Not I

by Joachim C. Fest

  On the night of March 8, 1945, after crossing the Rhine again, we reached the town of Unkel, which was on the right bank of the river opposite Remagen.7 Exhausted by the marching and our impressions on the way, we were granted “an hour’s rest.” Then we each received twenty rounds of ammunition, after which we crawled up a wooded slope as far as the meadow which bordered it. At the other end of the meadow, about two hundred yards away, was an isolated farmhouse which lay in darkness. At the edge of the woods we got the order to dig one- and two-man foxholes at intervals of ten yards. Now we were also told that the American Ninth Tank Division had captured the undamaged Ludendorff Bridge only hours before and an armored advance guard had already crossed. Several attempts by the Germans to blow up the bridge or to smash the American units had failed.

  When all the orders had been issued, Mahlmann called me over and instructed me to dig a two-man hole in an advanced position about seventy yards from the farmhouse. Surprisingly, he ordered the hole to be excavated a couple of yards this side of the edge of the woods in the open meadow and personally led me there in the shelter of the trees. When I asked why the foxhole was not to be dug in the woods like all the others, he simply retorted that it was not for me to ask questions here. After all, since Lieutenant Kühne had maintained with such conviction that I was so uncommonly eager for final victory, I should surely obey every order without hesitation. Then he ordered me, while standing at the edge of the wood, farther out into the open field. “Go on! Start now!” He went back into the trees to (as he said) check the work of the others. As I dug up the soil, we came under fire; the ground was plowed up without me being able to tell where the shooting was coming from. Once someone started to scream, which turned to whimpering, but there, too, I couldn’t tell whether it was an American or one of ours. Now and then a machine gun tap-tap-tapped through the black, empty night.

  At about six in the morning Mahlmann came back and only now did I realize that he wanted to use the two-man foxhole with me. He let his stocky body down beside me, grumbled about this and that, and finally ordered me to be lookout, because he wanted “to have the pleasure of a brief nap.” A fine drizzle started again and I covered us with the tarpaulin. When he woke up in the first light of dawn, he asked whether anything had happened and whether I had observed any movement in the farmhouse. When I replied in the negative, doing so in quite unmilitary fashion with my mouth full (because after eating my “iron ration” I was chewing a heel of bread I had saved up), he demanded that I should look again. When I replied that after two days without food I wanted to eat this piece of bread first, he shouted at me abruptly and quite incautiously that I was constantly contradicting him. “And that with a trial awaiting you! It’s going to stop!” he bellowed. “Once and for all! It’s an order!” When I went on chewing at my crust, he shook his head and grumbled, a bit more quietly, that he had to do everything himself.

  Calming down, he asked in an almost resigned voice, “What’s happened to discipline?” He scrambled around for a moment and stood up, put on his helmet, and raised his head above the top of the foxhole. “Well, is there anything?” I asked. “Perhaps Corporal Fest could take the trouble to get up here himself,” he barked again. As I, forcing down the last piece of bread, made ready to do so, I saw his knees suddenly go limp. “Sergeant Major, what is it?” I shouted and grabbed him by the shoulder. When there was no answer, I repeated my question. Suddenly Mahlmann sagged down with his face against the wet side of the foxhole. I carefully turned him over and saw a small sharp-edged bullet hole in the middle of his helmet. When I pushed his gas mask behind his neck and raised his head, several rivulets of blood coursed in short spasms down the lifeless face soiled by the damp earth.

  Sergeant Major Mahlmann was dead. But his demise didn’t move me. How easy it would have been for him, I told myself, to dispense with the court-martial against me or to say one comradely word. But he had never been capable of that. At no time have I ever forgotten what went through my head as I saw him lying beside me, motionless, his mouth open, the darkening trails of blood on his face: sometimes, I thought, even if only rarely, the right man gets hit. I should feel a little pity for him, I reproached myself beside the dead man in the hole. But I could muster nothing of the sort.

  Minutes passed. As the noise of battle which had intermittently intensified died down I jumped out of the hole in one bound, was at the edge of the woods in five steps and, as bullets struck the trees around me, ran without stopping to a nearby tree-lined depression which led to the farmhouse. About fifty paces from the building the inhabitants had put up a shelter, which was now deserted. Exhausted as I was, I lay down, but was unable to sleep. Instead, I ate the iron ration I had taken from Sergeant Major Mahlmann before leaving the foxhole. “At least you’ve done me one good turn!” I thought. I did not know that I would not eat again for the next six days.

  After that, crouching low, I crawled over to the farmhouse, whose four wings enclosed a large yard. The room behind the small window, which I came on just before the nearest corner, had been emptied. Yet a few steps farther, when I came to the end of the wall and carefully looked around it, I almost bumped into an American GI, who was holding his submachine gun at the ready and instantly started shouting, “Hands up! Come on! Hands up, boy!” He took the rifle and all my equipment from me, including the map case. “What’s that?” he asked, and when I replied that it was just books, he said, “We’ll check that!” Then, with a great deal of hysterical shouting, he led me across the yard. The tiled room, whose door he pushed open, had evidently served the owners as a parlor. The GI pushed back his helmet and ordered, “Sit down! And don’t move!” Without taking his eyes off me, he opened all three doors, behind which I made out about twenty American soldiers, and shouted something incomprehensible into each room.

  The lieutenant who entered shortly after that spoke perfect German, with a slight Palatinate intonation, so I asked him whether he came from the Mannheim area. But he hardly looked up from my paybook and retorted that he hadn’t made the journey from Milwaukee to the Rhine to make conversation with a Nazi. He inspected the map case, looked thoughtfully at the Goethe and Hölderlin poems, at the collections of quotations, and whatever else had been found on me. After glancing briefly at a few pages he threw the books onto the nearby pile of rubbish, where bits of wall plaster, scraps of fruit, empty meat cans, and other junk was heaped up. “All over!” he said. And when I wanted to know what exactly, he barked, “Everything!” and “No conversation, my boy!” Finally, the map case flew onto the refuse.

  Before the lieutenant started the interrogation that was evidently coming, I plucked up all my courage to ask whether I could keep some of the books. “They’ll just rot here,” I remonstrated. He looked at me in annoyance, but hesitated. Then he said with unexpected harshness, “You Nazi louts will have to get used to the fact that you’ll have no say about anything now. Or even better: that you’re not even allowed to ask for anything anymore.” For a moment I wanted to answer back that I wasn’t a Nazi lout, perhaps he had noticed that there hadn’t been a single Nazi book in my map case. But then I refrained from making the objection. He’s like Mahlmann, I said to myself. Typical military blockhead! But as if he had guessed my thoughts, the lieutenant went over to the pile of rubbish and picked out three of the thrown-away books: Goethe’s poems, Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs, and Josef Weinheber’s Self-Portrait. A curious selection, I thought, as he threw the books down in front of me. I asked him why he had left all the others. He replied, this time somewhat more civilly, “None of that German greed again. The other books stay where they are.”

  He ordered me to follow him into a neighboring room. At a small table sat a youthful captain holding an illustrated magazine, apparently unaffected by all the turbulence of battle, and for the first time I saw a person of rank with his feet on the table. He asked who was being brought to him. The lieutenant briefly stated what he had found out about me, my unit, and the names
of the officers. The two exchanged several more sentences in what seemed to me more like Double Dutch than English, and the captain threw his magazine aside to ask me a couple of questions himself. What was the operative officer on the German side called? What did I know about a Major Scheller and about the National Socialist political officer? And more questions like that. At the end he told me to pull up the sleeve on my right arm, and merely said the conversation was over. As I went out, he picked up the magazine again, put his feet on the table, and shouted, “By the way, we’re going to leave your hometown Berlin to the Russians. That’s what you deserve, after all.”

  In the more distant room to which I was then led I encountered three more prisoners, none of whom, however, had belonged to my unit. We had hardly exchanged a few words when a sergeant came in and ordered us to follow him. Escorted by two GIs with submachine guns, and repeatedly forced to take cover by shell fire, we ran across a big field toward Unkel. On the deserted street right by the first houses lay dead soldiers, most in contorted postures, some also stretched out on their backs, their sightless eyes turned to the sky. The colors of death everywhere, I thought, as we ran down the street alongside a house front. There was also a woman among the dead, her apron covered in blood, and a few yards from her lay a dead soldier who had evidently been flattened by the tracks of a Sherman tank into a board, dark red at the edges. “Like in a cartoon,” said the German NCO running beside me, but I thought what he said was out of place and retorted, “Shut up! No jokes about the dead!”

  We spent the evening on the cellar steps of one of the houses by the roadside. Over the hours more and more groups of prisoners arrived. Soon there were about twenty of us; there was a rough shoving and pushing on the steep, narrow stairs. After darkness fell there was suddenly shouting and movement; we were led out of the town and through the Erpel Tunnel to the Rhine crossing. One of the guards, who spoke German, warned us to be extremely careful, because the bridge had been badly damaged by attempts to blow it up, and indeed we passed by a number of large holes, through which we could see the Rhine flowing black and bubbling far below. On the approach road, on the other bank, there was a jam of vehicles with silent soldiers sitting on them or waiting in the tank hatches. Occasional shells landed from the German side. Some GIs had a radio working, from which came unfamiliar music; others were standing around with mugs of coffee; others again smoked in front of their officers, and everything looked altogether relaxed and unsoldierly. Our group was led past the vehicles and into Remagen. We stopped in front of a building like a school in whose yard about a hundred prisoners were already waiting. Then five rows were formed and our escort, their helmets pushed back on their heads, distributed us over the five floors to the accompaniment of constant shouts of “Let’s go!” and “Come on!” I was assigned a place in the attic.

  There was a terrible crush under the beams and in the corners. Everyone tried to secure a sleeping space for himself, although later, as I discovered to my surprise, no one lay down to sleep; instead everyone began to exchange experiences with everyone else, about dramatic events, trouble with superiors, small skirmishing successes which in a moment grew into great battles, or the deaths of comrades. An American sergeant appeared several times and roared “Shut up!” or a barely audible “Quiet!,” but the conversations continued without interruption.

  Then suddenly, at about midnight, a bright flash and deafening blast stopped everything. For a fraction of a second (so it seemed to me later) there was an eerie silence after the hellish boom. Immediately after that everyone realized that a shell had struck the attic, and instantly an indescribable tumult broke out. The room was filled with shouts, cries for help, and chunks of masonry flying about, by the rattle of bits of roof falling down, and other sounds one couldn’t place. At the same time shoes were hurled through the air, plaster, pieces of uniform, the contents of pockets. Something damp struck me in the face. Later I discovered that it had been a torn-off shoulder strap and had smeared my head with blood. Smoke and a dreadful stench filled the air. Whoever could, picked himself up and tried to reach the stairs. The lance corporal who had lain beside me behind the roof prop and talked incessantly about his family for the last two hours stretched out his arm and said that he wasn’t going to make it away from here. I should remember him to his wife, and to Mouse and Hansi. To my question—almost unintelligible in all the noise—regarding his name and address he simply furrowed his brow, tried to find a word, and then said nothing more.

  I pushed into the throng at the top of the stairs and even managed to get a few steps down, then everything came to a standstill. An American waving a submachine gun forced his way up and shouted, this time in an unmistakable Berlin accent: “Everyone stay where he is. The gate below is locked. Otherwise I’ll shoot!” And then, again and again: “Last warning. My gun is loaded! Attention! I’ll shoot!” But finally he had to give way, because the pressure on the stairs was simply too great.

  Meanwhile, a senior American officer had appeared. A German captain had assured him “on his word of honor as an officer” that the prisoners could be left in the yard even in complete darkness; no one would escape. He had chosen “reliable people” as overseers; they had vouched for themselves with rank and name. Then the care of the wounded was discussed and a mutually acceptable solution found. At a signal the two hundred or more prisoners came out of the doors and windows into the yard and spent the night in the open in the freezing damp. The intermittent shelling had ceased. In the early hours of the morning, impatiently expected, the trucks rolled up.

  As we climbed onto the vehicles, a good-natured black American answered the question as to where we were going: France, of course. “To Paris!” he added. “But not to a brothel!” He burst out laughing. He couldn’t stop, and even a little later, as we passed the place where he was posted, he pointed at us, laughing, “No girls! No fun!” I felt a shock when, just before the border, we abruptly turned toward Euskirchen and from there headed toward that airfield on which a few weeks before we had laid the glass mines. After about an hour of wearying waiting around we had to get down from the trucks, and at every moment I expected the order to clear mines.

  Quite lost in thought, I suddenly heard my name called. In front of me stood Medical Corporal Schneider, who had until recently tried to have me court-martialed, but who now showed something like warmth and expressed his pleasure at our unexpected reunion. “When did we last see each other?” he asked, and protested how much he had always liked me and my fearlessness “in front of the epaulets.” Had he ever even suspected how mendacious and inhuman the Nazis were, he would have been my most loyal friend, but, thank God, he wasn’t aware of any wrong he had done me.

  One could have easily suspected and even known what had remained unknown to him, I retorted, particularly if one had joined the party before 1933. But Schneider acted as if he hadn’t heard my objection, and told me that about ten thousand Americans had already crossed the Rhine on the Ludendorff Bridge. Hitler, he said, as informed sources already knew, had convened a drumhead court-martial to condemn to death the six or seven officers responsible for Remagen. I acted as if his confidences didn’t interest me, and simply said, “Just stop it, Schneider! Times have changed, as you know!” He looked at me in astonishment, and I’ll never forget his dumbfounded, foolish expression as I simply left him standing there. After two hours we were ordered onto the trucks again, and the convoy continued its journey.

  Our destination was not, in fact, Paris, but a small place not far from the French capital called Attichy, which at this late stage of the war had acquired some notoriety as an assembly camp for what would soon be hundreds of thousands of German prisoners of war. As we climbed down from the trucks in front of the camp, French civilians pushed toward us from all sides. They spat at us or cheered the women who struck us with their fists, while the American guards formed a cordon to stop the attacks. That was the beginning of the “heroic Resistance,” said one of my neighbors, who, aft
er we had passed through the camp gate, introduced himself as a French teacher from Hanover.

  What stays in my mind from Attichy, more than anything else, is Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, which at our arrival thundered from all the loudspeakers, and was still doing so nine days later when we left: day and night without stopping and with an annoying click after the sixty-fourth bar. The music was interrupted for every announcement, after which the gramophone needle was dropped onto the scratchy record again by a half-deaf GI. There was also talk in the camp of an organized squad of “Irreconcilables,” as they called themselves, who quite unceremoniously killed any prisoner who made a disparaging remark about Hitler or the war. The squad would throw him into the huge, open cesspool and push him back into it every time he bobbed up.

  Eight days later, shortly before we were moved from Attichy, I got into conversation with a prisoner who had caught my attention, because I thought I knew him. Indeed, it turned out he had belonged to the group from which I had been separated in Landau. I told him about my capture, the deployments from Arnhem to Remagen, and asked whether he knew Reinhold Buck. He said they had not been friends, but that he had admired Buck from a distance. “He was a genius,” he said. “I heard him play furiously and masterfully on the violin.” I asked him why he was using the past tense. “Oh, Buck,” he said, “he’s dead! And if I’m right he was only about two hundred yards away from you when he was dying, a bit to the east of the farmhouse where you were taken prisoner.” When he saw my shock, he went on to say that Buck had bled to death in a two-man foxhole. That’s what was said, anyway. He had been shot through the thigh, no one knew how, and had evidently not known how to apply a tourniquet to the wound. In a leather bag in his trouser pocket they had found a little Beethoven badge.