Upon her release from the hospital in Tönning on November 27, Anneliese was granted leave from her nursing duties and went home to Hamburg, where I joined her for four days. During this visit, she arranged for me to stay with her “Aunt” Frieda, a sweet elderly woman who was a close friend of her father’s and who had somewhat taken on the role of mother to Anneliese since her real mother was absent. She resided in a two-bedroom apartment in the Winterhude suburb of the city, located behind the popular delicatessen that she ran selling coffee, chocolates, and other desserts.
Like Aunt Frieda’s apartment, the house that Anneliese’s father shared with his sisters in the suburb of Wandsbek had escaped major damage in the bombing raids, but the magnitude of the devastation in the heart of Hamburg was astonishing. In tears, Anneliese finally described her horrible recollections from the previous summer.
In the aftermath of the bombings, she had only been able to reach the hospital where she had been training as a nurse with great difficulty. Once there, she treated many terribly burned civilian casualties. The giant inferno caused by the bombing had generated such intense heat that the asphalt roads had melted into a sticky tar. People trying to escape the firestorm became stuck and burned like torches.
In the tragedy’s grim wake, we found it difficult to appreciate fully our limited moments together. The war was now everywhere and impossible to escape. Yet, even as the situation at home and the news from the front grew more ominous, a surprising sense of optimism about the outcome of the war still prevailed among all those I knew.
Göbbel’s speeches promising the imminent arrival of miracle weapons, more advanced than anything Germany’s enemies possessed, inspired hope that our fortunes would soon change.
Chapter 13
KRIEGSCHULE
December 1943–May 1944
WHEN I ARRIVED FROM Püggen to commence my officer training at the Kriegsschule in the suburbs of Dresden on December 8, the old Saxon city was still beautiful. There was no hint of the terrible fate that awaited Dresden later in the war, when an Allied incendiary bombing would kill about 60,000 civilians.
In acknowledgement of our service at the front, the war academy tried to make our experience as officer candidates as agreeable as possible, providing us with comfortable rooms in the barracks and good meals in the mess hall. At the same time, the academy’s staff kept us constantly busy with a variety of tasks.
From morning until noon, we attended classes on leadership skills, tactics, and other military theory. Our instructors also taught military etiquette, such as proper conduct for an officer in the company of a woman and appropriate dining manners.
In the afternoon, we carried out field training in the snow-covered rolling hills of the academy’s firing range at Königsbrück. Our instructors would assign us a platoon with a couple of 75-millimeter guns in order to assess our leadership skills and our ability to handle the howitzers in a variety of offensive and defensive tactical scenarios.
Because most of the soldiers we were commanding possessed frontline experience, the exercises were not too challenging. In fact, because of my years in combat as a forward observer, I was often able to pass along practical advice to the instructors.
On weekday evenings, we would study in our rooms after a meal in the academy’s mess hall. Although the academy arranged no dances or other social activities for us on weekends, I sometimes attended operas and operettas with other officer candidates at Dresden’s renowned Semper opera house.
Despite increasing numbers of officers from middle class origins, Germany’s officer corps was still filled with many blue-blooded aristocrats—“Von so-and-so”—who had been educated at the nation’s elite institutions. The majority of these high-born officers were decent men who treated the other soldiers with respect, but there were a few who held very superior attitudes toward others not of their social class.
While most of the ‘Vons’ were fellow Prussians, I was not from an aristocratic background and despised those officers who treated common soldiers like myself in a condescending manner. My experiences with one particular Prussian aristocrat illustrates the character of this arrogance.
The same first lieutenant who had once led his horse into our barracks at Lüneburg in a drunken display of insolence had since achieved the rank of captain and been placed in command of a battalion-sized unit in the regiment.
At a regimental staff meeting I attended after becoming an officer, the captain exhibited his disdainful attitude toward the enlisted men. When several other officers entered the bunker to join our group, he said with undisguised distaste, “Shut that door! It smells of ordinary people out there.”
Relatively few officers from aristocratic backgrounds acted so haughtily, but this captain’s attitude reflected the importance of class in German society at the time. If someone had a ‘Von’ in front of their last name and was well educated, they would typically sail right through the hiring process when seeking a job. This same sort of favoritism similarly applied in granting military promotions, though the Wehrmacht was not generally a class-based institution in other respects.
Once becoming a German officer, you were accorded respect because of your rank rather than because you were a Prussian, a Nazi, or possessed some other privileged background. Interestingly, I never witnessed any particular cultural clash between officers coming from aristocratic Prussian backgrounds and those coming from less privileged circumstances. In my experience, it would be more accurate to say that the aristocrats separated themselves from everyone else, just as they did in civilian life.
A couple of weeks into our training, Anneliese surprised me with a telegram announcing her impending arrival in Dresden at the end of December. During this unanticipated but very welcome visit, Anneliese and I crammed as much as we could into our time together. In the couple of days before the New Year’s celebration, we wandered through the city’s famous rambling baroque complex of pavilions and galleries called the Zwinger, watched a play at the opera house, and called on some of my distant relatives.
Anneliese and I also dropped by a number of Dresden’s jewelers in order to select a shop to craft our engagement rings. Because it was impossible to purchase anything made of gold during the war, the customer had to provide the jeweler with an adequate amount of gold to fashion the desired item. Several weeks after we supplied our collected gold to the jeweler we had settled on, the shop delivered an attractive pair of rings to me.
On January 6, our cadre of officer candidates traveled 25 miles south from Dresden to the mountain resort of Altenberg for a week of training in downhill and cross-country skiing. The evenings included entertainment by a talented troupe of female dancers and a youth choir singing local folk songs, but our daytime “recreation” was far more demanding.
In a scenic winter setting among snow-covered trees, our instructor spent the first couple of days teaching us the basics of downhill skiing. Though I had cross-country skiied in Russia, this type of skiing was completely new to me. Once our instruction ended, we headed up to the slopes.
Waiting in single file at the top of a ski run, we watched each man in turn disappear from sight, uncertain what lay beyond our view. Finally, the instructor ordered me to push off. Building up speed as my skis carried me down the slope, I came over a hill to confront a ski jump located directly in my path. There was no way to avoid it. Racing down the ramp in a crouch, I was sitting on my leather riding britches by the time I left the end of the jump. And that was how I crash-landed in the soft snow at the bottom.
A couple of days later, our instructors ordered us to ski down an icy bobsled run. On my attempt, I managed to ski about 20 or 30 yards. By that point, I was traveling too fast to navigate the turn. In desperation, I threw my arms around a large tree growing beside the run to keep from breaking my neck.
Soon after our return to the academy in Dresden, we were faced with another test of courage. About ten o’clock one night, our instructors ordered us to put on our swi
mming trunks and come down to the school’s large indoor pool. On our arrival, we lined up at the bottom of the ladder leading to the 33-foot-high diving platform.
One at a time, each officer candidate was directed to ascend to the top. Once there, the instructor switched off the lights and ordered the man to jump down into pitch-black darkness. While some of my fellow officer candidates were very hesitant to obey the order, I simply dropped into the pool feet first when my turn came, figuring that our instructors would not seriously endanger the lives of Germany’s future officers.
With these types of training methods the German Army was instilling an unconditional obedience to orders, whatever obstacles might exist or whatever doubts an individual might possess. Such challenges perhaps also made my promotion to Oberfähnrich (senior officer candidate) on March 1 a little more meaningful.
A few days before our training concluded, we learned that Adolf Hitler would personally deliver an address in Dessau to officer candidates from across Germany. Even with my deep discomfort with the Nazi regime, it was impossible not to feel a sense of anticipation during the 100-mile rail trip from Dresden.
The subsequent announcement that the Führer would not be able to attend and that instead Admiral Dönitz, the commander-in-chief of the Kriegsmarine (German Navy), would speak to us was met with widespread disappointment. Even with my childhood interest in submarine warfare, I found his oration uninspiring.
Back at the Kriegsschule, our graduation on March 15, 1944 involved no fanfare. Instead, the academy’s commanding superintendent simply delivered a short, inspiring speech and wished us well. Though the field training had been of little practical utility and could not begin to match what I had learned through years of combat, the theoretical aspect of our instruction had been interesting and helpful to me as I prepared for a new leadership role. If nothing else, it was simply a relief to have several months away from the bullets and shells at the front.
On my arrival in Oldenburg from Dresden the day after graduation, I reported to a captain, who told me to return the following morning. When I finally received my second lieutenant’s shoulder boards the next day, I eagerly headed straight to a Wehrmacht tailor to make the necessary changes in my uniform. Although uncertain what lay ahead of me upon my return to the front, I had at last achieved my long-sought ambition to serve as a leader.
ENGAGEMENT TO ANNELIESE AND FURTHER TRAINING
March 17–May 13, 1944
Receiving a two-week furlough on March 17, I made the short trip from Oldenburg to Hamburg, anxiously anticipating my imminent engagement to Anneliese. She was already in the middle of a month of leave from her nursing duties and was waiting for me when I arrived.
Rather than spending my three nights at Herr Berndt’s house, I again stayed with Aunt Frieda in Winterhude. However, Anneliese and I took our meals back at her home in Wandsbek in order to give me an opportunity to spend a little time with her father and her other relatives who lived there.
On March 18, Anneliese and I placed our newly crafted rings on one another’s fingers at Aunt Frieda’s home. There was no real celebration of the occasion, but we shared the news of our engagement with her father and telephoned my family back in Püggen.
In the middle of a war in which our future together was so unsure, Anneliese and I agreed that we should delay our marriage until peace was achieved. Facing a return to the Russian front in a few weeks time, I did not know if I would even live to see my twenty-fourth birthday. Though it was difficult for me to tie another person to my uncertain fate, her promise to marry me would give me a sense of hope in the dark days that lay ahead.
While our decision to wait was based solely on our concerns about what might happen in the future, we were also aware that we would need to obtain authorization from the army and other government agencies when we did decide to marry. Beyond the normal bureaucratic red tape, we faced an additional complication because Anneliese’s mother possessed the Jewish surname of Salomon.
This had been her mother’s maiden name as a result of her childhood adoption by the family of a Jewish butcher in Hamburg. When the authorities saw the name, they refused to grant me permission to marry Anneliese without further investigation. Challenging such racial restrictions was impossible, though I did not see how the government had any right to interfere with whom I chose to marry, even if Anneliese had been Jewish.
Leaving Hamburg a couple of days after our engagement, Anneliese and I spent the next few days with my family in Püggen. On March 24, she departed our farm to spend a week at home before reporting for duty in Leer, Germany. After obtaining her orders in Leer on April 4, she made the 250-mile trip to her newly assigned hospital in Beverlo, Belgium.
At the end of March, I traveled 60 miles west to Munster, where I entered a two-week training course for company commanders. It included additional classroom instruction as well as field training at a large proving ground nearby. This gave us an opportunity to observe firsthand the performance of new weapons such as a highly accurate 210-millimeter rocket launcher.
Following another two-week furlough from duty in Püggen, I arrived on April 30 for a week-long course at the officer’s riding academy in the town of Soltau, a little west of Munster.
Waking at dawn, we began by leading our horses at a trot around and around the sawdust covered floor of a large building. This was followed by an exercise in which we practiced repeatedly jumping onto the horse’s back while the animal continued to move around the ring. Beyond the constant riding, our instructors also taught us other potentially useful skills, such as how to make a horse lie down in order to shield ourselves in the midst of a firefight.
By the end of the second day, areas of the flesh on my buttocks and thighs had become rather disgusting raw wounds. Each night they would crust over before painfully reopening during the following day’s riding. Other than this physical discomfort, the experience at Soltau proved generally agreeable. While many of the men found the course arduous, my previous work with horses on our farm made the training relatively undemanding for me.
On the completion of this last element of my required officer training on May 8, I spent three days at the 58th Division’s reserve base in Oldenburg. To my great satisfaction, Anneliese was able to join me after receiving a short furlough following an Allied bombing raid that had struck her hospital in Beverlo. Although she had not been injured in the attack, the prospect of further air raids nonetheless caused me to grow increasingly concerned for her future safety.
During her stay in Oldenburg, we had planned to get a hotel room together. However, when I approached the hotel’s manager for a room, he inquired whether we were married. When I responded that we were engaged to be married, he informed me that unmarried couples were not permitted to share a room and instead required us to pay for separate rooms. The war had brought many changes, but it did little to alter Germany’s traditionally conservative social conventions.
At the end of our brief time together on May 10, Anneliese returned to Belgium. Shortly after her arrival, she was shifted 20 miles east from Beverlo to the Belgian town of Genk. At the hospital here, she would soon be helping to treat a flood of casualties from France.
At the end of a final visit to Püggen from May 10 to 13, I said my goodbyes to my family. Heading back to the Eastern Front as an officer, I had no idea where I would be assigned, nor whether I would ever return home.
Little did I anticipate the hammerblows about to befall the Wehrmacht in the following month of June. During the summer of 1944 Germany would face an escalating series of crises that wouldsteadily increase the suffering and hardship at the front and at home.
Chapter 14
RETURN TO THE FRONT
May–October 1944
WHEN MY TRAIN REACHED Tilsit at the border of the German Reich on May 15, there was a cable waiting for me at the Wehrmacht’s central leadership reserve depot from Col. Behrend, commander of the 154th Grenadier Regiment.
His messag
e requested my return to the regiment to take charge of my old heavy weapons company, replacing the already departed Second Lt. Reichardt. Since I could have been assigned to any company in Army Group North, his appeal for me to receive command of my old unit was excellent news as far as I was concerned, though it was a completely unexpected action over which I had no influence.
Granting Behrend’s request, the army promptly issued new orders returning me to the 13th Company. Boarding the next train out of Tilsit, I embarked on the 250-mile trip to rejoin the 58th Division at the front, now located in northeastern Estonia. The journey offered me further time to reflect on developments on the Eastern Front over the previous half year.
In January 1944, the Red Army had executed an offensive that brought an end to our long siege of Leningrad and forced Army Group North into a general retreat to the west. This orderly withdrawal in the northern sector was part of the larger shift in the strategic situation that had taken place after Stalingrad.
Although there was no decline in the fighting capability of the individual German soldier, there were ever-increasing personnel losses that Germany could not replace. Meanwhile, the Red Army was steadily increasing its quantitative superiority in manpower and material and regaining its territory lost early in the war. There was hope that by shortening its length of front the Wehrmacht could in some measure compensate for its inferiority in personnel, while at the same time shortening its own supply lines and lengthening those of the enemy.
As the 154th Regiment pulled back to the northwest from Nevel with the rest of the 58th Division that winter, it split up into smaller formations in order to conduct a more effective fighting retreat. Under mounting pressure, the detachment of regiments, battalions, and even companies from their larger formations had become more commonplace. With few reserves available, the German Army deployed these newly created “fire brigades” to plug gaps that opened along a fluid front and to respond to other crises.
At Leningrad's Gates Page 19
