6. März 1943
| GEO INFO | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Saint-Renan | 
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| Brest |
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St. Renan. British air forces attacked Brest.[1] A shot fighter lurches towards the Channel at high altitude. Suddenly, the aircraft begins to spin and then shoots vertically into the depths. At that moment, a parachute inflates over the falling machine and the pilot slowly swings towards the earth. I immediately alert our standby cars. These are commandeered French lorries with French drivers. But suddenly they all break down. Not a single vehicle will start! I snap at them, but they just shrug their shoulders. They have courage, because what they are doing is outright sabotage. They couldn’t have done this with the Russians. These would have shot the first one and the others would have got their vehicles going very quickly!
In the meantime, a few men from my company had spontaneously ridden off on bicycles and followed the sinking parachute along roads and country lanes. I drive after them and already see the parachute lying in a meadow from far away. Farmers and children from the surrounding farms are standing next to it. There are even some small pieces of wreckage from the crashed plane scattered on the meadow. When I lift up a piece of the belt of the 2-cm on-board gun, the women run screaming apart. In the meantime, my men had loaded the pilot onto one of the locally usual two-wheeled farmer’s carts. The prisoner is a young, dark-haired officer. He carries his forearm, which is injured by a flak splinter, in an emergency bandage that one of my men had put on him. On our way back into town, a swarm of people followed us, growing larger and larger. We stop in front of our orderly room. I get off the vehicle and go inside to report the pilot’s arrest to the regiment. Outside, a large crowd has gathered around the cart in the meantime. It was by no means only curiosity that had brought them here. Their faces and their shouts spontaneously show sympathy for the British. The pilot looks over the crowd seriously and somewhat pensively. It seems to me that he doesn’t even register the ovation in his consciousness. He is probably still a bit in shock. We make him change to a lorry to take him to the regiment. A dense crowd of Frenchmen follows the vehicle as it pulls up. Many wave at him, especially young girls, of course. These few moments have thrown a spotlight on the real feelings of the French. We Germans are, after all, the occupiers of their fatherland. It is true that they come to terms with us, and usually quite amicably, but the British want to liberate them, which they understandably prefer. Among those waving is an elderly man who is walking in front of me. When he then takes off his hat and starts waving, in a fit of angry disappointment I knock the damned hat out of his hand and lead the guy to the orderly room. I make a phone call first, let him fidget for a while and then confront him. Suddenly he starts ranting at the English for bombing the French cities. Then I let him go. I didn’t make a friend, but I didn’t lose one either. He wasn’t one anyway.
Some time later we reappear in Brest. Our destination is the sea commander’s house, or more precisely, the bar on the first floor, where we now sit on the bar stools and chat at length with the bar girls. One is black, the other blond. Max and I benefit most from the two because we speak French best. The others prefer to stick to the excellent alcoholic beverages that the navy has to offer here. In keeping with my preference for Nordic, I have the blonde hogtied while Max entertains the black. The blonde is engaged to a German sergeant who commands the orderlies here in the house, as a kind of head waiter. He appears once, is obviously jealous, stands in front of me and explains with a grim face that he wants to draw my attention to the fact that he is engaged to the girl. I explain to him coldly that I am aware of this and what he actually wants to complain about. The girl immediately noticed from a distance that something was wrong. She comes over, grabs her fiancé by the arm and asks with a scowl what he said. Then he is quiet and leaves without a word. As I leave, I am still alone with the girl on the stairs to her room. The others had already gone ahead and were already calling for me. I wanted to say something, and the girl was obviously waiting for something too. Then I couldn’t think of anything more stupid than to advise her to be faithful to her fiancé. I should have told her exactly the opposite.
Last night, the battalion’s officer corps had arranged a party with ladies. The ladies were German girls from Brest who work there in all kinds of military and civilian offices. The event took place in a small hall of a house we use as a casino and where we also always have our lunch together. At the beginning, the battalion adjutant, Lieutenant Gawletta, introduced the officers one by one to the ladies by placing each officer in the middle of the hall and characterising them with a few witty words. He referred to me as the battalion’s “heavy boy”[2] because, as leader of the heavy mortar platoon, I commanded the battalion’s heaviest weapons. The evening goes quite nicely.
There was a small incident behind the scenes when the obnoxious, unsympathetic battalion (assistant) surgeon[3] suddenly disappeared with a girl. The officers disapproved of this conspicuous and therefore inappropriate behaviour, and Gawletta, the theologian, was most annoyed and also told the doctor. Then this fat pig also puffs himself up and hisses at Gawletta, “he would pursue him with all his hatred!” The man is hysterical.
In the evening the girls had to be driven back to Brest. Several officers immediately “volunteered” to accompany the girls. But the commander decides that only one will go. So this one climbs onto the waiting lorry. Max Müller, however, jumps behind at a favourable moment and waves to me: “Go, up!” So I secretly swing myself up too, and suddenly the fat assistant surgeon is up there too. Now we are four companions instead of the one.
In Brest, after a few dodges, we manage to shake off the disgusting doctor. And since Lieutenant X has already disappeared, only Max and I are left with two girls. We had already dropped the others off at their homes. By now it had become very late and the two girls, who live together, invited us in for a cup of tea. They took us to a very tastefully furnished villa, the lower floor of which they both occupy alone. It almost went without saying that we spent the night here. My partner had wonderful long braids. —
Max and I left at dawn. But since it was Sunday, there were no buses. So we wandered out of town and then continued on the country road towards St Renan. We hoped that some vehicle could give us a lift. Shortly after Brest, a heavy black car rushes up, but there is an admiral in it, and we didn’t dare stop him. So we march on along the empty country road. Everything breathes peaceful Sunday calm. Far and wide no human being is to be seen. The sun rises higher and we begin to feel warm. We march hour after hour and have already covered twenty kilometres. The sun is now burning unpleasantly warm. We have never experienced such a warm pre-spring day[4]. Lunchtime is approaching. If we’re not at the casino for lunch and the old man notices something, then all hell will break loose. In the last village before St Renan, Max calls the battalion office and orders a car. He gets a promise and we shuffle on with renewed courage. The first houses of St. Renan already appear in the distance, and shortly before the town, a sidecar bike finally rushes up to drive us the last three kilometres to the casino. It was literally the last second. They had just all taken their seats when we came dashing in. We apologise to the commander for being “late”, take our seats and begin to dine with harmless mine. The commander didn’t notice anything, only the others knew and were grinning like leprechauns.
We got a new one. I see him for the first time at a get-together of our battalion officers with the regimental commander Haarhaus. There we held a singing competition. Each officer was to sing the song that moved him most in his youth, the dancing class days.
This newcomer is a young, green lieutenant with a suspiciously pointed nose that is even more turned up so that the nostrils look like plug contacts. He is nervous and fidgety, speaking hastily in short, choppy sentences. He unabashedly tells us that he took a wonderful woollen blanket with him after an overnight stay in a Paris hotel. It was a hotel for officers.
I heard about this blanket stealer again later in Russia. He was in a military hospital when an EK I arrived. But since the cover letter was still missing, it was initially unclear to whom it had been awarded. A sergeant came into consideration. However, the aforementioned blanket stealer, in his naïve and impudent overconfidence, declared himself to be the presumed recipient. He put the cross on his tunic, stood in front of the mirror like a peacock and considered that it looked good on him. All day long he strutted around the military hospital wearing it. When the certificate arrived the next day, it turned out that the Iron Cross had been awarded to the sergeant. This was told to us by a man from our battalion who was also in the military hospital at that time.
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- ↑ possibly on 6 Mar 1943 (KTB 7. A. Frame 000336): “Around 2.30 p.m. about 20 bombers in the area north of Brest. Bombing on the northern edge of the city. [...] 2 Spitfires shot down.”
- ↑ German term for a “bad egg”
- ↑ “Assistant surgeon” was the medical officers’ rank corresponding to a second lieutenant
- ↑ in the original again “autumn day”; do we really have to doubt the order of the narratives now?