Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

Similarly, Alfons Heck puzzled that “a civilized, humane people had allowed ourselves to become indifferent to brutality committed by our own government.” Yet in the end his analysis verged on self-pity: “I developed a harsh resentment toward our elders, especially our educators. Not only had they allowed themselves to be deceived, they had delivered us, their children, into the cruel power of a new God.” Heck concluded that despite their enthusiastic support for Hitler, his generation filled the role of victim as surely as those cruelly murdered by Nazi aggression: “Tragically, now, we are the other part of the Holocaust, the generation burdened with the enormity of Auschwitz. That is our life sentence, for we became the enthusiastic victims of our Führer.” Similarly, though confessing that, “I and with me millions of Germans turned to [Hitler] as the Führer, willingly fought and died honorably for him,” Friedrich Grupe still professed shock at the remark of German President Richard von Weizsäcker—himself the son of a diplomat who had served the Nazis—in October 1988 that “the German people were led by criminals and let themselves be led by criminals.” “Without a reconciliatory and clarifying word to the onetime soldiers,” Grupe complained, “this is a bitter obituary for the millions of German war dead whose death under the swastika was pronounced: ‘fallen for Volk and Führer.’” Even Claus Hansmann, certainly no apologist for Hitler or the Nazis, at the end of the war fell victim to the “victim” claim: “We are no heroes…. Heroes? What are we? Poor, mistreated, mutilated victims of a… nightmare.” 13

If some Landsers sought but largely failed to discover a larger meaning to the war, many others refused even to consider the greater dimensions of their experiences. For them the war was and remained a personal matter, to be measured in individual gain or loss. Certainly, returning to a devastated homeland that no longer even existed as a nation, viewing the awesome destruction of German cities that had become less places of habitation than piles of rubble, facing the difficulties of readjustment to a civilian society that was not the same as the one they had left, recognizing that they had no careers to return to—all this emphasized for many the solitary nature of their burden. After the war, men found themselves searching everywhere for the lost years, knowing that they could never find them. Those years had been stolen, never to be recovered, and with this realization came either a lingering bitterness or a deep determination not to think of the loss but to work doubly hard to succeed with the remainder of one’s life.

Stunned by the extent of the destruction in Germany, many Landsers allowed their immediate thoughts to revolve around the notion of luck. Returning home from English captivity in late March 1946, Martin Pöppel was struck that “the mood here was almost… completely apathetic…. Everywhere there were just women and boys working in patched old uniforms, examining bricks, searching through the ruins for anything that could be used. Then the train journey with its unending procession of shattered towns, villages, factories The sight made us draw in our breaths…, it made us fear for the future.” Still, as Pöppel neared his old home in the Munich suburbs, all he could think about was his luck: he was “reporting back after five years of war and one year of captivity in England.” Likewise, Siegfried Knappe confessed that he “was finding it difficult to ‘justify’ my luck during the entire war. I had to accept it as my destiny without feeling guilt… that I had lived when so many others had died.” Fifty years after the war began, Claus Hansmann referred bitterly to “the careless assessments of those ‘graced by a late birth,’” although he admitted that “the only thing that remains with me [from the war] is the most pleasant puzzle of my life: my survival in the field.” 14

Many Landsers were convinced that one had to have had luck to survive. They viewed it as something mystical yet almost tangible, a presence that had accompanied the fortunate ones, a quality or property that they came to see as almost a moral lesson of history, as if one had been anointed by “chance” or “fate” for survival. With an emphatic staunchness, Ernst-Peter Kilian appraised his survival as the result of an inscrutable force that had protected him when by all rights he should have been killed. “I have always stressed that I had an improbable luck as a soldier,” he admitted, then repeated his statement as if he himself almost didn’t believe it: “On the whole I must say that I had completely unlikely good fortunes of war.” In like fashion, Hans-Hermann Riedel puzzled afterward that during the war “I was always dodging death.” Riedel not only spoke of having luck but sought somehow to make it into a tangible force that had accompanied him. Thus he “escaped by the skin of my teeth,” “survived [an air attack] out in the open,” “came out of it yet again,” and—recalling another bombing raid that killed many of his comrades—“I had been there ever so shortly before.” Perhaps troubled by his good fortune, Riedel could explain it only as the result of a force outside himself that favored him for whatever reason. Others, such as Otto Richter and Hugo Nagel, referred as well to an “improbable luck” but transformed the concept into a religious one, both men using such words as “fate,” “destiny,” “providence,” “chance,” and “miracle.” 15Hoping to find some sense in their survival but gnawed by the suspicion that it was undeserved, they sought solace in religious explanations of their good fortune. Many former Landsers almost had to turn to mystical explanations, so improbable did their survival amid the enormous slaughter seem to them. They could only conclude that fate, in a magical and personal sort of way, had been kind to them.

Despite feeling fortunate to have returned from the war alive, many Landsers nonetheless retained a simmering personal resentment at what they saw as stolen years. Even during the war, in fact, some had glimpsed an unsalvageable future. “The last few days were again so gruesome, the nights so tormenting, that they were like what is recounted about olden times, when the people saw gloom in each and every night,” despaired Harald Henry. “Here in the snowy fields of Russia our best powers are being murdered, not only in these years that we have lost here but also for the coming ones; even if we return, we are still cheated of the future, enfeebled, beaten down, and numb. An all-consuming hate, a really total void, is gathering in our breast.” 16Henry did not have to face this bleak future; he was killed less than three weeks after writing this letter.

Both Uwe Pries and Emil Dahlke, however, retained their bitterness about the stolen years long after the war ended. “I mean,” Pries tried to explain, “in any case they already took many years from us. You can say that our generation is still being swindled…. You can say that from ‘39 really to ‘49, almost ten years they took from us as well.” Dahlke, more than Pries, emphasized the sense of having been the victim of a fraud: “I think that my generation… has been swindled twice in our lives, if you take into consideration that we had nothing at all of our youth. Then came the war when we were in a position to marry… and what was there? Again, everything was gone. The postwar period, these years—well, you still had nothing.” 17Clearly, both former soldiers believed strongly that the war had cheated them of the normal patterns of life, of the possibility of marrying, starting a family, pursuing a career.

For many, this sense of loss never went away. Arthur Pieper, as an elderly man still yearning wistfully for the six and a half years of his life taken by the war, concluded painfully that “the best years were lost to us.” What this notion meant was perhaps best illustrated by Heinz Rieckmann, who was born in 1922, drafted into the army in 1940, and not released from Russian captivity until 1950. “Therefore I did not marry until 1958,” he recalled. “I first made up my bachelor period, because I had lost my youth And in the few years that I was still a bachelor I let off a bit of steam. Then I married.” Rieckmann’s account illustrates the personal nature of the lost years, for by the time he returned to civilian life and “let off steam,” he clearly faced severely limited possibilities in life. Little wonder, then, that many former Landsers nursed a sense of grievance. “When I look back I am filled with a total rage at the stolen years that have been very decisive in our whole development,” Gerd S. fumed, then added significantly, “and perhaps also over the fact that at that time we were also not more courageous in rejecting the whole thing.” 18