His outfit battered by a series of frightful Russian night attacks, and fearing his imminent death, Leopold von Thadden-Trieglaff composed a sorrowful letter—his last—in which he vented his feeling of being “now totally bereft, lonely, and abandoned.” The bleakness he glimpsed proved prophetic: he was killed the next day. Similarly, Friedrich Andreas von Koch, not yet nineteen and destined to fall in battle within a few months, noted in April 1943, “Combat and battles are for me no special experience. It is all so profane, so impersonal.” Meinhart Freiherr von Guttenberg also expressed this sense of unease, remarking after a battle, “I am unable to collect my thoughts. Everything is so desolate around me and I also feel as if it is constantly becoming desolate and empty within myself.” This forlorn feeling of isolation was not uncommon, and Ernst Kleist thought he knew why. “Anxiety grips me often,” he reflected, “not anxiety in the face of battle or death. But events grow so gigantic that I feel myself to be smaller than a nothing.” Kleist’s insight was seconded by Harry Mielert: “There are no longer any individual events anymore.”11
Overwhelmed by the enormity of the war, plagued by a fear of being inconsequential, facing a solitary death—all these emotions intensified the feeling of existential loneliness felt by the Landser. Life at the front meant living on the edge of unimaginable horror and suffering. “I have lived through hell,” Harald Henry remarked of an experience in October 1941 which he termed “inconceivable”; in another letter he spoke of combat as “agony without end.” “Hell is seething in all its cauldrons,” he opened a letter a few days later, referring to “we tormented humans” who cannot bear the suffering much longer. “Yet the last hell,” he concluded, quoting Bertholt Brecht, “is never the very last.”12
Given the agonizing nature of combat, some Landsers not surprisingly proved unequal to the task of describing the monstrous actualities they experienced. Helmut von Harnack attempted in a letter to his father to express the reality, but words failed him. “The picture will only really be completed,” he maintained, “when the simple front fighters of this campaign come home on leave and again find the power of speech.” Another soldier admitted that he would like to unburden himself, “would really like to tell you all the experiences I’ve participated in. But we cannot and may not write everything.” Rembrand Elert tried to portray the savagery of the German retreat from Russia during the winter of 1944, faltered and then concluded, “One who was not a participant can have no conception [of what it was like].” Likewise, Wilhelm Prüller confided to his diary, “Those who haven’t fought on the front don’t know what war is.” Whether from lack of language skills, fear of the censor, or simply because they despaired that people at home could not understand, many Landsers found it impossible to convey the reality of their world—even though, as Walther Weber conceded while on convalescent leave in March 1942, “these two months of the Russian winter war are an experience whose severity has been stamped into me and which stays with me.”13
Still, despite the horrors to which they were subjected and the limited horizons of the front fighter, many soldiers provided an amazingly urgent and concrete picture of combat. For some, it seemed almost a living organism and the battlefield a startlingly personal place where danger and death prowled, always seeking more victims. As Harry Mielert remarked, “One has the impression that a wild animal is menacing us,” a sensation doubly shared by Kurt Reuber, caught as he was in the Stalingrad vise: “Can you imagine an animal stalked by death,” he wrote to his wife in late December 1942, “that after running for its life, thrashing about wildly, then finds itself placed in a life and death struggle.” It was a struggle against stacked odds, since, as Friedrich Grupe noted of one especially menacing area of the front, “Death lurked everywhere.”14
To be sure, a grim fate constantly threatened any front soldier. “The worst was four days ago,” Mielert confessed to his wife in October 1943 of the savage fighting around Gomel,
when I had to defend a place with four men against five… tanks with Russian infantry aboard, and then was ordered not to leave this position until receiving an arranged signal. It was awful…. I lay with the…. men in a forlorn post…. At close range we fought the infantry…, but the threatening steel colossi roared on past us, shooting from all barrels…. Amid the dust and dirt and din I saw the green star-cluster signal flare, the arranged signal that I should now withdraw. Now began a race for our lives. The tanks pursued us over two kilometers, constantly firing and blocking the way. With a rifleman I succeeded as the only ones to make it back to our own lines. The others were overrun, trampled, or shot to pieces. These minutes have extracted the last reserves from me.
Nor did that sense of being stalked, of being under personal siege, leave Mielert. “They were horrible days,” he wrote two months later, just two weeks before his death. “None but the participants can understand what happened here…. I have been hunted as one would only hunt a wounded animal, have sat five hours in a swamp, in ice cold water up to my stomach, under continuous fire from a tank.”15
Little wonder, then, that Mielert professed bitterly that the world had always been a cruel place. “Only now,” he noted, “the wolf howls and drinks blood openly.” Nor did he leave any doubt as to who the wolves were. “We have bitten our way through,” he observed. “In the process we have acquired hard teeth.” Hard indeed; in dispassionate tones, Mielert said of street fighting in Russia, “The city is burning. In the market square stand a pair of tanks that are shooting wildly in all directions. We wait until they have no ammunition left, then ‘crack’ them. We threw the penetrating Russian infantry back into the cold river. Only a few saved themselves. We are pitiless. Now it is just as comfortable, as romantic, as it is dangerous here.” Pitilessly, dangerously romantic, men stalking other men in a perilous contest of chance where only death proved triumphant. As Mielert and most other Landsers knew, “the luck of war swung daily… [as] every second determined our being.”16
In this game of chance perhaps nothing seemed so terrifying or personally dangerous as having to go on night patrol behind enemy lines. After one of the seemingly endless night skirmishes with the Russians, Claus Hansmann and his comrades sat in their foxholes, regrouping, taking notice of who had been killed and wounded, when the dreaded happened. “Above on the embankment appeared a shadow. It is Karl. ‘You Claus,’ he whispered furiously. ‘[We] have to go forward to fetch the Lieutenant [who had been killed]…. Three Pioneers are also going out to look for a flame thrower that’s lying out there. The commander also thinks it’s nonsense, but it’s orders from battalion.’”17 In the sardonic jargon of the Landser, Hansmann had just been ordered on a Himmelfahrtskommando (trip to heaven) or suicide mission in order to engage in a little Knochensammlung (bone gathering) of dead comrades.