Topics concerning everyday life were the primary issues discussed: ‘Tommy’ air raids and clothing and ration cards. Most letters contained universal and understandable fears:
‘My loved one, I’m keeping my fingers crossed, you must and you will come back to your beloved wife and children. Darling, I hope you are not ill, how are your poor feet? My dear, I think of you day and night, because I can imagine how it will be for you if you are on a long march… You fight and must fight on to rescue your wife and children; we can thank you if the bombs fail to strike… I will never forget you, and will always remain true…’(18)
Norbert Schultze, a Berlin composer, returned home at about midday on Saturday, 21 June, after an exhausting series of engagements, only to be summoned back immediately to the radio station by his director. He was tasked, with another colleague, Herms Niel, to participate in a competition ‘to write the German Nation’s signature tune for the Russian campaign’. They had two hours, after which the Propaganda Minister Goebbels, who had written the text, would make his choice. Both composers were shown into a room with a grand piano. Schultze won; Goebbels selected his tune and said ‘and then I would like to request that you participate in producing the concluding piece to our Russian fanfare’. ‘I beg your pardon?’ enquired Schultze. ‘Yes, don’t you know?’ responded Goebbels. Schultze did not. ‘No, I have heard nothing over the last few days. I have been inundated with work and composing.’ The Propaganda Minister played a record: Liszt’s Les Préludes. It had already been played three times on the wireless, but Schultze had never heard it. ‘Put that on the end,’ said Goebbels, ‘it will precede all the radio announcements.’(19) It was the primary signature tune for forthcoming Wochenschau cinema newsreels and became the fanfare preceding important High Command announcements. It was to be the overture informing the German public they were at war with the Soviet Union. An artillery NCO wrote home:
‘And now to the situation. In three hours we will relay fire commands by radio which the batteries will receive to open fire on the Russian positions, that will destroy everything. You will meanwhile be peacefully asleep whilst we of the first wave will start the invasion of enemy territory. In any case, towards morning you, too, will know that the hour has arrived and you will be thinking of me even though this letter will not have arrived. I can imagine the surprise and at the same moment, dread, that will overcome you all. But you need have no worries, because everything is so well prepared here, hardly anything can go wrong.’(20)
All along the frontier with the Soviet Union and occupied areas German troops began to move up to their final assault positions. ‘I was with the leading assault wave,’ announced Helmut Pabst, an artillery NCO with Army Group Centre. His diary reveals snapshots of the final moments. ‘The units moved up to their positions quietly, talking in whispers. There was the creaking of wheels – assault guns.’ Such images remained permanently etched in the memories of survivors for the rest of their lives. Finally the infantry deployed. ‘They came up in dark ghostly columns and moved forward through the cabbage plots and cornfields.’(21) Having reached their final attack positions, they spread out into assault formation. Men lay in the undergrowth listening to the sound of insects and croaking frogs along the River Bug, straining their ears to hear sounds from the opposite bank. Some were breathless, tense, waiting for the release of the opening salvo.
Rearwards, by the airstrip at Maringlen in occupied Poland, Dominik Strug, the Polish labourer, recalled, ‘it was two o’clock at night when the engines started to turn over.’ The air base was humming with activity, subdued lights showed here and there and the smell of high octane became apparent as clouds of exhaust began to disperse on the breeze. He went on, ‘We didn’t have a clue what was going on. Later we learned the Germans had started a war against the Russians.’ Spectre-like black shapes lumbered into the air, gathered and began to move purposefully toward their objectives. Strug, gazing into the distance, attempted to discern some pattern to this activity. They flew eastward. ‘Everything went towards Brest [-Litovsk], Brest, Brest… ’(22)
Chapter 2
‘Ordinary men’ – The German soldier on the eve of ‘Barbarossa’
‘This drill – Ach! inhuman at times – was designed to break our pride, to make those young soldiers as malleable as possible so that they would follow any order later on.’
‘Endless pressure to participate’
Every conscript army is a reflection of the society from which it is drawn. The Wehrmacht in 1941 was not totally the image of the Nazi totalitarian state: it had, after all, only recently developed from the Weimar Reichswehr. It was, however, in transition. The process had begun in 1933. Progress could be measured in parallel with the economic and military achievements of the Third Reich. Blitzkrieg in Poland, the Low Countries and France had brought with it heady success. The German Wochenschau newsreel showing Hitler’s triumphant return from France showed him at the height of his power. Shadows thrown up by the steam-driven express train, Nazi salutes from solitary farmers en route juxtaposed against the sheer size of hysterical crowds greeting his return in Berlin have a true Wagnerian character. Children dressed in Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) uniforms wave gleefully from lampposts. Adoring breathless women are held back by SS crowd-controllers. Goering, standing with Hitler on the Reich Chancellery balcony, is visibly and emotionally impressed by the roaring crowd whose cheering dominates the soundtrack.
The Wehrmacht’s morale, bathing in this adoration, was at its height. Wochenschau pictures of the French victory parade in Berlin, with close-ups of admiring women, and the pathos of a solitary high-heeled shoe left in the road as the crowd is pushed back from flower-bedecked troops, say it all. The troops were jubilantly received. Organisations and private people ‘render thanks to our deserving soldiers’, the newsreels opined. The wounded and those on leave received a torrent of presents and invitations. These were the good times. Schütze Benno Zeiser remembered on joining the army in May 1941:
‘Those were the days of fanfare parades, and “special announcements” of one “glorious victory” after another, and it was “the thing” to volunteer. It had become a kind of super holiday. At the same time we felt very proud of ourselves and very important.’(1)
Success bred an idealistic zeal, producing an over-sentimental outpouring of the Nazi Weltanschauung that in modern democratic and more cynical times would appear positively alien. Leutnant Hermann Witzemann, a former theology student, marching with an infantry unit eastwards from the Atlantic coast, grandly announced to his diary:
‘We marched in the morning! Over familiar roads billeting in familiar village quarters. Infantry once more on French roads, Infantry in wind and rain, tired and irritable in wretched quarters, longing for the homeland all the time. The Reich’s Infantry! German Infantry. I lead the first platoon! In nomine Dei! [In God’s Name!]’(2)
The postwar generation has had enormous difficulties reconciling and identifying with soldiers who clearly believed in God on the one hand and were seemingly decent human beings, yet on the other appeared receptive to a racist philosophy that enjoined them to disregard international law and the laws of armed conflict. One German soldier after the war, removed from the prevailing conditions that shaped and moulded him, gave an exasperated and often misconstrued view of the ‘Landser’ (the German equivalent of the British ‘Tommy’) on the eve of ‘Barbarossa’: