Sniper at Monte Cassino: "Sometimes I hear them still screaming." E-Book

W.T. Wallenda

• Herausgeber: BoD - Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 306

Beschreibung

"Sometimes I can still hear them screaming," Josef Altmann said more than 50 years after the Battle of Monte Cassino, lost in thought. He instinctively flinched, ducked to the side, apparently seeking cover from an imaginary approaching shell. As a member of Regiment 361, the former foreign legionnaire witnessed the merciless fighting on the Gustav Line and around Monte Cassino. The war had reached an unimaginable level of cruelty, and death struck mercilessly every day. Altmann was quickly trained as a sniper and immediately sent to the front. He recognizes the faces of his victims through the telescopic sight. His hands start to shake, his heart races. Goose bumps covered his body. Fear, misery, the loss of his closest comrades and the screams of the dying made him pull the trigger despite his initial doubts. Josef Altmann tells his story without pathos, free of heroism and frighteningly close to reality. This book is an unflinching factual account and should serve as a memorial against war.

Leseprobe

The next war will be more terrible than any of its predecessors.

Bertha von Suttner

Austrian pacifist

(* 09.06.1843 - † 21.06.1914)

Except for historical personalities, all names have been changed.

Any similarities with real people would be purely coincidental.

The Author

Contents

Preface

Sniper at Monte Cassino: "Sometimes I can still hear them screaming"

Glossery and Landser-Jargon (Landser-Slang)

Quick overview Ranks (not final):

More Books by W.T. Wallenda:

Copyright

Preface

I estimated Josef Altmann to be about 90 years old. Despite his advanced age, he still looked agile and strong. His face was weathered, his gaze friendly. I was very impressed that he had taken the train from Ludwigshafen to the foothills of the Alps just to meet me. Of course, he also had an ulterior motive: he wanted to tell me his life story and persuade me to publish it in book form as another memorial against war.

Mr. Altmann had contacted me through my publishing house. After a few phone calls, I became curious and finally agreed to his request for a personal meeting.

I had already published several books on the Second World War and had met a number of veterans during my previous research. They all told me about their experiences. Not to revive old times, but to save them from oblivion and to warn future generations.

Not a single veteran glorified the Third Reich or the war. They were victims of the times in which they were born, victims of the equalization policies of the criminal Nazi regime, and ultimately victims of the Second World War, which was provoked and started by that regime.

I don't know whether one or two of them became perpetrators during the war. But one thing was clear to me: their experiences, unimaginable for us, were mercilessly etched into the minds and souls of these veterans.

Indelibly!

War is hell.

They told me exactly about this hell.

The majority of ordinary soldiers were drafted involuntarily. Torn from their normal lives, they had to leave their families behind and were condemned to go to war, to fight and kill in order not to be killed themselves. The only human closeness they felt was the comradeship of the man lying next to them in the dirt. The comrade waiting to die with them.

On the fronts of the theaters of war they did not find the much-quoted romance of the Landser or the legendary heroism. They found hardship, misery, suffering and injustice.

They were young and blinded. Infiltrated by nationalist ideas, they answered the call of a dictator and his executioners, partly voluntarily, partly under duress. They went to war in what became the greatest crime in human history.

In their stories, they revealed to me how much this past weighed on the veterans and the invisible burden they had carried with them for decades.

As a result, I now had enough original documents and interviews to write several books. My initial reaction to the telephone conversations with Mr. Altmann was accordingly reserved. But gradually this veteran captivated me. Unlike his former comrades-in-arms, he did not praise my debut novel about Monte Cassino, but told me right away what I had misrepresented in it. It was constructive criticism that I took to heart. Only at the end of his remarks did he say: "You couldn't have known a lot of the little technical details, because it's detailed knowledge from us former members of the Wehrmacht, but one thing is exactly right."

He paused.

"What is that?" I asked curiously.

"The way you described it, that's exactly how it was. Exactly like that. I can judge that. I was there. I experienced it."

After all the justified scolding, this sincere praise was really good.

Two weeks later, I agreed to meet with him. We made an appointment, and after Mr. Altmann arrived, we sat together in the restaurant of the guesthouse where he had rented a room.

After the usual procedure of getting to know each other, he opened a well-worn brown briefcase. His hand went inside and pulled out a stack of papers. He placed them on the table and pushed them toward me. "These are all photocopies. I have the originals at home. Most of them prove my story," he began.

As usual, I prepared a notepad and pen, then leaned back and listened. In a quiet, sonorous voice, Josef Altmann told me about his experiences. After only a few sentences, I was captivated. His narrative style was gripping, unsparing and without pathos. He hardly made a face and only interrupted his flow of words when he took a sip of water or noticed that I was writing over my notes. Only once did the old man become silent in a different way. It was when he was talking about the battles at Monte Cassino. Suddenly he hesitated, then stopped speaking. His eyes became moist, his gaze fixed. He literally looked right through me. It was as if I wasn't even there. At that moment, he was back in his mind. He was in the middle of the battlefields around Monte Cassino, reliving it all.

"Sometimes I can still hear them screaming," he said, his voice cracking.

I got goose bumps.

He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, the tunnel vision was gone. He had regained his composure, took a sip of water and said: "There were days when young comrades smoked a whole pack of cigarettes or drank a whole bottle of cognac a day just to get through it. It was horrible when the shells whistled and exploded between us. I've never been able to get the images out of my head. It was a battlefield littered with dead and wounded. There were men waving their stumps to get attention. There were young boys crawling out of cover, but they were missing legs. We waded through a mess of blood and bone fragments. And then these shrill screams all the time. You can't imagine, Monte Cassino was hell."

With wet eyes he got up and went to the toilet. When he came back, he sat down and immediately continued his story. I suspected that he was going to get everything off his chest that night. He cleared up everything that was bothering him. After all these decades, he was freeing himself from a heavy burden and wanted to leave it as a warning to posterity.

I promised him that I would use the material someday. He probably already suspected then that he wouldn't live to see it, but he was still grateful to me. As we said goodbye after a long evening, I could see the relief on Mr. Altmann's face. A week later, I received a handwritten letter and his original Africa bracelet as a memento of that conversation. It was his way of thanking me for everything.

Today I'm sitting at my PC, looking at the documents he gave me, opening my notes and keeping my promise.

The Author

Sniper at Monte Cassino: "Sometimes I can still hear them screaming"

Africa, mid-March 1943

Between bouts of fever that alternated with chills and blissful heat, I lay awake, at least if you can call that state awake. I was somewhere between reality and delirium. It smelled of urine and feces, carbolic acid, pus, and death. The air was stuffy and hot during the day. At night, however, the freezing cold crept into the unheated rooms and one froze despite two woollen blankets. When there was a rumble at the front, the detonations of the shells could be heard from here. They drowned out the constant moaning of the severely wounded.

A nurse dabbed at my forehead with a damp cloth. A doctor wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to a medic standing behind him. He mumbled something I didn't understand and then walked away. The look the medic gave me didn't bode well. The nurse tried to pour me some tea. She gently helped me lift my head.

"Just a little sip," I heard her say.

The brown brew was lukewarm. I first moistened my lips and then greedily tried to empty the cup. But as soon as I had taken two small sips, she took the cup away and set it aside.

"You must drink slowly," she warned as she stood up. "I'll be right back."

She walked over to the next hospital bed. Her body instantly became a silhouette. I collapsed again.

It was not my first time in Africa.

I come from a family of artists. My parents owned a small traveling circus that toured Europe from May to October. After more or less successful tours, we returned to the Saarland in late fall. There was our village, which was also our winter home.

We are originally from Alsace. My grandmother was French and my grandfather German. Towards the end of the First World War, in the summer of 1918, they moved to my great-uncle in the Saarland in the German Reich, more by necessity than by choice. We have been German ever since. I grew up bilingual, learning English as a third foreign language on our travels.

Because we were always on the road with the circus, I had never joined the Hitler Youth, which I found very disadvantageous at the time. When we made guest appearances, there were always young boys in Hitler Youth uniforms in the audience. I envied my peers and would have loved to slip into one of those uniforms myself. Especially when we talked before or after the performances and they told me about their adventures in the HJ. The older ones were even allowed to shoot.

I didn't know then that the Nazi regime was training them to become soldiers at a very young age. Both physical and ideological training were on the daily program of the Hitler Youth. The children of today were being molded into the soldiers of tomorrow. One of the slogans of the HJ was: "What are we? Little Boys! What do we want to be? Soldiers!"

My parents were very liberal and avoided talking about politics. My grandfather, on the other hand, raved about Adolf Hitler and his appearance, while my grandmother, understandably, felt more attracted to France and viewed political events in Germany with suspicion.

I was always in the middle and wasn't really interested in politics. It was something else that attracted me. It was the military. Fascinated by uniforms from all over the world and with a thirst for adventure in my belly, I had only one goal: I wanted to be a soldier. Despite my young age, I was already very self-confident and open-minded thanks to my travels and performances in the circus. For me, being a soldier was synonymous with heroism, missions in faraway lands, and pure adventure.

I had been training my body since I was a toddler.

My two older brothers and I swung on trapezes and helped put up and take down the big top. I was way ahead of my biological age, and people always thought I was two or three years older than I really was. I took advantage of this fact during a tour of Alsace-Lorraine in 1938.

I was clearly too young for the Wehrmacht. I didn't see any possibility of being accepted early by forging my papers. I couldn't imagine fooling the German bureaucracy. That's why I kept thinking about enlisting in another military unit. I was attracted to a unit that was already shrouded in legend.

The Légion étrangère.

It was said that everyone was accepted into the Foreign Legion without being asked about their papers. It was the place for adventurers and the gateway to the big wide world. And if you got in trouble with the law, they would give you a new identity. All you had to do was sign up for five years.

Naive as I was, this thought manifested itself in my head, and stubborn as I was, I put my plan into action a short time later.

When we made a guest appearance in Metz, I wandered around the city during the day. I found an advertising office of the Foreign Legion and knew what I had to do. I had made a decision and my mind was made up. After the circus had moved on and the tent had been set up, I packed my few things, left a letter for my family, traveled back to Metz and applied at the office of the Foreign Legion.

I found everything in the Legion, but not what I was looking for. It was a hard and hardscrabble man's world. We were in a fort in the middle of the Moroccan desert and everyday life was dull, boring and dreary. The water smelled of tin, was warm, and always sent one or another of us to the infirmary.

People often lay there with malaria, diarrhea, or if they had contracted a sexually transmitted disease in one of the cheap Arab brothels.

Violence was common among the legionnaires. They drank a lot of alcohol and homosexuality was widespread, probably due to the seclusion of barracks life. Occasionally there were rapes among the legionnaires.

Those who were too weak were disbanded from the legion. Anyone who ended up in a group with the wrong comrades had nothing to laugh about. The physically strong ruled and the weak obeyed, unless they were ice-cold and quick with a knife. Then they were feared.

The military hierarchy was strictly enforced, and discipline was paramount. There were draconian punishments for even the most minor offenses. For example, it was enough to wear unkempt equipment or uniforms, or to sloppily peel potatoes during kitchen duty, to which one was regularly assigned.

Even if they were at odds and hated each other in everyday barracks life, things were different on deployment. Once they marched out of the gate into the desert, everyone stuck together. The troop stood as one man. Everyone gave his life for each other. Nationality or religion did not matter. The German stood next to the Spaniard, the Italian, the Russian and the Swede. The Muslim fought next to the Jew, and the Jew next to the Christian.

Without exception, we adhered to the Foreign Legion's seven-point code of honor.

1. Legionnaire, you are a volunteer who serves France with honor and loyalty.

2. Every Legionnaire is your brother in arms, regardless of nationality, race or religion. You show him your closest solidarity at all times, as if he were your biological brother.

3. You respect your traditions and are loyal to your superiors. Discipline and comradeship are your strengths, courage and loyalty your virtues.

4. You show your status as a foreign legionnaire by your impeccable, always elegant appearance, your behavior is dignified and reserved. Your barracks and quarters are always clean.

5. As an elite soldier, you train tirelessly, you treat your weapon as if it were your most precious personal possession, you constantly strive to improve your physical condition.

6. An order is sacred, you carry it out until it is fulfilled, respecting the law and international conventions - if necessary at the risk of your life.

7. In battle, you act with prudence, coolness, and without hatred, respecting your defeated enemies. You never leave your fallen and wounded comrades or your weapons behind.

When we marched through the desert and sang a song, the inhabitants of the surrounding villages trembled with fear. France showed strength through toughness.

The motto of the legionnaires was then as it is now: Legio Patria Nostra (The Legion is our Fatherland) and Honneur et Fidélité (Honor and Loyalty).

I was lucky in two ways. First, I joined a platoon whose hard core consisted of eleven Germans, for whom everyone had respect, and therefore I was never the target of same-sex love attacks. Second, thanks to my good knowledge of foreign languages, I soon found myself in the typing pool, which meant that I only had to take part in a few excursions against rebellious Berbers.

With the outbreak of war between Germany and France, the German and Austrian legionnaires were caught between two stools. For the French, we were half enemies; for the Germans, we were considered traitors to the fatherland, even though we had taken our oath on the flag of the Legion and not on the flag of France. In keeping with our position between two stools, we remained silent and waited to see what would happen.

In 1941, when the German Reich had to help its Italian brothers in arms in Africa, we Legionnaires were remembered. A door to our homeland was opened by offering us the opportunity to join the Wehrmacht.

The motives of the 2,000 or so Legionnaires who accepted the offer were varied. Some wanted to serve their country and fight for the German Reich, while others identified with the regime's nationalist ideas. But most of the comrades I knew, like me, saw it as a quick way to leave the Foreign Legion. It was a way out of the Moloch of the wasteland, where we did our hard service day in and day out for little pay.

Besides myself, nine of my closest comrades volunteered to transfer from the Legion to the Wehrmacht. We went through the usual checks, and when it was clear that there were no wanted criminals or political opponents among us, we were finally integrated into the so-called Reinforced Africa Regiment 361.

However, the reception upon our return to the Reich was not as friendly as we had hoped. We were viewed with suspicion and thrown out of the frying pan into the fire.

Similar to the 500 and 999 probationary units, the 361 Africa Regiment was primarily deployed to the hot spots at the front. We were supposed to rid ourselves of the stigma of being accused of betraying the fatherland. And that's exactly what we did, because we were no ordinary soldiers. We were hard-trained desert warriors who knew the land and the hardships of life in this barren part of the world. We gradually earned respect and recognition, but the price for such a homecoming was high for many Legionnaires. They paid with their lives.

First there was a violent jerk, followed by heavy braking. The centrifugal force made me slide forward. My head hit something hard. I felt a short, sharp pain. I was suddenly awake, but still quite dazed from the fever. I heard the hum of engines. When I opened my eyes I saw a familiar face. It was the round, fiery red moon face of Erwin Mueller from Upper Bavaria, who was always in a good mood. A real good comrade. He´s game for anything. It was good to see Erwin. His presence gave me a feeling of security. He was a comrade who never let anyone down, who was absolutely reliable and absolutely discreet. The Upper Bavarian had never betrayed anyone who had done something wrong. Not even when he had been punished himself.

Erwin even served a week in the bunker once, although he had been falsely accused of stealing and drinking a comrade's wine. After Erwin served his week and was released, it wasn't long before a Swiss comrade was in the infirmary with swollen face and broken ribs. The Swiss insisted that he had fallen. But we all knew that Er-win had privately called the real culprit to account.

"Bon jour camarade," the moon-faced man greeted me in French, spoken with his unmistakable Bavarian accent. He laughed. "Well, you old circus clown, have you finally woken up?"

I was on the back of a truck. That explained the jerking and rocking.

"Did you think we were going to leave you behind?"

I tried to answer, but my mouth was dry. My attempt to speak sounded like opening an ammunition box with rusty hinges. Erwin unscrewed the top of a canteen and held it to my chapped, cracked lips. I opened my mouth. He poured some water into it. Some of it ran out of the corner of my mouth and seeped somewhere between my collar and the blanket. What stayed in his mouth was a relief.

"The Tommy is pushing hard against the Mareth line. Our comrades are still holding the line, but it doesn't look good. The military hospital has already been dismantled. It's heading for Tunis," he said.

I only caught a few words of what Erwin was saying. The fever quickly threw me back into delirium.

The next time I woke up, I saw corrugated iron forged onto twisted steel beams. Propeller engines roared. I was on board a Ju 52, heading for Sicily.

A stopover in a military hospital in Sicily was followed by long stays in military hospitals in Apollonia/Greece and Gars am Inn.

In Apollonia I learned of the fate of the Afrika Korps. The capitulation of my comrades had hit me hard. I didn't know who was still alive, who had been killed, and who had been taken prisoner. What was certain was that the Afrika Korps no longer existed. About 150,000 German and 125,000 Italian comrades had been captured.

When the Allies landed in Salerno, Italy, on September 9, 1943, I was on my way to Gars am Inn. I had lost more than 10 kilos of body weight and was still weak in my legs, but I was on the road to recovery.

In October 1943, I received a field mail letter from my legionnaire comrade Eduard Schwarz. Ede, or Oberlehrer (Schoolmaste / senior instructor) as we called him, was quite intelligent. He had the rank of corporal in the Legion. In the meantime, he had been promoted to sergeant in the Wehrmacht. Ede came from a family of lawyers in Cologne and had already studied law for several semesters. Lovesickness had driven him to abandon everything overnight and leave his comfortable life behind. Ede probably found his inner peace in the Legion. The headmaster wrote that Erwin Mueller, Richard Buchecker, Willi Faber and Alfred Kummerer had also escaped from the cauldron. Three comrades from our old platoon were dead, one was missing. All the others were probably captured.

Ede went on to say in his letter that they had been taken to Sardinia. There, the rest of Regiment 361, including about 80 Legionnaires from our battalion, had been incorporated into the newly formed 90th Panzergrenadier Division.

"80 out of the former 850," I muttered, mourning the dead and rejoicing that at least some of my closest comrades had made it. I stared for a few seconds. It was then that I realized that these men were more than comrades to me. They were my friends. The best you could ask for.

In addition to the headmaster and Erwin with the eternally fiery red moon face, three other legionnaires from my platoon had escaped the cauldron.

Alfred Kummerer was from the Palatinate and a trained butcher. He had spoiled us more than once in Africa with delicacies made from freshly slaughtered cattle or sheep.

When I heard the word sheep, I immediately thought of Richard Buchecker. He was a shepherd somewhere on the Baltic coast. Richard was the strongest man I ever knew. I had often suggested to him that after the Legion we could perform together in my parents' circus. He would be presented as the strongest man in the world and would guarantee a sold-out tent. Richard was about six feet tall, and when he stood in the doorway, the room went dark. He had a good disposition. And whoever was considered his friend in the Legion wasn't bothered by anyone. No one really knew why Richard had joined the legion. Richard was extremely taciturn. If he spoke two sentences a day, that was a lot. That's why everyone called him the mute.

Willi Faber was a Street boy from Hamburg. His nickname was Pocke because his face was covered in pockmarks and resembled a cratered landscape. Willi ended up in the Legion because he got mixed up in Hamburg's underworld. "I relieved some pimps of their money while playing cards. I was no longer sure of my life.," he said, grinning mischievously.

A week after I got the letter, I was released as cured. They put me in the Armored Grenadier Replacement Battalion 104 in Landau/Pfalz, and there I was immediately sent on leave, despite or perhaps because of my long illness. I was allowed to go home for 14 days.

But there was no reason to be happy. Grandpa had died two months before. My grandmother told me that Grandpa was proud of me for becoming a soldier. He didn't like the Legion, but he told everyone that I was serving in the Afrika Korps. Unfortunately, there were other bad fates to digest. My two brothers were drafted into the Wehrmacht in quick succession. Both were sent to the Eastern Front. Robert was killed in action at the Dnjepr and was buried somewhere in Russia. Oskar was in a military hospital near Kiev with a bullet in his lung. That was probably one of the reasons I was sent home so unexpectedly.

The time with my family was good for me. They cooked me good food and I visibly recovered. When I went to my unit in Landau at the end of the holidays, I promised my mother that I would write to her from time to time and take good care of myself.

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Pixabay Lizenz: https://pixabay.com/de/service/license/

From that day on, I tried to take notes as often as I could.

My time with the Replacement Battalion ended pretty quickly and I had to report to the 3rd Company of the Training Battalion in Neustadt an der Weinstraße.

Only four weeks later I was called back to the office. I was to receive my new transfer. My heart was racing faster than a machine gun. I knew that this time I was going to a front-line unit. Being a former Legionnaire, I had high hopes of rejoining my old gang. I entered the brick building with appropriate excitement, walked quickly down the corridor, and took a few deep breaths in and out in front of the typing pool. The door was ajar and I pushed it open. The spit lifted its head briefly. I smiled, took a step forward and said casually in a polite tone: "Good afternoon. Grenadier Altmann. I've been asked to come here."

A soldier in the typewriter pool skillfully twirled his fingers over the keyboard of a typewriter. Before I had even finished my sentence, the clacking of the levers on the platen immediately ceased. He had stopped typing and was staring alternately at me and then at the spit. The Sergeant Major gave me a sharp, oblique look, turned his attention back to the document he was reading, and signed it.

Sergeant Major in the Wehrmacht was not an independent rank, but a service position. He was the company sergeant and could be recognized by the two spit rings on the sleeves of his field blouse. The „Spieß“ was the so-called mother of the company. He relieved the company commander, ran the office, and kept order among the troops in the field. In short, the spit was a person of special respect.

With a grim look on his face, the company sergeant stood up and unexpectedly shouted at me at a tremendous volume: "I think I'm crazy! You will go out immediately, come back and report properly! If you don't, I'll chase you around the barracks yard in full marching gear until midnight! Understood?"

I was stunned and stood there in shock.

"Get out!" He shouted with such intensity that his head turned bright red and the pulsating artery in his neck stood out. His arm shot up like a Hitler salute, only his hand wasn't flat, his index finger pointed at the door. "Out!" he repeated.

I immediately left the office, closed the door behind me, and took a deep breath. I had to digest the scolding for a few seconds. I cursed the commissary, silently cursed the company sergeant, and collected myself. I pushed the door open again and entered the office for the second time. I stamped my boots on the floor without being heard, clicked my heels together, stood at attention and extended my right arm. "Heil Hitler, Sergeant Major. Grenadier Altmann reporting for duty. I've been ordered here."

The Spiess made me wait a minute or two, then leaned back and addressed his assistant. "Schneider, do we have anything on an old man? He can't have been here that long. I don't know the name."

There was a rustle. Seconds later, the soldier in the writing room lifted a document. "He came over from the Fifth. He's a former Legionnaire and is being transferred back to the front." Schneider stood and brought the document to the spit. He glanced at it briefly and beckoned me over to his desk. "Well, there you go. They probably didn't teach you much in the Foreign Legion. We're all about discipline and order here," he said. "Give me the pay book."

I spared myself any comment and handed over the military pay book, only to immediately return to my figure-eight position. The Spike took note and muttered: "Stand at ease."

I pushed my right foot forward slightly.

A few moments later, I pushed my soldier's book back in and held a letter in my hand. It was my marching orders. "As a former member of the 361st Africa Regiment, you are being reassigned to your old unit. Effective immediately, you are assigned to the 90th Armored Division. Regiment, 361st, II Battalion, 7th Company. The marching battalion will leave tomorrow morning at 07:30."

"Yes Sir, Master Sergeant," I replied briskly, suppressing my joy. This was exactly the unit my comrades served in. I would meet the schoolmaster and the others. And if I knew Ede, he had already made arrangements with the sergeant or the company commander for such an event and had my name registered.

"What are you staring at? Did you think we were sending you on Christmas vacation? Get out of here!"

I was satisfied. The whining went in one ear and symbolically slipped out the other.

"Yes Sir, Master Sergeant," I repeated, gave a military salute, turned around and went to my room to pack.

The Wehrmacht was a very modern army with new structures. During its development, it relied on the writings of the French officer Ardant du Picq. Du Picq, who died in the war against Germany in 1870, studied ancient and modern battles and wrote about the fighting ability and morale of soldiers in his book Etudes sur le combat. According to him, men who knew each other fought more tenaciously and stood up for each other, while the cohesion and thus the fighting strength and morale of soldiers who were strangers to each other were not as pronounced. In other words, the closer the soldiers felt to each other, the more stable their appearance as a cohesive unit.

The German Empire took advantage of this situation and built the new army on a patriotic basis. Men from the same regions served in the same units. They spoke the same dialect, had the same attitudes, and often had known each other for years or were even related. It was not until casualties increased as the war progressed that this type of recruitment could no longer be targeted.

The next pillar of the Wehrmacht's military success was training. Every German soldier was so familiar with his weapon that he could take it apart and put it back together blindfolded. This meant that they did not panic, or at least panicked less, when their rifles jammed, as the problem could often be solved in a few simple steps.

Another positive innovation was a small but effective change to the internal structure. During the First World War from 1914 to 1918, there had been a strict separation between enlisted men, NCOs (Non-Commissioned Officers), officers and general staff, but in the Wehrmacht things were different.

If qualified, every soldier had the opportunity to rise to the top.

Every member of the Wehrmacht, from the common soldier to the field marshal, received the same food.

Orders were discussed in detail. When you went into the field, even the common soldier knew what the order was and what the objective was. If the officers fell, the NCOs led; if they fell, the next rank led. The men could act and were not helpless if a superior officer fell.

December 21st, 1943

We marched out of the barracks with the Westerwald song on our lips. We radiated a cheerful serenity to the outside world. The young recruits, the majority of the men, were beaming with pride and joy. They dreamed of heroism and me-dals. The older ones among us, mostly returnees from military hospitals or units that had been wiped out, were more reserved. They knew the war, the front, the hardships and the hell on earth that came with it. They knew what to expect.

I myself had mixed feelings. On the one hand, I was looking forward to seeing my comrades again, but on the other hand, I was afraid that I would have to go into battle again. Killing was cruel. Lying behind a machine gun and firing into a swirling mass coming at you was less touching than meeting the enemy on a reconnaissance patrol and killing him with a bayonet, a spade, a dagger, or your bare hands to save your own bare life. I had to learn this bitter fate of the soldier in Africa. Kill or die. I wanted to live, so I inevitably killed. The night patrols in the already inhospitable desert were feared and hated. You almost always met the Tommy, and that meant hand-to-hand combat.

I closed my eyes as these memories flashed through my mind. How many sleepless nights had I spent because of this? How often had I been haunted by the faces of the men I had to kill? They danced around me like devil's grimaces until I woke up in a cold sweat. It got better with time. But it never stopped.

To distract myself, I joined in the singing and belted out the next verse at the top of my voice. "... the wind whistles so cold over your heights, but the slightest sunshine penetrates deep into your heart ..."

We all didn't know that we were marching straight into a hell of unimaginable proportions. The devil pushed the gate to his realm wide open. The entrance gate was called Monte Cassino. Thousands and thousands of soldiers were to pass through it. And we marched towards it in high spirits and singing loudly.

It was a good thing that none of the men had the slightest idea at that moment that around three-quarters of them would be dead within the next six months, were considered missing in action or would be languishing in a military hospital, some of them seriously wounded.

The sergeant leading us seemed to like the song very much. As soon as it was over, he shouted loudly: "And one more time! Let's go, comrades!"

And so it resounded again at the top of its voice: "Today we want to march, try a new march, to the beautiful Westerwald, where the wind whistles so cold ..."

We had to cover around 1200 kilometers to get to the front. On foot, by truck and mainly by train.

Six long days had passed since then. On Christmas Eve, we were accommodated in a hotel, but there were only enough rooms for a few of us. Most of the group slept on camp beds in the large reception hall or in the dining room. Beforehand, we celebrated Christmas together. We had a thin broth as a starter, then a very good roast with dumplings and red cabbage, and for dessert we were served chocolate pudding. The atmosphere changed from a friendly, cozy atmosphere to quiet contemplation. Those were the minutes, sometimes hours, when everyone was lost in thought about home and family. There were only a few of us who sat together in a corner until well after midnight, playing cards and laughing.

One day later we spent the night in a barracks and on the following two days and nights we stayed in the wagons of the troop transport. Fresh straw served as bedding and a cannon stove, stoked with wood and some coal, provided pleasant warmth.

When we left Germany for the Alps in sleet and snow, it was only two degrees plus and it was cloudy and gray. In southern Italy, we hoped for better weather. We talked about what it would be like there and agreed that we had drawn the middle lot of the three big fronts with Italy. France would have been better and the loser was, of course, the Eastern Front. Nobody wanted to go there. So we were all happy. We had all ignored the fact that you could die in agony on any of these fronts.

I had a seat near the stove and found the train journey relatively pleasant.

The superiority of the enemy air force was clearly noticeable in the approach of the troop transports, among other things. To avoid being a target for the Allied fighter-bombers, we mainly drove in the dark.

We quickly became accustomed to the ch-ch-ch of the locomotive and the clacking as it passed over the sleepers. The atmosphere in the carriage was quiet and restrained at first, later cheerful, almost exuberant. We passed the time playing cards and having lively conversations.