Friedrich Grupe recalled the sense of excitement in his small town in the Harz Mountains in the months and years after the Nazi rise to power, an enthusiasm aimed particularly at mobilizing the young. “You should serve a community,” stressed the HJ appeals, “live a life of comradeship, be harder and ready to fight, carry the will within to greater deeds.” Caught in the frenzy of emotions, Grupe ardently followed the path laid down for most young men in Germany: Hitler Youth, Labor Service, Wehrmacht. By April 1937 he had graduated from HJ to RAD, an experience that well prepared him for the army: “The work and the life in the [Labor Service] barracks camp are physically and also psychologically harder than we had imagined. Early in the morning at 4:00 A.M. out of our beds to a long cross-country run with early morning exercise, then washing up, breakfast, ceremonial raising of the flag, and already by 5:00 A.M. marching to the labor site in work overalls with spades at our shoulders.”8
In like fashion, Karl Fuchs underwent the transition from the Hitler Youth to the Labor Service, and in a letter to his parents left a similar picture of a taxing military-style routine.
We have to get up at five o’clock every morning. After reveille we have fifteen minutes of morning calisthenics. In half-an-hour I have to be washed, dressed, and have my area cleaned up. It is very difficult for me to make my straw bed in accordance with military regulations. If the bed is not made properly, the supervising officer simply throws the whole thing on the floor and you have to start all over again….
After the cleanup of our barracks we have a hearty breakfast of rye bread and coffee. At 6:30 we start with drill. This normally lasts until 9…. From 9–10 we have classroom instruction. After that comes second breakfast and a cigarette break. From 10:30–1:00 there is more drill…. Then comes lunch. From 2–3 we are busy with general cleanup of the area…. From 3–4:30 we have physical education (mostly jogging through the forest), and the afternoon activities conclude with more classroom instruction and singing. Dinner is at 7.9
As both Grupe and Fuchs illustrated, the daily routine of the Labor Service had a clear paramilitary content whose aims were not only to instill the rudiments of military training and physical stamina but also to foster character, comradeship, and cohesion. Grupe furnished evidence of the idealism created among many young Germans by this intense process of socialization, noting in his diary in 1937:
This community of working men is something unique. From all sections of society we come here together and wrest higher yields out of the soil through hard work….
Despite everything, probably just because of our burdens borne in common, the feeling of comradely identity grows rapidly…. We’re experiencing here what we understand to be “Volksgemeinschaft [national community].” And we’re putting our conception of National Socialism into action: We are all the same in our service for our people, no one is asked his origins or class, whether he is rich or poor…. Snobbery, class consciousness, envy, and idleness are left out on the street. This is the way from “I” to “We.”10
Not surprisingly, given the degree of hard work, intense physical training, and military drill to which they had already been subjected, when these tens of thousands of graduates of the HJ and RAD flooded into Wehrmacht training centers, they were generally better prepared for what lay ahead than were their counterparts in Great Britain and the United States. Still, the training they encountered proved of such intensity and realism that even those with “degrees” from these preparatory institutions were often taken aback. “They went to work on us,” noted Siegfried Knappe of his military drill instructors, “assuring us that, Labor Service notwithstanding, we not only did not know how to march, we did not even know how to walk. Then they went about teaching us, in their own way. It was beneath them to recognize our Labor Service training.”11
The earnestness of training also impressed Martin Pöppel, himself a veteran of the Hitlerjugend and Arbeitsdienst. “The Sarge, Hauptfeldwebel Zierach, …reigned supreme with his fat punishment book,” Pöppel recalled. “Whenever he looked at us poor squirts we started to tremble…. Our training was unbelievably hard, but basically fair. It passed quickly even if only because we were drilled so hard from morning till night that we never got a moment to think.” Nor did the situation improve when Pöppel left basic training for more advanced instruction:
Our arduous training continued. For example, we did a 25 kilometer march with full equipment and radio set…. This was followed by night exercises including an orientation race using sketches and prismatic compass….
In August we went to Wildflecken troop training grounds. The marches, exercises, night alerts, the shooting and radio practices were all even worse than before. Every day we fell into our beds completely exhausted. In action later on, we realized time and again how valuable this training had been for us. Sweat saves blood, that was a truism that was often confirmed later. We didn’t know it yet, though, so we cursed and swore at everything and everyone…. However, this tough training eventually began to produce results…. After our period at the troop training grounds ended, I never forgot one of our mottos about the damn place: Lieber den ganzen Arsch voller Zwecken, als vierzehn Tage Wildflecken (Better an assful of nails than two weeks at Wildflecken.)12
Karl Fuchs, another HJ and RAD graduate, wrote to his father: “We have to learn and train until we perfect all of our skills. Infantry training is almost behind us and in eight weeks we have to be fit for combat…. The intensity of training is tremendous and there is no rest for anyone.” Still, Fuchs claimed, and perhaps here one sees the significance of his earlier indoctrination, “all of us are eager to make progress and no one complains.” By contrast, Guy Sajer, an Alsatian and thus a novice in this sort of thing, was stunned upon arriving at a training center in Poland in September 1942. “I have just put my bundle down on the wooden bed I have chosen for myself when we are ordered to return to the courtyard,” he related. “It is now about two o’clock in the afternoon, and… we haven’t had anything to eat since the rye bread, white cheese, and jam we were given the evening before…. This new order must be connected with lunch.” Sajer discovered to his chagrin, however, that eating was the last priority for their new drill instructor: “A Feldwebel (sergeant) wearing a sweater proposes with an ironic air to share his swim with us…. He makes us trot at a brisk gymnastic pace for about three-quarters of a mile to a small sandy pool…. The Feldwebel… orders us to strip…, [then] plunges into the water first, and waves us after him…. The temperature of the air can be no more than forty, and the water… is really very cold.” Now, surely, Sajer believed, they would be fed. Again, disappointment reigned: “On the double, we catch up with our leader, who is already more than halfway back to our enormous residence. We are all frantically hungry…. A young… giant accosts one of the noncoms, staring at him as if he wished to devour him. ‘Are we going to have anything to eat?’ ‘Lunch here is at eleven,’ the noncom shouts. ‘You arrived three hours late. In threes, to my right. It’s time for target practice.’”13