent back to his old unit, in which he took enormous pride. Shortly after rejoining his comrades at the front, Löscher fell victim to the blast of a hand grenade. In his wallet lay Manfred Hausmann’s poem “Path in the Twilight,” with the closing lines marked:

Who coveted light had indeed to proceed in the darkness; many Landsers found that away from the front they seemed overtaken by a soul-destroying emptiness, and that there existed no equivalent feeling of comradeship, no strong sense of unity, no meaning, in the rear.

Tension between front and rear has always been a feature of military life, of course, with soldiers on the front line typically contemptuous of those stationed behind it, and the front soldier’s definition of the rear could be extremely harsh. As Harry Mielert wrote from a retraining center: “Only the front has a right to exist. Everything that is carried on here [in the rear] is without urgency, it can just as well be discontinued, for no person would notice. The front on the other hand cannot simply be abandoned; it is necessary.” 50

Martin Pöppel, in his war diary during the desperate early days at Normandy, expressed the same contempt and illustrated as well the very different feelings the men had toward upper-echelon officers in the rear as opposed to those who shared the front-line hardships with them.

Rrriing. Yet again. The Commander! Why am I providing harassing fire with my big gun and not with the machine guns? Crazy question from the Old Man. Because machine gun fire is completely ineffective… and because the Battalion has ordered me to provide harassing fire with all the guns I can. As a result of telling the truth I get a dreadful dressing down…. Rrring. Now there’s chaos, the Old Man is back on the line, even more furious with me than before. Now the word is that my mortars are firing too short. But that’s not possible, since the firing data has been precisely calculated and checked. As I’ve been firing for two hours, and accurately at that, then I can’t suddenly be firing too short using the same calculations. It’s enough to make you puke. The Old Man has suddenly gone crazy….

The Old Man is on the telephone again. Why am I firing with my big heavy gun again, after he expressly ordered me not to? Because a curtain barrage is the warning sign to the infantry that the enemy is making a major attack…. In such a case all heavy guns are to fire…. But the Regimental Commander is always right, or at least he thinks he is, and I’m removed from my company immediately…. It’s easy to imagine my bitterness. My platoon leaders… are furious as well, but there’s nothing to be done. The scum up there always stick together.

A few weeks later, during a temporary lull in the savage fighting, Pöppel got a measure of revenge, of Schadenfreude (malicious glee) at those in the rear: “The weather is still warm and beautiful. Most of the men are sitting in front of their dugouts to enjoy the sun…. A sudden concentration of fire from the enemy, but it lands behind our lines. And why not, why shouldn’t they get their share of our daily torment back there?” 51

Gottfried Gruner, a medical doctor serving on the front lines on the Black Sea coast, wrote scornfully in June 1943, “Recently I have even hauled around the Corps doctor. I think it was new to him to find that the war also took place there where he could not drive his car to it. Similarly, a professor from Königsberg, who had come… with his fly-net in search of malaria flies and larvae amazed us. The Landsers just laughed.” Similarly, Hans Woltersdorf raged at “those civil servants… [who] wore our uniforms, decorated themselves with our ranks, and considered themselves far too valuable to be wasted at the front, too good to be expected to end up as shreds of flesh on the bulkhead of a tank or even to have to see this. It was they who, with their signatures and a few strokes of a pen, sealed our fate, the fate of soldiers.” 52

These comments, accurately expressing the contempt for the Etappenschweine (rear swine) felt by the Frontkämpfer , also demonstrate that those at the front saw themselves as a lonely band of men exposed daily to the hardships and dangers of war; naturally, they resented those who were not. Most Landsers were convinced that neither officers and men stationed in the rear nor the folks at home could or would understand what they lived through, what the front was really like. Responding to a letter from home that had complained about a drunken soldier, Helmut Kniepkamp exclaimed:

But did you know his fate? Did you know what he had gone through? A year ago I was on Capri together with a comrade: 22 years old, a student, a corporal, 23 months without leave in Africa. What that means can only be appreciated by one who saw this man. Twenty-three months without trees and bushes, only desolation and emptiness! Physically he was a wreck and psychologically precarious. I will never forget him. His parents were killed in a bomb attack on Duisburg, his bride had cheated on him, his only brother had fallen in Russia. A fate that must leave us silent…!

Another comrade who was in the same regiment as I in Africa told me his life story: Wounded and taken prisoner by the English, escaped, handed over by Gaullists to the Americans, jumped from the train while under way, smuggled by Arabs to Spanish Morocco, then returned to Germany via Spain. So I would like it if you would just see a human in every soldier, even if he should misbehave, a man who, also for you, is giving his last unconditionally. 53

“It actually looks as if those at home want to lose their nerve,” complained a Landser furiously in August 1941. “If that is so, what should we at the front then say? Do you then believe that this acts as an encouragement for the soldiers?” “Whoever makes a soldier’s life miserable,” he continued in another letter, trying, perhaps vainly, to explain the mystique of camaraderie to an outsider, “and has not properly savored it, does not belong among humans.” “The impression that I had during my last leave was shattering,” concluded Lieutenant W.T. miserably. “The distance between those at home and those out there at the front has grown so much wider in the course of the year that there is hardly a bridge any longer.” 54Their fierce pride at being able to endure harsh situations, as well as their sense of being at the focus of battle, produced a feeling of exclusivity among the Landsers which blossomed into a deep loyalty to other members of this elite fraternity but generated an inevitable hostility between those who served at the front and anyone who did not.