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By Root 1169 0

700 miles in the west, had grown familiar with the overwhelming might of the Allied armies. All save the dedicated Nazis knew that their nation retained scant hope of military victory. Beyond this, every man who had served in the east knew what Germany had done to the Soviet Union, and what manner of enemies were the Russian people. German soldiers could anticipate the retribution that would fall upon their Heimat, or homeland, their own families and loved ones, if the Red Army reached them. The Allied commitment to accept nothing less than Germany’s unconditional surrender, rejecting all negotiation of terms, together with the revelation of the American Morgenthau Plan for the post-war pastoralization of Germany—reducing Hitler’s people to a nation of peasants, stripped of industrial capacity—had provided Goebbels with a propaganda feast. “The Jew Morgenthau sings the same tune as the Jews in the Kremlin,” trumpeted Berlin Radio. A characteristic German fatalism about their nation’s march to destruction persuaded most men of the Wehrmacht that there was no alternative save to fight on until they were released by death or the good fortune of Anglo-American captivity.

Wilhelm Pritz, an infantry sergeant, spent the autumn of 1944 in a military hospital in Germany, praying that he would not have to return to the Eastern Front. He had gone to Russia for the first time in April 1942, and was wounded by mortar fragments during the assault on Sebastopol. After some months in hospital, he rejoined his unit on the Volga in March 1943: “Almost everyone I knew was gone. They were very short of men.” He contracted frostbite in the trenches, which cost him another two months in hospital, followed by a spell as an instructor at an infantry training centre. In the autumn of 1943, he was sent to the Ukraine. One of four sons of a Coblenz factory worker, he had by now lost one brother killed in Russia, while a second brother was missing and would never return: “my parents prayed that I would not have to go east again.” In October 1943, he was among German forces encircled and cut off in their bridgehead on the Dnieper Bend. Pritz was manning an anti-tank gun when a Russian grenade exploded against the shield. A fragment knocked out two of his teeth. As he fled towards the river, grenade splinters wounded him in the back. His colonel, a ferocious fighter, stood raging among the carnage: “Why are you running, you miserable cowards? Where are your rifles?” The Russians clubbed the colonel to death when they overran his position.

Pritz and hundreds of others swam the Dnieper amid Russian fire, the water red with blood. On the western bank, he walked for three hours under Russian shelling among hundreds of men in similar condition, before reaching a field hospital. His wounds were not serious, and he was soon returned to duty. On 1 November, however, a Russian sniper inflicted a scalp wound which kept him in hospital until January. Then he was sent to southern Poland, for several terrible months of hand-to-hand fighting and headlong retreats, serving among men of whom he knew nothing and whose morale was at rock-bottom. On 19 August 1944, in the midst of an enemy attack Pritz raised his hand above the lip of a foxhole to seize his rifle at exactly the moment a Soviet grenade exploded near by, tearing open his arm.

A comrade used his neck scarf to make a tourniquet. Bleeding heavily, Pritz crawled away through an immense field of sunflowers, enemy machine-gun fire slashing through the blooms above his head. He hitched a ride on an ammunition truck to the battalion mess area, where some men were sitting eating goulash. He sat down shakily, and himself began to eat. Then came a storm of mortar and small-arms fire, and the Russians were upon them again. The dazed Pritz was helped on to a cart with the cooks. He preserved only shadowy memories of the hours that followed, as a great column of refugees and retreating soldiers trudged east under constant fire. At one point, German Nebelwerfers systematically blew a path through the refugees for the