headquarters was situated on the other side of the hill never entered my mind.
After about five minutes of shooting, a corporal ran up to me with an urgent order from Ebeling for my troops to cease their fire. Stray bullets were soaring over the hill and whizzing through the air around the regimental bunker. Though the soldiers in my company were proficient in the use of our heavy weapons, most of them, unfortunately, were not skilled marksmen with their rifles.
On the city streets near the farm where our company was garrisoned, my men posted signs with the words Einheit Lubbecke (Unit Lubbecke) to direct anyone seeking our location. Typically, the letters sent to soldiers at the front did not indicate the name of the company and regiment since this was militarily valuable information. Instead, the writer addressed the intended recipient’s Feldpost number (postal number in the field), which remained constant throughout the war.
Perhaps because the military situation had deteriorated so greatly, increasing numbers of our letters home passed through censors during this period. Despite this scrutiny, I never felt limited regarding what I could communicate. Likewise, I felt that I received a clear sense of what was happening with Anneliese and my family as well.
THE CHALLENGE OF LEADERSHIP
On January 20, 1945, the army elevated me from Kompaniefuhrer (company leader) to the more permanent status of Kompaniechef (company commander). My satisfaction at this promotion was reinforced when the men in my company honored me with an informal celebration at the farmhouse where they were quartered. Ultimately, the respect of the soldiers I led in combat was even more important to me than the approval of those above me. This elevation in my command status was soon followed by a promotion in rank from second lieutenant (Leutnant) to first lieutenant (Oberleutnant) on January 30, but by then other events would intervene.
The burden of my duties as a company commander were much lighter in Memel than they had been when we were in action at the Duna, but there were increasing manpower problems. By late 1944, the declining pool of replacements in Germany made it impossible for the Wehrmacht to provide us with an adequate number of troops to make up for our losses. As in the rest of the German Army, I could only reorganize my remaining 150 men in an effort to fulfill our combat mission as effectively as possible.
Though leading men in combat was something for which I felt well suited, there were many additional non- combat duties for an officer to perform. When soldiers under my command were killed, it was my responsibility to send letters notifying their wives and families back home. Despite the routine sentiments contained in such letters, I always felt this duty to be the most difficult in my service as an officer.
Yet death is an inevitable reality of war. The side that wins the field at the end of a battle controls the treatment of dead and wounded. Often, the fate of those listed as missing is never known. Though concerned for those lost in battle, the unit must look to its immediate needs. The enemy is not interested in an accounting of your casualties and the fighting moves on. The bodies of the dead lie in the woods and rot. It is terrible, but it is an ugly side of war that is often forgotten.
During the latter part of the war, combat on the Eastern Front grew even more brutal. When the Soviets won battles after 1943, they would sometimes shoot our wounded and leave our dead unburied. In those situations, only those who could walk would be sent off to the POW camps. Ultimately, the treatment of soldiers depended on when and where a battle was fought.
In my experience, the Wehrmacht never issued orders that forbade German troops to take prisoners. I never personally witnessed German troops shoot wounded or surrendering Red Army soldiers, though these things could have happened. While we did not necessarily bury the enemy’s dead, especially when the front became fluid, to the best of my knowledge German forces provided medical care to the wounded Russian troops and sent all those who surrendered back to POW camps, even if the conditions in these facilities were utterly inadequate.
Though German troops did not always behave properly, a military code of conduct was strictly enforced. As commander, I sometimes administered disciplinary action for the troops in the company who failed to obey it.
One case involved the court martial of a sergeant who was one of my oldest comrades. After being drafted into 13th Company with me back in 1939, he had worked his way up to command a gun crew operating one of our 75-millimeter howitzers. Finding a family’s silver belongings buried in a yard near Memel, he ordered one of his men to dig them up and pack them in a parcel for shipment back to Germany.
When the crime came to my attention, I enforced military procedure and sent him back to the division to receive his sentence. Last that I heard, he ended up in the punishment battalion that we called the Himmelfarhtkommando (roughly, the heaven-bound force), a unit so named because they received the most dangerous combat assignments.
Although lacking the subordinate officers who would normally assist the company commander, I did receive some limited support from the regimental command staff as well as from our “mother of the company,” Senior Sgt. Juchter, who was in charge of the Tross. His assistance was invaluable in carrying out my many mundane but nonetheless essential administrative chores, such as requesting supplies, ammunition, and hay for our horses.
My other tasks included issuing authorizations for furloughs, based on Juchter’s determination as to who was due one, as well as sending up requests for decorations or promotions. On my recommendation, two men in the company returned to Germany for officer training. The downside of this action was that I lost a couple of my better men.
By my estimation, about fifty percent of the troops were married, a proportion that had increased since the beginning of the war when a larger percentage were young volunteers. At this time, divorce was frowned upon in German society. Married couples typically pursued a divorce only when there were severe and irreconcilable problems, but war tended to worsen these problems as well as create new ones. The separation of soldiers from their wives and girlfriends at home sometimes exposed these women to unscrupulous men who would take advantage of the situation.
During my year in command, there were at least four situations where I had to respond to legal papers requesting me to verify that a particular soldier had not been on leave during the previous ten months before his wife had a baby. This confirmation would provide either the soldier or his wife grounds for a divorce.
Separately, I had to respond to about five or six sets of court papers from wives seeking divorce from soldiers in my unit. Calling the soldier into my bunker, I would ask him to tell me man-to-man what had happened.
When a soldier learned for the first time that his wife wanted to end the marriage or was having an affair, it would rip his guts out. Naturally, such traumatic news would also have grave repercussions on the way the man behaved in combat. The end of a relationship with a wife or serious girlfriend usually caused a sense of psychological torment that exceeded even the emotional suffering that resulted from the death of a close comrade.
Dealing with these situations only reinforced my own concerns about Anneliese. As I wrote to her in a letter at the time, “The price of war goes way beyond the battlefield.”
ANNELIESE
At the end of two months with my family in Puggen following her evacuation from Belgium, Anneliese received new orders on November 9 transferring her to a hospital run by the Kriegsmarine in Zeven, located about 100 miles northwest of Puggen between Bremen and Hamburg. Her previous service as a nurse had been in military hospitals run by the German Army, but the Kriegsmarine now provided her with a different uniform and issued its own regulations governing the conduct of medical personnel.
Following a couple of months working in Zeven, Anneliese was transferred further north to a hospital in Altenwalde, a suburb of the city of Cuxhaven located at the juncture of the Elbe River and the North Sea. While she spent most of the next nine months based in Altenwalde, she was later detached to the hospital in neighboring Suderdeich, further up the Elbe.
