Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II

Chapter 1: The View from Below

Burrowed deep into the snowbound desolation of the late Russian winter, shaken and exhausted by the horrors of the "ghostly weeks of defensive battles" that had just passed, Giinter von Scheven in March 1942nonetheless exalted the German Landser (foot soldier or infantryman ). "I don't believe that today in Germany any artistic feat can equal the performance of a simplesoldier, whoholds his position under aheavy barrage in a hopeless situation," he wrote in a heartfelt letter to his father. "This unknown soidier cries again in nameless greatness over the battlefield . . . . Anonymous, seen by only a few comrades, silent, he dies a lonely death,goes over intothe inaccessible, his mortal remains absorbed into the abyss of the east as if he had never existed." Scheven expressed well the sense of existential loneliness felt by many of these men, a despair based on the fear that theirs was a silent scream,without echo in the vast wasteland of war. "Generals have sincewritten accountsof these events, locating particular catastrophes, and summarizing in a sentence, or a few lines, the losses," Guy Sajer noted bitterly in his aptly named autobiography, The Forgotten Soldier, "but they never, to my knowledge , give sufficient expression to the wretchedness of soldiers abandoned to a fate one would wish to spare even the most miserable cur. They never evoke the hours upon hours of agony.. .. They never mention the common soldier, sometimes covered with glory, sometimes beaten and defeated . . . , confounded by murder and degradation, and later by disillusion, when he realizes that victory will not return him his liberty."' To the south, in the Crimea, Alois Dwenger expressed similar sentiments. "I am often angered by the hollow accounts from incompetent pens," he noted scornfully in May 1942. Recently I read a report of an attack where .. . they recounted so many details and in the process forgot the everyday life of the war, the actions of simple soldiers. These simple infantrymen are, without doubt, heroes. There in his hole .. .lies only abndser, and he may not stick his nose out without getting it cracked and yet he must observe the enemy. Therefore he always peeks carefully out from cover, any moment a bullet can hit him. Shells strike every day . . .shaking and spraying the ground, the dugout trembles, shrapnel whistles overhead. In the nights, where nothing is to be seen but more heard, the eyes tearing from perpetual staring, the imagination working feverishly, he sits wrapped in his shelter half, freezing, hour after hour, listening with strained nerves. In the gray dawn he crawls into the dugout, frozen through and dead tired; it iscrowded,damp, loud,half-dark; the lice torment. I believe that true heroism lies in bearing this dreadful everyday life.2 Over fifty years later, much of Dwenger's complaint regarding the neglect of the Landser, or what the men themselves more vulgarly called the SchiitzeArsch, remains true. Although the average soldier has been at the center of events in this century of wars, historians have traditionally focused on matters "at the top": the strategy, tactics, decision-making , and organization whlch, although of undeniable importance, do not constitute the whole of war. From this perspective, the common soldier appeared only as an object, a mere vehicle for receiving and carrying out orders. "Depersonalized, the anonymous crowd thatjust receives orders performs the events [ofthis drama]," Claus Hansmann complained in his diary. "A strategic picture far removed from the bloody tragedy. What's that got to do with him who stands at the top? He can't hear the screams, nor the agitated panting. . . .Is he supposed to think about them, the seven that the Dnieper carried off, is he supposed to calculate how farthey have now gone, how soggy their uniforms are, how pale their faces? Is he supposed to think about the hearts that are breaking at this moment, the mothers, wives, children?" Little wonder, then, that Hansmann branded "the soldier's existence [as] merely an oath to the death." "The soldier must have so much luck and so often," lamented another Landser in The View from Below 3 hauntingly similar terms. "Soldier's oath, soldier's joy, soldier's tunes, soldier's death, everything is one!"3 War, even the most primitive, as Robin Fox points out, has always been a complicated, intricate,highly organized actof human imagination and intelligence, so the fascination with the "larger" dimensions of war is readily understandable. But as...