Broken Lives Read online

  The Wehrmacht also made arrangements for the sexual urges of the soldiers, which intensified in a male company facing potential death. Many young men were still inexperienced and channeled their fantasies into ribald jokes. When Erich Helmer wanted to meet a girlfriend, his noncom bellowed, “without a condom, no liberty,” forcing him to beg one from his comrades, much to his embarrassment. In France, Hans Queiser was ordered to make use of a “plush bordello” populated by local prostitutes. “In spite of service in five minute intervals, queues formed in the street.” His own experience was not exactly appealing. “To be sure the little French woman who took me to her room was friendly, but rapidly ‘took care of business.’” Erich Helmer was shocked to encounter Jewish women who had been forced to choose between a “KZ or bordello …! What kind of human beings are these who order something like that?”50 Such facilities were supposed to decrease venereal disease and rape at the price of reducing lovemaking to a biological act.

  Another measure to restore the spirit was the granting of furloughs in order to get away from the violence of combat and see loved ones. Before being shipped out to the front, Gerhard Krapf enjoyed a couple of precious weeks at home, getting ready for the challenges to come. By contrast, Erich Helmer risked disciplinary action by sneaking away from his unit on weekends to spend time with his girlfriend, fortunately escaping the censure of a couple of zealous party members. When Karl Härtel received “five days of furlough,” he traveled home to Breslau in overcrowded trains, “coming completely unexpectedly” for Christmas. “Nonetheless, or perhaps because of the surprise, the joy of our reunion was especially great.” Such breaks from military discipline allowed soldiers to savor free time in a peaceful setting that reminded them what they were fighting for. Mothers, especially, used the opportunity to lavish love on their sons by feeding and caring for them because they might never see them again.51

  A more painful way to escape combat was to be wounded seriously enough to be shipped home, but not so gravely as to die. Scouting an enemy artillery position, Gerhard Krapf “felt a sharp rap at my left elbow and—somehow I seemed to have sprained my ankle [and] fell backwards” because he was being “shot at with an automatic pistol.” Playing dead face-down in the mud, he used a shell explosion nearby to scramble back to his unit, where a medic cut open his boot and diagnosed a bullet in his ankle. “Moaning and thrashing about” at night, he was then wheeled on a cart to an assembly point and from there taken by motorized ambulance to a triage station that sent him on to a field hospital. After making sure that he was not faking, a fanatical Nazi doctor had him loaded on “a hospital train” to the rear where more extensive examination revealed that the elbow had been grazed but the bullet that had gone through the right foot had smashed his heel bone.52 This was a classic Heimatschuss, requiring therapy at home.

  In contrast to the improvised first-aid behind the lines, soldiers experienced the treatment in military hospitals in Germany as a real relief. “Spanking clean, beautiful white linen, fresh smelling blankets, good mattress … what luxuries!” Gerhard Krapf remembered. He found the nurses solicitous, and the doctors competent. “What a wonderful feeling it was to be home in Germany, and in such a lovely place, as yet totally untouched by the war.” Though Hans Tausch was wounded in the left heel as well, he was delighted not to have been killed: “I had gotten away with it again.” Due to an accident that required three operations on his left foot, Paul Frenzel was hospitalized for several months, but eventually discharged as no longer fit for military duty. Krapf’s and Tausch’s rehabilitation also took time, requiring lengthy physical therapy and a stint of duty in the reserves, but eventually they recovered sufficiently to be sent back to the front.53 A moderately severe wound was therefore a ticket home—at least for a time.

  Being at home also allowed young men to renew their romantic relationships. The uncertainty of war often led to a more rapid consummation than during peacetime. After another affair, Erich Helmer discovered the love of his life in Gretel and persuaded her on the spot to become his bride. Even if it had not been infatuation at first sight, but “a deepening affection,” Karl Härtel and Erna Katterwe also decided to become engaged due to “the confrontation with this miserable war.” Against the opposition of his status-conscious father, Paul Frenzel resolved to get married to a spirited working-class girl, “his Martel,” since he was making enough money in war production to support a young family. “Happy to have found one another,” BdM leader Ruth Kolb and Waffen SS soldier Rolf Bulwin tied the knot in a secular Nazi wedding ceremony called “marriage consecration.” They vowed to enter “a union of fidelity to each other and our Führer.” The registrar enjoined them “to become a family, blessed by many children.”54

  When the war dragged on and on, the young soldiers gradually gave up hope for a quick ending and became cynical about Nazi propaganda. Gradually the victory announcements of the Wehrmacht on the radio, popularly known as “Goebbels’ snout,” lost their impact as the fighting continued. Also, party slogans such as “the Führer commands—we’ll follow” sounded more and more hollow, because it was not clear where the voyage would lead. Instead anti-Nazi jokes circulated in the barracks. One favorite was: “A real German is blond like Hitler, athletic like Göring, clear-eyed like Himmler, with physical prowess like Goebbels.” (This was funny because the Führer had dark hair, the air force head was fat, the SS leader wore glasses, and the propaganda chief had a club foot.) And another, after Hitler’s deputy surprisingly flew to England: “Churchill asks Hess, Are you the crazy one?’ ‘No sir,’ Hess replies, ‘I am his deputy.’”55 While the mood at the front turned sour, the less-informed public still believed in the Führer and final victory.

  In spite of the continually increasing death toll of their comrades, the young soldiers continued to fight. Karl Härtel described his shock upon receiving a letter with the news that his older brother had just died. “Every day one could read about the heroic death of unknown people, but when it concerned my own brother, I had to recognize that behind every one of the many little notices towered an immense mountain of pain and suffering.” Mothers usually took bereavement harder than fathers, who tended to rationalize the need for military sacrifices. Even if other siblings had already passed away in peacetime, the pain was intense, since Hans “was an outstanding member of our family and its whole pride [was] due to his achievements” as an officer. Similarly, Erich Helmer was inconsolable when in April 1945 he received the telegram “Your brother Justus has been killed in action.”56 While this traumatic scene was repeated in thousands of families, memorial ceremonies heroicized such deaths as service to the fatherland.

  INEXORABLE DEFEATS

  Hitler’s invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941 once again changed the character of the war, this time from lightning strikes to plodding attrition. The Balkan detour to bail out Mussolini in the spring was the last Blitzkrieg, though it cost time, materiel, and manpower that could not be replaced. Skeptics who believed that “those Italians can’t carry water in a bucket” were reassured by the daring exploits of Rommel’s Africa Corps. But the attack on Russia was another matter. The Soviet Union was a vast country with a large population and immense natural resources. All leaves were cancelled, new recruits like Heinz Schultheis were called up, and war production was raised to a higher level. One morning during training, Schultheis’s sergeant woke up the troops to convey the shocking news: “War with the Soviet Union!” Since the mutually beneficial neutrality had seemed “like quite a stroke of genius of our great Führer,” the announcement caught soldiers unawares. But “now everyone knew: This war will last a long, long time!”57

  The initial months of the Russian campaign belied such forebodings. The Wehrmacht advanced with dazzling speed. In spite of intelligence warnings, Stalin was surprised and Russian defenses in Eastern Poland were overrun relatively quickly. In forced marches, lugging heavy gear, German soldiers then poured into Ukraine and Belarus. “Almost daily huge victories
were announced,” Gerhard Baucke remembered. “In great encirclement battles thousands upon thousands of prisoners and big amounts of war materiel fell into German hands.” Ethnic Germans, Ukrainians, and Tartars “greeted us as liberators from Bolshevism, asked us into their clean, pretty houses and entertained us with what little they had left.” According to Horst Grothus, the pictures of “emaciated POWs” shown in newsreels “confirm[ed] everything we had expected from the Russian subhumans.”58 When the Wehrmacht reached the gates of Moscow, Nazi leaders and followers succumbed to the illusion that the war had already been won.

  The Soviet counteroffensive quickly proved that Russia was not about to collapse; it halted the German advance and made the invaders defend their gains. Hellmut Raschdorff remembered the wet fall “in which we almost drowned in the mud,” because the rain rendered the dirt roads impassable. “Then inexorably a winter approached whose rigors we could not imagine.” The Wehrmacht troops were unprepared for the severity of the cold, which reached −50C°, forcing them to stuff their boots with newspaper and wear “two undershirts, two briefs, overalls, and on top the uniform and coat.” These incredibly low temperatures halted supplies, stopped tanks in their tracks, shattered metal gun barrels, and froze the food. Attacking with fresh troops transferred from the Far East of Russia, the Red Army used its devastating rocket launchers and the unstoppable T-34 tanks.59 The astounded Germans were forced to retreat from the outskirts of Moscow, stabilizing their lines only by desperate efforts further west.

  Though the Wehrmacht and its Finnish allies were able to encircle Leningrad, they proved unable to conquer it. Heinz Schultheis was sent to reinforce the stranglehold of German forces around the city with his motorized antiaircraft battery. The troops were shocked by the cold, which even a special decoration, colloquially called the “frozen flesh medal,” could not alleviate. “This winter has saved the Soviet Union.” Shooting down fighter planes like the Ilyushin 2 from fortified bunkers soon became routine. But even continual German dive-bomber attacks failed to cut the last remaining supply line into the city, which was always repaired overnight. Hitler then made a “decidedly criminal” decision, condemning the besieged city to starvation. “The ‘success’ of this unsoldierly, deeply dishonorable and rather characterless order were 750,000 mostly civilian victims.” After stopping the first assault, the Russian defenders rallied and counterattacked and finally broke the encirclement after two bloody years.60

  While the Wehrmacht was bogging down in Russia, “the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor broke,” further complicating the strategic situation. “A few days later Hitler declared war on the United States,” expanding the “war in Europe [into] a new world war, which now got the ordinal number two.” The belittling claim “many enemies—much honor” struck Gerhard Baucke as “a stupid propaganda phrase!” Due to Washington’s manpower and industrial production, Gerhardt Thamm’s father thought that “this time [Hitler] overstepped himself” and that “he had no idea how strong and big America really was.” Hitler’s error was compounded by a signal lack of military coordination between the Axis allies. Bent on conquering raw materials from Western colonies, Japan missed the opportunity of attacking Russia from the rear. While it took time before the military consequences of that fateful decision became clear, critical minds instinctively understood that the entry of the United States meant “that Germany would lose the war for sure.”61

  The Russian stalemate and the US entry forced Nazi Germany to make a more systematic effort to mobilize its manpower and materiel reserves to make up for its structural inferiority. One effect was extending the draft to younger age cohorts, those born in the mid-1920s. Gerhard Krapf’s high-school instruction was broken off and his classmates received their graduation diplomas one year early. Moreover, wounded soldiers such as Paul Frenzel who had been dismissed were called up and shipped back to the front lines in the East. The military physicians steadily lowered their requirements for combat duty in order to fill the thinning ranks. At the same time, the output of war production was increased so as to provide the necessary tanks and airplanes for a prolonged struggle. Finally, Goebbels’ propaganda began to predict “the total enslavement of the German people” in case of defeat. Instead of confidence in victory, the soldiers’ mood deteriorated to “resignation and fatalism—soon it was only a matter of survival.”62

  During the summer of 1942, the Wehrmacht launched another strike to regain the initiative in the East by moving toward the oilfields of the Caucasus. “We attacked Soviet units marching toward the front and rolled over the Russian artillery positions,” Hans Tausch remembered. “As quickly as we showed up, we disappeared in wide steppe. Thereby we struck the enemy, but were no longer able to mount large operations with far-flung objectives as in the year before.” Nonetheless, Benno Schöffski’s outfit “could see in the distance the 5,600-meter-high Mount Elbrus,” on which some intrepid alpinists had managed to plant the German flag. In early fall, these advances carried the German troops into the outskirts of Stalingrad, a large industrial city that commanded the crossing over the Volga River. Its strategic position as the hinge of the entire Southeastern front meant that the Wehrmacht absolutely wanted to conquer it, while the Soviet defenders were willing to fight to the last man in order to hold it.63

  The decisive battle that shook the Wehrmacht’s confidence and turned the tide of the war in the East therefore took place at Stalingrad. The close house-to-house fighting negated its advantages in tank mobility and artillery firepower, favoring the Red Army’s desperate resistance with small arms and willingness to die for the motherland. The attackers managed to clear most of the western part of city except for a small enclave, but failed to get to the eastern side of the river. Arriving in January 1942 at the outskirts, Robert Neumaier found the conditions terrible. Already a large number of his comrades had been killed at the train station with a grenade. He then had to dig into the icy soil to create a foxhole for protection, was forced to warm his frozen food in his pocket before he could eat it, and developed scabies from not being able to wash. “At the dawn the Russians stormed down from the hills upon our positions” shouting a terrible “Urrrray, Urrrray.” Although machine gun fire stopped their attacks, “we grew more and more afraid that would no longer get out alive.”64

  The outcome of the struggle was decided by a Russian counterattack at the periphery. North of the city, the Soviet forces “had punched a wide hole into the front composed of weak German and allied units,” turning west and then southward, thereby trapping the entire Sixth Army at Stalingrad. Though Hitler had vowed “nobody else will get to where a German soldier has gone,” his command to Field Marshal Paulus not to retreat sealed the invaders’ fate when Field Marshal von Manstein’s effort to break the encirclement failed. A courageous battalion commander nonetheless “ordered a breakout in the direction of Millerowo.” The Russians let the soldiers pass, then killed nine hundred of the 1,200 men by running over fleeing Germans, Italians, and Romanians with tanks. Suddenly Neumaier faced a Soviet soldier with his rifle drawn. “We looked at each other, neither of us shot, we nodded and separated.” Unlike the 150,000 dead and ninety-one thousand captured Germans, by joining the desperate flight he “escaped the Hell of Stalingrad.!!!”65

  Gradually soldiers and civilians realized that this defeat “marked the turning point of the war which, from then on, was no longer winnable.” Gerhardt Thamm remembered that “the whole country was in mourning, yet we were also proud of our soldiers.” The problem was that “other devastating news” followed this tragedy. “In May 1943 some 250,000 Germans and Italians were captured in North Africa” when the Anglo-American forces surrounded the vaunted Africa Corps. In late July, the Fascist Grand Council voted 16 to 9 to depose Mussolini, and in early September Italy switched to the Allied side. Retrained as a parachutist, Robert Neumaier reported, “The Italian barracks close to us were stormed during the night.” In the battle for Rome “we met strong resistance,” but
his small force actually succeeded in capturing the city. More important was the failure of the Wehrmacht attack at Kursk in the largest tank battle in history, in which the Germans squandered their new Panthers and Tigers without regaining the initiative.66

  One of the chief reasons for the turning of the military tide was the seemingly inexhaustible manpower of the Red Army and its willingness to take casualties. Still new at the front, Gerhard Krapf had to face a Russian infantry charge in which “all hell broke loose.” The attack began with an artillery barrage with hundreds of guns shelling furiously for over two hours, making “horrendous noise” and heaving the earth. Krapf’s “stomach was registering all this with ‘knotting together,’” and he “cowered down at the floor of the trench, seeking protection.” One of his men “had been hit, his left eye was hanging out of its socket.” And then the Russians came: “In one huge line they advanced, running in short spurts … shouting a piercing ‘Urrrrray.’” The German defenders “responded with calmly aimed machine gun and carbine fire. But on and on they came, a second, a third line.” Fortunately, Krapf got his jammed machine gun working again. “The Russian attack had faltered, they had sustained tremendous losses. Ours were relatively small.”67