Originally it was just something to do, but I quickly grew enthusiastic about the project because these men had incredible stories and we all knew their time on earth was running out. In California I pretty much only had access to American or Canadian vets, and I wanted to get the stories of other nationalities. So I started reaching out to French and Belgians who had fought in the war.
Inevitably, as the scope of the project grew, I felt I had to get the Axis point of view. Then the idea of a book came about, with interviews and photographs. Covering both sides was much more interesting—at least for me. Around 2006 and 2007 I started traveling all around the world, particularly to central Europe and Japan, in order to find Axis veterans.
Compared to Allied veterans, meeting the Germans was much harder, especially those who had fought with the Waffen SS, an elite corps of troops who were not fully integrated into the Wehrmacht or Luftwaffe. When the Germans began losing the war, the Waffen SS was opened to non-Germans, so many Norwegians, Belgians, Finns, Yugoslavs, Ukrainians, and even French and Americans fought in SS divisions. It was always more of a prize for me to find Waffen SS men, because they were the elite corps of one of the most formidable armies ever put together. And the interviews were always fascinating because these troops had been repeatedly thrown into the most difficult situations and most intense battles.
Most of them were fiercely proud of their service to their country. But the fact that Germany was so tarnished by Nazi ideology—with its anti-Semitism and the attempted genocide—forced them to keep their pride quiet, expressing it only to those they felt would understand the complexity of the circumstances. So when they opened up to me, I took it as affirmation that all those years of studying history had trained me to grasp the nuances that rarely come through in films and books.
* * *
ONE VETERAN IN PARTICULAR, Ernst Gottstein, left an impression. He was a short, compact man, about five feet four, who participated in many of the most crucial battles that the Wehrmacht had to fight.
Gottstein (God-stone in German) was an ethnic German born in 1922 in the Sudetenland, the swath of Czechoslovakian territory that Hitler invaded and annexed in 1938 under the pretext that it was majority German. As a German, unsurprisingly, Gottstein supported the annexation. His father was in charge of storage facilities for the farmers in the region, and they owned their own farmland. He graduated in 1941, volunteered for the German Wehrmacht, and decided to join a tank outfit. He trained for six months on armored cars, from March 1941 to September of the same year. After his training he was transferred as a first-class private into the Third Infantry Division and was part of a reconnaissance unit, which used armored cars and sidecars as well. The Third Division was already on the Russian front; so, ten days after the end of his training he moved eastward by railroad, then had to walk about sixty miles to Vitebsk, in what’s now northeastern Belarus. As soon as he arrived at the front he started fighting. While driving to the front with the sidecar, he and his comrades were ordered to stop and unload their weapons. At that moment a comrade from the same training school was hit in the head by a sniper. It was his first moment facing death. He wanted to get revenge on the Soviets who had just killed his friend, so he strafed the enemy position in anger with an MG 42 machine gun.
He continued fighting with the division in Smolensk, where he saw heavy action in the neighboring countryside. The division got as close as twelve miles to the capital district of Moscow. He spent the entire winter there, enduring the subzero conditions. The Germans hadn’t anticipated fighting through the winter, so they didn’t have the proper clothes. When the temperature got down to minus 41 degrees, vehicles froze up in the cold and wouldn’t start unless a fire was built under the motor. On top of that, there were constant Soviet counterattacks in November and December 1941. Mass infantry assaults came their way, and with only a few tanks they had to defend their positions with knives or shovels since they were usually running out of ammunition. During that time Gottstein was also used as a courier for neighboring divisions.
In November 1941, he was promoted to unteroffizier, and in early 1942 he fought a Soviet unit mixed with partisans along the porous front. In April 1942 he was wounded in the shoulder on the Russian front about two hundred miles west of Moscow when an artillery shell burst near him. He was sent by railroad to Germany; about 20 percent of the wounded soldiers in the train died. At each stop soldiers who had just died would be dragged out of the wagons. Gottstein finally arrived in Vienna to be treated. It was a beautiful spring day, which he considered the best day of his life.
At the beginning of the war he was very motivated and, like most Wehrmacht soldiers, very confident about Germany’s final victory. When he returned to Austria, though, that confidence was gone. He felt like an old man.
He didn’t want to return to Russia, or anywhere near the eastern front, where what at first had looked like a rout was by that time turning into a very hard slog. He found out that the German army needed troops for Africa, so he volunteered for the Afrika Korps. He went through a physical to make sure he was in good shape for the difficult desert conditions and went through further training in Berlin. In July he was transported to Greece by train, then took a plane in August 1942 to Derna, in what’s now eastern Libya, sixty miles west of El Alamein. He fought in El Alamein in an armored car platoon unit as part of the Third Panzer Division, a recon unit, the only such unit in Africa, since the rest had been sent to the Russian front. He was under the direct command of the legendary field marshal Erwin Rommel.
By late August 1942, he saw heavy combat. After the defeat of El Alamein he participated in the entire retreat until they reached Tunisia. He told me that he still remembered the differences in climate between Russia and the North African desert. He also gave me his impressions regarding the difference between Soviet soldiers and British soldiers. Soviet officers didn’t seem to care about their soldiers much, he said. The British soldiers were more independent and better taken care of. The Brits were also more conventional, sporty, and fair, while the Russians would disregard conventions and even fight at night. During his first Christmas in Russia there was fighting, whereas in North Africa the war was put on pause for the holiday.
He described to me an incident in Cyrenaica, a region of Libya: One night they were hiding in a wadi to keep cool and it started raining hard. The wadi overflowed and four soldiers died. He only managed to survive because his tank was at a slightly higher elevation.
The old man still had a sense of humor. He described to me how in Tunisia he’d fought against the British Eighth Army. During the battle for Tunisia, as they retreated, they would often be strafed by British aircraft. One time all the soldiers started running to the side of the road and dove for cover, but there was no plane; the panic had started because one German soldier needed to go to the bathroom and the others followed suit.
While defending Tunis from the British in May 1943, Gottstein was wounded on the right side of his belly when an artillery shell landed nearby—a flesh wound. He was sent by plane to Sicily, from where he took another plane to Berlin. There he was treated for his wound, after which he went to Denmark for a few weeks. After further training at an officer academy for three months he was promoted to lieutenant.
He had the choice of unit, so he chose one in Vienna. Then he got his orders to go with the Second Panzer Division, based in the Pripet Marches of Belarus—a one-way ticket to the front. He was promoted to company commander of armored cars. He fought for two months, and by late summer the tank division was sent to northern France to be refitted and to prepare for the imminent Allied invasion.
They were based in Cambrai, where they got new equipment. In June 1944, with everyone expecting the invasion at any moment, his unit was put on alarm, but they didn’t get any orders. On the sixth they heard that a large contingent of Allied troops had just landed, and only then did they realize that this was the main invasion force. On the seventh they got an order at night, but it
was too late. They had to go through Paris to reach the front lines in Normandy, and as they got closer to the front, they were subjected to more and more attacks from Allied fighter bombers, so they got an order that small units had to go alone to reach the front at a special location.
They finally got to the front on June 10. Gottstein saw heavy action in Avranches against American troops; he was under constant bombardment from artillery and aircraft. “I’ve never seen so much firepower,” he said.
He recounted how lucky he was when, after placing his unit near a bocage to ambush Allied troops, they were bombed heavily by a barrage from ship artillery. The bocages in front of them and behind them were completely destroyed, whereas the barrage had missed their line completely. Soon afterward they captured American maps and he saw that the line his men were holding was not on the map. The oversight saved their lives.
During the last days of the battle at the Falaise Pocket, his unit got lucky because it was based on the division’s perimeter; he was driving with his men and the Americans closed the pocket soon after. Then suddenly a small convoy was coming toward him—Americans. He kept driving and as he passed by threw a grenade into a halftrack, which blew up because it contained an ammo crate. He managed to escape because the Americans were in shock. By the end of the battle he had only 25 percent of his men left. He arrived at the Seine but all of the bridges had been destroyed.
With the reorganization of the German forces, he saw heavy action on the Siegfried Line to defend Germany. Allied aircraft often bombed them. No activity was possible during the day. He also fought in the Ardennes Offensive with the same division in December 1944 and saw heavy action in Bastogne against American troops. His units were in the farthest point of the offensive between Marche and Dinan.
At one point he got the special order near Rochefort to go through a forest to a restaurant near a crossroad. He went inside to ask for directions because he’d heard a lot of noise. When he opened the door he saw the restaurant filled with American soldiers, so he pointed his machine gun. Some of them fled; three American officers who were studying a map were taken prisoner. The map they’d captured was very important.
Despite such an exploit, he didn’t get the Iron Cross, because instead of carrying on further in the offensive (which could have been accomplished by shooting the prisoners and moving on), the units waited half a day, wasting too much time. His commanding officer did all he could to ensure that instead of a medal he got a court-martial. Fortunately one of his friends saved him by lying and saying that he was not in the area during that time. Eventually they ran out of fuel and walked back to the division.
After the failed offensive Gottstein fought in Prague. By late January 1945 his unit had only three officers left. After a two-week leave he was sent to the village of Oberlauringen, near Schweinfurt; defending this village was his last operation. American tanks and soldiers closed in on him. Gottstein’s unit shot at the tanks, killing some of the soldiers, but there was a wall behind him and he was wounded by his own weapon’s backblast. He was then taken prisoner by American troops, who treated him, and that was the end of his extremely eventful war.
All wars and violent insurrections have their share of horrors, but compared to the two world wars of the twentieth century, today’s conflicts seem like brushfires. Gottstein fought in almost every major campaign of Germany’s epic defeat. But he fought for the losing side, and any heroism his fight may have entailed will always come with an asterisk for the average Joe fed on Hollywood films full of Nazi villains.
* * *
AS I WAS GATHERING material for a book, I’d accumulated enough for a one-man show in a SoHo gallery. My portraits were well received, but I caught a lot of flak for including photos of Waffen SS veterans.
“Don’t you have ethical problems glorifying Nazis?” I was asked.
“I don’t think I’m glorifying them,” I responded. “And I’m not sure these people were Nazis. In any case, that’s irrelevant. They all fought in the same war, each for their own reasons. I wanted to get both sides.”
I was accused of hiding behind objectivity.
“You give them the same degree of honor,” another person said.
“Well, I give them all a minimum of honor in this project. They all fought, they all risked their lives, and they’ve all survived to this day. I’m out to honor at least that—survival. I don’t know enough about them to judge them. And even if I did, it’s not so clear-cut.”
I tried not to pursue the polemic, but such criticisms made me realize how little people really knew about World War II. The Waffen SS veterans were elite troops; the foreigners who joined them were usually fighting for their own nation. They believed, rightly or wrongly, that communism was the greater evil. Someone like Gottstein, on the other hand, was simply a patriotic German. All of them must have witnessed horrors, and many, I assume, have had to reconcile themselves with their own conscience.
My project was primarily meant to extol survival—like taking photos of people who’ve been pulled out from the rubble of a collapsed building during an earthquake. Some survivors just happened to be nearer to the fault line. They were born male and in a year that required their entire generation to be mobilized for a struggle presented to them as good versus evil. And the ones I find most interesting are those who fought valiantly and lost, then had to spend the rest of their lives reassessing the notions of good and evil according to which they fought.
Such views weren’t very appreciated among the press community. Many journalists consider themselves champions of justice and truth—which is why they feel they’re required to plumb the depths of injustice and bullshit. I recognize that there must be some absolute truth and justice out there, but it would be presumptuous of me to try to advocate for it through my pictures.
As far as I’m concerned, discrete events happen in the ebb and flow of history, and I try to record them. I often choose to portray soldiers because they embody ideas of honor and valor that have lost much of their meaning in our society. At a minimum, I’m looking for the faces that reflect those notions—much like looking for artifacts in a living, breathing archeological site.
PLAN B
“SO WHAT DO THINK YOU’LL DO NOW?”
My father would casually insert that question into a conversation consisting mainly of anecdotes about what we’d seen and done since the last time we were together.
“I’m not sure” or something equally vague was usually my response.
My father is a very reasonable man. He assesses situations and goals, then determines how to achieve a desired goal with the given resources. And he’s honed his intuition and skill over the course of a decades-long career in recruitment. It’s inevitable that a professional headhunter will try to find a perfect slot for his son.
I was thirty-four years old. Many of my friends had already veered down the path of marriage and children. Yann, with whom I’d attended the Lycée Français in New York, had settled in Paris, where he’d landed a steady job with a French government energy utility, using his preternatural math skills to come up with pricing strategies. He was now married, with a kid on the way. Aaron was also settling down with a beautiful girlfriend, and they wanted to build a family. He was in the planning stages of launching an IT business and was looking to buy an apartment in Manhattan.
The other direction for me could be to just slip off the grid, like my friend David, who disappeared after I moved to New York. I couldn’t trace him the few times I tried, and I assumed his violence had gotten him killed or institutionalized. Given my own fatal attraction I wondered if that was an ineluctable fate for me as well.
I hadn’t been in a long-term relationship since Tara, the woman who had met me at the airport and with whom I’ve remained dear friends. She was a bit older than I was, with a young boy from a previous relationship, and as I mentioned earlier, she wanted to have a child with me. But I simply wasn’t ready to have children. Also, I didn’t feel I could co
mmit to any kind of stable situation as long as I constantly kept a bag packed in my closet while I scoured the Internet for conflicts to shoot. No matter who I was with, I was always itching to get on a plane and leave Manhattan behind, with all its hipsters, fashionistas, rooftop club denizens, and success addicts.
I went about my business. Helping other hostages helped me adjust. I was invited to conferences. The US government asked me to attend seminars meant to prepare State Department workers for situations in which they might be abducted and held for ransom—like during the Iranian hostage crisis. I did some fashion shoots, made appearances on TV. Speaking in public came easy to me.
“You can’t keep working freelance much longer. You need to start considering a plan B,” my father said. “Why don’t you teach?”
I always gave my father’s suggestions their due consideration. They were reasonable, pragmatic. And he’s a wise man.
At times he would relay a message from his old friend Gerard, a larger-than-life character I’d always admired. He’d led a regiment during the Algerian War, which kept France busy in the late 1950s up until 1962. When I was released he said, “Good. I hope he learned his lesson and never goes back. I know that part of the world and I know war. There’s nothing you can say or show that we don’t already know. Human beings will never change.”
The Shattered Lens Page 19
