Silent Night

The 1914 Xmas Truce was a nice touch.


One learns the meaninglessness of assigning any more value to a day other than its ending in Y when locked in a war of annihilation with godless Stalinists.
 
The 1914 Xmas Truce was a nice touch.


One learns the meaninglessness of assigning any more value to a day other than its ending in Y when locked in a war of annihilation with godless Stalinists.

The one that Germany started after reneging on a non-aggression pact you mean? Rough on the poor fuckers that got sent to fight in the East but the Nazis in general pretty much asked for it.
 
Nope. Xmas is as good a day to gut your fellow man as any other.


God will forgive you. We will arrange the meeting.
 
The 1914 Xmas Truce was a nice touch.


One learns the meaninglessness of assigning any more value to a day other than its ending in Y when locked in a war of annihilation with godless Stalinists.
WW1 did not involve Stalinists.
 
The one that Germany started after reneging on a non-aggression pact you mean? Rough on the poor fuckers that got sent to fight in the East but the Nazis in general pretty much asked for it.


They just reneged first. Stalin was coming, but later. Like any other pact between the criminally minded, it ain't worth the paper it was written on.
 
It was gonna happen. Only a question of who blinked.
Guy Sajer's book The Forgotten Soldier, while not very well written and apparently a bit dubious on some facts, is nevertheless a pretty harrowing read about fighting on the Eastern front from the German POV.
 
Guy Sajer's book The Forgotten Soldier, while not very well written and apparently a bit dubious on some facts, is nevertheless a pretty harrowing read about fighting on the Eastern front from the German POV.


I have packed some books so I don't have a title to one. I have recently finished a British author's book about the eastern front. I also finished With Our Backs To Berlin, a collection of anecdotes. I'm rereading Rudel's Stuka Pilot. In the queue is a book called Soldaten, which is a collection of secretly taped conversations among post-war German POWs. The eastern front was a veritable shitshow of epic proportions.
 
Christmas brings a moment of hope for/to the hopeless:



Christmas 1942 was progressively worse for Germany, with the entire 6.Armee was lost in the Stalingrad Pocket shortly after the holiday season. Interestingly enough, at midnight on Christmas eve, the sky over Stalingrad was lit up by thousands of colorful flares fired by nearly every unit trapped in the pocket. This amazing sight was in celebration of the Christmas season, and it lasted for many minutes. In the face of increasing despair, Christmas was sometimes celebrated with the sort of true peace, understanding, and acceptance that only those on the brink could feel. The following three excerpts are from a few of the men trapped in Stalingrad on that fateful Christmas of 1942.

“During the past weeks, all of us have begun to think about the end of everything. The insignificance of everyday life pales against this, and we have never been more grateful for the Christmas Gospel than in these hours of hardship. Deep in one’s heart, one lives with the idea of Christmas, the meaning of Christmas. It is a feast of love, salvation, and pity on mankind. We have nothing else here but the thought of Christmas. It must and will tide us over grievous hours…However hard it may be, we shall do our utmost to master fate and try everything in our power to defeat the sub-humanity that is wildly attacking us. Nothing can shake our belief in victory, for we must win if Germany wants to live…”
 
“I have not received any mail from you for some time… there is a terrible longing for some dear words from home at Christmas, but there are more important things at present. We are men who know how to bear everything. The main thing is that you and the children are all right. Don’t worry about me; nothing can happen to me any longer. Today I have made my peace with God… I give you all my love and a thousand kisses – I love you to my last breath. Affectionate kisses for the children. Be dear children and remember your father.”

~ Karl Binder, Deputy Chief Quartermaster, 305.Infanterie-Division
 
On the evening before the Holy Day, in a hut, which was still fairly intact, eleven soldiers celebrated in quiet worship. It was not easy to find them in the herd of the doubting, hopeless, and disappointed. But those I found came happily and with a glad and open heart. It was a strange congregation that assembled to celebrate the birthday of the Christ-child. There are many altars in the wide world, but surely none poorer than ours here. Yesterday the box still held anti-aircraft shells; today my hand spread over it the field-grey tunic of a comrade whose eyes I closed last Friday in this very room. I wrote to his wife a letter of consolation. May God protect her.”

“I read my boys the Christmas story according to the Gospel of Luke, chapter 2, verses 1-17; gave them hard black bread as the holy sacrifice and sacrament of the altar, the true body of our Lord Jesus Christ, and entreated the Lord to have pity on them and to them grace. I did not say anything about the fifth commandment (Thou shalt not kill). The men sat on footstools and looked up to me from large eyes in their starved faces. They were all young, except one, who was 51. I am very happy that I was permitted to console their hearts and give them courage. When it was over, we shook each other’s hands, took down addresses, and promised to look up relatives and tell them about our Christmas Eve celebration in 1942, in case one of them should return home alive.”
 
“Just now the master sergeant told me that I cannot go home for Christmas. I told him that he has to keep his promise, and he sent me to the captain. The captain told me that others had wanted to go leave for Christmas too and that they too had promised it to their relatives without being able to keep the promise. And so it wasn’t his fault that we couldn’t go. We should be glad we were still alive, the captain said, and the long trip wouldn’t be good in the cold winter anyhow.”
 
“Dear Maria, you must not be angry now because I cannot come on leave. I often think of our house and our little Luise. I wonder if she can laugh already. Do you have a beautiful Christmas tree? We are supposed to get one also if we don’t move into other quarters. But I don’t want to write too much about things here, otherwise, you’ll cry…. Sometimes I am afraid we will not see each other again. Heiner from Krefeld told me that a man must not write this; it only frightens his relatives. But what if it’s true!”

“Maria, dear Maria, I have only been beating around the bush. The master sergeant said that this would be the last mail because no more planes are leaving. I can’t bring myself to lie. And now, nothing will probably ever come of my leave. If I could only see you just once more; how awful that is! When you light the candles, think of your husband in Stalingrad.”

~ An unknown German soldier
 
“At the front, I had never seen Christmas be anything but sad. Men would drink, sing, and joke. For an hour everything was fine. then each would recall Christmas at home: the blushing cheeks, the dazzled children, the tender wife, the sweet songs. Eyes would gaze into the distance with a far-away look, seeing hamlets and rooms once filled with joy. A soldier would leave, and we would find him crying all alone beneath the moon.”

“That evening there were fifteen suicides in the division, hearts broken from the strain of so many months of separation and suffering.”

"I had wanted to visit all our volunteers’ bunkers. Amid the snow and the darkness, I made ten kilometers, entering each smokey shelter. Some squads, the young especially, were putting a good face on things and whooping it up, but I found a great many more grave faces than smiling ones. One soldier who could not contain himself (any) longer had thrown himself to the earth and lay sobbing against the ground calling for his parents.”

“At exactly midnight, at the moment when those who were still brazening it out had just started to intone ‘O Holy Night’ the sky burst into flames: it wasn’t the Herald Angels, nor the trumpets of Bethlehem. It was an attack! The Reds, thinking that by this time our men would be under the table, had opened fire with all their artillery and were hastening to the combat.”

“In fact, this was a relief. We leaped up. And in the snow illuminated by shells, by tracer bullets, by the flash of cannon fire, by the red, green, and white flares of the signalers, we spent our Christmas Eve preventing a raging enemy from crossing the Olshanka River.”

“At dawn the firing let up. Our chaplain gave Communion to the troops, who went up from their positions, squad by squad, to the Orthodox chapel where are Walloon priest dressed in Feldgrau joined in a truly Christian fashion with the old Russian village priest in his purple miter.”

“There sad and bitter hearts were soothed. Their parents, wives, and beloved children had heard the same Mass back home and received the same Eucharist. The soldiers went back down with simple souls, pure as the great white steppe which glistened in the Christmas afternoon.”

~ Leon Degrelle, SS-Sturmbrigade Wallonien
 
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