Harry Mielert recounted a “strange occurrence” to his wife in a letter in March 1943, only a small incident but one that well expressed the malignant atmosphere, the revulsion felt by many at the madness of battle:
In the last great mass attack on our position… a village in front of our main battle line was totally destroyed and all the cellars, which the Russians had defended stubbornly, were blown up…. Our combat outposts are now in the aforementioned village…. A cellar entrance appeared in the melting snow and a Landser… went inside and found four dead Russians. While he was attempting to turn two of them on their sides…, two of the dead rose up…. [They] groaned and with difficulty raised their hands. They were brought into the light of day, where they [told us]… the following: After the attack these four had crept into the cellar. German soldiers threw hand grenades inside…. Two men were killed by the hand grenades, these two wounded. They fed themselves on the potatoes which lay there by the hundreds. In this way they held out four weeks, together with two dead bodies, their own excretion, their feet… frozen, and yet they still wouldn’t venture out.
The anonymous terror, at least for a moment, had again been personalized, but Mielert tried to no avail to gain an insight into the nature of the abhorrent. “We tried in vain to glean some impressions from them,” he noted. “What they said was: cold and tired.” So common, so profane, so human. With disappointment, Mielert concluded merely, “You can see from this example what humans can withstand.”37 The deeper malignity of combat eluded even so reflective a soldier as Mielert. Here suffering seemed merely banal and sordid, not sweet or heroic. Perhaps the only real lesson to be learned was that even in the midst of war’s cruelties, life went on.
During the winter battles of 1941–1942 and again in the scorched earth retreat out of Russia, the Landser clung stubbornly to life amid devastation on a scale difficult to imagine. “It is not possible to give an impression of these ghostly weeks,” wrote Günter von Scheven in the midst of the bitter fighting of February 1942. “The horrors I have gone through hammer at me in my sleep.” Echoed Werner Pott, less than two weeks after the Soviet counteroffensive in front of Moscow, “For weeks we’ve been in action without let-up or rest, day after day…. marching in snow storms at -25 C, frozen noses and feet that make you want to scream when you have to take your boots off, filth, vermin, and other such unedifying things…. Next to all the personal exertions I feel sorry for the civilian population whose houses have been set afire in our retreat and who have been abandoned to famine. The complete cruelty of the war is obvious!”38
Everything, even the earth, seemed to be burning. “We ride into the uncertain night that is filled with the droning of motors,” noted Helmut Pabst in August 1942 while on the move toward the Volga. “The earth shudders under powerful blows, incendiary bombs glitter…, violent flashes in the darkness…. The scene is framed with continually changing crescents of trembling flares: ‘Here we are comrades, here we are!’ That is the mute cry of the outermost limits that has something strangely unreal about it. We ride toward this frontier…, amid the ruins of the dead city in which only the fire lives with its insipid, sweet smell.” Six months later, retreating back across the Volga, that river of fate, Pabst painted a picture of bleak and still fiery destruction: “In the streets yawn gaping holes…. The flames beat red in the hollows of a stone building, powerfully they shoot through the roof. The area has become desolate in these days: houses and spires, the last milestones, stand no more…. Flashes twitch behind us and fill the space from horizon to horizon. The muffled detonations roll back to us. It is a drama of horribly beautiful power.” In this “landscape of horror and death” the completeness of the destruction stunned even hardened veterans such as Pabst, who admitted that what he witnessed “was only a part of the destruction, a laughably small part.” As another Landser wrote in March 1943, “Today we had to take all of [the males] from the village that were left behind last time…. You can imagine the wailing of the women as even the children were taken from them…. Three houses in a village were set on fire by us, and a woman burned to death as a result. So it will be uniformly along the front in all the villages…. It was a fantastic sight for the eye to behold, as far as you could see, only burning villages.”39
It was an example of the wanton cruelty and destruction, added to the horrors of battle, that accompanied the Wehrmacht in Russia. Christopher Browning has pointed out that for the average German in Eastern Europe, the mass murder policies of the Nazi regime were hardly exceptional or aberrational but a routine part of everyday life. “A partisan group blew up our vehicles,” noted Private H.M., a member of an intelligence unit, “[and]… shot the agricultural administrator and a corporal assigned to him in their quarters…. Early yesterday morning 40 men were shot on the edge of the city…. Naturally there were a number of innocent people who had to give up their lives…. One didn’t waste a lot of time on this and just shot the ones who happened to be around.”40 Such executions occurred almost daily. Claus Hansmann has left a remarkably vivid image of an execution of Soviet partisans:
“In a gray, war-torn street in Kharkov. Agitated, expectant faces in pale misery. Businesslike, the men of the field police emerge and tie with oft-practiced skill seven nooses on the balcony railing and then disappear behind the door of the dark room…. The first human package, tied up, is carried outside. The limbs are tightly bound…, a cloth covers his face. The hemp neckband is placed around his neck, hands are tied tight, he is put on the balustrade and the blindfold is removed from his eyes. For an instant you see glaring eyeballs, like those of an escaped horse, then wearily he closes his eyelids, almost relaxed, never to open them again. He now slides slowly downward, his weight pulls the noose tight, his muscles begin their hopeless battle. The body works mightily, twitches, and within the fetters a bit of life struggles to its end. It’s quick; one after the other are brought out, put on the railing…. Each one bears a placard on his chest proclaiming his crime….: Partisans and just punishment…. Sometimes one of them sticks out his tongue as if in unconscious mockery and immoderate amounts of spittle drip down on the street…. Then a few laugh, jokes meant to reach those yet above.41
And why this seemingly callous reaction? “You are pleased at the death of another,” explained Hansmann, certainly aware of a soldier’s relief that the gods of war had passed him by this time. “You laugh, an unexpected little play…, laugh somehow relieved.” And then it is over. What next? “The dead are boring,” Hansmann mused. “They accuse the living only in silent reproach. The streets become empty. The people move on, you turn toward the market square, in order to buy onions and garlic. You have shown them the last bit of attention, you are hungry!” A sudden human drama, a bit of diversion, and then off to eat: a commonplace sequence in the everyday life of war. As Hansmann observed elsewhere, “In death all are the same…. Equally stiff, equally silent, and the same clods of earth weigh heavily on them.”42