When the train reached the Hamburg station about noon that day, I headed over to the shop where Anneliese was working. Taking off her apron, she joined me for a stroll through the station and into the adjoining neighborhood. Reaching a quiet spot at the north side of the station, I presented her with an expensive bottle of perfume that I had purchased in Verviers. As she embraced me in thanks, the bottle slipped from her hand and shattered, filling the whole area with a powerful aroma. It did not seem like a promising omen.
Anneliese and I were still involved, but had never agreed to pursue an exclusive relationship. In fact, there was a very pretty girl from the Ruhr city of Duisburg who I had encountered fleetingly back in 1937 when she had been visiting her relatives in Püggen. Three years after this initial meeting, I decided to renew our acquaintance and somehow obtained her address.
After we had exchanged a couple of letters, the girl agreed to allow me to come visit her in the Ruhr on my way back to Belgium, unaware that I would be coming from my brief visit with Anneliese in Hamburg. Our subsequent evening together in Duisburg inclined the girl to favor a more serious relationship, though it made me realize that my attraction was only to her looks.
Less than a month later, I joined in a drinking session with Schütte, my comrade from boot camp, and a few other enlisted men in our quarters in Verviers. Growing increasingly inebriated, we began to complain about our difficulties with our girlfriends back home. When the suggestion was made that we should write letters dumping them, we all swore to one another we would do just that.
This drunken promise gave me the final push to break off my close relationship with Anneliese, something that I had already been considering. Composing my thoughts in a letter on January 10, I told her that I was not ready for the serious commitment that she sought. We were too young to get married, especially when it was uncertain whether I would even survive the war.
While there had been no further correspondence with the girl in Duisburg in the weeks since my visit, I still felt compelled to inform Anneliese that I had met someone else. Without going into detail, I said that the relationship was not serious, but that I did not wish to go behind her back and cheat on her. Even if I had no intention of seeing the girl in Duisburg again, it just seemed to me that Anneliese and I should both feel free to see whom we desired. Concluding my thoughts, I conveyed my sincere wish for us to remain friends and keep in touch. Much later, I learned that she cried for days when she received the letter.
Late in 1940, meanwhile, each regiment of our division had been ordered to surrender one of its three battalions to serve as an experienced nucleus for new divisions. Similar to the earlier pattern, the loss of these battalions was made up by freshly trained recruits. Clearly, the army was still undergoing an expansion in size, though none of us were aware of the ultimate purpose.
That spring, our division traveled 25 miles to the east for a week or two of intensive training at a sprawling facility beside the Belgian town of Elsenborn, just across the border from Germany. In bonechilling rain, we carried out battalion-sized military maneuvers in close coordination with Panzers and the Luftwaffe. While we in the communications platoon repeatedly practiced stringing telephone and telegraph lines from the front to the rear, our company’s gun crews drilled on the howitzers with live ammunition. By the end of the exercises, our skills were honed to a fine edge.
On April 21, 1941, our Vorkommando (advance team) left for the east. Two days later, our division was issued 24-hours notice to prepare to leave Belgium. Even if some of the staff had been involved in advanced planning for our transfer, organizing a move was a time-consuming task due to the number of horses and volume of equipment. The lack of more advance notice was inconvenient to planners, but was intended to keep our relocation as secret as possible.
Late in the afternoon of April 24, most of our division’s troops were ready to leave, though some elements would join us later. Boarding our trains in Verviers, we still lacked any information about our destination. Not even our company commander knew where we were headed. During our journey across Germany, everyone around me was wondering out loud, “Where the heck are we going?” “What will happen next?”
A funny thing about military life is the prevalence and power of rumors. The atmosphere was charged with excitement and anticipation as various theories raced around the train about our mission. Conjecture focused on a destination somewhere up north. Some predicted, “We are headed to Finland.” With equal confidence, other troops maintained, “We are going to Sweden.” Both rumors proved wrong.
Chapter 6
BLITZKRIEG INTO RUSSIA
April–July 1941
PRELUDE TO INVASION
April 24–June 22, 1941
Traveling east-northeast into Germany, our train passed through the hometowns of many of the troops in Hamburg and Lubeck without stopping. During the 30-hour trip, only brief halts were made to change the locomotives before the journey continued. After traveling roughly 625 miles from Verviers, we finally disembarked at the city of Elbing in East Prussia.
From there, our division immediately set out on the first of two night marches. When dawn broke, we halted in the woods beside the road for a meal of cold rations. Hidden from any air surveillance by the trees above us, we rested on our canvas bedrolls in the warmth of the day before returning to the march as darkness fell.
On reaching Heiligenbeil about 25 miles northeast of Elbing at the end of April, we took up our quarters in barracks. During the next six weeks, our training exercises intensified, which only increased speculation regarding our mission.
The majority of those around me continued to anticipate that we were going to be part of a military operation somewhere in Scandinavia. Most of us found it very difficult to imagine that Germany would attack Russia. The Russo-German Nonaggression Pact signed in August 1939 probably influenced our mindset, but it was also simply the scale of the Soviet Union that tended to make the prospect of invasion difficult to conceive.
By this time, war news had grown to be routine and received scant attention. The Afrika Korps’ arrival in North Africa to assist the Italians in early 1941 as well as Germany’s occupation of Yugoslavia and Greece later that spring elicited only limited interest among those around me. Though I personally attempted to follow the German air assault on Crete at the end of May, such distant developments seemed to be of little direct consequence to us.
On June 8, our division departed on a further series of night marches to another undisclosed destination. The journey ended three days later at Labiau, about 50 miles northeast of Heiligenbeil. Billeted at a concealed site in the woods, we continued to prepare for an unspecified large operation, but now did so covertly.
Positioned so close to Soviet-controlled territory in Lithuania, there was increasing suspicion that Russia might be the target after all, though a degree of uncertainty still prevailed. Isolated in the woods, we failed to see the massing of infantry, Panzers, and artillery around us that would be necessary for a major operation. With the port of Memel nearby, it also still appeared possible that we might receive orders to embark on ship for a voyage across the Baltic Sea for some type of mission in support of Germany’s ally, Finland. As far as the timing of any potential operation, we remained completely in the dark.
Just after my twenty-first birthday, on June 17, orders came down to us that the invasion of Russia was at hand. Almost immediately after receiving the directive to prepare for the attack, we set out from Labiau on a long but rapid march to another forested bivouac area in the northeastern corner of East Prussia at Heydekrug, a little north of Tilsit. This would place us less than 10 miles from Russian-controlled territory in Lithuania, which the Soviet Red Army had occupied just a year earlier.
Perhaps surprisingly, there was no real discussion or debate over this momentous news among the troops around me. Instead, there was almost a sense of relief that our weeks of waiting and uncertainty were over. We now had our orders and we immedi
ately focused on preparing for war.
It is also true that, as young men, we possessed little tendency to ponder matters deeply. That may indeed be an essential quality for a soldier. If you ordered a company of middle-aged soldiers into combat, you would probably have a problem getting them to fight without convincing them of the necessity of their action. It was not that we soldiers were unconcerned about what was going to happen, but we were conditioned to obey orders as soldiers in a fighting unit.
Though most of the men around me had little or no interest in politics, it was nonetheless apparent to all of us at the time that war between Germany and Russia would be of great historical significance. When German troops and the public back home learned of the invasion of the USSR, most reacted with a deep sense of uncertainty, very different from the mood prevailing at the start of the campaign in the West. The questions that circulated reflected these concerns. “Why is this attack occurring before we have defeated the British?” “Are we going to repeat the experience of Napoleon?” “What will happen next?”
Few Germans doubted our ultimate triumph, but many wondered about the duration of the struggle and the price of final victory. Almost no one questioned the morality of a crusade to destroy Soviet Bolshevism, but there were some like me who shared practical misgivings. Germany’s forces were already engaged all over Europe and it appeared to me that Hitler risked overextending our manpower and resources by undertaking such a colossal campaign in the East.
For the large majority of Germans, the war was never about the Nazi dream of conquering Lebensraum (living space) in the East for colonization by “the Aryan master race.” Like most other German soldiers, I was fighting for my Fatherland out of a sense of patriotic duty and the belief that Soviet Communism posed a grave threat to all of Europe and Western civilization. If we did not destroy the Communist menace, it would destroy us.
In eliminating this danger to Germany and Europe, we would also be liberating the Soviet peoples from their oppressive Communist masters. Though Nazi propaganda presented the Slavic population as Untermenschen (subhumans), none of the men around me embraced such extreme racial views. For us, the Slavs were not a biologically inferior race of human beings; they were simply the ignorant inhabitants of an uncivilized and backward country.
At the start of the invasion, Germany possessed a large army of veteran troops who maintained supreme confidence in their ability to overcome any enemy. In the wake of our string of earlier victories in Poland, the West, and the Balkans, we could not have been more assured of ourselves. A few lines from a letter I wrote to Anneliese later that summer expressed the personal optimism that I had come to feel: “It’s tough here and we fight, but we fight for a reason and I am confident we are going to win. I am positive about that.”
MARCH TO THE EAST: June 22–July 5, 1941
On Sunday, June 22, 1941, the pre-dawn silence was shattered by the roar of guns, as three million German troops commenced “Operation Barbarossa,” the invasion of the Soviet Union along an 1,800-mile front from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. The tremendous cascade of thunderous booms echoed around us as German artillery delivered a short but intense hurricane of shells against the Russian lines, producing flashes of light all across the eastern horizon.
As dawn broke, the dim sky above us was filled by waves of Luftwaffe Heinkel and Junkers bombers, Stuka dive bombers, and Messerschmitt fighters droning overhead on their way east. The appearance of this aerial strike force was quickly followed by the rumble of tank engines revving up, but the noise soon faded as the German Panzer units raced eastward. The shock of this combined Blitzkrieg (lightning war) routed the Red Army forces defending the border and sent them into a full retreat.
Late the following morning, the 58th Division received orders to advance as part of the second echelon of troops in the XXXIII Corps of the 18th Army. The 18th Army, 16th Army, and Fourth Panzer Group made up Army Group North, one of the three massive army groups—North, Center, and South—created by the Wehrmacht for the invasion.
As we crossed the frontier, no border defenses were visible, but we noticed an immediate difference in that roads were not as good, though a few were paved. The next evening, the 154th Regiment staged brief assaults against Soviet positions in the small Lithuanian towns of Pajuralis and Kvedama, located about 25 miles east of our jumping off point in Heydekrug. These short actions against what might have been border troops did not even require the support of our heavy weapons, and we were ready to press on the next morning.
Advancing about 15 miles a day, we reached Siauliai, about 60 miles northeast of Pajuralis, by June 28. Though the Panzer units were far ahead, the 58th Division’s rapid progress soon placed it in the lead among the infantry divisions of Army Group North. Despite occasional traffic jams, everything was moving swiftly east, boosting our confidence. In the midst of our success, there was growing optimism that we could defeat the Soviet Union by the coming winter or the following spring.
Our march pressed on through long summer days that lasted from an early dawn until a late dusk when our officers ordered a halt, typically establishing our encampment in a field beside the road. Following a filling meal, the entire company would seek sheltered positions in which to sleep, in case of a Red Army attack. If camped in a village, we might sleep behind a home, but never inside, knowing that any structure presented a potential target for enemy artillery.
Unless posted to guard duty, I would prop my head on my steel helmet and instantly fall asleep. Anywhere from two to four hours later, someone would wake us with a kick in the rear. Within half an hour, we would eat breakfast and resume our trek.
Battling both stifling heat and thick clouds of dust, we plodded countless miles. There were few breaks from our march, except for the occasional chance to hitch a lift on one of our company’s horse-drawn vehicles. After awhile, a kind of hypnosis would set in as you watched the steady rhythm of the man’s boots in front of you. Utterly exhausted, I sometimes fell into a quasi-sleepwalk. Placing one foot in front of the other in my state of semi-consciousness, I somehow managed to keep pace, waking only briefly whenever I stumbled into the body ahead of me.
During our march across the open, flat country of northern Lithuania, we encountered no further enemy resistance, but could hear the perpetual din of gunfire and explosions in the distance as well as witness terrible scenes of carnage close at hand. In drainage ditches and out in the fields that lined the road, hundreds of still warm, contorted bodies lay where they had fallen. In many instances, there were ten or fifteen corpses grouped together, sometimes including uniformed women. The enemy tanks we passed were wrecked hulks, often still belching an oily black smoke.
Most of the Red Army’s troops and tanks had been caught in the open by German aircraft as they attempted to retreat to the east. Exercising complete air superiority over the battlefield, the Luftwaffe made sure that no enemy unit could move safely. When a fighter aircraft let loose with its heavy-caliber machine guns, it would decimate unprotected targets over a wide area.
Such attacks were particularly devastating when our planes swept along roads crowded with Russian men and vehicles. Everything in the path of their bullets would be annihilated; even soldiers sheltering in ditches alongside the road were not safe. In these strafings, nearly everyone who was not killed outright would at least suffer wounds.
The Red Army tanks that had not been destroyed had been driven back by German armor. If our heavy weapons company encountered one, a well-aimed round from one of our 150-millimeter howitzers could incapacitate it by damaging its main gun or its treads with a high explosive round. Our heavy gun company’s primary assignment, however, was to provide fire support for our infantry against Soviet infantry. We lacked the armor-piercing shells designed to penetrate the thick armor of these vehicles and would rarely engage Soviet armor except in a crisis. The division had a variety of other means to cope with enemy tanks.
On our march northeast, we covered the roughly
70 miles from the Lithuanian city of Siauliai to the Latvian capital of Riga within a week. Upon entering the city on July 5, small crowds along the streets greeted us with shouts of “Befreier!” (Liberator!) and presented us with flowers or chocolate in gratitude for their rescue from the Russian occupation. While some of the population remained fearful and hid in their basements, the generally positive reception we received here and throughout the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia reinforced our conviction that our cause was just.
As our column briskly proceeded down the streets of the city, it was easy for us to feel at home amidst architecture that differed little from that found in Riga’s Hanseatic counterparts along the German coast. Our swift pace was not even disrupted by the Red Army‘s demolition of the bridge over the Düna River along our route. Operating ahead of us, our Pioniers (engineers) had already constructed a pontoon bridge as a replacement. Within half a day, we had passed out of Riga and returned to the open countryside.
ENCOUNTERING THE ENEMY: July 6–July 21
Just after our company had halted at a Latvian village late the next afternoon, a group of us spotted perhaps a dozen Russians scurrying through a valley about half a mile away. Apparently, they had been caught behind our lines by the speed of our advance and were attempting to escape eastward. A number of soldiers around me immediately began pouring rifle fire on the men from our vantage point above them. A couple of the enemy troops may have been hit, but most of the group scattered into the woods behind them.
This incident represented our first encounter with the enemy since the initial skirmishes near the border, causing some of us to wonder whether the Russian campaign would ever involve much more than long marches in pursuit of a retreating foe. The following weeks, however, would provide a much clearer perspective on the struggle we faced.
At Leningrad's Gates Page 10
