One Must Overcome the Dead Point

 

Source: SS Leilheft, 1944, Issue 1 “S”

 

What is expressed in the following company commander’s field letter should be taken literally. It is about you and me, it affects all of us very personally:

 

...Despite the hardness of these days we look into the future with confidence. But one uncanny realization often plagues me, namely that the full, in the final sense absolute unconditionality of this war is still completely clear to far too few Europeans. Indeed, it gets around more and more. But the full hardness of the war grips only far too few.

 

The Bolshevik wants to move west, and with him strides death - for all of us, without exception. We fight over existence or non-existence - all of us, whether we live in the Reich or in Europe’s lands. What threatens us from the east is total destruction of everything we are, however one may label it. And the Russian is strong, especially in the one thing that has previously always decided all conflicts: attitude. He is so fantastically healthy that even the Bolshevik poison could not hurt him. Rather it works like a fission-fungus, which sets the resting forces into motion, that now follow their law blind and unstoppable. Bolshevism, in the formerly poor Russian history, is a very great event, something that has moved the wide masses of this huge folk and still moves it. The Russians go into this war unencumbered. We carry a rich heritage with us, and it burdens us.

 

It is like the Führer once said: The last battalion triumphs; in other words, whoever fires the last shot, has won, regardless how the game otherwise looks and where this last German shot strikes. Who five minutes after twelve can still aim his rifle at the enemy ready to fire, has won, even if he stands as one against a thousand.

 

Bitter weeks lie behind me, weeks full of horrible experience. But we soldiers here in the east learn a tremendous self-consciousness and sobriety over ourselves. Here we become cleaner, better, harder, healthier. The soldiers who have already held out for over three years in Russia, those are the best men of our folk, by far the best. It is so: one should no longer train recruits in German barracks with shower rooms, beds, lockers etc., rather in filthy nests on the east. One should no longer assemble German divisions in Western Europe, rather in the occupied east.

 

Recently I picked up two men separated from their unit, who had been in the Hague just ten days before. It is completely clear to us here that at first not much can be expected from such people, regardless how well equipped they may be. It is really a shame about what all is lost in the first fighting. This view spreads more and more. Even troop units that have been in the homeland for a longer time for replenishment or training are no longer worth as much as if they had never been there. One must first overcome the “dead point”; one must unlearn looking back, one must learn that the path to a real and genuine life only follows the detour over the defeat of the opponent, that there is no going back.

 

The homeland is too beautiful for us; it makes us sick, slack, soft. That has nothing to do with the mood at home. Rather it is the safety, the measuredness of all life to our being, that is what makes us so sick when we return to the Russian misery, to the loneliness and desolation of pitiless demand, which has probably only been so absolutely imposed on the Athenians in their struggle against Sparta, or Caesar in his fight against Vereingetorix.

 

One must understand that, also purely emotionally, otherwise one succumbs to the tremendous pressure that rests on one spiritually. When one understands that, this pressure disappears immediately. In its place comes the ice-cold, active will to get at the enemy and to beat him at any price. During my various assignments I have become acquainted with very diverse divisions; some who have been in Russia without interruption since 1941, some in Germany during the war and some that were assembled in France. The last ones are the ones who find it the hardest to get used to the unconditionality of the Russian land in order to gain a clear view for the gigantic possibilities of these expanses, which wait there for European formative energy.

 

In each head haunts: “Back then in France!”, instead of saying: “Here I am, here I remain - and if it is not so nice here, then it will become nice, that is why I am who I am!” The last, unfortunately, is only said by far too few. If we would firmly bite into the Russian earth - the Soviets would never get rid of us. But, unfortunately, only a few firmly bite in here; others dream about the end of the war at home, but not the end of the war as a free man in the east. And that is a big shame. That is what must come. At that moment the Russian can try whatever he wants; he will not advance an inch...”

 

If we see the old world in ruins, we do not ask a lot whether much valuable and irreplaceable was lost! That makes sad and weakens the fighting strength. Let us ask ourselves instead whether we still feel within us a spark of that energy that enables us to erect the Reich from flesh and blood. If that is the case - and I know that the best of us possess this rock-hard faith -, then we will also have the strength to build anew the high works where no old wall will still hinders us - in the expanses of the east and over the ruins of the west. Cathedrals fall, their holy substance lives on indestructible in our blood. So we are free for the struggle and will later be free to, in accordance with the eternal substance, to build the new castles of a new time.