First Chapter of WWII Fiction I'm Working On

[Ostkrieg]

The following is the first chapter of a piece of WWII fiction I am working on, a memoir of the Eastern Front from the perspective of a German soldier in the 132nd Infantry Division. I am posting it here for feedback and comments, as I am not much of a WWII historian, although I have done a good deal of research for this project.

Be warned: my main character is not taking a "We were professionals following orders" or "Our leaders deceived us" angle in regards to National Socialism. As you shall see, like most of the German people in his day, he willingly turned himself and his country over to the Nazis and believed in their policies and programs... and pogroms. A recurring theme in my work is not just the horror of war but also the genocide that the German forces pursued in WWII, and how a person who supported that genocide, directly or indirectly, honestly considers their involvement. My main character clearly regrets his decisions in hindsight, but do not feel pity for him; feel pity for the victims of the German war machine.

Any constructive commentary people have will be appreciated. Thank you.

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I was born on a sweltering hot summer in 1919, the day after the foundation of the Weimar Republic. The ink had not yet dried on the new constitution when I came wailing from my mother’s womb, entering a new state hopelessly divided. From the national level down to my working class neighborhood, Germany bubbled over with dissent. The communists hated the fascists, the fascists hated the communists, and everyone hated the moderates in power. This was not just the petty partisan bickering of contemporary politics, either; the fighting in the streets was constant, whether it was former veterans paid to put down trade union strikes or left-wing militants clashing with the police. Of course, cooing in my crib, I was ignorant of all this. I could have no idea at the time that a fuse had been a lit many years before, at the end of the last World War, that would soon explode and draw the entirety of Europe into it, leaving us all scarred.

My family was poor and had always been such, even before hyperinflation. We lived in a district called Wedding, nicknamed “Red Wedding” as it was a communist stronghold. Heinz Lowenthal, my father, however, was anything but; a traditionalist and a disciplinarian, he had loved the Kaiser until he had abdicated, “abandoning” Germany in its time of need. He had eagerly enlisted in 1914, certain that he would win glory and honor on the battlefield, returning home a triumphant hero, basking in admiration and praise. Instead, Germany had been defeated, forced to sign a humiliating treaty, “stabbed in the back” by a plethora of conspirators: liberals, Marxists, Jews, and a host of other "pathological enemies of the state.” He returned from the front changed physically and mentally. A machine gun had taken his left arm. His characteristic intensity remained, but whereas before the war he had been jovial and cavalier (at least according to my mother), afterwards he was bitter, resentful, escaping into a bottle at every opportunity. My mother, Helga, was a silent workhorse and supported us, working in a Luftschiffbau Zeppelin factory. She was a large woman, tough and stocky, with rough hands and thick muscles. This is not to imply she was masculine; on the contrary, she was shy and demure, and always deferred to her husband, even when he would go into one of his vitriolic rants. She did prevent any harm from befalling her children, and although he often hurled verbal abuse at his progeny, my father never struck my sister and me, outside of a spanking for especially noxious trespasses. We were fortunate in this regard, as I knew many children growing up who were not lucky.

My sister, Brigitte, raised me while my father was in his cups and my mother slaved away assembling airships. She was kind and sweet, fast with a laugh, but she inherited my father’s passion. She could be willful and defiant, embracing every chance for rebellion. She read avidly and frequently lost herself in any book she could procure. Once, my father found some Marxist literature hidden under her mattress. He was livid and threatened to disown her. I caught her that evening in the kitchen, her humble belongings gathered in a pillowcase tied around a broomstick. She told me she was going to Paris, that she loved me and that she would write me once she found some work and started a new life for herself. The police returned her before breakfast the following morning, by which time my father had become prepared to forgive her for all sins in exchange for her well-being. She insisted for weeks that her plan had come undone only because the woman selling train tickets had told on her. She was sixteen.

For my part, I seemed to have gotten my mother’s taciturn demeanor as well as her strength. I internalized my father’s warnings that I would amount to nothing without applying myself to the utmost in my studies, with the consequence that I became overly anxious, consumed by fears of my own inadequacy. While Brigitte rebelled against authority, I knelt before it, keen to please my parents, my teacher and any other adult whose approval I could win. Naturally, this did not endear me to other children and I became the frequent target of bullies. To my credit, when push came to shove, I stood my ground, as my father taught me, and took my licks with my victories. My fighting horrified my mother, but it delighted my father, who wanted nothing more than for me to follow him into the army. I wanted nothing less than to earn the pride of my father, which I would learn was to be ever elusive. I continue to think that he loved me and was proud of me, although he never said the words; men of his generation would not, could not say those words to another man, I think, no matter the man or the circumstances, even to their own offspring.

In school, I relished history and German, but did not share my sister’s taste for novels or poetry. I despised mathematics and found all the sciences to be incredibly boring. I had a natural gift for drawing, and when I could get away with it, I would while away lectures doodling in my notebooks, even sometimes in the margins of textbooks or on the surfaces of my desk. Sometimes I would sit in parks and draw people as they conversed or read; my favorites were people who were showing their emotions honestly. I still distinctly remember drawing the face of a middle-aged man, bald and plump, as he sat on a bench, his arms by his sides, with the most morose and despondent expression. He looked like a doctor had just told him that he had a terminal illness, or as if he had just walked in on his wife making love with his best friend. For all I knew, he had. More often, though I drew rough portraits of my relatives: my father, drunk and sleepy, red eyes with heavy eyelids, slouched on a table; my mother, calm and serene, peeling potatoes for supper; my sister, her fire just beneath the surface, turning each page of her latest book with intent, impatient to reach the next chapter.

When I was nine, I met my best friend, Kurt Welker. Brigitte dragged me along with her to see a movie, a silent film starring Otto Gebühr as Frederick the Great. She really had no interest in seeing it, but a classmate of hers named Helmut had invited her to see it with him, and she, being quite in love with him at the time, readily agreed. Since no one else could watch me, she had to take me, although I protested quite loudly that I would have preferred death to watching my sister look longingly at a boy. Little did I know that Helmut had also been saddled with a younger brother who harbored similar feelings? Kurt was just five months younger than I, albeit different in many ways. I was tall and broad, while he was small and lean. I had a long face with blonde hair and soft features, and he had a round face that was all rugged, chiseled lines, topped with ginger hair for which others teased him persistently. I was withdrawn and self-effacing, but he was the classic extrovert, mischievous and boisterous. We complemented each other nicely. The pair of us had entered the theater downcast, our respective siblings beaming at each other; when we left, Brigitte was already moving on in her mind to some other boy, Helmut no longer holding her interest, while Kurt and I took turns imitating stilted Prussian accents, much to our amusement.

Kurt’s family lived several blocks from our tenement, so we typically met at some halfway point for our daily adventures. I met his parents for the first time in January 1929. When I arrived, Kurt’s father was sitting in a circle with a group of men, all animatedly discussing politics. I was too young to grasp what they were saying, but I listened intently as Kurt put on his winter coat. I heard words like “Stalin,” “Trotsky,” and “exile.” I thought this to be a normal topic for adults, so that evening at supper I made mention of it. My father instantly flew into a rage; he wanted to know where I had picked up such nonsense. I lied and said a newsboy hawking papers had alluded to it. He told me not to concern myself with such things, that the Reds represented Jews and not the workers. He also warned me to be careful what I said around Wedding, though, as “true Germans” were outnumbered in Berlin – at least for the time being.

I soon learned my father was getting more than drunk at the local beer halls; he was also getting a political education. The Nazis were on the rise, and although National Socialism’s throttleholds of support were in the countryside, increasingly more urban nationalists were rallying to Hitler and his brown shirts. It did not take long for the Nazi chief in Berlin, Joseph Goebbels, to woo my father with his anti-Semitic, Jew-baiting propaganda. The decisive factor for him came at the end of 1929, when the New York stock market crashed. My mother lost her job at the Zeppelin factory. From that point on, my father was convinced that Jewish bankers and Jewish Bolsheviks would be Germany’s undoing, that what little my family had would be seized and redistributed were the communists to ever take power. When Horst Wessel, a young Nazi activist, was shot and killed by a communist in February 1930, I remember my father taking me to see Goebbels speak at an event. It was pure spectacle, designed to play on our emotions and view Wessel as a martyr. I ate it up with a spoon. We Germans, beneath our firm exteriors, are a sentimental lot; we love noble and tragic heroes. The story of a young and valiant man making the ultimate sacrifice to preserve the purity of his fatherland resonated with many, especially those who had lost so much pride in their nation and feared even worse was to come. We can never know what would have happened had the Nazis not come to power; everyone knows the Hell on earth they brought to Europe after they did so.

I am getting ahead of myself. On May 1, 1929, the communists held a march in celebration of International Workers' Day. At the time, Moscow preached war against the “social fascists,” that social democracy was just as poisonous and damaging to the proletariat as bourgeois capitalism. The police intervened, the crowd was told to disperse, and the assembly refused to give up the streets. The police opened fire, killing 25 people. Among them was Kurt’s father. I did not see him for around a month after that; he was so wrought with grief I wondered if he would ever overcome it. Finally, he agreed to see me, and even then, he was inconsolable. He would sit on his bed, looking out the window, while I would draw him or relate gossip I had heard that day in school. Gradually, he spoke monosyllables, then more complex sentences, and at last, he came outside to walk and, eventually, play. Still, he was never the same; the state took more than his father that day. He became more fearful and more violent, and any who dared mention his red hair in a playful manner now felt his wrath. He never had his long-desired growth spurt, but he became lean as well as mean, tenacious and quick. He also developed distaste for politics, and thinking in general; he was more impulsive, quick to act, postponing observation for a more convenient time.

In the years that followed the German people could not hand power to the Nazis fast enough. They went from a fringe party with a dozen seats in parliament to the second largest in the Reichstag, and soon after Hitler became chancellor, the conservatives thinking they could use and control him. Yet, we all knew the people have given Hitler a mandate to seize power; we had no illusions that the Nazis had anything but contempt for liberal parliamentary democracy. They had always presented themselves as revolutionaries, who wanted to rule rather than campaign. When they passed the Enabling Act in 1933, taking away our remaining civil rights and political freedoms, most Germans did not complain. We were tired of making decisions for ourselves; democracy entailed too many headaches. We wanted to put to our blind faith in a fearless and capable leader, and that charismatic Bavarian corporal promised he was that. My father, especially, was over the moon, certain that the greedy financiers and industrialists would get what was coming to them, that at long last there would be revenge against the Jews and the Reds that had betrayed Germany.

I would like to say that I thought differently, that I belonged to that minority who resisted or at least objected to National Socialism. Truthfully, however, I supported them and their program. I feared the communists for all the reasons my father provided me, and like many of my countrymen, German nationalism was far more familiar to me than the lofty project of constructing a classless paradise. The monarchists as well as the liberals had their chance; now it was the turn for fascism, which seemed to be genuinely interested in the welfare of the “masses.” As for anti-Semitism and racial purity, it made sense to German hearts if not to German brains that our identity, our culture, our civilization had to be kept wholesome and authentic. I may not have had a visceral, all-consuming hatred of the Jews, the homosexuals, or any other group the Nazi state persecuted from the outset, but I did have fears and prejudices, and yes, even anger toward them, and when I saw Jewish shops closed or Jews attacked on the street, I gave my consent. I chose a side, and I chose the Nazis. Others in my generation may claim that they stayed above the fray, that they were deceived or simply did what they were told. These are lies and justifications, attempts to avoid responsibility; we each had the potential to act, to save at least one Jew or homosexual or communist, but we did not.

In 1933, after the Nazis took power, I joined the Hitler Youth. I was fourteen. I received a more polished indoctrination than I had received from my father at the dinner table. My instructors advocated a Spartan militarism that fit my lifestyle and my attitude; my family already lived simply and I carried fantasies of becoming a warrior like my father. Additionally, there was something magical about the pageantry of the Nazis, their penchant for flags, symbols and uniforms. It was the joy of fitting in, fighting for a cause larger than you, with a mystical aura around it, a special destiny at the national level brought about at the individual by you and people like you. For those of us who had nothing, who had only known poverty and hardship, we became caught up in a movement that promised us everything as long as we gave ourselves over entirely. Most of my friends only lasted in the Hitler Youth a few months; although membership became required, enforcement was lax. For many, Nazism was a trend, like jazz or bird watching, a way of generating social capital and building networks. I, however, was no mere opportunist. I stayed active and committed. I lacked the intelligence and the breeding to be groomed as a future leader of the party, but I remained in the rank-and-file, a dutiful apprentice.

Kurt, meanwhile, was apolitical. Fatherless, his life lacked direction, and he became indolent and hedonistic. He threw himself into jazz and swing music, aping English fashions and slang, and although my mentors taught me that my friend was being seduced by a degenerate culture with wicked morals, I looked the other way. Even if I had tried to lecture him, bring him into the fold, Kurt would not have listened. He was rebelling purely to rebel, and the “swing kids” were simply more fun than the followers of the vegetarian teetotaler Hitler. He was forced into joining the Hitler Youth in 1936, when membership became mandatory, and only our time together made it tolerable for him. He refused to be indoctrinated, daydreaming when told about our special destiny and our racial supremacy, but he lost himself in the sports and camping that we did.

In 1936, Berlin hosted the summer Olympic games, and for a time we became infatuated with all things athletic. We would run through the streets of Wedding, sprinting, from our homes to school, from our school to the market, everywhere our feet could take us. Kurt, just to be subversive, would declare himself to be Jesse Owens, and true to his namesake, he often beat me when it came to speed. When we wrestled, either for competition or for fun, I usually emerged the victor. I had a competitive streak that the Hitler Youth nurtured and tried to turn against both my friends and rivals. Fascism is about survival of the fittest, of the alpha male imposing his will upon the weaker. I could never do this to Kurt and I believe because of this my mentors in the Party found me wanting. I did not really give it much second thought; I was just glad to have a steadfast friend.

When I turned eighteen, I had to join the Reichsarbeitsdienst, the national labor service. The organization acted as a massive public works program. It was very much like the soldiers’ life, but we were building roads rather than fighting battles. We all wore uniforms with special insignia and lived in barracks on the outskirts of the city, where most of the work was done. It was backbreaking work, swinging a sledge for 76 hours a day. However, I was in the prime of my youth and enjoyed working with my hands. Plus, we were in the country, and it was nice to be out of the city, to see trees and lush meadows, and to hear birds singing and be able to see the stars at night. I missed my family and my old friends, though. Kurt was assigned as a metalworker back in Berlin. We exchanged letters frequently, and from his missives, I surmised that he was leaving behind his Don Juan days and settling down. The government had failed to convert him into a true believer, but it had instilled in him a work ethic and created routine for him. The state was replacing the father it had murdered.

On a summer afternoon in 1938, Kurt and I met up in Berlin while we were both on leave from the service. This was after Germany had annexed Austria but before the Munich Conference. We were walking down Pankstrasse, debating where to have lunch. Kurt suffered from a terrible hangover, his shirt stained and wrinkled, and clutching a cigarette between his lips seemed all the energy he could muster. In contrast, I was alert and well rested, looking smart in freshly pressed clothes, ready to take on the world. We came upon some boys around our age aggressively flirting with a pair of girls out for a stroll, who were doing their best to ignore them. Seeking to be chivalrous, I jumped in, much to the annoyance of Kurt, who wanted to say out of it. However, when the first punch was thrown and I collided with the cobblestones, Kurt did not hesitate to retaliate, grabbing my assailant by the neck and hurling him to the ground. He mounted the boy and dropped a volley of blows, and so brutal was he that the boy’s friends, dumbstruck, watched on stupidly. Kurt only stopped once I peeled him off. The boys ran away, cursing us, leaving us with the girls we rescued.

They were both very pretty. They thanked us and introduced themselves. The taller of the two, Gretel, was blonde and fair-skinned, her hair pulled into a crisp bun, with warm chocolate eyes and a wide smile. The other, Ulrike, wore her auburn-colored hair down, and had a tomboyish manner that frankly made me uncomfortable. She had a vitality that only Kurt could rival. I believe that they fell in love almost instantly, joking and laughing as if they had known each for years. They shared affection for jazz and, for their first date, went to see a black band from the Southern United States performing at a nightclub. When I heard this, I lost my temper; I accused Kurt of perverting himself and corrupting Ulrike. He just smiled and rolled his eyes, then mollified me with his quick wit and easy manner. My harsh words were forgotten. He never suffered any other fools besides me. At his urging, we began going on double dates, he with Ulrike and I with Gretel. This went on for several months, going to the cinema or for picnics in the parks, and for a time we were happy and content.

Our mood reflected that of the nation, as Hitler had taken back the Rhineland, absorbed Austria and, in September, we gained the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. He accomplished all this without a war. Economically, we were in the midst of recovery; unemployment was falling and public works programs improved our crumbling infrastructure. My father managed to procure a comfortable job at a party newspaper, where he was largely paid to drink. My mother went to work at an Opel factory, although this displeased my father, who wanted to be the breadwinner. His criticisms quieted when he realized more money coming in meant more liquor for him. Our worries of the past were fading.

For others, however, their worst fears were being realized. In November, I was again on leave, and I met Gretel after breakfast to walk her to her school. It was a Thursday. On the streets, we noticed the traffic at a standstill, crowds of people stalling everything. I ran ahead to see what was happening. A group of people were standing in a circle so thick that some stood on boxes or chairs taken from cafes. I heard applause and shouting. I pressed forward and saw, in the center of the crowd, men hitting other men, kicking them or hitting them with hammers or clubs. The men on the ground wore beards and were bleeding heavily. I grabbed an old man standing beside me, a solemn look on his face.

“What is going on?” I asked.

“Ernst vom Rath is dead,” he replied. Vom Rath was a German diplomat who had been shot in Paris a few days ago by a Jewish teenager. The day before, the government in retaliation had proscribed Jewish cultural activities and banned several Jewish papers. Now, it appeared, things were escalating.

Somewhere someone had started to play a bouncy polka tune on an accordion. I returned to Gretel and took her by the arm, ushering her past the mob. We went by several shops, their windows shattered, graffiti written on the walls saying that these had been Jewish businesses. Suddenly, just in front of us, a man came flying through a window and landed almost at our feet. Gretel screamed as I pulled her back from the rain of glass splinters. I heard the delicate crack of the man’s neck as he struck the pavement. A burly man in a brown shirt leaned out of the window and, seeing us, said, “Pardon me, kids, I didn’t see you.” Realizing that we were in the midst of a riot, I turned around and began to usher Gretel back home. She was sobbing, becoming hysterical. I tried to comfort her but it was no good. All around us was chaos, blood and cruelty.

Foolishly, I thought an alley would be better than the main streets. As soon as we dipped into one, however, we heard wild yelling. Some boys around my age were stomping on two Jewish kids, Hasidim, lying facedown in the gutter. Gretel tugged at my harm. “Reinhard!” she shouted. “Do something!” I shrugged. Slowly, it dawned me; I recognized the attackers. They were classmates and comrades from the Hitler Youth; they were younger than me, a few years behind me. If I wanted to, I could have told them to stop, and they may have even listened to me, deferred to me as their elder if not their superior. Yet, I did nothing. I watched, gawking, as they pummeled defenseless children without restraint. I flexed not a muscle, moved not a finger, and uttered not a breath to save those Jews – I, who had so gallantly protected Gretel and Ulrike just months before. Why? I have asked myself that question many times, and come to many conclusions, but the answer is quite simple: these Jews were not “real” Germans. Ulrike and Gretel could have been my sisters or my lovers; they looked and acted just like me. The Jews in the mud were different, with their strange clothes and odd ringlets, plus customs and language all their own. My hostility toward them predated the Nazis, Hitler and all the speeches and propaganda I had heard in my adolescence. My gut had always told me they were not to be trusted, that they had ulterior motives and sinister designs for my people and our way of life. I did not need to read the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion to know about their plans for world domination or their undermining of our morals. It was not necessary for men like vom Rath to die at Jewish hands for me to dread and loathe them. In a different world, in a world where the Nazis never came to power, and still I had witnessed the pogrom, would I have done anything to prevent the massacre? The answer, quite honestly, is that I still would have done nothing. Gentiles have standing idle while Jews suffered since the days of ancient Babylon and Egypt. Why should Kristallnacht have been different? I accepted the suffering of the Jews, and what is more, I convinced myself that they deserved it.

Gretel never saw me anymore after that. I suppose I reminded her too much of that day. We remained acquaintances, and after I joined the army, we corresponded briefly, and then the letters stopped. I tried looking her up after the war and learned she had died in April 1945 during the Allied bombing of Berlin. At the time, however, it was no great loss. I knew that I did not love Gretel, and like mine, her family was poor, so a long-term relationship with her held no benefits. The images of the pogrom stood with me, however, a presence in my nightmares, and to escape it I threw myself into my work. I became taciturn and dour, and sometimes, when we would go for beers at the end of our shifts, I would drink more than the other boys. The memory of my father kept me from following in his footsteps, and thankfully, the physical conditioning of the labor service saved my body and my liver from the worst of alcohol. Of course, we were being molded into fighting machines, turned into men of granite to be sculpted into soldiers for the greatest conflict known to humanity. At the time, though, I thought that I was just doing my bit for Germany, helping the government invest in infrastructure that had been allowed to wither under the Weimar Republic.

In early 1939, my family was rocked by scandal. My sister eloped, running away with a boy named Heinrich that my father had forbidden her to see. He had said some things critical about the Nazi Party in my father’s presence, and my father had sworn to report him to the Gestapo. The next day Brigitte made good on her childhood dream of escaping to Paris; at least, that was what she said in the contents of the letter she left my mother and I. My mother made me swore to not relate this to my father, and I was willing to agree. I loved my sister, as she had been my guardian growing up, and even at a tender age I knew that her strong will and large personality would chafe under a system that wanted women to stick to traditional places in the household. I never knew if she made it to Paris with Heinrich or what became of her; I tried searching for her in 1940, after Germany took the city, and again in 1945, but each time without success. All I know is that she most definitely deserved happiness and I hope she found it.

As the year went on, war seemed increasingly likely. Germany demanded the incorporation of the Free City of Danzig, now Gdansk, which stood on the border of German East Prussia and Poland. The German inhabitants of the city favored the move, but the Polish government would not acquiesce. On September 1, 1939, Germany went to war with Poland; in response, the United Kingdom and France declared war on us. The invasion of Poland only last around a month before the Poles capitulated. Even at that point, however, we among the common people did not believe that this would lead to a prolonged war; we imagined that our Fuhrer, genius that he was, would mollify the Allies as he had in Munich, and form a peace with the British and the French. After all, we had signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union and even divided Poland with Moscow, and the Nazis had been more consistently antagonistic to the Bolsheviks than the other Western powers. No treaty came, but there were also no major offensives against us. This was the so-called “phony war,” which the French called a joke version of a war. We did not really believe the rest of the West would die for Danzig, and when the Soviet Union invaded Finland in November 1939, I even thought the European democracies would seek closer ties with Germany and Italy against the Soviet threat we had been crowing about for years. In hindsight, we were witnessing the opening stages of World War II, but we had no idea.

On May 10th, 1940, German troops overran Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, bypassing French defensive lines in the south. No one expected France and the British forces there to be defeated quickly, especially not in the same time it took to take Poland. Yet, the Battle of France only took five days more than the Polish invasion, and German casualties were minimal. All of Germany succumbed to war-fever. Every boy in my barracks, including myself, wanted to join the military afterwards. Even Kurt, the carefree bon vivant, confided his excitement that, in the summer, we would be conscripted. I fantasized about being in the infantry, as my father had been, while Kurt dreamt of flying a fighter plane over the continent, dogfighting with as much flair as the Red Baron had in the First World War. There was even a fear among us that it would all be over before we even had a chance to put on a uniform, that Adolf Hitler was too clever and that there would be an armistice favorable to Germany before our basic training finished. At that time, it was impossible to think about anything other than the war and our seemingly invincible military might. I lay awake at night, images of me in a helmet and dashing field gray uniform, marching in column through the streets of London, Manchester and Liverpool.

In the summer of 1940, sure enough, I was conscripted and placed in the Ersatzheer, the “replacement army,” to be trained. Contrary to what you might suspect, our training was not grueling, and our instructors were not cruel. The Hitler Youth had kept most of us physically vigorous, and the obligatory labor service had previously implanted in us the fundamentals of military organization. For the most part, we were virtually already trained. For those of us from the working class, used to living in dilapidated tenements, our living conditions were either the same or improved. The strict discipline and punitive measures employed by the Prussian old guard had changed in favor of promoting camaraderie and bonding between soldiers. Our superiors chose our squad leaders not for their ability to push us to the breaking point, but for their skill in showing initiative and team building. As time went on and our fortunes in the war worsened, this changed; the military became more political and less professional, and each decisive defeat we suffered was blamed on our incompetence and our cowardice. By the end of the war, when we were fighting in Germany itself, we more motivated more by fear and hatred than pride and hope. In those early days, when I was just a raw recruit, we had no reason to be bleak. We were full of joy and energy, ready to follow our Fuhrer to any destination.

I was assigned to the 437th Regiment of the132nd Infantry Division, which was mobilized in October 1940 by the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces. The division consisted of elements of three other divisions, the pre-existing formations filled in with new recruits like myself. Kurt, much to his chagrin, did not become a pilot in the Luftwaffe. Instead, he was placed in the 416th Regiment of the 123rd Division. The 123rd had many Berliners in it, the majority of recruits coming from the Berlin military district, whereas I was in the minority in my division. I feared that I would be lonely and in a long drinking session with Kurt I made him vow that he would write me regularly. With tears streaming down his face, his breath stinking with hops, he held me tight and agreed that he would. He kept his promise. Our letters to each other would be the bedrock upon which our morale our rest, especially when the doom meant for the Third Reich became apparent. My letters home were standard boilerplate, a mixture of sentiment and perfunctory inquiries about health, but my letters to and from Kurt were more genuine and even heartfelt; he was the only person from my past who I could share my thoughts and pain with, for those thoughts and pain were his too.

As it turned out, I became fast friends with several of the boys in my platoon. We bonded over the strenuous runs and the mediocre food that became the shared happenings of our days. There was Siegfried Stromberg, a tightly wound office clerk from Stuttgart; Josef Heppner, a curmudgeonly and crude lumberjack from a small town in the Black Forest; Rolf Drexler, the baby of the group, immature but witty; and Paul Reichenbach, a gentle giant from some farm in upper Bavaria. These were my core comrades, although there many more. I got along with almost everyone, and being newly picked from civilian life, we were not shy about striking up conversation with one another. The war would make us distant, cold, harsh; we did not bother to get to know anyone knew because there was no point, save for getting close to someone who would probably die in front of you, if you did not die in front of them first.

There were a couple of men no one liked. Perhaps it was because of this that they gravitated toward one another. Erich Lange and Karl Zuckerman ate together, talked together and even ran in formation together. They deplored work assignments and neglected their uniforms and their bunks, and for their carelessness, the entire platoon would pay the price, losing our leave and being made to do extra exercises. Initially we felt some solidarity with them, but it became clear that they did not intend to try harder; in fact, they seemed to be enjoying their little rebellions, regardless of the collective punishment.

Finally, we had enough. One night, Drexler woke me; it was still dark outside. He giggled and motion to the bunks where Lange and Zuckerman were sleeping. I and several other men he had roused gathered around the hated duo. We soon saw that their left eyebrows had been shaven off. I laughed, but I also felt fear for my friend. “Sergeant Gerhardt is going to kill you!” said Stromberg, articulating my apprehension. Drexler, in his blithe way, rolled his shoulders. He seemed not the least bit worried. Not one of us could blame him, but at the same time, we knew that, were no one to step forward for the prank, we would all bear a punishment ten times worse than anything Lange and Zuckerman could have brought down on us. The army was no longer comprised of humorless Prussian officers wearing monocles and holding riding crops, as I said, but for this sort of embarrassment to be inflicted on the platoon, the company, and the regiment… Well, it would not go down well. The more I thought about it, the more it bothered me, and I do not think I slept even one second more that evening.

The next morning, as we expected, Sergeant Gerhardt was furious. His face red, he stomped up and down as we lined up in front of our beds. He stopped in front of Lange and Zuckerman, wearing the face of a disappointed father. “First, I want you two to shave off the other eyebrow! That look may not be regulation, but at least you will be uniform!” He glared at the rest of us. “Second, I want the man responsible to step forward! If he does not, believe me you will regret it!”

I immediately stepped forward.

Sergeant Gerhardt sprung on me with the swiftness of a cheetah. “Lowenthal! Are you admitting that you shaved the eyebrows of these men?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you have any accomplices?”

“No, sir.”

“I don’t believe you.”

That wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer. I could feel Gerhardt’s eyes on me, measuring what I want amounted to. Much to his surprise, I could detect a softening in his demeanor. Perhaps he knew that being a troublemaker was not in my nature, that I was taking the fall for one of my friends. Still, he had to make an example out of me. I knew what I had brought on my head. My eyes were open. I do not know if he thought I was brave, stupid or some combination.

He made me run. He made run until I vomited. He made me run until not a drop of sweat remained within me, until I was panting so hard my tongue felt as dry as sandpaper. Every muscle in my legs ached and my heart pounded like a diesel engine. Then he made me run some more. I did knee bends while I watched the rest of the platoon eat lunch. For 24 hours, he made my life a living hell.

I was something of a god after that. Even Drexler, so oblivious to what his prank had entailed, understood what I had done for him and for the others. I got extra rations the following day, and when I lagged behind on the course due to my soreness, others slackened their pace so my slowness was not so evident. An incident that should have been a black eye for the entire regiment turned into a sterling example of brotherhood, of one soldier sacrificing himself for the unit.

To me, the adoration was bittersweet. In my head, I hung onto the shame of November 1938, when I had seen the Jews struck in the alleyway. Where had been my courage then? I told myself what any National Socialist would tell himself, that subconsciously I already realized the Jews were realizing their judgment for their untold depravities. Yet, I could not convince myself. The men in the platoon believed in a fiction that I had authored, that I was a noble and daring spirit, when the truth was that I had no moral authority. Did the truth even matter? If I – or any man, for that matter – persuaded enough people to accept a fabrication, and the reality became so covered up by layers of deceit, would not lies become true? Hitler himself had written that big lies carried credibility, in that people easily conceive of small lies, but since they will not resort to incredible distortions of the truth, they cannot anticipate them. Hence, he said, that is how the Jews and the Marxists convinced so many Germans that the government had lost the First World War for Germany. I wonder now, with hindsight, if he really believed that were true, and if had been introspective enough to ask himself if he was in fact the liar, or if all the anti-Semitism and nationalist puffery he ingested had been lies. Laying on that bed in 1940, I confess I lacked that much introspection; I was still a committed Nazi.

In 1941, I abandoned my caprices of invading the United Kingdom. Around the time my unit had been mobilized, Italy had attacked Greece without success, and by the end of the year, they had been pushed out of the country. It became clear that Germany would come to Italy’s rescue. We spent the first couple months of 1941 thinking we would have our baptism by fire against the Greeks and their British allies, but in March, there was a rude surprise. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia, surrounded by Axis powers in the southern Mediterranean, decided to join our alliance, but a group of pro-Allied Yugoslav officers staged a coup. Our forces were already preparing to take on Greece, so it was rapidly decided that we would simply conquer all of the Balkans in one large, swift operation.

We attacked in April 1941. It only took a dozen days for the Royal Yugoslav Army to surrender. We missed the invasion, but we learned we would be responsible for the occupation. The 132nd Infantry Division traveled to Zagreb and onto Bosnia, where we would be performing security missions to keep the peace and uncover enemies of the state. I found the place fascinating, a melting pot of the exotic Turkish East and the more familiar legacy of Austrian hegemony. We passed through a multitude of quaint hamlets, many centered around feudal castles and in the shadows of beautiful snow-capped mountain ridges. Most of us had no frame of reference for the place, save for knowing that the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo almost three decades ago had led to a great war whose sequel we were now engaged in. We were curious, excited, but also nervous; most of us had never left our home neighborhoods, much less our native cities or our fatherland. We did not know what to expect.
We were only in Yugoslavia for a few months, and truthfully, I have just a handful of memories of it; my experiences in the Soviet Union are much more vivid in my head, much to my discomfort. We patrolled in and around Sarajevo, mostly, traversing the hills of Romanija, Trebević, Semizovac-Srednje and many others. We hunted members of the nascent partisan movement, always communists. The Chetniks, the Serb monarchists, posed a problem elsewhere in the country, but the communists had deep roots in Sarajevo and elsewhere, and unlike the royalists, they were united behind an ideology that cut across ethnic cleavages. The feuds and histories of Yugoslavia were too complex for our brains, but we more or less figured out that the Catholic Croats hated the Orthodox Serbs and vice versa, and no one was overly fond of the local Muslims, who just wanted to survive. After the Axis victory, Germany had lent its support to the Ustaše, a movement of Croatian fascists, who subsequently decided to inflict as much agony as possible on the Serb populace, for crimes real or imagined.

I particularly remember on one day we were supposed to inspect an ethnic Serb village east of Sarajevo. The name I cannot recall, save that it was mostly consonants. When we arrived a dense of crowd of people surrounded the main square. In the middle of the small square, a blonde man of medium height, probably in his 20s, leaned on a wooden club as thick as his arm. Around him, fifteen to 20 dead and dying people lay at his feet. Someone was running a hose because water poured incessantly, washing blood away into a ditch. About 20 men, guarded by armed civilians, stood waiting nearby for their own execution. After a cursory wave, a man came forward and the blonde man with the club beat him to death, each blow accompanied by enthusiastic shouts from the crowd.

Many of us felt this was a disgrace and moved to break up the proceedings. A shouting match broke out between our soldiers and the armed civilians, and it was not until our commander, Lieutenant Wolff, arrived with a translator that calm returned. Apparently, the civilians were part of a militia affiliated with the Ustaše, who wanted to exterminate or convert all the Serbs, and the Serbs in this village had been given the choice to either become Catholics or die. We were witnessing the execution of those who chose the latter. Lieutenant Wolff stepped on a crate and told us this was an internal dispute, a spontaneous action that we could not disrupt since it posed no actual threat to our occupation. We left.

Whatever the Serbs had done to the Croats, the brutality we saw had seemed excessive to me, and naturally I thought once more about the pogrom I had seen in Berlin. That, too, had been retribution, so was it not hypocritical to justify a German massacre of the Jews but reject a Croat slaughter of Serbs? Again, my mind did gymnastic contortions to reason out an answer. I told myself that individuals had documented the Jewish conspiracy against the gentiles for time immemorial, that the Jewish threat was global in scope. The quarreling of tribes in some provincial Balkan backwater could not compare to the Nazi agenda against the Jews. After all, the Ustaše gladly assisted us in the rounding up of Jews and Romani people in Yugoslavia, so they too knew our cause was just. Thus, I managed to further delude myself to stave off the cognitive dissonance.

As April turned into May, we had seen the aftereffects of sabotage and sniping by partisans, but my platoon remained unscathed, at least until Mother’s Day. That afternoon, we were marching in column down a street in Sarajevo, escorting trucks carrying supplies meant for some unknown place. We were passing a schoolyard where children were playing when a farmer pulling a cart laden with vegetables stopped in our path. A child appeared abruptly from a little side street. I could see him holding onto something. When he reached our column, he blew up. The explosion shattered the windows of the trucks in our convoy; I can still hear the glass clinking on the pavement. We flew into a panic, and some of our men began firing at the children in the schoolyard. They started screaming. I shouted for them to stop, that the child that exploded had come from somewhere else, but my voice could not rise above the gunshots or the cries of their targets. I surged forward, coming upon the carnage created by the bomb; I found Drexler, his legs blown off, staring up at the blue sky, his pale face dotted with pimples. I wanted to cradle him, to comfort him as he died, but the gore revolted me and the sight of death terrified me. Here, in blood and flesh, was what all soldiers’ fear, to die on a battlefield far from home, scared and alone. The meaninglessness of the event hit me, sent me into grief. How did the death of Drexler help the partisans? How did one dead German soldier make a difference in this occupation, when he would just be replaced? Yes, they had terrorized us, rattled us, but the occupation was not up to us; Yugoslavia had just been an impediment to helping the Italians in Greece. We had no scores to settle. This was not personal for us. Nevertheless, we could see how it was personal for them. After all, if foreign troops marched through Berlin or Stuttgart or Munich, would we not have begrudged their presence? Would we not take desperate measures to safeguard the sovereignty of our home? The tenacity with which Germans kept fighting the Allies in 1945 is testament to the facts that resistance to conquest is universal and that no cause is lost in the eyes of those too proud to submit.

At the end of May, we were relieved. The 718st Division took our places, a unit designed specifically for fighting the partisans. From what I have learned about the war, they caught much worse than we did from the partisans. We did not shed any tears for Yugoslavia once we left it, though; we were glad to be gone. Again, we were unsure what would come next. When we were deployed near the border with the Soviet Union, we developed an idea. A showdown with the Bolsheviks had always seemed the natural conflict; it was an article of the Nazi faith that Germany needed “living space,” to take the arable territory from the Slavs and resettle it with German pioneers. Moreover, the Jewish Bolshevik cabal headquartered in the Kremlin, that nest of vipers, and them we could not abide. It was only a matter of time before we declared war on Moscow. That time seemed to be nearby. Progressively, the ugliness we had seen in Sarajevo and the Bosnian hills gave way to a tinge of the fervor for war we had felt in 1940. If we had been given a glimpse of the future, an inkling of the surreal hell that the Eastern Front would become, we would have shot ourselves rather than live through that infernal journey east and back again. The stories I am about to relate, no matter how vibrant I describe them, no matter how effective I am in turning your stomach, pale in comparison to the degradation and trauma that was inflicted on me and my friends, and that which we inflicted on others.

[James A Pratt III]

If born in 1919 he probably had been called up before October 1940.

"swinging a sledge for 76 hours a day" is a little to much how about 10 hours a day

it should be yes sergeant not yes sir

Yugoslav Partisans I don't think there were any attacks by them at this time. Germany and the USSR were still "friends". The Partisan movement didn't start up until after 22 june 1941 when the German invasion of Russia occurred.

otherwise pretty good

[Helmut0815]

Heinz Lowenthal, my father,

Lowenthal (english transliteration of Löwenthal or Loewenthal) is a jewish family name. Are you aware of that?


regards


Helmut

[Ostkrieg]

Thanks for the replies.

I read elsewhere on here that someone born in 1919 would have been too young to be conscripted and trained in time for the 1940 campaigns but would have been ready for Barbarossa in 1941. If he would have turned 21 in August 1940, then he would have been conscripted and trained by October, yes?

Also, 76 hours a day is my mistake; should have been 76 hours a week, which I think is historically correct.

As for the Yugoslav partisans, there is a book on the history of Sarajevo that partisan activity started right away after the German invasion. Communism is inherently hostile to fascism and vice versa and I don't think the Yugoslav communists or anywhere else occupied by Nazi Germany much cared about the official line from Moscow (or that Moscow much minded uprisings against Germany, even before 1941). I will say that the partisan movement didn't begin in earnest until much later, once the partisans had time to really get organized.

As for Lowenthal as a surname, I didn't realize that is exclusively a Jewish surname. I will change that.

Thanks again for reading and for constructive feedback