Thousand Days: Fragments of a Soldier's Life of 1939 and 1940 (part 1 of 6)

The first ever translation of this Waffen-SS memoir

The Indo-European Friendship Club is proud to present the first ever translation of Joachim Fernau’s “Thousand Days”, which was, from rarity, difficult to get a hold of in a German copy, in six parts, coming out daily.

If you have enjoyed the translations, essays, and reviews published on this substack and want to support further efforts, please consider a paid subscription (and cancel later in good conscience!), for a little goes such a long way.

Other than the universal motivator of money, share the posts you enjoy with people who you know will be interested, thereby increasing the total amount of joy and happiness in the world.

read more of The Indo-European Friendship Club through the table of contents

About the author:

Joachim Fernau (1909-1988) was an author with a circulation in the millions of his true to life and allegedly disrespectful depictions of history. His best-known books include “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” (1952), “Roses for Apollo” (1961), “Thistles for Hagen” (1966) and “Caesar Sends His Regards” (1971).

Fernau was assigned to the SS-War Correspondents-Company as a journalist from 1940, with a few interruptions, until the end of the war. This previously unpublished text is a fragmentary record that was originally intended to serve as the basis for an actual “thousand days” report on the experiences of the Second World War.

Thousand Days: Fragments of a Soldier's Life of 1939 and 1940

Foreword

The soldier Joachim Fernau served in the German army from September 1, 1939 to April 30, 1945. He was deployed in Poznan, in the French campaign, on the Eastern Front, and from autumn 1943, in France. In the West, he took part in the retreat to Lake Tegernsee, where he at the end of April demobilized himself and his soldiers. He escaped captivity.

Fernau, immediately after the war, dictated a memoir of his time as a soldier to his wife Gabriele. He gave it the working title Tausend Tage and planned a complete report to the end. However, the shorthand dictation that Gabriele Fernau wrote breaks off in April or May 1940 and was forgotten. After her husband’s death, Mrs. Fernau transferred her shorthand and transcribed the fragment. It appears here under the working title Fernau chose.

Fernau’s report bears all the hallmarks of an unfinished memoir: it has not been worked through stylistically, and the parts of this autobiographical account are not yet balanced with one another. One can be sure that Fernau would have removed the clichéd atmosphere of the description of a forced eviction, ultimately unperformed, from a Polish apartment in Bromberg that clings to it in the fragment. And harping on about the stature of the SS-men in Lichterfelde would undoubtedly have resulted in one or two unforgettable images in the valid version.

Nevertheless, both passages are characteristic of Fernau’s honest attempt to clarify what he—the convinced “civilian”—experienced during the war. And so he does not even try to hide his so-called involvement. Fernau thus describes the always slightly unreal atmosphere of the rear units, whose part in the war consists of waiting and readiness—only to suddenly have to talk about the harshness with which he too, as a soldier, had to intervene in the civilian life of the occupied territories: he was involved in reversing the Polonization of Poznan by making the Poles, who after 1918 moved into requisitioned German apartments, to vacate these apartments.

Fernau tried to avoid the Etappendienst¹ by requesting while on home leave a job as a war correspondent. His request was granted differently than he had hoped: in February 1940 he was transferred to the War Correspondent-Company (KBK) of the Waffen-SS. In his memoirs, Fernau describes his training in the “Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler” (LAH)². It is a respectful report about this guard unit of the Waffen-SS, of which he never considered himself a part of, as a forced transferee and by no means convinced of the National Socialist ideology. But as a war correspondent, he always wrote with respect about the bravery of these troops and individual outstanding personalities. And early on he sensed the fascinated horror with which today, when looking at these soldiers, an affirmative or benevolent business is carried out—depending on your point of view. In one place, in connection with Frederick the Great, it says: “Speechlessly the West looked at the small state of Prussia. If back then an officer of the Prussian Guards traveled ‘abroad’ to Mannheim or Weimar or Vienna to visit his aunt, he was regarded at the parties with the same slightly eerie curiosity with which France stared at the first figures of the Waffen-SS on the Champs Elysées in 1940.”

After the war, Fernau’s critics, because of such provocations, denounced his membership in the SS and the one or two propaganda articles that he wrote. It was not enough to overthrow Fernau; his position as a best-selling author was too stable; his honesty, too unflustered; and his opponents’ cannons too small-caliber.

—Götz Kubitschek

THOUSAND DAYS

On the evening that Adolf Hitler announced over the radio to the German people that troops would invade Poland and thus the beginning of the Second World War on September 1, 1939, we were sitting in a small restaurant in Charlottenburg, a district of Berlin. Our circle of three or four—I only remember three—were as diverse in age, temperament and education as it was possible to be, but the effect of Hitler’s words on us all was the same. The first emotion was a dull shock at the fact that an avalanche had started rolling that had already brought terrible misery and two million deaths to our people before in 1914. I remember that we were by no means in high spirits, although we were familiar with the phraseology used to justify the war, and Hitler’s speech, which sounded from the loudspeaker with great seriousness and obviously deep shock, appeared to us in many respects right and passionate. The cups and plates remained untouched, and I myself rose and very soon took my leave to be alone with my thoughts. When I got home, the muster order was already on my desk. It was signed by the Police Section South, Berlin. I was a soldier.

The next morning, strangely enough, I got up, feeling as if something had happened the night before that I had taken too seriously. I was somehow in a similar mood to that after the Austria-Czechoslovakia invasion, where the tension and anxiety at the news of the troops’ entry were relieved by the apparently unheard-of simple fact that two men boarded a plane and traveled to a third to talk to him about these facts. To me it even seemed superfluous as was actually ordered, to take socks, cutlery, underwear and the like with me to the muster call. I simply looked at the map again to see where I had to go, ordered the food for one o’clock as usual, put my hat on and left. The fact that I was actually eating at 1 o’clock was not thanks to the two men who had come to a third on the plane, but only to the abundance of German professional soldiers and the disorganization of the departments that still prevailed for the time being.

We gathered in a school where we stood around idly until about 12 o’clock, sitting on bars, horses, diving boards and waiting for what was to come. The majority of us were men my age, born in ’09, hardly any younger, some older. They for the most part belonged to the classes that life had taught to take orders that came to them on postcards very seriously, which is why they were there in weatherproof suits, with high lace-up boots and the ordered socks, underwear and cutlery. My pleasant suit caused serious concern, and my goatee, which I wore to excess at the time and which I would soon no longer be able to afford, caused the greatest amusement.

Around 12 o’clock some excited police officers arrived and strictly ordered us not to leave the protective roof of the gymnasium because Polish planes were approaching. Shortly afterwards, Berlin experienced its first alarm. Top Polish units had reached Frankfurt/Oder. The news suddenly hit me harder than I thought, and for the first time we all began think to about bombardement of Berlin and the terrible possibility that the German troops could be defeated by the Poles. However, the alarm soon came to an end, and when around 1 o’clock no officer had appeared, for admission into the Wehrmacht, I decided to go to lunch and have never regretted it.

In the streets of Berlin through which I hurried, one noticed a strong excitement and unrest, although the ourwardly the appearance had changed little. People talked of nothing but the war, but they only ever spoke of the German-Polish war, while I, with my knowledge of the political situation, waited in anxious suspense to see whether the period of danger would pass and the war would remain a German-Polish one, or whether the greater horror today or tomorrow was still to come and England and France would declare war on us. It was not a world war yet, and I decided not to get my socks and cutlery.

Our draft lasted a whole three days. I was assigned to the air raid police and given a suit and a blue cap, in which I looked like a mechanic for the municipal gasworks. We also carried a nine-millimeter caliber revolver, but we lacked cartridges. My superior was a police sergeant, not an officer, who had about ten active policemen and about twenty conscripts under him, whom he called “auxiliary policemen.” This designation seemed a hard blow to us all, because we did not want to be auxiliary policemen, but soldiers. I threateningly saw the possibility of a shako³ in front of me. The police sergeant, an expert in stamp matters, was undisturbed by any further expertise in military matters or air raid police measures. As my high forehead gave him the impression of above-average knowledge, he constantly asked me whether I thought the war would last a long time, which I was unfortunately unable to answer. I suspected him of not being very good at writing, because he regularly used one of my new comrades for written work from then on, who seemed to him to be well qualified for it because of his doctorate. The doctor was a tall, bespectacled and extremely funny man of thirty, who was the first to teach me to take my personal situation with humor, without underestimating the seriousness of the situation. He was convinced that a second World War would break out. He was a dentist and oral surgeon by profession. We visited many an air raid shelter together and went on many a night patrol through the streets of Steglitz. Although he had never taken part in a military exercise before, he had a very keen eye for how a simple soldier should behave. He was the contriver of the furnished rooms and apartments of acquaintances, which he carefully distributed throughout the district for our night patrols and used as bases. After just a few days, I never saw him do field work for more than ten to fifteen minutes.

All of these things, written down today, sound very fun. However, we were little aware of this at the time, especially since I was suffering enormously from the uncertainty of political developments and the awareness of the significance of all the decisions made by England, France, America and Russia. The bomb exploded on September 3rd: England and France declared war on Germany. I did not notice any hurrah mood either on the streets or in private circles. Nor did I hear the sentence from 1914: “more enemies, more honor.” The mood was very serious.

Now that this fear of mine, this unbelievable fear of the possibility of such scale and of the possibility that I could witness a new 1914/18, had become reality, I confess that I overcome by an unspeakable fear of this adventure. Only the lightning victories that soon followed put the anxiety to sleep again. But this and the last years of the war were still in complete darkness, and that I would play a role in this adventure neither I nor another suspected. I went to war as an unknown, nameless, simple soldier.

For two months, military training was carried out in the barracks yard day after day. In between there were 48 hours of air raid duty. We then had twelve hours of free time, during which we were allowed to live at home and wear civilian clothes. In the two months that I spent in training and serving, while the German army was already fighting battle after battle in Poland, I got to know the German police well and saw that they were consisted mainly of very well-behaved, but completely subaltern, externally brash, internally tired men.

During this time we made hundreds of patrols through the nighttime streets of Berlin and experienced the first, and only timid, attempts at bombings, which were so senseless that I even today I could not say who they came from and who they were aimed at. One night we found a bomb with a highly sensitive detonator in the middle of the street that would have exploded if a pedestrian had knocked it over in the dark. It was discovered by the smallest, tiniest, shyest and most unwarlike of all the conscripts, a man who bore the beautiful name Pomsel and who thus became the first, of all of us, to receive the first public commendation in this war. Shortly afterwards we discovered a second hero in our midst. One night a robbery at a savings bank branch was discovered by one of our patrols. The perpetrator jumped into a waiting car, turned on the lights and tried to flee. Our auxiliary policeman stood twenty or thirty meters in front of the car, right in the headlights, drew his pistol and fired at the driver. The pistol failed. The driver, with presence of mind, now tried to run over our hero, whereupon he jumped between two trees on the side of the road, reloaded the pistol and fired again at the robber. The pistol failed again and the robber pulled the car to the side to drive at the policeman between the trees. In no time he had raised the pistol back up and fired for the third time, without success. Then fate decided to put an end to this tragicomic game and let the car to drive into the tree, causing the robber to crack his skull so badly that he was then brought in by the auxiliary policeman. For many years these things, bombs, robberies, remained the only disturbances, just as the first period was more turbulent than the years that followed.

I know almost all of the air raid shelters in Steglitz and Südde, the two large, beautiful suburbs of Berlin, and there are thousands of them. Because we had the task of inspecting the houses, requisitioning the cellars as air raid shelters and arranging the furnishings. Four years later, the first carpet of bombs dropped on Berlin by the English Air Force was placed on these houses. It has almost completely incinerated a two kilometer square. Now and then a few houses still rise unscathed from the ruins, including, strangely enough, my own (Kellerstr. No. 1). At that time, the population did not have the slightest understanding of the expansion of air raid shelters. When we were out in the houses from midday to evening, we could talk our heads off, trying to convince people that bombs might fall one day. Everyone thought that was completely out of the question and no one wanted to move a single crate of potatoes or shake a single hand.

The negotiations were almost all the same: first the landlord was visited, then all the tenants were called together, followed by an inspection of the cellars. Everyone protested in advance and tried to convince me that the dark hole they had under the ground was absolutely essential to their life and that they would be completely desperate if they had to give it up. The landlords tried to convince the auxillary policeman that their house was one of the most stable and that he had recently had several tons of steel installed in the cellar ceiling. He was met with derisive laughter from all sides, the tenants assured him that the house should actually be torn down because it was dilapidated and that the landlord was an outright usurer. What usually followed was an extremely turbulent scene between the individual parties, whereupon everyone resolutely put on their hats and wanted to return to their homes. In the end, for better or for worse, they had to submit to the police’s orders. The few handshakes they had to do dragged on agonizingly long for weeks and everyone was convinced that it was completely pointless. Four years later, I saw the same people running out of the burning rubble and witnessed how they dragged stones and beams to protect themselves as best as they could in their ruined houses with the last of their strength.

One morning in November, came the transfer order to a police battalion that was fighting Polish partisans in Poland. The next day we stood shivering in a gloomy barracks yard at dawn, newly clothed, heavily laden, sullen and full of feelings of farewell, and an hour later, on the platform. After twelve hours, late in the evening, our transport rolled into the train station in Poznan. The battalion, to which the small Berlin troop had joined, had almost completed its task in the partisan fight when we reached it. We had marched across the country for days, the frost rattled in the air, the snow crunched under our feet, we ran forward almost in forced marches, just to warm ourselves up a bit by marching. The feet of the men in this group that trekked across the Polish plains were either in worn-out jackboots or in new, cement-hard boots whose fresh black shoe wax still showed the old brown of the leather. We had turned up our coat collars, our faces burned like fire from the icy air, and if we touched the barrel of the gun or the iron parts of the lock with our bare hands, scraps of skin stuck to them. After days in which the monotonous image of the dirty, poor Polish villages was repeated without any change, our destination lay before us, a village that was in no way different from the others. It had a name that I have long since forgotten, all I remember is that there were a lot of sc and cz in it, it had a dirt road and twenty low, thatched houses. Behind the windows, the cracks of which were covered with paper, stared out the faces of countless dirty children and, now and then, a few burning black eyes of a girl. The command post was located in a shed-like building called a school, and around it camped the battalion.

TO BE CONTINUED…

read part 2 here.

1. submarine resupply service

2. also known as the 1st SS Panzer Division

3. police cap