All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [386]
Vyacheslav Eisymont, a former history teacher who served as an artillery observer, wrote from East Prussia on 19 February: ‘We stay in all sorts of places: sometimes in a shed, sometimes a bunker, and right now a house. It is spring weather, wet, sometimes raining. There are civilians who failed to escape, now being sent to the rear … We saw them as we advanced on Königsberg: old men, women and children with shouldered bundles, in long crocodiles trudging along the roadsides – the road itself was occupied by our column. That night, we saw terrible things. But our battery commander spoke for many when he said: “Sure, you look and you feel saddened by the sight of old people and children on foot and dying. But then you remember what they did in our land, and you feel no pity!”’
In February Konev advanced across the Oder towards Dresden, before halting at the Neisse; in the weeks that followed, his principal achievement was to secure Pomerania and Upper Silesia. Early in March a half-hearted SS panzer counter-offensive in Hungary, undertaken in pursuit of Hitler’s fixation with recovering lost oilfields, was easily repulsed. On the 16th, two Soviet fronts began to push for Vienna. Even that dedicated Nazi Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner told Hitler on 20 March: ‘I must report that the military worthlessness of troops in [Upper Silesia] exceeds my worst expectations. Almost without exception, they are exhausted. Formations have been broken up, mingled with alarm and Volkssturm units. Their military value is shockingly low. North of Leobschutz there is no one deserving of the name of a German soldier. My impression is that the Russians can do anything they choose, without great exertion or expenditure of strength.’ Second Panzer Army in Hungary reported to OKW without irony on 10 April, ‘To improve morale, an execution was carried out on the battlefield.’
Corporal Helmut Fromm, facing the Russians in Saxony, wrote in his diary at Easter: ‘I’m sitting in my candle-lit O[bservation] P[ost] 500 metres from the Ivans. An icy wind is blowing through the tarpaulin. Shelling continues all night, interspersed with machine-gun fire and my neighbour’s snoring. When I walked along the trench an hour ago, an NCO told me the Americans are in Heidelberg. Now, I’m cut off from all my loved ones, and they must be worrying about me. I wonder where my brother is. I am convinced I will see them again, because I believe in God. How long will this madness continue? May God have mercy on his people. This has been a long crusade, strewn with corpses and tears. Please grant us an Easter followed by redemption.’ Corporal Fromm was sixteen years old.
Guy Sajer, serving with the Grossdeutschland Division, wrote: ‘We no longer fought for Hitler, or for National Socialism, or for the Third Reich or even for our fiancées or mothers or families trapped in bomb-ravaged towns. We fought from simple fear … We fought for ourselves, so that we shouldn’t die in holes filled with mud and snow; we fought like rats.’ A German lieutenant protested wearily to his fiancée: ‘To be an officer means always having to swing back and forth like a pendulum between a Knight’s Cross, a birchwood cross and a court-martial.’ A Berlin woman wrote: ‘These days I keep noticing how my feelings towards men … are changing. I feel sorry for them; they seem so miserable and powerless. The weaker sex. Deep down we women are experiencing a kind of collective disappointment. The Nazi world – ruled by men, glorifying the strong man – is beginning to crumble, and with it the myth of “Man”.’
A Russian soldier wrote to his wife from East Prussia on 19 April:
Hello my darling! For the past fortnight I have been moving almost daily, sleeping in bunkers, tents, or simply under the open sky. Since yesterday, however, we have been quartered in a house and sleeping in beds … Our unit has earned this, for we’ve played our parts in the assault on Königsberg, and of