Thousand Days: Fragments of a Soldier's Life of 1939 and 1940 (part 5 of 6)

Short small writers between tall gigantic men

read part 1 here, read part 2 here, part 3 here, part 4 here.

When the man finally went out, accompanied by many blessings, the room became incredibly cozy and lively. Mungo Schuster and Waldl Hofmann got up again and got out beer and schnapps, Werner Klähn, the vice squad officer under me, smoked a very large, black cigar in bed, and to my utter astonishment two Unterscharführer (corporals) entered shortly afterwards with a friendly expressions, sat on the table and were very funny. I thought about this phenomenon for a long time: SS-Leibstandarte and guards and recruits and the taps and the house party. I believe that the solution was as follows: the corporals, old active soldiers of the Leibstandarte, did something quite unusual here, not that they drank beer and schnapps after taps and sat together in the same room, but that they did it together in a team room with common soldiers who they had snapped at just before and would snap at them again immediately after. They were seduced into this by two things: firstly by the aura of journalism or the writing of these men, and secondly by a kind of doom and gloom, not because of the war, but from the fact that they had to experience how complete strangers, some of them dwarf-like people, squiting and bespectacled, wearing Leibstandarte uniforms and moving into the rooms of the Waffen-SS stronghold. This race of giants was never able to come to terms with this. However, the climax of the surprise was yet to come. The door opened once again and the gaunt corporal on guard duty came in, this time without a steel helmet, to share in the joy. For this there was no general explanation for this: it was due to his character.

It was late that evening and I woke up the next morning feeling very exhausted when I woke up at five o’clock. At the same time, I realized that the wheel of the day would initially turn even slower for me than for the others, because I was not yet registered and not yet dressed. I stood up slowly and, as a precaution, did not attend roll call, and no one missed me either. Then I went to the office, reported to the chamber and got my uniform and weapons. A comrade came with me to the clothing distribution, whom I was seeing for the second time in my life, and the first time had been years ago. It was the writer Eberhard Wolfgang Möller, state prize winner for poetry, senator for culture and holder of countless medals and honors. It was the 6th or 7th time he made the trip to the chamber, but the NCOs up there never tired of bursting into Homeric laughyrt whenever he appeared. This time they had even invited guests, and soon there was a whole circle of huge men standing around Möller, all of them bending down and looking at him. Möller was very small. He was unusually small. He was almost an insult in the rooms of the Leibstandarte. The Leibstandarte men could not believe it either and never got tired of marveling at him, the brash little Dr. Nachrodt and Guzzi Lantschner, the well-known cameraman of the Olympic films and world skiing champion, who joined us later. Sometimes, when the three of them went across the courtyard to get food, they accompanied her step by step with their upper bodies slightly bent down, just as submissive adjutants accompany high-ranking dignitaries.

I myself received a field gray uniform of the smallest size available in the Leibstandarte up to that point, according to the “it fits, it fits” method. It was a little too big for me since I’m only 1.76m tall. The tailor had been brought in for Möller, who expressed the hope of being able to make him a uniform soon. So it happened that the soldiers Möller, Nachrodt and Lantschner wore special uniforms from day one.

At lunch in the large staff hall, where everyone sat eagerly crouched over their plates, while an Oberscharführer, a sergeant as deputy to the officer on duty, walked up and down with a steel helmet and a long, dragging saber, I got to know the other comrades in our war correspondent company. That was Hermann Pierich, the huge Steyermark doctor of philosophy and journalist from the National Socialist “Attack,” who wore a horse’s head on his shoulders and was tremendously choleric. He later became a very good reporter at the front until he was shot through the knee with a machine gun. I liked him very much. He had a way of speaking very loudly with rolling R’s and rolling eyes and very theatrically. On the first day he got the whole EB-hall excited when he noticed that there was rice pudding, he jumped up and shouted into the hall in a pitiful voice: Rice pudding! Am I a child, am I an infant, do I have no teeth left, do they want to take me to the grave with this food? Give me something for my teeth, I'm a man!

Since he was quite tall, around 1.95m, the guard did not immediately recognize him as a war correspondent. The Oberscharführer, completely taken by surprise, suspected him of being an active soldier, picked up his saber and was about to attack when someone whispered to him: “That’s a war correspondent, Oberscharführer!” Whereupon the man’s hands fell down, disarmed, and he left the hall. Pierich went with him, who was not embarrassed to swear incessantly and to constantly forget to greet on the way to the room. It was a very turbulent few minutes in which his curses alternated continuously with the curses of the superiors he encountered, he gesticulated to himself, then raised his arm again in salute, his face which had been slashed with saber scars trembling with indignation. He went into the canteen and drank enormous amounts of beer.

Then there was an amateur photographer, a boy with very handsome looks and a modest, friendly personality, whose name I no longer remember. I still remember his girlish beauty and his quiet smile. I also clearly remember that all the superiors were deceived by this. In truth, he was a man who avoided everything with great skill and who was as sly as a fox. He was soon burned alive in an armored reconnaissance vehicle. This is what the SS-War Correspondent Company looked like at the time. Some of the men had arrived between the time I first reported in and the start of my duty, so I was officially given the number 7. This happened in the afternoon when I went to the clerk’s office to have my personnel file opened.

I had been a soldier for over six months, I was a corporal, and I immediately saw that there was indescribable chaos in the office. My personal details were recorded, and after the questions about party affiliation, the tone of this military office took on more of the tone of a party headquarters. The men of the old General SS lived so much in the party world and in its thoughts that at a moment like this, when they saw an outsider in their own uniform, they became as frosty as zealous party members become all over the world, who talk with self-assured confidence in their party jargon in a small circle and suddenly realize that there is someone among them who doesn’t belong at all. Later, years later, things changed, most of the old active members of the General SS had fallen and the others became accustomed to the fact that over the course of the later years tens of thousands of young men who were completely removed from party life joined the SS through the simple route of conscription. This is important remember, as the question of how it was nevertheless possible that the old SS divisions such as the Leibstandarte, Totenkopf, the Reich, to become by far the best combat units at the front, the most disciplined, the bravest. Already in those days the Leibstandarte, which went into the Polish campaign as a regiment, was almost decimated. It was somewhere outside Warsaw, and what I saw here in the barracks in Lichterfelde was already a replacement. It recruited from young SS men from all over Germany who had volunteered to join the Waffen-SS. It was supposedly obvious from their appearance that they were replacements, as only a few were taller than two meters. None of them could replace the three wingmen of the first main company, who were 2.08m tall but were buried under the earth at the time. In our eyes, however, the race of giants in Lichterfelde had lost none of its greatness. The groups that I saw from then on every day for two months chasing across the parade ground or across the infamous “southern area,” and which I heard marching out on their 25 km fast marches at all hours of the day and night, were almost all huge people with unheard-of strength. I later saw some of them standing there for hours with the barrel of the heavy grenade launcher or the base plate, each weighing 40 to 45 pounds, slung over their shoulders simply because they had forgotten to put it down. These men came as great idealists who all loved Hitler and were convinced of the correctness of his ideas, but rejected the party with its evil manifestations. During these two months I was only with them at a distance, but later shoulder to shoulder at the front, in the fire. At that time, however, they were as alien to me as those black SS men who I had seen in the peacetime promenading in the parks and gardens in the evenings already with very unpleasant feelings.

In the afternoon the first sergeant, whom I was seeing for the first time, examined me in my new equipment. He was a very slim, serious man, perhaps 22 years old, who towered over me by at least a head and looked at me from above. He had a slow way of speaking, but it was very soldierly, concise and sharp. It was Oberscharführer Rudeck. Next to him stood another, slightly smaller, dark-haired Oberscharführer, who, as I was then told, was called Lehmann and, alongside the deputy company commander, the SS-Obersturmführer Junge, was our second platoon leader. Rudeck only asked me a few questions, but Lehmann asked me to tell him a few things about my police battalion. On this occasion I told him that I was a corporal, had completed a NCO course and asked him to exempt me from the basic training that the others were currently undergoing. I added that I had already trained others myself. Lehmann listened to this and then said we’d see. Rudeck, however, slowly began to explain to me that I was now in the Waffen-SS and that credit from an institute like the Schutzpolizei would not be counted here. Do I understand that I am neither a corporal nor anything else, but a simple SS man?

I had to accept this rigorous highhandedness and was told the next day that I would have to go through the entire basic training all over again. No one spoke anymore about the rank of corporal, about Poland or about half a year’s service. From the next day onwards, with the reveille at 5 o’clock, I, like the others, was firmly placed in the vice grip of the barracks. If I had suspected until then that the training was as lenient and curious as the way the active companies regarded us in the barracks yard and in the corridors, I was sadly mitaken. Our instructers were active soldiers who had served for many years and were assigned to us by the companies. They did their work with indescribable reluctance as soon as they were newly transferred to us, but after eight days they found that life was decidedly more pleasant for them if they only managed to soften the written and unwritten laws that had become part of their blood of the strictest soldiering. If that was the case, then they were usually transferred to us permanently and stayed with us until the end. None of them did not change. They became fatter over the years, more sensitive to cold and their character didn’t improve, because the others, like the good old Mohrmann, who was riddled with shrapnel, whose name I have tellingly not yet forgotten, were transferred back to the active troops after the French campaign. We have thus revealed the second law of German war reporting during the 39/45 war. It reads: Anyone who was not an specialist in war reporting was certainly a shirker or a scoundrel. I don’t mean the military experts, the mechanists, drivers and first sergeants, I mean the “middlemen,” the “ground staff.”

At five o’clock, like in all the barracks in the world, a voice shouted “Get up!” I stood up quickly, others did not. The one who was on room duty was even quicker than me because he also had to clean the room during the half hour. Everyone ran into the big, cold washroom in their pajamas. Over the next five minutes everyone rushed in, icy water cascaded down the stone wash troughs, towels waved in the air, shaving brushes were swung. Then we ran back to get dressed. Then the bed was made. The wooden Kumrov took out his wooden boards and silently built his cement bed. In the next moment he was already waxing his belt and shoes. Then he jumped back to his rifle and oiled it. Every now and then he glanced around the room and noticed that the room attendants had cleaned very poorly. He was not afraid to take the broom himself and sweep around under the cupboard again. He also gave the advice not to smoke anymore because then the ashtray would stay clean. He was completely absorbed in this life. Meanwhile, the illustrator Waldl Hofmann from Braunau stood admiring Kumrov’s bed and made the decision to become a different person. He also wanted to have such a bed, and through legal means. With constant soldierly incantations he went to work. Mungo Schuster grinned at him with his old, furrowed Foreign Legionnaire face and cut slices of bread and broke wind. Schmidt, who later became paralyzed, had opened his suitcase again and was looking at his lenses. He explained the peculiarities to a non-existent listener. The only one who had not yet stood up was Klähn, my publisher acquaintance and vice squad officer. He was lying in bed with his Slavic skull and it was impossible to tell whether he was still smoking since yesterday evening or whether he was smoking again. As I was watching this, I must confess that I did not feel amused for a moment, but rather felt as cold and gray as this late winter morning. I made my bed as I had always done in the police battalion; it lay there clean and tidy, without being ashamed that it revealed that it had been used that night. I also had time to eat a piece of bread and drink some of the coffee that the room attendant had fetched, then a shrill whistle sounded in the corridor and an equally shrill voice shouted: Come out.

We didn’t rush, we went out, especially since Klähn was not fully dressed yet, and as a result had the pleasure of “stepping out” and “stepping in” continuously for the next half hour. This is not very strenuous physical work, its appeal lies elsewhere, it cools down the rooms that have just been heated and are supposed to keep us warm for an hour after lunch, and it doesn’t make them any cleaner. Eventually however, this came to an end and the company stood. It was a very short line. The service began with this muster. This was followed by an hour of theoretical lessons and an hour of weapons training, and then we went to the drill ground. For eight weeks, almost without exception, we drilled every morning in this barracks yard or did field service exercises out in the fields and forest areas, and both were times of suffering. Our training was considerate in relation to the active companies, but only in proportion. At 12 o’clock we had lunch together in the dining hall, followed by an hour of free time. I can’t remember that I ever spent this hour in any other way than in two ways: either I walked up and down in the garden-like forecourt between our side wing and the street fence, genuinely desperate and brooding dully, or I stood in a telephone booth, mobilizing every person I could remember to get me out of here or at least to get me out for for an evening. At first it wasn’t even possible to think about it. We couldn’t get out of the barracks at all. In the afternoon there was a major field service on the southern area for four to five hours, followed by weapons cleaning in the rooms and finally cleaning the area, i.e. completely clearing out, washing out, drying out, sweeping out and putting all the rooms back in order. Then the corridor was cleaned, then the office, then the NCOs’ rooms, then the lavatory. And then we ourselves. This word weighs almost the heaviest, because our uniforms looked horrible every day after duty and had to be spotlessly clean at roll call at 7 or 8 o’clock. It was impossible for them all to be uniformly clean, and a simple logical tells you that roll call in the evening was regularly repeated as often as the line up in the morning. It was eight o’clock and the duty was over. We collapsed onto the stools and didn’t work up the courage to eat until some time later. On the very first evening I decided to go to the canteen alone and I didn’t regret it. I was there almost every evening, quietly drinking my beer, sitting among the others, the active soldiers, and over time I have head from them many of the fates and the entire history of the Leibstandarte in the most colorful, the whitest and the blackest colors.

TO BE CONTINUED…

read part 6 here.