Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

Many Landsers, undoubtedly influenced by Nazi propaganda, thus depicted themselves as conducting an ideological crusade in defense of European civilization and the German community. As their letters and diaries indicated, however, there was more to their ideological motivation than preconditioned racist hatred; the profound disbelief and disgust felt by the Landser at the primitive conditions in the Communist heartland, the very brutality of everyday life, produced a sense of waging an apocalyptic struggle against a cruel and backward power. Consequently, events served not merely to sustain ideology but often to create an acceptance of Nazi views among men previously skeptical or untouched by them. The hard fact of the matter was that the reality of the Soviet Union stunned the average Landser. To Lieutenant J.H., everything about Russia was backward. “This primitiveness surpasses every conception,” he wrote. “There is no yardstick for comparison [with Germany]. For us it is a totally odd feeling…. Merely filth and decay; that is the Soviet paradise.” “Peasant houses with straw roofs which look more like dog huts,” Wilhelm Prüller observed of Russia, “a ragged, dirty, animal-like people…. The paradise of the workers [is] nothing but a conglomeration of hunger and misery, murder and mass imprisonments, slavery and torture.” 30

“All those who today still see any kind of salvation in Bolshevism should be led into this ‘paradise,’” Karl Fuchs wrote derisively to his wife. “When I get back I will tell you endless horror stories about Russia.” “No matter where you look,” he concluded in another letter, “you can’t find a trace of culture anywhere. We now realize what our great German Fatherland has given its children. There exists only one Germany in the entire world.” To his mother, Fuchs exclaimed indignantly, “These people here… live like animals. If they could only once see a German living room. That would be paradise for them, a paradise that these communist scoundrels, Jews and criminals have denied them. We have seen the true face of Bolshevism, have gotten to know it and experienced it, and will know how to deal with it in the future.” For Fuchs, the German mission was clear: “Our duty has been to fight and to free the world from this communist disease. One day, many years hence, the world will thank the Germans and our beloved Führer for our victories here in Russia.” 31

Nor were these merely the sentiments of middle-class soldiers. Landsers from a working-class background who had been reared in the belief that Soviet Russia was the workers’ paradise often seemed especially shocked and revolted. Direct experience thus reinforced Nazi propaganda as the men saw for themselves what they regarded as the cruelty and barbarity of Russia. “We are deep in Russia, in the so-called paradise,” Private H. wrote disdainfully in July 1941. “Here great misery rules, the people held for over two decades under an oppression that one can hardly imagine. We all would rather die than live through such misery and agony…. Often we ask the Russian soldiers why they threw their weapons away, and they answer: ‘What should we fight for then, for the years of oppression and the misery that we went through?’” Raged Corporal W.F., “I am fed up with the much praised Soviet Union. The conditions here are antediluvian. Our propaganda has certainly not exaggerated, rather understated.” His opinion was seconded by Sergeant H.S., who noted ruefully, “One can almost not imagine how poor and primitive the red paradise is.” “Why the men can bear to hold out,” echoed another soldier in September 1943, “one can learn here in the east.” Commented a working-class soldier disgustedly:

Our dwelling for the night was a wooden house already occupied by a Russian family…. We were bitten all night by vermin…. A huge stove served to warm the family and they slept on or near it at night…. The inside walls of this hovel were wall-papered with pages from newspapers…. The children all had the protruding bellies of long-term malnutrition and this was the Ukraine, the great wheat-growing region of the Soviet Union…. The satirical joke I had heard in a Berlin night club years ago but had never really believed had become true. “The first communists were Adam and Eve. They had no clothes to wear, had to steal apples for food, could not escape the place in which they lived and still thought that they were in paradise.” The reality of the situation is that in twenty-two years of Communism a salted fish occasionally is for this family… the height of luxury. How this country depresses me. 32

Even the legendary ability of the average Russian to bear hardships seemed to the Landser to have something nonhuman about it. “The Russians are poor souls… who live a rather wretched existence in their foxholes,” observed Harry Mielert, then added, “But the Russian is also more primitive, animalistic, and lives more eagerly and routinely in the ground than we.” Observing Russian wounded, the Italian war correspondent Curzio Malaparte remarked wonderingly: “They do not cry out, they do not groan, they do not curse. Undoubtedly there is something mysterious, something inscrutable about their stern, stubborn silence.” Similarly, Erich Dwinger noted his awe of the wounded Russians:

Several of them burnt by flamethrowers had no longer the semblance of a human face. They were blistered shapeless bundles of flesh. A bullet had taken away the lower jaw of one man…. Five machine-gun bullets had threshed into pulp the shoulder and arm of another man, who was without any dressings. His blood seemed to be running out through several pipes…. I have five campaigns to my credit, but I have never seen anything to equal this. Not a cry, not a moan escaped the lips of the wounded…. Hardly had the distribution of supplies begun than the Russians, even the dying, rose and flung themselves forward…. The shapeless burnt bundles advanced as quickly as possible. Some half a dozen of them who were lying down also rose, holding in their entrails with one hand and stretching out the other with a gesture of supplication…. Each of them left behind a flow of blood which spread in an ever-increasing stream. 33

The combustible mixture of astonishment, disgust, and fear with which many Landsers viewed Russians caused them to see their enemy as something unreal, the product of a brutish and menacing system that had to be eliminated. “It’s not people we’re fighting against here,” concluded Wilhelm Prüller, “but simply animals.” “The war here in Russia is totally different from former [wars] with a state,” observed Corporal L.K. And he was in no doubt as to the reason, agreeing with Prüller that the Russians “are no longer people, but wild hordes and beasts, who have been bred by Bolshevism in the last 20 years. One must not allow any sympathy to grow for these people.” Indeed, Corporal H.H., observing Russian prisoners, dismissed them as “stupid, animalistic, and ragged.” Another soldier asserted that among “this mixture of races the devil would feel at home. It is, I believe, the most depraved and filthiest [people] living on God’s earth.” Karl Fuchs claimed, “Hardly ever do you see the face of a person who seems rational and intelligent…. The wild, half-crazy look in their eyes makes them appear like imbeciles.” 34This combination of ideology, idealism, and firsthand experience was a potent contribution to the extraordinary endurance of the Landser, as many, confronted by a culture that seemed alien and barbaric, brutal and threatening, believed that they were fighting for the very existence of the German community.

If the resilient and resolute Landser thus went beyond Jüngerian functionalism and embodied to a great extent the Nazi notion of the hard, dynamic soldier in the service of an ideal, what was it he fought for? Certainly the incessant stream of propaganda served to produce in the minds of many soldiers a legitimacy for the Nazi regime, which encouraged willing obedience. The Landser, perhaps to a surprising degree, carried ideological beliefs with him into the war, especially in Russia. The consequence of incessant Nazi indoctrination in the schools, in the Hitler Youth, and in the army seemed to be a body of men with a remarkable cohesion in the face of the tribulations of war. The steady flow of racist and anti-Semitic ideological indoctrination undeniably reinforced a general sense of racial superiority on the part of many Landsers. But this negative integration, so thoroughly documented by Omer Bartov, could not by itself have induced the amazing resilience under conditions of extreme disintegration demonstrated by the average German soldier, a point even Bartov seems to have conceded. “When the fighting in the East physically destroyed such socially cohesive groups (primary groups), the sense of responsibility for one’s comrades, even if one no longer knew them, remained extremely strong,” he admitted in a significant change from his earlier position that savage fighting destroyed such connections irreparably. “At the core of this loyalty to other members of the unit was a sentiment of moral obligation.” And what did this sense of obligation entail? “The new sense of existential comradeship extended also far beyond the purely military circle to encompass first the soldier’s family and friends in the rear, and ultimately the Reich as a whole, if not, indeed, what the propagandists of the period referred to as ‘German culture’ and ‘European civilization,’” Bartov asserted. “Both the worsening situation at the front and the growing impact of the war on the rear convinced increasing numbers of soldiers that they were in fact fighting for the bare existence of everything they knew and cherished.” 35