BUT NOT FOR THE FUEHRER

Suddenly there were SS Military Police all around us.  The political officer sent two of the SS MPs after the sergeant who walked out.  They took the sergeant and we never saw him again.  I found out later that he was charged with insubordination and sentenced to Strafbattalion Company 333. He was the first of us to be taken away.

The rest of us were dismissed and sent back to our lines.  None of us felt that the speech or the MPs were necessary, the whole event was just another example of how things were under the iron grip of the Fuehrer.  So far the only escape from that grip was death.  During the next couple weeks the political officer tried to save face by visiting the troops right in their trenches.  This was to show his courage, perhaps to show that things were going to arrive at the front.  The only problem was that he wasn’t welcome.

He visited one soldier who asked him, “Why do we have to sit here in the mud and the rain, in a place we won’t be able to defend when the attack comes.  Why don’t we fall back to a position that we can defend, and maybe win this back when we are strong enough to counter-attack?”

The political officer grew angry right away, as people often do when they have no answer for the questions thrown in their faces.  He raved at the soldier, “You are not to question the orders of the Fuehrer like that!  The Fuehrer has decided that you will defend this position and you will defend it until we are strong again!” 

The soldier took this as a personal attack, as anybody would, and responded with, “The Fuehrer is not out here in the rain and the mud and the Fuehrer can kiss my ass!”

This soldier was the next to disappear, picked up by the SS MPs and taken away.

The next soldier the political officer tried to talk to was somebody I knew very well, Feldwebel Stumpf.  He already didn’t like Stumpf, because of the comment Stumpf had made during the meeting.  I think he was looking for Stumpf as he walked along the line, and looking for a way to have the SS MPs take Stumpf away.  If that was what the political officer was looking for, Stumpf certainly didn’t disappoint him or keep him waiting.

Stumpf started in on him before the political officer could even begin his routine.  Stumpf blasted him with, “Tell the Fuehrer and all the other assholes back there that I’m not going to fight for them anymore!  I quit doing that a long time ago.  I fight only for myself and for the kids who are fighting with me, my boys.  We fight for ourselves, to survive and that is all we’ll do, but not for the Fuehrer!”

The officer yelled that we couldn’t talk about the Fuehrer like that.  He called us all kinds of names, saboteurs, destructors of the Armed Forces which is resistance to the German army.  Anything like that meant the death penalty.  We were still right on the front and the officer asked Stumpf if he would go to the rear with him.  Stumpf said, “You would like that, wouldn’t you?  Then your SS gangsters could pick me up.  Nobody is going to pick me up, mister.  I’ll give you this advice, you better just get lost, get out of here.”  We immediately formed a half circle behind Stumpf.  The officer saw this and left the area.  Then Stumpf said to us, “Two of you guys always stay with me. Stay close and have your machine pistols ready.  If those SS men come we won’t ask any questions, we’ll just kill them.  They don’t have enough SS to get me.”

During the next few days the Russians hit us with a lot of little attacks, nothing big but a lot of hit and run attacks which gave us heavy losses.  There weren’t too many wounded, most of the losses were dead.  The dead included our only regular army officer.  The SS Sturmbanfuehrer was the next ranking man in line.  His main job was political but he was also SS and he was supposed to be capable of command.  In order to stop the hit and run attacks we planned a little counter-attack for the next day.  This wouldn’t be a full fledged attack, just something similar to what the Russians had been doing, a small show of strength and to find out what they might have in the planning at the same time.

The night before this was to take place, Stumpf gathered his favorite and most trusted boys together.  I was one of them.  He talked to us in a low voice.  “Do you know who our leader is tomorrow?  That political officer is going to lead us into battle.  Let’s make very sure, as soon as any shooting starts, that he is the first one to die for the Fuehrer.”