We volunteers were still of the opinion that the battle of and for the whole of Europe was justified. The battle was not against the people of the Soviet Union, but for the people of the Soviet Union. It was proved when the USA decided to join the war in 1941 and showered Russia with vast amounts of American war material. Pope Pius XII described the action of the Waffen SS, who consisted of a very mixed bag of Danes, Finns, Norwegians, Dutch, Belgians, Swiss and French, as “the defence of the basis of Christian culture”.
We had covered vast distances in comfortable trains and goods-wagons, in transport planes and lorries, tanks and troikas, and then marched on foot to the Front. As Germany’s war-generation, we all shared the same fate, which welded us together and which only the fire of battle could separate. We had not found ‘adventure’, nor the ‘laurel-leaves of victory’, but lice, mud, polar-conditions and death. In indescribable huts, as many as twenty men were provisionally housed, waiting for the next order. We crouched in holes in God’s earth, in ‘ready’ positions, before attacking the enemy. The minutes seemed like hours, before we could ambush those who felt at home in the darkness. We had restless, interrupted nights, ‘sleeping’, for want of a better word, a light and fitful sleep. We kept a finger on the trigger and had the smell of burning villages in our nostrils. We lit a fire when the opportunity arose and warmed ourselves around the flames. Flames which could not only kill, but save as well.
We had warmed ourselves with the warmth from exhausts, or lingered if only for minutes, in the warmth of the burning houses on our marches, not wanting to move away. Living under open skies with temperatures 30° below freezing, reduced us to the fundamentals. Later it dropped to 52° below freezing point. Napoleon, in 1812, suffered only at 25°. At every possibility, we German soldiers slipped into any coverage we could find in that God-forsaken land, be it a hole in the ground or the poorest of huts, away from nature’s hostility. The Russian Steppe, with its unending horizon and vast heavens, was a ‘lord’ over the victorious, in the moment that we, its enemy, won a battle. It was natural that we had tension in us, as we first trod the earth of the Soviet Union, but the wretchedness of the Bolshevik world exceeded even our imagination.
Stalin’s Empire was at this time, an actual ‘state of dead souls’. There was a land, no, a continent at Europe’s door which in the day and age of radio and films, was completely cut off from the rest of the world. This ‘saga’ in the history of humanity, this ‘paradise’, was nothing new and nothing but ice-cold propaganda. We assessed this ‘state of workers and farmers’, not with the eyes of scholars, but the bare facts as soldiers do, with eyes that were wide open and therefore all the more ‘fundamentally’.
For example, one could search the whole of the Soviet Union for a replacement shaving-mirror when you smashed your own. But you could not find one for love nor money. To lose your pocket knife or your fountain pen was a real tragedy. This annoyance, this lack of, for us the simplest of commodities, was not appeased for months on end. We did find civilised articles, but then in senseless quantities. One of our comrades, who had been in Russia far longer than we, told us about a state-owned shop (what else?) that had not only enormous reserves of ladies’ face-powder, and toothpaste in tons, but not a single toothbrush! One saw Russian girls on the streets, thickly powdered because it was the cheapest of goods. One could buy it by the pound. The shelves were bending under the weight of the toothpaste which tasted of nothing but chalk. But a toothbrush was never found. In another town, its shop had records, hundreds of the same record, with an excerpt from one of Stalin’s speeches on one side and an operatic aria on the other, but a choice? There was none.
We were nearly swallowed up by this land, this Russia. Despite the changing seasons, be it with the changing leaves of autumn or the white of winter, to us the monotony of this land appeared as a deathly shade of grey. It was a land embedded in a vegetative condition. In the villages, the inhabitants appeared as children who had to be woken, their existence being colourless, uniform, simply nondescript. The men appeared to be exhausted, the women full of the worries of life. When one had a new apron or a new cap, then there were reasons for suspicion. Dictatorship ruled here in all of its Proletarian instinct, breeding jealousy, resentment and slander. It was better that one did not own something that no one else had.
One must ask what happened to the army of slave-workers, who worked for a pittance and saw nothing of the promises of Stalin’s “five-year plan”, which was nothing else but an Armament Plan and having no reform. They received nothing. The energy and the riches of the nation were used by power-crazed fanatics and turned into armaments for a war that was described by the Russians themselves as the biggest war of aggression in world revolution.
CHAPTER 12
In Hospital
The Wehrmacht slowly regained its strength after the winter. The summer of 1942 saw the start of new areas of attack that ran to plan and were successful. Sebastopol, in the Crimea, the HQ of the Black Sea Fleet was the strongest fortress in the world. It fell into our hands after a bitter fight, in which two enemy armies could have crushed one another.
Within the next month, we also pushed back the Russian Front by three hundred kilometres, taking Voronezh and Rostov. Nonetheless, Hitler’s plan to destroy the Red Army collapsed. Even outside Russia’s borders, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in North Africa had taken Tobruk that summer. German submarines had risen out of the water at Long Island and their crews viewed the traffic in New York. The “Grey Wolf had engaged in its first attack in Canadian territorial waters, in the flow of the St. Laurence river. However, the war leaned dramatically to the side of the Allies with the defeat of the 6th Army, in February 1943, at Stalingrad. The Allies however still needed another two years to force Germany to its knees.
The hospital train which I found myself that summer did not need as long as that to bring me from Orel on the Oka, to Warsaw on the river Vistula. The Russian soldier had not managed in months of bloody fighting, but that little beast, the louse, managed to put me out of action in much less. A high fever, which came and went over a period of five days, was eventually diagnosed by the troops’ doctor, as Volhynian Fever. It is one of the typhus category and transmitted from bites from Rickettsia, a parasite that is neither bacteria nor virus, and which is found in the Ukraine.
The train painted with red crosses, travelled from the central sector of the Eastern Front, over Briansk, Smolensk, Minsk and Brest, into the territory of the General Government. When one could shut out the moans of the wounded and try to ignore the stench of pus and fresh wounds, then one could ask for nothing more. The comfortable sleeping compartment for us was like travelling tourists’ first class. The converted hospital train was fitted with bunk-beds for the wounded. They were tended continually by the doctors, medical orderlies and Red Cross nurses. At nearly all of the stations and halts, the volunteer nurses of the German Red Cross appeared with large steaming coffee pots. This service covered the whole of central Europe, practically to the front. Among the nurses were women and girls from all over Europe, not only Germans, but all working just like the male volunteers.
Our military hospital lay very near the river Vistula, opposite the town of Praga. Before we could enter the hospital we had to be disinfected, body and uniform. We entered a long barrack, as naked as the day we were born, forming long queues. We were a living conveyor-belt for the ‘carbolic angels’, the nurses who were ready to smear every hair-covered part of us with a disinfectant oil. It caused problems for those who had not seen a member of the female species in months. They were then the centre of teasing, grins, laughter and comments from their comrades, which the nurses diplomatically ignored, carrying out their duty with a faint smile on their lips.