In the Fire of the Eastern Front: The Experiences of a Dutch Waffen-SS Volunteer, 1941-45

CHAPTER 10 On the Eastern Front

Autumn unfolded over Klagenfurt as the successful attack on Russia was coming to an end. The hay was dried in the summer sun and stacked in the hay-barns, and the summer having been a good one offered a very good harvest. The colours of the flowers paled and ‘Mother Nature’ prepared herself for a winter sleep. However, sleep and leisure were begrudged us soldiers of the Lendorf Battalion. For us, life meant training and drilling, and drilling and training, repeating everything that we had already learned. It was cemented with visits from officers and the non-commissioned, who were posted away from the Russian front from the Wiking Division. We listened intently and in wonder to the decorated soldiers as they related to us their experiences and encounters against the Soviets. Soldiers were constantly posted to the Division in Russia, including those who were in Munich-Freimann before us and who had ended their training in Klagenfurt.

The send-off of the graduates of war, with their thirst for action, was indeed a wet one, with ‘elbow exercise’ in our canteen, as we wished them “all the best”, including my brother Evert. It was not a sad send-off. On the contrary, we made it a celebration in festive mood, giving vent to our high spirits. We were really jealous, and desperate to be included in the Victory Parade to take place on Red Square in Moscow!

The volunteers from the lands of Europe had become not only companions, but very good friends. A friend of mine, also Dutch, was Robby Reilingh from Groningen. I looked upon this twenty-year-old student almost as a brother, our friendship beginning in the first few days in Sennheim. All-in-all we were a happy bunch of wide-awake young men, who could and did laugh a lot about ourselves, as much as our daily lives allowed. We were always ready for a joke.

We didn’t usually take it too seriously either when something went awry, or we overstretched ourselves. Nor were we nasty with one another, or ridiculed each other when one of us found ourselves in an embarrassing situation. We laughed it off, in a friendly manner mostly, as in one particular exercise copied from the Fallschirmjäger divisions. In rows they fell forwards on to the grass, necessary exercise for their parachute jumps, with their feet together and hands held behind their backs. We did too, or at least we tried. This sporty exercise was not easy and we fell around laughing. It was not everyone’s cup of tea. It cost us more than a little pluck and/or a dislocated joint or two.

Another exercise produced a far more serious and macabre scorn in us. One of our chums turned out to be a ‘walking disaster’ when practising with chemical agents. We had practised this exercise time and time again, in the open air. The time came however, for us to practice changing the filter on our gas-masks in an air-tight room. We felt more than a little apprehension. Nervous tension caused our chum to fumble with the screw when changing the filter and in that moment he forgot to hold his breath! Our nervous friend had to hastily leave the room, with streaming eyes, coughing and spluttering endlessly.

Our hour of probation eventually came. Over the summer months the Wiking Division, in stubborn fighting, had pushed the enemy back to the south of the western front. In September of 1941 they were in Dnjepr. In the hundreds of miles that lay behind them, the Division had suffered very heavy losses and needed replacements of highly-trained combat-ready men. The enemy had proved to be unexpectedly tough opponents, not to be compared with the Poles in 1939, or the French in 1940. The first wave of volunteers had already proved themselves in the field. With their front experiences, in the tank and motorised divisions under General von Kleist, they had proved that they could be relied upon. The Dutch, Danish, Norwegian and Finnish soldiers had earned themselves a reputation among the General Staff. The task of the second wave was “to hold the headway made by their predecessors”, wrote Felix Steiner. We were the second wave, the graduates of the SS surrogate battalion ‘Westland’ from Klagenfurt.

The days became shorter and frost was in the air as the first powdery snow fell on the rooftops. The roads were somewhat slippery too. Marching with our backpacks, we slipped now and again on the cobbles, as we entered the old town. In the early morning hours the battalion marched from Lendorf to Klagenfurt. The route went over the long Feldkirchener road, leading to the main railway station. As we marched we took a long, last look at the Lindworm fountain. The picture-book houses with their arcades and courtyards were imprinted on our minds. Passers-by waved to us, as company after company we entered the railway station, the last ‘native’ station for us. At the station there was a lively throng. The girlfriends and sweethearts made in Lendorf, were waiting with bouquets of autumn flowers, usual for a farewell.

They stood in sharp contrast to the parents of soldiers, who lived near enough to have made the journey of farewell to their sons before they made their way to the front. Farewell parcels, containing sweet delicacies and something warm to wear, were presented by many a helpless and weeping mother, to sons who tried to comfort them with promises that they would see one another again soon. It was a moving scene.

We ‘volunteers’ from the western and north European countries did not have this problem. Our parents were too far away to travel to southern Carinthia. This moving scene came to an end, with the increasing noise of the waiting steam-engine. We had to take our seats, and settle down in one another’s trusted company. The waving girlfriends and family members disappeared in a cloud of white steam, as the train slowly pulled away to the shrill whistle of the porter.

It was to be a journey into the unknown, into a strange world. It was to be the world of war and a powerful crusade in which we were small fish. Some made themselves comfortable, lying in the luggage racks over the seats in the compartment. Soon after the departure of the train some others were speculating as to our destination. The wheels rolled over the tracks with a monotonous rhythm, so monotonous that it silenced the speculation. Few noticed the gradual change in the countryside after leaving Carinthia. We travelled slowly from the west to the east, leaving behind a friendly and magical idyll.

We passed the Wörthersee, a lake in which we had bathed, and picturesque farmhouses, where long rows of maize cobs were hanging to dry. Later in the evening, in Vienna, we crossed the Danube. Shortly after, we left behind us the Ostmark and Austria, a land then united with the Pan-German Reich. Bratislava was the next borderiess checkpoint. Not long after, we passed through the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, an unspoiled land in the middle of Europe, set between the forests of Bohemia and Tatra.

In the grey, early morning hours we reached Po land. Poorly-built shacks for houses, built upon clay or sandy soils, flashed by the window. Two years before, Poland had been the prelude and the first eastern theatre of the Second World War. Now it was the central government of the Germans. The Slavic people, from the plains between the Baltic and the Caparthian mountains, who were so often separated in the past, were now divided and mercilessly ruled in old colonial style, by both Hitler and Stalin. Krakau, i.e. Cracow, was to be our next in-between stop, en route to the Russian front. We stayed there for some weeks, for an unknown reason. At least if our officers knew, they kept it to themselves. We were found quarters in a former Polish barrack, old, uncomfortable and plagued with fleas!

Cracow, the old Polish seat of kings, was now the capital of the General Government, which in the six years of war had hardly been damaged. Poverty, however, had become rife and could not be overlooked on our trips into town. Polish prisoners of war, working for the local farmers, had much better living conditions than anyone else. Those in the Officers’ camp could study, and even further their education. Who ever believed that the lull before the storm was going to be a holiday, was very wrong. Our old lifestyle ruled our lives once more with old drills, old rules and control. Even the payment in zloty of the Polish girls, engaged in the Wehrmacht brothel, was controlled by a sergeant-major. He resided in the rooms of the former house-master and inspected our pay books, and our condoms too.

During that time our battalion was to receive a special duty, that of bodyguards, so to speak. We had to ensure the safe passage of the Fuhrer’s train as it passed through Cracow. We stood for hours on end on either side of the railway tracks, in the biting cold, with loaded carbines, waiting for the night train. The Commander-in-Chief and his staff had their quarters in two locomotives and it was our duty to save them from any planned assassination attack. Our superiors hid themselves in the darkness and randomly threw stones to check that we were awake, and that we reacted. At around midnight the rolling stock with the curious name of Amerika (from 1943 renamed the Brandenburg) with the two locomotives and two armoured anti-aircraft wagons, raced by in a white cloud of flying snow. Had he even been on the train?

Our own ‘front-express’ was on the rails again and heading in an easterly direction. Some of our master-sergeants had already been sent to the Wiking Division, which had lost many men in the fighting on the southern Russian front, in the Donets basin. We travelled alongside the river Vistula. Dams were to be seen in low-lying stretches, built against flooding. That is all that one can say for the Poles and the care of their river. It was gradually filling with sand in places, and clear to see. Two years before, many railway and pedestrian bridges across the river had been destroyed and replaced with provisional ones, built by German Army engineers.

The journey was unending and it was hours before we crossed over the San, an arm of the Vistula, and reached Lemberg. The German/Soviet demarcation-line was in that area somewhere, but there were no obvious signs of it. In fact it was very hard for us to orientate ourselves, with former state borders having disappeared in the fury of war, and former territories having been returned to the Reich. Our train had no corridor and so we had no room for movement. The compartments were small, airless and sticky. It was no wonder that we were tired and mostly disinterested in our surroundings.

The countryside through which we travelled was really no different to the eastern Polish plains. In the so-called ‘endless Soviet paradise ‘, the very thinly populated areas and colourless view offered only a lonely farmhouse now and again. It was depressing. The lights went out for the night, but for many of us sleep did not come in the darkened compartment. The continuous and monotonous sounds of the train intruded and disturbed us, making it impossible to sleep. In that twilight sleep our minds nudged the pangs of home-sickness, and a premonition or two. Innermost apprehensions came to the fore, leading to doubts as to our courage. There was nothing for it but to conquer the creeping depression, take the bull by the horns, stand by our voluntary sacrifice, and follow the dictates of our conscience.

With daybreak and our soldiers’ songs, we were our old selves again especially after our first fight with snowballs. Yet again our journey had been broken for some unknown reason. We remained for several hours in a half-destroyed railway station. Our opponents were Hungarians, but our ‘fight’ between the railway tracks with those sons of the Hungarian plains, was jovial and bloodless. Their train had been held up for some days. While we waited men who were obviously prisoners, from the look of their tattered clothes, whether Jewish or Russian being unknown to us, cleaned the compartment. They used over-large and primitive brooms, and were under the supervision of older, uniformed men. In very crude tones, they drove the prisoners to hurry. When those in our compartment were denied the crusts of bread left by us, and which we were not going to eat, it annoyed us, to the extent that one of our SS-Untersturmführer tore the overseer off a strip, for his inhuman behaviour. It was our very first experience of the fate of prisoners. Was that in store for everyone, for us too?

Once more underway, we saw wooden huts along the line, housing armed Wehrmacht guards. We also saw a message for the homebound trains along the side of the track. “Say ‘Hallo’ to the Rhine for us”, was written in black stones. The further east that our train took us, the colder it became, especially for those guards on the running-board outside the compartments, and in the icy wind of the moving train. They were on the look-out for partisan activity. Tracks and bridges were very often mined and so our locomotive pushed a goods-wagon filled with sand in front of it. The theory was that it softened the impact of an explosion and lessened the damage to train and men. Some days before, the guards of a transport train travelling on the same line, shot warning shots into the air to warn the driver of a visible explosive charge. But instead of stopping he accelerated, in the belief that partisans were attacking. Thirty men lost their lives in that explosion.

The extent of what we were to see in Tarnapol was unavoidable. The signs of encirclement and the bloody battle of the summer months were a taste of what was to come. It was almost like seeing a newsreel, with scenes of that legendary battle opening up before our eyes, in all its original bitter and savage reality. There were uncountable numbers of burnt-out tanks and other war machinery. Outlying destroyed villages showed the bitter fighting that had taken place in the area between the Carpathian mountains and the Pripyet marshes.

We then had another break in our journey for no explainable reason. It lasted for three weeks, in Vinnitsa, a middle-sized town in Ukraine. The population was passive and resigned, showing us no hostility. The reason for that undoubtedly was the social misery that they had had to endure under Stalin. One could not fail to see the utter poverty. You were not able to distinguish the men from the women on the streets. They all wore the same grey, ugly, wadded clothes, which they held together with string or suchlike. There were no buttons and no shoes. Leather shoes and fur boots were seldom to be seen. Most wore the ‘local shoe’, made from sail-cloth or raffia. The poorest of the poor had bound a piece of an old car tyre to the soles of their feet. Those conditions were hardly the outcome of the first few months of the war. In a fatal light it illustrated a classless State and was in sharp contrast to the ‘Soviet paradise’ as loudly proclaimed by the Russians.

The lack of housing in Vinnitsa was also very noticeable, as was probably true in the whole of the Soviet Un ton. For instance, we knew of a three-roomed house built in the twenties. The largest of its rooms measured five metres by five metres, in which no fewer than nine people were housed, not all of the same family. They all lived, slept, cooked and ate in that room, cooking on a paraffin-stove. There was a married couple with two small children, a bachelor engineer, a ‘worker’, and an older woman with two unmarried daughters.

Under those living conditions and as the product of the Bolshevik Regime, it is not to be wondered at that sexual morals sank to the lowest imaginable, without boundaries or control. The situation grew out of all proportion. It had its roots in inhumane politics. Year after year thousands of illegitimate children, in exploding numbers, without parents or state to look after them, gradually became a danger to the land and its people. We could assess it for ourselves. The picture was of orphans dressed in rags, without having washed or bathed for months on end, with boils, other skin infections and festering wounds. All of it made a mockery of everything and everyone who possessed a healthy, hygienic and normal standard of life.

In large numbers, those bands of orphans wandered from town to town to beg, steal and rob, in order to keep themselves ‘above water’. Already in 1941, the numbers could be assessed by non-Russian experts at some millions. The state that had caused the catastrophe, sought to solve the problem with a law that permitted youngsters from the age of twelve to be given the death sentence. As a result, the gangs armed themselves and then battled with the police. Such scenes made a very grave impression upon us. It confirmed to every one of us that Communism had to be repulsed at all costs. It also justified our presence in that land.

My friend Robby had a close contact with a Russian family, or perhaps it would be better to say, with the daughter of the family. He was very much enamoured. I had orders to accompany him on his visits and, more often than not, a loaf of bread found its way into the very modest wooden house of the family. That charitable ‘fraternisation’ released a very moving response.

To digress briefly, I would point out that six months later, in the middle of July 1942, and with the advance of the southern army groups, Hitler’s headquarters was moved to fifteen kilometres north-east of the town and on the road to Zhitomir. The new headquarters named ‘Werwolf, was nearer to the front-line and ensured a far more efficient direction and organisation of troop movement, formation and liaison.

Underway, once more, after our stay in Vinnitsa, we journeyed undisturbed, reaching the town of Uman, in the centre of Ukraine. It was not far from the airfield. We were in primitive but warm wooden barracks. Suddenly everything was hurried. Our transport to the front was no longer overland by train, but by plane.

However, bad weather delayed the flights. Day after day we marched with a full pack on our backs to the airfield, but could not take off. As the bad weather cleared, Junkers 52s of the transport squadron landed one after another, on the snow-covered airfield. Marching to the planes, we noticed two wolves, totally unimpressed or disturbed by our presence, until the noise of the starting engines drove them back into the forest.

There was a weight problem to be solved, much to our disgust, by being told that our food rations had to be left behind! We, with our insatiable appetites, were indignant at such a suggestion, and they were not going to do that to us. We solved that problem by making short work of our rations very quickly. Despite the hard and icy-cold sausages we did not give a thought to the weight, inside or outside our stomachs.

Like excited schoolboys waiting to board the bus, we finally took our places in the Tante Ju, Auntie Ju as they were called, the word Tante not always having a nice meaning. We had to sit on our rucksacks. The seats had been removed because of our numbers, but we didn’t mind this lack of luxury for were we not flying at the cost of the State? With their 600PS, BMW star motors, the Junkers prepared for take-off. It was not only the motors that started to throb. Many hearts of us first-time flyers started to beat in time with the engines too. It was a sluggish take-off for a Ju, loaded to full capacity. They headed in an easterly direction, flying over the low-lying clouds at first. Then, in order to shake off any enemy fighters, the formation reduced their height and we crowded at the large portholes.

The Russian Steppes, covered in snow, unfolded like a map beneath us. It was unending. We were astounded at the view from above, seeing dark forests and black craters in sharp contrast to the white snow. Destroyed bridges were clear to see. Now and again, an air-pocket lifted the Junkers, with its thirty metre wing-span, a foot or two into the air. We were like children on the switch-back at the fair. We let out a cry as the metal bird dropped again, like a stone. Unconcerned and naive we soaked up this new experience until, during the course of the hour-long flight, small dark spots appeared in the sky, approaching our format ion rather quickly. Enemy fighters! Then our radio operator rose hastily, and dressed in a thick fur-lined jacket, brown leather cap, goggles, and with a cartridge-belt slung over his shoulders, went to take his position at the rear of the plane, at the machine gun position. It was open to wind and weather. Only then did we realise how serious the situation was. The slow and clumsy Junkers, with a maximum speed of 270 kms per hour, would have been a very easy target for the Soviets. But luck was on our side that day, for suddenly they turned and disappeared into the horizon. We, as flying infantry, somehow had a feeling of being the ‘victors of the air’.

Our joviality was to disappear very quickly with the increased turbulence. Face after face lost its pink colour, slowly turning to an ill-looking white. Many rued the hasty consumption of their rat ions, which now landed undigested in hastily emptied gas-mask cases. There was nothing else available. There were no exceptions, all of us, but all of us were horribly air-sick. Busy only with ourselves, we did not notice, some time later, when our Junkers approached a landing strip with very provisional markings.

With the motors still running, we sprang from the ice-cold Junkers. I cannot impress enough how good it was to have the earth under our feet once more. Shivering with the cold, we ran through flurries of snow to a large, open hangar. There a log-fire burned in an empty oil-barrel, to warm our frozen joints. At that time, we had no clue as to where we were, only later did we learn that the airfield had the name of Orel. Shortly after, it was clear to us that the town did not lie in the south, near Dnjepr, but in the centre of the Soviet Union and on the river Oka. We had flown in a straight north-easterly course over Kiev and had landed roughly 250 kilometres from Moscow. It meant that we were not to fight with the Wiking Division, and the question was ‘why’?

The English historian, David Irving, in his research for his book on Hitler and his generals, came up with the answer to the question that we were then asking. In a tense situation caused by the bitter Russian winter, Hitler had taken over as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, from Field-Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, just before the attack on Moscow. His orders were for fanatical resistance, and no consideration for the enemy who had broken through the flanks or at the rear. He had given the order for replacement troops to be sent from the Waffen SS and at the shortest notice possible, by air. They had to act as ‘flying firemen’ to support the troops who found themselves in a very tense and dangerous situation, in the middle sector of the front.

In his observations David Irving summed-up by saying, that in those dark months of the winter of 1941, Hitler displayed his determination, combined with the legendary strength of the German soldier, who bore every hardship. On the evening of our arrival in Orel we witnessed, from the edge of the airfield, a huge fire-ball, followed by a hefty explosion. Upon landing, a four-engined Focke-Wulf-Condor plane had crashed, killing all of the passengers, mainly Generals, but it had not been attacked.

The Junkers 52 were no luxury machines and had deficiencies, in comparison with today’s planes. There was no heating and no toilets. One of those deficiencies endangered the take-off of the Junkers that we had just used, upon its turn-around. One of our chums, in his moment of need during our flight, had used a half empty petrol canister in the rear of the plane as a pissoir, not knowing that the mixture of urine and petrol was not digestible for a Junkers, robust as it was. It gave the pilot a couple of uncomfortable minutes.

We spent the night in that hangar, with temperatures of minus thirty degrees. Our journey the next morning was in goods wagons in which we had an iron stove. We could huddle around and thaw our deeply frozen joints with the added small comfort of fresh straw covering the floor. It did not therefore take very long before we oiled our vocal cords and were singing our old songs. More than once, snowdrifts stopped our train and we had to alight and shift the snow. Those who were first to jump from the wagons unexpectedly landed in chest-high drifts. It happened more than once. So we shovelled ourselves free for the rest of the journey, from one drift to another.