Separation from loved ones proved difficult for all involved, for it was not only front soldiers who felt the pangs of loneliness and jealousy. “Now again I have here a letter that a widow of a fallen soldier wrote me,” Harry Mielert complained to his wife. “She wants to know precisely the details of his death, be informed about his suffering and last words…. These wives cause me terrible pain. They cling with the greatest obsession to everything which remains mortal and earthly.” To write letters to grieving widows was an onerous duty, certainly, for it served to heighten fears of one’s own mortality. In the massive uprooting caused by war, however, women whose husbands or lovers were at the front suffered equally the desperate longing for love. “It appears to me,” Mielert reassured his wife in March 1943, “that you fear that if I fall you also will be quickly forgotten…. Should I have to be in life-long imprisonment in Siberia, I would never give you up, never, and I also think that if I lay in a grave and my spiritual being had another existence I would not forget you, so that one day you must also come to me, to an absolute unification. That is the achievement of love. It goes beyond all borders.”24
Such a pledge of undying love was harmless enough in itself, but emotion could get the best of a Landser. As Mielert also noted: “The real contact [with their husbands] that so many wives seek to get through fantasies such as newsreels, radios, and newspapers” failed to satisfy, so that an unresolved yearning remained on both sides. “You are so dear to me!” he confessed. “Have I deserved it? Yet as an impulsive woman you can rage and stamp your feet that I’m not attempting by all means to come to you.” This anger, though, often had dire consequences, as Mielert was well aware, for he knew “some men who deserted out of love.” Amid all the ironies of the battlefield, perhaps this was the greatest, that some soldiers reached the breaking point not from fear but out of love. As Mielert concluded in September 1943, what “we rough warriors… lack is love. That’s why we’re all so lonely among ourselves.”25
In his loneliness and fear the Landser often sought solace even in the intangible. Ironically, that age-old staple of all armies, spreading rumors (what the Landsers called Latrinenparole, or latrine talk), evinced a reassuring tone, since the rumors most often concerned an end to the war or at least one’s impending removal from the front lines. Despite the bustling commotion in preparation for the attack on the Soviet Union, activity that could have only one purpose, Alfred Opitz recalled that many Landsers chose to believe the rumor going round that “a great undertaking in the direction of the east was imminent, however not against the Soviet Union… but against England, which would be attacked in the Middle East. For this purpose the Soviet Union agreed to a transit march of seven German divisions through south Russian territory in the direction of the Caucasus-Iran. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union would remain neutral.” On the eve of Barbarossa, Wilhelm Prüller too heard that Stalin would “let us march through voluntarily.” Friedrich Grupe picked up the same gossip. Despite the fact that “the company had already been given instruction about Russia [and] that the Cyrillic alphabet had been learned,” Grupe noted that “the strangest rumors were swirling around the camp: that German troops had supposedly gotten the permission of the Soviet regime… to travel through Russia in order to come to grips with the Tommies in India. Then our troops supposedly will link up with Rommel in the Caucasus.” In similar fashion, Lieutenant H.H. related, in a letter of late May 1941, “The wildest rumors about Russia are circulating here. The one says that we have leased the Ukraine for 90 years and have received permission for a transit march toward Turkey and Iraq. The other asserts that the danger of war has been averted because of Stalin’s attitude…. Each latrine races after the other [in rumors].”26
Amid the appalling hardships and severe conditions of the winter war of 1941–42, who could be surprised that Prüller day after day in his diary related the latest gossip about being relieved and sent to the south of France, or Rumania, or Turkey, or anywhere warm. In the midst of the bitter fighting of February 1942, Corporal R.M. relayed a hot rumor:
The southern army will break through the Caucasus to the Caspian Sea and divide itself into two parts. The one will move to the mouth of the Volga, the other through the Caucasus in a southerly direction…. Turkey will emerge from its heretofore strong neutral position to our favor and with its weapons will help force the victory…. In Africa at a suitable point a great offensive will be started with the goal of connecting with the comrades coming out of southern Palestine. An invasion of England will come in the course of the summer of 1942…. Between these battles… Japan ought in the meantime to have given the death blow to the English and Americans in the Pacific and India.
Martin Lindner, a university student from Vienna, speculated in July 1942 on an advance
over Stalingrad toward Astrakhan and then rolling up the Caucasus…. After this isolation of inner Asia, Japan and we will take action against the Anglo-Saxons…. The Mediterranean must be totally controlled by us, naval control of the Mediterranean excludes an advance from Africa against Europe. Then Europe will have more peace, raw materials, and time to prepare itself for a clearing action in the East. The East will secure our freedom of foodstuffs and in addition from there comes oil, coal, and iron ore in substantial quantities. You will see how everything is resolved; in any case, somehow we will be finished with our enemies.27
Such fantasties corresponded in many cases to Nazi dreams of Lebensraum. But in addition, they allowed the common soldier to believe that the war with Russia would not take place or, if it did, that Germany had powerful allies whose help would soon produce a conclusive victory. These rumors gave the Landser hope, a commodity often in short supply at the front: hope that the war would soon be over, hope that Germany would be victorious, hope that in the end all would be well.
Still, since hope and courage often proved inconsistent, and Landsers suffered under a constant threat of breakdown in combat, the Wehrmacht attempted to strengthen the morale and stiffen the resolve of its forces in a number of ways. One was to stress camaraderie and peer pressure by grouping friends together. Returning to the front after a stay in a military hospital, Guy Sajer was returned not only to his old unit but to his old rifle squad. “I’ll take you to your friends,” his captain said. “I know that being with friends can make up for the lack of a comfortable bed, even for the lack of food…. I always try to group my men as friends.” And, Sajer recalled, “I suddenly felt the full strength of my attachment to all the friends… nearby, an emotion which struck me as… profound.”28