with the gun crew. One subfreezing night, he decided to take action and snuck alone across the snow-covered No Man’s Land that separated us from the enemy. Armed only with his MP-40 submachine gun and a satchel containing a kilo of dynamite, Schutte slipped past the Soviet sentries and crept up to a Red Army bunker. As he heaved the satchel inside, he shouted to the doomed Russians, “Here’s your bread!”
Fighting his own war, he pulled off this crazy feat at least a couple of times. On the second occasion, I even heard the sound of the dynamite’s explosion. What had begun as an unauthorized action soon won the approval of our superiors. On my and their recommendation, Schutte was later awarded one of Germany’s highest military decorations, the Gold Cross.
The critical food shortage in Leningrad that inspired Schutte’s black humor also led to more serious discussions among us. There was real concern that the Russian authorities might decide to send the city’s women and children across the lines to our side. It was not clear what would ensue in such a situation, but everyone agreed that mowing down a crowd of civilians with our weapons was inconceivable. My own inclination was to feed them and then send them further back, once we made certain that the enemy had not exploited such a population transfer to slip military-age males into our rear areas.
About this time, our intelligence learned that the Red Army was infiltrating dogs across the lines. These poor animals had been strapped with dynamite around their bodies and trained to run under our vehicles. When they did so, the triggering antennas on their backs would bend and detonate the explosive.
Though there were probably few dogs actually armed this way, the army directed us to shoot all dogs as a precautionary measure. Carrying out these orders was especially painful for us, but we obeyed. Over time, war hardens your heart and leads you to do brutal things that you could never have imagined yourself doing in civilian life.
In early 1942, a reporter from a German-language newspaper in Reval in Estonia came up to the frontline to do interviews with the troops. When he asked me if they could take my photograph, I willingly agreed. To my surprise, that picture eventually ended up on the front page of The Revaler Zeitung on April 2, 1942 above the caption, “This is the German soldier who you will find in the trenches, young, agile, and sure of victory.” Though it was amusing to be featured in such heroic terms, the words accurately reflected the high morale that we felt.
At the beginning of March, Army Group North ordered our division to make urgent preparations for redeployment. A couple of nights later, we pulled out of the trenches. Our replacements were a police division composed of police officers who had volunteered for the unit and a Waffen SS division filled with troops from Nordic countries like Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.
Because many of these Scandinavians were tall men, their heads frequently poked above the snow walls in front of our trenches, making them especially easy prey for Soviet marksmen. Before we departed Uritsk, we heard they had suffered perhaps a dozen such casualties in just their first day at the frontline. Following this cruel lesson, they too would respect the Russian snipers.
By the time of our departure from Uritsk, confidence in an early victory had faded. It was already clear that the war in Russia would be a long struggle. Nonetheless, I remained utterly certain of the Soviet Union’s ultimate defeat.
BEHIND THE FRONT
Uritsk was a battle zone largely deserted of inhabitants, but it still retained a small population of about 100 Russian civilians, mostly women and children. These few residents kept their distance, but were not visibly hostile in their behavior. Curious to gain my own impression of the Russian people, I decided to pay a visit to one of these families.
Inside their small, clean home, we somehow managed to communicate in a limited fashion through gestures with our hands and feet. Yet, while the brief encounter perhaps somewhat humanized the Russians for me, their true emotions toward me and the German presence in their land appeared hidden behind a mask of inscrutability.
There was one Russian girl as well as a couple of Soviet POWs who worked in the company kitchen, located back about two miles behind the front. Not surprisingly, the girl became involved in a romantic relationship with one of the German kitchen staff. Military regulations prohibited such fraternization with the enemy, particularly out of concern that they might be spies.
Although this was the only truly romantic liaison of which I had firsthand knowledge, there were other German troops in my regiment who exploited the dire Russian food situation for sexual gratification. Putting a loaf of bread under their arm, these men would head for a certain area a couple of miles behind the front where there were hungry Russian women or girls who would willingly exchange sexual favors for food.
One tale circulated that a particularly heartless soldier had responded to a woman’s request for her “payment” of a loaf by slicing off a couple of pieces for her while retaining the remainder for himself. Most German officers and troops disapproved of such behavior, but I knew of no one who was reprimanded or punished for engaging in this type of act.
What was more difficult to explain was the widespread absence of a strong urge to have sexual relations with women as would be normal among a group of young males. Naturally, the rumor mill provided an answer: our cooks were under secret orders to mix an agent into our food that chemically suppressed our sex drives. While it might make sense for the high command to take such a radical step given the general lack of women at the front, the true explanation for our low libidos remained a mystery.
Generally, our own food supplies in Russia remained constant throughout the war, once the crisis of the first winter had passed. During heavy combat or when on the move, our company’s quartermaster supplied only canned goods like tuna, sardines, herring, or sausage with canned crackers or bread which we kept in our Brotbeutel (food bag) on the side of our belts.
When we were engaged in stationary warfare, troops from the Tross would come forward at night to deliver food and mail up to the bunkers. Typically, they brought an insulated kettle of hot soup from our company field kitchen containing a generous ration of beef or pork and potatoes, or perhaps sausage for dinner.
They also left us with a small round loaf of brown bread from the large divisional bakery and butter, or occasionally cheese, to eat the following morning. Frequently, the quartermaster also provided us with chocolate. Since real coffee was rare, we ordinarily drank a fairly tasty artificial coffee which we called Mukefuk, made from roasted grain.
Troops rarely went hungry, but our diet quickly grew monotonous. In certain circumstances, the army provided us with additional items that helped break the routine of army food. In the winter, we received a regular ration of a couple of small bottles of vodka to help us keep warm. At Christmas and Easter, they sometimes issued a bottle of cognac that would last for three or four days. Patients recuperating in the rear from injury or illness frequently enjoyed better foods like a roast of beef or pork, a chicken, or boiled sausage.
Even if my closest comrades and I were somehow able to acquire potatoes or meat to supplement our rations, we lacked the means to cook such items. In these instances, we would pass along the potatoes or other foods obtained outside of normal quartermaster channels to our company cooks to prepare.
On a few rare occasions, we were lucky enough to find something to eat that did not require any preparation. Although most Russian houses had burned down, we once discovered a barrel of sour pickled tomatoes in an abandoned home that provided us with a rare treat that lasted for several days.
Once the war became stationary, the issue of sanitation grew increasingly important, so building latrines was one of the first priorities. These Donnerbalken (literally, thunder-beams) were simply wooden planks on which the soldier could sit with holes dug into the ground beneath them.
In certain ways, our position in the outskirts of a city had its advantages in that some of the troops could find more satisfactory shelter. There were even toilets in a few of the three-story wooden buildings in Uritsk that offered a small measure of civilization in the midst of our primitive conditions. However, because the apartments’ plumbing was comprised of narrow square wooden channels inside the walls instead of pipes flushed by water, the sound of the waste tumbling down through the structure was audible to anyone in close proximity every time someone used the toilet on one of the upper floors.
Thinking that it would be a pleasant alternative to our latrines, I once made use of the toilet on a visit to
