Klaus Willmann - Death March Through Russia: The Memoir of Lothar Herrmann

DEATH MARCH THROUGH RUSSIA

My Journey from Soldier to Prisoner of War

Klaus Willmann

(As told to him by Lothar Herrmann)

Foreword by

Roger Moorhouse

Translated by

Eva Burke

Death March Through Russia

This English-language edition

first published in 2019 by

Greenhill Books,

c/o Pen & Sword Books Ltd,

47 Church Street, Barnsley,

S. Yorkshire, S70 2AS

www.greenhillbooks.com

ISBN: 978-1-78438-503-3

eISBN: 978-1-78438-504-0

Mobi ISBN: 978-1-78438-505-7

Publishing History

First published in German in 2017 as

Todesmarsch durch Russland: Mein Weg in die Kriegsgefangenschaft

by Edition Frg (Rosenheim).

This is the first English-language edition and includes a new foreword by Roger Moorhouse.

All rights reserved.

Klaus Willmann text Edition Frg GmbH 2019

Roger Moorhouse foreword Greenhill Books, 2019

Translation by Eva Burke Greenhill Books, 2019

The right of Klaus Willmann to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.

CIP data records for this title are available from the British Library

Designed and typeset by Donald Sommerville

This book is dedicated to all those prisoners of war who suffered the agonies of sickness, hunger, exhaustion and freezing temperatures in Stalins empire.

It was a delicate task to translate Death March , written in the first person and as the personal memoir of Lothar Herrmann, a German prisoner of war of the Russians during and after World War II. The original German-language edition was in fact ghost-written by a journalist, Klaus Willmann, who interviewed Herrmann over a series of meetings half a century after Herrmann had returned from the gulag . From this perspective it is a memoir once-removed, but it very much demanded Lothars own voice to resonate as principal narrator.

Thankfully, Klaus Willmann is a sensitive, honest and sharp listener who approached this undertaking with enormous integrity and thus provided a text which allowed me as translator to hear the protagonists own account, to establish an immediate rapport with him and in turn to offer the reader what I hope is the feeling of a direct and authentic narrative.

Invariably, through the passage of time, memories become obscured, pain is dulled and anger mitigated, with survivors of trauma thus often leaving us with little more than silence. Whilst the deprivations and cruelty suffered in the Russian camps can surely never be adequately expressed, neither in the original language nor in translation, the challenge remains: how to convey these experiences to the readership? How to allow an emotional bond to develop between the younger generation and the past, a past which begs to be understood? How is one to impart something for which no vocabulary exists? While trying my absolute best to allow the suffering of Herrmann and his fellow men to echo in the account, I was frequently reduced to using a phrase such as indescribable stench.

Herrmann did not grow up in a milieu that appreciated profound discussion or deeper political thought. Hence, he offers many short sentences and logbook-like accounts; and whilst the reader might wish for more, it would invalidate Herrmanns testimony had either the author or myself moved beyond the language he used.

Though not men of letters, Herrmann and his friends coped with their life experiences with a sense of wry, deprecating humour and irony, rather typical of the young men who grew up in those parts of Germany and Austria, but perhaps somewhat foreign-sounding to British people, who would instead have shown the traditional stiff upper lip, unwilling or unable to turn those difficult emotions into words when faced with adversity.

I have referred to towns and cities by their usual names in German before 1945 but to avoid confusion have included the modern equivalents in notes whenever possible. Military and similar ranks (including those created by the Nazi regime for the SS and so on) are translated from the German to their nearest equivalent in the British services. A few well-known German terms like Fhrer (for Hitler) have been retained.

Eva Burke

Around 3 million German soldiers became prisoners of the Soviet Union during and after the Second World War. As woina pleni (prisoners of war), they were paraded, abused and forced to work in Stalins vast network of camps, payback for the horrors that they had unleashed upon the Soviet people during Hitlers war. By the time that the last of these prisoners were repatriated in 1956, more than a decade after the end of the war as many as a third of them, some 1 million individuals, are estimated to have perished; victims of maltreatment, malnutrition and disease.

Yet, despite their numbers, German former prisoners of war were scarcely commemorated, let alone written about. They were largely ignored, as embarrassing, painful reminders of the lost war, of the Nazi regime, and of all those soldiers who did not return from the front. Moreover, Germanys post-war narrative quickly developed into one dominated by an overwhelming sense of its own guilt: of shame for the Holocaust, for its military aggressions and transgressions, and for its own brutal treatment of enemy prisoners and civilians.

There was little room in that dark world for an objective treatment of the fate of Germanys former prisoners, or indeed for anything that portrayed the Germans themselves in any way as victims.

All of which should serve to explain why Lothar Herrmanns memoir is so necessary. Born in humble circumstances in Breslau (now Wrocaw in Poland) and apprenticed as a painter, he lived an uneventful and largely unpolitical youth before being conscripted into a Wehrmacht mountain division in 1940. He then participated in the invasion of the USSR in the summer of 1941, alongside Germanys Romanian allies, ending the operation at Odessa on the Black Sea coast.

Though interesting in its own right, Herrmanns military career is passed over swiftly, and most of the book covers the period after his capture, itself a wildly dramatic episode in the autumn of 1944, when his unit was left stranded after the Romanian troops alongside whom he was conducting a fighting retreat switched sides with the fall of the Romanian leader General Antonescu. After a desperate race to reach the safety of German lines, with the advancing Red Army hard on their heels, he and his fellows became prisoners, initially of the Romanians, and then of the Soviets, and almost inevitably were packed into cattle trucks for the long journey eastward to an unknown fate.

Herrmanns experiences as a POW in the Soviet Union were searing, characterised by casual brutality, maltreatment and the ever-present threat of disease. The contempt of his Soviet guards was palpable. As Hermann lamented, We were no longer human beings. We were nothings.

Already by the end of the war, Herrmann reckoned, less than a year after his capture, only a third of his original cohort of prisoners were still alive. The remainder had fallen victim to dysentery and malnutrition.