By then the hospital needed the room. So after about 10 days there was a great visitation headed by a General of the medical service. They sorted the wounded and had to empty some beds. In his numerous entourage there was one corpulent medic. He could have been a factory manager. He had doubtless only recently been caught by the Heldenklau, and had gone to ground in the medical service. When the swarm of doctors had passed my emergency bed, I asked that medic to hand me the inflatable pillow from the foot of the bed. He replied that I should ask someone else because he was not responsible for doing that.
I could scarcely believe my ears, and lost my temper. There I was, lying pale and hollow cheeked, hair on end from lying down, and uncut for four months, unshaven and generally run to seed, and obviously seriously wounded on a wooden bedstead. On the seat next to it was my field tunic with all its medals, including the silver wound insignia. In front of me was that fat man, with prosperity written all over him. He was all dressed up, his hair slicked down, and he had the nerve to say that he was not responsible for carrying out one small service consisting of handing over one small thing. Never before during my service as an officer had I lost control of myself before a subordinate, yelled at him, and pulled rank on him, as I had with this man.
With the last remnants of strength and breath remaining in my wretched body, bellowing, I unleashed the full fury of the frontline fighter against the ‘damned’ people behind the lines. ‘We are letting ourselves get shot to pieces out there on the front line, and this swine, who has never heard the whistle of a bullet in his life, is not responsible for handing an inflatable pillow to a seriously wounded man!’ I was going mad. Tears were choking my words. I was no longer in control of myself. Some gentlemen from the visitation at first were shocked and indignant. Then some staff came over to calm me down, while the travesty of a Samaritan hurriedly left the room.
Even more than the days, the nights in that room were full of dread. Every evening I was given morphia, but its numbing effect only lasted for a few hours. By one o’clock in the morning I would wake up in the stained bed and wait patiently for an unwilling nurse, who would get peevish having to clean things up. I had never experienced such an accumulation of misery as I had in that room. A boy near to me asked again and again for water. Shot in the stomach, he had recently been operated on and was not allowed to drink. Everybody tried to make him understand that, but failed. One moment when he was not being watched he opened his hot water bottle. I was too weak to be able to warn him as he greedily gulped down the contents. The following morning he was dead. Opposite me, another man had had both his legs shattered. Resigned and quiet, he lay on his bunk. That was the way he died.
On the other hand, those impressions, however depressing they were, gave me courage and I used them to pull myself together. I had no intention of dying. The hope of getting out was germinating in me. Certainly the town was encircled, and certainly I was not fit to be moved. In fact for days I had had a high fever, but that would pass, I hoped, and by ship or by aircraft I surely must be able to get away. I felt a hesitant joy at the fact that evidently I had got away with it again. With the greatest difficulty I managed to scribble some lines to Mother and to Gisela. Gisela received them, but Mother did not.
From there they carried me to a room on the second storey of the building. Six wooden bunks filled the room. My new comrades, all officers, were seriously wounded like me, but obviously over the hill. My right-hand neighbour was Franz Manhart, Flak-Leutnant from Grafenberg near Eggenburg in Lower Austria. (He had managed to reach the level of section head in the finance ministry in Vienna). His left upper arm had been shattered but he could hobble. Opposite was the antitank Oberleutnant Nabert from Schweidnitz, whose left arm had been amputated. As it turned out, we had a whole series of common acquaintances in Schweidnitz, including an actress from the Landestheater whom I had seen in Sudermann’s Frau Sorge. When his dressings were being changed, Nabert’s stump gave out such a stench that we regularly felt sick. On the left next to me lay a Panzer Hauptmann, whose right upper thigh had been shattered. He tried in vain to move the toes on his foot. Then he was taken to be operated on, and came back without his right leg. After waking up from the anaesthetic he felt with both hands to where his knee had been. He could still feel it. The realisation that he was an amputee hit him like a bolt of lightning. Gasping, he drew the air through his teeth, then, without making a sound, he put his hands over his face in horror. On the evening of 25 March he was taken away by members of his unit. A destroyer had intended to make a run for it during the night, and was to take him along.
As I found out after the war from Herr von Garn, our Division also sent a detachment to remove wounded men from the hospital. Obviously the group could not have carried out the order properly, because they did not find me. No doubt they had only been on the ground floor. It is idle to speculate whether I might have been lucky and subsequently reached Denmark, with the regiment, on board a ship.
The frontline was approaching. The large pocket had shrunk to a beleaguered town, and declared a Festung. An old reserve officer, an invalid from the First World War and teacher by profession, went from room to room. He tried, as a ‘NSFO’ – National Socialist officer leader – to spread confidence in victory. Nobody took him seriously any more. But I still hoped that I might be transported away. Exactly three weeks after I had been wounded, my high fever fell overnight to normal. The crisis had passed. The euphoria of the convalescent came over me. The doctor declared me to be capable of being moved.
But by then it was too late. The harbour was blockaded. Two days before, it was said, one last hospital ship had sailed out. But it had been torpedoed and had sunk with hundreds of wounded men on board. In actual fact, it was the Wilhelm Gustloff. It was sunk by a Russian submarine. There were several thousand refugees on board. Two days previously, when I was unable to be moved, I had struggled against my fate. Once again I had to learn my lesson and resign myself to the inevitable.
An elderly Leutnant from the supplies services, had been laid in the Hauptmann’s bed. He was very drunk and had obviously been injured by a bomb splinter while in that state. Soon afterwards he died, still in the state of intoxication in which no doubt he had spent the last days and hours of his life. When he was taken out, I asked for his pistol. I still had the thought of making use of it.
In the meantime Russian and British aircraft were bombing the town. Bombs fell day and night. Heavy artillery shells landed. In the park of the high school, artillery and flak went into position. The explosions of the impacts, very close by, and the sharp cracks of our own guns and cannons as they fired went on alternately. The front was right there. We lay helpless, stuck in bed, on the topmost floor of the building. On the doctors’ rounds we asked if it was possible for us to be placed in the cellar. The station medical officer replied with the words: ‘You’re surely not just a bit afraid, gentlemen?’ Saying that, he smiled, but at the same time remained for safety’s sake under the cover of the lintel of the door.
He evidently considered us to be some of those guilty for the war. He perhaps believed that we should face our just punishment in the form of a bomb. He was not allowed to gainsay it, for instance by taking us down into the cellar. Even the ward medic no longer very often summoned up the courage to climb from the cellar to the upper ward. When it was absolutely necessary he brought up food. While butter and other provisions were supposedly stored in great quantities in food depots, they dished out only thin carrot soup to us. Sometimes there were a few slices of bread spread with cheese and marmalade. Right in front of our eyes, however, the medic would still be biting pieces off a block of chocolate. When taken to task about it, he declared shamelessly that none had been issued for the wounded.