My comrades’ ‘assignment’, the term by which it was known to us, was followed by dreary weeks for me. I was only fit for indoor duties and was employed as recruit Gefreiter in the 2nd Company of Infantry Ersatz Battalion 461, in the neighbouring barracks. The recruits, who reported on 1 April, were all from the eastern part of Upper Silesia, aged from thirty to thirty-five years, and were all members of the so-called Volksgruppen 2 and 3. According to that system of classification, which still covered the Reich Germans (Volksgruppe 1) and the Poles (Volksgruppe 4), there were those who professed to be German or who were still classified as Germans.
Two of these I can still see. One was a slim, sensitive cobbler Slavik, from Ornontowitz near Gleiwitz. The other was a small, black-haired and round-headed Hilfsarbeiter Stanitzek from Hindenburg. Slavik used to tell of his craft and how he had made orthopaedic footwear but also had made riding boots for Polish officers. He told us that he had not long been married. He had taken a kind of vow never to take off his wedding ring, and spoke of his marriage in a way that impressed me. But he was killed in Russia when he went into action for the first time. Stanitzek was a true Pjerun. I remember him as a Schweik character. He taught me how to drink 96% proof vodka, that is, trickled on to a sugar cube!
I then had more time for myself, and went into the officers’ mess as I had before. Jochen Fiedler, who had a wireless set, left it behind for me. After four weeks I had to report to the medical officer, and at the beginning of May was sent to the reserve military hospital in Metz. For a few more days I was ‘under observation’. Indoor duties such as peeling potatoes, in comparison with my previous duties, I found demeaning. If they were not on the agenda, we could go out and look around the town. I went for walks in the parks by the Moselle and even went to a concert. One afternoon I had been in a coffee-house and got into conversation with Wolfgang Schneiderhahn, the young leader of the Vienna Philharmonic. That evening he was playing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. The German cultural life in Metz was mostly provided by artists from Vienna. Later I found out that, at that time, people like Josef Meinrad were engaged in the theatre in Metz.
On 10 May I was operated on and after about a fortnight discharged back to Mörchingen. Of my fellow-patients I remember a Feldwebel who had a sliver of bone from his lower thigh transplanted into his lower arm in order to make the arm more mobile. The Feldwebel was a teacher and had an education to match. He played chess, and so we were able to pass the time playing chess and in conversation. Nevertheless, I was impatient, and would not accept my fate. I would much rather ‘be in Russia in the worst muck’, as I wrote to Mother. She and Aunt Lotte, she said, had ‘little natural tendency or talent to be mothers of German heroes’. However, my letters spoke of little else. There was not even loving raillery, but a few reproaches that she had not written. It was rather a restrained kind of tenderness with frequent assurances that I was thinking a lot of her and my sisters and was ‘her thankful son’.
In one Christmas present, the little book Wie die Pflicht es befahl, ‘As Duty Commanded, Words from our War Poets’, the editor’s foreword states that “in this struggle all Germans are animated by a single belief. It is belief in the mission of the Führer and in the eternal nature of the Reich. There is a single certainty that Germany shall live, even if we must die”. To the quotations from works of the war poets Walter Flex, Ernst Jünger, Baumelberg and Zöberlein, etc. was added the then well-known poem An die Mutter by a certain Irmgard Grosch. Its last verse runs:
Such proud mourning, as was displayed in many death announcements at that time, would certainly have been beyond my Mother. I am also unable to say how she took the news of the death of my brother. He was killed in action, as late as April 1945. But the poem had little effect on me. Naturally its heroic tone, all the more so in the poetic art form, appealed to me. But the thought that it could be I who was being mourned like that did not occur to me. I never suffered from premonitions of death, but carried the conviction that it would never happen to me. I was even then looking forward with confidence to the longed-for test of the front, and left for the field with a light heart.
The Reich was in danger. It was not Germany that had declared war on England and France, but they that had declared war on Germany. But, as far as the Soviet Union was concerned, there was no doubt about what the Reich government had written, in its declaration of war, to the Soviet government: ‘The German Volk is conscious that it is called to save the whole civilised world from the deadly dangers of Bolshevism, and to lay the way open for a true process of social advancement in Europe’. That extract from the declaration was printed in small print on the upper edge of many field postcards. Who among us could have doubted the truth of what was said there? Who could have proved it to be wrong?
PART II
FROM RAW RECRUIT TO OLD HAND
2
July–September 1942: First actions
From 15 October 1942 Infanterieregiment 7 was a Grenadierregiment, a unit in the Prussian tradition. It served in the First World War as Grenadierregiment König Friedrich Wilhelm II (1. Schlesisches) Nr 10. After reorganisation and reformation it had participated from 1935 to 1939 as Infanterieregiment 7 in the campaign in Poland. In 1939 and 1940 it fought in the campaign in the West. Within the unit of the 28th Infanteriedivision, to which it had belonged since the beginning of the war, it was prepared for the attack on the Soviet Union in the Suwalky sector in East Prussia.
It served in the following actions in Russia, 1941–42:
- 22–27 June 1941: breakthrough of the ‘Bunker Line’
- 29 June–9 July 1941: Bialystok-Minsk encirclement battle
- 10 July–9 August 1941: advance and fighting at Smolensk
- 10 August–1 October 1941: defensive fighting on the Popij, before and around Jarzewo
- 2–14 October 1941: the Vyazma battle
- 15 October–18 November 1941: the Regiment was released from the 28th Infanteriedivision and placed under the command of the 252nd Infanteriedivision
- 19 November–4 December 1941: the attack on Moscow
- 5 December 1941–15 January 1942: retrograde movements into the Rosa-Stellung and trench fighting
- 16–25 January 1942: the Winterreise, or the winter journey (Translator’s note – the term Winterreise ironically echoes the 19th century poet Heinrich Heine’s sequence of poems under the same title, and also Franz Schubert’s subsequent musical arrangement of Heine’s poems)
- 26 January–28 February 1942: widespread defensive fighting to the east of Gschatsk.