Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II

Chapter 9: The Lost Years

Writing in his diary from the eastern front in early May 1942, Helmut Pabst reflected on the personal impact of the war: "The soul .. . becomes still harder and more serious, further removed from petty things. A harsh judgment molds you, which can leave you badly marked." Still, in an attempt to give a positive sense to what otherwise might seem lost years, Pabst insisted: But in front of the bleak ground of our existence . . . the beauty of our lost youth appears in a gleaming radiance. .. . All of us have cut ourself off from a carefree life. But that leads not to weariness, not to resignation, for it is . . . a question of asserting yourself. . . .The will to life unfolds powerfully. . . .You live for the moment. . . .Just to live is happiness. But even in the serious moments you feel a life full of content. It is bitter and sweet, all and one, . ..because we have learned to see the essential. . . . In such hours emerges a will to . . . build a second life out of our knowledge. This will rules us with such a power that in this instant the soul cannot be damaged. Almost exactly a year later Pabst returned to the theme of time lost: "Our life has its age. When the years diminish ...you can only grit your teeth. It is childish to think that we might be compensated for this. For what possibilities a personal life loses with the peeling away of the years cannot be made up. .. . But perhaps it is also childish to speak of this subject anyway. Itell myself that, because more than in allprevious wars our thoughts turn on the sense of events. And I see my attitude in this question neither fully clarified nor free of doubts."' Although Pabst himself, killed in Russia in September 1943,lived neither to confront the meaning of the war nor to discover whether one could recover lost years, his reflections accurately foreshadowed the experiences of many who did survive. At the end of the war, with Germany collapsing and chaos all around, the immediate goal of most Landsers was simply to escape the Kettenhunde-the guard dogs of the military police--or the roving courts martial of the SS and get home alive. As one put it succinctly, "My first priority was naked survival,not moral regenerationM2 But aslife returned to some semblanceof stability, if not normality, they inevitably began to look for meaning in their activities. Most had mixed feelings, realizing as they did the horrors of war yet also perceiving, however reluctantly, something positive in their experiences. For virtually all, the war had been a watershed, impossible either to dismiss or to forget. Branded by its harshness, these men sensed that they remained linked with others who had participated and, equally, that an outsider could not possibly understand the world they had endured-hence their feeling of isolation, as if they were in society but yet detached from it. Part of the problem in coming to terms with their war experience stemmed from the fact that the ordinary Landser saw himself as a decent fellow. As Alfons Heck, a former Hitler Youth leader and soldier, confessed , "I never once during the Hitler years thought of myself as anything but a decent, honorable young German."3Precisely because of that self-perception it proved difficult for many to bear when, at the end of the war and later, they were told that the things they had done asyoung men-hard and distasteful things that had cost the lives of so many of their friends,were not only mistaken but evil.This verdict was especially perplexing to those who in their own eyes had merely sought to do what they had been told was their duty.Now their experiences seemed stripped of any meaning. Some clung to National Socialist values and continued to believe in the old leaders in order to lend their deeds and sacrifices some purpose. Others sank into a sullen apathy or gave way to bitter disillusionment with politics, in either case withdrawing into a private world that few could enter. For many who had known only faith in Hitler, obedience, and fighting, the end of the war brought a crumbling of their value system, and with their belief in Hitler shattered they found themselves left with The Lost Years only a sense of emptiness and painful disappointment. "The world appears hopeless and bleak to...