The German War (73 page)

Other impressions confirmed this picture. One of the men in Kurt Orgel’s artillery unit came to seek his advice after receiving a devastating letter from his wife: ‘Leave is blocked,’ she had written:

Who knows when you can come? Perhaps not till after the war. I don’t need to wait for you. I could have four men, if I wanted, at any time. I’ve had enough, I want it now too! Finally, I want to have a couple of strapping boys now too. At this moment I don’t know what else to write!

Kurt told the soldier to let his wife go, pointing out to Liselotte Purper that ‘What we demand of him, he can expect from his wife’ – loyalty and steadfastness. But, as Kurt admitted, so many ‘war marriages’ had failed that the very term was used with cynical smiles and allusions. What, Kurt asked Liselotte, made theirs so different? Was it that others mistook sexual attraction for ‘true, deep love’? Were other couples too young, or had they simply had too little time to get to know each other? But he did not dare ask how the war had altered things between Liselotte and himself. Liselotte had recently complained that she had been living ‘like a nun’ for the last six years. She had noticed that hardly anybody asked her about her husband. By 1944, even wearing a wedding ring in Germany was not a clear marker. ‘Perhaps’, she reflected, ‘most people have bad experiences and prefer “not to ask”.’ Death and infidelity had made everything more complicated.
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Germany’s moral guardians in the SD and the Catholic Church could broadly agree in their misogynistic diagnosis of sexual disorder. The SD urged withholding ‘family support payments’ from soldiers’ wives who misbehaved and appealed to the military honour of soldiers not to sleep with the wives of comrades. They also demanded that the Propaganda Ministry ‘de-eroticise’ press, radio and film by getting rid of songs with ‘erotic’ couplets. But both the Nazi and Catholic guardians were floundering and did not know how to restore self-restraint. Their frustrations apart, in the context of early 1944 they were actually describing a society which was still managing to absorb the strains and tensions of total war. Its structures were largely intact, and expectations and aspirations for the post-war future remained modest, focused on finding homes, families and careers within local worlds to which the men at the front would one day return.
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The SD was also describing a problem which had grown partly through the German cult of ‘love tokens’, the official encouragement given to teenage girls to write and send parcels to unknown and unmarried young soldiers. ‘Dear, unknown Miss Gisela! You will be quite astonished to receive mail from an unknown soldier and will rack your brains over how I came by your address,’ began one letter in October 1943. Heinz was a young submariner stationed in Arctic Norway; Gisela a young woman in Berlin, still living with her parents. During the entirety of their four-year correspondence, they seem to have met only once, when Heinz finally got leave in June 1944. But the rest of the time they waited impatiently for each other, trying to work out when they could meet again, sending and receiving photos. He fixed hers to his bunk, his one bit of private space, ‘so that I can always see you, when I get up and in the evening when I go to sleep, I have to see you. And then I can think, “Gisel is now thinking of me too”.’
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Kurt Orgel and Liselotte Purper continued to write to each other love letters whose erotic content markedly increased as the frustrations of separation grew. They affirmed their commitment to each other and they promised to wait, continuing to put their ‘real’ life on hold. Dreams and fantasy came to their rescue. Kurt dreamed that he was walking along Liselotte’s street in Krumke at night, when she and Hada appeared in the sidecar of a motorbike. He hugged them intensely before they could even get out – ‘you can see how great my need for love is!’ he commented. Kurt assured Liselotte that he found her far more attractive than Hada, whom he had still not met. When his letter arrived, Liselotte told him, she was sitting on the balcony of the country house – sunbathing and ‘half naked’. Laughing at him and telling him that ‘you don’t have to be called Siegmund [
sic
] Freud’ to read lots of meanings into the dream, she described one of her own:

I dreamed last night about more super things than just sitting in a sidecar and waving . . . I beg for forgiveness, but last night another man took me in his arms and smothered me with kisses, though I did manage to protect myself gently all the same by telling him that I am married! (I didn’t forget!)

Later that year, after a night working on a photo-story together, Hada and Liselotte each wrote to Kurt, pretending that he could see them through the eyes of his photo on the wall: Liselotte was warming her long bare legs against the tiled stove; Hada undressing for the night – ‘and you didn’t look at her the way a husband should’, Liselotte wrote. ‘Next time, you’ll have to turn around or cover your prying eyes with a cloth.’
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Others were experimenting with different ways of expressing themselves. Born in Bremen in 1926, Reinhard had spent his teens without his father, who was killed in 1941. He trained as a radio operator two years later and was then posted to the relative quiet of Hungary. From there he kept up a regular correspondence with six young women, who all knew of each other and yet all wrote love letters to him. They wrote of their ‘many admirers’, their disappointments and their flirtations with others and imagined how ‘dashing’ he looked: ‘I would so like to see you in your uniform,’ Eva flattered him. Ina pictured Reinhard in his steel helmet as ‘cute’. They quoted snatches of romantic film songs: for Hannelore, training to be a nurse in Königsberg, it was hearing ‘Girl, I’m coming straight back / when the enemy is beaten I’ll always stay with you’ on the radio that made her think of him. To them, the war appeared even in 1944 more an adventure than a threat – having brought them all greater freedom of a personal kind. Even the youngest of the six, 16-year-old Ina who still lived at home, was in work, training to be a secretary. They all smoked – though they meekly accepted his rebuke – and made their own choices. Hannelore instinctively rejected the advances of a French prisoner of war: although he was an officer, she seemed alive to the injunctions to defend the honour of German women without needing to say so explicitly.

Reinhard and his admirers did not quote political slogans or tell each other to ‘hold out’, as older couples like the Guickings or Kurt Orgel and Liselotte Purper did. And they spoke less of their longing for peace. The search for privacy may have been ‘apolitical’ in its indifference to official messages, but it was certainly not anti-war. The correspondents accepted their obligations and moral duties, moulding their self-images around the appealing ‘soft’ propaganda of popular film and music with its combination of eroticism and gratification deferred until the war’s end. They had grown up during the war and they treated it as a normal, almost natural, state of affairs: in the spring of 1944, it afforded them the freedom to be young. Their play at promiscuity would have shocked their parents – but it hardly resembled the spectre of moral dissolution painted by the SD.
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On Saturday, 5 February 1944, the post arrived at the little airbase at Aschersleben, a town below the north-eastern escarpment of the Harz, and, in the eyes of Hans H., deadly dull. The 23-year-old climbed up on to his bunk to read the letters in privacy. When he had finished, he began them all over again. Then he threw on his greatcoat and walked in the woodland under the pale winter sun for an hour till he reached a village station where he caught a train to another town. Carefully avoiding all chance conversations, Hans managed to stay in his unbroken reverie, finding a quiet café where he could dwell on his girlfriend’s letters. As he described it to Maria the next day, he could see with his ‘inner eye’ how she got up before dawn and travelled to the village station at Michelbeuern, where she worked in the ticket office and where she had to hide her own letters from Hans’s father, the stationmaster. ‘If I had only the inner eye to transmit impressions, then I’d only see beauty all day,’ he promised. The railwayman’s son from a village to the north of Vienna had a knack of drawing Maria close with the vividness of his imagination, putting himself in the scene near her, helping her to issue the tickets.
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Hans needed all his ability to woo her. Neither was certain of the other. Like most new couples, they began to cement their courtship by creating an instant store of memories: on 16 January, it was two weeks since their first kiss; by 23 July, it was already twenty-nine weeks. In January, Hans was seriously worried that it might not mean as much to Maria as it did to him: though her later kisses were freely given, that first time he had simply grabbed her and refused to let her go. She had not pushed him away but it was clear from his half-apologies that she had not responded either. And there was another problem: keeping the relationship a secret from his father, her boss. It could not be kept from his mother and sister, however, and by July, Maria felt that both his parents were giving her ‘funny looks’ and making ‘loaded remarks’.
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With so few days together, snatched at the station in Michelbeuern on whose upper floors Hans’s family lived, it was the thousands of kisses sent by mail which made their relationship real. Hans was cheered by songs broadcast on Sunday afternoons and hoped Maria might have heard Zarah Leander singing ‘I Know There’ll Be a Miracle One Day’. He was worried about his reputation as the village lover-boy, and assured Maria that military service had changed him for the better. Maria, who was two years younger, had had her share of local admirers too. Hans confessed that the very idea that he might lose her to someone who managed to avoid the army and stay at home was like ‘theft during the blackout’, and he vowed to Maria that if anyone ‘goes and takes my girl from me, I’ll kill him. I’ll do him in like a Russian.’ Although she suspected the village postmistress of steaming open and holding back Hans’s letters to her out of spite, somehow Maria succeeded in evading the prying eyes of a small Austrian village. In old age, Maria confessed that she had also corresponded with nine other young men at the time. As with Reinhard’s six female admirers, this was not so unusual when none of their futures was secure.
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After serving in Russia and then Italy, where his 2nd Paratrooper Division had seized control of Rome in September 1943, life on the airfield at Aschersleben was boring and Hans detested his comrades’ taste in music. The young veterans were not keen to exert themselves in the menial clear-up work, where they answered to civilian engineers. At the end of May 1944 they were moved west to another airbase near Cologne, where Hans sunned himself and was deeply impressed by the stoicism of the population. He told Maria that the air raids on Vienna which she had seen from a distance were no worse than what the Rhinelanders had been enduring day and night for the last three years. Then, scarcely a week after he and his comrades had arrived at the Rhine, their division was sent to France.
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In May 1944, Lieutenant Peter Stölten stopped off in Paris, tramping from the Champs-Elysées to Montmartre, taking in Notre Dame and the Moulin de la Galette and washing down lobster with burgundy, followed by real coffee. He was part of the Panzer-Lehr Division which had just returned to the west after participating in the occupation of Hungary. It had taken seventy trains to carry the men and their equipment. The young, aspiring painter from Berlin was thrilled by the Parisians’ sense of style and by the ‘elegant world’ which had long since vanished from German cities. Scarcely bothered by the string of air raid alarms, Stölten and his friend Hermann had explored the capital for fifteen hours before crashing into their beds; as they fell asleep, they kept repeating the enchanted city’s name aloud, ‘just like soldiers in a patriotic film murmuring the name of their loved ones on the battlefield’.
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Peter Stölten was almost two years younger than Willy Reese, who at this moment was being moved up to the front too. His unit quit the village of Jurkovasteno where he had spent several quiet months, sharing the bed of a Russian girl. ‘It was hard,’ he wrote in a letter to his uncle the next day,

for all involved. The evening before, I lay with Klara in bed and comforted her till she fell into a troubled sleep, but when I kissed her goodbye yesterday morning, she cried all the same . . . the father wished me luck and the mother blessed me – such people, and they are meant to be enemies? Never.

Willy Reese was headed for Vitebsk, the sector of the front he most wanted to avoid.
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Stölten and Reese had both started their military service at the same time, on the eastern front in 1941. A motorbike despatch rider with a tank division, Stölten was twice invalided out with suppurating boils, after which he succeeded in being admitted to officers’ training, doing well enough to jump up the rungs from non-commissioned officer to lieutenant in short order. The year 1943 had seen him mastering Goliaths, which, belying their nickname, were in fact minature, remote-controlled vehicles loaded with high explosive which were used for attacking fortified structures. Having gone on to train with the most valued heavy tank, the Tiger, Peter Stölten gained entry into one of the most elite armoured divisions of the Wehrmacht, despite his lack of battlefield experience. Its 316th Company, which Stölten joined, specialised in using both Goliaths and Tiger tanks. From Paris, Stölten and his comrades were sent to the Département d’Eure-et-Loir in Normandy, where the division formed part of the armoured reserve of Rommel’s Army Group B. Against a backdrop of old mills, chateaux and trees in full blossom, Stölten felt a pang of nostalgia and the old tug to get out his sketchbooks and settle into the landscape.
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On 5 June, the weather was so appalling in the English Channel that the Germans called off their air and sea reconnaissance. Having lost their long-range ability to monitor the weather out in the Atlantic, they did not know that a brief window was about to open into the storm. Into this the huge Allied convoys with their six battleships, twenty-three cruisers and eighty destroyers in attendance embarked that night. The landings depended on surprise, speed and concentration of force if the Normandy beaches were to be won from the superior numbers and firepower of the fifty-eight divisions of the Wehrmacht.
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