Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

Writing in his diary from the eastern front in early May 1942, Helmut Pabst reflected on the personal impact of the war: “The soul… becomes still harder and more serious, further removed from petty things. A harsh judgment molds you, which can leave you badly marked.” Still, in an attempt to give a positive sense to what otherwise might seem lost years, Pabst insisted:

But in front of the bleak ground of our existence… the beauty of our lost youth appears in a gleaming radiance…. All of us have cut ourself off from a carefree life. But that leads not to weariness, not to resignation, for it is… a question of asserting yourself…. The will to life unfolds powerfully…. You live for the moment…. Just to live is happiness. But even in the serious moments you feel a life full of content. It is bitter and sweet, all and one, …because we have learned to see the essential…. In such hours emerges a will to… build a second life out of our knowledge. This will rules us with such a power that in this instant the soul cannot be damaged.

Almost exactly a year later Pabst returned to the theme of time lost: “Our life has its age. When the years diminish… you can only grit your teeth. It is childish to think that we might be compensated for this. For what possibilities a personal life loses with the peeling away of the years cannot be made up…. But perhaps it is also childish to speak of this subject anyway. I tell myself that, because more than in all previous wars our thoughts turn on the sense of events. And I see my attitude in this question neither fully clarified nor free of doubts.” 1

Although Pabst himself, killed in Russia in September 1943, lived neither to confront the meaning of the war nor to discover whether one could recover lost years, his reflections accurately foreshadowed the experiences of many who did survive. At the end of the war, with Germany collapsing and chaos all around, the immediate goal of most Landsers was simply to escape the Kettenhunde —the guard dogs of the military police—or the roving courts martial of the SS and get home alive. As one put it succinctly, “My first priority was naked survival, not moral regeneration.” 2But as life returned to some semblance of stability, if not normality, they inevitably began to look for meaning in their activities. Most had mixed feelings, realizing as they did the horrors of war yet also perceiving, however reluctantly, something positive in their experiences. For virtually all, the war had been a watershed, impossible either to dismiss or to forget. Branded by its harshness, these men sensed that they remained linked with others who had participated and, equally, that an outsider could not possibly understand the world they had endured—hence their feeling of isolation, as if they were in society but yet detached from it.

Part of the problem in coming to terms with their war experience stemmed from the fact that the ordinary Landser saw himself as a decent fellow. As Alfons Heck, a former Hitler Youth leader and soldier, confessed, “I never once during the Hitler years thought of myself as anything but a decent, honorable young German.” 3Precisely because of that self-perception it proved difficult for many to bear when, at the end of the war and later, they were told that the things they had done as young men—hard and distasteful things that had cost the lives of so many of their friends, were not only mistaken but evil. This verdict was especially perplexing to those who in their own eyes had merely sought to do what they had been told was their duty. Now their experiences seemed stripped of any meaning. Some clung to National Socialist values and continued to believe in the old leaders in order to lend their deeds and sacrifices some purpose. Others sank into a sullen apathy or gave way to bitter disillusionment with politics, in either case withdrawing into a private world that few could enter.

For many who had known only faith in Hitler, obedience, and fighting, the end of the war brought a crumbling of their value system, and with their belief in Hitler shattered they found themselves left with only a sense of emptiness and painful disappointment. “The world appears hopeless and bleak to me,” wrote Walter D. bitterly in his diary at the end of the war. ‘The biggest screamers, who were already in the Party when it barely existed, they now were never in the Party…. Yeah, I’ve learned… bitter wisdom and have paid with my faith, had to pay with a shattered world of ideals. Within me it is bleak…. I was once an idealist; today I am no longer one. What is man except misery? Full of pain, I think of all the young comrades who in all this disastrous confusion never found that they had been wasted…. Will they ever find a belief?” A seventeen-year-old soldier declared in despair to the equally young Helmut Altner in the ruins of Berlin at the very end of the war, “Give it up. Life has lost its meaning…! The years in which you have up to now existed are gone forever.” 4If the war really had been senseless, however, equally pointless were the exertions and sacrifices of the men involved, having many former Landsers, in their attempt at retrospective assessments, hesitant and uncertain. They could hardly seek justification in National Socialist values, but many also felt an undeniable attachment to what they had perceived as striving after a new social order.

Martin Pöppel reflected this ambivalence in his account of going into captivity at the end of the war. For two hours every day for ten days, Pöppel found himself interrogated by a British Captain, who wanted to know “not about the war as such…. Instead, he wanted to see into the heart and soul of a young (and in his opinion still fanatical) officer of Hitler…. He tried patiently to show me the evil of the Hitler regime, but failed because of my obstinacy and a kind of blind Nibelungen loyalty which still held me in its grip. I had survived, but I didn’t see any reason for me to crawl to these moneybags…. In those early days I still couldn’t see how the German people had been misused…. We men had been educated to stubborn, blind obedience. By the end of the war I had certainly become more critical, but cured, completely cured, I was not.” Although he admitted that “in that camp I saw whole worlds collapse,” Pöppel’s experience illustrates all the complexity of the readjustment process, from his ideologically driven contempt for the British as class-ridden colonialists to his insistence that the average Landser had fought to the bitter end primarily because of his fear of harsh Allied retribution associated with the Morgenthau Plan (a proposal made in 1943 by U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau to destroy all industry in postwar Germany). “At the end of the war we were completely demoralized,” Pöppel admitted at one point, but then hastened to add, “After some time in captivity… the spirit of battle had been reawakened…. Perhaps we were just stubborn, not prepared to accept the collapse of our world, the devaluation of all values. In any case, we were drawing new strength from these setbacks.” 5

For all his bravado, however, ambivalence haunted Pöppel. “The vast majority of us were soldiers, often credulous soldiers, but not executioners and not monsters,” he insisted. “We had been committed to Germany, but now we had to find new meaning in our lives. Each one of us would have to struggle alone for himself and his family, without being able to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with other soldiers, without the comradeship… to support us.” Pöppel illustrated both the self-image of the Landser as a decent guy and the painful difficulty of finding sense in a shattered world stripped even of basic fellowship. Significantly, he now recognized that, “personal responsibility, which the Führer took away from us, could no longer be avoided.” Still, the old identity proved stubborn and hard to discard: “Only in the field is man worth something.” Nor could Pöppel easily rid himself of his ideological underpinnings. He betrayed more than a hint of admiration for the unrepentant Nazis in the camp, suggesting that they were “the idealists. Not one bowed head, not one democratic whimper, only discipline and order…. For them all explanations were a swindle, the war and its end were the unjust judgment of the world, and the Nazi system remained their ideal…. What was especially tragic was that these idealists were often potentially among the best men.” Although criticizing their attitude, Pöppel still admitted, “But I could understand them.” Indeed, Pöppel counterposed these self-disciplined men of integrity, these unshaken Nazis, with the man he called “our model democrat,” who was found guilty of embezzlement from the camp store he managed. “But we all knew about his character,” Pöppel wrote contemptuously, “the way he denied his Germanness, and his democratic whimperings.” 6