Baku oil and Kuban grain
Otl Aicher's memoirs recorded unwilling days spent on the Russian front. His perspective in 1942 was that of a German soldier sent to fight Russians. His words ring true in these difficult days.
June 1942
If the Scholl family had known what Otl Aicher faced, they would have fretted more for his safety. On June 28, 1942, Otl’s regiment had been swept up in Operation Blue, the renewed push to capture Russian oilfields. He did not realize it, but overnight he had become a foot soldier in the so-called Caucasian Oil Brigade. No one bothered to tell the lowly privates that Hitler had declared on June 1, “If I do not get the oil of Maykop [now Republic of Adygea] and Grozny [now Chechnya], then I must end this war.” They were merely awakened very early in the morning and instructed to get their gear together. They were on the move.
By the first of July, war was a jarring reality for Otl. Backpack safely hanging off the advance tanks (“they didn’t even look like tanks”) along with fuel containers and beams to bridge ravines, he climbed into a sixteen-ton steel-tracked tow truck. There were three of these vehicles for every howitzer dragged behind to ensure that firepower was secure.
Others slept, but he could not. Officers and non-coms had not said what was planned or what their objectives would be. He heard “Baku” [now Azerbaijan] and understood that they were going to get oil. It wasn’t that Otl was a superior tactician. He just recalled high school geography when Dr. Scheuffele had said that Germany was going to have to find a way to access raw materials.
Baku oil and Kuban grain – those had been staples of the Soviet economy since the USSR came to be. “So on this particular morning, we were not fighting the Russians, we were not fighting the Bolshevists, or the World Enemy Number One. We were there simply to conquer the oil fields north and south of the Caucasus.”
Otl decided that if he were now going to be part of Hitler’s war machinery, he would memorize every dead face he saw. It was the least he could do. I needed to see their faces. Somehow, I felt personally responsible for every Russian who had been killed. I shared the guilt and gave them the interest and sympathy of a moment, a glance in their specific direction.
He had noticed that the tanks and heavy vehicles had flattened everything in their path: Wheat fields, horses, vehicles, cadavers. Most were crushed beyond recognition, thin as paper. Without warning, one of those dead Russians jolted him out of his grave glimpses. This corpse did not have a face. It was his fault, his fault. He could not escape the sense that he had sinned.
That burden only weighed heavier as they rolled into the forests of the Caucasus Mountains. As Sophie Scholl had revolted against the notion of Nature’s destruction, so Otl was repulsed by the pointless obliteration of grand old oaks and walnut trees.
When they forded creeks and nearly-dry riverbeds, the mood in Otl’s truck grew somber. Three days earlier, before they headed to Baku, a tank had flipped over as they crossed the Kuban River. Nine soldiers – nine people whom he knew – had been buried beneath it. They breathed easier each time their vehicles lumbered up steep slopes without capsizing.
As they settled in for the evening, relieved to have made it that far without incident, lone grenadiers attacked. No rest – they hurriedly dug foxholes and hunkered down for the night.
In the morning, the lone grenadiers returned with reinforcements. The Russians had been ready for the assault, waiting until the Germans were far enough inside the mountain chain to prevent a hasty retreat. Vehicles exploded in the trees, metal bits morphing into shrapnel. The soldier next to Otl took a direct hit to the head. Otl could see his brain. The soldier ran screaming through the forest “like a crazy man.”
But Otl had been wounded too, shrapnel in his leg and hands. He could not worry about that. Everyone knew – from C.O. to the greenest soldier – that they were caught in a trap. They had to turn around. Turn around, Otl mused, not retreat. They did not retreat.
July 1942
In Russia, Otl Aicher encountered an incident that he found unthinkable. Literally. A few days after his public humiliation at the hands of a superior, an old woman – a mamushka – waved to him from her window. When he entered her house, she let him know that she had seen what had happened to him and then presented him with five cooked red beets wrapped up in newspaper. She could not have given Otl anything that could have delighted him more.
He snuck back to his quarters with the delicacy, only to come upon a non-com from his regiment. The Sergeant used a calfskin whip to rape a Russian woman.
Otl Aicher was not naïve. He knew things like that went on in wartime; he was mindful that the terminologies of war and sex were almost interchangeable. But he had never seen it firsthand, and the sight disturbed him.
Out here on the front, if I had said, “The Germans are wild brutes,” I would have been beaten up. Everyone considered himself a decent person. The reduction of morality to private life, which is carried out in the name of Christendom, illuminates this completely, namely: Germans view the world through freshly laundered living room curtains. A German keeps his house in order. He is not a wild brute. Whatever the German State does, whatever happens in the name of German culture, in the name of German history, can be no other way.
Now if I were to say, “The Russians are wild brutes,” that is believable. Every newspaper, every radio broadcast, says the same thing. In so doing, we are so brutish that in order to cover up our own crimes, our own surprise attacks, we designate those we attack as inhuman, as wild brutes. We attacked this country, we are burning down its villages and cities, we are driving out its residents, we are hunting them to death, and they are the wild brutes.
And we are going to continue believing that until someone closes our eyes. We are going to continue to believe that, because at home, we are decent people. And as long as we live, we will view the medals we take home from this war as signs of honor. The German is a wild brute?
Unthinkable. Un-think-a-ble.
“They” are the barbarians.
October 1942
While Josef Söhngen’s message proceeded to the Russian front at a snail’s pace, Otl Aicher cheerfully abandoned plans to defect to the British army. He had turned “yellow as a lemon.” With a diagnosis of jaundice, the doctor ordered Otl transferred to the rear. They relieved him of his steel helmet, his weapon, and his gas mask and gave back his backpacks containing personal items.
Since he was ambulatory, the doctors at the TVP (or HVP) pointed Otl in the direction of the nearest railroad tracks and told him he would have to catch the first train that came through traveling west. No one knew when such a train would arrive. Schedules were irregular at best.
In the middle of the season’s first snowstorm, a German locomotive materialized. “The hissing steam mixed itself up with the snow that pelted the steppes,” Otl recalled. A couple of box cars were attached to the engine. Otl learned that they were his ride to the rear.
He promptly grasped how tenuous the German war machine was. They had no coal. The steam engine “preferred” coal, but had to utilize the only fuel that was available: Wood. It was dark before they pulled out of the makeshift station. Otl and other sick soldiers huddled in straw laid out on the floor of a box car that had recently delivered munitions to the front.
It was all Otl could do not to worry about his final destination. Though jaundice was not fully understood in 1942, no one deemed it fatal. He would probably be dumped off at a field hospital at the rear, shipped back to the front lines within a few days. Otl determined he would find a way to make it all the way home.
At the rate they were moving, it would take them weeks just to get to the rear. Not enough steam, not enough fuel, no coal, little wood. On one occasion they cannibalized extra railroad ties lying next to the tracks. No matter, because Otl could not sleep. He had to see where he was going.
Once he spied a sign identifying the station as Armavir. His knowledge of geography sufficed to let him know they had made it as far west as Armenia. They were still in the USSR, but miles and miles from oilfields near Baku. Otl could not explain the sensation. He only knew that for the first time in weeks, he felt free. “I had escaped the machinery of war, felt liberated from having to run the business of a murderer, a business that could only be run by application of force and terrorism. They were permitting me to become human again.”
Surreptitiously, he used his pocketknife to loosen a stitch on the Nazi eagle that adorned his cap. “Maybe it would start to get loose and one day, simply fall off. My heart needed a sign.”
The above is an excerpt from White Rose History: Volume II – Journey to Freedom. May 1, 1942 – October 12, 1943. To learn more about our histories, and to order, please click here.
We highly recommend Otl Aicher’s memoirs. innenseiten des kriegs. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag GmbH, 1985. If you can handle a book written entirely in “bauhaus” - that is, without capitalization - you will get a glimpse of the White Rose friends in Ulm, one you never dreamed possible.