In Wernigerode I had another letter from the company clerk, Unteroffizier Wolf. In it he told me about what had happened to my company after I left. Wolf wrote that, in accordance with my letter, the recommendations had been made for decorations for the men, namely the two medics. In the barrage fire in front of the cemetery at Asorowo they had heroically done their duty. It was the chaplain, Unteroffizier Jaschek, whom I had put in for the Iron Cross First Class, and Obergefreiter Beuleke whom I had recommended for the Iron Cross Second Class. Wolf continued:
…after the heavy casualties of 15 October, the company was topped up again. At the end of November we were taken back by rail to Nevel. From 8 November we had more heavy casualties, 20 dead and 50 wounded! Leutnant Ludwig, who had taken over command of the company, was also wounded. Major Brauer and the battalion Adjutant, Leutnant Buksch, were killed in action.
I wish the Herr Leutnant a really good convalescence and I hope to see you again soon. Company leaders of your calibre, with a fresh and daring spirit and filled with concern about the welfare of the men in the trenches, do our people good. Then it will be easier to master the difficult tasks that face us.
PART III
THE TIDE TURNS
7
January–July 1944: Officers’ course, Operation Bagration – the Russian summer offensive
In Wernigerode I had already found out that, after my Christmas leave, I would be sent on a course for convalescent officers. Such courses were held in all Wehrkreise. The Silesian course, the one appropriate for me, took place in Freiwaldau-Grafenberg. Freiwaldau, at that time in the Sudetenland, is in the Altvater mountains, and it is also a spa. We were therefore quartered in the Altvater sanatorium, otherwise a tuberculosis sanatorium. We had duties in the morning for only three to four hours in the form of lectures or sand table war games. On the course I met the very comradely young Hauptmann Hein. Since the spring he had been in command of the second company as an Oberleutnant. From Hein I learned that of the 40 officers in the regiment, at the beginning of the enemy offensive on 6 August, only three were still with the regiment. All the others were dead or wounded. All the battalion commanders had been killed in action, as were many other good comrades. On 11 January I wrote to Father, quite shaken. ‘In March we will be off to Russia again. Sometimes it gives me the shudders, but I put my trust in God’.
In the sanatorium there were skis. So some of us went skiing when the weather permitted and the snow was right. The mountain countryside offered many opportunities for skiing, and also for walking. I remember one trip, on which we came through the long Strassendorfer Oberlindewiese and Niederlindewiese. Their names were as quaint as was the landscape. ‘The food’, I wrote to Mother, ‘was not particularly copious, but we discovered the existence of a decree. According to it those under 21 years of age were entitled to 200 grams of sausage, per man, per day, in addition to their other rations! The flabbergasted paymaster immediately authorised the addition!’
Freiwaldau was not so noble a spa as Wernigerode. It offered no diversions at all. After dinner, Hein and I, together with the artillery Oberleutnant Sylvester von Glinski from our Division, stayed together for a while, and then went to bed. The almost superhuman exertions that had gone on for weeks and months resulted in an enormous need to sleep. Sometimes, after I had slept 10 hours during the night, I went to bed again after lunch and slept another four hours until dinner. So the actual purpose of the course, our convalescence, was achieved. At least in my case!
After five weeks in Freiwaldau I arrived in Schweidnitz, where I met many old acquaintances and good comrades in arms. Amongst them, was Oberleutnant Klaus Nicolai. In August, as commander of the third company, he had been wounded. I became friendly with him and we often went to the theatre and frequented the Hindenburg-Hof in which I had lived the previous year. As head of the convalescent company, Nicolai had rooms in the barracks. I had a private room in the house of innkeeper Pöttler. Another acquaintance was Leutnant Heckel, member of a well-known family of hatters in Neutitschein.
One Sunday, I went from Freiwaldau to Mährisch-Schönberg, to visit my officer cadet comrade Bormann from Breslau. He had been wounded during his first period of probation at the front and had come away with a stiff knee. Another time Nicolai, Heckel and I went from Schweidnitz, in the company of two actresses, on a trip to the dam at Frankenstein. Schweidnitz possessed a quite good provincial theatre. When I heard Flotow’s Martha the tenor part was played by a certain Alexander von Krüdener. He was a fairly old gentleman and, so the story went, had many children.
The commander of the Ersatz battalion was a Hauptmann Brandt. Nicolai and I called him ‘SA man Brandt’, after a novel from the Kampfzeit, i.e. the ‘period of struggle’ before the Nazis had come to power, well known at that time. The battalion adjutant was Leutnant Dr Waller, who in civilian life was an attorney from Eger. To a certain extent Waller seemed to me more of a business manager to the battalion. At any rate he was more of a businessman than an officer. He had gained his Leutnant’s rank in the Czech army.
At that time a marching company went every month to France to the Atlantic Wall. There the mostly recently enlisted older and quite young soldiers were given further training. In April Waller assigned me as transport officer. After I had received the papers, he took me to one side. He made the remarkable suggestion that I should travel from St. Maixent near Poitiers, without marching orders, and without a leave permit, and go to Bordeaux to buy some things for him. Such obviously irregular suggestion I brusquely declined, without even asking for the details. However, Waller accepted it with just a shrug of his shoulders.
The railway journey, through Germany and half of France, was naturally more pleasant than the journeys through Russia had been. There was much more variety in terms of landscape. I did not even know the Rhineland through which I then travelled and had never been any further west than Metz. In Verres, the massive freight station to the south of Paris, there were troop trains. Among the goods transports there were many wagons carrying wine. Word immediately got round that a unit had succeeded, with the help of a shot from a pistol, in ‘nabbing’ a huge wine container. In a flash the Landsers on our transport had run with their canteens to the place where the ‘nabbing’ had occurred.
When the military police arrived, it was no longer possible to find out who had done it. As long as the hole was not stoppered the best thing was to hold the canteens under it and fill them up. The wine soon began to take effect and the accompanying personnel, again and again, had to take care that there was no rowdiness. The men lay on straw in the goods wagons, each with a little cannon oven. For the accompanying personnel there was a passenger carriage available. While unloading in St Maixent, an oven fell over in one of the Schweidnitz wagons. The straw immediately caught fire and the men had to hurriedly evacuate the wagon. ‘Heaven help us’, I thought, if this accident had happened during the rapid journey through France.