Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II

Chapter 6: The Many Faces of War

Through long hours of boredom and loneliness, deprivation and hardship, horror and agony, the Landser soon became familiar with many of the myriad faces of war. Still,as Giinter von Scheven observed, "This endless, sinister war brings the deepest layers of our being into turmoil." Conscious of "an enormous . . . change," Scheven wrote that "individual fates evaporated in the limitless expanses [of Russia]." But this, he added pensively, was both "a painful and yet a pleasant experience ." For the anonymous soldier, the real war was intensely personal, tragic yet ironic, agonizing but also magnificent, a frightful harvest of emotions, and, above all, deeply sensory. "We are branded in our strengths and passions," noted Siegfried Roemer in December 1941,"by war and its demands."' Fear was the real enemy of most Landsers: fear of death or of cowardice, fear of the conflict within the spirit, or, echoing Montaigne's claim, a simple fear of showing fear. Men felt haunted, hollowed on the inside by pockets of fear that would not go away, caught in the grip of something enormous about to overwhelm them. Still, the notion that combat constituted a test in which mistakes were counted in blood, and which one dreaded to fail, served as a motivating force for countless soldiers. "We fought from simple fear," Guy Sajer maintained, "which was our motivating power." Whether assured ("I go intobattle confident, happy, and undaunted and take up the test of life with pride"), hopeful ("These tests must have a blessed effect on us"), or doubtful ("Who among us knows if he will pass the test"), many Landsers would have agreed with Karl Fuchs, who maintained that "a man must prove himself in battle." In a letter written to his wife on the eve of his initiation into combat, Fuchs claimed: "A man ... has two souls in difficult times; indeed, he must have two: The one soul expresses the sincere wish to be home with his beloved; the other soul wants to be engaged in battle and to be victorious. This feeling for battle and victory must be the more important in a man. .. .Life, by definition, means struggle and he who avoidsthis struggle orfearsit is adespicable coward and doesnotdeserve to live."2 Aharsh, Nazified social Darwinism, perhaps, although most Landsers would have agreed with the more prosaicjudgment of a captain who ruefully admitted that it "would certainly be easierto experiencethe war from at home, but I would be ashamed of myself if I were not here." Similar thoughts were betrayed by Harry Mielert. "If I have to be in the war," he concluded, "I want . . .to belong to the frontmost men, to the little men whocarry on the real war with only their weapons andphysical strength." Still, he acknowledged, "it is difficult to preserve one~elf."~ Most men knew full well which foe they had to steel themselves against. Preparing for his first action, Guy Sajer watched his closest friend "trying to build up his nerve. Inreality everyonefeelsconsiderable emotion. . . . The idea of war terrifies us." Similarly, on the eve of the invasion of the Soviet Union, Claus Hansmann observed: "Interwoven desires, fears, and uncertainties are the content of this night. .. .There on the border bridge is the first man that this day will demand. We know already how long his life is still to be measured." Others feared not war in general so much as their specific response to it. "Anxiety often seizes me," Ernst Kleist admitted in May 1940, "not anxiety about battle or death. But events have grown so gigantic that I feel myself much smaller than nothing." "I will not be a coward, so I pray a lot to God," wrote Walther Happich. "I know against which opponent I have to fight." In the last lines written in his diary, Klaus Wilms asserted, "There must be fightingand searching in life;fighting forthe necessities of life,yes, even with the dark powers within yourself." Friedrich Grupe, before going on patrol in a dense thicket teeming with Russians, found it necessary to strugglewith his fear, "to overcome the innerSchweinehund." As Private H.S. put it succinctly, "We must often conquer ourselve~."~ This was a conflict of the spirit, "a frightful fact that must be endured," as Harry Mielert put it. "The battlefield constantly provokes a shudder in me," he wrote. "I would like no longer to see the dead and The Many Faces of War 137 the squirting, streaming...