Adventures in My Youth

1 August 1941–June 1942: Call-up and training

On 1 August 1941, I had to be in the Jäger barracks at St Avold in the Westmark by 3pm. If the word ‘Westmark’ had not been added, I would not have had even a vague idea as to where my destination was. Westmark was the name given to that region which had been added on to the Reich after the surrender of France. Whether that included only the former German Alsace and Lorraine, or more, no one knew. In any event, I had to seek the aid of a large-scale map to find St Avold which, I finally discovered lay between Saarbrücken and Metz in Lorraine. 1 August was not a normal call-up deadline, the normal dates were 1 April and 1 October. It turned out that there were in fact only a few of us young lads who turned up on 1 August 1941, in accordance with our call-up orders. In the meantime, Mum was in the Liesertal with Rudi and Liesl, so I went for a few days to where they were staying in Zlabing Post Lieserbrücke. For 31 July they had planned a trip out to the parsonage at Eisentratten to visit the family of Pastor Schimik, a school friend of Father’s.

From there, I began my journey on the regular afternoon post bus. The journey took me first as far as Spittal on the Drau, and from there by rail via Salzburg. During the night we crossed southern Germany to Saarbrücken. There I left the express train to get on an ordinary passenger train going towards Metz. On the platform I met a boy who was looking around just as I was. He was dragging along two big suitcases. I spoke to him and it turned out that we were both going to the same place. He was Ludwig (Wiggerl) Popovsky, the son of a Vienna tram driver. In him I had found my first comrade. We remained close through two years, more or less.

Neither of us knew or had any explanation why we had ended up in that particular district. We also knew nothing about the unit to which we had been assigned, namely the 2nd Company of Infantry Ersatz Battalion 7, nor from which part of the country its members came. Wiggerl, like me, had left it up to chance as to what infantry unit he would be assigned. The mystery was resolved shortly after we arrived. First, after getting out at St Avold station, we had to lug our heavy luggage two kilometres over a mountain, behind which lay the little town. At the edge of it was the Jäger barracks.

We arrived at about 2.30pm. Although we were not yet soldiers, we had nevertheless to experience for ourselves the truth of the saying that ‘half his life the soldier has to wait in vain’. There are certainly good reasons for that. At 3pm, however, to a certain extent in an official manner, there began the new and serious part of my life. It turned out that altogether there were four of us soldiers who had been provisionally accepted as officer candidates. Most were from Lower Silesia. One came from the Ruhr area, two from Trautenau in Lower Bohemia and the two of us, Popovsky and I, came from Vienna and the Vienna area.

The battalion stationed in St Avold was the Ersatz unit for Infantry Regiment 7, in peacetime based in Schweidnitz. We found out that the entire Silesian Ersatz Army Corps had been moved into the ‘Westmark’. In the French campaign Regiment 7 had been commanded by a colonel from Vienna. At that time, replacements had been added to the regiment to the strength of almost a battalion of men from Vienna. It was the case, right up to the end of the war, that in almost every company I came across there was at least one Viennese or Austrian.

For my part I often regretted that I had made no attempt to join a unit from my homeland. Before I became a soldier I had dreamed how grand it must be to march in the victory parade through the Ringstrasse with the returning troops. But later my regret was because I had no close wartime comrades living nearby. That became clear to me when eventually I sat on the Linz regional high court with my colleagues Zauner and Hemetsberger. They had been in the Linz Division, the 45th. Zauner was among the men of the Linz Infantry Regiment – ‘the sons of the region and of the city’ – who marched off to war from the castle barracks. Hemetsberger had been an artillery officer in the Division.

Immediately after ‘installation’, under which general heading I include being assigned a barrack room and a bed, and obtaining items of military uniform and equipment, there began the rigorous service involved in basic training. It lasted six weeks. It turned out that this too had been a kind of test. Of the seventeen of us who had joined on 1 August, six were dismissed because they did not meet requirements. Because they were not yet of age for military service they were sent back home. We could easily imagine with what mockery they would be welcomed back to school by their classmates who had stayed behind, after their experience of a ‘holiday’ that brought so much trouble.

So, ‘eleven’ of us remained together. Our service went on, apart from the normal work of the barracks, under the supervision of a Leutnant, a NCO, and a Gefreiter who, at the same time, was senior soldier in the barrack room. The ‘eleven’ of us were Hans Alterman from Gottesberg in Silesia, Walter Borrmann from Breslau, Walter Henschel from Reichenbach in the Eulengebirge, Hans Bernt and Gottfried Bergmann from Liegnitz, Jochen Fiedler from Glogau, Diesel and Helmut Überla from Trautenau, Pohlmann from Wuppertal, together with Popovsky and me.

Since Popovsky had a camera with him, I have some photos. The first shows us in a group on the parade ground. We are wearing field service jackets, with our top collar button undone, our belts buckled, army boots, and the ‘forage’ field service caps on our heads. My hands are still stuck into my trouser pockets in a quite unmilitary fashion.

After basic training was over we were moved to Mörchingen, halfway between Metz and Saargemünd. The place mostly consisted of barracks built after 1871, after Alsace-Lorraine had reverted to Germany. Here was the staff of Ersatz Regiment 28, to which the two infantry regiments 350 and 461 belonged. From then on our group was part of the 2nd Company of Infanterie-Ersatz-Bataillon 350. I scarcely have any recollections of St Avold, because at the time, during basic training, you were not allowed to leave the barracks. I can only remember one single trip out that we used to find a photographer’s studio. I recall Mörchingen as the place where all our training took place, carried out on the parade ground and on the firing range. Certainly, in St Avold we drilled on the parade ground and first practised with our weapons. That was only a little compared with the variety of the drill to which we were then subjected.

The ‘Training Regulations for the Infantry’ (A.V.I.), Army Service Regulations (HDV 130/2a) for Schützenkompanie was the ‘bible’ according to which our life as soldiers then proceeded. From the Individual Training I shall quote the following, concerning the ‘basic position’:

We had the old Kar 98 rifle. Rifle training was followed by training on the light machine-gun (LMG), the 08 Pistol, the machine-pistol, the hand-grenade and the anti-tank rifle. All that was followed by the infantryman’s training in combat and field service, and training in close-quarters fighting. No less important was training in the section, the smallest unit, which consisted of the section leader and nine men.

Section training also included the section’s method of combat, its behaviour under fire, working its way forward, penetration, taking and holding a position, withdrawing, as well as the group being on reconnaissance service and picket duties.

HDV 130/2a of course also covered training in the platoon and in the company. All that was contained in 670 points. Infantry officer training, however, not only required the knowledge necessary to command a section, a platoon or a company, but also knowledge of the so-called heavy infantry weapons, i.e. the heavy machine-gun, the heavy mortar, the light and heavy infantry guns, and the antitank gun. It covered training in horse riding and driving, the latter including driving both horse-drawn and motorised vehicles.

By listing the material it can be seen that we spent most of our service time on the training ground. We began with simply moving around the ground in the respective formation, then to march training in formations of different, slowly increasing lengths, and finally firing practice. All that was preceded by a thorough process of training in firing positions. I proved to be a good shot. I soon found out that my vision in my right eye was not as sharp as that in my left. The eye test we had when we mustered had been a cursory one. It was only much later that I became aware that I had an astigmatism, with a clear decrease in visual sharpness of my right eye as against my left. Meanwhile, after I had successfully tried shooting left-handed, I stuck with it and achieved excellent results. At the exercises at 100m range, standing offhand, and 200m range, lying offhand, I managed to score 30 and 55 respectively, and thus was in the narrow range leading the group.

Firing practice, and the marches that regularly took place on Saturday, stood out from the drill on the parade ground. Firing practice involved bodily relaxation. Marches involved particular bodily exertion. If on the first march, which lasted an hour, we covered only 5km, within a few weeks that was increased in 10km increments to 55km. It all led to the very edge of exhaustion. As proper infantrymen, on the marches we wore footcloths instead of socks, and before the march we smeared our feet with deer tallow so that, provided our boots fitted, blisters or sores hardly ever occurred. Only once did I get so-called pressure points, that is, blisters under the hard skin. They were extremely painful but at least entitled me to sit up on the horse-drawn vehicle that followed behind us.

Everyday life in the barracks began with reveille, soon followed by the duty NCO’s (UvD) call ‘those detailed to fetch coffee step out’. Before work began, one-and-a-half hours after reveille, morning washing had to be done, beds had to be made expertly and lockers tidied up. Inside work included cleaning weapons, and cleaning barrack blocks. The weekly hour of polishing and patching also took place as part of the daily boot cleaning and occasional uniform cleaning sessions. We pressed the trousers of our walking-out uniform by laying them overnight between the sheet and the straw mattress.

In addition to the field uniform and drill clothing, every man also possessed a walking-out uniform. It was called Sarasani, because in actual fact it looked by no means smart, but resembled circus dress. While the field uniform was made of single coarse cloth of a green-grey-brown colour, the walking-out uniform had two different kinds of grey cloth. The jacket was vaguely green, but the trousers were more of a blue tinge. The collar was dark green, the collar patches and those on the forearms were of silver braid trimming.

To that was added the field service cap and, best of all, the white braid, which was the colour of the infantry arm of the service. Apart from its smart and clean appearance, this colour always seemed to me to express the innocence and unpretentiousness for which the infantry was praised. Other colours used were the red of the artillery, the green of the Gebirgsjäger, the black of the pioneers, the blue of the medical units, the bright blue of the Panzer units, the citrus yellow of the signals units, the dark yellow of the cavalry and later reconnaissance troops, and the violet of the military chaplains. But none of them could compare with our pure white.

Outside training mainly took place on the large garrison training ground. However, especially for marching, we switched to the friendly, hilly countryside near to, or further away from, Mörchingen. Once we were resting near a large plum orchard that was far away from any village. It gave the Leutnant the idea that we should ‘take cover’ there and stuff our bellies. Some time later, before the wine harvest, our march took us past a field that was planted with vines. Here, too, the lieutenant let us ‘take cover’ between the furrows. As you see in old pictures of the land of milk and honey, we lay on our backs between two furrows, reaching for the nearly ripe grapes hanging over us, and contentedly ate our fill.

The most pleasant activity, because it was completely different from all the others, we had on Wednesdays. Then, from 2pm to 4pm there was riding, and from 4pm to 6pm driving. In our riding training each one of us had his own horse, mine was the mare ‘Orange’. Everyone had to keep a piece of bread from his rations for the horse, to win its trust and to be able to reward it. We learned not to approach the animal from the rear, and how to bridle and saddle it. We also had to muck-out the stalls and brush the horses.

During the course of that training we learned the paces of the horse, the walk, trot, and gallop, and how to control the horse. Finally, in the riding arena we jumped modest obstacles, and performed exercises on horseback. Riding outside was more satisfying than strenuous, especially when, after our first few hours of riding, our behinds were not burning any more. Once, I must have irritated ‘Orange’ because she bolted with me on the training ground. She slipped into a raging gallop and I could not hold her. After almost a kilometre she had calmed down, but evidently wanted to vex me some more, because she stopped abruptly in her tracks. I had to summon up all my strength not to fly out of the saddle, which is certainly what she intended.

The driving instruction passed off without such difficulties. To drive a horse-drawn vehicle was something we learned in an afternoon, but instruction in driving motor vehicles stretched out over several months. As well as a thorough theoretical and technical training, taken with the aid of an Army service regulation book, a lot of time was spent on the driving itself. We rode motorcycles, motorcycles with sidecars, and drove a medium-weight Kübelwagen. On 18 January 1942, that is, a few days after my eighteenth birthday, we received our Wehrmacht driving licences.

On Wednesday evenings in the officers’ mess there were ‘Gentlemen’s Evenings’. We officer cadets, in our walking-out uniforms of course, had to take part. Before dinner you would stand about aimlessly in the side rooms of the dining hall. Then the commander of the Ersatz Regiment would invite us to take our places. On the first occasion we were, understandably, somewhat awkward and almost stood in ranks. That led a doctor, whom I later got to know as a very clever man, to the sarcastic remark, ‘Ah, the gentlemen have turned up for confirmation’.

We did not always sit together at the end of the table, but were placed individually between officers and thus had to take part in their conversation. If I had not already learned at home how to behave at table, I would have been taught it there. It is true that I had not learned at home that you had, on occasion, to manage with only 40cm space at the table. That had to be done on Christmas Eve, when the wives of the married officers were invited to dine with us and space was tight at the table.

On those occasions, and also on the gentlemen’s evenings, music was supplied by a palm court orchestra composed of members of the regimental music corps. It was frowned upon to speak of service matters. That was strictly avoided. On the gentlemen’s evenings we were allowed out for longer. We were allowed to stay out after the general lights-out, I think until midnight. The food in the officers’ mess was not better than that in the barracks canteen, but was cooked separately. An exception was made at Christmas and New Year, when everyone got a portion of carp or tench. But in addition, there were also Bratwürstchen or Bockwurst that assuaged our hunger and, together with the potato salad, laid down a good basis for the wine. In the Mörchingen officers’ mess you could buy splendid French wine. It was there that I drank my first white and red Bordeaux and Burgundy.

In St Avold there had often been air-raid warnings that mostly lasted from midnight, until the enemy aircraft had left the area of the Reich. For that reason duties were assigned in such a way that, after reveille at 4.30am, they began at 6am. After the meal set for 10.30am, the lunch break lasted until 2pm, so that everyone could catch up the sleep they had lost during the night. There were none of those annoying disturbances in Mörchingen.

Once, in the autumn, we went to Strasbourg and saw the sights of that beautiful city, by then once again in Germany. On the platform of the Minster, from where you got the wide view eastwards into the Black Forest and westwards into the Vosges, Ludwig Popovsky took our photograph. At that time he had attached himself to Helmut Überla from Trautenau. I had become friendly with Hans Alterman from Gottesberg in the Riesengebirge. From Alterman I have a written testimony to our friendship which he wrote for me in the little book Novellen aus Metz, which each of us had received from the regimental commander as a Christmas present. ‘Either we shall meet in victory or never again’, the young man had prophetically written.

A year later, when we passed out of the War College in Dresden, of ‘us eleven’ comrades there only remained Henschel, Popovsky and I. Fiedler wanted to become an officer of engineers. I later chanced to meet him on Liegnitz station as a Panzer Leutnant. I met Bormann at about the same time, in the spring of 1944, in Mährisch-Schönberg. From the summer of 1942 he had had a stiff knee, and without attending War college had, after a long delay, become an officer. Of the others I never heard anything more. As far as my friend Hans Altermann is concerned, I am sure that he was killed in action as early as 1942.

It is time that I described our instructors, who no doubt had been selected for that duty. The Gefreiter and senior soldier in our block, Herbert Kräkler, was a candidate for NCO, a small, blond young man from a Silesian village. His place was shortly afterwards taken by Obergefreiter Wahle. I met Kräkler in the summer of 1942 at Upolosy when we were both already NCOs and could call each other by the familiar Du. A few days later he was killed in action. Wahle was getting on for thirty, and, to judge by his appearance and behaviour, came from a town. The NCO, August Gehle, during the French campaign had suffered a fractured pelvis from a falling tree. Like Wahle, he was a patient, self-controlled instructor who never lost his temper and carried out his duties in an exemplary manner.

Leutnant Riedel came from Bad Rheinerz in the county of Glatz. He was, as he would proudly relate, the son of a worker and had joined the Army after leaving school. He was extraordinarily agile and intelligent. Like Gehle he was a fair-minded superior officer who showed preference to no one and provided us with a thorough training. He, too, gave each of us a little book for Christmas. I corresponded later with Riedel, but do not know what became of him, or of Gehle and Wahle. Once, when I was suffering from bad toothache, I had to visit Riedel in his room before morning duties, to wake him and knock him up to ask permission to be allowed to go on sick parade to the dentist. I was not sure how he would react to being disturbed, and was pleasantly surprised when he gave me permission without question.

The two photographs of our Christmas in barracks show ‘us eleven’ officer cadets with Obergefreiter Wahle in our Sarasani jackets. In front of the Christmas tree in the background, there are on the left, some lockers and against the wall, in front of them, a bunk bed. In the foreground is the long table. In the second photograph we are sitting with our tunics off. In front of the darkened window is the big tree, decorated with lametta and many burning candles. From the ceiling is hanging the big Advent wreath and on the table, too, some lights are still burning. In front on the left sits Popovsky, beside him Altermann, on the right opposite him Überla, and in front of him is me, with a reflective-questioning expression.

Better than all the service regulations intended for training, instruction and individual study, was the Reibert. It was named after its author, Dr.jur.W. Reibert, Hauptmann and company commander. A 300-page compendium, it was entitled Der Dienstunterricht im Heere, i.e. Service Instruction in the Army. We used the green-bound edition for the men of the Schützenkompanie. The Reibert was an excellent systematic compendium of all the training material. As well as the introduction for service instruction, it was divided into the sections Patriotism, The Soldier’s Profession and its Duties, Sense of Duty, Behaviour of the Soldier, The Army, Anti-Gas Defence, Close-Range Weapons, Weapons and Equipment, Drill, Firing, together with Duties in the Field and Combat. In addition to the oath on the colours, the words of which everyone had to know and repeat as he was sworn in, there were ‘The Duties of the German Soldier’, about which Reibert states: ‘The German soldier is expected to know the following articles by heart and word-forword’. They read:

Those ‘duties’ hark back in their essentials to the Imperial Army and probably to still older regulations. Millions of soldiers in both World Wars modelled themselves on those regulations. In the Second World War soldiers followed their guidelines right to the bitter end. For those born after those wars it is hard to comprehend. But for me and my comrades, who willingly submitted ourselves to those duties, with all the idealism of youth, they were a kind of profession of faith.

To give an example of the sterling quality and thoroughness of the Reibert, I will quote from the General Principles of the Barracks, Room and Locker Regulations:

There are many other examples that could be added. However, it may become clear why, in our day, the Wehrmacht was spoken of as the ‘school of the nation’. In that school, even the ‘simple man of the people’ learned a lot that he had not learned from either his parents or his teachers.

At the end of 1986, 45 years on, when I read the letters that I wrote to my family from St Avold and Mörchingen, during that first period as a soldier, I was astonished by the dispassion and distance with which I regarded the business of the Army, although I was right in the middle of it. In all conscience I had shrugged everything off. To have to learn hard lessons, to go through troubles and exertions, to have the occasional moments of harassment had never become too much for me. In any event, neither I nor my officer cadet comrades had ever been ‘reduced to tears’. That was something about which the regimental commander had once asked at the gentlemen’s evening. He no doubt was speaking from personal experience as he thought of his own time as a cadet. Certainly the cadets of the Imperial Army, about whom such stories were told, had been much younger. For them the seriousness of military life had begun when they were only ten years old.

In my first letter to my Mother and sisters I complained that ‘we have really very little time’ and that we officer cadets were given the ‘most impossible things to do’. Thus, for instance, ‘would you believe it’, I had been ordered by the UvD to darn his leather gloves. Nevertheless, I completed it to his total satisfaction. On 4 August 1941 I had to travel to Metz to the Reserve Military Hospital for a specialist medical examination of my heart. At my recruitment medical, the unit MO diagnosed a ‘serious’ defect. In Metz it proved, ‘thank God, to be a completely wrong diagnosis’. Otherwise I would have been sent home, which would have been a big disappointment. After only ten days we were having firing practice for the first time.

‘Then was our swearing-in, a ceremonial occasion. In the afternoon we had no duties and we had our first trip out, it is true, with our NCO and Obergefreiter. But it was quite nice. We gorged ourselves at a confectioner’s. For once at least we were full again. Otherwise we are always hungry. Yesterday we got our pay books and identity tags’. To Father I reported on 25 August that ‘today we had been flushed out, quick marched with machine-gun and gas mask, and then over the 2.5m high scaling wall’. But still, ‘I don’t let it get me down, you needn’t worry. In the group there’s a lot to laugh about, and you get through everything much easier with humour than with idealism’.

On 4 September I told Mother of a stay in sick quarters. The cause was angina, from which I had suffered a lot in my youth. In that letter I was longing for my schooldays, but in the next sentence went on that ‘we all really think that we’ve never had any other life than the one we have now in the military. Our time as civilians is only a beautiful dream. For all that we’re happy and contented’. In the letter of 18 September to my Mother, I reported that ‘in the last two days we have had no rest at all at night. The day before yesterday we had night exercises until 12.30am, then straight into the air-raid shelter until 2.30am. Yesterday was Gentlemen’s Evening again, very jolly, then air-raid shelter again until 2am. A Gentlemen’s Evening like that’, I said, ‘was as good as a rest, despite the tightness of space, especially the tightness of my tunic. I sat at table with the Colonel, but fortunately he left about 10pm. Then things got going. You get used to drinking. Today I can feel no ill effects at all’.

At the beginning of October, the recruits arrived who were born in 1922. They had been called up normally. For us officer cadets, who had the so-called inspection behind us, it meant that we had reached the lowest rung on the military ladder. We were assigned as block seniors and during the mornings served as assistant instructors. My nine men, all but two, were Silesian farm lads. In my letter of 18 October I answered Mother’s question as to how I was feeling to be block senior. ‘It was very nice’, I said, ‘the work was quiet and we didn’t have to do any more lousy jobs. On the other hand, we didn’t have any more free time for ourselves – particularly because we needed to attend the officer’s mess very often’. We had to go to the Gentlemen’s Evening there three evenings a week, as well as having to have lunch there on Saturdays and Sundays. At another level that made a change. Among the older officers who frequented the mess was the leading baritone of the Breslau Opera. The palm court orchestra that sometimes played in the evenings, was conducted by the Opera’s first violin.

At the end of October I told Mother and Rudi of my success in pistol-shooting, that our training work was indeed easier, but not our other work. Part of that meant we had to run the obstacle course with the heavy machine-gun, the mortar, and each of us carrying 50lb weight. I also told them about essay subjects. We had to write the essays in the evenings we were not at the officers’ mess. The theme, ‘Loyalty is the very marrow of honour,’ is something I could still write about today, unlike the question ‘Why must Russia lose the war?’ I give an account of the swearing-in of the recruits as a ceremonial occasion in which the regimental music corps participated. They played, among other things, the chorale Wir treten zum Beten vor Gott, den Gerechten, ‘We Come to Pray before God the Just One’, the so-called Dutch Prayer of Thanks. In a letter of 30 October to Lieserl, who was seven at the time, I wrote that snow had fallen overnight, but that I was sorry I couldn’t go sledging with her, but on the other hand had to be glad if no-one was going sledging with me.

I do not remember whether at the time we actually suffered from hunger, even if I often wrote about hunger and tiredness. But it was no wonder. The unaccustomed physical strains reached the very limits of what we could tolerate. Others, thank God not me, experienced symptoms of exhaustion such as nose bleeds. The comradeship among us eleven was good, even if at first we two Austrians and the two Sudeten Germans did not feel really very comfortable together. That was why I wrote, with delight, ‘now and then I meet a fellow-countryman’, such as, a man from Waidhofen who had studied with our Professor Höchtl.

By the middle of January 1942 we had completed the first stage of our training, and after a successful ‘inspection’ we were promoted to Gefreiter. Then, too, came the longed-for leave, during which an event occurred that threatened to derail my plans. Literally overnight I got severe pains in the region of my appendix which required that I was admitted immediately into the Stockerau civilian hospital. In the middle of the night the consultant had to be fetched. After palpating my abdomen, to no little horror on my part, he uttered the words, ‘It’s too late’. In fact, the appendix had perforated, but an infection had developed which had to be cured before there was any question of an operation. I had to remain in hospital for some weeks.

On the day after I was admitted I was laid down in a small room. The only other patient there I recognised as my schoolmate, Ewald Henk. A few days previously – I had found out from Herta – he had attempted suicide because of an unhappy love affair. The object of his affections was ‘Mausi’ Grundschober, a really striking girl who, however, had not yielded to his advances. Standing in front of a mirror in order to give particularly drastic form and experience to the scene, Ewald shot himself through the body with a 6.35mm Flobert rifle. But he had set the barrel muzzle too low with the result that he shot himself in the left lung and spleen. After the shot he dropped the rifle and staggered wailing into the family living room where he cried: ‘Help me, I have shot myself!’

My great worry was that the ill-timed appendix would throw me completely off course or else delay my training. Only at the end of March did I arrive back with mixed feelings in Mörchingen, just in time to be able to spend a few days with my comrades before they left for the field. A farewell photo shows us on the steps in front of a door in the barracks building, crowding round our Lieutenant Riedl, our NCO Gehle and Obergefreiter Wahle. For the farewell, which meant the end of our period of training, we received presents from the Leutnant. For me he had selected a small volume of poetry, Volk vor Gott. This showed that he had not only recognised the religious bent instilled in me by my parents, but that he also admired it. The dedication harked back to the hard period of training and also contained a maxim for my future:

‘Dear Scheiderbauer. Life brings us many hardships, but it is only in these that we show our strength. We overcome! We never give up! The reward will be ours!’ The little book contains -

Gebet in höchster Not, a prayer when things are at their worst, by Ricarda Huch; Gebet der Knechte und Mägde, a prayer of the Lads and Lasses, by Richard Billinger; Die innere Gestalt, a prayer, ‘The Inner Form’, by Josef Weinheber; Geistiches Lied, a ‘Song of the Spirit’ by Hermann Claudius; Zuflucht, a ‘Refuge’ by Ina Seidl; Haussegen des deutschen Bauern, ‘The German Farmer’s Blessing on His House’ by Paula Grogger, and Jochen Klepper’s Neujahrslied, a ‘New Year’s Song’. Hermann Stehr, Heinrich Zillich, Walter Flex, Bergengrün and Rilke, Agnes Nigl and Rudolf Alexander Schröder with his Lobgesang, a Song of Praise, were among the authors. The last page contained the prophetic dedication of my friend Hans Altermann that I have already mentioned. ‘Either we shall meet again in victory – or never again! Always, your friend Hans’.

My comrades’ ‘assignment’, the term by which it was known to us, was followed by dreary weeks for me. I was only fit for indoor duties and was employed as recruit Gefreiter in the 2nd Company of Infantry Ersatz Battalion 461, in the neighbouring barracks. The recruits, who reported on 1 April, were all from the eastern part of Upper Silesia, aged from thirty to thirty-five years, and were all members of the so-called Volksgruppen 2 and 3. According to that system of classification, which still covered the Reich Germans (Volksgruppe 1) and the Poles (Volksgruppe 4), there were those who professed to be German or who were still classified as Germans.

Two of these I can still see. One was a slim, sensitive cobbler Slavik, from Ornontowitz near Gleiwitz. The other was a small, black-haired and round-headed Hilfsarbeiter Stanitzek from Hindenburg. Slavik used to tell of his craft and how he had made orthopaedic footwear but also had made riding boots for Polish officers. He told us that he had not long been married. He had taken a kind of vow never to take off his wedding ring, and spoke of his marriage in a way that impressed me. But he was killed in Russia when he went into action for the first time. Stanitzek was a true Pjerun. I remember him as a Schweik character. He taught me how to drink 96% proof vodka, that is, trickled on to a sugar cube!

I then had more time for myself, and went into the officers’ mess as I had before. Jochen Fiedler, who had a wireless set, left it behind for me. After four weeks I had to report to the medical officer, and at the beginning of May was sent to the reserve military hospital in Metz. For a few more days I was ‘under observation’. Indoor duties such as peeling potatoes, in comparison with my previous duties, I found demeaning. If they were not on the agenda, we could go out and look around the town. I went for walks in the parks by the Moselle and even went to a concert. One afternoon I had been in a coffee-house and got into conversation with Wolfgang Schneiderhahn, the young leader of the Vienna Philharmonic. That evening he was playing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. The German cultural life in Metz was mostly provided by artists from Vienna. Later I found out that, at that time, people like Josef Meinrad were engaged in the theatre in Metz.

On 10 May I was operated on and after about a fortnight discharged back to Mörchingen. Of my fellow-patients I remember a Feldwebel who had a sliver of bone from his lower thigh transplanted into his lower arm in order to make the arm more mobile. The Feldwebel was a teacher and had an education to match. He played chess, and so we were able to pass the time playing chess and in conversation. Nevertheless, I was impatient, and would not accept my fate. I would much rather ‘be in Russia in the worst muck’, as I wrote to Mother. She and Aunt Lotte, she said, had ‘little natural tendency or talent to be mothers of German heroes’. However, my letters spoke of little else. There was not even loving raillery, but a few reproaches that she had not written. It was rather a restrained kind of tenderness with frequent assurances that I was thinking a lot of her and my sisters and was ‘her thankful son’.

In one Christmas present, the little book Wie die Pflicht es befahl, ‘As Duty Commanded, Words from our War Poets’, the editor’s foreword states that “in this struggle all Germans are animated by a single belief. It is belief in the mission of the Führer and in the eternal nature of the Reich. There is a single certainty that Germany shall live, even if we must die”. To the quotations from works of the war poets Walter Flex, Ernst Jünger, Baumelberg and Zöberlein, etc. was added the then well-known poem An die Mutter by a certain Irmgard Grosch. Its last verse runs:

Such proud mourning, as was displayed in many death announcements at that time, would certainly have been beyond my Mother. I am also unable to say how she took the news of the death of my brother. He was killed in action, as late as April 1945. But the poem had little effect on me. Naturally its heroic tone, all the more so in the poetic art form, appealed to me. But the thought that it could be I who was being mourned like that did not occur to me. I never suffered from premonitions of death, but carried the conviction that it would never happen to me. I was even then looking forward with confidence to the longed-for test of the front, and left for the field with a light heart.

The Reich was in danger. It was not Germany that had declared war on England and France, but they that had declared war on Germany. But, as far as the Soviet Union was concerned, there was no doubt about what the Reich government had written, in its declaration of war, to the Soviet government: ‘The German Volk is conscious that it is called to save the whole civilised world from the deadly dangers of Bolshevism, and to lay the way open for a true process of social advancement in Europe’. That extract from the declaration was printed in small print on the upper edge of many field postcards. Who among us could have doubted the truth of what was said there? Who could have proved it to be wrong?