--- Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:
>
> The other thing that would help make these war
> accounts more real is a
> brief description of the location---if you've been
> there or know
> it. From the first volume of Carell, I imagine
> Russia to look like the
> US midwest, mostly flat, low rolling hills, small
> towns connected by
> long rail lines, an occasional forest in otherwise
> agricultural
> dull-drums..
Yup, that's pretty much what European Russia looks like, but it's also very green and watery with lots of streams and rivers and forests. The Ural "Mountains" are actually a bunch of low hills. They should be called the Ural Bumps.
I enjoyed Sven Hassel's fictionalized account of the battle of Stalingrad on the German side in his book SS General.
Here's an Ehrenburg piece I just translated. This was written for Soviet soldiers:
KILL
By Ilya Ehrenburg Originally published by the military publishing house Voenizdat June 24, 1942
Here are excerpts from three letters taken from dead Germans:
Commander Reinhardt writes to Lieutenant Otto von Shirach:
“They have taken the Frenchmen from our work camp. I selected six Russians from the Minsk region. They can endure much more than Frenchmen. Only one has died, and the rest continue to work in the field and on the farm. It costs nothing to maintain them, and we need not suffer, because they are animals, not people, whose children may be killing our soldiers or eating German bread. Yesterday I executed two Russian rogues who had been secretly devouring milk that had been destined for pigs ”
Matheus Zimlich writes to his brother Heinrich Zimlich:
“In Leiden we have a camp for Russians, and you can see them there. They are not afraid of weapons, but we talk to them with a good whip ”
A certain Otto Essman writes to Lieutenant Helmud Weigand:
“We have Russian prisoners. These guys eat worms that have come up after a rain on the square of the aerodrome; they throw them into a slop-pail. I have seen them eat weeds. To think that these are – people!”
These are slave masters, who want to make our people into slaves. They take Russians, mock them, and drive them insane with hunger to the point where, dying, they eat grass and worms, and a filthy German with a rotten cigar in his lips philosophizes: “Are these really people?”
We know everything. We remember everything. We understand: Germans are not people. From now on, the word “German” is for us the worst of curses. From now on, the word “German” causes rifles to fire. We are not going to talk. We are not going to be awed. We are going to kill. If you have not killed a German today, your day has been wasted. If you think that your neighbor will kill a German instead of you, you have not understood the threat. He will take your loved ones and torture them in his accursed Germany. If you cannot kill a German with bullets, kill him with your bayonet. If there is a lull in fighting, if you are waiting for a battle, kill a German before the battle. If you leave a German alive, he will hang a Russian man or degrade a German woman. If you have already killed one German, go kill another – there is nothing more festive for us than German corpses. Don’t count the days. Don’t count the versts. Count just one thing: how many Germans you have killed. Your aged mother asks, “Kill a German!” Your grandfather prays, “Kill a German!” Your native earth cries, “Kill a German!” Don’t miss. Don’t let pass. Kill!
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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