Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
Winston Churchill

Chapter 8

Another Furlough

Back at my Liaison Company, I had a pleasant surprise, I could go on furlough again. Maybe the company chief felt that after my crash I deserved a rest. On June 10, I arrived in Landsberg/Warthe and surprised my mother, who was working in the garden. That evening I called my father in Berlin, who promised to come home as soon as he could. This time the weather was perfect, warm and summery. I put on shorts and soaked up the sun.

A few days later I went down to the boathouse, and pulled out the old skiff with the funny name of “Jung Häschen” (young hare) for a solitary excursion upstream. I was uneasy in the beginning, because perfect rowing coordination is essential to keep a single racing shell from capsizing. After getting away from the pier, I didn’t have any problems at all. I visited Friedl, several times, but she still didn’t want to go to bed with me and I finally lost interest in her. I went to see my father in Berlin, and a girl with whom I had corresponded. She had been one of those “write to a soldier pen pals” which were common in Germany during the war.

Berlin is a mess

In Berlin I saw the extensive damage done by British and American bombings.

I stayed with my godmother, Else Gottschalk, who was still in the millinery business. Due to war shortages in material she now primarily did alterations of lady’s hats. There were shortages everywhere, because after the declaration of “Total War” earlier in 1943 all “nonessential” businesses had been closed. Even the best restaurants had only one or two meals on the menu. Often they served only “field kitchen meals” which was a stew of potatoes, cabbage and here and there bits of most likely horse meat.

Father had gotten me tickets for a stage show, and I invited my pen pal Ingrid to join me. She was attractive, reasonably intelligent, and neat, but she couldn’t have been more than 5'-1" tall. To me, at 6'-1", that was too much of a mismatch.

I went home to Landsberg thinking I had lost the ability to enjoy life and have a good time. I was overweight, because of the high carbohydrate diet of potatoes and cabbage with little meat or fat.

When back in Siverskaja, I was surprised that the Company’s name had been changed to Liaison Comp. z.b.V.1, meaning “Air force liaison company for special assignments”. The new name was more appropriate for what we were doing, but the abbreviation “z.b.V.” had a special meaning in German military parlance. It was given primarily to penal units, which were always assigned to the most hazardous battle situations. They performed tasks that were called “Himmelfahrtskommandos”, or suicide missions. I was never able to find out if the renaming was a clever camouflage to prevent the company from being integrated into a Luftwaffen Field Division (LwFD).

Decades later I found out that in 1943 the Luftnachrichten Regiment 31 was reorganized and renamed. Those Luftwaffen Field Divisions, mentioned above, were the catch basins for nonessential air force personnel. They had a poor reputation because of their lack of infantry training, lack of combat experience in ground warfare, and officers who didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground during front line actions. The whole northern front had been jeopardized by one of these Luftwaffen Field Divisions in the frontline between the Army Group North and the Army Group Center.

A weak sector breakthrough

The Russians, who were always probing for weak sections in German front lines, found it in the area south of Kholm, where the 2. Luftwaffen Field Division was entrenched. The Russians attacked in a narrow sector there, and broke through the lines with several T-34 tanks, because the Luftwaffen soldiers had no antitank weapons. Encouraged by their initial success the Russians penetrated deeper, took the town of Nevel and tried to penetrate further towards the Baltic Sea. They hoped to encircle the entire northern front, and cut it off from the adjacent central front.

On July 5, 1943, my liaison group was ordered to report to Army Corps II, about 18 miles southwest of Kholm. This was the southernmost section of the German Army Group North, where that breakthrough had occurred. We got off to a bad start. I was sitting in the communication van and was trying to get more information about the military situation at our destination. As I looked out of the window on the left, a loose wheel sped by, passing our van and going in the same direction. As I wondered where the hell that came from, a second wheel zoomed by, and the whole truck started to tilt, making godawful grinding noises.

The driver stopped the vehicle and we all got out to look at the damage. We retrieved the lost wheels, but could only find two wheel nuts. The group cracked all sorts of jokes about the incident, but it was not funny. The van could have tipped over on its side because it was top heavy. We had been lucky, we were going only at about 30 MPH when it happened. The NCO was furious, and when the officer who was in the lead car stopped and came back, he immediately set off towards the next telephone to tell the company chief what had happened. Within an hour a vehicle from the company was on location with the maintenance supervisor and the mechanic who had serviced the truck before we left. The poor guy got shit from everybody, but fortunately he had been smart enough to bring tools plus wheel nuts along, to try and fix the problem right there. We were lucky that none of the threads on the wheel bolts had been damaged by the escaping wheels or by the road surface. We continued south via Luga and Nikolayevo and then over bad corduroy roads to the area near Porchov. We were now about 10 miles from our destination.

To wade through knee-deep mud

The road to our destination was under knee-deep mud, so we had to wait for a vehicle to tow us. Finally a large half-track vehicle normally used to move heavy artillery pieces pulled our Volkswagen, the communications van, plus several other waiting vehicles, for at least 10 miles through the worst muck. The communication van was top heavy and not very stable. We all felt seasick during the ordeal. I was responsible for the vehicle and its functionality, and I visualized it being tipped over or torn apart. The wheel incident was on my mind too, but we made it through to the 2nd Army Corp’s headquarters in one piece. The HQ was located in the undamaged small village of Gorki with Russian civilians still living there. We parked the van next to a house, which was going to be our quarters, while the officer moved into an earthen bunker up a shallow hill from the house. We set up the station and acquainted ourselves with the tactical situation of this section of the front. We were about 40 miles north of Nevel.

Another Stalingrad in the making?

The 2nd Army Corps was at the northern flank of the Russian breakthrough, and in heavy fighting had brought the Russians to a halt. The initial Russian success had gotten the attention of the generals of the 18th Army, the northernmost frontline contingent, still entrenched south of Lake Ladoga, about 300 miles farther north. If they didn’t make plans for a fast withdrawal, the whole German “Army Group North” would face the same situation like Paulus’ Army in Stalingrad.

On our maps we apprehensively tracked the evolving strategy of the Russian forces. The Russians had gained the initiative after their breakthrough at the central fronts, and were moving rapidly and steadily towards the west and now north, to encircle the Army Group North by cutting through to the Baltic Sea. The northern front was still solid, but was several hundred miles farther east than the central frontline, and in danger of being separated and encircled. At our location in Gorki, we were in the middle of nowhere. Access to retreat routes was limited by the terrible road situation and visibility of the overall tactical situation was not much better.

Forward comrades, we are retreating

Retreat was now the only action possible on our German side despite Hitler’s “No retreat orders”. In retrospect I say that the Generals of the Northern Front made far more sensible decisions than those of the central and southern fronts. The German Army Group North had hardly any reserves, but they manipulated the few available reserve units so quickly and strategically correctly, that the Russians, despite their enormous manpower advantage, did not succeed in encircling the 18th and 16th Army during their retreat. It was often at the last minute that we were able to avert a major catastrophy through heavy rear guard fighting. About 900,000 German soldiers had to be moved from the Leningrad fronts and brought back to the Baltic States. On no other fronts was the situation so well under control.

Trouble was brewing all through July of 1943. The allied forces landed in Sicily, and the Italians where so shocked, that a palace revolution took place, and Mussolini was ousted. In August the Allied forces finished the occupation of Sicily, and the Italians started armistice negotiations with them. On the 8th of September, Italy surrendered, after British forces had landed in the south of Calabria. Everybody said, “With friends like that who needs enemies.” A few days later the Americans landed near Salerno. The German forces in Italy, Albania and Greece now had to fight the Italians, as well as the Allied forces in the Mediterranean theater.

Along the central eastern front the Russians took Kharkov and advanced on a broad front. On the Northern Front the advancing Russian forces, which had reached Nevel on October 7, 1943 as part of their goal to reach the Baltic sea, were finally stopped.

My liaison group, in the meantime, was sitting tight in this little village, hoping that we would get out before it was too late. Some Russian women were cleaning house for us, which was always a suspicious activity, because we couldn’t watch them constantly. To a trained eye one glance at a map or a frequency chart would be enough to gain important facts. These women were assigned by the village commandant and our group didn’t have any say in the matter. The commandant also rounded up women for work assignments in Germany. One young woman who could speak some German and who lived in the adjacent house came crying, and told me that she had to go to Germany. She wanted to know what to do. I told her to disappear, go underground, because the war was not going to last much longer. She gave me a surprised look. I didn’t find out whether she actually went to Germany.

On the 2nd of November I was called back to the company in Siverskaja. That was traveling in the wrong direction, because the frontline was getting close to that town. I reached Siverskaja and was immediately turned around going west to the company’s “advance” group, in Aluksne, Latvia. Rumor had it that this was in preparation for the withdrawal of all German forces from northern Russia towards the Baltic countries. I helped to set up the central transmitter, which enabled the company headquarters to keep in touch with all the liaison troops. I also met and worked again with my old friend Baumgarten, the company’s electronic expert.

News from a mysterious source

The company chief, Captain Herrgot, had somehow acquired brand-new super fancy 20 tube Telefunken receivers, which were in a class by themselves. I enjoyed using them for all sorts of legal, and illegal, information gathering purposes.

I could, for the first time, hear the best source of allied propaganda, the “Soldatensender West”, camouflaged as a legitimate German Armed Forces radio station. I eagerly listened to their clever and intelligent program. The Russian propaganda, where the most despicable character, Ilja Ehrenburg urged the Russian troops to rape and plunder, was far worse than Joseph Goebbels. Ehrenburg actually reinforced the Nazi’s opinion that all Jews were deplorable criminals, who must be killed. Although I understood the Russian’s hatred of the Germans for invading Russia, Ilja Ehrenburg’s propaganda did a disservice to the Jewish people, as well as the Communism that Russia wanted to sell to the Europeans. In retrospect I think he should have been on the defendant bench in the Nürnberg Trials and should have been hung like the German war criminals.

I was in for a furlough, and wondered what connections Captain Herrgot had that gave our company so many furlough tickets. The next surprise was that my best friend King had a furlough too.

We left on December 30, 1943 by train to Gulbene, and then to Riga. Here we went aboard the “furlough express”. We had to have our weapons ready at all times. The locomotive of the train pushed three flatcars loaded with sandbags ahead in case the railroad tracks were mined by partisans. We saw two blown-up trains along the route, evidence of increased partisan activities. Between Riga and Tauroggen we celebrated New Year’s Eve on the train, drinking whatever we had brought along. Since we never before had the luck to go on furlough together, King and I decided to spend a couple of days together at home. King lived in Guben and had to return via my hometown Landsberg/Warthe, and he would arrive two days ahead of our return journey to stay with me.

I arrived at Landsberg on Sunday, January 2, and called home from the railroad station. My father came down by bike and we walked home together. I asked my father how things looked in Berlin, and he said, “pretty grim.” He said that during one of the air raids he had been at grandmother’s place. Incendiary bombs had crashed through the roof and landed in the staircase of the four story apartment block. He checked for problems after the all clear sirens sounded, and found several bombs still burning in the staircase. He used a shovel to toss them out of a window and saved the whole apartment block from going up in flames. Eighty families would have lost their homes if he hadn’t been there.

The British had come up with a new trick in these incendiaries. Normally they didn’t do much harm because all the uppermost floors in large buildings in Germany had a layer of sand on the floor, to prevent ignition of the wood. Now the bombs drilled themselves through the sand layer. Another example of men’s misguided intelligence, channeled into mutual destruction rather than mutual welfare. Small wonder Nietzsche had said: “ War is the father of all things.”

I had brought enough liquor to be able to celebrate a second New Year’s Eve at home. Father went out in the garden and butchered a chicken and we had a real old fashioned noontime meal. I opened a bottle of the wine I had brought and we celebrated the beginning of 1944. We talked all afternoon, unfortunately without a decent cup of coffee, but with a reasonably good carrot cake that mother had baked.

A sarcastic “Happy New Year”

Later on I called Friedl, Inge Bergner and neighbors and wished them a happy and successful 1944. Had I told them the truth, they wouldn’t have believed it and I would have been arrested. I was determined to live it up according to a newly surfaced saying, “Enjoy the war, peace is going to be horrible!”

I dated Friedl a couple of times and told her that my friend King was coming and I was trying to set him up with a date. She promised to ask her girl friend Helga. Several days later Helga called and asked about King. She also asked me how I was getting along with Friedl. I told her that we get along fine, except that we couldn’t agree as far as sex was concerned. Helga told me that Friedl had talked to her about it, but that she was afraid. Helga promised to talk to her again and invited me over to her parents place. As I was on my way, another air raid alarm sounded off. Damn, was I pissed! I decided to go home. I was even more ticked off the next day when I called Helga to apologize. She told me I should have come anyway, because they habitually ignored the alarms.