I understand you were in the Wehrmacht during the war and fought on the east front?

Ludwig: Yes, yes, I was there in the thick of it, what would you like to know?

How did you come to be in the army?

Ludwig: Well there was a war going on and you either joined willingly picking the branch, or the state would choose it for you. I was accepted into the army and was first going to be a mountain fighter as I could ski. They always tried to trick you by asking the men what they were good at. If you said you could fly, bang, you went to the Luftwaffe, if you could work on motors then you went to mechanics school, if you liked skiing then naturally you became a mountain soldier. Of course I jest, as you had to also pass tests to make sure you did have the ability, but you understand what I mean. I ended up being put into the infantry and sent to the east to fight the Soviet Union. We had the misfortune of being on the north front which was very cold, wet, and muddy.

What weapons did they issue you?

Ludwig: I was given the K98 rifle, or Karabiner 98. I had a few of them as in battle they could get dropped, damaged or worn out. The German army was so strict with the issues that they wrote the serial numbers down in our soldbuchs [ID books] that the spiess [German military slang name (literally "spear" for the Company sergeant major in the German Wehrmacht until 1945] would look over and check if they were picky. You had to account for why you did not have the same serial number as recorded during the first issue. Of course the frontline men and officers could care less and threw the regulations out the window, but behind the lines you had to be prepared with a reason. The strict ones would even check your bayonet too. Being a soldier meant everything had to be in order at all times. I also was foolish enough to buy a pistol in Vienna to carry with me, as I thought I would look like a front fighter right away. Little did I know that the battlefields were littered with hundreds of pistols I could have picked up.

I also used a PPSH machine pistol [PPSh-41 was a Soviet submachine gun] for a short time until it became hard to get the ammo for it. It was also said the Soviets shot any soldier caught carrying a captured weapon, or equipment. Many of us later in the war kept our own issues, I did see evidence this was true. I saw three soldiers executed by the Soviets through field glasses. They all had PPSHs and the Soviets ripped them away, and then shot them in the head. I advised my sergeant, who passed it up but nothing could be done to retrieve them. This caused us to want to shoot Soviet prisoners, but cooler heads prevailed.

How did you view the Soviet soldiers?

Ludwig: I saw them as dirty animals; they were uneducated just like the Soviet system wanted. They smelled bad and had a hate in their eyes that we could not understand. We came into Russia in 1941 to destroy an evil system that threatened the world even back then. We expected that the will to fight would not be great. They were either poor uneducated sloths, or they were educated in the Soviet way of thinking and fanatical communists. These were the ones who thought of us as the fascist invader who had to be killed off. We had no love for them and they had no love for us, the fighting was very hard. They often would play dead and shoot us in the back after we passed.

I was wounded like that, we passed a platoon we thought had been shot down and they rose up and opened fire. One of my friends was hit and he lost his arm, I was hit in the back but it went clean through without hitting anything. Those sneaky bastards always had to be watched. I had heard even when captured that they would pull knives or try to get away by force. I guess you could say we respected them as fighters but they really were a lousy bunch. They were prone to commit crimes; this was seen the first days of the war. They shot a Luftwaffe crew who had parachuted, and surrendering soldiers. They behaved badly towards anyone they saw as their enemy, even their own people. They behaved like this because their political officers, many of whom were Jews, made this a war of extermination. We came into Russia to safeguard Europe, and to free the people from communism. The communists were able to convince people we came to kill or enslave them and they fought with hated because of what they were told.

[Above: Did they live? Did they die? We only know one thing: they fought to prevent the catastrophe that is today's world.]