We were officially designated “burial squad” one morning at dawn.
The light was so faint it was still almost as dark as the middle of the night. Laus informed us that our new job would take the place of the fortnight’s leave we had been promised, and were so much looking forward to. As a rule, the Russian prisoners were used to bury the dead, but it seemed they had taken to robbing the bodies, stealing wedding rings and other pieces of jewelry. In fact, I think the poor fellows many of them wounded but designated fit for work — were probably going over the bodies for something to eat. The rations we gave them were absurd — for example, one three-quart mess tin of weak soup for every four prisoners every twenty-four hours. On some days, they were given nothing but water.
Every prisoner caught robbing a German body was immediately shot. There were no official firing squads for these executions. An officer would simply shoot the offender on the spot, or hand him over to a couple of toughs who were regularly given this sort of job. Once, to my horror, I saw one of these thugs tying the hands of three prisoners to the bars of a gate. When his victims had been secured, he stuck a grenade into the pocket of one of their coats, pulled the pin, and ran for shelter. The three Russians, whose guts were blown out, screamed for mercy until the last moment.
Although we had already met birds of every color, these proceedings revolted us so much that violent arguments broke out between us and these criminals every time. They invariably became furious and abusive, shouting insults at us. They said they had escaped from the camp at Tomvos, where the Russians dumped German prisoners, and they told us how our countrymen were being slaughtered. According to them, the infamous Tomvos camp, sixty miles east of Moscow, was an extermination camp. Rations as ludicrous as those we handed out to Russian prisoners at Kharkov were served once a day to men reporting for labor. Men who did not work received nothing. One bowl of millet was provided for every four men. There was never enough, even for the prisoners who could work. The daily surplus were simply killed: a favorite method of execution was to hammer an empty cartridge case into the nape of the prisoner’s neck. It seemed that the Russians often distracted themselves with this type of sport.
I myself can well believe that the Russians were capable of this kind of cruelty, after seeing them at work among the pitiful columns of refugees in East Prussia. But Russian excesses did not in any way excuse us for the excesses by our own side. War always reaches the depths of horror because of idiots who perpetuate terror from generation to generation under the pretext of vengeance.
We spent hours digging out a long tunnel which had been turned into an emergency hospital during the fighting. The surgeons had been so overloaded that the wounded had almost certainly been abandoned. A line of rough triple-decker beds extended some hundreds of yards down the corridor, each containing three blackened, stiff, and mutilated bodies. From time to time, an empty space marked the final flight of a dying man.
There was no light in this charnel house, except from the electric torches which some of us had fastened to our tunics. These threw beams of horrifying illumination on the thin, swollen faces of the cadavers, which we had to pull out with hooks.
Finally, one delicious spring morning, incongruous in that sad, ruined landscape, a muddy truck drove down the track to the new barracks we had moved into the day before. After a brisk half turn, it stopped about ten yards from the first building, where a group of men which included myself were busy removing a heap of gravel and small stones. The back flap of the truck was kicked open, and a plump little corporal jumped down and clicked his heels. Without saluting or saying a word, he rummaged in his right breast pocket, where all military instructions were supposed to be kept. He pulled out a sheet of paper which had been carefully folded four times, and read out a long list of names. As he read, he indicated with a wave of his hand that the men named should step to the right. There were about one hundred names on the list, among them Olensheim, Lensen, Hals, and Sajer. Feeling somewhat anxious, I joined the group on the right. The corporal told us we had three minutes to climb aboard the truck with our weapons and packs. Then he clicked his heels again, saluting this time, and turned his back without another word, striding off as if he were suddenly going for a walk.
We ran frantically to collect our things. There was no time for conversation. Three minutes later, a hundred breathless soldiers were packed into the truck, whose bulging sides threatened to collapse. The corporal was also on time. He threw a withering glance at the eccentrically bulging packs some of us were carrying, but said nothing. Then he bent down to look at something under the truck.
“No more than forty-five on board,” he barked. “Departure in thirty seconds.”
He took another hundred paces.
We all groaned silently. No one wanted to get down; everyone had the best of reasons for staying put. Two or three men were shoved off the back. As I was right in the middle, packed in like a sardine, there was no question of moving. Laus finally took matters in hand. He made half the men on the truck get down. The remainder came to exactly forty-five. The corporal, who was already climbing into the front seat, told the driver to start. Laus gave us a friendly wave. We had received our final orders from him. His last smile more than made up in our eyes for all the duties he had imposed on us. Beside him, the other half of the group called out by the corporal watched with dazed faces as we vanished in a whirl of dust.
This half of the group joined us four days later, one hundred miles behind the front lines, at the rest camp of the famous Gross Deutschland Division. A large part of the division, especially the convalescing wounded, occupied the rustic Akhtyrka camp. The division itself held a mobile sector in the vast Kursk-Belgorod region. Everything at the camp was clean and neatly organized, as in the Boy Scouts, only far more lavishly supplied.
Akhtyrka reminded us of an oasis, surrounded by the trackless steppe.
We jumped down at the corporal’s order, and lined up in a double file. A captain, a first lieutenant, and a feldwebel walked toward us. Our plump little corporal snapped to attention. These officers were all dressed with astonishing style. The hauptmann looked like a figure from a costume party, in a jacket of fine gray-green cloth with the red facings of a combat unit, dark-green riding breeches, and gleaming cavalry boots. He waved at us, and then said something we couldn’t quite hear to the feldwebel, who was every bit his equal in elegance. After a short conversation with the hauptmann, the feld walked over to us, clicked his heels, and addressed us in a tone which at least was more agreeable than that of the corporal who had come to fetch us.
“Welcome to the Gross Deutschland Division!” he shouted. “With us, you will experience a genuine soldier’s life, the only life which brings men close to each other on terms of absolute sincerity. Here, a sense of comradeship exists between each and every one of us, which might be put to the test at any moment. Any black sheep, anyone unsuited for comradeship, does not stay in this division. Everyone must be able to count on everyone else, without any qualification whatever. The slightest error on anyone’s part affects the whole section. We want no slackers and no strays: everyone must be prepared either to obey without question, or to give orders. Your officers will think for you. Your duty is to show yourselves worthy of them. You will now get yourselves some new clothes and throw away your stinking rags. Absolute cleanliness is the essential foundation for a decent frame of mind. We do not tolerate any sloppiness of appearance.” He took a deep breath, and then continued. “When these preliminaries have been accomplished, this group of volunteers will receive their passes for the fortnight’s leave which has been promised them. If there is no counter-order, these passes will become effective in five days, when the convoy leaves for Nedrigailov.