I was assigned to a battalion headquarters that was situated in a village about three kilometers to the rear. Plodding through heavy snow, I arrived there on December 13. It was late, and I found a space to sleep on the floor of one of the houses.
The next morning I tottered out, stiff-limbed and still half-asleep, to wash off my face with snow. Somebody suddenly grabbed me from behind in a big bear hug and said, “Well, who would have believed it? Rauch has managed to survive his first ten days without suffering any depreciation!”
With that, Haas released me from his clinch and pulled my cap over my eyes.
“Hey, where are you detailed?” I asked him, grinning.
“Same firm, same team. Even the same hut.”
I was very happy to see him again. The realization that he was going to be nearby seemed to make the entire situation a lot friendlier.
Russia, December 14, 1943
Dear Folks,
Now I’ve become a human being again. A short time ago I arrived here at battalion headquarters, where I will be engaged as a telegraphist from now on. I like it tremendously! There are twelve of us telegraphists and phone operators living together in one hut, all very nice guys. The atmosphere is so friendly here, a relief from up front, where there is only yelling and complaining. What’s more, I have washed myself from head to toe and brushed my teeth. Yes, now the unpleasant part is all behind me. I can even hope to celebrate a halfway happy Christmas. Today, also, for the first time in a long while, I had a good laugh. That’s why I’m in a fantastic mood.
The food is excellent, because the Headquarters Company is feeding us. Schnitzel for lunch, schnitzel for supper, and sausage for breakfast. Meat in large quantities. The cook thinks to himself, whether we eat the pigs and calves today or the Russians eat them when we move on tomorrow, it is all the same. (Of course, it is not all the same to us.)
I feel like Adam, standing here naked, without possessions. The Russians have everything. I’ll just have to organize something. At any rate, I don’t have to worry much about the loading of my luggage when we are on the march. I feel particularly unburdened.
Outside it’s finally becoming bitter cold. Pfirt Euch Gott [May God watch over you] and go happy into the New Year. Many loving greetings,
Your Georg
Russia, December 21, 1943
Dear Mutti,
First of all, my best regards from Russia. Nothing has changed here for the last eight days. The daily monotony: up at six, Madka puts the potato soup with chicken on the table, it becomes light. One begins the first lice hunt. In every piece of clothing, twenty to thirty lice. Then the joint gets cleaned up. One man always sits at the switchboard and makes the connections. I am already pretty good at that. Mornings there’s nothing else to do.
At twelve-thirty we receive our warm lunch from the field kitchen and right after that they hand out the cold rations: sausage, butter, bread, and coffee. At two it starts to get dark, and you have to hurry up with another delousing or they’ll eat you alive.
In the afternoon I blow on the harmonica or write a letter. At five or six there’s chicken again. I can hardly bear to look at another chicken since, in addition to our military rations, which are plentiful and good, each of us eats approximately one chicken per day, and they are pretty fat in this part of the world.
Yesterday we also butchered a hundred-kilo pig. Meat, meat, and more meat. On that point we certainly can’t complain, but now and then you do miss something that tastes a little different from meat, potatoes, and bread.
At six we usually go to bed (which consists of a pile of straw and two blankets on the floor of the hut). But I’ve become used to it. At night each of us has two hours’ duty on the switchboard, but one doesn’t mind. First of all you aren’t very sleepy, and second the lice are biting like mad. Sometimes you think you will truly go crazy, and there’s not a thing you can do about it. And so one day passes like another.
Into the bargain, of course, one hears the eternal howling of the mortars, hits from bombs, bullets, and everything else that bangs and bursts around here. The main battle line is three kilometers away. Sometimes the Russians break through and come critically close. Then we also grab our guns and run out in counterattack to push them back. These occurrences are usually pretty bloody.
Except for food, the supply situation is pretty bad, because we’re sitting in a pocket that the Russians close up from time to time. In these cases, we have to exert ourselves to open it up again. For that reason not much is getting in. Incoming mail has begun functioning recently. I still haven’t heard anything from you, but I also have my third field post number. This one is the final one, however.
I have a couple of wishes that you might fulfill: three number-two pencils, some matches, four safety pins, a lighter and flint if possible, a map enlargement of the section with Alexandrovka and twenty-five kilometers west, a 1944 calendar diary, envelopes and paper, a paintbrush, and a mouth organ in C, since mine is broken or not working very well. These are all things I’m lacking.
I got back part of my luggage, mostly underwear. That’s why today is a holiday for me—I have on clean underwear with no lice! Please write me how much mail is getting through and when you receive it.
Many kisses from your Georg
The twenty-first of December was Stalin’s birthday, and all day long we could hear the drunken Russians shouting and shooting off their pistols. On the twenty-second and twenty-third they shot at us all day long with mortars and succeeded in wounding and killing quite a few. Haas convinced me that it was better to go without a helmet, because the German version was so heavy and came down so far over the ears that it made hearing almost impossible. And hearing well was vital. There was that sound of a soft blip that came from the Russian positions, the discharge from the mortars that one had to learn to take seriously. Approximately twenty seconds following that sound the hit landed, and it was much better to be prepared.
Russia, December 24, 1943
Dear Mutti,
Christmas in Russia, a rather strange feeling, especially when one is used to celebrating this holiday the way we do. But there is nothing to be done about that here. Nobody has the head for it. The Russians lie one hundred meters away, dug fast into the ground, and any minute they could come our way in great multitudes. Then there’s always uproar, shooting, wounded, dead, and afterward everyone sinks down somewhere or other and sleeps a couple of hours to recover. Who could still have the head for a Christmas celebration with presents, etc.? The soldiers are happy about the extra pack of cigarettes and bottle of schnapps that everyone gets. Some have received a package from home in time. Even just a greeting from home helps to a few peaceful thoughts.
Yesterday I went organizing here in the village. That is to say, one goes from hut to hut, pushing open the door, gun in hand. Then you rummage through the whole house without even tossing a glance at the inhabitants who are standing around and wailing, and you take whatever is worth taking. At first I didn’t have the heart for this, but in time you learn that, too. Thus I found eggs, butter, sugar, flour, and milk with which I baked a first-rate cake. Together with a little schnapps, it was a real treat. Afterward a few loving thoughts of you and Christmas 1943 was over. Well, one time like that for a change. Otherwise I’m doing great.
Your Georg
As delighted as I was to get out of the trenches, and especially out of the front fighting lines, being quartered a few hundred meters farther back, in a Russian house, was a mixed pleasure.
Very seldom did we encounter the solitary dwellings that one often sees in the Austrian countryside. The Russian houses were almost always grouped closely together in villages, each with its own vegetable garden and often a few fruit trees nearby. Usually the dwellings were uninhabited, evacuated, and at the soldiers’ disposal, but sometimes we shared the huts with very old people who hadn’t wanted or been able to evacuate, and even people with small babies.
The main building materials were sun-dried mud bricks to which a little chopped straw had been added. The ceilings consisted of thick, often sagging, smoke-blackened beams, over which boards were nailed. Outside the roofs were covered with straw and very steeply pitched so that the blankets of winter snow could slide off easily. The straw roofs, as well as the unbaked bricks, provided the perfect insulation against the harsh winters.
The wooden doors were so low that we average-sized Western Europeans always had to duck our heads upon entering. Windows were sparse and very small, but this aspect and the low ceilings were well thought out for keeping the houses pleasantly warm with only a minimum of heating materials, even during the bitterest of Russian winters.
Most of the huts had almost identical room arrangements. One entered a small vestibule through a door facing the square or street. Doors on the left and right of this hall led to the two main rooms. One of these served as living room/kitchen, with the large heating stove occupying one-quarter of the room space. The second, usually unheated room, which contained beds and a chest of drawers, was also used for storing clothing, tools, and seeds for the next planting season.
Russian village hut interior.
A ladder or very steep set of stairs rose from the entryway up to the attic, which often provided winter shelter for the chickens. A back door opened to the courtyard behind the house, where the horses, cows, pigs, and goats were quartered. The courtyard usually contained a deep well with a long rope and wooden bucket, a corncrib built on stilts to protect it from mice and dampness, and artfully piled stacks of straw and hay. Towering mounds of dried sunflower stems and cornstalks served as the only source of heating and cooking fuel, since neither wood nor coal was available in the immediate area.
At the back of the courtyard lay the vegetable garden, fenced in to protect it from the chickens and other thieves. Beyond this the fields stretched off onto the endless Ukrainian plain.
The spacious four-by-five-meter main room and the giant stove were the hub of the house, especially in winter. A bed, a few wooden trunks, a large rustic wooden table flanked by simple benches, and a number of low stools for accommodating tired feet or little children made up the humble furnishings.
The brick stove was very complicated and a wonder of heating and cooking technology. It jutted out from the walls by about two and a half meters on each side and had a main platform about sixty centimeters above the floor. Concentric, removable iron rings for the cooking pots and tea kettle lay on this surface, toward the center of the room, and iron bars formed a grill on some of the models. Sufficient platform space was still left over near the walls for sitting and warming one’s frozen bones after coming in from the cold on a wintry day.
A separate, higher masonry sleeping platform, back in the farthest corner of the stove against the wall and bedecked with feather coverlets, served as a bed for grandparents or whoever in the family might be ill. An iron door at floor level opened for the removal of ashes. Another door, slightly higher up, received the foot-long pieces of sunflower stalks used as fuel. A door to the bake-oven was the largest of all.
One or two massive columns rose up through ceiling and roof, ending outside as squat chimneys. An extremely complicated labyrinth of draft channels manipulated the smoke, taking advantage of and conserving the last little bit of warmth. Finally this radiating giant performed as a clothes dryer. Diapers, wet coats, and shoes were hung to dry on strings and poles running between the stove and the carved posts that supported the sagging roof beams.
The floor, of either tamped dirt or wooden planks, was covered with straw. The mud we brought in on our shoes could be swept out with the old straw and the floor freshly strewn, but though clean, the straw also provided the perfect breeding ground for fleas.
Small, heavily smoking oil lamps that illuminated poorly and blackened the faces of all present provided the only evening light. Nonetheless, it was easy to imagine how cozy such a room might have been in its original state, sheltering a small family group.
In wartime, however, these buildings with their rising chimney smoke were perfect targets for the Russian mortars. When you considered the shelling, the vermin, the rank smell of six or more dirty soldiers cooped up for days, plus the wailing of old folks and babies, a well-furnished bunker was often much to be preferred.
At night, when the firing was particularly heavy, we descended to the damp earthen cellars in the courtyards. There, in spite of rats and the pungent smell of sour beets and pickles, we felt less vulnerable and sleep came more easily.
Russia, December 29, 1943
Dear Mutti,
Outside everything is white, deep white. When I look outside I see nothing but white. Besides that, it is freezing cold. Such an icy wind roars through the region and hurls ice crystals into our faces. The breath of the men and horses looks as though it were coming from a steam engine.
We are completely outfitted now, and we look like snowmen. When we go outside, we put on over our regular uniform a kind of ski jacket, snow white.
When you turn it inside out it is camouflage material with padding in between. The pants are just as white and warm all the way down, just like long ski pants, and tied at the bottoms. In addition, a pair of felt boots, mittens, everything white on white. The whole thing serves as combination camouflage and protection from the cold.
Meanwhile I have become a skilled telephone operator. I take my turn at the switchboard, go out fixing breaks in the lines, repair telephones. I’m not on the wireless because there’s no available equipment. There are constant breaks in the phone lines, though, either from artillery hits, from mortars, or torn up by some vehicle or other. We at the switchboard have to make a line check every half hour—that is, all the participants call in to make certain everything is still functioning.
But sometimes it happens, especially at night, that the guy at the command post falls asleep instead of standing watch. He doesn’t hear the phone when we call, and then a repair crew has to tramp the two or three kilometers through the snow to check things out. That’s not always so easy, as it is usually terribly dark, often foggy besides, and since there are no orientation points in this godforsaken countryside, all of a sudden you are lost! There you stand, knowing neither the hour nor the direction, surrounded by snow, snow, and more snow, freezing and thinking of your happy youth.
That’s just exactly what happened to me on the twenty-fifth of December. It must have been about 3:00 a.m. There were two of us, each armed only with a pistol, and as we stood there, not knowing where or what, suddenly a group of people came out of the nothingness. We yelled, “Hello, password?” and were answered with an icy stillness, filled only by the whistling of the wind. We were standing about fifteen meters across from each other, and then we heard some Russian word!
At that we made an about-face and took off like a flash in the opposite direction for about thirty meters. A few shots rang out. Voices shouting. We threw ourselves down in the snow, rolled around a bit, and waited. I think we were invisible in our camouflage suits, for they—it must have been a Russian patrol—passed by quite closely and in some agitation.
We stuck to the same spot, walking back and forth until dawn, not daring to stray from there for fear of landing behind the Russian lines. When it became light, it wasn’t hard at all to find our way back.
And so you keep having new experiences here. Each time a little excitement, and in a few moments it’s all over. You laugh about it and tell it to the others in the accents of a hero.
Right now I’m stuffed so full that nothing else could tempt me. Perhaps a good apple, but nothing else. The Christmas rations were fantastic. Then we all shared in the contents of the many packages from home. In addition, there are special packages, such as the “major battle day” packages, packages from the “comrades stationed in Paris,” from the members of the National Socialist Party in Silesia (I’m in a Silesian division) or parcels “from girls to unknown soldiers.”
I’ve received about five of these packages, each one a bit different but none too exciting. One package, from a girl I don’t know in Karlsruhe, included a nice letter and was put together with a lot of loving care—some cake and cookies, writing paper, razor blades, an apple, some safety pins, and a few cigarettes, each thing packed and tied up with ribbon—very sweet.
In this way a lot of the soldiers begin exchanges of letters, and it can happen that these fellows receive eight to ten letters or packages from as many different girls in one day. Then when they go on furlough, they check the girls out one by one. I don’t think that’s my sort of thing. (Daughters of butchers or delicatessen store owners are especially popular.)
Otherwise things haven’t changed much. The daily life—eating, sleeping, grenades. I still haven’t received any mail from you, but I think something has to arrive pretty soon. If you are able to find something anywhere that works against lice or scabies, please send it to me, as I’m suffering quite a bit from these. They don’t give us anything here.
Don’t think unhealthy thoughts. Everything’s great. Greetings to all and tell them I’m fine. 100,000 kisses from your Georg
On January 1, we were sent to search a nearby woods and the adjacent village for partisans. The village had been evacuated sometime previously. We found nothing in the woods, and then we were ordered to search each house in the village thoroughly. I checked each one assigned to me, going first into the room on the left, then the one on the right, and finally the attic.
In the fourth house I found a young man, about seventeen years old, in civilian clothing and cowering in a corner of the attic. I gave him a sign to come out and follow me, which he did without hesitation. A few officers were standing outside in the square. I brought the man to Hauptmann Winter, the battalion commander, and reported. Then I received the order I shall never forget.
“Go with the man over there and shoot him. He is a partisan.”
I stood paralyzed.
“Well, what are you waiting for? Carry out my order. Dismissed.”
I was nineteen years old, three weeks on the front, and now I was supposed to shoot a young, unarmed person. I had already studied his face. It was handsome and filled with fear, the features still almost those of a child. Maybe he simply hadn’t wanted to go to war, just like me, and had hidden himself when it came time to be a soldier. Or maybe he had still been too young.
I marched away with him, not knowing where I was going or what I should do. I knew I couldn’t just shoot him. But was I certain of that? If I didn’t do it, what would happen? Refusal to obey a direct order meant court-martial, with an automatic sentence of death. Those were the rules farther to the rear.
Here in the front lines, perhaps it would depend on the mood of the officer. He could have me shot immediately to set an example or have me ordered to a minesweeping unit. I knew from hearsay that this was also a death sentence. The young man would be shot either way, whether I did it or someone else did. On that point nothing could be changed.
Haas came around the corner. He must have sensed my dilemma. Desperate, I turned to him for advice. He already knew me well enough to see right off that mine wasn’t one of those smaller problems, something that one just wasn’t in the mood for doing. I must have been very pale.
Haas was certainly not a bad person, but thanks to his years at the front he was hardened, rational. He said, “I’ll do it for you.”
He led the boy away. In all of the war, there was never again a shot more painful for me than the one that shortly rang out over the quiet village. I will hear it the rest of my life.
This was one of the stories that I didn’t write home to my mother. In fact, I had made up my mind at the beginning to write only reassuring letters, but I soon found out that it wasn’t possible. She wouldn’t have believed me, anyway, because of something that I didn’t know at the time. She was taking my letters to her sister-in-law, Rhoda Wieser, one of the most highly respected graphologists in Germany. Together the two women regularly analyzed my handwriting in order to ascertain my true mental and emotional state.
The East, January 5, 1944
Dear Mutti,
Today I am more or less on my feet again. For the last five days I’ve had a fever that was constantly between thirty-eight and forty. In addition I had terrible headaches and was vomiting all the time. I was completely wiped out. At sick bay they took my temperature and then informed me that they couldn’t do anything for me. “Everybody has that sometime.” Not even an aspirin. Today I have no more fever, but I can hardly stand up. My mood is below zero; that’s why I’ll write when it’s better again. I still haven’t caught sight of any mail. I hope at least that you are receiving my letters, since they usually leave with soldiers going on furlough to Germany. Till next time, kisses,
Your Georg