The German War (55 page)

Probst’s desperation at the growing rift and his own dwindling paternal authority was palpable. A week later he was regretting that he would miss Karl-Heinz’s confirmation, consoling himself with the photo Hildegard had sent him of the three children. He closed with a reminder to his wife ‘not to allow yourself to be weak’. It was possible to meet the challenges of life ‘only if you are hard, also against yourself . . . And that we want to be, hard and determined and to keep on hoping that we will see each other soon.’ Here the ‘hardness’ of character embraced the dangers of the front and the domestic burdens at home in a common sense of shared familial endeavour. Three months later, Probst was encouraging Hildegard and also himself: ‘We must be still harder, must not lose courage, can only keep on hoping for the day when our longing is fulfilled.’ As he tried to resolve the private conflicts of family life, Fritz Probst turned again and again to the public virtues, to ‘commitment’, ‘hardness’, ‘determination’ and ‘sacrifice’. Unable to tell his wife much about the campaign, his letters lent these common phrases his authority, and the authenticity of the front.
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The 20-year-old Helmut Paulus had no such cares. Miraculously, the letters and parcels from home caught up with their advance and, thanks to his father’s efforts, Helmut Paulus was able to replace the campaign medal his sergeant had lost. The man was delighted. As the company neared the Caucasus, enough notepaper arrived for several months. He used the sugar his mother sent to sweeten the cherries and mulberries he and his comrades gathered in the villages. The lemon extract helped allay his thirst during the marches. He hid the volume of selections from Nietzsche in an ammunition box, and he devoured the review in
Das Reich
of Gustaf Gründgens’s performance in Goethe’s
Faust.
When he started to ask about the rumours that the home front was awash with complaints, his mother defended its honour, telling him that people were getting by and putting up with the shortages and long queues, with housewives often standing in line in utter silence.
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Compared to 1941, his parents were now much better informed and able to follow some of Helmut’s campaign almost in real time, his mother predicting practically to the day when he would reach the Don marshes. His father still urged him to volunteer for officer training, but unlike a year ago, he had learned to accept no for an answer. Helmut saw himself in more populist mode as a brave ‘grunt’ and not a ‘peacetime’, parade-ground soldier. But he gradually came round to the idea of the family profession, medicine, even though it meant giving up his own desire to study chemistry. The wasted time spent at war had made him increasingly impatient to start his own career and family: ‘Perhaps the war with its hardness and unfairness has made me long for quiet and settled life. Chemistry can offer that to me only after long years.’ His sister Elfriede had decided to study medicine too. His mother wrote that many young men were suddenly opting for university to get out of military service. The problem was, Helmut realised, that as an infantryman he had little prospect of receiving permission: there were still too few replacements. The only option would be to request a transfer to a medical unit and then apply through their chain of command; but, he reckoned, that would take at least a further two years and he could not see the war lasting so long.
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Hans Albring was making plans to apply for leave to go to university. He wanted to study history, philosophy and German literature. Rather than just treat his military service as so much ‘lost time’, in the quiet hours of the night, when the radio in the signals van was switched off, he embarked on a fresh translation of St John’s Gospel. He also reworked his sketches into illustrations for what he hoped might be a published work. He began drawing his comrades’ faces and, above all, their hands. Not to be outdone, his friend Eugen Altrogge began work on the text and illustrations for a ‘Book of Hours’ as soon as he recovered from a bullet wound in his thigh and returned to the front. By then, however, Eugen had heard too that all study leave for soldiers on the eastern front had been stopped and he worried about Hans’s state of mind, now that the ‘castles of his hopes and dreams’ had suddenly collapsed.
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In the Caucasus, Field Marshal Wilhelm List’s Army Group A had captured the first of the oilfields at Maikop on 9 August 1942, though not before its oil installations had been destroyed. Having advanced 480 kilometres in two weeks, the German supply lines were so extended that petrol had to be brought up by camel train. Helmut Paulus’s unit helped capture Krasnodar on 12 August, opening up the eastern Black Sea ports along the Taman peninsula and with them the possibility of provisioning the German and Romanian forces in the Caucasus by naval transports from the Romanian ports.
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By the second half of August, Helmut Paulus’s infantry unit had left the seemingly endless monotony of the steppes far behind them. As they climbed the foothills of the Caucasus, he began to feel more at home. On 20 August, an artillery duel gave Helmut time to stop and take in the beauty of his surroundings, the oak forests and mountains rising behind them. He felt he ‘could almost imagine being back at home. The place resembles the edge of the Black Forest so much.’ That afternoon a Cherkassian forester offered to guide them along forest tracks deep into the Soviet rear. That night, while the company halted on its third peak, Helmut’s platoon was sent down into the valley to spy out the military road which would lead them up to the high mountain passes. They lay the entire night in the bushes beside the road, watching Red Army trucks, artillery, marching columns and baggage trains pass by along this one major route through the mountains to the oil-rich territory to the south. At daybreak, instead of returning to the rest of their unit, they opened fire. The Soviets quickly recovered from their surprise at being attacked so far to their rear and used the woods to outflank the small group of German scouts, pinning them down in the bed of a little stream in the valley. Helmut was hit by one of the first shots.
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‘At first,’ he wrote home, ‘I didn’t realise that I was wounded at all. I saw the hole in the trousers. But there was no blood. Then I soon saw the underwear turn red, and so knew what was up.’ A medical orderly reached him quickly, cutting away his trouser leg and bandaging the wound so that Helmut could hobble back to the gully where the doctor had set up his first aid station. The bullet had passed clean through his left thigh, missing the main artery and the bone and leaving a 5-centimetre-long flesh wound. The battalion was running out of ammunition and was gradually pushed back, hemmed in on three sides with their backs to a mountain. It was the mountain that saved them. The next morning, a column of German drivers and clerks, who had toiled all night over the hills to bring up munitions and food, reached the beleaguered skirmishers. They helped bring the wounded back. As Helmut limped along on his own, the bandage loosened and the wound rubbed against his underwear, which was drenched in sweat, caked with dried blood and unwashed in weeks. After a couple of kilometres they finally reached the carts and, with enormous relief, Helmut clambered up.
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The journey back, as the cart kept sliding towards the edge of the mountain road, reminded Helmut, as he lay there helplessly, of a track in the forest just to the south of Pforzheim where his sister Irmgard had nearly gone plunging over the precipice in her pram as a child. The only brake was a chain locking the cart’s rear wheel. At last they reached the valley floor where they could be loaded on to German ambulances, though not before the ‘Stalin organs’, with their thirty-six-rocket salvos, sent them a final farewell. An hour later, Helmut was at the main dressing station, where he was given a massive tetanus injection before being taken to a military hospital in the Caucasian city of Krasnodar.

Hospital conditions in this former Red Army training barracks were spartan but comfortable, the food simple but plentiful and almost all the wounded were fellow infantrymen, many from his own company. Someone had set up a radio in the canteen and there to the sound of the light-music station, Helmut and his fellow wounded sat talking, eating apples and writing their letters home. The news took a fortnight to reach his family – still half the time letters had taken in 1941, thanks to the introduction of a special airmail service for the eastern front – and Dr Paulus immediately asked for the names and ranks of all the doctors, in the hope that he might know one of them. He also hoped that the rather friendly chief doctor might smooth Helmut’s transition from the infantry into the medical corps and so back home to study. As soon as he received the certificate for Helmut’s badge for having been wounded, he had the medal issued in Pforzheim and sent it to his son.
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Helmut was proud to have been part of the infantry assault which had taken Krasnodar, but he hated the way the rear echelon condescended to shabby
Landsers
like himself. He recalled visiting a town behind their line the previous winter and seeing ‘how officers and soldiers went walking arm in arm with Russian girls. Here in Krasnodar there is even supposed to be a dance tavern. It is to be hoped this tavern will be closed soon.’ Eventually boredom got the better of him and he ventured out, with one or two comrades and no crutches, to visit the market, where they gorged themselves on apples and grapes and loitered, fascinated by the ‘colourful and semi-oriental’ atmosphere of the streets. He found some Russian leaflets in the hospital to send back to his sister Irmgard to stick in her war album and scoured the market for an embroidered skullcap for her birthday, so that she could impress the girls of Pforzheim. At the theatre, the poor lighting hid the tatty costumes in a ‘mystical half-darkness’ and the largely Russian audience, as ‘true proletarians had no idea how to behave in a theatre and went on talking loudly, eating snacks and smoking’. The cinema offered a pleasant diversion and, although the images of actual fighting on the
Wochenschau
suffered from the ‘impossibility of taking accurate pictures’ of such events, Helmut was impressed by the portrayal of advancing infantrymen. These shots, he wrote home, ‘were pretty accurate . . . no dressed ranks. Everyone just walked the way they would . . . no singing of jolly soldiers’ songs (which we have not ever done in the whole war so far). They were just the right shots of an infantry company which has already marched 40 or 50 kilometres.’
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By that time Eugen Altrogge had also just recovered from a flesh wound to his left thigh. Relieved to have taken only a minor wound, he had been excited by the flight back over the Sea of Azov in a medical transport plane, the ‘Auntie Ju’, as German soldiers affectionately called the Junker 52s. Eugen was more critical of the cinenews coverage, declaring that the

serious war artist is today replaced by the reporter, the photojournalist, the PK [embedded cameraman of the Propaganda Company] – the sketcher for the press. My God – how all these gentlemen lie! Yes, even the

is untrue, which I saw again after a long gap. What’s the cause of this untruth – doesn’t one see the objective photo?

Eugen felt that the images just could not capture the emotional and physical exhaustion of war or the tension of battle. Although he admitted that ‘I don’t feel called upon to be a war artist’, he had done one drawing which he felt was ‘right’. It showed an NCO, sitting in a dugout after coming back from patrol, shirtless, his finger bandaged, his mouth open, his gaze vacant. There were other images he had not sketched but which stuck in his mind:

Two soldiers asleep next to each other, lying on their stomachs, like the dead or like men taking cover . . . or the ‘river landscape’ of the Don near Rostov: the scattered remnants and ghastly remains of an army which had fled, countless bloated horses, with their outstretched hooves crying out to heaven . . . the bloated, dismembered corpses of the Russians. Every image has its laws!

he concluded, before adding falteringly, ‘You can’t say what they are – but they are there.’
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Helmut Paulus’s comrades had called him ‘bulletproof’ for making it all the way from Romania to the Caucasus without a scratch, and they were astonished when his luck ran out and he limped into the dressing station. Hans Albring still remained unscathed. ‘I don’t call that “luck” any more’, he wrote to Eugen, ‘but I know that Providence is at work, which has so far watched over me.’ The day before a lieutenant he had liked was killed. ‘Did he believe in Providence?’ Albring asked himself, promising to pray for the man’s soul.
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At the very start of the campaign in the previous summer, Albring had found it difficult to find words as he tried to reflect on the meaning of death after he he had witnessed the execution of Jews and prisoners of war. Now, as he contemplated the death of comrades, he was forced also to think about the risk to himself. Many soldiers had developed psychological defences robust enough to cope with the shock of near misses such as Helmut Paulus had experienced when a shell tore the legs off a comrade next to him in July. The egalitarianism of the trenches and the bonds of brotherly reciprocity demanded that dead comrades were treated with the highest respect: even in the worst moment of their winter retreat from Moscow, Robert R.’s comrades had carried him as long as they could, bottling up their desire to flee westwards in order to give him a decent burial and adding his notebooks to their own burdens. And many would have agreed with Wilhelm Abel’s sentiments, when he dedicated his role in a raid, in which they had flung hand grenades into eighteen Soviet bunkers, burning and blowing up the occupants, to ‘avenging our own dead a bit’. The bond with the dead comrades became another reason to go on fighting. When Fritz Farnbacher’s friend Peter Siegert was hit on 20 November 1941, Farnbacher thought about their two mothers as he enacted the final gestures of maternal care and cradled his dying friend.’
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