The Forgotten Soldier

[PacificTide]

I’m often leery of books about the Russian Front in the Second World War simply because both the Germans and Russians have been demonized in this country to the point that the poor slobs who fought the greatest land battles in history are, to us, just fascist or commie fools. Sajer’s book is an account of the life of a common German soldier on the Russian front. It’s a shame that more works presenting the human side of Fritz and Ivan haven’t appeared.

The Forgotten Soldier starts with Guy Sajer as a 16-year-old recruit undergoing training in Poland. I’m not going to dissect the book because many of you have not read it yet. I would like to present some ideas that have occurred to me as I read so that some feedback can be started.

I can identify with Sajer on several levels. At a basic level, soldiers are soldiers, sergeants are sergeants, and officers are officers in any man’s army. Anyone who has been in the military can easily put himself or herself in his place. On another level, perhaps only the German male ranks below the Southern white male in perceptions created by the propaganda of the pseudo-intellectual mass media of this country. As you read the book, Sajer (half-German, half-French), lets some of his bitterness creep out. A Southerner can easily understand a “lost cause” and the pain of being belittled for it. Lastly, as a Viet Nam veteran, there is the kinship of having fought and lost a war that everyone else would just as soon forget.

The conditions on the Russian front were appalling. The sheer size of the battlefront suggests that it would take a modern version of War & Peace to begin to do it justice. That hasn’t appeared yet, but Sajer’s work puts humanity to massive battles that have been ignored in this country.

An excellent book.

 

[drunkboy29]

Is "The Forgotten Soldier" the title of the book? I'm interested. Who is the author? Full name, please.


[This message has been edited by drunkboy29 (edited June 12, 2001).]

 

[LTBF]

The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer.

Birmingham Public Library has ONE copy for all its branches. I requested the ONE copy today to be sent from Springville to Hoover.

I just can't keep buying books!

ROLL TIDE FOREVER!

 

[The Tusk]

I posted about The Forgotten Soldier a while back and would agree with PT's assessment. I found the book almost challenging me to read another page, a dare if you will.

I was travelling on business when I finished the book. I picked up another book in an airport but one of the guys I was travelling with was looking for something other than the pulp fiction he'd brought along. I loaned Sajer's book to him.

Bob called me last Friday - three weeks after I loaned the book to him - to let me know that he still had the book and that he was still reading it. He apologized for taking so long but admitted that he'd read three books in the interim - Sajer's description of life in the East was so full of pain and despair that Bob was having problems making it through the book. By way of encouragement, I told him, "It gets worse..." He chuckled darkly and replied with "Yeah, I remember my WWII history," and said he'd knock out the last few chapters this week.

Here's a link to the Barnes & Noble site for The Forgotten Soldier:

The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer


Sajer is actually a cartoonist living in Paris these days. People have accused him of making up his account of life on the Eastern Front, but they are by far outnumbered by those who understand the risks he took writing the book - a Frenchman serving not just in the Wermacht but in an elite SS division - der Gross Deutschland division - at a time when being a Frenchman who'd served with the hated Boche was not a popular thing.

Pick it up...if you dare.

 

[LTBF]

Good post, Tusk, and good link. Very interesting to know more about his later life.

Of course, he did not intend to join the elite division. He was drafted into it in the desperation of the war on the Eastern Front. I was touched by the description of his father's visit with him in Berlin. His father was French, and was obviously not very happy with his son's decision to join the German army.

ROLL TIDE FOREVER!

 

[PacificTide]

Tusk, I ordered the book from Barnes & Noble after I read your original post. I read up to the point where he joined the Gross Deutschland division and took his R&R to Berlin. I wanted to let anyone else reading it catch up, as I would rather discuss a book fresh.

His initial service in a transport company brings to the forefront how poorly prepared the German Army was for a winter campaign in the interior of Russia. One reads conflicting reports as to why this came about, most blaming it on Hitler's (and the General Staff's) conviction that the war would be won before winter set in. This was sheer folly that caused incredible suffering.

After my own R&R forays in Hong Kong, Manila, & Singapore, his trip to Berlin was rather disappointing. I suppose it depends on what you are looking for.

But, even this gave me a sense of the wartime ennui that is reflected in virtually any German text of the time.

The book is devoid of humor with the exception of some dry observations by Sajer on certain events. One that struck me was when he left the training camp on the supply train headed to the front. His sergeant came by and chewed him out for sheltering from the cold and not being on the lookout for Russian partisans. His reaction to seeing a man alongside the tracks and then firing over his head is a classic reaction of a young kid given a gun with real bullets and told to guard something with his life. There is a certain Lieutenant JG who will probably never know how close he came to heaven when he surprised me at an ammo dump once. All he got was his nice white uniform muddy but I still get the willies thinking about it. My sergeant looked at me funny too.

 

[LTBF]

I have finished The Forgotten Soldier, and I have several comments which I wish others would respond to.

The war scenes are among the most horrible I have ever read, especially toward the end. If you are in the middle, and you don't think anything can get any worse, just wait, they can.

The only things I can think of that rival them are some of the more horrendous battles of the Civil War, as described by people who were there, some of the battle scenes from the War in the Pacifc during WWII, and some things I have read about Viet Nam. I'll admit that I don't read much about 'Nam. It is too close in time for me to have the proper historical perspective for it.

I don't know quite what to make of Sajer's comments that the Russians were so horribly barbaric as they drove the Germans back. I'm absolutely positive they were, but with good reason, it seems to me.

He does not mention anything about the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the East. In fact, he never mentions the word Nazi, as far as I can remember. I have a range of options to chose from in explaining that, and I haven't decided yet what I think is most likely.

1) He never saw or heard about any of these things and didn't know what the Nazis stood for or what they were trying to do. That is very difficult for me to believe.

2) He knew about them, but chose not to mention them so as to drum up support for his point of view. There were times I felt sorry for him, personally, and dismayed at the cruelty of the Russians. But I only had to stop and think what they had to be cruel about, to put an end to those tender feelings. I could feel a great deal of empathy, however.

3) They were irrelevant to what he was trying to explain. This is possible, I suppose, but it leaves much to be desired in telling the WHOLE story.

War IS hell, and this particularly sector may have been more hellish than most. Was it worse than the Battle of Gettysburg? I know that Gettysburg was on a smaller scale, but in terms of sheer horror, how did it rank?

I felt terrible about the civilians in the parts of Germany being overrun by the Russians, and I understand why so many Germans were so eager to surrender to the Western allies instead of the Russiams.

But I also know that German civilians often behaved barbarically themselves. I know the Nazis considered the Poles and the Slavic Russians as subhuman, and treated them as such. It wasn't just Jews they were trying to exterminate.

I have never met a German who lived in Germany during the War who will admit to knowing what was going on there. They NEVER knew, they avow. Hard to believe, isn't it? For me it is.

Another thing I would like to comment on is the extent to which Sajer says he and his buddies were kept in the dark about what was going on elsewhere. I suppose that was true.

This book left me with extremely mixed feelings. I felt an abhorrence for war, but also for the Nazis, and to a lesser extent, for Sajer himself for the way he extricated himself from any culpability. That was not exactly his fault, I don't suppose, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.

When we have discussed the theme of good versus evil in LOTR and some other things, we could have used this book as a poster child for that concept, except that all the good wasn't on one side and all the evil on the other. Almost all, but not all.

And we need to thank our lucky stars that Hitler was dumb enough to attack the USSR. Didn't he learn anything from Napoleon?

ROLL TIDE FOREVER!

[This message has been edited by LTBF (edited June 23, 2001).]

 

[The Tusk]

LTBF - While it's likely that he was aware of the Nazis and what they were up to, it wasn't relevant to the story he was telling - HIS story. He was in a Waffen SS unit after all, so some things had to have been apparent to him. IMO, unless he'd been involved in something other than, for lack of a better description, run-of-the-mill atrocities (killing prisoners, etc.), what was going on in the larger sense wasn't relevant to the story. Given the brutal honesty of the rest of his story (especially things like seeing German troops executed on the spot late in the war for not having the proper papers on leave, etc.), if he'd been involved in things like executing Commissars I think that he'd have written about it.

Regarding German civilians and treatment of the Slavs, they had almost no interaction. While some Germans were relocated in the East to "Germanify" the countryside, most Germans never dealt with Slavic civilians. The German government, especially the police organizations and the Waffen SS, were the main perpetrators of the policy of extermination. There were some Slavs used as forced labor, but most were POWs.

As for the German civilians and their awareness of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, it's probably highly likely that they didn't know the details of the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis. Most knew that their Jewish neighbors were no longer around, but asking questions or commenting on it wasn't something that people did if they wanted to live out the month.

In a police state where all news is controlled by the state propaganda office (Joseph Goebbels), it's not difficult to believe that there wasn't widespread knowledge of what was going on. Also, those who did know were obliged to keep their mouths shut under penalty of death. Given the Nazis' propensity to hang people on meat hooks or using piano wire for a crime, real or imagined, is it surprising that even those who did know didn't talk about it too much? They didn't have First Ammendment-like rights, nor did they have Woodward and Bernstein doing investigative reporting. When questioning the state often meant that you woke up on a train moving east, either to the Russian Front or to a labor camp, people simply didn't do it.

The German troops were lied to as much if not more so than the German people. If they knew the true extent to which they were getting the snot beaten out of them, they would likely have caved more readily. Accusations of "defeatism" were worth a term in a labor camp or worse.

If you wanted the whole story, The Fall of the Third Reich is a better (and significantly longer) book. However, Sajer's book wasn't about the whole story, but about one man's perspective on infantry combat on the Eastern Front. This book showed that good and evil aren't black and white, that both co-exist within the same framework and that no side can make exclusive claim to the moral high ground, regardless of their assertions.

 

[LTBF]

TUSK, I wholly agree with your thinking, I guess. (Boy, is THAT a controdiction in terms!) I know that he was telling what happened to him, and to those around him whom he knew personally, and that this was not a generalized discussion of the entire Russian Front, or the War.

However, it did leave me with very mixed feelings. On the one hand, I sympathized with his ordeals, and they WERE awful. On the other hand, I did not feel he was entirely truthful about what he saw and what he knew.

I definitely read in cycles, and I guess this will trigger a WWII Russian Front cycle. I had read extensively about the war in the Pacific, and about the ETO, but not so much about the East.

And one small point: I didn't say that German civilians were the ones who were eradicating the Slavs. At least I don't think I did. I didn't mean to, as I know better than that. I am saying that the German civilian population was something less than honorable, for the most part, in their treatment of minorities.

BTW, here is an article that appeared in yesterday's The Birmingham News:

Kiev, Ukraine - Keeping up his tone of atonement for Catholic inaction to stop the Holocaust, Pope John Paul II on Sunday condemned Nazi massacres and said Jews endured suffering and injustice throughout the ages only because they were faithful to their religion.

The pope made his comments on the eve of a visit to Babi Yar, a ravine where tens of thousands of Jews and others were killed and buried in mass graves during the WWII Nazi occupation of Ukraine.

"Here in Kiev, at Babi Yar, during the Nazi occupation, countless people, including over 100,000 Jeews, were killed over a few days. This is one of the most atrocious of the many crimes" of the 20th century, the pope said during a meeting with the leaders of Ukranian religious denominations.

John Paul also said the Jewish people "suffered injustices and persecutions for having remained faithful to the religion of their ancestors."

Ukraine's chief rabbi, Yaakov Dov Bleich, responded with gratitude, saying Ukranian Jews prayed to God to let the Pope "teach the believers until he turns 120," a traditional Jewish blessing.

Since a good bit of the narrative in The Forgotten Soldier deals with Ukraine,
it seems fair to use this article here.

Much of the narrative also deals with Poland, where even worse things were done by the Nazis.

As a Catholic, I am glad that the Church is finally dealing with its culpability in the atrocities of WWII. I know that the German Government has tried to do the same thing.

It's too bad the Japanese have not done likewise.

May we ever keep this awful example of the inhumanity of man before us to prevent it from happening again, at least on the scale of WWII. Unfortunately, on a smaller scale, it has been happening with regularity elsewhere ever since!

ROLL TIDE FOREVER!

 

[PacificTide]

I finished the book as well. I also have mixed emotions after completing it. I'm not sure if it was cathartic for Sajer as a soldier, a Frenchman, or as a German to write it in the fashion he did. The ending left me wanting more of an explanation of his life in France after his return. It also left me wondering how and why he entered the German Army in the first place.

The Second World War was so cataclysmic for continental Europe that a rational balance has yet to be found in treating the main protagonists. Nothing in the Anglo/American experience of the war in Europe comes close to the hard hatred of the eastern front. Our fight with the Japanese approached it and could likely have been on a similar scale had we been forced to invade Japan.

Another thing that is glossed over in Anglo/American accounts is the extent of European collaboration with the Germans. There were French, Belgians (the Walloons Sajer met), Dutch, Danes, Norwegians, Czechs, Austrians, Italians, Spanish, Finns, Romanians, Hungarians, Swiss, Poles, Lithuanians, etc., individuals, as well as organized formations in the regular German Army and the SS. We hear a lot about the resistance to the Germans in France, some in Italy, Holland, or Belgium, and in Yugoslavia and Greece as well as on the eastern front. What isn’t as well documented is that the majority of the resistance in all of these countries was communist backed. The essence of what I’m saying is that the people of Europe, no matter their nationality, were torn apart by the same idealistic turmoil that was convulsing their continent. This makes me think that Sajer joined the German Army, likely against his parents wishes, because of his own idealism.

The troops in an elite division such as the Gross Deutschland would have been subjected to Nazi propaganda constantly. For that matter, they wouldn’t have been in it in the first place if they were not politically reliable. It’s always amazed me that the Nazis were able to control the European people to the extent they did. It wasn’t just terror or threats or even ideals that made Europeans accept things that we, as Americans, consider unacceptable.

As I said before, I can emphasize with Sajer on several levels. Had I been born into the same timespan and region as Sajer, I very likely would have done the same things that he did. Makes you wonder.

 

[LTBF]

Good points, Pacific Tide. I'm glad that someone else shares my sense of turmoil over this book. If the point of any book is to make one think, this one has certainly succeeded, for me at least.

Speaking of collaborators, didn't Sajer seem to make the point that at the beginning, the Ukrainians welcomed the Germans, because of their hatred for the Soviets. It was only after the tide turned (no pun intended) and the Germans were getting the bejesus kicked out of them, that they became "partisans." And yes, many of the partisans were Communists. That was certainly true in Italy and in France. And perhaps one point in vindication of the Catholic Church (as if any is really possible) is the fact that Pope Pius XII hated the Communists, which may have been the reason he got into bed with that bunch of vipers, the Nazis.

Why DID Sajer join the German army? He seemed to feel pride in the order that was exhibited by the Germans, and even as they were retreating, time after time they were able to pull things together, and make a token resistance.

How DID he feel when he melted back into French life after the war? Did he feel contempt for the French? I wish that he had said. In a way, the French suffered the least of any of the combatant nations in Europe. I resent that about them. Maybe they deserved each other!

This is a book that will stay with me for a long time.

I went to the library today to get some more material on the subject. I didn't find what I really wanted, but got a newer book about the battle of Stalingrad, and a book of photographic essays on the Eastern Front. If one picture is truly worth a thousand words, this book ought to be a real eye-opener.

Another point about Sajer, which I have made several times. He was not originally a part of the Gross Deutschland. He was in military transport on the Eastern Front, and it was only after the war began going extremely badly, and the Gross Deutschland began taking heavy losses, that he was drafted into that division. So it is difficult to know to what extent he shared in the extreme doctrination that the Gross Deutschland received. If he had joined it at the beginning, and received the total doctrination, I would feel even more contemp for him. And I'm not sure that contempt is the correct word. I cannot put into words right now how I feel about him. I can truly say that I do not admire him. I admire his courage in difficult situations, but I do not admire him.

Well, let me think about this some more. Not being a man, nor never having served in the military, this is a strange experience for me.

ROLL TIDE FOREVER!

 

[LTBF]

I am well into Stalingrad, by Antony Beevor, a British writer, in my quest to learn more about the Eastern Front in WWII.

Strictly speaking, it isn't just about the Battle of Stalingrad, but starts with the German invasion of Russia, and, I suppose, moves on to Stalingrad, which was the high point of German penetration into the USSR, and then follows the retreat back to Berlin.

A German officer quotes Napoleon, "Avant deux mois, la Russie me demandera la paix."
My French is atrocious, but I translate this loosely as, "After two months, the Russians will demand peace." Well, it didn't happen for Napoleon and it didn't happen for the Germans.

Beevor says that the idea of "Rassenkampf," or racial war, was what gave the Russian Campaign its unprecedented character. The Nazis had so effectively dehumanized its "enemies" in the East that it had morally anaesthetized the Wehrmacht from the beginning. The Wehrmacht participated in the mass execution of Jews, and deliberately confused this with security measures against partisans. "Many officers were affronted by the Wehrmacht's abandonment of international law on the Ostfront, but only the tiniest minority voiced disgust at the massacres, even when it became clear that they belonged to a programme of racial extermination," according to Beevor.

He then discusses the use of ordinary troops to round up the undesirables and transport them to the ravine at Babi Yar.

What the Germans most underestimated, other than the Russian winter, was the extent to which ordinary Russians, even those who detested the Communists, would rise up and fight doggedly against them, and not simply collapse, as they supposed would happen.

He also discusses the fact that the Ukrainians, after having their ability to produce crops wickedly destroyed by the Soviets, collaborated, AT FIRST, with the Germans, and considered them saviors.

All the above, and more, is relevent to an understanding of The Forgotten Soldier.

This book was first published in 1998, and so presumably contains material from the Soviet Archives that was not available to earlier writers.

It is very interesting to read, and not heavy and plodding, as I had supposed it might be.

ROLL TIDE FOREVER!

 

[crimson princess]

I think some of you know or remember that I am married to a German. That being said, I thought the book was a great account of a soldier's view of the war. Did they know what was going on anywhere? I do indeed doubt they knew. Heck, they weren't even told that Kiev had fallen, would they have been told Auschwitz was going on? I don't buy it. I think they were out there freezing their tails off for an idealistic Germany, getting disillusioned with the war as they saw it slogging on just like anyone else would, and just trying to stay alive.

I did note that he was not impressed with the Russian tactics or soldiers though he absolutely acknowledged that the Ivan soldiers were soldiers and he respected them as such even if he had to fight against them(unlike his bitterness towards partisans). I was glad he recognized that the Russians were simply doing what they were told too. They were just fed a different line of bull. And they were fighting for their homeland too and likely never knew that their dear leader Stalin was also a disgusting mass murderer. How would they know that? Just boys in the field.

 

[LTBF]

Princess, I absolutely agree with you to a certain extent. Heck, the soldiers INSIDE THE RING in Stalingrad did NOT KNOW that they were encircled, at first, and the people back home were not told that Stalingrad had fallen, at first.

That being said, there is absolute evidence that some military personnel, including lower level troops, participated in the massacres of civilians and unarmed soldiers that definitely took place. In their defense, some of them were sickened by it.

In Stalingrad, one of the commanders was quoted as saying that "if there is a God in heaven, Germany will lose this war." There was, and they did.

The ironic thing is that the Ivans were about as heartless, but they did it mostly to THEIR OWN PEOPLE. And of course, to the Germans they captured after Stalingrad fell.

Go over to the thread about ACFL, and go way down, almost to the bottom of the thread, for some more comments on the Eastern Front.

My point was that the guilt that anyone would feel in these circumstances, if you have any conscience at all, would be so overwhelming that it was easier to simply block it out of your consciousness, and say that you didn't know.

To their everlasting credit, the German government, and most ordinary Germans, have owned up to the hideousness of what was done, and atoned, to the extent that that is possible. The Neo-Nazis are another problem altogether.

The same cannot be said about the Japanese, who have simply rewritten their textbooks to cover up their crimes. The points on the Non-Sports Board about Pearl Harbor are well-taken!

And I do not believe in collective guilt. Just as I do not believe that present-day white Southerners are guilty of slavery, so I believe that present-day Germans are not guilty of genocide. Unless, of course, they are old enough and took part in those crimes.

ROLL TIDE FOREVER!