When possible, farmland was divided and returned to the villagers for them to manage the field cultivation themselves. But that good relationship, nurtured by the front-line troops failed unfortunately, being absent later in the National Socialist Eastern politics.
At home, the churches in Germany were carried away with “the crucial course of military action against the mortal enemy of Christian Occidental culture” [taken from Statutes of the German Evangelist Churches 9 July 1941]. “The Reich’s Christianity give you, our Führer, the guarantee, in these moving hours, of our unwavering faith and willingness”. In the edition from 10 August 1941, the newspaper Kirchliche Rundschau, produced for the entire group of Evangelist churches, it was stated that they prayed for a victorious result in the battle in the east. “Dear God, we praise you, we thank you for our leader, and for the men that you have given us to lead our army to victory”.
Following the typical spirit of today’s political atmosphere, they now vehemently deny that they gave their blessing then, in fact they now try to convince us that they rejected National Socialism. It was definitely not as they state. To quote, “It is true that there were exceptions, but in the majority, many influential men of the church, or circles of both confessions, definitely supported the Third Reich. Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Minister for Propaganda, distributed worldwide, every printed declaration of support appearing in church publications.” (from Nicolaus von Preradovich and Joseph Stingl’s Gott segne den Führer).
Neutral States also supported Germany’s ‘just war’ alongside the church, such as Turkey, who put it in ‘black and white’ in a memo which it sent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on 22 June, shortly before a German/Turkish Alliance had been formed. There were groups in Britain and America too who welcomed and encouraged the bravery and audacity of Germany in tackling Stalin.
The governments in London and Washington however saw things differently. Due to the pressure of the situation, Britain agreed to an alliance with Stalin, not with foresight, for after the war Churchill was to say, “we slaughtered the wrong swine”. Stalin received gigantic amounts of war-material from the western Allies that were despatched over the Persian-Gulf and the polar sea routes. From reports from the United States War Ministry, Stalin received during WWII enough war material to equip 200 divisions, including 400,000 lorries and 1,500 planes, for his Red Army. The very alliance between Capitalism and Communism was a very unnatural one. It ended, after the war, in a ‘cold war’ that lasted decades.
In deciding to join the fight against Communism and with their enthusiasm for a new Europe, thousands of young foreign ‘volunteers’ enlisted for the Waffen SS in 1941. 135,000 men all-in-all, from the western European lands in the four years of the Russian campaign. They were made up of 55,000 Dutch, the largest portion, followed by 23,000 Flemish and 20,000 French and as many Walloons. Among those volunteers, were the sons of the Norwegian Nobel prize-winner for Literature, Knut Hamsum and Iceland’s President Sveinn Björnson. By the end of the war, 1,123,700 non-German nationals had served in the German Wehrmacht (quoted from Hans W-Neulen An Deutscher Seite), statistics that are not generally known, never broadcast, and are even suppressed.
The thought of a new crusade fascinated not only National Socialists but also the conservative and ultra-clerical in the occupied lands. They marched with the enemy in their homelands and in doing so were bound closer together with them, than with the anti-Christians in the Soviet Union.
CHAPTER 10
On the Eastern Front
Autumn unfolded over Klagenfurt as the successful attack on Russia was coming to an end. The hay was dried in the summer sun and stacked in the hay-barns, and the summer having been a good one offered a very good harvest. The colours of the flowers paled and ‘Mother Nature’ prepared herself for a winter sleep. However, sleep and leisure were begrudged us soldiers of the Lendorf Battalion. For us, life meant training and drilling, and drilling and training, repeating everything that we had already learned. It was cemented with visits from officers and the non-commissioned, who were posted away from the Russian front from the Wiking Division. We listened intently and in wonder to the decorated soldiers as they related to us their experiences and encounters against the Soviets. Soldiers were constantly posted to the Division in Russia, including those who were in Munich-Freimann before us and who had ended their training in Klagenfurt.
The send-off of the graduates of war, with their thirst for action, was indeed a wet one, with ‘elbow exercise’ in our canteen, as we wished them “all the best”, including my brother Evert. It was not a sad send-off. On the contrary, we made it a celebration in festive mood, giving vent to our high spirits. We were really jealous, and desperate to be included in the Victory Parade to take place on Red Square in Moscow!
The volunteers from the lands of Europe had become not only companions, but very good friends. A friend of mine, also Dutch, was Robby Reilingh from Groningen. I looked upon this twenty-year-old student almost as a brother, our friendship beginning in the first few days in Sennheim. All-in-all we were a happy bunch of wide-awake young men, who could and did laugh a lot about ourselves, as much as our daily lives allowed. We were always ready for a joke.
We didn’t usually take it too seriously either when something went awry, or we overstretched ourselves. Nor were we nasty with one another, or ridiculed each other when one of us found ourselves in an embarrassing situation. We laughed it off, in a friendly manner mostly, as in one particular exercise copied from the Fallschirmjäger divisions. In rows they fell forwards on to the grass, necessary exercise for their parachute jumps, with their feet together and hands held behind their backs. We did too, or at least we tried. This sporty exercise was not easy and we fell around laughing. It was not everyone’s cup of tea. It cost us more than a little pluck and/or a dislocated joint or two.
Another exercise produced a far more serious and macabre scorn in us. One of our chums turned out to be a ‘walking disaster’ when practising with chemical agents. We had practised this exercise time and time again, in the open air. The time came however, for us to practice changing the filter on our gas-masks in an air-tight room. We felt more than a little apprehension. Nervous tension caused our chum to fumble with the screw when changing the filter and in that moment he forgot to hold his breath! Our nervous friend had to hastily leave the room, with streaming eyes, coughing and spluttering endlessly.
Our hour of probation eventually came. Over the summer months the Wiking Division, in stubborn fighting, had pushed the enemy back to the south of the western front. In September of 1941 they were in Dnjepr. In the hundreds of miles that lay behind them, the Division had suffered very heavy losses and needed replacements of highly-trained combat-ready men. The enemy had proved to be unexpectedly tough opponents, not to be compared with the Poles in 1939, or the French in 1940. The first wave of volunteers had already proved themselves in the field. With their front experiences, in the tank and motorised divisions under General von Kleist, they had proved that they could be relied upon. The Dutch, Danish, Norwegian and Finnish soldiers had earned themselves a reputation among the General Staff. The task of the second wave was “to hold the headway made by their predecessors”, wrote Felix Steiner. We were the second wave, the graduates of the SS surrogate battalion ‘Westland’ from Klagenfurt.
The days became shorter and frost was in the air as the first powdery snow fell on the rooftops. The roads were somewhat slippery too. Marching with our backpacks, we slipped now and again on the cobbles, as we entered the old town. In the early morning hours the battalion marched from Lendorf to Klagenfurt. The route went over the long Feldkirchener road, leading to the main railway station. As we marched we took a long, last look at the Lindworm fountain. The picture-book houses with their arcades and courtyards were imprinted on our minds. Passers-by waved to us, as company after company we entered the railway station, the last ‘native’ station for us. At the station there was a lively throng. The girlfriends and sw
eethearts made in Lendorf, were waiting with bouquets of autumn flowers, usual for a farewell.
They stood in sharp contrast to the parents of soldiers, who lived near enough to have made the journey of farewell to their sons before they made their way to the front. Farewell parcels, containing sweet delicacies and something warm to wear, were presented by many a helpless and weeping mother, to sons who tried to comfort them with promises that they would see one another again soon. It was a moving scene.
We ‘volunteers’ from the western and north European countries did not have this problem. Our parents were too far away to travel to southern Carinthia. This moving scene came to an end, with the increasing noise of the waiting steam-engine. We had to take our seats, and settle down in one another’s trusted company. The waving girlfriends and family members disappeared in a cloud of white steam, as the train slowly pulled away to the shrill whistle of the porter.
It was to be a journey into the unknown, into a strange world. It was to be the world of war and a powerful crusade in which we were small fish. Some made themselves comfortable, lying in the luggage racks over the seats in the compartment. Soon after the departure of the train some others were speculating as to our destination. The wheels rolled over the tracks with a monotonous rhythm, so monotonous that it silenced the speculation. Few noticed the gradual change in the countryside after leaving Carinthia. We travelled slowly from the west to the east, leaving behind a friendly and magical idyll.
We passed the Wörthersee, a lake in which we had bathed, and picturesque farmhouses, where long rows of maize cobs were hanging to dry. Later in the evening, in Vienna, we crossed the Danube. Shortly after, we left behind us the Ostmark and Austria, a land then united with the Pan-German Reich. Bratislava was the next borderiess checkpoint. Not long after, we passed through the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, an unspoiled land in the middle of Europe, set between the forests of Bohemia and Tatra.
In the grey, early morning hours we reached Po land. Poorly-built shacks for houses, built upon clay or sandy soils, flashed by the window. Two years before, Poland had been the prelude and the first eastern theatre of the Second World War. Now it was the central government of the Germans. The Slavic people, from the plains between the Baltic and the Caparthian mountains, who were so often separated in the past, were now divided and mercilessly ruled in old colonial style, by both Hitler and Stalin. Krakau, i.e. Cracow, was to be our next in-between stop, en route to the Russian front. We stayed there for some weeks, for an unknown reason. At least if our officers knew, they kept it to themselves. We were found quarters in a former Polish barrack, old, uncomfortable and plagued with fleas!
Cracow, the old Polish seat of kings, was now the capital of the General Government, which in the six years of war had hardly been damaged. Poverty, however, had become rife and could not be overlooked on our trips into town. Polish prisoners of war, working for the local farmers, had much better living conditions than anyone else. Those in the Officers’ camp could study, and even further their education. Who ever believed that the lull before the storm was going to be a holiday, was very wrong. Our old lifestyle ruled our lives once more with old drills, old rules and control. Even the payment in zloty of the Polish girls, engaged in the Wehrmacht brothel, was controlled by a sergeant-major. He resided in the rooms of the former house-master and inspected our pay books, and our condoms too.
During that time our battalion was to receive a special duty, that of bodyguards, so to speak. We had to ensure the safe passage of the Fuhrer’s train as it passed through Cracow. We stood for hours on end on either side of the railway tracks, in the biting cold, with loaded carbines, waiting for the night train. The Commander-in-Chief and his staff had their quarters in two locomotives and it was our duty to save them from any planned assassination attack. Our superiors hid themselves in the darkness and randomly threw stones to check that we were awake, and that we reacted. At around midnight the rolling stock with the curious name of Amerika (from 1943 renamed the Brandenburg) with the two locomotives and two armoured anti-aircraft wagons, raced by in a white cloud of flying snow. Had he even been on the train?
Our own ‘front-express’ was on the rails again and heading in an easterly direction. Some of our master-sergeants had already been sent to the Wiking Division, which had lost many men in the fighting on the southern Russian front, in the Donets basin. We travelled alongside the river Vistula. Dams were to be seen in low-lying stretches, built against flooding. That is all that one can say for the Poles and the care of their river. It was gradually filling with sand in places, and clear to see. Two years before, many railway and pedestrian bridges across the river had been destroyed and replaced with provisional ones, built by German Army engineers.
The journey was unending and it was hours before we crossed over the San, an arm of the Vistula, and reached Lemberg. The German/Soviet demarcation-line was in that area somewhere, but there were no obvious signs of it. In fact it was very hard for us to orientate ourselves, with former state borders having disappeared in the fury of war, and former territories having been returned to the Reich. Our train had no corridor and so we had no room for movement. The compartments were small, airless and sticky. It was no wonder that we were tired and mostly disinterested in our surroundings.
The countryside through which we travelled was really no different to the eastern Polish plains. In the so-called ‘endless Soviet paradise ‘, the very thinly populated areas and colourless view offered only a lonely farmhouse now and again. It was depressing. The lights went out for the night, but for many of us sleep did not come in the darkened compartment. The continuous and monotonous sounds of the train intruded and disturbed us, making it impossible to sleep. In that twilight sleep our minds nudged the pangs of home-sickness, and a premonition or two. Innermost apprehensions came to the fore, leading to doubts as to our courage. There was nothing for it but to conquer the creeping depression, take the bull by the horns, stand by our voluntary sacrifice, and follow the dictates of our conscience.
With daybreak and our soldiers’ songs, we were our old selves again especially after our first fight with snowballs. Yet again our journey had been broken for some unknown reason. We remained for several hours in a half-destroyed railway station. Our opponents were Hungarians, but our ‘fight’ between the railway tracks with those sons of the Hungarian plains, was jovial and bloodless. Their train had been held up for some days. While we waited men who were obviously prisoners, from the look of their tattered clothes, whether Jewish or Russian being unknown to us, cleaned the compartment. They used over-large and primitive brooms, and were under the supervision of older, uniformed men. In very crude tones, they drove the prisoners to hurry. When those in our compartment were denied the crusts of bread left by us, and which we were not going to eat, it annoyed us, to the extent that one of our SS-Untersturmführer tore the overseer off a strip, for his inhuman behaviour. It was our very first experience of the fate of prisoners. Was that in store for everyone, for us too?
Once more underway, we saw wooden huts along the line, housing armed Wehrmacht guards. We also saw a message for the homebound trains along the side of the track. “Say ‘Hallo’ to the Rhine for us”, was written in black stones. The further east that our train took us, the colder it became, especially for those guards on the running-board outside the compartments, and in the icy wind of the moving train. They were on the look-out for partisan activity. Tracks and bridges were very often mined and so our locomotive pushed a goods-wagon filled with sand in front of it. The theory was that it softened the impact of an explosion and lessened the damage to train and men. Some days before, the guards of a transport train travelling on the same line, shot warning shots into the air to warn the driver of a visible explosive charge. But instead of stopping he accelerated, in the belief that partisans were attacking. Thirty men lost their lives in that explosion.
The extent of what we were to see in Tarnapol was unavoidable. The signs of encircleme
nt and the bloody battle of the summer months were a taste of what was to come. It was almost like seeing a newsreel, with scenes of that legendary battle opening up before our eyes, in all its original bitter and savage reality. There were uncountable numbers of burnt-out tanks and other war machinery. Outlying destroyed villages showed the bitter fighting that had taken place in the area between the Carpathian mountains and the Pripyet marshes.
We then had another break in our journey for no explainable reason. It lasted for three weeks, in Vinnitsa, a middle-sized town in Ukraine. The population was passive and resigned, showing us no hostility. The reason for that undoubtedly was the social misery that they had had to endure under Stalin. One could not fail to see the utter poverty. You were not able to distinguish the men from the women on the streets. They all wore the same grey, ugly, wadded clothes, which they held together with string or suchlike. There were no buttons and no shoes. Leather shoes and fur boots were seldom to be seen. Most wore the ‘local shoe’, made from sail-cloth or raffia. The poorest of the poor had bound a piece of an old car tyre to the soles of their feet. Those conditions were hardly the outcome of the first few months of the war. In a fatal light it illustrated a classless State and was in sharp contrast to the ‘Soviet paradise’ as loudly proclaimed by the Russians.
The lack of housing in Vinnitsa was also very noticeable, as was probably true in the whole of the Soviet Un ton. For instance, we knew of a three-roomed house built in the twenties. The largest of its rooms measured five metres by five metres, in which no fewer than nine people were housed, not all of the same family. They all lived, slept, cooked and ate in that room, cooking on a paraffin-stove. There was a married couple with two small children, a bachelor engineer, a ‘worker’, and an older woman with two unmarried daughters.
In the Fire of the Eastern Front Page 9