Thoughts on war: Day of Decision Somewhere (Published on 22/11/2023)
In addition to letters from the war and immediate post-war period, literature sources from the time also provide a vivid impression of what war means for people and what a high price all soldiers and their families have to pay in war – mostly in complete contrast to those who have politically fomented and initiated it. It is of central importance to keep alive the memory of the times of war and its consequences in order to prevent the same mechanisms from being set in motion once again and history from repeating itself with ever more fatal consequences.
On 17/08/1952, standing at the graves of the dead buried in the military cemetery in Hürtgen, the then German Federal President Theodor Heuss formulated the importance of war commemoration in his speech at the opening of this cemetery as follows (translated from German language):
“They were human beings like us. But at these crosses we hear their voices: ‘Take care, you who are still in life, that peace may remain, peace among men, peace among nations.’”
To this end, under the title “Thoughts on War”, excerpts from literature describing war and its consequences for those involved will be reproduced here as a reminder of what war means to man and mankind. To provide food for thought and in the unshakable hope that this may make a difference.
The chaos and events of the final days of the Second World War and the emotional state of a directly affected German are described particularly vividly in a report by Emil Barth from an unknown German town during its seizure by US forces, taken from his work “Lemuria – Aufzeichnungen und Mediationen aus den Jahren 1943 bis 1945”.
He writes (quoted from Kuby, Das Ende des Schreckens [1986], p. 176 ff.):
“DAY OF DECISION SOMEWHERE
16 April 1945 / evening
The decision has been made, the incomprehensible has become reality. Overflowing with the events of today, I record only this, shaken and moved; I write it down to the echoing trot of hundreds and hundreds of German soldiers marching down below in the twilight under the guns of American tanks into captivity.
17 April 1945 / Tuesday
The fateful hour, which we had all been awaiting for months between fear and hope, came as a complete surprise yesterday morning. The disturbing fire had ceased three hours ago, but the horizon was surrounded in a tight semicircle by the irregular fire of heavy and small calibers, against which – according to a psychological law full of wisdom – we had become increasingly indifferent as the danger approached and were now all the more attentive, as the whole city was packed with troops and the main street in particular presented the sight of an encampment with constantly arriving remnants of battered units.
Like the previous days, this one was also warm and radiant in summer, with sunshine and blue skies and white clouds of blossoming trees in all the gardens; the image of the worn-out front-line soldiers, however, who waited indecisively, as if half disarmed, with the remains of poor vehicles, some without a guide, for something they themselves did not know what it was: Dismissal or flight, battle or surrender, or wounding and death – this bleak picture of earthly confusion stood in cruel contrast, of course, to the springtime glory of unwavering cosmic change. And yet in a few moments it was to take on a truly terrible expression!
I was just writing in my pocket-book, finishing my final sentence with restrained nervousness, while a disturbance, as it were spreading through the air, grew rapidly and soon resembled the approach of a stormy rush under the rattling of distant lightning. Shouts of terror broke out, staggered, propagating themselves up the street, and reached my ears with vehemence. At the same time, a wild race of thousands of feet and the roar of chasing vehicles began, and a confused chorus of voices rose into the air as if from the surf: »The tanks are coming! The tanks are here! Clear the road! Into the cellars!« – dark, echoing, warning shouts from men, high-pitched screams from women’s throats and the small, bird-like shrill cries of children.
Since that moment, I know what panic means.
I rushed to the window, half-torn away and yet spellbound by the sight below. The street resembled the bed of a raging torrent, flooded to the sidewalks by masses of fleeing people running for their lives in blind fear, hounded by the whip of rattling machine guns that was already approaching. No longer accessible to any call except the one announcing the onset of the death-threatening storm wind, which could be heard roaring irresistibly from the station area, the raging torrent of people rolled up the street in furious jams, civilians of all ages and sexes mingled with the troops torn away in panic, soldiers of all arms and ranks, some of whom took the time to break their rifles with a furious, hopeless blow against a curb or wall corner, while others, running, climbing over garden fences, falling and picking themselves up again, tore their steel helmets or caps off their heads, flung their pistols away, stripped off their coats, and in no small number removed their tunics, revealing the blue of a mechanic’s suit or other civilian clothing. However, as if the waves were rising and the raging force was accelerating unstoppably, in the middle of the stream the Wehrmacht cars were constantly pushing forward, honking their horns, the drivers of the fourage wagons were standing and whipping their horses, shouting warnings, sweeping, dashing and galloping along with masterless carriages and single nags with their apocalyptic heads held high.
It was a picture of the forces of nature unleashed.
I saw it, I grasped it, received it in a thousand converging snapshots »as if pierced with a needle into the whites of the eye« – as the Arab storytellers like to say when they want to testify to the utterly unbelievable, the fantastic, the miraculous as being experienced in visible reality – but I was as if absent-minded and only tore myself away from the sight when I heard shouting in the house. So this was the moment that would seal our fate? He bore such features and still had mercy on us? Our eyes told each other as we met by the stairs with a gleam that, despite the suddenness and unpredictability of the event that was about to take place, gave us a glimpse of happy survival. And while the women downstairs let a few more strangers in, drumming against the front door, and hurriedly went with them to the cellar, I stepped once more to a window overlooking the street: it was already almost empty. Only a few soldiers were still fleeing to the side into some hallway or courtyard. And before the iron roar of the approaching armored cars, which was already rattling the windows, before the rattle of the machine guns, which was pierced by the dark blasts of heavier weapons, two horse-drawn carriages with dragging drawbars and half-broken, disintegrating wagons chased past as the last rearguard of the wild stream of escape: Sable horses, covered in sweaty foam, and dun-colored heavy cold-blooded horses with waving blond manes and fire-beating hooves – horror even in the eyes of the creature!
As I reached the cellar, the first tanks arrived at the level of our house, firing continuously. A few minutes passed in extreme suspense, as the continuous rattling of the small-caliber bullets was intermingled with the heavy fire from the top of the passing battle vehicles. Had the tank trap been closed and occupied after all? Would the fanatics of destruction manage to prevail? But the noise of battle quickly moved on towards the city. Then, in an almost wild, impetuous, painful movement, I felt hope rise in my heart like a fluttering sun out of the year-long night of nameless oppression and supra-personal grief; and while the machine gun barrages crackled to the roar of the never-ending columns of tanks, we all embraced each other in an overflowing feeling of gratitude and kissed each other – an unspeakable kiss that sealed the end of the blind, senseless reign of death and destruction and was the first hint of the sweetness of peace.
The shooting in the street finally subsided, but the rolling of the battle vehicles continued to rumble past. It was difficult to rely on the sense of hearing alone all the time during such events; and although scattered gunfire was now ringing in the gardens and shouts in a foreign language echoed through the air – we had already opened the cellar door a while ago, clouds of pear tree blossoms hovered in the frame of the doorway as if unearthly in the sunny blueness – we quickly ran upstairs to at least satisfy the desire to see with a glance. I have to catch my breath. The whole ignominy of the regime that has reduced our people to the dust was expressed in the bitter picture that presented itself to our eyes out there – this, after all that had gone before, finally only terrible-organic picture of the disorderly surrender of the soldiers of a people broken in body and soul. Bare-headed, unarmed, looking down or turning their eyes back and forth in sheer mortal fear, both hands raised or clasped over the top of their heads or necks – in a gesture of incomparable expressiveness: symbolizing the yoke of submission – German soldiers emerged from cellars and courtyards individually or in groups of two or three, moving uncertainly and hesitantly under the machine guns and rifles of the Americans pointed menacingly at their chests and backs, close to the fences of the front gardens and along the fronts of the houses down the street, against the still unstoppable roaring stream of tanks and fighting vehicles: creaturely defenceless human game, exhausted by long pursuit, crushingly overshadowed by monsters of the floor-high armored monstrosities, finally confronted in the last, innermost ring of a battue!
Not for one day during this whole horrible war, indeed, not even before its planned outbreak unleashed with demonic lust, had I believed that it would lead to anything other than a crushing defeat of our people; but that one could take us as far as it did, that one would sacrifice the substance of centuries in a few years and be willing to bleed us to the last drop, such a degree of nefariousness had not been imaginable to me. That was what would have turned my heart over: to see our wretched nation brought into this situation not by an external enemy, but by itself – by the delusional inflation of its national weaknesses of grandeur and slavery under the tyranny of inferiors.
Shaken, we returned to the cellar. A lighter battle vehicle was just about to break away from the passing column and drive into the neighboring yard, another onto the sidewalk next to our front gate; the khaki-yellow figures in steel helmets who were holding them jumped off and scattered into the yards and gardens behind the houses, shouting loudly. I was still holding the candle from which I was smoking a cigarette when the shouting behind our house became louder and one and another helmeted figure at the top of the cellar stairs, rapid-fire rifles at the ready, obscured the magical spring scene. »Come up!« they shouted and waved us up. And so we, men and women alike, paid our tribute to the hour with upraised hands, received by a third soldier outside and ordered into a line with slightly lowered machine pistols, while the other two searched the cellar for any hidden German soldiers.
And while we explained upon questioning that there were neither weapons nor military personnel in the house – the women used their English in more detail in a moment – I looked at the first of these strangers from across the ocean, who might as well have been one of my cousins. Tall, broad-shouldered, tanned face under a steel helmet pushed back casually, chewing gum with a magnificent set of teeth and mumbling his words, in his linen-like sand-colored dress with the rolled-up shirt sleeves he presented the sight of strength and nonchalance: a nonchalance, it seemed to me, of the unabashed self-confidence and democratic freedom of his great country, that strange offspring of Europe, whose future character it will largely determine to have developed through two wars into the most powerful nation in this old, backward, twilit mother-earth.
When we were finally able to step out into the street – the air was still full of the chains of automatic weapons fire from other parts of the village, the muffled blasts of tank guns echoed all around, clouds of fire rose over the center of our village – a hideous scene began to play out just a few steps above our house, which will forever stain the tragic image of that hour in my memory. A horse, killed by bullets, lay by the side of the road, still in the drawbar of the slurry wagon, which was halfway up the sidewalk; and within a few minutes women and men were swarming around the carcass doing the bloodiest business. Carrying buckets or tubs in their left hand and waving a white handkerchief or kitchen towel with their right, their faces were filled with fear and desire at the same time. They came running out of the houses and scrambled for the loot under the pipes of the armored cars, while more and more German soldiers in groups and smaller, already orderly formations with their hands folded over their heads made their bitter way down the road to captivity. Understandably, the scene was immediately photographed by the Americans. Two men had captured a whole hind leg and were hurriedly and laboriously dragging it across the road, so that the hoof rattled on the pavement, close to the head of a larger column of prisoners led by officers. What a miserable picture, this bloody lump of flesh in the torn brown fur like the stain of a hideous flag in front of the procession of troops exhausted to death, escorted by a slow-moving battle vehicle and man by man under the symbolic yoke of hands clasped over their necks, eyes lowered or fixed straight ahead, under the gaze of their silent compatriots over the road strewn with pieces of uniform and debris, the last stretch of their unfortunate journey, bowed not only by the realization of the finality of their defeat, but by the foreboding of the unthinkable infamy that has led to this hour within a dozen years and brought nameless misfortune upon the earth, ruin and shame upon a great people! No honest heart will begrudge a man the tear he sheds at such a moment for the misfortune of his fatherland.
The speed of the armored advance had made it unnecessary to hang out white flags; only a few sheets hung down from the windows in front of the barricade, which fortunately could no longer be closed. Meanwhile, in the side streets and especially in the upper part of the town, the fighting continued; and nothing was more fantastic than this rapture of war at the very moment when it was being fought in individual battles barely a few hundred meters away. German artillery was still firing from the heath, the columns of smoke from burning cars and armored cars lined up in the direction of the approach road, the sound of distant detonations repeatedly pressed against our mouths and ears, and the rattling of small calibers wandered back and forth. But here on the street, the war was over. The light combat vehicles and the super-heavy monsters with the white star in a circle and all sorts of grotesque cabaret-style paintings were at rest, the crews were dismounted, except for a few guards behind the machine guns dominating the street; some were eating their canned meals, others were searching the houses rather haphazardly for weapons, at the same time confiscating binoculars and photographic equipment, but one or two also took a wristwatch or a fountain pen as a private tribute.
Meanwhile, leaking news from the city center told of looting of food and textile stores by the masses of workers deported from the East who had set out from their camps: Signs of disintegration that were to be expected and to which the unrestrained cannibalization of the fallen horse had corresponded here. A heap of bloody garbage and iridescent entrails had long since lain in the gutter. At last, however, the two men who had borne the brunt of it reappeared and set to work clearing the road: they dragged the remains of the carcass on iron pole hooks to the nearby shell hole, pushed them in and threw some earth over them. This is how the great war ended with a miniature Schindanger scene.”
The most powerful means against the repetition of history are remembrance and commemoration.
(Head picture: Memorial stone inscribed “Jedermann” (“Everybody”),
Ehrenfriedhof Bischofsgrün, September 2023)
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