To Lieutenant Spiller:
I am writing to you in the hope that you are alive. I spent a lot of time in hospital but still am not right after the last wound I got in Crimea. I have no idea where to look for my unit. We have left Crimea, but we will be back there again. That land, soaked with German blood, belongs to us Germans. If I am not able to return there, I lay the duty on my son to take it back and make it German once and for all, this land studded with our graves, made fertile with our blood. Crimea is ours! We have left it but we will return, and if not we, then our next generation. I swear it on my life!
To Senior Lance Corporal Ludwig Ruf, from his girlfriend:
Do not be angry about the long silence. I thought that after the assassination attempt on our beloved Führer he would bring the war to an end, but everything is going topsy-turvy. The Tommies fly here frequently. We have air raid alarms almost every night. Our dear, wonderful Munich – what have they done to it?
‘Our Prince von Baruth is also behind bars in connection with the 20 July Putsch,’ Sergeant Ernst Ditschke was informed in a letter from his sister in Halbe. Another correspondent wrote:
Dear Paul, That you are in hell out there we can well imagine. It is terrible, but it is no better for us here. And you have so much tobacco there, and here there is so little. And we cannot get a parcel from you! We can only wish and hope it will soon be over. The main thing is for you to stay healthy and stop being in such despair. Remember the song: ‘Everything will pass away: after winter comes the May.’ Day after day we wait for news of Kurt, but there is none. It is so dreadful.
Oh, Ludwig, Ludwig, your schoolfriend Delp has died, too, of wounds received in Russia. He was a sergeant major. Helmuth Bott lost an arm in Italy, and his brother Willi has been showing no signs of life for a long time. In Bensheim a lot of people have been arrested, why I do not know. Maybe something to do with 20 July. And Spranger’s wife, too, you remember her, a fat woman. They had lost their son as well. Jürgen Hein has been killed, and so it will go on and on until there is no one left. It is so terrible.
To Senior Lance Corporal Hans Stressner from his wife in Hof on Saale:
I’ve just come back from church – today’s sermon was very authoritarian. The basic message was that we live by the grace of the Lord and have absolutely no rights of our own. Just what I wanted to hear!
Only yesterday, when I read an article in the Völkischer Beobachter [People’s Observer] and the war correspondent’s final words were, ‘Victory really is close at hand,’ I was beginning to feel more cheerful.
To Lance Corporal Heinz Grumann from his father in Schönwiese:
You write that you do not want the Russians to get into East Prussia, but now we are being overwhelmed by aircraft. They have almost completely done Königsberg in, and after Königsberg it will be the turn of other cities.
To Lieutenant Willi Wüsthoff from a friend in Elbing-Danzig (East Prussia):
Just a little more and we will have won the war. We lost the 1914–18 war, and we will also win this one [sic], but perhaps our children will get to see at least something of the good times we were, and still are, being promised. I have no doubt we are yet going to endure times more cruel than Germany has ever known before. To be or not to be, that is the question.
It was at this time that Bertolt Brecht wrote:
These are the cities where we bawled our ‘Heils’ in honour of the world’s destroyers. And our cities are now just some of all the other cities we have destroyed.
In September, and later, people were still harbouring hopes of Hitler’s promised ‘miracle weapon’, said to be all but ready for action, and set to turn the course of the war in Germany’s favour.
‘In the homeland everything is facing east and everyone is waiting to see if some decisive weapon will be put into action to stop the Russians’ advance,’ Senior Lance Corporal Damm writes from Küstrin to Sergeant Major Fritz Nowka.
To Lieutenant Willi Wüsthoff, from a friend in East Prussia:
The day is not far off when the Führer will press the button. For now we need only to play for time and soon the new weapon will do its job.
But there are already signs of mistrust and sarcasm. Senior Lance Corporal Karl Stein’s wife writes to him from Munich-Kochel,
The enemy is advancing ever closer. In places they are already at the Rhine, but when that new weapon is launched everything will be fine. Have you heard what it is? It is a tank with a 53-man crew: one to steer, two to shoot, and fifty to push because we’ve run out of petrol. Today’s jokes are absolutely terrifying.
‘What do you think about our new amateur militia, the Volkssturm?’ a soldier’s father asks. ‘Great idea, isn’t it? They say that is the new weapon.’ ‘I just want to see how this will all finish,’ his mother writes. ‘A horrible end or horror without end. Our thoughts are always with you all, there in the trenches. Our only prayer is that God protects you.’
As I worked through that sack, reading the letters, that abstract concept ‘the enemy’, stuck in there behind the walls of the besieged fortress, began under the pressure of the different voices in these letters to separate out into the blurred figures of all these Ludwigs and Willis, Karls and Hanses. Meanwhile, the German front was retreating ever further to the west, and the transport planes were seen less and less frequently above the citadel.
An order was issued to the Wehrmacht from its commander-in-chief, A. Hitler, that soldiers who were captured, ‘if they had not been wounded or in the absence of evidence that they fought to the last,’ were to be executed and their relatives arrested.
My work on the letters was drawing to a close. I had got to the end of those dated September. Although they had not been delivered to their addressees, they had been written in response to news received from the front, with which there had still been a live connection. Increasingly, however, the western regions of Germany were being occupied by British and American troops. The names of certain cities disappear and the stream of letters becomes a trickle. Some time in October, the reciprocal contact ends, presumably because the unit is surrounded. They are getting no news from their loved ones at the front but parents, fiancées and girlfriends continue hopefully to write, perhaps from superstition, sharing their woes.
To Lance Corporal Fritz Karpanyk from his mother in Hindenburg:
15 October. I can find no respite from the sorrow and torment, and your lives are a path of martyrdom that you must travel. I am alone, and repeat to myself, ‘God, just let me have my children back!’
Everyone must buckle down because enemies have crossed the German border, the newspaper says… The house is full of Russians but nobody is getting down to work, nothing is being done. God is nowhere to be found in a house where there is no master, and that is how it is now in our house. I can’t believe you have as much to put up with as I do.