Adventures in My Youth

7 January–July 1944: Officers’ course, Operation Bagration – the Russian summer offensive

In Wernigerode I had already found out that, after my Christmas leave, I would be sent on a course for convalescent officers. Such courses were held in all Wehrkreise. The Silesian course, the one appropriate for me, took place in Freiwaldau-Grafenberg. Freiwaldau, at that time in the Sudetenland, is in the Altvater mountains, and it is also a spa. We were therefore quartered in the Altvater sanatorium, otherwise a tuberculosis sanatorium. We had duties in the morning for only three to four hours in the form of lectures or sand table war games. On the course I met the very comradely young Hauptmann Hein. Since the spring he had been in command of the second company as an Oberleutnant. From Hein I learned that of the 40 officers in the regiment, at the beginning of the enemy offensive on 6 August, only three were still with the regiment. All the others were dead or wounded. All the battalion commanders had been killed in action, as were many other good comrades. On 11 January I wrote to Father, quite shaken. ‘In March we will be off to Russia again. Sometimes it gives me the shudders, but I put my trust in God’.

In the sanatorium there were skis. So some of us went skiing when the weather permitted and the snow was right. The mountain countryside offered many opportunities for skiing, and also for walking. I remember one trip, on which we came through the long Strassendorfer Oberlindewiese and Niederlindewiese. Their names were as quaint as was the landscape. ‘The food’, I wrote to Mother, ‘was not particularly copious, but we discovered the existence of a decree. According to it those under 21 years of age were entitled to 200 grams of sausage, per man, per day, in addition to their other rations! The flabbergasted paymaster immediately authorised the addition!’

Freiwaldau was not so noble a spa as Wernigerode. It offered no diversions at all. After dinner, Hein and I, together with the artillery Oberleutnant Sylvester von Glinski from our Division, stayed together for a while, and then went to bed. The almost superhuman exertions that had gone on for weeks and months resulted in an enormous need to sleep. Sometimes, after I had slept 10 hours during the night, I went to bed again after lunch and slept another four hours until dinner. So the actual purpose of the course, our convalescence, was achieved. At least in my case!

After five weeks in Freiwaldau I arrived in Schweidnitz, where I met many old acquaintances and good comrades in arms. Amongst them, was Oberleutnant Klaus Nicolai. In August, as commander of the third company, he had been wounded. I became friendly with him and we often went to the theatre and frequented the Hindenburg-Hof in which I had lived the previous year. As head of the convalescent company, Nicolai had rooms in the barracks. I had a private room in the house of innkeeper Pöttler. Another acquaintance was Leutnant Heckel, member of a well-known family of hatters in Neutitschein.

One Sunday, I went from Freiwaldau to Mährisch-Schönberg, to visit my officer cadet comrade Bormann from Breslau. He had been wounded during his first period of probation at the front and had come away with a stiff knee. Another time Nicolai, Heckel and I went from Schweidnitz, in the company of two actresses, on a trip to the dam at Frankenstein. Schweidnitz possessed a quite good provincial theatre. When I heard Flotow’s Martha the tenor part was played by a certain Alexander von Krüdener. He was a fairly old gentleman and, so the story went, had many children.

The commander of the Ersatz battalion was a Hauptmann Brandt. Nicolai and I called him ‘SA man Brandt’, after a novel from the Kampfzeit, i.e. the ‘period of struggle’ before the Nazis had come to power, well known at that time. The battalion adjutant was Leutnant Dr Waller, who in civilian life was an attorney from Eger. To a certain extent Waller seemed to me more of a business manager to the battalion. At any rate he was more of a businessman than an officer. He had gained his Leutnant’s rank in the Czech army.

At that time a marching company went every month to France to the Atlantic Wall. There the mostly recently enlisted older and quite young soldiers were given further training. In April Waller assigned me as transport officer. After I had received the papers, he took me to one side. He made the remarkable suggestion that I should travel from St. Maixent near Poitiers, without marching orders, and without a leave permit, and go to Bordeaux to buy some things for him. Such obviously irregular suggestion I brusquely declined, without even asking for the details. However, Waller accepted it with just a shrug of his shoulders.

The railway journey, through Germany and half of France, was naturally more pleasant than the journeys through Russia had been. There was much more variety in terms of landscape. I did not even know the Rhineland through which I then travelled and had never been any further west than Metz. In Verres, the massive freight station to the south of Paris, there were troop trains. Among the goods transports there were many wagons carrying wine. Word immediately got round that a unit had succeeded, with the help of a shot from a pistol, in ‘nabbing’ a huge wine container. In a flash the Landsers on our transport had run with their canteens to the place where the ‘nabbing’ had occurred.

When the military police arrived, it was no longer possible to find out who had done it. As long as the hole was not stoppered the best thing was to hold the canteens under it and fill them up. The wine soon began to take effect and the accompanying personnel, again and again, had to take care that there was no rowdiness. The men lay on straw in the goods wagons, each with a little cannon oven. For the accompanying personnel there was a passenger carriage available. While unloading in St Maixent, an oven fell over in one of the Schweidnitz wagons. The straw immediately caught fire and the men had to hurriedly evacuate the wagon. ‘Heaven help us’, I thought, if this accident had happened during the rapid journey through France.

On the journey back, we went past the Loire castles spread out in the sunlight. The barracks of St Maixent, the French infantry school, had no attraction for me. My journey back was uneventful, apart from the fact that it passed through strange country, which was an event in itself. But the main event was Paris. At that time, there was an order that every member of the Wehrmacht who was travelling officially, to or through Paris, was allowed to stop there for 48 hours to see the sights of the city. With a Pionierleutnant from another Silesian garrison town I too made the visit. We were accommodated in a double room of the Grand Hotel de l’Opéra. It was the hotel requisitioned for officers’ accommodation. To our pleasant surprise there was running, even if only lukewarm water.

It was a Sunday and Monday that we spent in Paris and we raced through the main sights of the town, as I wrote on 9 April to Father. We saw Les Invalides, the cathedral of Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Champs-Elysées and the Trocadéro.

On the Arc de Triomphe, where the changing of the German guard was just taking place, I discovered, among the names of Napoleonic battles and engagements engraved there, the name of Hollabrunn near Stockerau. Father had climbed the Eiffel Tower two years previously, in two and a half hours, counting the steps up to the top. However, at that time, we could only climb up to the restaurant on the first storey. But the view from there over the huge city was over-whelming and confirmed my impression that Paris was far greater than Vienna and Berlin.

In my Easter Sunday letter to Father, I told him of a good Easter sermon by a preacher from the Confessional Church in the Schweidnitz Parish Church. I thought that Father would have a lot to do over the Easter holiday in Cambrai. I reminded him of Mother’s birthday on 11 April, as I knew that Father easily forgot such family events.

On the journey back from Paris I managed to trick myself a day out to Stockerau. It had been easy, because the army leave trains from the Paris Gare de l’Est, left in the evening after 7pm, with a quarter of an hour interval between them. The train to Vienna was the later of the two. So because I did not catch the Breslau train, I ‘had to’ travel with the Vienna train, so to speak. I was able to make this easily understood to the railway authorities, and the guard, an old Austrian Reserveonkel, nodded understandingly.

When I arrived back in Schweidnitz I learned that the father of my comrade, Leutnant Ludwig, had died suddenly. With Oberleutnant Liebig who was also from Lignitz, I travelled there in order to attend the burial. The Ludwig family owned Vaters Hotel in Lignitz. The mourners assembled there in the salon. Oberleutnant Liebig was a ‘12-Ender’. A former Unteroffizier, he had risen to the rank of officer. He had married in Lignitz, but only seldom visited his wife. In fact he had a relationship in Schweidnitz with a singer at the Theatre. Paulchen Vogt had a small voice, was thin in build, but had a lovely nature. In Martha she had sung the part of Frau Flut.

Liebig was commander of the so-called Marschkompanie of the Ersatz battalion. All officers and soldiers passed through there after they had been wounded and had been in the convalescent company. Once they had been certified fit for combat again, they waited there to be sent back to the front. Liebig himself suffered from a stomach complaint. He and the core personnel were ‘GvH’, i.e. garnisonsverwendungsfähig Heimat, which meant they were fit for garrison service at home. Unfortunately, to my disappointment, I was the same. I was longing to be at the front and did not much enjoy life in the barracks.

Meanwhile, I had found an enjoyable activity. I was responsible for the war training of a Marschbataillon that had just been formed. It was composed of people who had not been old enough to fight in the First World War. They had only just been called up. The platoon and company commanders had no experience of the Eastern Front. I had to set up the service plan and supervise the training operations on the training ground and shooting range. Men from those age groups formed the ‘secret weapon’, was what we said mockingly. But the new weapon that would decide the course of the war, for which everyone was hoping, was nowhere to be seen.

In my service in connection with the Marschbataillon I was under no supervision. For example, I could allow myself the advantage of prolonging the lunch break. I spent it in the officers’ mess, followed by a visit to a coffee-house. How important those few visits to the coffee-house became, I will relate later in another connection.

I got to know the commander of the Marschbataillon that I had to train. He was a man with a remarkable history. Major Norbert Freisler was born about 1890 and came from Neutitschein in Moravia. He had already been an active officer in the old Imperial Austrian Army. In September 1914, something of which he was proud, as an Oberleutnant, he had been awarded the Militärverdienstkreuz III Klasse. But at that time he had immediately been taken prisoner by the Russians and had been in Siberia until about 1920.

He was one of the few officers who went into the Czech army, or rather who was taken over into the Czech army. He struggled during his service to reach the rank of Staff Captain. He said it was the highest rank he could attain as a German. After he was taken over into the Wehrmacht he became a Major. Because of his excellent command of Russian he was used with the Russian volunteer units, the so-called Vlassow-Armee. In the context of that service he was made commandant of the group of Lofoten Islands off the Norwegian mainland. He was a small, white-haired man, a ‘wiry’ character with an expressive face and a lively temperament. He liked chatting with me and could tell riveting stories.

The officers’ mess of our infantry barracks was, as is usual in barrack buildings, a separate building with several large lounges. Naturally, you only went to table when the commander had arrived, and only began to dine when he had picked up his spoon. The German army at that time was the first army in the world that made no distinction between the portions of officers and men. But the advantage of the food in the officers’ mess was that a good cook ran the kitchen and she was able to use the rations that were assigned more economically and to cook more appetisingly. So the food cooked there for perhaps 20 to 50 officers was much better and of greater variety than the food provided for the 1000 or more members of the Ersatz battalion and the training unit.

In the kitchen of the officers’ mess I got to know the famous Schlesische Himmelreich that until then I had only known from soldiers’ tales. It consisted of very soft, almost melting, yeast dumplings with stewed plums or mixed fruit. The unique point was the addition of finely diced smoked meat, through which the dish received a distinctively spicy flavour. After lunch I usually withdrew into one of the many armchairs, where you could stretch out your legs and doze undisturbed. To me the gentlemen’s evenings were no longer as exciting as they had been in Mörchingen. The reason was that by then only a minimal amount of alcohol was dispensed. Only on 20 April 1944, for the Führer’s birthday, was there a celebration dinner and unlimited drinks. I remember that, for me and my close comrades, it was an hilarious celebration. I played the piano, and it lasted well into the night. ‘Enjoy the war, for the peace will be terrible’, was the sarcastic refrain.

A celebration of a quite different kind followed. As I reported to Hauptmann Brandt, the battalion commander, a colonel by the name of Werner was also present. I knew the latter from the Hindenburg-Hof. He was head of the army film unit that had moved from Berlin and had for some time been stationed in Schweidnitz. He had his quarters, as befitted his rank, in Kammrau, the estate of Count Kayserling located about eight miles from Schweidnitz. Werner informed me that on the following Saturday a birthday celebration was taking place for his granddaughter. They were one gentleman short, so I was to take that place. I then learnt they had been keeping their eyes open for a socially skilled young officer and had lighted on me.

It was to be an interesting experience. Until then I had never been in a house of the nobility of the eastern Elbe. Oberst Werner took me with him on the Saturday afternoon in his service car. Kammrau was a little village within the estate. It consisted of several farm buildings and a small castle. The lord of the manor was, if I remember correctly, a nephew of the philosopher Kayserling. The family was from the Baltic nobility and the Count himself had been a Chamberlain of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

I remember a series of interconnecting rooms, the last of which was the Count’s study. All the rooms were tastefully and in some cases opulently furnished. There were many pictures, paintings and photographs with dedications, especially portraits of his Majesty. The Count, to whom I was only briefly introduced, was somewhat small and had a bald patch. He had the air of a private scholar and not of the owner of an estate. The dominant personality in the house was perhaps the 70 years old Countess who involved me in a lengthy conversation. She radiated a natural nobility. Of the other guests, with the exception of Oberst Werner, I have no recollection, but I do recall the younger people.

First there was the birthday girl who had just reached the age of 25, Baroness Viola von Richthofen. Her brother was a Leutnant of Reserve in an infantry uniform. He had lost a kidney as a result of being wounded. The father of young Richthofen was Lothar von Richthofen, brother of the famous Manfred, the red fighter pilot. He too was a fighter pilot holding the Pour Le Mérite. He had met his death in about 1930 as a civilian pilot. He had married the daughter of the house in which the two grandchildren grew up. Viola was a Red Cross sister in a Breslau military hospital. Blonde and blue-eyed, she was friendly, natural and almost maternal.

It appeared that her friend was a Fräulein von Garnesse, from a Huguenot family. Reddish blonde, particularly slim and tall was a Bezigna von Rohr, an uncomplicated young lady from the country nobility and the opposite of the governess type of Fräulein von Garnesse. The youngest was a Fräulein von Karlowitz, full of life and very pretty. She soon told me that her brother was a Panzer Oberleutnant from the Sagan regiment and was by then in Baden near Vienna. Of the young men, in addition to the Richthofen grandson, there was a commoner school friend, who had had infantile paralysis and thus was not fit for military service. Nevertheless he wore his disabled sports badge with pride. Then there was also the signals unit Oberleutnant, ‘Conny’ von Falkenhausen. He was perhaps 25 years old, with long hair slicked down, which, together with his general appearance gave him the dashing air of a greyhound.

Of course it was part of the visit to have a look round the stables and the farm buildings and to walk through the nearby estate area. There was a little castle pond, with water-lilies floating on it. The conversation was free and easy and lively. It turned out that a room had been prepared for me to spend the night, provided with a toothbrush, naturally! In the absence of a special invitation, I had not brought one with me. Before dinner we gathered in the drawing rooms for an aperitif and when the gong sounded, we went in to dinner. To celebrate the birthday the ladies were escorted to the table. A gentleman had to bow to the nearest lady and offer her his arm. The table was round and big enough for 12 people to be seated round it fairly comfortably. The dishes were of wartime fare and thoroughly ‘unaristocratic’. They were brought, by means of a lift, from the kitchen in the undercroft of the house, then placed on a revolving platform in the middle of the table. The revolving table meant that the need to pass dishes round was avoided.

For us young people it was a jolly evening which lasted far into the night. I could tolerate a great deal in those years of my youth. There was never any danger of losing my composure, and I don’t recall ever having had the need to excuse myself. In that way I passed the evening with great pleasure. Next morning I was at my place at the proper time for breakfast. Breakfast was taken en famille at the round table and afterwards I made a move to get back again to Schweidnitz. Count Kayserling wanted to put a Landau at my disposal so that the coachman could take me to Schweidnitz. However, I politely declined, with thanks. I had a real need for physical activity and looked forward to the brisk walk along the quiet country road on that beautiful May Sunday. I arranged it so that I arrived at the officers’ mess just in time for lunch. On the way, I went over the impressions of the previous day and looked forward to the coming week and also to seeing Gisela.

Several times after lunch in the officers’ mess I had sought out a cafe in the town square. There I had noticed grammar school girls, so easily recognisable by their school bags and by the topics of the conversations they had. It was not yet three years since I myself had been going to grammar school, and it gave me pleasure to watch the gaggle of girls. One of them particularly appealed to me, and I soon fell for her. She was just 17, had brown hair and a lovely open face, merry yet serious. Of course I did not know who she was, nor how I should approach her. I often posted myself on my bicycle near to the school at times when I thought lessons were finishing and I actually succeeded in seeing her several times and to notice that she had also noticed me. She wore her thick hair over her forehead, eye and cheek and would fling it back as a foal shakes his mane in a gallop. The gesture pleased me more than I can say and at the same time imprinted itself unforgettably on my memory. Her eyes were a mixture of brown, grey and green, and had a dark black rim. To me they spoke of fathomless depths, undreamt of sweetness, and measureless goodness and warmth of heart.

It was on the evening of 9 May when, through a fortunate coincidence, I was able to speak to her under touchingly memorable circumstances. I had passed the Friedenskirche, which had once been built in thanksgiving for the end of the Thirty Years War. The extensive, spacious half-timbered building was surrounded by old limes, whose first green shoots were just coming out. There in a park-like forecourt and the adjacent cemetery I felt the mood of the evening, a wistfulness and longing that was especially strong. I entered the church, from which chords of a chorale were ringing out. In an effort not to disturb the congregation, I did not look for a seat, but leaned up against a pillar. In doing so my gaze turned to a girl whom I recognised as Gisela. She had bowed her head and folded her hands, and I was surprised to see her there. It turned out she had been at the grave of her mother, who had died a few days after she was born. While the service was still going on she left the church and I followed her at a respectful distance. I saw her stop at a grave, the grave of her mother, and only when she had walked on and neared the cemetery gate, did I walk up to her and speak to her. She turned her great eyes upon me. Out of them there spoke seriousness, surprise, and, as it seemed to me, a gentle reproach. But perhaps I only felt this because I felt like an interloper.

Afterwards we met as often as Gisela could manage it after school. We went for walks together over the ‘Ring’, the former fortress wall, which had surrounded the town and which was a promenade walk luxuriantly overgrown with trees and bushes. Sometimes we went on our bicycles in the late afternoon, out into the May evening. We soon found a favourite spot, a bench at the edge of the woods to the west of the town, where the highway climbs uphill towards Burkersdorf. It was where the park disappeared into the forest and hills beneath the Riesengebirge. At our feet there lay the soft picture of the town, our dear town of Schweidnitz, with its towers and roofs lit by the rays of the setting sun.

Meanwhile, things moved on and the time of my departure for the front approached. During the past months it had become clear to me that I probably would not be satisfied with a career as an officer. If I were to stay in my chosen profession I would at least have to follow the career of a general staff officer. But to do that I would first have to become a Hauptmann. All that would take a long time. For the time being I had to go out to the front line again. I had had enough of the barracks, its many shirkers, and its defeatists.

I wanted to go ‘into the field, into freedom’. I was eager to experience again the camaraderie of the front, the unheard-of experience of community, for which every young man had an especial longing. Out there, and nowhere else, was where I had that experience. For better or for worse you belonged out there, together. Out there, things were right.

I had an additional determining factor. I had won the Iron Cross Second Class, the Infanteriesturmabzeichen, i.e. the infantry assault badge, in silver, and the Verwundetenabzeichen, i.e. the wound badge. But I did not have the coveted decoration of the Iron Cross First Class and a hoped for Nahkampfspange, i.e. the close combat clasp. Without those it appeared to me, you were not a ‘proper’ infantry officer. I had therefore voluntarily signed myself ‘kv’, i.e. fit again, which the medical officer would not have done. Even the fact that Gisela had suddenly come into my life had not been able to alter my decision.

I travelled home once more on the short leave that we received once a month. In my case, since the garrison was over 300 kilometres from my home town, it amounted to four days. I had found a way of making the most of every minute of those four days. I travelled at midnight from Schweidnitz and went with the Ostbahn to Vienna. Then I returned with the Nordwestbahn from Stockerau through Bohemia to Gorlitz, from there I arrived back on the same train I got on in Schweidnitz. On the evening of my departure some comrades and I had been drinking in the Hindenburghof. So I was fairly well oiled as I got on the train. In Kamenz in Silesia I got on the leave train from the front coming from Breslau to Vienna. I was exhausted and tipsy.

In the compartment I fell asleep and wakened with a shock when I heard the guard crying ‘Mittelwalde, Mittelwalde’. Thinking that I had got on the wrong train, I jumped out and asked for the train to Vienna. A Feldgendarme told me that I had just got off it. Back in the train at last I began to think of some way of overcoming my intoxication. I succeeded to a certain extent. When I arrived in Stockerau my school friend Walter Hackl welcomed me at the station. He had already been several days coming at home, on leave from the Afrika Korps. There was a great ‘hello’ and we looked up a few inns in succession and tippled heartily. Then exhaustion overcame me again and Walter finally delivered me home where Mother received me, laughing.

Once back in Schweidnitz I learnt that I was to go into the field with the next marching company. On 4 June, a Sunday, it was time to go. I had assembled the company and a general had inspected it. Purple and white lilac was in bloom, and I had given orders to plunder the bushes by the barracks hedge so that every man wore a flower on his chest. Led by the regimental band, we set off for the station. It was the only time in my entire career as a soldier that I was able to march with a full band. So we went through the Peterstrasse and across the town hall square to the station. I marched at the head of the company.

At a window of her apartment in the Peterstrasse stood Gisela. She came to the station. The company was already entrained, and we were able to speak for a while together. Not only for her but also for me, that farewell was hard. She gave me a book Wer Gottes Fahrt gewagt, ‘Who dares God’s journey’. It had pictures and histories from the house of Flex, at its centre Walter Flex, the poet of the Jugendbewegung or youth movement, who was killed in action in 1918. I stood with Gisela a little apart from the others. There was a fence between us. She was wearing a bright summer dress with a narrow waist. Gisela’s eyes shone moist and we kissed tenderly. To the strains of muss i denn the train began to move. Gisela’s face and figure became blurred to me. Soon I could only see the white speck of her dress and finally even that disappeared. The dedication that she had written in the book read: ‘For lonely hours in the field – from my heart – your Gisela’.

On 6 June we were sitting in the goods station at Lodz, which at that time was called Litzmannstadt. News reached us of the landing of Allied troops in France. Even if we ordinary Landser did not know anything of the wider picture, it was still clear to everyone that by then the war had entered into a decisive stage. However, that it could end with a German defeat was far from anyone’s thoughts. In the ‘travelling community’ of the goods wagon we were temporarily filled with a feeling of special belonging. Once we arrived out there the companionship of the train would be immediately torn apart and we would be assigned to many different units. But at that moment everyone felt the common experience of an unknown, even if distant, danger. After some excited commentary on the news it became quiet and one man hummed a tune. Then one became several and finally every one joined in the familiar old melody:

When the last verse rang out, the modest beginning had grown into a choir. It was impressive how many men knew the words for the second and third verses.

On 11 June we were at our destination. The journey had passed through Warsaw, Vilna, Dünaburg, Molodetschno and Polotzk, as far as a Vitebsk, and finished in Lowsha. The command post of the Division was located there. The allocation of men took place as expected. The Majority of the infantrymen joined the newly reformed third Grenadierregiment of the Division. By then it consisted of regiments 7, 461, and 472. I became Adjutant of the 2nd Battalion, which was commanded by Hauptmann Muller. ‘Pi’ Muller had been among the seven ‘seveners’ who had been convalescing in Freiwaldau. When he found out that I had come on that transport, he asked for me as adjutant. Our 252nd Infanteriedivision, the Eichenlaub or ‘Oak leaf’ Division, was the division located at the point of connection between army groups Centre and North. That meant particular danger, because a preferred target for attack was at those points of connection, where areas of command were separated.

The enemy knew that there it would be harder to re-establish connections once they had been broken than it would within a single area of command. The Russian summer offensive was imminent. We were greeted with that announcement. So for formation and training, for getting to know one’s way about, there only remained days, or at most weeks. On 15 June the Füsilier battalion under Major von Garn, deployed in the main line of resistance, had succeeded in shooting down a Russian reconnaissance aircraft. Its passengers had been general staff officers, who wanted to view from as close as possible the terrain over which their troops would attack.

The battalion was welded together ‘in a flash’, so to speak. The work as adjutant was exciting and reconciled me with the fact that for the time being I could not be with my Regiment 7. I was responsible for the preparation of battalion orders, correspondence and personnel matters. But above all, the fact that I was leader of the battalion staff with the orderly officer, the signals staff and the runners, was a new experience for me.

On 18 June an exercise involving the whole battalion took place, in which Hauptmann Muller and I participated on our horses. My Army-issue horse, the white horse Hans, was a wilful chap. It was difficult to keep him within the prescribed distance of half a horse’s length behind the commander’s horse. He had also well and truly stripped me of a waist belt against a wall. In order not to get trapped by my left leg, I had to jump off at the last moment. With that battalion exercise, my life as a ‘cavalryman’, so to speak, came to an end. From then on there was no more opportunity for riding. On 20 June the battalion was moved up to the village of Lowsha along the Vitebsk-Polozk railway line. Then there was no more doubt that the Russians would begin their offensive on 22 June, the third anniversary of the beginning of that campaign. On the evening of the 21st the commander, Hauptmann Muller, invited all his officers to celebrate the start of their new posts. For many, it would at the same time be a farewell.

I quote from the history of Grenadierregiment 7, by Romuald Bergner: ‘The most serious defeat ever inflicted on the German Wehrmacht in the Second World War began on 22 June 1944, as the Red Army began the battle in White Russia’. The fact that the beginning of the operation coincided with the third anniversary of Barbarossa was no coincidence. The date had been deliberately set by the Soviet high command. That reminder of Russia’s darkest hour was intended to inflame the passions of the soldiers of the Red Army and to inspire all the soldiers of the Red Army to give of their utmost. According to the final plan, Bagration, the Red Army was to begin large-scale offensives, following rapidly in succession, in six different sectors. That almost simultaneous large-scale offensive, in six widely separated locations, was intended to split the German defences, to splinter their forces, and to deny them the opportunity of deploying all available troops in a concerted effort to repulse the Soviet attacks.

The historian Andreas Hillgruber has shown that a direct causal connection exists between the collapse of Army Group Centre and the downfall of the Third Reich. On 22 June 1944 the Soviet general attack began against the front of Army Group Centre. In pincer operations the feste Platze of Vitebsk, Orsha, Mogilew, and Bobruisk were encircled. The mass of the Soviet offensive forces, however, struck out further westwards. The catastrophe took its course. In purely numerical terms it had almost twice the impact as that of Stalingrad. The operational effects were a great deal worse.

To the north of Vitebsk, where we were, the Soviets began their offensive in the early morning of 22 June. On a front extending 64 kilometres, the IX Army Corps with Corps Detachment D and the 252nd Infantry Division were conducting the defence. There, eight divisions of the Soviet 43rd Army attacked. To those were soon added the first division of the 6th Guards Army. It was intended to achieve a breakthrough some 25 kilometres wide. Along with the offensive divisions of the Red Army there rolled two armoured brigades into the focal-point of the breakthrough area. The two offensive wedges encountered the right-hand and central sectors of the 252nd Infantry Division. In the course of the night of 21 June and in the early hours of 22 June, the Russians pushed up nearer and nearer to our position. At 4am the enemy’s heavy barrage began and at 4.20am they attacked on a wide front. Breakthroughs were made in the sector of the 1st Battalion Grenadierregiment 7 and the Division’s Füsilier battalion.

As I recall, the hurricane broke at 3.05am, on the dot, just as it had in 1941. The fire was concentrated mainly on the main line of resistance. Only isolated heavy-calibre shells dropped in the village. We had long since left our quarters in houses, and were waiting in the cover trenches beside them. I had been woken by the crash of bursting shells after just an hour’s sleep. That action began for me with a thundering within my skull, weakened by schnapps and tiredness. Towards 5am the battalion received orders to move into the second line, that is, the trench that was planned for that purpose. It was good news, because as soon as the enemy attacked up front, we could expect the fire to be moved to the rear. Then it would be mostly the firing positions, villages, and roads, the position of which had been long established by enemy reconnaissance, that would be under fire.

We moved forward, the bombardment ahead of us and the impacts of heavy-calibre shells behind us. In the event, the Division was divided into two halves. Under its command remained Infanterieregiment 7, the divisional Füsilier battalion, and our 2nd Battalion 472. But of these, the 5th Company deployed on the left, the 1st Battalion, the regimental staff and the whole of Regiment 461 were pushed north-westwards. Even on the next day there was no news whatsoever of the 5th Company. In the meantime the second line had become the main line of resistance and the gap that had opened on the left urgently needed to be blocked off.

Visiting our main line of resistance, Hauptmann Müller and I found an 8.8cm Army anti-tank gun, commanding the road to Lowsha from a clearing in the woods, on which the Russians were bringing up tanks. A T-34 passed by; one shot, and it was in flames. The second followed straight behind it. The next shot hit it, it stopped and from the turret an oil-smeared figure twisted itself out. A third tank came up and drove slowly past its comrades. The number one gunner of our anti-tank gun watched with a tense expression and once again pressed the firing button. Once again the shot scored a direct hit and from the tank the whole turret blew into the air. High flames shot up.

After a short rest of only one hour on the night of the 22nd, and no sleep the next night, on the night of the 23rd and 24th I still did not get a wink of sleep. Our command post was located in a leafy shelter, probably the construction shelter of the Stellungsbaumeister, when the second trench was constructed. In the morning we were still holding on. Then towards noon, as ordered, we withdrew behind the Vitebsk-Polozk railway line. The enemy was pushing up behind us, the railway installations were under fire. Beside the station, where just 14 days before I had alighted from the train, the remaining part of the battalion crossed the line. At the Lowsha station a goods train was waiting with steam up to set off to Polozk. Like a magnet it attracted the Landsers to it. Müller and I, with a great deal of shouting, tried to counteract the signs of disintegration. We just about managed to hold together the remnants of our battalion.

However, many did not think, but saw an opportunity to get away and wanted to use it. They climbed up and bombarded the engine-driver with appeals to leave. When the train had at last drawn up, our battalion was already in order and had withdrawn behind the railway line. The train had not gone 100 metres when it came under fire from an enemy anti-tank gun. A direct hit in the locomotive’s boiler abruptly ended the journey. The passengers leapt out again and rushed on along the tracks.

As dusk was falling I received orders to undertake a counter-attack. With the men of my staff I put the Russians to flight from the houses of the village of Werbali. Since there were not many of them and since we roared like mad, the operation was fairly easy for us. In the evening a ‘V-man’ from the Division was brought forward. He was an Armenian in Russian uniform. During the night he had to scout around in the enemy lines and then return. Meanwhile, it was announced that the gap to the left was becoming wider and wider. There were no German troops within miles.

On 25 June the remnants of the Division were to cross the Düna. Around the village of Ulla and its bridge over the Düna a bridgehead had been formed. One kilometre across, half of it was occupied by what remained of our battalion. The Russians were feeling their way forward without serious pressure, but throughout the entire morning there was lively individual fire. At 11.30am the order came that at 12 noon the bridge over the Düna would be blown up. By then the bridgehead would have to be evacuated. Our artillery was just in the process of changing position and was not therefore available to provide covering fire. There remained three assault guns. We preferred to keep them with us rather than to let them go into firing positions across the river. Hauptmann Müller had allowed the other unit still in the bridgehead to go first. He wanted to cross the bridge with the last assault gun. My proposal was that those men who could not swim should immediately withdraw. The rest would then cross the river with the swimmers, instead of gathering before noon on and around the endangered bridge.

Müller decided to follow his own idea, but he became more and more unsure the closer it came to 12 o’clock. Finally, at five minutes to 12, it only remained to climb on to the assault guns and to go back. With 15 Landsers Muller and I clambered on to the vehicle. It was far too high for us. Everyone would much rather have gone into cover behind another comrade. The Russians were firing all around, and bullets rattled on the assault gun. But we clung on there, one beside another. Only two men were slightly wounded. At exactly 12 o’clock we crossed the wide wooden bridge. On the other bank a pioneer officer was waiting, to whom we announced that we were the last men out of the bridgehead. A little later, after we got down from the assault gun, the pioneer activated the detonator. As we marched away we saw, as we looked round, the bridge blow apart with a mighty explosion. Its wreckage fell into the river and over the surrounding area.

Five kilometres upriver we took up a new position to the right of the Füsilier battalion in the little village of Labeiki. Our right-hand neighbour was Corps Detachment D. They were the cobbled-together remnants of a corps from which the Russians had taken the village of Labeiki on the very first night. The position would have been just ideal. The excellently constructed trench ran along the western bank of the Düna on the steep bank that on average was 10 metres high. A frontal attack across the 16 metre wide river was practically out of the question. The occupied village of Labeiki was already on our right flank.

In allocating sectors I had even found time to enjoy the beauty of the landscape. It resembled an English park with meadows, groups of trees and bushes. There was an open view across the river under the summer sun. No shot had yet been fired. I had found a civilian motorcycle that had apparently been left by men from the Organisation Todt working there. On a track across a meadow I rattled across the sector to establish links with our neighbours. As a substitute for the ignition key I had a little piece of wood and, lo and behold! the Dürrkopp 125 worked. However, the track was under enemy observation. The journey went well until a Russian anti-tank gun got me in its sights. The first shot was too wide, but at the second I was nearly brought down as I tried to avoid the first crater. I felt the sharp draught of the third shot and then gave up the journey.

At dusk Müller returned from the regimental command post that was behind us, in the Ulla valley running parallel to the Düna. While Hauptmann Miller was away, after five nights and four days without sleep from 21 June, I slept for just three hours, in deep exhaustion. The combat actions and frequent changes of position plus Müller’s hectic pace, and also, at the beginning, a Pervitin tablet, had not let me rest for more than 100 hours. I had been uninterruptedly awake. So I slept like the dead in some soft green moss. Then I needed half an hour to become fully awake again.

Müller brought the order to retake the village of Labeiki. To me he did not seem to be in his right mind, he was speaking incoherently and was not steady on his legs. He must have drunk too much schnapps at the regiment or, more probably, a small quantity of it had overcome him, since he was just as exhausted as I. But, perhaps he had a premonition that the time of his death was near. ‘We’re off, Scheiderbauer’, was the first thing he said. Then he gave the details. The entire battalion staff had to take part in the attack. Labeiki was to be attacked from the north and south along the Düna, and had to be taken. We had to do it without artillery, without assault guns, or any other heavy weapons to support us, without even adequate information concerning the strength of the enemy, but with only ‘Hurrah’ and the ‘moral’ support of the night.

When dusk had fallen we moved forward. The night was no use at all to us. When the Russians noticed that an attack was underway, they fired flares and deployed anti-tank guns and mortars that they had already brought across the Düna. In a small pine wood, at close range, the attack ground to a halt. It seemed impossible to overcome the enemy’s wall of fire. Anti-tank shells exploded against the trees. Ricochets and explosive shells whizzed, crashed and exploded in between. It was a noise that could not be drowned out by men’s voices. The darkness of the wood was lit briefly and spectrally by tracer ammunition. When the magnesium glow of flares had gone out, the blackness of the wood by night surrounded us all the more profoundly.

Müller did not seem to me to be in his right mind. Gesticulating with his pistol he cried ‘Hurrah’, but that did not get the attack any further. Finally he sent me to the left flank, where I looked for Leutnant Kistner, the commander of the 7th Company. Seeking cover behind pine trunks, I went forward step by step and so drew near to the main trenches on the bank of the Düna. Instead of Leutnant Kistner I found a couple of helpless men waiting for orders. The Russians were still firing with everything they had got. Suddenly there was calm and you could hear the ‘Hurrah’ from the direction of the enemy, coming closer and closer. Briefly we thought that it was the attack of the neighbouring unit to the east of us. Nothing had been heard of them until that moment.

But the attackers approached surprisingly quickly and by their throaty voices we could recognise that they were Russians. They counted on us being more afraid of our ‘Hurrah’ than of the Russian ‘Urray’. Because they seemed to be making their assault along the trench, I ordered the men to get out of the trench and to take cover to the side of it. In that way we could have let the Russians charge past us into the trench and thrown hand-grenades after them. The men leapt to the right out of the trench. While the threatening ‘Hurrah’ shook me almost physically, I turned to the left out of the trench, crept quickly into a bush and lost the ground from under my feet. ‘A steep bank’ was my only thought. I could not feel the ground under me. I was slipping and rolling downwards. I fell and went head over heels, until my fall came to an end in the soft sand of the bank of the Düna. I must have slipped down almost 20 metres. I had not taken into account of the gradient of the bank in relation to the higher level of the village of Labeiki.

I found myself alone. It seemed, in the almost complete silence of a dawning summer morning, that there was nothing else for me to do but try somehow to get back to my men. For almost 200 metres I went downriver along the steep bank, until I found a place where I could clamber up. Everything was calm, but I did not know where or if I would find Hauptmann Müller and the other members of my staff. They would doubtless have withdrawn from the pine wood.

Giving a wide berth to the command post, where some wounded men were gathering, I went forward again. On the way I met one of the staff runners. He told me that Müller had been killed. Soon afterwards they brought him in. A complete anti-tank shell must have gone straight through his breast and killed him outright. But the attack had been beaten off. I ordered the battalion back into the exit position.

As soon as it was light I went to the regimental command post for further orders. I took with me the dead Hauptmann. We put him, half lying, in the sidecar. I climbed behind the seat, laid his head on my lap and closed his eyes. His usually lively, familiar face bore a great strangeness and an exhaustion beyond words. The journey was uphill, on a woodland road along the valley of the little river Ulla, to the wooden house in which the regimental command post was located. The command of the regiment, or what was left of it, had been taken over by Major Arnulf von Garn. Until then he had been commander of the Divisional Füsilier battalion. While I was giving my report, two runners of the regimental Staff dug a grave in the garden. Müller’s body was laid in it. Major von Garn and some men were standing around the grave. Garn began to say the ‘Our Father’ and all joined in. Then we scattered earth on the tarpaulin in which the body had been wrapped and the grave was filled in by the silent men.

Our battalion was without a commander. It was taken over by Oberleutnant Mallwitz. He had been commander of the 6th Company from 6–9 August 1943, and had been seriously wounded in the upper thigh. But he had held the village of Ivanowo. I went with him in the motorcycle sidecar forward to our command post. The order was to attack Labeiki again. We would need to use a little more cunning after our experience of the previous night. There could no longer be any talk of companies. The plan was for half the battalion to go forward and round the pine wood to the right. The other half with Mallwitz and me had to move forward in the trench on top of the steep banking. I remembered to look at the place where I had fallen down. After the strong defence put up by the enemy during the night, we did not have the remotest expectation that the new attack would succeed.

When we entered the village of Labeikia, that second time, there was complete quiet. There was no shot, although the enemy must have long since seen our movements. At last, on the final leg, we shouted ‘hurrah’ as per orders and broke in to the position. Right up to the last moment we were still afraid that the enemy would let us approach, only to wipe us out all the more certainly with fire from everything they had got. But they put up no resistance. With their hands in the air, Red Army troops climbed out of trenches and bunkers and gave themselves up. Forty prisoners, three anti-tank guns, a German assault gun, mortars and machine-guns were captured. In addition, there were six wounded German comrades who had been set free. They had belonged to the troops who had earlier occupied the strong point. They had been severely wounded, not brought in, but had had their wounds dressed by Russian medics.

Our joy at the small victory of Labeiki did not last long. Further to the right a breakthrough was reported. The front therefore had to be drawn back. In the afternoon, when we had hardly had chance to establish ourselves in Labeiki, the situation appeared to become critical. Contact to the right had again been broken. On the Lepel-Ulla road, running along the valley of the Ulla to our rear, there was heavy vehicle traffic. Obviously everything that could travel was making for the little village of Ulla. Everyone wanted to cross the bridge there and to be able to reach further roads on which to retreat.

Meanwhile we waited, concerned, for the order to withdraw. When it was finally given by wireless it was, to all appearances, too late. As the battalion, widely separated, moved back into the Ulla valley, on the road there were already scenes of a wild flight. I saw baggage wagons with galloping horses, motorised vehicles of all kinds, and among them soldiers rushing on foot. The vehicles were loaded with men and material. Obviously behind them Russian tanks were coming. The rumbling reached our ears. Those who were fleeing were driven before them. The picture of the flight, the approaching enemy tanks, firing their cannons and machine-guns, swept the remnants of the battalion along in the panic.

No commander was able to hold his unit back any longer. Oberleutnant Mallwitz had suddenly disappeared. I ordered the men from my little staff group, who were still around me, to cross the Ulla somewhere and to assemble on the other side. It was obviously out of the question that we would be able to reach the bridge at Ulla. In the ditch by the side of the road I suddenly found myself alone again with two enemy T-34 tanks driving past me at full speed. Both were loaded up with infantrymen, riding on them. The fantastic situation surprised me so much that I never thought of firing after them. With no cover I just watched the scene. The next rational thought caused me to jump across the road in order to reach the riverbank.

Completely calm again, I looked for a lump of wood in order to make the crossing easier. I found a veritable beam. Then a medic joined me. It was the red-haired Beuleke from my staff. I knew him from the Asorowa cemetery the previous autumn. Beuleke had stripped off down to his vest and underpants and said that he was not a good swimmer. I carried the beam, about the size of a railway sleeper, to the water. Then I told Beuleke to sit down on it, in front of me, and it would carry us both safely. Beuleke clung frantically to the wood. It was better after I had told him to stretch out his arms sideways, flat along the surface of the water. I had sat down on the beam in full uniform behind Beuleke. It sank about half a metre under our weight, so that we were submerged half way up our chests.

The little river was getting on for 20 metres wide and should have been crossed easily and quickly. My hastily conceived plan, however, intended to make use of the current and to go down river. I intended to connect up to a larger group and also to get to the opposite bank. On the right hand bank soldiers of all ranks were discarding their weapons, equipment and clothing. I shouted as loud as I could that they should find themselves lumps of wood. But many had been seized by panic and swimmers and non-swimmers alike were throwing themselves into the river.

Meanwhile, I steered my beam with the help of my hands, taking care that my machine-pistol did not get wet. Before getting on the beam I had tied it round my neck on a quite short strap so that, in spite of our being half submerged, it was protected from the water. As we were moving round a bend of the almost rushing river, bursts of machine-gun fire lashed the surface of the water. I struggled to look round to see if the firing just chanced to hit the river or whether we were observed by the enemy. In moving I unwittingly lost my right rubber boot. It had filled up to the top with water. The water had simply dragged it off. Angrily, I let my left boot follow it. It slid off just as easily.

After a kilometre of that memorable journey on the water I found Major von Garn standing on the left bank putting on his boots. He had swum alone across the river and, careful man that he was, had taken his boots off before doing so. I steered towards him and we climbed on to the bank.

The Divisional history (page 205) records those events as follows:

With Major von Garn, Beuleke and I went to the road leading southwards from Ulla, an unparalleled road of retreat. Beuleke, who the previous year had escaped with me at Asorowa, left us in order somehow to find the baggage-train and to get hold of a uniform again. He was not the only one. Down the road were coming Landsers of all ranks. They were still rushing, many without uniform or only dressed in their underwear, without weapons and without equipment. Running towards them with just bare feet I was almost fully dressed. Von Garn said that the regimental orderly officer, Oberleutnant Kruger, had stretched a cable across the river at the regimental command post, by means of which 15 non-swimmers were able to pull themselves across. Oberfeldwebel Miller, the man in our battalion who held the Knight’s Cross, was a non-swimmer. He said he had got himself across the river in his vest, with his service cap on his head in which he had wrapped his Knight’s Cross. To protect the congested traffic on the bridge, an anti-tank gun had been positioned there. Its clear-headed crew were shooting up, one after the other, the tanks that had broken through.

Still barefooted I supported the Major in assembling the returning men, insofar as they belonged to our units. But a Leutnant from the Panzerjäger, like me without boots, was among them. The hot midday sun soon dried our clothing. The fact that I had no boots and was not responsible for losing them was to me of little consolation. But I had rescued weapons, ammunition, map case, and uniform. I was glad that the Major did not blame me for the loss, but I was tormented by the undignified picture that I presented as a barefoot officer! We quickly gathered together the remnants of Regiment 7. The remnants of my battalion we used for topping-up.

In the small baggage-train at the regimental staff there was so-called ‘light gas clothing’. Other reserves of uniform and footwear were with the baggage-train said to be 80 kilometres behind us. Until the Hauptfeldwebel of the regimental Staff could get hold of a pair of decent boots, perhaps from a wounded man, I had to content myself with the famous Schuhwerk. They consisted of a rigid sole and an asbestos cover coming from the sole and reaching to the knees, normally tied over the boot under the knee. They were never used in the Second World War. With such a temporary arrangement, that did not allow you to walk properly, I began my duties as second orderly officer in the staff of Grenadier Regiment 7. With Oberleutnant Kruger from Berlin-Charlottenburg, the 01 (assistant to the 1st General Staff Officer), I participated in really dangerous tasks that we covered in our motor vehicles along hazardous routes during the coming days.

8 Summer 1944: Bitter defensive battles

For the IX Armeekorps, in which the 252nd Infanteriedivision was fighting, the six weeks that followed 22 June developed into a memorable race. It stretched over some 500 kilometres from the area of Vitebsk in a generally westerly direction almost as far as the western border of the Reich in East Prussia. The wedges that the Russians had driven into Army Group Centre to destroy it, caused the Armeekorps to lose its connection with its right hand neighbour. Principally, it caused a gap of varying widths of up to 70 kilometres to open up between the Division and Army Group North, to which a considerable number of the Divisional units had been attached. Under the command of the IX Armeekorps were the remnants of the 252nd Division and of Corps Detachment D. Into them had been gathered remnants of other divisions which themselves had been shattered. Our Division had Regiment 7, the Füsilier battalion, and the remnants of my battalion that had been absorbed into Regiment 7. After the Düna position had been surrendered the regiment had again been under the command of Corps Detachment D. Only on 30 June had it returned to the command of its own Division.

On 29 June Major von Garn had succeeded in getting hold of some Iron Crosses for the regiment. They were distributed almost unceremoniously to the few experienced men. It was done in front of the tent that held the regimental command post. When Garn pinned the Iron Cross First Class on my chest I had just returned from a journey on the tracked motorcycle. I already had orders for another journey. So there was no time for joy and pride over that much longed-for decoration. Still, it was lucky that on the previous day I had got new rubber boots from the baggage-train.

On the following night a rapid withdrawal took place. It lasted well into the morning. The regiment was supposed to move to rest at a location 20 kilometres behind the most forward security positions, of which we certainly had seen nothing. By a pond, which lay in a hollow, we found the spot. The exhausted men laid down their weapons and equipment and most of them immediately went into the warm marshy water. The entire regiment of several hundred men swam, splashed in the water, washed or shaved. Many of them did this quickly and then settled themselves under the shade of trees in order at last to get some sleep. Von Garn and I had first to concern ourselves with setting up security positions and to convince ourselves that we were in contact with the Division, before we could think of relaxing.

The rest had not lasted half an hour when the sound of engines was to be heard. It had to be from our own assault guns or tanks that were standing in front of us to provide security. But we wondered why they were already moving back, since it was only midday. Our wondering immediately turned out to be pointless. From behind the hill of yellow grain enclosing the hollow to the north and west, an enemy T-34 emerged. A second and third followed. The tanks pushed slowly up on to the ridge of the hill, their long gun barrels towering skywards. The appearance of the tanks panicked the men who were bathing and resting. Once again a panicky flight began. But after a few hundred metres the officers succeeded in stopping the men and bringing them back.

Oberleutnant Mallwitz, who had reported to Garn immediately beforehand, ordered me to take care of the tank with him. Through the corn and past bushes we crept up to the tanks. What Mallwitz intended to do was not clear. Neither of us had anything but pistols which were useless. We could do nothing unless the tank crew stuck their heads out of the hatch. We came to within 10 metres of the first tank, which had stopped near a line of bushes.

In order for bravery to succeed, the right weapon must be to hand at the right time. Such an advantage, in the shape of a Panzerfaust, an adhesive hollow charge, or a T-mine, was lacking for us. On the contrary, the crew of the first tank had spotted us. They fired on us with their machine-guns and Mallwitz was shot in the knee. Then even he realised that we had to beat it. Mallwitz hobbled painfully and we moved slowly back. To our surprise the tanks turned round. They had become suspicious.

The emergency line was held until evening. The urgently needed anti-tank gun had come. It was standing in a hedge, well camouflaged. Garn and I were beside it when a second tank attack came in the afternoon. We scored a direct hit on the upper part of its turret at 30 metres range, on the most forward of the three tanks. Flames were soon shooting up and two smoke-blackened figures climbed out, holding their hands high above their heads. Pointing his machine-pistol, the corporal of a group of infantrymen in positions beside the anti-tank gun took them in charge. Von Garn had them taken to the rear in a regimental vehicle. At 10pm the regiment withdrew. The rearguard had to remain until midnight. Only then did Von Garn and I withdraw.

The following night the regiment managed to put some distance between us and the enemy. The march went on during the day, one behind the other, gelaufen as our Silesians said. I appreciated the advantage of not having to run, but for the most part being able to travel on vehicles. To the west of the little town of Kublici the broad sandy road went through forest for many kilometres. The area had for a long time been the home of partisans.

However, in June, the Supreme Commander of our 3rd Panzerarmee, Generaloberst Reinhart, having in mind the possibility of a retreat, deployed all his available forces there to fight the partisans. But there had been no time to bury the bodies. That was why long stretches were overwhelmed by a ghastly stench. It was said that hundreds of dead were lying in the woods. The July heat strengthened the smell of putrefaction. You had to pinch your nose and breathe through your mouth. Some men even put on their gas masks.

On that road, 132 years before, the Grande Armée had moved on Moscow. Not far from there is the source of the Beresina with its other tributaries. On the advance in 1941 our regiment crossed the Beresina at Stujanka, the site of the historic battlefield. During entrenching work at that time a Napoleonic eagle had been found. They had immediately sent it to the Fuhrer’s headquarters. The parallels with the Napoleonic retreat were borne in upon us in a shattering way.

On the way to Globokie, the old Polish border town, a pig jumped out of a farmyard in front of the Kübelwagen. The poor creature kept running in front of the vehicle. Then it was overtaken, run over, and lifted into the Kübelwagen with broken limbs. The fact that in the evening the field kitchen was once again issuing pork, caused von Garn to utter the apposite remark: ‘Just get yourself a calf in front of the Wagen, and not just a pig!’

On 4 July, as our next stage, we reached Dunilovici. From there I had to branch off to the north-west to get to the village of Nowopajewa and to direct the 3rd Battalion to its lines. I had just got off the motorcycle when I heard the familiar roaring of a ‘Stalin organ’. My driver threw the vehicle into the soft bushes and we lay down flat in the sandy road because there was not a scrap of cover. The ‘organ’ sounded like the swish of a mighty scythe as it swings through the air before it cuts. All the shells crashed on to houses, into the gardens and on to the streets. There were 42 explosions of 15.2cm calibre shells. It seemed a miracle that no one was hit. Those weapons no longer had any effect on alte Hasen, or old soldiers, like us. When the ‘blessing’ was over we stood up, shook the sand out of our uniforms and drove on to look for the battalion.

In our quarters that evening the regimental medical officer treated me. Several times I had had injections of Cebion i.e. Vitamin C, into my behind, so that I was almost unable to walk. At that time the staff medical officer Dr Hellweg had little to do. The regiment did not run its own dressing station and, because of the speed of the withdrawal, casualties remained few. The wounded were immediately sent to the rear by the battalion medical officers. Sometimes though it seemed that the doctor would rather be the regimental adjutant. When new maps, always in short supply, were issued, I had to fight him for them every time. It finally dawned on him that as orderly officer, I was more in need of a map than he.

On the 4 July we passed Postavy. It had been set on fire by shelling and was well ablaze. The day before, on another dispatch journey, I had passed through the town and found it intact. Wind was driving the flames. Fire from the many trim wooden houses gave off such heat that in the open Kübelwagen, after two attempts to drive through the town, we had to drive round it. The motorised vehicles had to leave the road. In order not to sacrifice our precious wireless Kübelwagen, we finally drove two kilometres over open country, right in front of the point units of the Russian tanks. Then we finally reached the road leading westwards. At the edge of the road, there were many rolls of expensive field telephone cable. They would almost certainly fall intact into enemy hands, just as had happened with the Army’s supply dump located east of the town. The responsible paymaster, despite being threatened with court martial, had refused to give out the cable supplies right up to the moment when the first tank shells were bursting.

Wir machen Parjecheli was the catch-phrase of those summer weeks. Freely translated it meant ‘we’re beating it’. The tempo of the withdrawal alone saw to it that we did not get very much sleep. We just had to take advantage of every spare quarter of an hour to grab a doze. One afternoon I had lain down in the leather-upholstered back seat of the wireless Kübelwagen. When the driver, August Wörtz, a Tyrolean from Wörgl, came to use the vehicle, he failed to notice that I was lying on the back seat. Reversing in the farmyard he drove so close to the wall that my foot, which was hanging out of the car, was trapped. I woke with a shout and bellowed a Donnerwetter at him. In the late evening the same thing happened. Driving back with Garn on an assault gun, as part of the rearguard, I had dozed off. In the darkness of the night we overtook a refugee column of ethnic Germans accompanied by a Landesschützen. Half asleep as I was, I had not noticed that my foot was hanging over the edge of the assault gun. So it got between the gun and the horse and cart that we were overtaking. But once again things were all right. I was relieved to be spared from ending up in a military hospital in such a way.

We were sorry for the people in the refugee columns and we wondered if they would be able to maintain the pace. The further west we went the heavier the traffic and the more congested the roads. In the baggage-trains, it was often said that unruly scenes took place. Again and again senior ranking officers exploited unconditional obedience. They stopped commanders of lower rank from moving first, and claimed precedence for themselves.

There were also said to have been people at work misdirecting the traffic. We had been warned as early as the summer of 1943 about strange officers in the trenches. The Russians had placed men from the National Committee of Free Germany in the uniform of officers or military police at road junctions. They were said to have directed withdrawing troops towards a pocket. I was convinced that it would not have happened to us. The conscientiousness and composure of Major von Garn guaranteed that we did not go in the wrong direction nor lose our way. Sometimes when I was not with Garn in the rearguard, I was the leader of the nightly column in the regimental staff. While the others on the vehicles were dozing or sleeping I drove on ahead on my tracked motorcycle with the column’s drivers. With my pocket torch showing a green light tied on my chest, I led the regimental vehicles behind me without us ever losing our way.

One night Hauptmann Kaupke, the commander of the heavy artillery battalion, announced through the field loudspeaker that the Russians were in their firing position. Through the loudspeaker we could hear rifle and machine-gun fire. That meant that the Russians had occupied the next village to the west of us. Kaupke was there with his guns. The Russians had also occupied the road along which we were retreating. How often during that retreat had the enemy tried to overtake us with an advance party and cut off our line of retreat. After a hard search we managed to lead the regimental column out of the encirclement through woodland roads.

The next day, 10 July, the Major was out and about with Kruger, his 01. I remained behind in the command post with Hauptmann Grabsche, who had replaced the wounded Oberleutnant Stolz as Regimental Adjutant. Suddenly there came an unconfirmed report that the Russians had broken through very close to us. The excitable Grabsche ordered a counter-attack in which all available members of the staff had to take part. We advanced almost a kilometre to the east, but found no Russians and came under no fire. Finally Grabsche shouted ‘Hurra’ and ran round in front of the others waving his map board over his head. In the event it was much ado about nothing.

On 11 July we passed through Labazoras. In peacetime it must have been an idyllic village among the Lithuanian lakes. On my dispatch journeys on my motorcycle I never forgot how lucky I was that I did not have to march on foot. Even the battalion commanders covered hundreds of kilometres on foot. During the night, when I drove past such a column marching exhaustedly, I felt guilty that I had it so good. Hauptmann Husenett, who since Lowsha had been commander of the 2nd Battalion, did not envy me my ‘wheels’.

Husenett’s downy blond boy’s face, even when things got rough, did not lose its friendliness. He was the same even when he begged me to ‘sort out an assault gun’ for him for the evening, or when he begged the Major to say that he could hold out for another hour or two, or when he was in urgent need of ammunition. Friendship bound me to Husenett almost as soon as we met. He was always eager to hear something about our situation and our neighbours’. To the left the gap had certainly become wider and wider. From a width of 17 kilometres during the last days of July it had expanded to more than 70 kilometres. The Corps, even on the right, was fighting without units adjoining them. It was like a wandering ‘pocket’, often having to fight to keep open the roads of retreat leading westwards.

The retreat drove me on, too. I rushed madly to and fro on my motorbike to the units under our command. To the battalions, the assault guns, the anti-tank guns, and the pioneers I took orders that were only in my head and for which there were no written papers. I had to find them with the aid of a map and often just by my own intuition. Often I was in danger of dozing off. Then, when the driver had to brake sharply in order to avoid a crater or another kind of obstacle, I was in danger of being thrown out. Or sometimes a Russian Rata suddenly dived out of the sky or a couple of twin-engined Martin bombers, supplied by America, dropped their bombs on the road along which we were retreating. Then the two of us had to jump off almost while we were still driving, and take cover where we could.

When I returned in the evening to the regimental command post, a seriously wounded soldier of the Russian Guards was lying in front of the farmhouse. He had several orders on his chest. He was the escort to two colonels who had lost their way in a jeep, also of American origin. It had hurtled into our lines. A machine-gunner lying in the ditch at the side of the road had riddled the vehicle with holes at point blank range. As a result the officers had been killed.

At that time I thought how good it would be to take a holiday in that country. To live in one of the small, moss-roofed houses, to wander barefoot through the hot sand of the country roads in summer and to be able to bathe in the dark warm lakes, must be a pleasure which could scarcely be called earthly. When we had time and a favourable opportunity, von Garn and I would stop, throw off our uniforms and throw ourselves into one of the many lakes of the Lithuanian lowland. But even pleasure in bathing occasionally meant sacrifices. On one of those days the Corps Adjutant, Oberstleutnant Gyncz-Rekowski, an elderly gentleman, suffered a heart attack.

In Alanta, on 12 July, the good days with the regimental staff suddenly came to an end. I had to go up to the front to take over command of a company. That meant continuing the retreat per pedes apostolorum i.e. on foot like the Apostles. During the night we withdrew 25 kilometres. I was surprised how little the march tired me. Around the village of Alanta a barrier was to be formed. After the company had dug their trenches and I had established the machine-gun position, I climbed to the pointed wooden tower of the brick church in which a forward artillery observer had already settled himself. I looked out of the belfry window of the tower further and further eastwards and saw fields, meadows, roads, woods, lakes and a little river in the light of the morning sun. That tranquillity did not last long. Soon the artillery observer and I were driven out of the tower by an enemy antitank gun. The Russians would have been able easily to work out that the tower was occupied, and as the number of hits increased, we both climbed down.

The knowledge that I was back in the main frontline again gave me the old familiar feeling of security. Once again I knew that whoever came from the front could only be the enemy. The dangers there were at their greatest and were ongoing, the physical exertions always at the limit of what we could bear. But to compensate there was no more fear of surprise attacks. On my motorbike I was travelling long distances, as orderly officer, behind the main lines through the forest. Once a couple of Russians emerged from the wood. That was an unpleasant surprise that for a moment left me not knowing what to do. But on the other hand when the enemy attacked from the front, overran the positions or broke through during the night with an assault unit, those were events for which I was always braced.

Now and again an exception to the turbulence of the retreat confirmed my rule. For example, when scattered units broke through to the west and reached our lines. On 13 July we were in position along a line in which a railway embankment crossed the main line of resistance. A Feldwebel and three men came along the embankment. It turned out that they belonged to the troops guarding an Army supply dump and their paymaster had let them retreat without orders. The supply dump, of course, had not been evacuated, for which the men, happily returning from there, got an earful from my men.

During the march the next night there were two stops. The reason for the first was a ditch into which one of the 15-ton tractors of the heavy artillery had skidded. The huge vehicle, however, was able to pull itself out of the mud as there was a firm enough tree close by, round which the steel cable from the built-in windlass could be secured. The second halt occurred towards morning. A grenadier on the march keeled over and declared that he could not march any further. Since neither vehicles nor horses were available on which he could sit, it was hard to know what to do. After a five minutes breather, we divided his pack, including belt, steel helmet, and rifle, among ourselves. With the admonition ‘think of your old woman, mate’, two men grabbed him under the shoulders, and put him on his feet between them. Supported in that way, we continued the march. After a while he managed on his own again. When we arrived in the new main line of resistance he thanked us for not having left him behind. That too was without infantry!

Scarcely had I settled in, or rather ‘run in’, again as company commander than I had to go back to the regiment. I had been lucky. In those three days the enemy had not been pushing up behind us so strongly as to cause skirmishes. But replacement officers had arrived. The Major wanted me, whom he already knew, rather than a new Leutnant as orderly officer with the regiment. Scarcely was I there than the enemy attacked. One of the first to be brought back was Herr Husenett. I say Herr, because in the German Wehrmacht there was a regulation that officers basically were per Sie among themselves, i.e. the formal form of address, and within the different ranks addressed each other with Herr and their surname. To some one you did not know, say on the railway, you said ‘Herr Kamerad’.

Herr Husenett had been wounded in the lungs. The young man who had been so kind to me, was at most only two years older. His usually fresh face was pale and yellowish. But he easily survived the wound, one of many, and soon returned to the regiment. In October he received the Knight’s Cross, and was also decorated with the Goldener Nahkampfspange i.e. the golden close-combat clasp, and the Goldener Verwundetenabzeichen i.e. the golden wound badge. In 1945 he was killed in action

During the evening we took up quarters in a country house of aristocratic design. The assault guns remained at the regimental command post. Their crews, who were not used to spending nights so far forward, dug foxholes for themselves, over which they placed their vehicles. In that way they could be doubly certain, so to speak, of being able to sleep.

The next day we stopped in the still fairly well preserved German positions from the First World War. We even found concreted cellars, although they were naturally fairly overgrown. The Ostwall was an excellently built and deeply ramified defensive position, by which the enemy offensive should be contained. But, like so many rumours, it proved to be bogus. The fact that that campaign in the East had been won by our fathers and had been concluded with a peace was a thought that forced itself upon us. In the First World War they had only penetrated a few hundred kilometres into enemy territory, whereas we had almost got as far as Moscow and there was still no question of peace.

It seemed rather that we would have to keep on retreating. Because our retreat rolled rapidly back, often the few connections between east and west were heavily congested. Sometimes it needed longer stops and furious disagreements to clear the way for one’s own column. It was still only a question of combat units and smaller baggage-trains who argued over their relative rank. The large baggage-trains had arrived days ago in Marianpol close to the Reich border.

To try to relieve the pressure of the pursuing enemy, on 15 July aircraft were sent in. Despite the fact that we had laid out the orange coloured recognition cloths and red swastika banners, they hit our columns. Among the wounded was the VW Kübelwagen driver from the Staff. So Leutnant Kruger, the first orderly officer, whom the Major sent off to the large baggage-train drove the vehicle. It was not exactly a ‘genteel’ occupation for an orderly officer, but it was good to have the baggage- train led by an energetic officer. Garn said he could manage with me alone.

In the evening came the report that Hauptmann Gräbsch had been killed. He had only just taken over command of the 2nd Battalion after Herr Husenett had been wounded. When he took over command of the battalion I realised that within himself he had felt some reluctance for the job. I knew then that he must have had a premonition of his death. I regretted my unkind thoughts about him. He had been a master optician from Beuthen in Upper Silesia, a brave officer and he certainly possessed many good qualities. After his death came the news that for action at the Ulla bridge he had received the Knight’s Cross. De mortuis nil nisi bene.

I add a touching detail from the time of the retreat. The foals of the draught horses on the march with us, clung to their mothers, suckling as they walked. It was a sad sight. On 17 July we were removed from the command of the Corps Detachment and returned to the command of our own Division. The Divisional Adjutant, Major Östreich, was waiting for us at the edge of the village of Swenzoniai like a father waiting for his lost sons.

Sitting on a garden seat outside a house, rather like Napoleon III with Bismarck at Donchéry, he told us of the situation. It was the intention of the divisional commander to reform the 2nd Battalion of Grenadierregiment 472, whose adjutant I was. If successful he said, the Division would again have command of more than one infantry regiment. We should no longer need to fear the ‘bogey-man’ of staffs, whose troops have been wiped out. We would not be used to top-up other troop units. To me personally Major Östreich made the remarkable announcement that I had been ‘posted as killed’. I was not left speechless, as I happened to be in a cheerful mood. But I thought with some concern about Schweidnitz and my parents and the fact that the news could possibly have reached Gisela by some circuitous route.

The next day, 18 July, I drove with Major von Garn to receive our orders at the divisional command post. It was likely that, for 48 hours, it would be located in an unostentatious castle that had formerly been the summer residence of the Lithuanian State President. The white painted building, shining in the sun, was set quite formally in the quiet countryside by Lake Lenas. While Garn was with General Meltzer, I dropped into an oversized leather armchair, in the spacious hall, laid my head against the bulging back and stretched out my legs.

I was awakened from my doze by the Ia, the first general staff officer of the Division, Oberstleutnant im Generalstab Hugo Binder. He told me that my battalion, shattered at the Ulla, was to be reformed with immediate effect. The remnants of Regiment 7 that we had absorbed would be discarded again. In addition, he said there were newly arrived replacement Unteroffiziere and other ranks, and some officers who could be spared from elsewhere. For me it was a painful farewell, especially from the unflappable Major von Garn. Command of the battalion was to be taken over by a middle aged Hauptmann by the name of Schneider. He was an East Prussian and a former ‘12-Ender’. He had been awarded the Kriegsverdienstkreuz I Klasse i.e. the War Merit Cross First Class. It was a decoration given to lines of communication troops. But he had no experience of the Eastern Front.

The Ia outlined the task to be undertaken by the new Battalion. He said the deep flank of the Division was to be protected to the north. The entire Corps, or rather what remained of it, was to continue to fight back westwards, but without connections to either side. Above all, he said there was no connection to Army Group North. The gap at that time extended to 55 kilometres. To support us in that task he would assign us assault guns as the occasion demanded. We would have the motorised vehicles of the staff of Regiment 472, those from the baggage-train, and a Panzerjäger platoon from the 14th Company. After the business conversation there was a personal conversation. Binder was a Swabian. From 1938 he had been with the Gebirgsjäger in Innsbruck. He talked about the Tyrol after he found out that I was an Austrian. Binder, who had smooth black hair and brown eyes, was stocky in build and obviously of high intelligence. The fact that he possessed the latter quality matched the idea that I had of a general staff officer. He wore the crimson red colour of the General Staff with the double 4cm white stripes on his riding breeches.

Kawarskas was the next station on our route. The little town was on the left flank of the Divisional sector. I was once again the battalion adjutant. I set up the Battalion staff in the modest country house of a former Lithuanian minister. It had obviously only recently been abandoned by its inhabitants. In the library, as well as books in various languages, there were a number of visiting cards from ministers, diplomats, and businessmen from several countries. Evidently they were relics from the times when Lithuania was still an autonomous state and had not yet been annexed by the Soviet Union.

Since we had gained some ground on the Russians, there was time to have a look around the village. Hauptmann Schneider and I had a look around the Catholic Church, and found the priest, who invited us to lunch. The old gentleman asked us to a meal of beef, which was tough as old boots, and rock hard dumplings in a simple milk sauce. The meal was served by a friendly housekeeper, who was quite wizened with age. To the question as to whether he would flee, he answered with an astonished ‘No’! He said that God would continue to help him and he would remain with his flock.

In the afternoon, in accordance with orders from the administration in the rear, all men in the village of military service age had to assemble to be transported away. That was to prevent them being immediately enlisted into the Red Army by the advancing Russians. With tears in his eyes the old priest, who had been our host for lunch, came to us accompanied by a young woman. He asked Schneider to release his ‘organist’ who had only just married the young woman. Although Schneider had no authority to do this, he looked at me questioningly and I nodded to him. The priest was allowed to take with him his ‘organist’ and therefore the woman her husband. In the deserted chemist’s shop there were some useful things for the battalion medical officer to take away. Meanwhile, for me, a more important find was a piano in the chemist’s house. Like a thirsty man coming to water, I sat down and played once again, for the first time in months.

The next morning the enemy had pushed up after us. Siberian Guards troops attacked. The minister’s country house was lost then retaken with the support of assault guns. The following night the little town was evacuated. Many wooden houses were burning, set on fire by enemy artillery. Clouds of smoke hung over the place. The glowing yellow and red of the flames lifted up vividly against the dark night sky. When I left the town to go westwards on my motorcycle, I nevertheless felt the chill of frost in the warm evening air. I could not get the poor old priest out of my mind.

In Kawarskas the post had arrived for the first time in four weeks. Letters from Mother, Father and Gisela, who all followed the Wehrmacht reports, were full of concern about my welfare. Father hoped that I had not remained in Vitebsk. He had read about the fighting in and around Vitebsk. Because of his experience in the First World War he was able to decipher the Wehrmacht reports and other communiqués concerning the fighting.

The battalion was not directly under the command of the Division, but under the command of Regiment 7 and Major von Garn. On the 21 July we received orders to re-take the village of Pagiriai. It had been occupied by the enemy the previous day. Major von Garn had himself come to lead the attack. Three assault guns from our old comrades-in-arms, the Swabian 232nd Sturmgeschütz-Abteilung, were also taking part. I joined the Major and went with him to make preparations. Then the assault guns drove up, and the battalion left the wood, fanning out. Garn and I rode at the head on the first assault gun, until enemy tank and rifle fire forced to us to get down. The village was neatly retaken.

The Russian infantry had evidently lost the vim and vigour that they had shown in attacking. They fled. A Stalin tank collapsed through the bridge over a stream at the entrance to the village. The tank crew climbed out and disappeared. They took with them their optical equipment that they had hurriedly detached. To salvage the colossal capture from the stream was not possible with the means at our disposal. So our people placed explosive charges in the engine and the cannon in order to make them unusable.

For the battalion command post I assigned trenches that must have been used as a cellar by the inhabitants of a farm at the edge of the village. The men fitted them out with ‘corn dollies’. The situation seemed to indicate the firm prospect of getting some sleep that night in the bed that had been made. In the event, the miracle happened. I was able to sleep during the night for five hours without interruption.

At 5am the Second General Staff Officer of the Division rang. He asked where the two men were who should have reported to him at 5am to go to Königsberg to fetch a caterpillar tractor. With no idea what he was talking about, I asked him in turn which men he meant and what they were supposed to be doing. The general staff officer, also called Binder, only with the Christian name George, exploded. ‘Are you mad, Leutnant, I spoke with you last night and gave you the orders!’ I very respectfully pointed out that he must be mistaken. For once I had been able to get to sleep and had spoken with no one. I said he must have telephoned the battalion commander. Furious, he hung up.

After a while the telephonist, Gefreiter Hermens, whom I called Hermes, reported to me. The Ib, he said, had telephoned and asked for me. Hermens connected us and I had reported in. Whereupon the Ib ordered me to have two men at the command post, for 5am. They had to go to Königsberg to fetch two RSOs, i.e. Raupenschlepper Ost, half-tracked trucks. He said that, drowsy with sleep, I had dealt with that order in a quite un-military fashion with several Ja, ja! That had caused the Ib to interrupt several times to ask ‘Can you hear me Scheiderbauer? Can you hear, Leutnant?’ To this I had repeatedly said Ja, ja! and finally put down the receiver. ‘Hermes, lad, you dummy, you knew I was asleep and was not quite with it. So why didn’t you wake me up properly?’ I reproached him via the receiver. The brave lad answered ‘Ah, but I thought that the Herr Leutnant should get a bit of sleep’.

Up at the Battalion staff we had a large open Madford Kübelwagen at our disposal. I had brought it up from the regimental baggage-train along with the driver. We drove in the afternoon to the Divisional command post to receive orders. I took the opportunity of making my apologies to Major im Generalstab ‘Schorsch’ Binder. On the journey from Parigiai, westwards through the gently climbing terrain that was largely visible to the enemy, we were spotted by a Stalin tank. It sent a few shells after us with its gu, but thank heaven did not hit us. The driver, who must have formally served in the Dutch police, drove off, with a shout of Karacho, in a zig-zag course over meadows and fields.

On the evening of 22 July it was announced that an assassination attempt had been made on the Führer on 20 July. Among us there was more surprise than fury. We had no time to comment on the event and scarcely had any time to reflect on it. I thought to myself, it was doubtless a kind of treachery that had taken place. But, I went on to think, men with names like Yorck, Stauffenberg, Witzleben, and Moltke would not be likely to betray Germany, nor would they be likely to betray what the German Fatherland meant to them. I wondered if perhaps they had acted for Germany and not against her.

The following day the battalion was assigned to occupy and hold a sector eight kilometres wide. The lack of forces only allowed us to defend the as strongpoints of three villages lying within the sector. The Battalion staff also had to go into the main line of resistance. So we established ourselves in the Dvariskai strongpoint. The retreat road unfortunately led southwards. Therefore I kept the motorised vehicles safe along the westward course of the road. I did it because it was a fact that I had to assess the situation on my own and make the required dispositions. It seemed to me that Hauptmann Schneider was not capable of commanding a battalion. He certainly did not seem to be up to the job. He had no idea of how to command an autonomous reinforced battalion and would simply say ‘Get on with it Scheiderbauer’, in his broad East Prussian dialect.

Dvariskai lay on a gentle rise. Neat gardens and yellow wheat waved round the thatched cottages whose cleanliness bespoke a modest standard of peasant prosperity. To sit again at a wooden table with a clean plate was a pleasure in itself. My batman Walter Hahnel set about whipping up a big plate of rolls spread with Konservenwurst, with local bacon and a lot of eggs. After the telephone connection had been re-established and our connection to the right had been secured, we sat down to table in the battalion command post, a farmhouse. The Russians were evidently only feeling their way hesitantly after us. We hoped that we would remain unscathed until the evening when we were to leave the position. That hope proved to be unfounded.

From the advanced security positions, rifle fire could soon be heard. Therefore I sent the motorbikes to the rear on the retreat road that was still open. To gamble with them and lose them would have put an end to our task of protecting the flank, where particular mobility was required. Scarcely was the rifle fire heard than the new commander ‘disappeared’. I had already noticed he did that in critical situations. Then he did not need to make decisions and could not be called to the telephone. Probably he was observing the advancing Russians with his binoculars, from cover. The rifle fire continued and drew closer. I had to bring up supporting fire. While I was sitting at the field telephone I noticed wounded men were struggling past and to the rear. A little later non-wounded were also passing. To me that meant that they were fleeing. The commander was absent all that time and I was tied to the telephone. Of the whole sector I could see nothing more than a bit of a wheatfield.

At the regiment and the artillery they wanted to know how the situation was progressing. I had been able to direct the artillery fire well for a quarter of an hour by the use of a map. Then outside I saw large numbers of Landsers rushing to the rear. Walter had taken up position at the window and had cocked his weapon, while I, with the telephone cabinet in front of me, sat at the other window in telephone contact with Hauptmann Bundt, the Adjutant of the Divisional Artillery Regiment. Just as I was saying to him that according to what was going on outside we would only be able to stay there for a few more minutes, I saw Russian infantry wading through the cornfields towards the house. Walter fired. ‘Get out!’ I ordered and shouted into the telephone, ‘Fire on our own strongpoint, the Ivans are outside the house’.

I tore the telephone from the wires, sprang after Walter and left the house by the backdoor, just as two Red Army soldiers entered by the front. As the last to leave, I dashed with long strides after my comrades. After half a kilometre I at last caught them up and was able to build a new security position to the south of the village. While I was still at the house I had seen a wounded man lying there shouting imploringly ‘Take me with you’. But, as the last man to leave, how could I have managed it? Some hours later, in the afternoon, Dvariskai was retaken with the support of assault guns and quadruple flak guns. I entered the farmhouse and even found a couple of rolls still on the plate.

The most dashing officer in our battalion was the 20 years old Leutnant Blatschke. In June he had been orderly officer for only a short time. But since the battalion had been re-formed he had commanded the 6th Company. Within our group he was the right man for a company commander, with its task of covering the deep flank to the left. At that time Blatschke, with his little band of men, had to hold the village to the south of Ponewisch. When the village was finally evacuated Blatschke, not a second before he was ordered, sitting on a motorbike, was the last man to leave the village. Nobody knew how he had come about the motorbike, and Russians had broken into the village on several sides. While the driver bolted away shouting Karacho, i.e. step on it, Blatschke fired with his machine-pistol in every direction. He finally reached the wood, not far from the settlement, and thus reached cover.

On the 28 July we reached Gedainiai, also called Gedahnen. It was a friendly little provincial town through which there ran a little river. On the raised eastern bank of the river, from which you had a wide view westwards, was the grammar school. I set up our command post there. Straight away I found the Direktor’s room, because in Lithuania too, I gathered, grammar school Direktoren sat enthroned in leather armchairs. So the venerable seats were, so to speak, desecrated for a few hours by our tired schoolboys’ bodies. We former Pennäler enjoyed almost as much as ever the natural science room. It contained the same skeleton of homo sapiens, the stuffed birds, the induction machines, and the loo just like our school at home. In a burst of black humour I planted my steel helmet on the skull. It looked like the natural model for an anti-war poster. It also reminded me of the helmeted Russian skull, from the summer of 1941, on which I had stumbled the previous year in the minefields in the Jelnja sector.

Since the battalion had been re-formed, its orderly officer was a Leutnant Gegel, with whom I did not get on. He was getting on for 40 years old, came from southern Hesse and was a teacher by profession. However, in line with the old prejudice, he was a ‘know-all’. At the same time he was ‘professionally incapable of dealing with grown-ups’. It obviously did not suit him that because of his position he was subordinate to me and that Hauptmann Schneider gave me a free hand in the command of the battalion. One time he tried to get above himself, and I had to sharply remind him of his duty. If my relationship with him was cool and tense, all the more friendly and heartfelt was my friendship with Leutnant Helmut Christian.

Christian was the commander of the two guns from the regimental Panzerjäger company that belonged to our reinforced battalion. It went without saying that he was always with his guns and brought them with him into positions. He immediately grasped the situation and, unlike Gegel, did not need me to explain what was going on. He and his few men were skilful at ‘organising’. They had petrol and ammunition in abundance and Helmut’s Mercedes Kübelwagen always carried plenty of rations and drink with it. Since for the most part he was not tied to strict deadlines for evacuation, he could also occasionally leave early and sort out a detour for the retreat.

His family had hotels in Oppeln, Upper Silesia and in Heidelberg. As the son of an hotelier he had a nose for open ration dumps and always struck the right tone with the paymasters. Along with him one time I was presented with burgundy and champagne. That happened on the sandy road along which we were retreating in Lithuania in the hot summer of 1944. While drinking it we stood leaning against the Kübelwagen or sitting on the running boards. One day his men brought a wolfhound a few days old. From then on the little dog made the retreat with them in the Kübelwagen. With its awkwardness and as a living creature in need of love it touched the hearts of the soldiers who played with it and looked after it.

On the night of 30 July, once again after having become completely exhausted, I slept through a surprise attack. I had lain down in the back of the Kübelwagen to get some sleep during the withdrawal. During the journey through a wooded district, partisans or members of the Red Army who had already outflanked us, had thrown hand-grenades into the column and fired off shots. I must have been sleeping like the dead, because I had heard nothing of the whole ‘business’. As my batman Walter told me, they could not get me to wake up. The Hauptmann was said to have been lost for what to do, and instead of giving a sensible order he had tried personally to shake me awake. However, he failed.

On 1 August we reached the little River Dubysa. Unfortunately we had not succeeded in making a halt along its course in a north-west to south-east direction. The enemy had already pushed back the Corps Detachment who were fighting further to the south. At noon we crossed the bridge and rearguards had to stay for a time on the far side of the bridge. I remained behind with them. Then, an hour after the greater part of the battalion, marched on alone, westwards. On the way the thought struck me that I was walking homewards and that since 22 June we had somehow all been on the homeward trek, by detours or by direct routes, whether our homeland was the temporal or the eternal one. Sunk in those reflections I was walking alone on the sandy road against regulations, that is, without runners. Along my march I met Major von Garn, my especial comrade in arms during that retreat. Our battalion was still under his command.

The regimental history wrote about him: ‘The regimental commander Major von Garn could issue no orders in the confused changes in the situation. Mostly there was no time, as in many cases the Division was having to communicate orders verbally. ‘Withdraw immediately,’ was what was ordered.’

If what the Ia had said was correct, Garn told me, along the stretch from Ariogala to Raseinen we would have the last stage of the retreat before us. The news sounded hopeful. Even today, after almost 43 years, I can still see us marching along together, I at the side of my exemplary, revered superior officer. I eventually saw him again in 1955. I am bound to him in a strange way even now, just as he is to me.

We were coming from the south-east. Two roads, which remarkably ran parallel to each other, led to Raseinen. As late as midnight we were situated one kilometre east of the two roads and some five kilometres outside the town in the last line before Raseinen. General Meltzer himself had indicated the line to me by telephone. He had done that not in accordance with the requirements of the terrain, but by using the General Staff map, i.e. ‘from the bend in this or that stream or road over the ‘U’ from the place-name Nadukiai’, etc, connecting on the right to what remained of the Corps Detachment. For reasons relating to the terrain, however, I disregarded the strict order not to deviate an inch from the line which had been indicated and thus had been ordered. But our main line of resistance would, in following the General’s direction, have run in to a valley, behind which some 500 metres away there rose a gently sloping incline. But to withdraw up that incline under fire during or after an enemy attack would have meant sacrifices that I did not want to risk.

Hauptmann Schneider was afraid to take responsibility for not following that order, when I told him what I intended to do. He shrugged his shoulders and would come to no decision. So then, at my own risk, I gave the order to construct the main line of resistance up on the hill 50 metres in front of the edge of woodland. The nearby woodland would if necessary soon be able to take us under its cover. When the General rang back some hours later, Schneider disclaimed responsibility and I had to go to the field telephone. In the hope that he had not learnt from the neighbouring Corps section what the actual course of our main line of resistance was, I lied boldly and directly. Instead of the actual course of our line, I described what I would imagine the course of our line to have been if we had followed his orders. It happened, after it had already been reported, that enemy infantry were working their way up in small groups to our positions and we were already under artillery fire. On the two roads we could see enemy T-34s advancing unhindered. They were only stopped outside the town through the anti-tank barrier that had been set up there.

At about noon on 3 August we reached the little town of Raseinen. Its oldest building was a huge convent several hundred years old. I had a fleeting desire to have a look at the inside and, so to speak, furore teutonico, to inspect the enclosure of the nuns, the abbess’s room and things like that, which could be interesting. Instead of that I politely asked at the dining room counter for a couple of scrambled eggs. The young woman, not a nun, a little while later pushed the plate to me through the hatch with one single tiny egg on it. In doing so, she treated me as if I were begging for the daily ration of soup which was handed out to the poor. Before her eyes and those of the nun in charge of the kitchen I had Walter eat up the snack and said to the women that they should keep their supplies well up for the Russians, because they would show appropriate reverence to the holy women.

I quote from the Divisional history concerning the fighting around Raseinen:

On 5 August the Russians, with strong infantry and tank forces, took possession of half the town, including the raised Osthügel with the hospital, visible from afar, and the convent. They also commanded the low ground adjoining it to the south and the high ground beyond it. From my command post there was played out before my eyes the enemy tank attack across the lower ground. The tanks approached the firing positions of our artillery on the western edge of the low ground, where, well camouflaged in bushes, the howitzers stood in position. From my window I observed how seven tanks were destroyed by the gunners’ direct fire. They were firing with impact fuses. The last tank had approached to within 50 metres of them.

With my Battalion staff I had struck lucky again. The battalion was at first held in reserve. Later one company after another was taken away and placed under the command of the battalions of the old regiment. In the absence of our own battalion sector my activity was confined therefore to passing on as quickly as possible the orders assigning units to other commands. I had to ensure that the companies in question got quickly and surely to the appropriate battalions.

Meanwhile, the town was under heavy fire. I had immediately reported the repulse of the tank attack to Major von Garn whose regimental command post was in a house in the town from which the plain could not be seen. We on the other hand were in a sawmill on the western edge of the town, where the street to Vidukle crossed a stream. The gate to the sawmill was still and deserted. The inhabitants and workers had disappeared. In the smoke-room of the house there was hanging a row of massive sides of bacon. The men of my staff immediately tucked in to them. Fathers of families took advantage of the forced break and made up packages to send home. The one-storey building of the sawmill was partly covered with trees and from several windows allowed an uninterrupted view across the low ground to the heights beyond.

My friend Helmut Kristen had taken up quarters with his company 100 metres to the south of the sawmill in a little farm. In the blazing midday sun I took a walk to his farmyard. He too was enjoying the enforced rest. In the shadow of a nut tree we drank a bottle of Bordeaux which came from the army supply dump at Globokie. His little dog was hanging his head. He was obviously sick and apathetic, while we were enjoying life. The little dog died a few days later of distemper. Loving care and even a consultation with the artillery vet had not been able to help him.

Our command post in the sawmill proved no longer to be ideal. Again and again individual artillery shells were exploding in the vicinity. Finally eight tank or anti-tank shells smashed through two walls of the room above my head. So the transfer of the command post 300 metres further westwards to a little house on the road to Vidukle was indicated. But even there we were not secure. For the first time since the previous June, we received getting on for 100 replacements for the battalion. They were 18 and 19 years old Kölsche Jungs. During the time in which they were being allocated the Russians dropped some shells on the road in front of that house. Most of the poor young lads did not even take cover they were so shocked. Three of them were killed instantly. Two others were wounded. The others were shivering with shock for a long time, while we old and experienced men, as if by nature, it seemed to me, got up unscathed.

During the night the Russians had dropped leaflets over the town, most likely from a slow-flying biplane, one of which I had found on my way to the regimental command post. It was a safe transit for deserters and concerned itself with the events of the 20 July. ‘Hitler called on the hangman Himmler and ordered him to ruthlessly annihilate the German generals and officers who spoke out against Hitler. Hitler is also pushing experienced generals to one side and putting in their place crooks and adventurers from the SS, with no talent. Leave the front, get back to Germany, and you, too, take part in the fight against Hitler and his bloody clique! Up and to it!’ Then came a personal note, ‘To our comrades in Regiment 7’, with a description of the casualties of the 11th Company which mentioned the names of men killed and wounded. ‘Why do you want to be killed or to be shot up and crippled at the last minute? Just to prolong the existence of the doomed adventurers like Hitler and his clique?’ The situation was not as simple as the leaflet made out. Nobody thought that it was simply a matter of the survival of ‘Hitler’s clique’.

On 14 August the counter-attack began to re-take Raseinen. Regiment 7 and the units under its command, with the addition of a Tiger and Panther Abteilung, two mortar regiments, and two Army artillery units supported the attack. Oberst Garn was back in command. His Adjutant was Hauptmann Nicolai, my friend from the spring in Schweidnitz. Major von Garn, promoted to Oberstleutnant, had to hand over the command and temporarily lead the Panzergrenadier regiment in a counter-attack on Schaulen. I was sorry that he was not allowed to command the attack on Raseinen. It would have been a worthy conclusion to his career as a regimental commander in the ‘7th’.

The supporting units had been brought up the previous night into the most forward trenches. The Tigers and Panthers, those excellent tanks, were assembling behind houses and ruins close to the main line of resistance. It is true that my confidence in the assault and fighting ability and versatility of the tanks was lessened when I saw that their crews consisted of young men. Thin little chaps with children’s faces, in the midst of it all, they looked lost. They had not yet grown up together and not yet grown together with their vehicles and cannons. That was the impression given by the men of our old escort, the Swabian assault gun Abteilung.

The attack went according to plan and was successful. The Russians were thrown out of the town with heavy casualties and moderate casualties on our side. Only the convent could not be taken. The 23 years old Hauptmann Ahlers from the Fusilierbataillon was indeed able to get into the church with a few men, but came under fire from the chancel and from behind the altar and had to get out again. Several T-34s were standing in the convent courtyard, protected by thick walls. All the same they were encircled and cut off.

On 15 August several enemy deserters were brought back. They were elderly men who came from Tschernovitz and the Bukovina that had been annexed to Russia in 1940. They had all taken part in the Great War and served in the Austrian Army. In itself, that was shocking.

In accordance with the situation in the town we were able to move the command post forward again. It was in a modern villa built in the Bauhaus style and made a strange contrast to the mostly simple neighbouring wooden houses. Since the Russians were continuing to fire on the town, we took up our quarters in the cellar of the villa. I then spent a few days mainly lying on one of the tubular metal bedsteads brought down from the house. Since all the units under the command of the regiment were connected to the telephone in sequence, it rang without ceasing. You had to count every ring so as not to miss the call that was intended for you. But in doing so you could listen in to every conversation and thus gain an overall view of the up-to-date situation. I sat, or rather lay, at the telephone, while Hauptmann Schneider either slept or stretched his legs outside.

So for me there was no question of sleeping and, with the receiver at my ear, I dozed away the night hours, listening in to everything that the individual callers had to say. The reconnaissance training battalion, normally stationed in Krampnitz near Potsdam at the weapons school for armoured troops, was posted to Army Group Centre because of the disastrous situation. It had come to Raseinen where it was placed under the command of the homespun Grenadierregiment 7. Its commander, Major Graf Krockow, spoke there with Hauptsturmführer Mylius. The latter was ‘snappish’, with a sharp voice. However, Graf Krockow inimitably talked through his nose like a Prussian Graf Bobby. They consoled each other by assuring themselves that they had not been in such Scheisse for a long time.

Mylius was the commander of a unit also under the command of Regiment 7, the SS Bataillon z.b.V. 500. It was composed of men who had ‘all done something wrong’. In order to get to know the SS sector, I had spent the afternoon with Hauptmann Schneider in their position. It was obviously the worst in the Raseinen hot spot. It was hopelessly unprotected. From the flank, on the other side of the plain, enemy anti-tank guns fired on every movement in the trenches. The SS, as they ran through them, suffered casualties. The officers and men whom I saw in that command post were fine specimens of manhood, the typical élite that was found in the SS. I thought to myself that the Vandals of King Geiserich, or King Teja’s last Ostrogoths, must have looked like them at Vesuvius.

When Hauptmann Schneider and I made a move to go, Oberst Dorn appeared, giving a friendly greeting to me, the only person he knew. He was wearing a white summer tunic, radiated calm and rest. I could tell that he had just come back from convalescent leave. His greeting was interrupted by one of the two battalion medical officers of the SS. They had two medical officers in contrast to comparable army units with only one. He reported to his commander that a SS-Unterscharführer had carelessly shot off his arm with a Panzerfaust. The heat of the gas escaping backwards, he said, had immediately sealed the blood vessels. The man was still standing and in possession of all his faculties. He had gone on foot to the dressing station, the arm that he had shot off clamped under his healthy one!

The deployment of the SS battalion in our unit evidently demonstrated the military senselessness of setting up such a praetorian guard. Every one of those fine SS men was a NCO lost to the Army. Even more stupid seemed the formation of the Luftwaffe field divisions. With those 100,000 or more soldiers of the Luftwaffe the burned-out divisions and regiments of the army could have been sensibly topped up.

The Russians still occupied the convent. In order to put an end to that situation a 28cm mortar had been requested and brought into position overnight. At noon on 20 August it fired 24 shells on to the convent. Almost all of them had delayed fuses. They had exploded on the target that was by then only a heap of ruins. Four survivors were taken prisoner, all completely terrified.

All the rest, I did not know the exact number, were dead. Where the nuns had gone I could not find out. The prisoners also revealed the reason for the tough enemy defence of the convent. A general with his staff had carelessly ventured that far forward, obviously confident of the progress of the offensive. He had, however, slipped out in the night before the mortar bombardment. Since he was not caught, he must have got unchallenged through our lines.

After the modern Bauhaus villa had been occupied by my staff, the battalion, subdivided into companies, had once again been sent into action. It went as a complete unit and in conjunction with the SS battalion. But on the evening of 21 August we had orders to occupy a sector north of the town. The left-hand third of it reached the Dubysa and there connected to a Volksgrenadier division. That was the name given to the divisions of the last wave that had been assembled after all lines of communication and the so-called home front had been combed through for men. We could be sorry for any one stuck in such a unit. I considered myself fortunate to be with my old mob, at least in the 252nd Infanteriedivision.

The remnants of the Regiment were then driven back on 22 June to Army Group North. They had returned from Dünaburg with their staff and the regimental commander, Major Herzog. My welcome from him in June had not been pleasant but it was then frosty. He found no word of recognition for the fact that we had brought back the few survivors of our 2nd Battalion safely through the long retreat. From one remark, I thought I heard that Leutnant Gegel, the hypocrite, must have landed me in it. Certainly he had not forgiven me for the fact that he occasionally had had to obey my orders. I had unwittingly remarked to him that I did not like ‘this joint’. The commander, he said, was collecting together scattered men in Dünaburg. The adjutant was making the retreat with the baggage-train. In addition the undamaged 13th Company, the infantry gun company, was similarly with the baggage-train. Through Major von Garn and the Ia of the Division, I had brought up a detachment of light infantry guns and two vehicles and thereby run the risk of losing them, but success had proved me right. What a difference between that unjust and unpleasant person and Major von Garn with his achievements.

I quote from the regimental history: ‘On 2 September Major von Garn was awarded the Knight’s Cross for outstanding tactical command of Grenadierregiment 7 in the heavy fighting and withdrawal during the period from 27 June to 1 July’.

The enemy seemed to leave us alone for a long time, and the battalion established itself in the new sector. The companies worked industriously on constructing the position. The battalion command post was located in a small ravine running north-south, the eastern slope of which was ideally suited for the construction of the bunker.

Life together in the Battalion staff was, so to speak, harmonious. Hauptmann Schneider remained passive as far as command of the battalion was concerned. The orderly officer, since Gegel’s departure, was a Leutnant Martin Degering, the son of a ship’s doctor from Bremen. For a very long time he had been in the French lines of communication. It was then his first time in front line action. The battalion medical officer was a Dr Franz Josef Mies from Rheine in Westphalia. He did a good job, in that he reliably completed the change of position of his dressing station. I well remember the operations clerk, Unteroffizier Dressner. He was a teacher about 35 years old. He could judge what weight of responsibility I had to carry in commanding the battalion. Once he very kindly expressed his admiration for that. Apart from the signals man, Hermens, of whom I have already spoken, I vividly recall the wireless operator Obergefreiter Guth. In all the noise of the fighting he would listen in extreme concentration through his headphones to his wireless set.

A person of a special kind was Walter, my batman. He regularly piled up my plate high, and when I said to him that it seemed that he would never become a fine man, he was honestly troubled. His hair was oiled and curled over his round face, from which he peered with a squint. He also wore a small Menjou beard. He had been unemployed for a long time and said that he had felt quite well during that period. From time to time he had knocked about in the backyards of Breslau as a ‘busker’, an occupation which must have been quite lucrative, until he was put to working on the autobahn. When Walter gave the best examples of his art, the whole Battalion staff enjoyed it. In one of his heartrending songs of an invalid there was the verse: ‘With both legs shot off and also my right hand, still I live on unresenting in my dear Fatherland’. No one could keep a straight face in the face of this. To me as his Leutnant he was loyally devoted. He asked me for my wristwatch, which had stopped, so I had to have a Wehrmacht watch brought from the baggage-train. I gave my old one to him not remembering that it was a confirmation present from my godfather, Erich Scheiderbauer, who was killed in action by Lake Ilmen in 1942.

In the Raseinen position there was regular post once again. On the 20 July I had written to Mother that, ‘after four weeks now our link home through the post has been re-established’. At the same time I asked for photos, since after my involuntary water journey in the Ulla my pictures ‘had been completely stuck together and had become unrecognisable’. On the 30 July I had written to her that I was not able to give any news, we were ‘just at war’. I said that our Division had been mentioned in the Wehrmacht reports on 21 July. She then looked through the local newspapers to find relevant news about it. I had time again for letters that were not simply ‘quite short’. I had to write to Mother, to Father, to Rudi, and of course, to Schweidnitz to Gisela, to whom my heart belonged. Father wrote that he was very eager for news from me, but that the main thing was that my mother should often hear from me. The only thing, he said, was that I should not be careless, because you can be as brave as you like, but still be prudent and careful. ‘Our prayers surround you. God will preserve you just as he has until now! So all the best and God protect you’!

If we had not realised what legendary good fortune had been granted us to have been able to fight the withdrawal from Vitebsk to Raseinen as an intact unit, we were reminded of it by the individual scattered men who reached our lines during those days. Many had been on the way for almost four weeks. An Oberst and his batman came through ‘in robbers’ clothes’. An artillery Unteroffizier, a native of Klagenfurt, wore full uniform together with his Iron Cross First Class. He had a full beard and badly inflamed swollen eyes. He had been lying for three days and nights behind the Russian trenches until he had got through on the fourth night.

In the light of such events, and the overall situation in the east, it was no wonder that an order, issued as a result of the events of 20 July, had not come through. According to it the Wehrmacht was from then on to salute with the deutscher Gruss, i.e. the Hitler salute. ‘The Reichsmarschall as the highest ranking soldier of the German Wehrmacht had asked that favour of the Fuhrer.’ The favour made us equal with the SS, the Party, and the State. Even today, however, it seems to me unheard of that we should be reminded of an order that we felt to be ominous, even as we received it.

Leutnant Blatschke had complained about an enemy Ratschbum that was giving him a hard time in his sector. I spoke about it with Helmut Kristen, who offered help with the following result. After hours of intensive observation, Helmut had discovered the well-camouflaged gun near to a solitary house about 300 metres behind the enemy lines. During the night he brought up two of his 5cm anti-tank guns into a good firing position. Nearby there waited under cover the company vehicles. As dawn was breaking the gunners aimed their guns and, just as the enemy anti-tank guns became visible in the light, for a full minute fired shot after shot on to the target. We watched it excitedly through our binoculars. The flames shot in the air, ammunition exploded, and the Ratschbum was silent from then on. Helmut Kristen and his men, however, packed up their anti-tank guns and drove away as if the devil was after them in order to escape the appropriate ‘blessing’ that the enraged Russians would bring down upon us, as indeed did happen.

Towards the end of August it had at last become quiet and we had made ourselves at home in the position. General Meltzer had just received the Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross for his achievements in commanding the retreat. One day he visited the battalion sector and was satisfied with it. Afterwards he sat with Oberleutnant Hrabowsky, his orderly officer, in the greenery that the staff runners had set up next to the bunker. He was cheerful and chatted in a friendly way. In general he directed his remarks to me, something that I felt to be a deliberate mark of distinction.

Then the adjutant’s clerical work claimed my attention again. All sorts of other decisions were piling up. Hauptfeldwebel Bierlein of the 5th Company came up with a letter from a neighbour telling him that Bierlein’s wife was ‘two-timing’ him. Bierlein got a week’s special leave to sort things out at home.

Oberleutnant Merkle, who for a short time had commanded the 5th Company, and had been killed in action, on the plain in the first Russian attack on Raseinen. His parents wrote asking about their son’s personal effects. The dead man who I had myself seen lying on the ground, was unable to be recovered. His body had been exposed for a week to the heat of the sun, but had been found after the town had been retaken. It had been stripped by the Russians. I would indeed have been unable to report to the parents that he was buried, but had had to say nothing about what became of his things and why his burial was delayed.

As had happened the previous summer in the Nemers positions, a fresh order warned of explosive ‘toys’. It said that the Russians had dropped fountain pens and lighters whose explosive charge would explode in the hand of the finder the first time they were used. It was a further development of the explosive shells that were known in the First World War under the name of Dum-Dums. They had been banned under the Geneva Convention. But what did a treaty mean in a war of ideologies, in that war against Bolshevism? In any case we did not even know if the Soviet Union had signed the treaty.

As the unit commander of the Battalion staff I also had to become involved with the task of the Divisional court martial. It had to punish a staff runner because he had contracted a venereal disease and thereby had weakened the armed forces. The Obergefreiter, so he told me, had been released one evening three weeks previously from the military hospital in Tilsit. He found that there were no more trains going to the front. Instead of spending the night on straw at the front control point, he preferred the soft bed of a woman of easy virtue. The result had been gonorrhoea. He then had to go back into hospital. Since he was a capable and reliable runner, I decided to put the matter on the back burner, because to judge by the overall situation, the case would perhaps resolve itself. Otherwise I would have had to send him to the penal company.

At that time, under the direction of pioneers, it was engaged in laying mines in the combat area in front of our main lines. The penal company was an Army unit. The ‘small sinners’ were sent there to do several days’ construction. Essentially, however, the penal units consisted of Luftwaffe and Navy soldiers who had been sentenced to longer terms of imprisonment for more serious crimes. The sentence had been commuted to one of proving themselves at the front. The crimes that had led to their sentences had in most cases been committed in the occupied districts in the West. The unit commander had an unenviable task.

In front of the sector of our neighbour to the left on the Dubysa, the Corps had ordered an assault unit to be prepared. It was to be carried out by our battalion, since they did not to have confidence in the Volksgrenadiere to achieve success. The officer selected for that duty, Leutnant Blatschke, was furious that, as he said, he had to snatch foreign chestnuts out of the fire. We went across to our neighbour and had a look round the sector.

On the way Blatschke told me that in a house directly behind the frontline of his company’s sector there was a Blüthner grand piano. The house was visible to the enemy and stood empty. To judge by the way it was furnished its owners must have been educated people. After Blatschke left, I went with Walter into the darkness. The windows had been shattered by fire. Because it was visible to the enemy, we were not able to use a light, but the moonlight gave light enough. From time to time flares blazed up and you could hear rifle bullets chirping as they whizzed by. In the glimmer of the moonlight (‘thou fillest again bush and valley…’ as Goethe wrote) I sat down at the grand piano and played and sang, even though I could not do it perfectly, from Schumann’s Mondnacht. For a while I actually had the illusion that the heavens were kissing the earth to sleep. Then I went on, because I knew it better, to Matthias Claudius’ ‘The Moon is risen…’

On the way back to the command post I reflected on the great good fortune which I had encountered since 22 June. Thinking about what had happened to those who returned from behind the Soviet lines, and other scattered troops who came back over the lines near us and elsewhere, I wondered what I myself would do in similar circumstances. After my experience in swimming the Ulla, I would try to get through by night as far as the Memel, that is about 80 kilometres further southwards. Then I would let myself be floated down river on a piece of wood to the Baltic. It would then have still been warm enough to do it.

9 Autumn/Winter 1944: The Narev bridgehead, a training course and special leave for bravery

On 24 September it was announced that the Division would be withdrawn from its positions and relieved by the 95th Infantry Division. An advance party set off. By rail, the first part of the Division travelled on 29 September through Tilsit and Insterburg to Zichenau (Cziechanow), where they were unloaded. The Division was then out of the command area of the 3rd Panzerarmee and the IX Armeekorps, under whose command it had been for more than two years. Henceforth it was joined to the 2nd Army (Generaloberst Weiss) under the command of the XX Armeekorps (General der Artillerie von Roman). The troop units which then arrived were allocated quarters in the area to the south of Zichenau.

At the end of September the units of the Division went into assembly areas to the south-east of Nasielsk. The task of the Division was to eliminate a larger bridgehead that Soviet troops had formed across the Narev between Serock and Pultusk (Ostenburg). In the 2nd Army sector the enemy had formed several bridgeheads over the Narev. They could be considered as jumping-off points for a large-scale enemy attack, especially as they could be expected to expand them at any time. Hauptmann Schneider and I learned of the position at the regimental command post. It was clear to us that we were to come into a new future hotspot. We consoled ourselves with the assumption that sooner or later the ‘old magic’ would work again, even in Raseinen.

In the evening, in my capacity as battalion adjutant, I drove out to the baggage-train in order to be at the Vidukle railway station early in the morning. Since the whole Division was to be unloaded within two days, even with the danger of air-raids, day time had also to be used. This required not only the greatest possible haste but also familiarity with the local conditions. I arrived at the baggage-train, and enjoyed the advantage of being able to sleep alone in a room, in a good barracks bed on a straw mattress. The soldiers of the baggage-train had unhesitatingly placed the room at my disposal as their chief. They had quickly cleared the bed in the empty room on the side facing the enemy, but that did not trouble me just for the one night.

On 26 September the battalion was unloaded in Zichenau. A look at the map showed that we were behind the most southerly of the two bridgeheads on the Narev. The short journey through German East Prussia had, depressingly, made clear to us the extent to which we were already fighting ‘along the inner line’. For parts of the way we travelled attached to a regular passenger train. Civilians got into the staff compartment, even a Hoheitsträger from the Party in his brown uniform. He did all the talking and expressed really confidently the simple message that ‘the Führer will soon sort things out’.

In Deutsch-Eylau where the branch line led southward into Polish territory, there was a longer stop. In the orderly surroundings of that German railway station, that looked clean swept, the transports with our ‘mob’ presented a really strange picture. The companies were loaded by platoons into cattle trucks. Other wagons were loaded with horses and old vehicles from the baggage-train. Among it all straw was everywhere, there was baggage-train equipment, and even live cattle and pigs. There were also Russian women with their headscarves, who worked as washerwomen and on other jobs for the baggage-train. We were there too in our shabby uniforms. I wore a pair of deep yellowish-brown Lithuanian riding breeches that Walter had found for me on the way, together with boots. The boots fitted well and saved my rubber boots. Yellow lice had first to be removed from the trousers before I could wear them. Then there was the disciplined yet free atmosphere. I addressed as du the staff runners, telephonists, and wireless operators of whom I had become fond. At the beginning of the sixth year of the war, it seemed that in our frontline units, all human relationships had been reduced to a certain essential core.

After the unloading, Hauptmann Schneider and Leutnant Degering remained behind in Zichenau. They wanted to find a cafe and ‘to be able to talk once again with German women’, as Schneider said. Meanwhile, the battalion set off on the march towards the village that had been assigned as our destination. As we marched through the village, in ranks of three, we sang lightheartedly, in a way we had not had the opportunity for in a long time. It ended on the popular ‘Honolulu’ song: Ich ging einmal spazieren, um mich zu amüsieren…‘I once went a-walking to have a bit of fun’. The simple content of the song is that a soldier follows a girl who then rebuffs him with the answer: ‘I’m married, I’ve been married a long time, and what you can do, young man, my husband can do too’.

I drove out from the end of the village on the motorbike and sidecar. After branching off from the highway there was not much more chance of driving. The region of Polish sand was beginning. The motorbike, the driver and I, pushing the bike sank to our knees. The sand and the pines stirred up memories in me of the Hasenheide in Döberitz, on which two hundred years ago, der Alte Fritz had exercised his Grenadiers. Just two years previously on the company commander’s course, I had lang gemacht i.e. ‘served my time’ there, as the phrase went, bei Preussens or ‘in Prussian times’.

There followed a few days of complete quiet. In order to keep our forthcoming attack as secret as possible, no exercises of any kind were staged. The men tried to catch up on the sleep they had lost in the summer. They lay on their backs for days on end and when it was dark visited the front-line cinema that had been established in a neighbouring village. Wien 1910 was showing there and it would have interested me because of the young Otto Wilhelm Fischer whom I liked very much. But I remained in my quarters in order to get a little peace and quiet. I was afraid too that I would be seized by homesickness for Vienna. But what I once more thoroughly enjoyed again in those days was riding. It was one last opportunity for it and only then was my life as a cavalryman to come to an end.

On the other hand, I denied myself another kind of pleasure. My batman Walter, always very concerned about my physical welfare, told me that Marja, a pretty and buxom washerwoman from the staff baggage-train, had fallen for me, and he offered to arrange a rendezvous. He could not understand and was almost hurt when I told him that I was not interested in anything like that. The fact that he had made the offer made further explanation seem superfluous.

On the night of 2 October the battalion was brought up to a point four kilometres behind the frontline. We were placed in houses that were still standing there. The order went out that, during the day, no movement must take place on account of enemy aerial reconnaissance. The attack was supposed to be a complete surprise. It was therefore impossible to take a walk. We could only leave the hovels to answer calls of nature.

In the afternoon came the regimental order for the next day. The Division had been given the task, together with the 3rd and 25th Panzer Divisions, of eliminating the bridgehead at Serock. After a concerted preparatory artillery barrage lasting 30 minutes, our Division was to move up between the two Panzer divisions. Within our Division it had been ordered that Regiment 461 would advance on the right, and Regiment 7 on the left, while Regiment 472 had to follow in the second wave. Most importantly, participating in the attack too were an assault gun brigade, two Nebelwerfer brigades, one heavy SS Panzerabteilung (Tiger), one Heeresartillerieabteilung, two mortar battalions and one flak regiment. The fact that we were to run up in reserve behind the two other regiments was almost a source of relief to me, since it showed me how highly General Meltzer valued the capability of the regiment and its commander. But it strengthened my resolve to return as soon as possible to my Regiment 7.

We spent the night of 3 October on straw in a hovel. We were lying pressed closely together, waking, dozing or sleeping. In the straw I found a small crucifix that I kept since it did not belong to anyone there. One of the people who had slept there before me or an inhabitant of the house must have lost it. I do not know what became of the crucifix. However, I lost it later when I was a prisoner. But there came to me the cheering promise of the in hoc signo, and I knew full well what victory that meant.

At 5am the half-hour heavy barrage began. We moved slowly forward between batteries of howling mortars and barking cannons. We had never before seen that kind of concentration of our own heavy weapons. We still had ammunition, we could still fire it, we could still attack and hopefully we could still gain the victory. Regiment 7 had already reached its target for the day at 10.30am. The attack had gone off smoothly and the enemy had fled. They had left behind few prisoners, but a lot of material. Oberleutnant Husenett and his company had taken an enemy mortar battery.

Half an hour after the attack began we had crossed the trenches. We looked with amazement at the American war matériel that had been left behind, from tinned meat to a motorcycle and sidecar and heavy Studebaker lorry. Some Russian trenches smelled of perfume. By this and by the articles of clothing that had been left behind, it could be seen that women, perhaps women soldiers, had been there. The Russians had not built bunkers, they simply had dugouts, each for two men, over which short thick tree trunks had been laid. They were an example of the admirable Russian capability of combining improvisation with the greatest usefulness. Since the entrances to these small bunkers opened, from our point of view, on the side facing the enemy, for myself I preferred to spend the night in a simple one-man foxhole without a roof. I remembered Major Brauer and Leutnant Buksch who had met their deaths a year before, at Nevel, in such a dugout that faced towards the enemy.

On 5 October, the second day of the attack, the Division was once more successful and Regiment 7 had reached the Narev at 2.30pm. We, in 472, moved up behind them as reserve and at the same time as spectators. The high ground facing the river was shelled by our mortars and artillery and then stormed. I was able to observe it through the field glasses. On the way I saw a human torso that had been torn apart by massive force. It was lying beside a destroyed SS Panzer reconnaissance vehicle, burnt out, a relic of the heavy fighting at the time that the bridgehead was being formed. From that sight even the hardened among us turned away in horror.

After the southern half of the bridgehead had been pushed back and was again in German hands, on 8 October the attack on the northern half was to take place. On 6 October we were moved 10 kilometres to the north, into a village that on the map looked like a star made up of roads. At the centre was a crossing from which seven roads or lanes stretched out exactly following the points of the compass. The only problem was that there was no road leading south-westward. As such, the crossing formed an ideal target for heavy weapons and was constantly under fire. In spite of that the cellars of the surrounding houses were fitted out with command posts from all possible units. The frontline was not a kilometre away towards the east.

As the orders had said, quite generally, that units should take over the command posts of the units to be relieved, Hauptmann Schneider had insisted on moving into the cellar at the crossing. He remained impervious to my suggestions for us to take up position in a cellar away from the crossing, especially since the cellar roof, only some 10 centimetres thick, did not provide adequate protection. The constant impact of shells very close by was gruelling even before the attack. In addition, runners and all who wanted to get to us were exposed to the most serious danger. When finally the leader of the signal section and two men had been wounded, I went on my own initiative to look for a suitable command post. I found it 300 metres along the road leading westwards, in a considerably deeper and better-covered cellar. Without Schneider’s approval, I asked the regiment whether we could move. It was approved and Hauptmann Schneider himself was afterwards pleased that we were away from the main impact area.

There were no good omens for the second part of the attack on the bridgeheads. With the rain, mist and badly softened ground it presented a very difficult task, to which situation the confused terrain was also a contributory factor. We had advanced only one kilometre. During previous days the Russians had laid many mines, so that numerous tanks drove over them and were lost. In addition the preparatory fire was weaker than it had been on 4 October and we had not succeeded in destroying the underwater nets over the Narev. As they had done in Stalingrad over the Volga, the Russians this time too laid nets under the surface of the water across the river, over which, with columns of carriers, they brought ammunition and above all mines.

The units had to dig in just where they were. The battalion command post was in the open behind a small rise in the ground that did not deserve the name of hill. Foxholes were lined with straw. The nights were already cold and we were freezing pitiably. Since 3 October no one had been able to wash. To add to that it began to rain continuously and the tarpaulins, after 24 hours, were almost completely porous. The Russians were preparing a counter-attack. Every hour, low flying aircraft flew over our positions and fired on the roads, luckily mostly behind us. But an unmistakable sign that an attack was being prepared were the shells exploding in the air by means of which the enemy artillery registered their fire.

On 14 October the expected counter-attack took place. There was surprisingly little Russian artillery preparation. Instead, there was a large-scale deployment of aircraft. With machine-guns, cannon and shrapnel bombs, the Ratas and IL 2s attacked everything that they thought to be German positions. Up to 20 aircraft circled in our immediate vicinity. We knew better than to stick our heads out of the ground. Whether casualties were too great or the men had been worn down by the air-raids, in any event they climbed out of their foxholes and came back. As they were struggling to get back to the rear across the wide field, I stood desperately on the battalion’s hill, waited and shouted to them until they had got up to me. But my cries of Stellung, Stellung were in vain. They limped, rushed, and ran on, 50 or 100 metres ahead of the Russians who were charging after them.

Finally I saw that I was alone, facing the brown wave of the attackers. To stay so long had been idiotic, but I had been gripped by resignation. Then, not 40 metres ahead of the Russians, who were moving more slowly, I turned and ran. My map case under my arm, clearly recognisable as an officer, I ran on, weaving, in front of the Russians. I am convinced that the only thing that saved me was that the fact that the Russians were advancing at the run. Some were running ahead and their wave was fairly thick, but none of them wanted to stop and aim at me or the others. I ran and ran and after 200 metres I had reached the retreating line of our men. We reached the firing position of a battery that was ready to fire directly on the Russians. I succeeded in bringing to a halt a handful of men, by which action a small amount of infantry cover would at least remain for the guns.

The enemy infantry assault halted facing the battery position. However, we were exposed there to the latest attacks of the enemy aircraft. In one such attack Walter, my batman, was wounded. He was able to limp and reported to me with tears in his eyes. He asked me to write to him and take him back when he was recovered.

The heavy air raids had continued throughout the entire day. Nevertheless the main line of resistance was stable again and I could go looking for our company. I gave my situation report in at the regimental command post. On the way forwards to the 5th company I had to take cover in a right-angled trench from the attack of a low-flying aircraft. It was only by leaping round the edge of the trench that I was able to avoid an exploding shrapnel bomb, but a tiny fragment of iron caught me on the left hand side. When I mentioned the incident in the course of conversation in the Regimental bunker, the ‘Old Man’ made a snide remark. It simply sounded stupid and hurtful. He was becoming more and more repugnant to me.

The following incident took place in the sector of Regiment 461 and, when things had calmed down, word of it quickly got round. A Russian sergeant had driven forward with the ration vehicle for his company on the road that crossed the lines of both sides exactly at the so-called ‘Close-quarters Corner’ in Budy-Obrebsky. There the trenches were only 30 metres apart. One might have assumed that alertness on both sides, there of all places, should have been greater than usual. But that was not the case. The vehicle passed undisturbed along the road, which was not interrupted by trenches, and drove getting on for two kilometres further into the area behind our lines. Finally the driver became suspicious and turned round. When he had almost reached our most forward line again, he was at last nabbed. The rations, and especially the vodka that he had loaded up for the following attack, were distributed among the regiment.

On 18 October the enemy attacked once again. In one of the repeated air-raids Oberfeldwebel Scheidig, the leader of my runners, was seriously wounded. A hole in his back, the size of a large coin, pointed to considerable internal injuries. Scheidig, a tried and tested combat soldier, had been a platoon leader with the 6th Company and I had brought him in to the Battalion staff so that it might be easier for him. However, things looked bad for him. Scheidig died while he was being transported to the dressing station. Meanwhile the air-raids went on. Every now and then we managed to shoot down an aircraft. Pilots suspended from their parachutes, for the embittered Landsers, became a gruesome form of target practice. Not far from our command post a twin-engined Martin, of American manufacture, had crashed and, unusually, had not exploded on impact.

In the evening we caught scraps of a speech on the radio by Himmler, the Reichsführer of the SS. After the assassination attempt on Hitler on 20 July 1944 he had been appointed Oberbefehlshaber der Reservearmee and also Oberbefehlshaber Heeresgruppe Mitte. For a man who had never been a recruit, never mind an officer it was a memorable career. From the speech I only noted that Volksartilleriekorps were being formed, part of the Volkssturm as the last, ‘secret weapon’.

On 1 September I had written in a letter to Rudi that the sixth year of the war had begun, and that this would certainly be the last. Then, on 20 October, I received a letter from Father, dated 10 October, which read as follows:

Hope that the war would soon be at an end was something that I did not cherish even in secret. I also did not believe that a single one of my comrades shared it, because the alternative, namely what would become of Germany if the dams of the Eastern Front broke, was plainly unimaginable. In that sense, and not for the sake of Hitler and the Party, we had our duty to do and did it diligently, even if it was soon to be with the last strength we had.

Father’s concern for Mother was something I shared, as much as I could, at 20 years old. She was by then 45 years old. As a result of the war she had been separated for four years from our father, to whom she was happily married. Even today I can remember how she suffered from the fact that she, facing the menopause, was separated from Father. She had neither relatives nor female friends nearby and there was no community life. She had never been particularly well able to manage, and had always relied on the help of servants or friendly neighbours. She was just not up to the adversities of life in the fifth and sixth years of the war. It is true that she also had the worry about the welfare of Father and of us, her sons. Father, until then had not been in physical danger. Rudi had only been so recently. She still trembled for me whom she knew to be in constant danger whenever I was at the Eastern Front.

She and Father always had an idea where I was. With the help of the Wehrmacht reports, together with the scanty news concerning the situations in which I found myself, and from the tone of my letters, they could build a picture of how things were going for me. In August 1944, she went for a few weeks to her sisters in Dresden with little Liesl. She thought of staying there longer and told us what she intended to do. In exchanging letters Father, Rudi and I had trouble talking her out of the idea. I understood the reasons, namely the ‘total war effort’ that had just been announced in a spectacular way by Josef Goebbels. I said that our flat should not remain empty under any circumstances. Someone else would simply be put in there instead. The block on leave, which was in force again just at that time, would soon, I said, come to an end, and then we would have no proper home to return to. I said that she should write to me as often as she could, that the post was our only connection with home, and that without it I would get no news at all from Stockerau. From Schweidnitz, on the other hand, from Gisela, I received post regularly.

In the event, it was advisable that Mother went back home again. She failed to get through the official medical examination and was not drafted in to war work. But a part of the flat, two closets, was requisitioned, which she had to clear. ‘Like a lioness’ she fought to keep our lads’ room. On 2 October I had written to her that she should just ask the gentlemen in the offices whether we, who were laying our heads on the block at the front, were actually ‘homeless’. Was our room to be taken away from us for the reason that we were ‘always at the front and there is no leave’. Then I tried to console her, because there was ‘no point in cursing’, I said. ‘Be patient for just a few more months, then the war will be over, for a little while longer you must just bite on the bullet, then we will all be coming home in person’.

It was fortunate that Father was able to get special leave and it was also fortunate that Rudi, too, after 13 months, had got leave in September. He wrote to me on the last day of his leave and quoted in his letter ‘it is all so deeply sad’, words whose source I can no longer remember. In my letter of 9 October, from right in the midst of the action on the Narev, I asked Mother to excuse the fact that I had not managed to get round to writing. ‘Really, I had no spare time and had no time to collect my thoughts. But in spite of this I am more than ever with you in my thoughts, dear old Mother, and I hope, at least in spirit, to be able to make the difficulties of the time somewhat easier for you. How much I would want to help you, if only I could. But then we are all hoping that very soon there will be a fundamental change in fortune that must come. My nerves are again a bit ‘below par’. But I always very much enjoy your dear letters and those of my dear girl from Schweidnitz’.

In a letter of 11 October to Father I wrote: ‘I am on the lower Narev in a quite lousy district. The little book Im Streite zur Seite, ‘In the conflict at your side’, which you sent to me, is very good and has really been of value to me. It’s true that it cannot be disputed, at least I cannot, that often it is not possible to go on by your own strength and your own consolation. So I pray, and hope, that we will all happily meet together soon’.

At the Narev bridgehead around 20 October, the battalion was pushed back some kilometres to the south. We had set up the command post in one of the separately built cellar vaults usual in that district. It was high enough for you to be able to stand up and to walk around. It was getting on for eight metres long and three metres wide. By our standards, then, an apartment. Incidentally, in that billet there were also rats. One of the runners almost caused a disaster by firing his rifle in fury and shock at a gigantic specimen that emerged in full daylight. There was a crack as if we had received a direct hit. The bullet ricocheted, shattering the chimney of the petroleum lamp that stood in front of me on the table. Then it struck the wooden door that a fraction of a second later was opened by a wireless operator coming in.

On 24 October Hauptmann Schneider was transferred. He was to go first to the Feldersatzbataillon, the training unit with the ‘large’ baggage-train of the Division. It was somewhere to which he was better suited than he was to a combat unit. He was a good-natured man of stolid stature and it was not easy for him to say farewell. He thanked me for the help that I had been to him during the time in which he had commanded the battalion. So it was he, at least, in this regiment who found a word of recognition for me. As he did so I remembered Raseinen. When, to my objection that the Hauptmann was not there and that I could not transfer him, Major von Garn had answered, ‘Then you’ll just have to lead the battalion’. A few days before Schneider left, something happened to us that made his farewell easier.

One day towards noon we had wanted to have a look around the positions of Leutnant Christen’s anti-tank guns. The crew of a Ratschbum must have seen us. They had us in their sights, but fortunately we were in a field whose flat furrows offered us some slight cover. Nevertheless, the fellow shot so precisely that I felt the suction and pressure of the shell that hurtled only centimetres above me. With great clarity I felt my hair actually stand on end. After a very long two or three minutes, during which the enemy gunner had fired off about 10 shots at us, I managed to leap into another furrow. It seemed to be deeper. A little bit further on, Schneider also lay there. After the Russians had fired about 50 shells at us they finally stopped. Nevertheless we continued to lie still for a while longer, so that the enemy would just think that we were dead. Then we jumped up and ran to some bushes about 50 metres away and that at least offered us some cover. When we got there we saw that the sweat of fear was running down our faces. As men used to say, ‘yea’!

Until the new commander arrived, the battalion was taken over by my old company commander from 1942, Beyer, who in the meantime had become a Major. The command post was then moved into a single house that had a view of the frontline and thus also lay in the direction of fire of the Ratschbum. No light, and no smoke was therefore to become visible. I found that Beyer was telephoned at night by his wife, who was serving as a signals auxiliary in the Oberkommando des Heeres. It reminded me of the wood at Shabino, when Beyer sang to the encamped company the well known and popular Berlin song of the krumme Lanke, on which a lover sat with his Emma uff der Banke, ‘Emma on the bench’. Beyer sat in stoical calm at the table playing patience. While he was doing so he whistled with gusto the best-known melody from the Millionen-des-Harlekins, da capo, over and over again.

On 4 November the new commander arrived. He was a Major Walter Premrou from Steyr in Upper Austria, who had previously commanded the so-called assault battalion of the 78th Infanteriedivision. Their insignia was the iron fist of Götz von Berlichingen. As fellow-countrymen we immediately liked each other and I was pleased with my new superior officer. Like Major Beyer, however, Premrou too was killed in action in February 1945.

On 10 November, to my great surprise, I received orders to attend a course at the Infantry School in Döberitz from 20 November to 10 December. I immediately saw the opportunity of jumping ship, i.e. of returning to Regiment 7. I made farewell calls to people in the battalion and celebrated my departure with Helmut Christen, my especial comrade, from the retreat we had just made. We were in agreement and cursed about the unfair treatment in the ‘472nd’. The regimental adjutant, Leutnant Wix, junior in length of service, who had made the retreat with the baggage-train, had just become an Oberleutnant. At five minutes to 10pm we heard once again ‘Lili Marlene’, the song that was broadcast every day at the same time from the soldiers outside Belgrade. It had long since become a legend. Even I, who had at first disliked the song as I had disliked other hits, had to surrender my resistance. The voice of the singer Lale Andersen and the simple text, the contents of which every soldier had already experienced for himself, had won me over. Even irreverent parodies – I recall one cruel one concerning the first Russian winter of 1941/42 – could not take away the magic from the melody.

Major Premrou had spoken with the regimental commander and asked that before the beginning of the course I might be allowed a few days’ leave. I was lucky and I could scarcely believe that in a short time I would be at home. In the last hours before I left I was overcome with such a state of nerves that I felt I was physically shivering. I was afraid that at the last moment orders would be given for a total block on leave and travel, or that the notorious direct hit would strike.

Arrived at the baggage-train, I got into a wooden washtub and took a purifying bath. Then the driver, Alois Wörz, a Tyrolean, took me to the station at Nasielsk. There I waited for the regular train to Thorn. I felt like a man in a dream. In the compartment were sitting two German girls who came from a farmstead near to the front. Their parents had sent them back to relatives in western Germany. Everything was so wonderful and, after this exciting summer, so incomprehensible. The burden of all responsibility was lifted from me and tiredness overcame me. Leaning against the older of the two girls, I fell asleep. In Thorn our ways parted.

Of my journey home and my arrival there I no longer have any recollection. I gather, from a later letter from Mother, that she was startled by the doorbell at 9pm, and there I was standing at the door. She and little Liesl were quite well, but completely surprised. My week’s special leave flew by, but none of my classmates was at home. They were all scattered at the fronts in distant garrisons and even my girls, with whom I had been friendly – Herta Henk and the Skorpil-Mädi – had been drafted in to war work. That too was also what had happened to Gisela. She was somewhere in Saxony where I could not reach her, because she herself would certainly have not been allowed out. Only Hermi Eckart had been temporarily spared from work service because of diphtheria. She was in an isolation hospital.

I had a vague friendship with her brother Hans. At that time he was an Untersturmführer in the SS. Hans, whom I met again later during my studies, at that time said to me that he was ‘working for the Americans’. In 1949 he was kidnapped in Stockerau by the Soviet secret police. He had to spend six long years, until the treaty, in captivity, among other places in Vorkuta.

So my only company was classmates of Rudi’s, namely Ernst Vogl and Egon Papritz, who went by the name of ‘Kitty’. Papritz was an officer cadet Unteroffizier in the Infanterieregiment Grossdeutschland, and was on leave. Vogl was a gifted pianist, the son of a factory owner. As a Hitler Youth leader he had his military service deferred. Vogl later took over his father’s pump factory and in addition became a well-known contemporary composer. Papritz on the other hand was, like so many others from Rudi’s class, killed in action in 1945. So with those two I’d got together a few times in the ‘Vogl-Villa’ and one evening joined a game of poker. Being no poker player, and as such not favoured by luck, I was the evening’s loser and at the end had gambled away my entire monthly salary of a Leutnant, 300 Marks. The next day I had to go to the bank and withdraw money from my savings to pay my debt of honour. In the meantime my savings had grown to about 4000 Marks.

On 18 November the plan was that I should travel to Berlin. Allied terror air-raids on the 17th and the 18th on Vienna had caused railway disruptions. The Northern Railway Bridge was damaged so that my departure was delayed until 19 November. I wrote of it in a letter of the 18th to Rudi in which I also told him that ‘Kitty’ and I had naturally paid honour to the Rubik Asylum with the daughter Gerlinde Rubik. I said I had met my schoolmate Herbert Weyr, whose mother continued to be ‘the centre of discontent’. Julius Zimmerl, I said, had been taken prisoner in Italy in August, and the previous day had written from America, to the great joy of his relatives.

Arrived in Döberitz, I wrote to Mother and Rudi that the train had only departed at 2am from Floridsdorf. Hopefully, I wrote, Mother had got used to solitude again, but for me, on the other hand, it was fairly difficult. We could console ourselves, I said, that all unnatural circumstances and also the present conditions would all come to an end someday.

The course on which I had been sent was evidently intended to provide, not only leave, but some sort of winding-down period. It was for people like myself who had survived the heavy defensive fighting in the East, the West, but also in Italy and in the Balkans. As always, here too I was one of the youngest, but we had all commanded companies and there was nothing in the way of theory that they could have taught us. We had all experienced things for real without theory. Differently from the beginning of the previous year, we had our quarters not in poor barracks, but in the ‘Olympic Village’. There were individual rooms for each of us.

I lived in the ‘Weimar house’. The second apartment was occupied by a Fallschirmjäger Leutnant, whose right arm was decorated by two Panzervernichtungsstreifen, i.e. tank destruction badges, and who had just become, for the second time, father of a little girl. From my Division Leutnant Edion from Regiment 461 was there. He held the silver Nahkampfspange. Later, in January 1945, he was killed in action. Another comrade on the course for company commanders of all frontline units was Oberleutnant von Rohr, the owner of a Klitsche in Pomerania and, as it turned out, a cousin of the Benigna von Rohr whom I had got to know in the house of Graf Keyserling. Of the training officers I can still well remember Oberleutnant Brucker, a fellow Viennese, the Knight’s Cross holder Hauptmann Johanssen and Major von Dewitz. To Major von Dewitz I must have looked particularly young, because he repeatedly asked me ‘how old are you, Scheiderbauer?’ And my answer, ‘Twenty’, amazed him every time.

At that time a large part of Berlin had already been destroyed by bombs. One night, not far from the Olympic Village, a land mine went off with a massive explosion. But the air-raid sirens did not prevent us from going as often as we could into the town and, as far as possible, having a bit of fun. I recall two pretty Latvian girls from Riga whom Leutnant Edion had turned up. One of them had known the fighter pilot Novotny, who, a fairly long time ago, after 251 victories, was himself shot down. As a Viennese, he had been given a hero’s grave in the City of Vienna, in the Vienna central cemetery.

In Döberitz at the entrance to the buildings of the infantry school I found that three-verse poem, the last verse of which will move me as long as I live. It is also the motto under which the last years of my youth were set:

During the infantry course, to Mother’s great delight, Father got a period of special leave to sort out the problems ‘on his home front’. While I was pleased for Mother, yet I was sorry that I had not been able to see him. I had not seen him since the spring of 1942, nor Rudi since April 1943. Anyway, on 30 November Leutnant Edion and I had a great surprise. A telegram from our Division told us that we had been given 20 days’ special leave ‘for bravery’. That happened in accordance with an order which permitted a unit to send not more than two per cent of its current establishment on leave ‘for bravery’, irrespective of any block on leave which was then in force.

Mother was very pleased, as she wrote to me on 5 December. ‘So at least at Christmas we shall not be completely alone… Yesterday Father went away again – I am dreadfully upset and have no idea what to write to you’. To Rudi, too, I sent the happy news and wrote to him that he should see whether, on his way to war school, which was imminent, he could not arrange to meet me at home. In my Christmas letter to him of 18 December I complained that this time nobody was here.

Around the 15th Mother had gone with Liesl, who was still only attending school irregularly and very seldom, to Aunt Lisa Scheiderbauer in Aisting near Schwertberg to get supplies for Christmas and to ‘really treat me’ to the Geselchte (salted and smoked meat) she had promised me. In my letter of the 18th I also wrote that in the OKW report the sober announcement had just been made that in the West a German offensive was under way. ‘I think this is the dress rehearsal. God willing!’ Even today I can remember how, while that announcement was being read out, the tears sprang to my eyes, so much was I hoping, one last time, for a change in fortune. But it was in vain, and after only three days all hope was gone. But the fact that we did hope for a change in fortune, will show the present day reader what irrational feelings guided us, in assessing a strategic situation long since become hopeless.

Everyone who knew me envied me my leave. ‘In any event’, I wrote, ‘it’s stirred up all kinds of dust, from those who are happy about it and from those who envy me!’ Unfortunately I arrived eight days too late to be able to see Father. I would set off again on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. He then wrote to me under the field post number of my old regiment 08953. I was looking forward to that, because with the help of the Regimental Adjutant, my friend from Schweidnitz, Klaus Nicolai, I had managed to arrange that I got back into the ‘7th’.

The really great happiness of my leave, however, was that Rudi arrived home quite unexpectedly for two or three days. If as children we had quarrelled from time to time, from my sixteenth year truly brotherly harmony had reigned between us, even if each of us had his own friends. Since he had joined up in August 1943, contact between us had dropped off, but the ties of feeling had become even stronger.

At the bridgehead of Nettuno near Naples he had an experience that left its mark on him. It also made a great impression on me, almost as if I had gone through it myself. He had been at night with seven comrades in a barn and had been asleep when the impact of an incendiary bomb at point blank range left the hut in flames. Rudi was the only one who had the courage to dash through the flames out into the open. While his comrades horrifically burned to death, he had only singed his face and his hair. After a short spell in hospital he had new pink fresh skin. He was home, again as good as new. We walked proudly side by side through our home town. In his smart black Panzer uniform of the élite unit Hermann Göring, with its white collar tabs, tall and slim, he was the very image of a fine young man.

I had no idea that I was never to see him again. He on the other hand, as I later realised, had a premonition of his early death. In March 1945 he once again passed through Stockerau and said farewell to the people who knew him with the remark, ‘Now they’re scratching around for heroes and then we’ll be sent out to the slaughter’. In his papers we found Josef Weinheber’s ode Den Gefallenen, ‘To the Fallen’. It was handwritten on a loose sheet of paper. For one last time, after Christmas 1944, he had taken photographs of us both. I remember Mother’s admonition from the proverbs of Solomon, which she had often quoted to us and which had now become reality: ‘O, how good and joyful a thing it is, when brothers dwell together in unity’.

His look on that photograph, his last, became my favourite. Later his portrait was painted from it. He seems to be looking into the camera lens, but far beyond it, right through the observer and out into the unknown.

10 January 1945: The Russian Vistula Offensive

However bleak I found the difficulties of everyday life at home, and however much I actually longed to be back at the front and with my comrades, it was still hard for me to say goodbye. As always at the end of the leave, Mother had not come with me to the station. I could not bear our feelings, especially those of my dear mother, to be watched by strangers. Mother knew that. She always swallowed her tears and stayed behind at home. With a bag of freshly washed clothes in my hand, I left the house. Mother waved to me from the window for a long time. In Vienna I struggled to get from the North West Railway Station to the Northern Railway Station. The platform, as I was used to by then, was full of soldiers, women and children, all saying goodbye. Throughout the entire journey from Stockerau, I had an anxious New Year’s Eve feeling. Vienna’s formerly peaceful appearance, where only blackout precautions reminded you of war and danger from the air, had been lost. It had become a city behind the lines. The front ran through Gran and by Lake Balaton. As the leave train slowly moved out from the platform, I was depressed by the tears, and the pain of farewells, that I saw around me.

In the dark New Year’s night my thoughts raced ahead into the New Year and what it might bring. The Reich was gripped by its enemies on its Eastern and Western borders. In East Prussia the Russians had touched the soil of the Reich and committed unimaginable atrocities. During my leave, almost daily, hundreds of American bombers had flown over our small town, down the Danube, towards Vienna. Standing at the doors of their houses, many inhabitants had watched the great aircraft taking their course, unopposed, with imposing equanimity. Father, in his Christmas letter to Mother, had told her if the worst came to the worst to stay where she was. Rudi and I had pressed her to flee in any event if the Russians came. We had even put together, for her and for little Liesl, some light baggage for that eventuality. A stroke of good fortune let our Father return home just at the right time. That removed from her the responsibility for taking a decision, and both parents did the right thing in not fleeing.

In Thorn I left the leave train. It was going on to Königsberg. I changed to the passenger train to Sichelberg (Sierpc). There, Leutnant Brinkel the first orderly officer of the Regiment got on. By profession he was a Protestant pastor in Silesia. At midnight he had heard the Führer’s address promising ‘victory to our armed forces’. It was full of optimism.

The railway ended in Nasielsk, six kilometres behind the front. Brinkel and I marched together to the Divisional command post. It was a gleaming white winter’s day. The sun illuminated the Sunday peace and the war, for once, was still. At the Divisional Staff everybody apart from the guard was still asleep. They had been celebrating New Year, and the Divisional Adjutant, Major Östreich, had to get out of bed on our account. He said we could have stayed at home to see in the New Year. That was easily said, my leave ended on New Year’s Eve, and that was when I had to begin the journey. Quite apart from that, I could not have celebrated knowing that the next day I would have to travel to the Eastern Front, for the fourth time. The nearer the front I came, the more I had the familiar feeling of ‘butterflies’.

But there was some compensation in the fact that I was back with the ‘7th’. I looked up Klaus Nicolai. We had a quick welcome nip and went to the bunker of the regimental commander. Oberst Dorn, the Grand Seigneur from the Rhineland, welcomed me to the regiment and informed me that I was to get the 1st Company. The company was at the moment in reserve in the so-called second trench of the extended trench system. The next day it would move back into the frontline. At the 1st Battalion, Hauptmann Fitz and Oberleutnant Küllenberg, the Hauptmann and the Adjutant, welcomed me with a loud ‘hello’. I knew them from the previous summer. Then a runner took me forward and at the Company I was welcomed by Leutnant Martin Lechner who was to take over command of the battalion’s heavy weapons company.

I had become friends with Lechner in spring 1944 in Schweidnitz. At that time he had come from the war school to which he had been sent as an active Unteroffizier with above average potential. He had good manners and you could not see the ‘12-Ender’ in him, even if at the Ersatz battalion he had not had any comrades. I had put myself out a bit for him for which, I noticed, he had been grateful. But we celebrated our reunion with the appropriate drop of the hard stuff. Before that of course we had done another tour of the bunker. I had to see and greet the men. They should get a look at their new ‘boss’ straight away. After that we sturdily went on to have a few jars, because that was still the best tried-and-tested way of getting things off to a good start. Finally Lechner got up and made a speech on the theme that the 1st Company must be the ‘first’ not only in name but also in achievement, something it was now and also must remain in the future. Not quite so awkwardly and seriously as Lechner, I also said a few words to him and to the men of the company. I stressed my pride at now being commander of the 1st Company of our old regiment, and that was the truth.

The next night we moved into position in the Nase von Poweilin. It was extremely unfavourable, because the main line of resistance ran at a right angle, one arm pointed in a westerly and the other arm in a southerly direction. The Russians could come from two sides, in the intersection of the angle enemy fire was possible from three sides. Our neighbour on the right was the 2nd Company, on the left was the Divisional Füsilierbataillon. Only a hundred metres of the trench had been dug out to knee depth, so that during the daytime you could only move through it by crawling.

Because of the way the trenches ran in the entire Nase, the men of the company regarded themselves, in the event of the expected large-scale enemy offensive, as ‘written off’. With almost complete certainty, those in the Nase could expect to be overrun or cut off. As far as anyone could see, there was no way of escape. Fire could come from three sides, attacks from two sides, and to the rear in front of the second line were our own minefields only passable in narrow channels. Whoever survived the heavy barrage before the attack had to face the attack itself. Scarcely anybody would be able to survive that. Because of the minefields and the completely open, gently rising terrain, to retreat did not offer the slightest prospect of getting through in one piece. Thoughts like this I had to keep to myself, and particularly the thought that, if the worst came to the worst, I had only my own pistol to keep me out of the Russian captivity that I viewed with such fear and horror.

During those days, or rather nights, I was continually moving around the trench from post to post and bunker to bunker, in order to get to know every one of the men under my charge. Many knew me by sight, many by name. Actions like Upolosy, Nemers and Raseinen and many others, bound us together. Also I spoke the language of the Silesians, who still formed the majority of the regiment. I was able to converse with them in their local dialect, so that none of them felt that I was a stranger. Soon after I joined the regiment I had learned to speak Lower Silesian and Upper Silesian. Once, on an exercise march in the vicinity of the garrison, an old dear had said to me that I was certainly a Schweidnitzer. Telling her that I was not, I had laughed at her, and she had got angry.

My company troop leader was the young Berlin Unteroffizier Ulrich Lamprecht. He was a student of Protestant theology with the Iron Cross First Class on his narrow chest. Every day he read the book of proverbs of the Herrenhut Brethren. In the days that remained until the offensive, I read the proverbs with him and also the corresponding references from the New Testament, which I had in my pack. Among the runners Walter Buck stood out, He was a 35 year old businessman from Hamburg. He matched the type of the intelligent soldier, who has long since passed normal military age, and who lacked the ambition of youth. He was reliable and did his duty well, as did the other runner Reinalter, a farmer from Swabia.

As in all the earlier trenches, in this trench too some branch trenches led to the separate Donnerbalken or ‘Thunderbox’. It was the one little place where you could be alone at the front. In that quiet hermitage, you could, if it suited the enemy, actually spend the quietest minutes of the day or night. In summer as in winter there was the smell of the chlorine. Then, in the icy cold of winter, strange towers, frozen stiff, stood up in the pit as in a dripstone cave. It was then that I decided, if I was granted a happy return home and had the opportunity, I would somehow sing the praises of the latrines, which I have now done here!

The company command post lay on slightly rising ground, in the middle of the bridge of the Nase. The linking stretch leading to the main trench could be seen by the enemy, during the daytime. Therefore, if at all possible, we had to remain in the bunker. In that way, during the long days up to 14 January, I learned how to play Skat. I never had any interest in card games. Many a time comrades or superiors had asked: ‘Can you play Skat or can you play Doppelkopf?’ When I said ‘no’ it usually prompted the surprised and amused question, ‘Eh lad, how did you get to be an officer then?’ On 6 January I had the great surprise of seeing a schoolmate from Stockerau, Leutnant der Reserve Otto Holzer. In the autumn he had passed out of war school, and came as a platoon leader into the heavy weapons company. It was a huge pleasure for me, even if our time together during the evenings did not last long. Subsequently, after Otto was wounded in February, we did not see each other again.

A ‘visit’ of another kind was the assignment of a ‘trench dog’. Not the designation for a new weapon or machine, it was an actual guard dog. It had been selected to alert us to ‘alien elements in the trench’. It was a smallish, wolf-like mongrel, and despite my love for dogs I had no confidence in its military value as an additional defence against the ever-active Russian commando units.

On 9 January I received orders to prepare an assault unit to bring in prisoners. It was to be led by me because I was the most experienced of the company commanders. The order, and above all the fact that I was to lead the assault unit, did not comfort me at all. I still did not feel myself to be sufficiently familiar with the terrain. I would also be responsible for the operation. There were others who had not yet had the opportunity to win a decoration. I spoke about it openly with Martin Lechner, who agreed with me entirely. But the assault unit was called off, on 12 January, after it had been announced that the Russians had begun their large-scale offensive. With 3,000 tanks they moved up from the Vistula bridgeheads of Baranov and Warka.

Those were the omens as I faced my 21st birthday the next day. I celebrated it, therefore, on the evening of the 12th in the expectation that from 12 midnight on the 13th a special feeling of ‘consecration’ would set in, befitting the significance of the fact that I had attained my ‘coming-of-age’ as a citizen.

On 13 January the enemy’s major offensive in East Prussia began. It was still quiet where we were. There was harassing fire of varying strength and noise, and from time to time snatches of songs from the enemy trenches. With the field kitchen came ‘best wishes’ and the usual bottles as presents. The General, the Divisional Adjutant, the commander and the commanders of the Artillery regiment whom I knew, Oberst Dorn and the battalion commanders all sent their congratulations. I was touched by the expressions in them of the respect and esteem in which my achievements were held. In the light of what faced us, the wishes were of particular warmth and sincerity. Unfortunately, the mail that I used to send them all home was lost. Unexpressed, but certainly honourably meant, was the wish that Leutnant Roberts had expressed to me in the summer in Raseinen. When we were saying goodbye to each other, as we were changing positions, he squeezed my hand and, smiling sadly, no doubt with the premonition that he was to die soon, said ‘stay alive’. He had been killed in action in October on the Narev.

At 6pm the company commanders received their orders at the Battalion. Since Hauptmann Fitz had left in the night after he had been wounded, Oberleutnant Husénett, wearing the Knight’s Cross, had taken over command of the battalion. I had gone off with the runner, Buck, and the dog. At the battalion command post we had learned more about the serious situation in the Vistula bridgeheads and in East Prussia. There was no longer any doubt about the fate that awaited us.

On the way back, I went with the runner into the completely destroyed village church of Powielin. It had been a quite simple little old wooden church, but the tower had been shot off during the recent fighting. One single token remained to remind you of its religious purpose, namely a large cross on the side of the altar. ‘Thy will be done’, I could have no better prayer. When I got back to the company I strode once again from bunker to bunker, and went from post to post, to give everyone one more word of confidence.

On the morning of 14 January, as we had since the morning of the 12th, we were expecting from hour to hour the beginning of the heavy barrage. According to the custom of the Russians recently, the thunderclap was to be expected on the hour, i.e. at 6am, 7am or 8am. After we had been spared the unavoidable event on the 12th and the 13th, the beginning had to be today, because the long-observed preparations of the enemy allowed for no other possibility. They would have to get as far as possible in daylight after the effect of their devastating fire. It would last several hours and would land on our positions. Their attack would necessarily have to be as early as possible. Thus the preparatory fire would also have to begin very early in the morning.

I was with the men of my company in the bunker. We were lying or sitting on bunkers or at small tables, weapons and steel helmets ready to hand. An all-consuming nervousness, that no one let show, dominated us. A cold feeling crept over me, that trembling in the stomach that used to affect me in school before exams. But when at 7am the fire did not erupt, I hoped that the Russians would today be sparing us once again. The feeling was reinforced because even on the dot of 8am, by my service watch, nothing happened.

But just as I was about to say what I was thinking, there began the dreadful crashing, the familiar noise of ‘Stalin organs’ firing. Several of them must have been firing in sequence, because the crashing went on for what seemed an eternity. Only within the detonations of the organ shells did the barking reports of cannons and those of howitzers, mortars, and the Ratschbum sound out. The earth was literally shaking and the air was thudding. An uninterrupted grumbling thunder descended upon the German lines. Obviously the enemy were trying to destroy the minefields of our trench system, extended fourfold, and to flatten trenches and shatter bunkers.

The only things dangerous to us in the company bunker were the shells dropping very close by, of which there were not a few. The whistling, rushing and crashing of shells round about indeed almost drugged the senses. But we were lucky and along the whole ‘bridge of the nose’ we only received a few direct hits in the trench and none on the bunker. I got the impression that the Russians were sparing the Nase. Even the advanced observers of the artillery and our heavy weapons company beside my command post remained untouched.

After exactly two hours the bombardment suddenly broke off. A paralysing calm fell over the front. It meant that the Russians were moving their fire forward, in order not to endanger their attacking infantry. Raus, I ordered, and that meant going into position in the small trench system around the company command post. All nervousness had fallen away from me. The patient waiting in the bunker was at an end, we could see and deal with the enemy. Outside there was fog, but it was the powder smoke from the massive amount of exploded shells that had dropped on our positions. I thought that I could not believe my eyes when on the right I saw that the second company had already retreated a long way. I then saw the enemy rapidly advancing in battalion strength on to the second trench. The Russians went round my company and cut us off. But from the left, charging at the company command post, there came the left wing of a confused brown wave, approaching unstoppably with cries of Urrah.

But the most shattering thing about the picture was the fact that individual German soldiers were running away in front of the assaulting Red Army troops. They were wobbling with exhaustion, without weapons and equipment, plainly at the end of their strength. But we had to fire, even at the risk of our comrades thinking that we were firing at them. So I carefully took aim at the Russians storming up behind them. They had in the meantime approached to within 100 metres of us. In the feeling of desperation that there was no way that we could escape from that dire position, other than dead or as prisoners, an uncanny calm came over me.

As I had learned as a recruit in our much vilified drill, I took aim and fired, disappeared behind the parapet after firing, then quick as a flash popped up again a little to one side and got the next enemy in the sights of my Sturmgewehr. I succeeded in hitting enemy officers and machine-gunners. They were clearly recognisable, especially the officers, by the arm movements with which they accompanied their already audible orders. Thus, as one after the other fell, hit by my bullets, I was seized by a triumphant savage pleasure and by the hope of escaping once more. I watched one of the men I shot, stepping on persistently with his head lowered. Then, he was hit by my bullet. Slowly he struck his chest with his hand and finally fell forward. That picture will never leave me as long as I live.

The miracle happened. The targeted fire from my rifle, and those of the runners, brought the attack to a standstill. The Red Army troops went to ground. Then, pursued by our bullets, they drew back far to the rear and sought to connect up again to the forces on their right. We had lost our connections both to the right and to the left because the Russians had already pushed forward a long way, Meanwhile, my platoons had left the trench. They gathered in a line, one man behind another, in the secondary trench leading to the command post. I gave orders immediately to go back into position. There was no more immediate danger just then, for the very reason that the enemy was not at all concerned about us. However, the longer-term situation seemed hopeless. Sooner or later we would certainly fall into enemy hands.

I was still considering how we could get out of that wretched situation when, on the right from the sector of the 3rd Battalion infantry fire could be heard. It could mean nothing other than that our battalion had held its position. It must therefore be possible to connect up to the 3rd Battalion via the abandoned sector of the 2nd Company. There was no longer any wireless contact with our own battalion. Even the advanced observers had evidently been able to withdraw in time. So I had to make the decision to remain in the position or to connect up on the right to the 3rd Battalion.

I decided on the latter course because it seemed to me to be unlikely that the position could be held. It could also be assumed that orders would be given during the night to evacuate the main line of resistance, insofar as it was still occupied by our people. In the light of that it seemed unimportant from which point the company should begin its withdrawal. Since the waves of the enemy had rolled past us on the right and on the left, I gave orders to withdraw along the main trench to the right towards the 3rd Battalion. The Oberfähnrich took the lead and I myself remained at the rear. Like the captain of a sinking ship, I was the last to leave my company sector.

An enemy reserve company spotted our withdrawal, changed its direction and made moves to attack us. A particularly dashing group was storming up at a run outside the trenches while my company was withdrawing hurriedly along the trench to the right. To make the withdrawal easier, I formed a rearguard with a machine-gun and the two runners. With care I picked out again the nearest of the attackers. When they felt our resistance, they left off their pursuit. It was doubtless not part of their immediate task.

Eventually there only remained a short length of trench to overcome, in which there were Russians. We managed it with a few shouts and a short Huura! It was easy because for the most part they were wounded and the group had no leader. We even took prisoner some slightly wounded troops and chased others away. Those who were seriously wounded we left alone. Soon we had connected up with the 3rd Battalion. The men took a breath, and I went to the battalion command post. The commander, Hauptmann Dolansky, greeted me with words of recognition for our achievement. He immediately reported our arrival to the Regiment through the still intact telephone line. All that remained of my strength deserted me and I could almost have fallen asleep. I really had to ‘pull myself together’ so as not to give in to exhaustion.

Towards dusk a captive Russian captain was brought into the bunker. An active officer, about 25 years old, he said he had never been in action before. He had only arrived a few days previously with an entire division from Siberia. Through this and other information we slowly formed a proper idea of the inexhaustible reserves of the enemy.

The third line of trenches, to which we had had to withdraw during the night, ran along the back of a slope. In front of us was some woodland. On the right of it about 600 metres away there was a single farmhouse surrounded by fruit trees. As we could see from their movements, the Russians had already reached the edge of the woodland. Our trench was continuous and well constructed and excellently camouflaged with snow. We ourselves, as we moved into it from the edge of the woodland, had only noticed it when it was a few metres away.

We must have only settled down in it for an hour, when out of the woodland came two Russians who briskly and unconcernedly walked towards our trench. They had machine-pistols slung around their necks and were walking comfortably side by side almost as if they were whistling a little song. They came to within 200 metres, to within 100 metres and even nearer, without having noticed our trench in front of them. I quietly gave the order to let them approach and to take them prisoner. Fifty metres away from us they slowed their steps. Twenty German voices shouted Stoi! Whereupon they turned round and ran back, weaving as they went. In the hail of bullets they collapsed. I had not anticipated that. They must have been riddled with bullets.

Some time after that period of cruelty and bitterness there was movement at the farm. As a result of it the enemy artillery opened up and obediently dropped shells on us. I scanned the farm with my binoculars and discovered the advanced observers. There were two men with wireless sets, whose heads, shoulders and equipment could be seen behind low cover. I asked to be handed a rifle with a telescopic sight and for a runner to observe through the binoculars. Then I pushed myself carefully over the parapet of the trench and calmly took aim. There was a soft pressure as I fired. The observer’s head sank on to the cover and that of the second man disappeared. My runner saw through the binoculars the dead man being dragged back into cover. An hour later came the order to evacuate the position. In the meantime another Russian artillery observer had taken over directing the fire, which unfortunately was so accurate that we had some casualties.

A position as well constructed as the fourth line, in which we spent the night of 17 January, I had never seen. The bunkers were as much as three metres below ground level. The trench had been dug out to the height of a man. It was provided with secondary trenches, and in places with rails. The rifle positions and machine-gun nests were tactically in the correct places. It could not have been better in the trench warfare of the First World War. So this was the so-called Gauleiterstellung, which led over 1,000 kilometres along the eastern border of the Reich. It had been built in autumn 1944 by women and girls who were either volunteers or on war service, under the direction of officers who had been injured in the war. On the Oder, even Gisela had participated with pickaxe and shovel in that massive project.

From my perspective in the trenches, the position, apart from some buildings that should have been blown up, was an ideal one in which to spend the winter. Not a spadeful more could be dug out of the frozen ground. The Powielin position, with its trenches in places only knee deep, bore no comparison to this one. But I had no feeling of confidence. Even though I had no overview of the wider situation, I did not reckon on staying there long.

My feeling had not deceived me. After sleeping for a few hours in deep exhaustion I had woken up. At dawn I emerged from the bunker. The houses in front of the position, 50 metres away, made me nervous. As it came light, movement could be seen. It turned out that there were some individual Russians in the houses and that more were moving in. In ones and twos they came running over the bridge which led over a stream on the other side of the farmyard. I had the machine-gun spray the bridge, whereupon in the background a movement to the left, along the stream, could be seen. After quite a long time, individual rifle fire sounded from the neighbouring sector to our left. The direction of it moved more and more obliquely to the rear in our direction of retreat. While it was gradually becoming light, the enemy were also advancing on the right about one kilometre away. We were threatened with encirclement. Our neighbours on both sides crumbled. They left their trenches and withdrew, widely separated.

The battalion commander, Hauptmann Wild, could not decide to evacuate that magnificent position without orders. There was neither telephone nor wireless connection to our Regiment. In view of the threatened encirclement it seemed crazy to stay in the position. Behind it stretched several kilometres of open plain, offering no kind of protection. To withdraw across it in daylight would involve heavy casualties. No runner came from the Regiment who might have brought the order we were waiting for. The pale day brightened and the rifle fire behind us to the left became more concentrated.

Hauptmann Wild waited and brooded. To surrender the position without the enemy attacking was a decision with far-reaching consequences. Even apart from the possibility of court martial proceedings, the order to evacuate meant giving up trenches and bunkers of such good quality as we had never had before. Even if the enemy had dug in on the other slope of the bank only 100 or 150 metres away, this would still not have been any ‘close-quarters corner’ such as we had in October in the Budy-Obrebski position. At the company commanders’ meeting I pressed for the order to withdraw to be given. I pointed out that otherwise, if there were any further delay, the battalion of nearly 150 men would be lost. Hauptmann Wild came to his decision. We climbed out of the trenches and moved off over the wide, snow-covered field.

While the battalion was retreating in open order, suddenly bursts of fire from machine-guns and machine-pistols hit the right flank. There were Russians in a small trench system, not 30 metres away from me. Men hit by the bullets were collapsing all around. One cried out that we should take him with us. Who could have done that? Everybody was running, and in long jumping strides I ran along with them. Then suddenly there was a blow against my head. As I was running, I was spun round. I fell, and pulled myself together again. My head was thumping, but I felt that I was not wounded. Stumbling, I ran on, zig-zagging across the expanse when there was no cover.

After some 100 metres the commanders were able to bring their units under control and to change the running flight into an orderly retreat. At the end of the fields lay the next settlement. A machine-pistol barked out from there and a voice, going haywire, was shouting out. Both weapon and voice belonged to Oberst Dorn, who was firing in the air over our heads in order to halt the retreating troops and bring them into their positions. ‘You Schweinehunde, will you stand still!’ he roared, although this was not necessary. I had never seen the Oberst, this quiet and kindly man, so excited. Clearly he had not seen and did not know anything of the retreat of our neighbouring units and nothing of the enemy machine-gun fire that had hit us from the flank as we were retreating. But the Oberst was fair and experienced enough to immediately grasp the situation and not to hold us responsible for it. He knew that in the sixth year of the war the troops were already too worn out to be able to make anything of a situation such as this.

Lengthy retreats demoralise any troops, as had been seen in the summer of 1944. There on the Russian front was added a massive momentum not present on the other fronts, apart perhaps from the partisan war in the Balkans. It was the fear of being taken prisoner, the fear of falling into the hands of an inhuman enemy. Goebbels’ propaganda had a boomerang effect. The bitterness with which the war was waged against Bolshevik Russia marked it out as a struggle between personal deadly enemies. The disregard of the Red Cross, the news of the atrocities carried out by the advancing Red Army, all this had long since extinguished the chivalry practised in earlier wars. However, it seemed to be still present on the other fronts in the West and South. Two ideologies were battling it out. The protagonists knew that the conflict would only end with the destruction of one or the other. In the East it had never been a decent war.

One notable thing was that on the evening of 17 January 1945, quite against my usual careless custom, I had put on my steel helmet instead of my field service cap. An indeterminate but compelling feeling had made me do it. When I was at last able to take off my steel helmet I saw the reason for it. The bludgeoning blow, that had thrown me to the ground, came from an infantry gun. It had very nearly penetrated the helmet, but the inserts of sheet steel and leather had stopped it from going right through.

From the beginning of the large-scale offensive on the 14th until the 20th January we had carried out a fighting withdrawal of almost 70 kilometres. We had to take up positions in front of the little town of Bielsk. Since only the commander, Hauptmann Wild, had a map, the process of directing us in to our positions was a very long-winded affair. Also, the allocation of sectors did not seem to be quite right. Wild drove for a long time in a regimental vehicle around the district in order to find the right sector. We had to shift sideways. He had already directed away half the battalion, then went to find it and did not come back.

The Adjutant, Oberleutnant Küllenberg, and I remained behind, as the only officers, with the other half of the battalion. It was a bright and sunny winter’s day with good visibility over a long distance. We were standing on the top of a gentle rise, parallel to which, and some 700 metres to the left, to the south, ran the road to Bielsk, 4 kilometres away. To the right of it, one to two kilometres further on, at a right angle to the first road, another road led to the town. Two small areas of woodland lay between. On the latter road, which could not easily be observed, enemy tanks were advancing, to judge by the noise they were making, But on the left, one brown lorry after another, carrying anti-tank guns or infantry, rolled in the direction of Bielsk.

Küllenberg and I considered our position. As it later turned out, a battalion runner sent by Hauptmann Wild had not got through. In the meantime it had got to 3pm. Getting on for 30 lorries had already driven past us and on the right, to judge by the noise, at least as many tanks. So our only option was to withdraw, to lie up in the nearest woodland and to wait for the approaching darkness. In two hours it would be dusk and after that it would quickly become dark. To the woodland it was one kilometre, in between there was a village. We moved through it in column, widely separated. The few inhabitants, mostly old people, observed us with indifferent faces. They may have felt pleased that we were retreating, but also uncertain as to what was going to happen. Not far behind the village we reached the protection of the woodland. Russians travelling to Bielsk on the road to the left of us seemed to have a definite destination. Although they must have been able to see us, they left us alone. Possibly they thought that we were their own people. That gave me an idea.

When we arrived in the woodland, sentries were posted at its edges and then we began to get changed. The winter clothing that we were wearing over our uniform was white on one side and covered on the other with brownish-green camouflage patterns. At a distance it could not be distinguished from the brown cloth of the Russian uniforms. So we turned our uniforms inside out. Brown on the outside, we had a better chance of being taken for Russians and not being recognised. Till darkness fell we remained undisturbed.

Then a tense operation began. Everyone stuck closely to his neighbour as we stepped through the snow. We could touch no village, no farm. The aim was to push through the most forward enemy lines in a wide arc around Bielsk, and thus reach our own lines. A critical point would be the road on which the tanks had been advancing. Now and again we could still hear the sound of engines from there. Before we set off, Küllenberg and I had looked at each other. The question as to who would be able to keep it up remained unsaid.

After an hour of wading through the snow we reached the road. Firelight shone from farmhouses. They were already occupied by the enemy. While the men, distributed in the nearest hollows, were under cover, Küllenberg and I stalked our way forward to the road. The broad tracks of the enemy T-34 tanks had left deep tracks in the snow. On the road there was no traffic. The opportunity was favourable, we brought up the men and our crossing was successful.

On the other side of the road we began afresh the process of creeping up between the farms. We approached to within only 50 metres of one of them. In the light of a fire Russians were making themselves comfortable. They were cooking and roasting, making a noise and felt quite safe. We, on the other hand, refrained from doing anything that would give us away, in order not to endanger our goal of reaching the German lines.

Almost two hours later we found ourselves to the south-west of the town. We had almost described a semicircle around it when a village came into sight. According to the distance and the noise of the fighting during the day, the Russians could have only got this far. We halted once again, and Küllenberg and I crept alone into the village. In a ditch at the side of the road we took cover and waited until we saw people, friend or foe. We waited a while and consulted in whispers.

Suddenly two chaps came along the road, in fur caps and snow jackets with telephone equipment round their neck, evidently Russians. Since they had to pass quite close to us and would anyway see us in the light of the snowy evening, there was only one thing left for us to do, namely to let them come to within a few metres of us and then take care of them. Walking side by side they approached us, suspecting nothing and without a care in the world. When they were quite close we jumped up, our assault rifles at the ready, and shouted Ruki wjerch! The two of them were completely taken by surprise and raised their hands in the air. Then one of them, when he had recovered from the shock, said, ‘Oh God, Herr Leutnant, you didn’t half give me a fright!’

So we relaxed a bit! The two of them were Strippenhengste, i.e. signals troops from our artillery regiment. They had to check the telephone lines to an advanced observer, who was supposed to be somewhere further forward, that is, where we had come from. That meant that without noticing it we had successfully crossed the lines with our 80 men. Both sides had, in view of the darkness evidently ‘called it a day’ with the occupation of farms and houses. Hauptmann Wild and the other half of the battalion were soon found.

After such adventures it was the greatest pleasure to put the first cigarette in your mouth. Inhale the first pull at it, then to the able to breathe out again. I had begun to smoke when I was at grammar school, and Father, who was a nonsmoker, had had no objection to it. On the contrary, and this reinforced my habit, he had spoken of comrades in the First World War who were smokers and who in critical situations kept or found their calm with the help of tobacco.

That night there were still a few hours’ rest to be had on a German estate. I was sitting with some men in the library of the house and found there Stefan Zweig’s Sternstunden der Menschheit. I read for a little while, sitting in an armchair, until my eyelids closed and my head sank backwards.

In order to relieve the strain of the winter retreat, we received orders to requisition farm vehicles. Affected by this were the Polish farmers who had remained on their farmsteads, while the Germans with their heavily loaded carts had already fled. The farmer from whom I had taken two nags together with his light vehicles complained a lot. The unit commander, in accordance with the Hague Convention on land warfare, had to issue a written receipt for the requisitioned goods. But it was no use to the poor farmer. Nor was it of any help to him that the interpreter told him that the whole of Poland, when the Russians occupied that country, would long to be back with the Germans. We, however, if we were not actually in combat, could load machine-guns and boxes of ammunition on the vehicles and now and again one of us could rest his weary body.

On 23 January Oberleutnant Küllenberg was shot in the stomach. Apart from the commander, I was then the last officer in the battalion. As we were withdrawing during the day in open order I had fallen through the ice while crossing a frozen stream. The water had got into the felt lining of my boots. I either marched along in wet boots, with my feet to a certain extent warm, or if I was not moving they got cold and threatened to freeze to the soles.

The following night brought me the craziest experience of that winter retreat. I had received orders to take over command of the rearguard. Who else could have done this, since there was no other officer there anyway. I had bent over the Hauptmann’s map, the only one in the battalion, and with clammy fingers had dug out of the map case a pencil and a little slip of paper. Out loud to myself I had spelled out the unpronounceable Polish place names and written them on the slip of paper. A few lines, an arrow pointing north, and the sketch was ready. The runner Buck had similarly had to look at the sketch and then I reported my departure. ‘Auf Weidersehen, Herr Hauptmann, Leutnant Scheiderbauer reporting his departure’, I had said, in a fairly unmilitary fashion, and Wild had replied ‘Go with God, my boy, go!’

The company of only 14 remaining men, sat in the overheated room of a farmhouse warming themselves before the 20 kilometre night march, or rather, journey. The 14 chaps comfortably fitted on the vehicles, so that it was clear that their feet could be protected. The entire battalion was ‘motorised’ in this way with the help of 10 such ‘combat vehicles’. The head of the column set off, and I remained behind with two vehicles as rearguard. It was a dark, almost mild night, and we were not freezing to any great extent. No wonder that the men dozed and dropped off, and seemingly the horses did too.

Then suddenly the penultimate vehicle had driven into a ditch and the men on it, woken up with a shock, were only just able to jump down from the vehicle as it tipped over. ‘Dopey sod!’ they cursed the driver, and ‘wretched nag’ was how he cursed his horse. Of course the men pushed the vehicle back out of the ditch again, loaded the ammunition boxes back on to it, pulled up their hoods and sat back on it. They were annoyed about the 10 minutes the accident had lost, and the fact that by then they had lost touch with the battalion.

We drove on and the men dozed on. But I stayed awake, lit up my sketch with the glowing tip of my cigarette, took compass bearings, and waited for the left-hand fork in the road leading westwards. But it didn’t come. We drove past a brightly-lit farmhouse in front of which a lorry was standing. ‘So we’re not last’, said one of the men. The situation slowly began to seem suspicious to me, because we had already gone too far northwards. But suddenly we heard vehicles in front of us that must come from the battalion. Out of the darkness the outlines of houses emerged. It was doubtless a village in which the battalion was waiting for its rear-guard. The distance became less and less, and the outlines of buildings, trees and vehicles became clearer and clearer. These must also come from other units. We overtook some, until an obstacle brought us to a halt. I jumped down in order to look with the runner for Hauptmann Wild.

We passed figures shrouded in white and were suddenly asked, in Russian, ‘Well, who are you?’ I assumed that the man asking the question was a Russian Hilfswilliger, many of whom served with our baggage-train, and had paid no more attention to him. But then the chap had moved his hand in a suspicious way and was holding a weapon in it. My runner, the medic, suddenly planted one on his chin. Bellowing loudly and falling backwards he shouted ‘Germanski, Germanski!’ Shots cracked out and shouts rang out.

There was complete confusion in the Russian baggage-train into which we had stumbled. No one could recognise anyone else in the darkness. I shouted ‘Out! Into the fields!’ We had to get away from the village street and the vehicles. The only option open to us was the field to the left of the road, because on the right the road was blocked. Franz stuck close to me. The other men were swallowed up in the snow and the night. After an hour of strenuous searching and muffled shouting we had only found seven of the fourteen. Then we set off, without vehicles and without machine-guns. I could not hold up any longer if I wanted to avoid being seen when it got light.

It was the only time during my time as a soldier that I lost my bearings at night. The sky was cloudy and the Pole Star could not be seen, and my sense of direction let me down. I was convinced that the west was in the east, but my compass showed the opposite. I wavered between which I should trust, my instinct that had never yet let me down, or the compass. Then reason and drill, which were the stronger, won through and trust in the compass saved us. We were stamping through the snow in the direction my compass showed as west. From time to time we had to wade up to our knees through the snow. At last a farmstead came in sight. There we had to ask the way. Fortunately I had written down the place names along our retreat. I could not send any of the men still shocked by the experience to the farm, so I went again with Franz.

While the rest of the group waited near a tree that we hoped to be able to find later, Franz and I, with the safety catches off our weapons, crept closer. A dog set off barking, but from the house there was neither light nor any sound to be heard. We knocked on the window and on the door until an anxious farmer opened up. Were there any Russians here yet, the Upper Silesian Franz asked him in Russian, to which the Pole replied: ‘No, you are the first’. Smiling to ourselves we got him to tell us the way to the road and the names of the next villages.

Soon we had found the road again. Just as it was becoming light, we at last found the battalion in the third village. With the help of Hauptmann Wild’s map I had to establish that we had missed the fork in the road by five kilometres. At the regiment and at the Division they were agitated when they found out, on the basis of my report, that enemy baggage-trains were already in the village where we had had our adventure.

On 25 January we had come to within 10 kilometres of the Vistula to the south of the town of Graudenz. From midnight there was a two-hour halt. After that we were to march on again. Since the enemy was not pushing up behind, we only had to take normal security precautions. There was enough time to knock up a decent stew for the men. The farmhouse, in which we were, had been deserted by its inhabitants. They had fled. But the stock was still there. Two men who knew how to do it hurriedly slaughtered a pig. The portions we needed were cut out, the rest was left. The Ivans could make a good meal of it if it had not become inedible by that time. In a massive pan that the farmer’s wife must have used at harvest time and at celebrations, the pieces of meat simmered in such a way as to make our mouths water. Outside it remained quiet and we were lucky enough to be able to eat our fill until we left.

After three hours’ slow night march we crossed the frozen Vistula. Pioneers had reinforced it to form an ice bridge so that tanks and heavy artillery could also get across it. At 5am in the area of Deutsch-Westfalen, I set my foot on the western bank. The positions ran along the riverbank on the Vistula embankment. On the western bank a strip of meadows about one to three kilometres wide then ran along the river, ending in a steeply climbing hill. About 10 kilometres north-eastwards was the town of Graudenz with the visible silhouette of its fortress. Called after the Prussian General, Courbiere, it stood high above the Vistula.

11 February/March 1945: The last days

The Vistula embankment was occupied by alarm units that had been pooled together at the nearest frontline control point. We had the presence of such a unit to thank for a last day of rest. The German inhabitants of the prosperous town had not all yet fled. They hoped that the enemy could be brought to a standstill at the riverbank. Despite the ample evening meal, everyone ate his fill of the plentiful supply of food. While the men were cooking chickens I scoffed a full ten scrambled eggs that Walter had rustled up for me by way of a change of diet. When the field kitchen arrived in the morning, most of the men made short work of another pot full of bacon and beans. The joker Franz said, tongue-in-cheek, that as far as he was concerned the Führer could do away with the card system. After the meal we stretched out to sleep. Someone had found a gramophone and got it working. Of the two records only one was chosen. Adolf Hitler’s speech, ‘Give me four years’, was not requested. Instead we had an old song, the melody of which I know to this day. It rang out from the tinny sounding gramophone: So liebt man in Lissabon, in Tokio, Wien und Rom; die Sprache der Liebe ist überall gleich (‘Thus people love in Lisbon, in Tokyo, Vienna and Rome; the language of love is the same everywhere’).

On the afternoon of 27 January we moved into the positions on the bank of the Vistula. My company’s sector was the village of Jungensand, to the south of Deutsch-Westfalen. On the snowy riverbank there were willows. Adjoining it was an embankment, some five metres high and sloping on both sides. To the east of the embankment ran the village street. On the other edge were clean, for the most part smallish farmsteads all planted out with gardens. Since there were no trenches, we dug foxholes in the embankment. In the farm that I took as my command post I met a Leutnant with a few troops on leave from many different units. As they got out of the train in Deutsch-Kone they had been gathered together into an alarm unit. The Herr Kamerad had let his men sleep in the outhouse while he had spent the night with mother and daughter in the farmer’s bedroom. Grinning offensively he suggested to me that I should do the same. Without saying anything I looked at him, not understanding and full of contempt.

Since the enemy obviously had need of a break, as we did, we were granted two days of rest. As our physical exhaustion abated, the oppression of our minds and spirits proportionately increased. The deserted dwellings, farms and settlements created a thoroughly sad atmosphere. There were columns of German refugees, old men, women and children with belongings they had had to snatch together as best they could in the emergency. We had already overtaken some of them on the way. Everything reinforced those sad impressions. The realisation hit me that the area, German for more than half a millennium, would be irretrievably lost.

In the stables there was still some warmth. Many farmers had not even been able to take all their stock with them. Gates and doors were standing open, as if the houses were still inhabited by their owners and they had just gone out into the fields. The cellars and barns were full. The shelves of the dining rooms were stocked. In addition to the large amount of meat daily, we even had stewed fruit. We would have done without it only we were still standing at Smolensk. We, the infantrymen, were to be the last to set foot over the threshold of those countless homes about to be given over to the enemy. ‘Oh Germany, poor Fatherland’, I thought at the time. I happened to find in the First Letter to the Corinthians, chapter four, verse seven, the text that essentially ‘hit the nail on the head’ in describing what was happening to us. ‘Even unto this present hour we both hunger and thirst, are naked and are buffeted, and have no certain dwelling place’.

Meanwhile, it had become known that we were in a pocket of huge proportions. The Russians in Pomerania had reached the sea. So we would see whether the troops, encircled and cut off, were still capable of breaking through to the West. This was what many hoped. Others feared that Danzig would be declared a Festung. As such it would have to be defended, as usual, ‘to the last drop of blood’. The fighters wore grey, not brown, tunics. The pause for breath granted us by the enemy seemed to be ending. The Russians again began firing registration fire. Streets, embankment and houses were under not very heavy, but regular, fire from heavy weapons.

As I was standing outside the door of the house, a Ratschbum shell hit the lintel. Apart from a tiny splinter that hit me in the mouth, nothing else happened. But it was puzzling where the shell had come from. The house was covered by the embankment in such a way that it could not be hit by direct fire. So the firing must be coming not from the bank immediately opposite, but from further up or down river. That too seemed to indicate that the Russians were up to something in our sector. In fact, during the night of 29 January the enemy had crossed the Vistula in the sector of our neighbouring battalion in Deutsch-Westfalen. They were then in the village with at least one company. Reserves, which could still have thrown them out again during the night, were of course not available.

The Division decided to take our battalion out of the line. Then, next day, it would be possible to carry out a local attack, with the aim of driving the enemy back on to the right hand bank of the Vistula. A meeting and the issue of orders took place in the regimental command post in the Schwenten forester’s house. A crowd of senior people was present, as befitted the occasion. Vater Dorn outlined what he described as a ‘shitty’ situation. That was to be expected from the conditions of the terrain. Since the plain in the glacial valley of the Vistula offered no cover, consideration had only been given to an attack from the north and south, along the street, moving from house to house. Two assault units were to work their way forward through the bushes on the bank on the far side, that is the enemy side, of the embankment directly on the riverbank. I was ordered to take command of the group advancing from the south. So this was the Himmelfahrts-Kommando, that, evidently, I was not to escape (translator’s note: Himmelfahrt in German means ‘Ascension’ in the sense of Christ’s ascension into heaven. Its ironic use here is echoed by the term Himmelfahrts-Strasse [‘Ascension Street’] used in Auschwitz for the road leading to the gas chambers.) I said Jawohl and did not show any fear.

As we were taking our leave, I thought that I could sense different looks and different handshakes from usual. I could feel that none of them wanted to be in my shoes and were happy that the lot had not fallen to them. The esteem of the artillery commander, the visible respect of the Panzerjäger officer and the fatherly kindness of Oberst Dorn made me inwardly happy. Then I was truly glad about Freimuth Husenett. In the meantime he had relieved Klaus Nicolai as Regimental Adjutant. At 22 he was only one year older than I. He wore the Knight’s Cross and the Goldene Nahkampfspange, was clean, modest and cheerful. In his soft voice, in a heartfelt and brotherly way, he said, ‘Look after yourself’.

How seriously and importantly the operation was regarded by those higher up was indicated by the fact that the battalion was to spend the night in peace in Schloss Sartowitz. Sartowitz, some five kilometres behind the frontline, was a trim manor house in the German Ostland. The great house was situated in a select spot high over the Vistula valley, on what was once the bank of the glacial valley. The view from the terrace offered a tormentingly beautiful picture across the ice-covered river. There were little villages in the foreground and out to the horizon, was the town of Graudenz, embedded into the fortress above it. But because the great house could be observed by the enemy, and there had been instances of shells hitting the house, for the sake of peace and quiet we preferred the gentleman’s residence. It was in a deeper location than the main house and was covered by the trees of the park. In some of its 99 rooms we settled ourselves down.

Before we all went to sleep I gave precise instructions to the NCOs. Then I had to tell the men what awaited them the next day. However, I had to give them confidence. That had never been harder for me to do than it was then. I could not conceal from them the fact that there was only a slim prospect of our survival. But, I said that they should nevertheless reflect that we were always, every one of us, in the hands of God. He would be with us every day, as always. Therefore He would be with us ‘tomorrow’. Nothing would happen to us without His willing it, I said. God was ‘with us’, as it said on the belt buckles we wore next to our bodies.

At 3am, after I had lain for four hours in the deepest sleep, I was woken up. It was a battalion runner. Drowsy with sleep, I tripped over my boots. We had been permitted to allow ourselves the luxury of sleeping in the beds with our boots off. What was the matter, I asked Hauptmann Wild. He looked at me and said quietly: ‘Don’t worry, it’s been called off, we’re going on with the retreat’.

The enemy had extended their bridgehead and the village of Schwenten had been lost. Our battalion had to retake it. The first target of the attack was a four-sided complex of farm buildings. It was a commanding position on a hill to the south-west of the village, surrounded by woodland 100 metres away from it. Two assault guns were coming up to our support. With my company of only 20 men I had to attack at a right angle to the other battalion. The assault guns remained with them. I had to push forward and draw the attention of the enemy on to me. The battalion with the assault guns would then advance.

The enemy had seen the movement associated with our preparations and let us know of it with fire from an anti-tank gun in the farmyard. The shells exploded on the trees over our heads. But the oaks and beeches were strong and gave us some protection. Our attack began after several salvoes from our artillery and mortars. We came out of the protection of the woodland and immediately came under fire from the anti-tank guns. We went to ground, but the assault guns could be heard. There was consternation among the gun crew who could be clearly seen in the corner of the farmyard. I leapt up and cried Hurra! Hurra!

Once we were on the go I did not need to give any more orders. The men were behind me. Walter overtook me because he wanted to be first in the position. The Russians too, perhaps a platoon of them, were running away on the other side of the farm and the anti-tank gun was standing there abandoned. We charged after them and into the farmyard. There were no longer any Russians. Only the gun, the limber and two pathetic Russian horses remained behind. In the limber box the men discovered what the Russians had plundered, namely a whole pile of quarter-kilo pieces of German dairy butter.

As I came out of the farm gate I saw the battalion advancing with the two assault guns. I waved to the approaching platoon and turned round towards the enemy. Some of the men had already turned towards the valley in which the roadside village of Schwenten lay. Along the village street, fleeing in confusion, were a good two companies of Russians. They doubtless felt that they were threatened from the flank. ‘Off, down, in there’, I shouted and once again the Hurra! rang out from the few of us. The enemy, far superior in number, were running away.

In the forester’s house, in which a few days before Oberst Dorn had been based and where the orders had been given for the counter-attack which had been called off, I set up my command post. It is true that we were in the cellar, whereas the Oberst had been on the ground floor. I looked at the room in which the meeting had taken place. A hole, one metre wide, was gaping in the wall. When it hit, it had caught the Oberst in the head and shoulder. In the cellar a Russian command post had already been operating. Telephone equipment and half-empty American meat conserves with Cyrillic labels were lying about. And then the room was permeated by the almost indescribable smell of the Russian common soldier, which I can still smell today, but do not think I could begin to analyse. It could be a mixture of damp leather, horse shit, but also possibly the smell of the unwashed.

The main line of resistance had been maintained for two or three days in front of Schwenten. After the departure of General Meltzer, the Divisional commander was Generalleutnant Drekmann. At noon he visited my command post. In broad daylight he came driving up to the forester’s house, along the road, in full view of the enemy, with the red flashes on his overcoat. Outside the house he stopped. It was only with difficulty that he could be persuaded to come down into the cellar. At first I thought, because of the grand way in which he had arrived, that he was over-excited. But the reason for his behaviour soon became clear. He had obviously been knocking back too much cognac. His initial briskness soon passed over into joviality. Then he adopted a patronising and encouraging tone as far as the situation was concerned. When the opportunity presented itself, I mentioned that I was the Regiment’s ‘last horse in the stable’, namely the last Schützenkompanie commander to have survived from 14 January. That made no impression on him and he soon drove off again.

Walter shouted loudly after him the wish that a Ratschbum would get him. That would teach him the meaning of fear. But luckily for all of us that did not happen. On the contrary, the same afternoon a similarly careless attitude had the result that little Hauptmann Hein was not so lucky. He had been called Freund Hein, in 1943, by Oberst von Eisenhart. Like many others he had also been a friend to me. It was said that, in the school of the neighbouring village, the Divisional commander had held a large officers’ meeting. The Russians must have noticed. They radioed to their firing position with the result that there were several dead and wounded including Hauptmann Hein. The careless General, however, had remained uninjured.

On 7 February the Russians had pushed us out of the village. I had given up the command post in the forester’s house and withdrawn 500 metres up the road to the Maierhof. There a man from the 14th Panzerabwehrkompanie, had put paid to a ‘Stalin’ tank with a Panzerschreck. The main line of resistance then ran along the front of a brick-red so-called Insthaus. At the rear were the entrances to the living quarters of the estate workers, the Instleute. I lived in the kitchen of that squalid dwelling. Facing the doors to those dwellings was a ramp a metre high, to which I owed my life.

To get some air I stepped through the door on to the ramp, leaving the door open. Every now and then a mortar shell exploded close by. But the ramp was in the blind corner of the building. It seemed to give cover against shell splinters that came from above and also against the dangerous splinters from mortar shells that flew out horizontally. Then, suddenly, a shell exploded very close by. A blow on my chest flung me through the open door back into the room. The men leapt up and surrounded me, helped me up and asked if I was wounded. At first I did not know. Then I saw and could feel that my limbs were in one piece, I could move them and I was not bleeding anywhere.

What had happened? A shell splinter, just the size of a fingernail, had gone through my winter overcoat. It then bored through the 32 page map, which had been folded 16 times, stuck between my winter clothing and my field tunic. The paper of the map, folded many times, had so reduced the momentum of the shell splinter that it had been slowed down before it went through my field tunic. The shell, as it fell, had passed within 20 centimetres of me and the slope of the ramp. The ramp had caught all the shrapnel flying in my direction apart from the one shell splinter that I pulled out of my coat. However, my intention to send home, as war mementoes, the shell splinter and the map that saved my life was fruitless. At that time the post was no longer functioning properly.

The following night I was ordered to lead an attack in order to move the main line of resistance forward a little. Nobody knew where the enemy was. A Russian Maxim machine-gun was popping at us from the rising ground to the east of the forester’s house. However, there was to be no preparatory barrage. We were to report and then to drive out the enemy with a shout of Hurra. It was a well-known fact that the Russians avoided fighting at night. But the high-ups had evidently forgotten that we too were no longer the heroes of the first years of the war. In spite of everything we went forward.

There was impenetrable darkness. Soon it took all our efforts to keep the leading man in sight. We were shadows and outlines creeping over the snow-covered terrain towards the chattering machine-gun. Every one of the soldiers no doubt felt, as I did, the pounding of his own heart. After a while the enemy machine-gun ceased firing. We got as far as the forester’s house, but it too had been abandoned. The enemy had evidently withdrawn of their own accord. We had by then reached the southern edge of the Tucheler Heide. With differing degrees of intensity, the enemy went about driving us out of the wooded terrain.

By 11 February we had spent three days and three nights in the woodland and in the snow. We had been without a roof over our heads and without sleep. On the first day the Russians were still trying to advance into the woodland, but then had given up. I had not heard for quite some time the rattling and twittering of infantry weapons in the woodland. Sometimes, when a ricochet whistled into a certain corner of the woodland, it sounded just like singing. ‘The little birds in the wood, they sing so wonder-wonderfully’ was the line that occurred to me, in romantic longing. But it was not at all romantic just very serious when one of the ‘singing’ bullets slashed open the flapping leg of my winter trousers. In snowy hollows we tried to snatch a quarter or half an hour of sleep. We did not manage to sleep for longer because, as time passed, the cold, 10 degrees below zero, penetrated our ragged uniforms. In my case there was the added misery that my feet, which had otherwise been warm with walking, threatened to freeze to the soles of my boots. They had turned to ice.

On the evening of 12 February we crept into the Mischke forester’s house. It was the only house for miles around. At night it was packed full of soldiers from various units. Following Hauptmann Wild’s orders I tried to get my people, insofar as they were not outside on sentry duty, together in one room alone. My attempt failed. So I had to go round trying to free up at least a few corners of rooms for us. It was important, because the forester’s house was on the front line in our sector. At any moment an enemy assault unit could attack. To be able to repulse it, the unit commander had to have his people together at all times ready for combat at the shortest notice. That, however, was not guaranteed if the members of a large number of different units were lying about, mixed up in the numerous rooms.

In the very first room I met resistance from a Feldwebel. The men around him, apparently his people, made room to a certain extent willingly, but he on the other hand remained lying down. I spoke to him sharply and gave him ‘as an officer the direct order’ to get up immediately and to leave the room with his people. He remained unaffected. ‘I will give you two minutes. If you have not obeyed my order by then I shall shoot you!’ I did not wait to see the effect of my words, but went to Hauptmann Wild, to report the incident to him. Wild sat in the light of my tallow candle, not looking up, and said drily: ‘Do what you want’. ‘Herr Hauptmann, I just can’t simply shoot the man!’ I exclaimed. But Hauptmann Wild, the brave man, the fatherly comrade and the pastor, seemed to be at the end of his strength. He did not express an opinion and he took no part in what was agitating me. He shifted on to my shoulders the responsibility for deciding and acting, and once again replied tonelessly and apathetically, ‘Do what you want’.

Irresolute and uncertain I turned back, fearing that the chap would still be lying in his corner. That was in fact the case. I could no longer restrain myself. Stirred up to the highest degree, I shouted at him: ‘Get up immediately and leave this room, or I shall shoot you on the spot!’ Inwardly I was trembling. I wondered whether the chap would obey this order. While my trembling fingers were reaching for my holster, another Feldwebel, one of his comrades, intervened to calm and to placate me. Even his words, that the man who was refusing to obey my orders was a tried and tested and excellent soldier, I turned against him, saying that in that case he should know all the better that he had to carry out my orders like any others. But even as I was saying this, and as the Feldwebel had pointed out to me, I felt that the behaviour of the man refusing to obey my order could not have any rational cause. He was completely exhausted and at the end of his strength.

What would have happened, if I had shot the man? Nothing would have happened. As in earlier retreats and crisis situations, it had become the duty of senior officers to use weapons in cases of refusals to obey orders. They could shoot the offender immediately and without a court martial. I was therefore, formally, completely within my rights. The facts of the case clearly attested to a refusal to obey orders. Moreover, my commander had expressly given me a free hand. The order was in fact completely well founded. But what were those men doing in our sector? Were they men who had been scattered or were they deserters? To establish which it was, I was much too agitated and did not have the time. I had only time for the shot that would re-establish discipline and order.

But I did not fire it! The man was almost as exhausted as I. Probably, just like me, he had not slept during the previous days and nights. He had most likely been overwhelmed by a physical, mental, and spiritual exhaustion that left him no longer in control of his actions. It would have been the same for me, if I had not been an officer, if I had not had to be a leader and if the enormous agitation about the inconceivability of this refusal to obey orders had not then overwhelmed me. A remnant of common sense within me restored my sense of proportion. I gained enough control over myself to be able to ponder whether the insignificance of the case was worth his death. Was it right that my order should be carried out by that man? So I came to the conclusion that I should not allow myself to be guilty of his death, even if I was in every respect justified in doing so, even if it was my duty to do so.

I walked out into the dark of the February night. I was oppressed by the dichotomy of feelings of defeat that my formalistic spirit had suffered. But I was also glad of my victory over that spirit. For one trembling moment, I had held the life of that man in my hand and nearly destroyed it. Outside, the Feldwebel comrade of the mutineer joined me and said that I was ‘a fine man’. He seemed suddenly to trust me, because he had recognised me as a fellow countryman. Then, in all seriousness, he proposed that I should travel to Vienna with him. He had, he said, a motorcycle and sidecar, his unit had been wiped out and he had had ‘enough’. With me as an officer, he said, we would easily get through the Feldgendarmerie checkpoint and through the Heldenklaus. I was speechless. Should I now have this man arrested, taken away, and shot? I shook my head, uncomprehendingly, without saying a word. He disappeared.

15 February is the date of my last letter to Mother that actually reached her, in which it says:

On 16 February we were marching in a northerly direction towards Dubelno. Clouds of shrapnel had indicated that the enemy attack was going to continue. It was always the same. A couple of hours, perhaps a night, perhaps two days without pressure from the enemy. Then the Russians attacked again, pressing and pushing us back. Meanwhile, we had been driven on to the Tucheler Heide. For more than four weeks we had had ‘no abiding city’. Around noon I had a splinter from a mortar shell in my right upper arm. It came through the open window of a farmhouse in which we were resting. It was of course too small a wound for a military hospital. But, for all that, the feeling of nerves that had gripped me since morning fell away from me. I then knew why.

You could see that on the other side of the Vistula a captive balloon was sitting enthroned in the sky, untouched. There were no German fighter aircraft in its vicinity. Our Luftwaffe had long since vanished into thin air. Only on the next morning did a German fighter aircraft attempt to approach the balloon. But it was driven away by hundreds of Russian flak and other guns.

Meanwhile the cold had broken. On 17 February we were lying in fresh trenches in front of the Graudenz-Könitz railway line, on a tongue of land a kilometre wide, in the midst of woodland. It was a typical stretch of countryside for the Tucheler Heide. The Russians had pushed forward through the woods. To the north and to the south they had reached the railway line. Until then we had stood firm. But we were then shelled by a series of salvos from German Nebelwerfer that the enemy had captured. The enormous detonations of their heavy calibre guns made the still, frozen earth shake.

We pressed ourselves against the walls of our trenches and wished that the attack were over, so that such hellish music might come to an end. Despite the mortar fire, which had had a very demoralising effect, the enemy only advanced hesitantly. It was easy to keep them at a distance with targeted rifle fire. Once again my Sturmgewehr with its U-shaped back sight and the flat pin was proving its worth.

The next day the railway line in our sector was given up. We withdrew over a bridge that had been prepared for blowing. It led over an artificial ravine. Nobody knew who was supposed to be blowing up the bridge, or when and from where it was to be done. So it was a matter of climbing down 25 metres into the ravine and clambering up again on the other side. Actually I saved myself the trouble and ran across the bridge, feeling foolhardy. Certainly, once across, I became aware of how careless I had been.

In the next village there was a short halt. The halt was rudely interrupted when out of a haystack a Russian machine-pistol sprayed fire and two of our people fell, hit by the bullets. From a little distance away I saw an Unteroffizier having a go with the Sturmgewehr, whereupon a Russian came crawling out. Evidently he was making a move to flee. The corporal fired once more, and the treacherous deed was atoned for.

Some days later Hauptmann Wild assigned me to his staff, if you could still call it that. But he doubtless wanted to do me a good turn or to protect me a little, because in fact I was the last officer who was still there from 14 January. In any event it did not matter to me, I simply moved about here and there on foot. Whether I commanded the 10 men of my company or supported the Hauptmann in commanding the 50 men of the battalion, there was no essential difference. We pulled back further. On a narrow country road that ran through the heath in the middle of splendid woodland, we were still about 20 kilometres south of Preussisch-Stargard and 60 kilometres away from the Baltic at Danzig.

On 24 February Hauptmann Wild celebrated his 35th birthday. The kitchen Unteroffizier had not forgotten him. He brought a cake into the forester’s house in which we were resting. It had been part-baked during the retreat. But he only produced it after he had fed us with roast pork and no one could eat any more. Sitting in the deserted house, in a velvet-covered grandfather’s chair belonging to the forester, I stretched my legs out on to the leather armchair opposite. Exhaustion overwhelmed me. I was wakened by the explosion of an anti-personnel mine. It was two o’clock in the morning. An enemy patrol must have trodden on it. ‘What the hell’, I thought, ‘the enemy never attacks in the dark at night’. Besides, I could not care less. I wanted to sleep. ‘You can all go hang!’ Drowsy with sleep, those were my thoughts.

At the northern edge of the Tucheler Heide, a little beyond the wood, the battalion had moved in to a wide sector. We could only hold on at key points. On the morning of 26 February we had repulsed an enemy patrol. Since then the enemy had not pushed on after us. They were obviously exhausted and needed a breather. They stayed in the wood, preparing for another assault. Because of that, we hoped that a few days’ rest would be granted to us. Almost overnight the snow had disappeared. The warm March sun had sucked it up, and a mild wind was blowing over the fields, all newly brown. In the open meadow, tiny shoots of green seemed to be sprouting. My imagination seized on to an illusion of reawakening life. Our winter clothing was handed back to the baggage-train.

The railway station at Gross-Wollental was the battalion key point. It lay furthest to the left. It was occupied by the remnants of ‘my’ 1st Company. There were still 15 of them, commanded by a Leutnant who had just come from Germany. They had installed themselves in the railway buildings and had a good field of fire. Within the solid, thick walls they felt themselves to be protected, for the time being. It was the typical brick station of a smaller town, such as could be found in a good 1,000 stations in northern Germany. A little while before it had still been in operation. The air still smelled just like a railway station.

The small farmhouse that housed the command post had thin walls. The only room was on the southern side facing the enemy. Since we had already grown apathetic as a result of our exertions, comfort had won the day over the regulation efforts to provide security. Instead of taking up our quarters in the stable on the southern side of the house, we used the room facing the enemy. There were two beds. Men and officers slept in them, in shifts, of course without being able to take off their boots or clothes. We had not been used to such peace for a long time. I could count on my fingers the days and nights that I had not slept without my boots. That continued during the war of movement, the trench warfare, or whenever else, in that campaign.

In my dreams I heard the hiss of a hand-grenade and the nasty quiet fizzing of the fuse before it exploded. I was dreaming that an enemy assault unit was in the process of digging us out, and had thrown a hand-grenade into the room. Still half asleep I jumped out of bed and the laughter of my comrades brought me fully awake. But there was an element of truth in the dream. An infantry gun shell had come through the wall over my head and the headboard of the bed. It had stuck into the opposite wall of the room. Mortar was still crumbling down from the wall.

That was how the regimental history described the start of the day. As I recall, the neighbouring sector on the left was under heavy fire. The commanding high ground to the north of Gross-Wollental lay behind us to the left, and fell into enemy hands. The battalion, that is, our 15 men, received orders to re-take the high ground. First we had to pull back a little to strike. Then we moved up to where the artillery positions were, in order to be able to move in a semi-circle round the high ground that had been lost. In the meantime the enemy were giving the terrain a vigorous pounding with heavy weapons. In particular they fired on the farmhouses that lay on their own. They rightly suspected firing positions to be there. They had also spotted our movement while we were approaching the open heights. At the last farm at the foot of the heights there were field howitzers under trees that were firing on them.

From the enemy positions came the thumping of the mortars. All round we could hear shells whistling towards us and exploding. From early morning I had felt, ‘in my water’, a sense of apprehension. So I was almost relieved when what I had dreaded actually happened. I had thrown myself to the ground. But I jumped up too soon, in order to move towards the house, thinking there might be better cover there. I must obviously not have heard the mortars fire because of the sound of the explosions. The severe pain of a considerable flesh wound in my left buttock forced me to the ground. I painfully crawled towards the house. I felt a lack of air that worried me. I knew I must have been shot through the lungs. One of my runners dragged me into the house where I was laid down on a bundle of straw. A medic from the artillery bandaged me up. I was taking shallow breaths, gasping and struggling for air.

The best chance of getting to the rear and to a dressing station was to go on the artillery food vehicle. It had just arrived at the firing position. It was to take me with it. But it took another quarter of an hour that seemed like an eternity, until it was ready. Then I was lifted up on to the little wagon. The loading area was too small to lie down, so I had to sit up with the driver. But I hung rather than sat on the driver’s seat, at the same time clinging on to the driver and to an iron armrest. A wild drive began. Enemy aircraft flew over us. The driver could not risk using roads and lanes. The horse was galloping in terror. The wagon bumped and tossed across country over meadows and fields, furrows and trenches. It was sheer torture. At the staff of another unit the driver unloaded me. A doctor gave me a tetanus injection. Sometime later I was loaded up into a Sanka i.e. a medical vehicle. After an absolutely endless journey I arrived at the field hospital section of the 35th Division, our neighbouring division.

There, in a small village school, the wounded as they arrived were laid on bundles of straw. A medical officer sorted us out according to urgency, not according to rank. All men are equal before God and before the court, but also before the surgeon’s knife. Of the two schoolrooms, one served as an operating room, the other as a preparation room. In the latter I was undressed and, by means of injections, somehow stabilised. Scarcely had the surgeon finished with one man, than he got to work on me. Half on my belly and half on my right side, I lay on the operating table. It was only a local anaesthetic under which the operation was carried out. The doctors asked me questions and forced me to answer them. Meanwhile, I could hear my breath bubbling out of the entrance wound, and could feel them working to close it. How long that lasted I have no idea. According to what they said, they were doing plastic surgery on my skin. The effect of the anaesthetic had already begun to wear off by the time the larger shell splinter from my behind and another lodged immediately next to my spine, were taken out. The Staff Medical Officer, Dr Brunn, asked whether I wanted to throw the shell splinters away. I replied, ‘Too bloody true’. The scars would be mementoes enough for me. The shell splinter in my lungs I would carry for the rest of my life.

After the operation I was moved into a small room. In one of the two beds was the man wounded in the stomach, who had been operated on before me. I was able to have a closer look at him and to recognise him. He was the commander of the reconnaissance battalion of the 35th Infantry Division. He was a Major and a holder of the Knight’s Cross. From time to time we spoke to each other. But I had the strange thought almost immediately that there was little hope for him.

Even so, they also seemed to consider me to be a serious case. The Major and I were nursed by a particularly capable Obergefreiter medic. On his tunic was the Kriegsverdienstkreuz First Class, which testified to his quality. Every quarter of an hour, I estimated, he came back into the room and administered injections in my upper thigh. During the two days I spent there, I must have had, I estimated, getting on for 80 injections. For years afterwards, the area in which they had been administered above my knees was numb.

The following night the Major reached the end of the road. He was increasingly struggling for air. It seemed to me that he had a heart attack. The medic came with Dr Brunn and they brought an oxygen machine but could not help the poor man. I was then alone. But I was myself too weak to be significantly affected by the death struggle of my comrade. The following day the medic told me that the previous night an armoured breakthrough had been made. The enemy tanks, he said, had come very close, and they had feared that they would have to let us fall into Russian hands. According to rumour, the two chaplains from our Division, the ESAK and the KASAK, i.e. the abbreviations for Protestant and Catholic ‘anti-sin guns’ had been ‘snatched’.

On 8 March, after four days, I was at last transported away. A medical motor vehicle drove me and other wounded men to a station. It must have been the one at Preussisch-Stargard, where we were put in cattle trucks and laid down on straw. During the loading process some wretch of a medic stole my pistol. That filled me with the overpowering fury of the helpless. I was glad that immediately after I had been wounded I had, at his suggestion, handed over my watch to my runner Franz. In Danzig, Sankas took us to the Technical High School in Langfuhr. It had been set up as a military hospital. At first I lay with about 50 other seriously wounded men in a large hall. I was in a pitiful state, because I was getting no air. After a short examination, I was immediately taken by porters into the operating room. The porters were French prisoners of war obediently doing what was expected of them. From the map case, which had not been stolen from me, I brought out my remaining cigarettes, that I certainly no longer needed. Gratefully, I gave them to the Frenchmen.

The operating room resembled a gigantic human abattoir. A haze of vapours of blood, pus, sweat and filth, from the dressings and disinfectants filled the room. On several tables operations, amputations, and dressings were performed. A doctor had just finished the circular cut around an arm, then began an upper arm amputation. All that I saw, though only half-conscious. Acting as theatre nurses were Dutch medical students. Doubtless, they were ‘compulsory labour’, and were getting some dreadful practical experience. I had to place my arm round the neck of one of these kindly and helpful nurses. Dizzy and weak, no longer used to sitting upright, I had my lungs tapped. An increasing lack of air, and the unbearable smell, had made me so apathetic that I scarcely noticed the short, severe pain when the doctor inserted the cannula. The intervention produced an aspiration of 700 cubic centimetres. It was no wonder that I had feared I was slowly suffocating. I was then able to breathe again during the following two weeks. The next aspiration produced another half-litre of fluid. After that there were only 20 cubic centimetres. Eventually the interventions were no longer necessary.

By then the hospital needed the room. So after about 10 days there was a great visitation headed by a General of the medical service. They sorted the wounded and had to empty some beds. In his numerous entourage there was one corpulent medic. He could have been a factory manager. He had doubtless only recently been caught by the Heldenklau, and had gone to ground in the medical service. When the swarm of doctors had passed my emergency bed, I asked that medic to hand me the inflatable pillow from the foot of the bed. He replied that I should ask someone else because he was not responsible for doing that.

I could scarcely believe my ears, and lost my temper. There I was, lying pale and hollow cheeked, hair on end from lying down, and uncut for four months, unshaven and generally run to seed, and obviously seriously wounded on a wooden bedstead. On the seat next to it was my field tunic with all its medals, including the silver wound insignia. In front of me was that fat man, with prosperity written all over him. He was all dressed up, his hair slicked down, and he had the nerve to say that he was not responsible for carrying out one small service consisting of handing over one small thing. Never before during my service as an officer had I lost control of myself before a subordinate, yelled at him, and pulled rank on him, as I had with this man.

With the last remnants of strength and breath remaining in my wretched body, bellowing, I unleashed the full fury of the frontline fighter against the ‘damned’ people behind the lines. ‘We are letting ourselves get shot to pieces out there on the front line, and this swine, who has never heard the whistle of a bullet in his life, is not responsible for handing an inflatable pillow to a seriously wounded man!’ I was going mad. Tears were choking my words. I was no longer in control of myself. Some gentlemen from the visitation at first were shocked and indignant. Then some staff came over to calm me down, while the travesty of a Samaritan hurriedly left the room.

Even more than the days, the nights in that room were full of dread. Every evening I was given morphia, but its numbing effect only lasted for a few hours. By one o’clock in the morning I would wake up in the stained bed and wait patiently for an unwilling nurse, who would get peevish having to clean things up. I had never experienced such an accumulation of misery as I had in that room. A boy near to me asked again and again for water. Shot in the stomach, he had recently been operated on and was not allowed to drink. Everybody tried to make him understand that, but failed. One moment when he was not being watched he opened his hot water bottle. I was too weak to be able to warn him as he greedily gulped down the contents. The following morning he was dead. Opposite me, another man had had both his legs shattered. Resigned and quiet, he lay on his bunk. That was the way he died.

On the other hand, those impressions, however depressing they were, gave me courage and I used them to pull myself together. I had no intention of dying. The hope of getting out was germinating in me. Certainly the town was encircled, and certainly I was not fit to be moved. In fact for days I had had a high fever, but that would pass, I hoped, and by ship or by aircraft I surely must be able to get away. I felt a hesitant joy at the fact that evidently I had got away with it again. With the greatest difficulty I managed to scribble some lines to Mother and to Gisela. Gisela received them, but Mother did not.

From there they carried me to a room on the second storey of the building. Six wooden bunks filled the room. My new comrades, all officers, were seriously wounded like me, but obviously over the hill. My right-hand neighbour was Franz Manhart, Flak-Leutnant from Grafenberg near Eggenburg in Lower Austria. (He had managed to reach the level of section head in the finance ministry in Vienna). His left upper arm had been shattered but he could hobble. Opposite was the antitank Oberleutnant Nabert from Schweidnitz, whose left arm had been amputated. As it turned out, we had a whole series of common acquaintances in Schweidnitz, including an actress from the Landestheater whom I had seen in Sudermann’s Frau Sorge. When his dressings were being changed, Nabert’s stump gave out such a stench that we regularly felt sick. On the left next to me lay a Panzer Hauptmann, whose right upper thigh had been shattered. He tried in vain to move the toes on his foot. Then he was taken to be operated on, and came back without his right leg. After waking up from the anaesthetic he felt with both hands to where his knee had been. He could still feel it. The realisation that he was an amputee hit him like a bolt of lightning. Gasping, he drew the air through his teeth, then, without making a sound, he put his hands over his face in horror. On the evening of 25 March he was taken away by members of his unit. A destroyer had intended to make a run for it during the night, and was to take him along.

As I found out after the war from Herr von Garn, our Division also sent a detachment to remove wounded men from the hospital. Obviously the group could not have carried out the order properly, because they did not find me. No doubt they had only been on the ground floor. It is idle to speculate whether I might have been lucky and subsequently reached Denmark, with the regiment, on board a ship.

The frontline was approaching. The large pocket had shrunk to a beleaguered town, and declared a Festung. An old reserve officer, an invalid from the First World War and teacher by profession, went from room to room. He tried, as a ‘NSFO’ – National Socialist officer leader – to spread confidence in victory. Nobody took him seriously any more. But I still hoped that I might be transported away. Exactly three weeks after I had been wounded, my high fever fell overnight to normal. The crisis had passed. The euphoria of the convalescent came over me. The doctor declared me to be capable of being moved.

But by then it was too late. The harbour was blockaded. Two days before, it was said, one last hospital ship had sailed out. But it had been torpedoed and had sunk with hundreds of wounded men on board. In actual fact, it was the Wilhelm Gustloff. It was sunk by a Russian submarine. There were several thousand refugees on board. Two days previously, when I was unable to be moved, I had struggled against my fate. Once again I had to learn my lesson and resign myself to the inevitable.

An elderly Leutnant from the supplies services, had been laid in the Hauptmann’s bed. He was very drunk and had obviously been injured by a bomb splinter while in that state. Soon afterwards he died, still in the state of intoxication in which no doubt he had spent the last days and hours of his life. When he was taken out, I asked for his pistol. I still had the thought of making use of it.

In the meantime Russian and British aircraft were bombing the town. Bombs fell day and night. Heavy artillery shells landed. In the park of the high school, artillery and flak went into position. The explosions of the impacts, very close by, and the sharp cracks of our own guns and cannons as they fired went on alternately. The front was right there. We lay helpless, stuck in bed, on the topmost floor of the building. On the doctors’ rounds we asked if it was possible for us to be placed in the cellar. The station medical officer replied with the words: ‘You’re surely not just a bit afraid, gentlemen?’ Saying that, he smiled, but at the same time remained for safety’s sake under the cover of the lintel of the door.

He evidently considered us to be some of those guilty for the war. He perhaps believed that we should face our just punishment in the form of a bomb. He was not allowed to gainsay it, for instance by taking us down into the cellar. Even the ward medic no longer very often summoned up the courage to climb from the cellar to the upper ward. When it was absolutely necessary he brought up food. While butter and other provisions were supposedly stored in great quantities in food depots, they dished out only thin carrot soup to us. Sometimes there were a few slices of bread spread with cheese and marmalade. Right in front of our eyes, however, the medic would still be biting pieces off a block of chocolate. When taken to task about it, he declared shamelessly that none had been issued for the wounded.

All those symptoms indicated the end to be imminent. It was a collapse that was taking place around and within us. Had we deserved that fate? Should they leave us there to kick the bucket like miserable dogs? Should they leave us to the tender mercies of the Bolsheviks? Bitterness and disappointment came over me, and doubtless also over my comrades. There was silence in the room. Nobody spoke. Everyone, lying there so wretchedly on the floor, was alone at a turning point in his life.

On 27 March 1945, the Tuesday before Easter, a bright spring morning dawned. Neither doctor nor medic appeared. The enemy artillery fire had become more and more intense. A direct hit on the wall of the building sent window-frames and panes flying crackling into the room. Then rifle fire could be heard.

Thus it was finally clear that no one else was to get out. We would be consigned to an uncertain fate. But why, I thought, should they not leave me alone there? Who was I, to be able to claim that the course of my life should be only smooth and good? I realised that I had considered myself to be too important. I realised that I had been just a tiny interchangeable part in the massive German war machinery. But by then it was obviously grinding to a halt. I reached once again for the pistol. I took hold of it, but put it down again. The thought of suicide, was at first as strong and serious as it had been that time in Powielin. But by then it was done with.

Suddenly I knew that an important part of my life was certainly coming to an end, with us losing the war. However, life even if perhaps under completely different circumstances, would go on. It would still be worth continuing to live, but not to give in to oneself. A wonderful clarity came over me. Praying, I experienced the certainty that God would not leave me in the lurch, and that he would be with us, with me. I thought long and hard about my Mother. Lost in all those thoughts I detached myself more and more, finally completely, from the situation.

Then another medic appeared. He had orders to collect up pistols and medals. He announced that the hospital had been surrendered to the Russians. He said that two doctors and ten medics had remained behind with 800 severely wounded men. ‘The white flag’, he said, ‘had already been raised’.

Another hour passed. Franz Mahnart stood at the window and reported back on the situation. He saw our infantry retreating and the Russians moving closer and closer. Meanwhile, again and again, there were moments of anxious quiet. Finally voices could be heard, announcing an approach from room to room. Andreyev shouted out several times. They were the same dull, throaty sounds that I had heard for the first time three years before in the woods at Upolosy. The voices had exactly the same effect on me as they had then. Both wings of the door were opened as the first Russian entered. His machine-pistol at the ready, he stood at the doors and looked around. Meanwhile, outside, next to the house, German shells were still falling.