Christmas under Fire, 1944: The Last Christmas of World War II by Prenger Kevin

Author:Prenger, Kevin [Prenger, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

Soldiers of the Volkssturm celebrate Christmas 1944 in a bunker in Eastern Prussia. On the table mail from the home front.

(Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-J28377 / CC-BY-SA 3.0)

In their primitive lodging, candlelight made shadows of the men on the damp walls. "By New Year's Eve," Wallin wrote after the war, "it was still looking as homely as it could be in a temporary underground bunker. Soldiers' rough, chapped and frozen hands had tenderly and carefully conjured up this Christmas treasure for all to share. We still cared for such [things] in the days between Christmas and New Year." Every now and then, one of the men took a swig from one of the canteens on the stove containing steaming glogg, the "Nordic version of English mulled and spiced wine." The sound of the radio was intermittently interrupted by some lively comments on the card game, or by a violent snore from one of the comrades.

That night, Wallin had to leave the relatively comfortable bunker for a reconnaissance patrol along front positions of the Red Army. The landscape, illuminated by a clear moon, had been transformed into a winter wonderland. "In the reflected whiteness of the cold sparkling snow, all outlines appeared razor sharp," the Swede recalled. "A group of trees, riddled by bullets and shells, with their splintered trunks and twisted network of branches, reminded me of grotesque figures in a fairy-tale about brownies and hobgoblins." When he arrived at a machine gun post manned by two men, he heard wild shooting over on the Soviet side. Drunken Red Army soldiers heralded the New Year in this way. A mere 50 metres from Wallin and the two other soldiers, on the far side of a railway embankment, there was a forward post of the Red Army. Conversations in Russian and the sound of a mouth organ were clearly audible.

"Comrade, why are you so melancholy?" suddenly sounded from the other side in broken German. "Did you get cabbage soup for dinner today, again?" It was the first time that the three men heard a Red Army soldier talk to them from across no man's land. They laughed about it and answered the question by firing their machine gun, followed by other automatic weapons in the vicinity. "Why do you shoot, comrade?" the same voice asked from the other side. The SS-soldier with the machine gun replied, "If you come over here and play the mouth organ for us, I will not shoot any more." In the bright moonlight Wallin and his comrades next saw a head emerge, clearly outlined against the gleaming white background in the wide open doors of a derailed freight car that had fallen over. "Then, a pair of shoulders appeared and indeed, there came a Red Army soldier in full view, struggling towards the railway embankment. Another two followed."

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.