Blood Red Snow

The Memoirs of a German Soldier on the Eastern Front

Günter K. Koschorrek

• Publisher: Frontline Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781473812482
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

A German soldier recounts his experience serving along the deathly cold Eastern Front, fighting the Russian army in World War II. Gnter Koschorrek wrote his illicit diary on any scraps of paper he could lay his hands on, storing them with his mother on infrequent trips home on leave. The diary went missing, and it was not until he was reunited with his daughter in America some forty years later that it came to light and became Blood Red Snow. The author's excitement at the first encounter with the enemy in the Russian Steppe is obvious. Later, the horror and confusion of fighting in the streets of Stalingrad are brought to life by his descriptions of the others in his unit, their differing manners and techniques for dealing with the squalor and death. He is also posted to Romania and Italy, assignments he remembers fondly compared to his time on the Eastern Front. This book stands as a memorial to the huge numbers on both sides who did not survive and is, some six decades later, the fulfilment of a responsibility the author feels to honor the memory of those who perished.

Contents

	List of Illustrations
	Introduction
One	En Route
Two	Fighting in Stalingrad
Three	A Narrow Escape
Four	A Last-Minute Reprieve
Five	Blood Red Snow Falls Not from the Sky
Six	A Temporary Lull
Seven	Hunting Italian Partisans
Eight	Return to the Russian Inferno
Nine	Alarm at the Nikopol Bridgehead
Ten	Fear and Hatred Supplant Tears
Eleven	Through Bottomless Mud
Twelve	Deadly Intermezzo
Thirteen	From Knight’s Cross to Wooden Cross
Fourteen	Condemned to Death
Fifteen	Vultures over Nemmersdorf
Sixteen	From Poland to a Fool’s Paradise
Seventeen	Better Dead than Siberia

Illustrations

Plates (between pages 192 and 209)

1. The Old Market Place, Insterburg.

2. German reinforcements marching through a Russian town.

3. On the way to Stalingrad through the Kalmuck Steppe.

4. Moving across a broad front to Stalingrad.

5. A pause on the steppe.

6. A Rachel or Balka.

7. A kolkhoz on the Kalmuck Steppe.

8. A family on the Kalmuck Steppe.

9. Stalingrad burns: September/October 1942.

10. Fighting in the ruins of Stalingrad.

11. Barricades in the streets of Stalingrad.

12. Receiving supplies in the ‘Tennis Racket’ area of Stalingrad.

13. The 24th Tank Regiment Cemetery in Stalingrad.

14. The Stalinorgel—a primitive rocket launcher on an open truck.

15. A bridge over the Don built by German engineers.

16. Travelling through the Tyrol towards Italy.

17. Farewell to Italy! And back once again to the Russian Front!

18. A machine-gun team in position.

19. A Russian officer being interrogated.

20. Panzergrenadiers at the Nikopol bridgehead, November 1943.

21. Oberleutnant Prinz Moritz zu Öttingen-Wallerstein.

22. An attack with the new 75-ton ‘Ferdinand’ tank destroyer.

23. Salute to a fallen comrade.

24. Infantry preparing for a tank-supported attack.

25. Soldiers at the front in thick fog.

26. Waiting in the Rachel for the next attack.

27. Retreat! Vehicles struggle through the thick Ukrainian mud …

28. … and even tanks find the going heavy.

29. Romanian infantry on the road to the front.

30. The retreat continues.

31. The author with a companion at the military hospital.

32. The author with his sister, New Year 1944.

Maps

The 21st Panzergrenadier Regiment’s war zone in Stalingrad,
October–November 1942

From the cauldron of Stalingrad to the defensive positions
near Rytschov, up to 13 December 1942

Hunting partisans in Istria: 21st Panzergrenadier Regiment,
5 September–11 October 1943

The first battle after the return to the Russian inferno: 24–29
October and 30 October–1 November 1943

The retreat to the Bug in the Russian mudbath

The retreat in Romania near Jassy

The fighting in Poland: early August 1944 around the Vistula
(Weichsel)

Out of the barracks in Insterburg and into action towards
Nemmersdorf

Introduction

IT’S NOT EASY to pull your experiences of the Second World War from your memory and then write a chronologically accurate report about them: either you satisfy yourself with the incidental events which you have with difficulty sifted out, or you simply fill the gaps in your memory with lively fantasy. Many books have been published using the latter mixture, either glorifying the war by telling of what are indisputably acts of heroism, or interpreting it by means of malicious obituary with the result that the reader is persuaded to regard soldiers as bloodthirsty murderers. I want neither of the above; I intend neither to glorify nor to judge. I will describe the reality—how I, as an ordinary soldier, personally experienced and perceived the war on the front lines in Russia from the autumn of 1942 until the bitter end, interrupted only occasionally because of injury.

This book is an authentic report, with descriptions of my own unforgettable experiences, impressions and perceptions—the perceptions of an ordinary front-line soldier, referred to, in the slang of the day, as a Landser. Unlike many books, which rely on contemporary documentation, it does not discuss responsibility (or the lack of it) from the point of view of the command staffs in charge of the conduct of the war, nor even from the point of view of the leaders who had been specifically trained to be examples to their men (and who, as a general rule, fought alongside them in the front lines).

The book is intended to be a tribute to the countless anonymous soldiers who spent most of their war in filthy foxholes in the Russian soil, relinquishing them only when they needed to engage the enemy directly—whether it be in summer in the boiling hot sun, during the rains in knee-deep mud, or in a winter blizzard with the ground frozen hard or covered in deep snow. The only hope for these men was the promise of a brief respite when they were permitted to rest with the rear-area supply trains. But, until that happened, their home was the front-line trench or the foxhole—there, on the main battle line, where day after day they worried about their survival and killed their enemies in order to avoid being killed; where each man fought as a unit but in the end had to rely upon himself; where the earth around them often turned into a burning hell; where they sensed the ice-cold touch of death when a glowing hot splinter or a fizzing bullet searched out their living bodies; where the shredded corpses of their enemy were heaped in front of them; and where the piercing screams of the wounded would mix with the barely audible calls of the dying, touching them as they cowered deep within the ground and pursuing them in their nightmares. There cannot be many still living who, after half a century, can say that they survived the murderous war on the Russian front, or survived an inhuman imprisonment afterwards. But there most assuredly are still fewer who, thanks to some miracle, escaped the hellish inferno and who, because of notes they made during those days, can now write about it.

After my training I graduated as a heavy machine gunner. As a result, my superiors employed me primarily in this speciality and as a heavy weapons gun team leader for most of my front-line service. I will not deny that, using this rapid-fire weapon—mounted on a gun-carriage and equipped with an optical sight—I killed many of the enemy during the war on the Eastern Front.

During this period I made a number of notes with a view to writing up a factual report after hostilities had ended. Initially I also kept a diary, although this was against regulations for the common soldier. I made my first comments in this diary as we, a freshly trained unit of young recruits, made our way to Stalingrad as replacement troops. Before we reached our destination we marched for days, with heavy loads on our backs, through the shimmering heat of the endless Kalmuck steppe.

During a massive Russian tank attack on 13 December 1942, at the edge of the Stalingrad pocket, our supply train and personal effects fell into enemy hands. Unfortunately my diary was amongst the booty. I didn’t worry too much, as I had only written down my impressions, which the Russians would not be able to make much sense of. My name was not in it, nor was the name of the unit I belonged to, although from the material they took they would in fact have been able to discover my unit.

Later, while I was recovering from my first injuries, I again wrote down what I had experienced during this fateful period—the days and weeks in which we distraught Germans tried to escape the Stalingrad encirclement, finally fleeing headlong across the frozen Don under the shattering live fire from the approaching one hundred Russian tanks. This incident ended a never-to-be-forgotten experience as, almost deafened from the roar of the exploding shells and the incessant clatter of tracks, and blinded by the flashing close behind us, we made our way over mountains of emaciated corpses and wounded comrades whose blood stained the snow red, to the safety of the other bank of the Don, which, the day before, had seemed so peaceful covered in a mantle of fresh snow.

After I lost my diary I had made my notes on any scraps of paper which happened to be available at the time. I then folded these pages and slid them through a tiny slit in the lining of my uniform coat. During my short stay in the military hospital I twice had an opportunity to pass these observations on to my mother for her safe keeping. I was convinced that no one other than I would be able to decipher my scribble, which was partly in shorthand.

This hiding place in the lining of my uniform jacket apparently served its purpose, because when I returned home during my next leave I again deposited my latest notes in the same place. The only difference was that now the notes were in the lining of my new winter coat, which I had last worn at the end of 1940, before I was called up to spend a year at the NSKK Motor Vehicle School in Itzehoe. (This was preliminary military training to qualify for several different Army driver’s licences.) Sometime or other I began to organise the notes chronologically and to formulate an idea out of them. It became my fervent wish to write a book, but this ambition was destined to remain unfulfilled for various reasons. The years passed, though the flame was often rekindled.

Then came the time when I mislaid my notes: I assumed that I had somehow lost them during a move, and it was only much later that I discovered that I had left them behind in our apartment in the 1950s when I had gone through a traumatic divorce from my wife. After the divorce my wife quickly did what she had longed to do—she married an American soldier, who took her and my daughter, and a further child, back to America.

The decades passed, but the painful memories of the war years remained deep in my soul. Moreover, changes in society’s attitudes, from what was once acceptable behaviour to an unmistakable ‘new wave’ permitting lack of respect, aggressive attitudes, hatred and violence, did nothing to help me forget those fateful times. Then, one day, I quite unexpectedly held my long-lost notes in my hands again. Reading merely a few lines from them brought images from the 1940s back to stark reality.

It all had begun with a call from the United States. At first I found no words as an unknown woman’s voice with a decidedly American accent asked me for my name and thereupon addressed me as ‘Daddy’. It took a moment before I realised that the caller was my daughter from my first marriage—a daughter whom I had not seen since my divorce in the mid-1950s. It was a strange feeling to discover that I suddenly had a daughter who was married and who, overnight as it were, had also made me a grandfather of two.

She then visited my new wife and me in Germany, and she presented me with a wonderful gift—a folder containing all my wartime notes! These notes had been the only souvenir she had had of her father, and she had kept them all these years in the hope that one day she would be able to meet him again. It took almost forty years. Her repeated attempts to find me had been frustrated by the many changes in addresses which I had gone through. Contact has remained intact since then, however, and we have enjoyed several holidays at her home in Las Vegas.

Today, almost sixty years after World War II, we are fed images of hatred, acts of brutality and footage of war by the various media directly into our homes. These events may cause a sudden chill to run up and down the spine and perhaps bring tears to the eyes, but no one really understands the true hurt suffered by the victim. People see brutalisation and atrocities; the...