Fritz Hartnagel and Stalingrad
Fritz Hartnagel's letters to Sophie Scholl from the battlefield of Stalingrad provide an intimate glimpse into that turning point in World War II. Read his firsthand observations here.
August 1, 1942 was a landmark day for Fritz Hartnagel. His promotion to the rank of Captain came through! [Note: This was the same day the White Rose friends arrived in Gzhatsk, Russia for their clinical rotation.]
While the promotion had seemed like a good idea before, once he had it in hand, he wasn’t sure he wanted it. “Now I have been thrust forward one more level in a system on which I would rather turn my back. I feel like a puppet that represents something outwardly, that in reality it is not. If only I could be a completely simple soldier who can be who he really is. If only I had the usual promotion parties (booze fests!) behind me, I would be feeling quite a bit better.”
Fritz also addressed Sophie’s hopes that he would be able to take vacation and visit her before the winter semester started. “You are terribly optimistic,” he told her. “The operations currently underway will last at least until winter sets in. And who knows whether we will be pulled out of Russia over the winter, since there are so many units deployed here that have been in Russia since June of last year. And one cannot take furlough when one is in Russia. But I will hope for a miracle!”
The dreaded promotion party turned out worse than Fritz expected. He had planned to provide plenty of free booze for the partygoers so they would get drunk really fast, allowing him to escape unnoticed. “Unfortunately, however, I also drank too much,” he wrote Sophie. “Oh, how dreadful I felt, and how I yearned for that which is good and real and light.”
In the four days that had passed since his promotion, Fritz had been on a downward spiral. The promotion party was only the tip of his personal iceberg. He had attempted to hold a conversation with men in his company about the difference between obeying military orders and “internal orders” – the kind a person hears when his conscience tells him that a military order is wrong. “They think that obedience to an internal order is weakness, lack of self-confidence, servile sycophancy.” He gave up trying to talk to them. Their pride was too great.
Then he’d gotten into an argument with his C.O. (and others) on the National Socialist concept of population policy. It didn’t take long to recognize that they didn’t care about the legitimacy of the concept. They were solely interested in the acquisition and retaining of power and control. They didn’t even know why they wanted power and control, Fritz wrote.
Finally, he had been forced to discipline a soldier in his company who had stolen 57 Marks ($456) from a comrade. The conviction was already in place. Fritz was supposed to complete the paperwork to hand the man over to a military court for sentencing.
As Fritz reviewed the case, he was struck by the injustice of the punishment he knew the man would receive. The soldier was very young, only twenty. Orphaned, with no relatives as support system, such an incident could change the course of his life. “I feared that he would become totally apathetic and would think he had already lost everything,” Fritz reasoned, “so nothing would matter.”
Fritz opted to follow the internal order and ignore his military duties. He refused to file the incident report and instead lectured the young man, appealing to his conscience. “I am now curious to see if my leniency becomes a greater incentive for improvement.”
That very night, as Fritz told Sophie on August 6, he had to behave like a military man once again. Russians bombed their airport several times, never inflicting serious damage. And the morning of August 6, before he sat down to write Sophie, more planes flew over their location at low altitude. The Germans were able to return fire, which kept the Russians from dropping their bombs. “At the same time, I was forced to shoot at the enemy for the second time during this war.”
Movement toward Stalingrad had come to a complete standstill, Fritz said. He attributed it to intense Russian fighting, as “the Russians have dedicated very strong forces to the bend in the Don River.” For Fritz’s company, heavy fighting on the front meant relative quiet, as they held back until the advance could get underway.
Sophie had expressed concern in one of her letters that they were not getting enough to eat in Russia. When he replied on August 7, Fritz admitted that he missed fresh vegetables, lettuce, fruit, and cherries, but they were doing all right. “I can only tell you that yesterday evening, I ate a huge serving of baked calf’s liver with roasted potatoes. You see, I am not starving.”
Nevertheless, his company had more than its fair share of illness, he said. Gum disease was bad, and “Russian fever” – a form of dysentery accompanied by high fever – had taken its toll. “I almost always have at least 10% of my company sick.”
Fritz attributed the dysentery to the unusual weather they faced. Between noon and 4 pm, it was so oppressively hot that he could not expect his company to work. They sweated even when completely inactive. But by 7 pm, dusk would set in, and half an hour later it would be dark. And cold, miserably cold. In August. “At night, I crawl into my sleeping bag in my sweat suit and sleep under a blanket.”
By Saturday, August 11, 1942. Fritz’s company was temporarily headquartered somewhere between Donetz and Don in Russia, no longer in the Ukraine. The unbearable weather continued. During the day, Fritz endured temperatures around 42C (108F), with nights that left him shivering. The daytime heat was so extreme, he told Sophie, that he had to bind his candle to a stick. If he did not, it would melt and “hold its head over the edge of the table, unable to bring itself to stand upright.”
The day before, Fritz had to deal with something much worse than unbearable heat. He had made a practice of refusing to hand his soldiers over to military courts when they disobeyed a direct order, believing ever more firmly that harsh sentences unnecessarily ruined the futures of his young men.
There had been only one rule that he had informed his company had to be followed, no matter what. Namely, whoever stood guard was not to leave his post, period. On the 10th, someone had reported that two men had left their posts the night before. Fritz undertook a formal inquiry to determine the identities of the offenders, and once he had established that fact, he handed them over to the proper authorities.
The necessity of his action grieved him deeply. It was something he’d rather not do. But – “I had to act as I did in order to ensure my authority.”
Even as he wrote that sentence, it struck him as odd. “You will surely smile about the word authority,” he said. “But no matter how much I have tried to act otherwise, I have learned from experience that one can keep a crowd under control only with severity and a certain military tone of voice. But nevertheless, I always try to speak man to man about individual cases (especially when I am dealing with individuals) and quietly convince the offender that his action was not right.”
Shortly after mailing that letter to Sophie, Fritz’s company moved further east. When he next wrote her on August 16, they were situated west of Kalatsch in the great bend of the Don River.
He assumed they would stay put, at least for a while. His company had been ordered to adjust the communications connections and reorganize all signal corps activity “to correspond to the new circumstances.” Fritz’s work kept him busy, something he preferred over the inactivity that accompanied heavy fighting on the front lines.
As much as Fritz tried to downplay the war in letters to Sophie, words he wrote after he learned where Hans Scholl was stationed must have been a dagger through her heart. He said that Hans would be busy, and that “[h]e will have plenty of work,” he wrote, alluding to Hans’s position as medic. “Last week, around 1000 wounded were flown out of here on Ju 52 planes in a single day.”
Fritz’s “boy” continued to make his life easier. His current project: Constructing a table that Fritz could place outside his tent for his wash basin. “Every morning, he gets my wash things in order, everything nicely sorted, even with a new blade in my razor. You see how princely things are for me.”
Conversations with his “boy” also revealed a person who shared many of Fritz’s beliefs. After years of struggling with feelings of being an outsider, finally there was someone he could trust! “We don’t have to watch ourselves when we converse,” he said. This young soldier told Fritz about Bishop Galen’s sermons and agreed to procure copies of them for Fritz to read. “I really was lucky when I chose him to be my driver and constant companion. Otherwise, I probably would not have noticed him among the crowd of 250 men.”
On August 18, Fritz received a letter from Sophie that triggered him. She begged for additional ration coupons or money, so Carl Muth could have better food to eat. Apparently he didn’t like the black bread Germans could buy.
Her letter had obviously come at a bad time, when Fritz was in no mood to deal with elderly theologians who felt they needed better food than they could acquire with rations. The last two days, he had realized how close they were to the front lines and what the additional danger meant to him and his men.
A routine signal corps operation could have ended with his death. His duties required him to fly to a command post near to, but not directly on, the front lines. A combination of bad German maps and lack of reference points in the desert terrain caused their navigator to become completely disoriented. While flying at an altitude of 20 meters (62 feet), they found themselves on the other side of the front line, in Russian territory.
Ordinarily they would have been shot down and either killed or captured. But luckily, the Russians on the ground were in the process of surrendering to the Germans. “Otherwise, things could have been bad for us.”
The delay caused by the dangerous detour meant they left just as dusk fell. The pilot transported them out of harm’s way, but the fighting on the ground prevented him from finding a safe place near the troops to put down. Instead, they set down in the middle of nowhere, no weapons, no blankets, afraid to light a fire for warmth (they would become an immediate target).
They tried to sleep – and failed. All night long, flares illuminated the horizon and machine gun fire reminded them that war raged nearby.
Fritz laid awake, thinking about everything he had seen that day and the days that had come before. “There are so many atrocious things,” he wrote Sophie. “Hour by hour, millions of soldiers on both sides are constantly endangered, engaged solely in trying to mutually kill one another. And another million or so think and work only for the same goal, and families are separated and plunged into deep sorrow.”
He told her how the Germans were needlessly destroying everything in their path, something that bothered him more than he could express. Cattle and vegetable gardens had been totally plundered to feed the German army, leaving nothing for the populace to whom they rightfully belonged.
“But prisoners probably suffer the most,” he said. “A few days ago on a stretch of road about 3 km (1.8 miles) long, I saw about fifteen to twenty dead Russians along the road. They had not been there only a few days earlier when I drove down this same stretch of road. Therefore these could only have been prisoners who had collapsed from exhaustion and hunger, who had been shot to death by their guards.” In contravention of the Geneva Convention…
For a man who despised the injustice of sentences meted out by German military courts, such obvious barbarism pained him deeply. It was all he could do to bear the wretchedness and insanity.
After a full three days of relative peace, on August 23 war returned to Fritz’s otherwise quiet company. An airplane dropped an announcement that several armed Russians had been spotted less than two miles from their location. Fritz chose forty men from his company and searched the region for the enemy. They could only find an abandoned radio station. “The result of our ‘warlike’ undertaking was merely that of coming back, dripping with sweat.”
Their Sunday treat, then, of “real coffee” and pudding felt like a genuine reward for work well done.
Physical conditions on the ground continued to worsen. That 100+ degree heat left them all exhausted, wiped out, unable to exert themselves. And the extreme cold at night – well, it had gotten ridiculous. Even the heavy layers of clothing Fritz donned at night could not protect him from the wintry conditions.
And they had flies to contend with. “When I eat breakfast in the morning, my toast and jelly (or whatever I am eating) is covered in an instant, black with flies. These things are so audacious and greedy that one could almost catch them with one’s fingers. Often one must chase them from one’s mouth or nose with force. Nowadays I eat my meals sitting on my bed, under the mosquito netting.”
With letters from Sophie becoming fewer and far between, and with prospects of moving ever closer to the front on the immediate horizon, Fritz’s letter dated August 26 assumed a more detached tone. He didn’t know how she was doing (even when he heard from her, her letters shed little light on her circumstances), “so what else may I do for you, except like (sic) you as well and as staunchly as I can, and wrap you up with my wishes, hopes, and prayers?”
The extremes of heat and cold plagued him more than ever. They had just experienced a night of -4C (25F). “Despite body bandage, underwear, pajamas, pullover, sweat suit, socks, sleeping bag, and a blanket, I pretty much froze,” he wrote.
The day before – August 25, 1942 – had also marked the three-year anniversary of their mobilization for war. “How many years of war still follow?” [Note this date! A full six days before Hitler was “forced” to defend Germany in Gleiwitz!]
The move east was delayed until August 31. Fritz’s new location was less than two miles from the Don River. After weeks with limited access to water, he and his men were ecstatic to see the Don River a mere 3 km (1.8 miles) from their position. But it was not to be. This time, it wasn’t fear of epidemic that kept them from diving in. Rather, those Russians sitting on the opposite bank, ready to pick them off one by one.
Fritz Hartnagel apparently was getting his fill of the death and destruction he witnessed daily. “It is so terrible that hour after hour, millions of soldiers are in constant danger, only so that they can be about the business of killing one another.”
[Note for White Rose readers: At the end of August 1942, Sophie asked Fritz again to requisition a duplicating machine for her. As he had done in May 1942, he refused. As he had done in May, once again he gave her money instead: 250 Marks, or $2000.]
September 12, Fritz received another woe-is-me letter from Sophie. Remember: She was at home, and she did not much like her family. The “woe” seemed to have been bound up with her lack of self-esteem combined with simply not enjoying time with Inge, her eternal complaint.
In his letter responding to the woe, Fritz recounted the events of the previous evening for Sophie. A captain and two lieutenants had joined him and his lieutenant for an evening of coffee and a movie – the movie to be shown to Fritz’s entire company in the open air. After the movie, the visitors lingered for a glass of wine. By daybreak, they had polished off every bottle of wine in Fritz’s “meager inventory.”
For once, the wine-fueled conversation pleased him. In stark contrast to his Commanding Officer, these men did not dismiss his views out of hand. One of the visiting lieutenants was a Party speaker, and Fritz’s lieutenant had been a Hitler Youth leader. “My conversation partners did not presume my world views to be out of the question,” he said.
Despite their openness, Fritz had great difficulty holding his own alone. “When for example I accused the current regime of egoism that could not be justified by all of humanity, they responded that even the Christian is an egoist since he only does good to be blessed and to escape the agony of hell. Although I could sense the nonsense, at the moment I could not come up with a response.”
These pleasantries vanished into thin air in the days that followed. Fritz learned that they were to winter at their current position near the Don River. Therefore, he was entrusted with the task of driving to Stalingrad to secure wood, so his men could build sturdier bunkers in preparation for a Russian winter.
The procurement exercise became a political science lesson he would never forget. He had been made aware of conditions in Stalingrad, but could not have prepared himself for the things he saw and heard.
“It was probably the most shocking impression of calamity and desolation that I have gotten during this campaign,” he wrote Sophie on September 14, 1942. “Thousands of refugees, women and little children, and men, are trekking along the entire road from the Don River to Stalingrad, without shelter or anything to eat. There is nothing left in the countryside to get. There is only an endlessly barren steppe, and through it a road several hundred meters wide flows like a wild river with many tributaries.
“They were sitting there in the rain with their few belongings and waiting to see if a German car would take them along, or they were struggling to move forward with a wheelbarrow.”
The river of refugees was nothing compared to the destruction he witnessed in Stalingrad itself. Most of the city had been burned to the ground. He also quickly perceived that he was not the only officer charged with providing shelter for his men through the winter. He faced fierce competition for building materials.
The German army had discovered that it could obtain the wood it needed for constructing winter bunkers only by demolishing structures that had not been destroyed by fire. This action went against everything in Fritz’s character, but he acknowledged that if he did not join in the demolition project, he would be unable to source wood for his men. There were no forests whatever in that part of the country.
“It’s a mystery to me how we are supposed to get firewood for this winter,” he mused aloud to Sophie. “But there must be a solution for this as well. These difficulties take up a lot of my time right now.”
On the return trip to his encampment, Fritz picked up an old man who could barely walk, along with an older and a younger woman. “How happy they were,” he said, “and how reverently they sat in the back, like children. The older woman kept making the sign of the cross.”
By September 16, Fritz had received official confirmation that they were in fact building the permanent bunkers they would occupy throughout the winter. He recognized his mission as critical to their survival. The cold had reached such a point that even the animals they had grown accustomed to seeing had burrowed deep inside the ground for refuge.
Fritz himself had become one of those “burrowing” animals, seeking safe haven in his sleeping blanket as soon as darkness descended. No matter how many layers of clothing he piled on, it was never enough to endure sitting at his table to read or write letters after sunset. He was surprised to find that he could easily sleep twelve hours or more. And he thought about learning Russian.
On the 18th, two letters arrived from Magdalena Scholl. She asked Fritz to submit a clemency petition on behalf of Robert Scholl. Fritz chided himself for not having thought of doing so on his own. “Perhaps there is a chance for success if a ‘Captain’ asks for it,” he said, tongue in cheek, in a letter to Sophie. “That sounds a little bit like a dignified person. Those in charge will never know that the title hides a boy.”
He was distressed to read that Sophie and her mother thought he lived in constant danger. Fritz regretted the tales he had told about near-death experiences. “I am in as little danger as you are, or at least, not more danger than any resident of the Rhineland.”
Fritz updated the Scholls on the progress of their bunker. He had joined in the construction work, thankful for the excuse to engage in physical activity, to get out from behind his desk for a change. “I am having fun despite the blisters and muscle cramps.”
That physical labor continued for several days, as Fritz reported in his September 20 letter to Sophie. Since paperwork was all but nonexistent, he happily picked up a shovel and set himself the task of digging out twenty cubic meters of dirt. It wasn’t that he neglected the supervisory aspects of the project. He took charge of the bunker design and kept his men motivated. “My newest plan involves a sauna,” he wrote.
Fritz had been able to quickly draft the requested clemency petition, and it went out by air mail on the same plane that carried his September 20 letter to Sophie. He had been thinking about it, he said, and wondered if the Scholls shouldn’t call in all their markers to ensure that Robert Scholl spent as little time as possible in prison.
For example, shouldn’t Magdalena Scholl contact their old friend, the Kreisleiter in Öhringen, since he knew Robert Scholl well? They should draw on the support of all the “personages” Robert Scholl had cultivated through the years. It just wasn’t fair that someone like Robert Scholl should be treated like a common criminal. [See White Rose History, Volume II for more information about the very antisemitic, ardent Nazi Kreisleiter, Ferdinand Dietrich.]
Fritz’s last letter in September ignored thoughts of clemency petitions in particular, and life in Ulm in general. He had spent two days on the road with a couple of his men, checking up on the detached troops that belonged to his company. For once, the weather cooperated and he was able to enjoy the beauty of autumn.
They slept in the vehicle. To his surprise, these men opened up on the topic of religion. Fritz did not tell Sophie what they discussed (she probably would not have approved), only that it did him good to have such a conversation, “without the kind of reserve I am usually forced to assume.”
But he had to return to their base camp, the place they would be wintering. The final decision that had been handed down had now been re-confirmed. They were to build permanent bunkers because they would spend the entire winter at their current location.
“That which can fill my heart with true joy is not any more distant here than it would be someplace else,” Fritz concluded. “I wish to be able to dispense with everything else.”
In his letter dated September 16, 1942, Fritz mentioned his “old tin cigarette box” in which Sophie had written “Yest man teberat” in Russian. Thomas Hartnagel noted that the inscription cannot be translated. [Still looking for a translation, even a lucky guess!]
By October 3, things soured perceptibly. Fritz was having problems, he told Sophie, with men who had been granted leave refusing to return from their vacations. Now it had become a guessing game as to who would come back to his post as ordered.
Fritz also recounted for Sophie’s benefit how the refugee problem had begun intruding upon their world. No longer did one have to drive to Stalingrad to encounter the river of people fleeing that city. At every turn they saw “the starved and ragged refugees from Stalingrad.”
The Russians had taken up positions along the opposite banks of the Volga River. It didn’t take a military genius to know that they were gearing up for a major battle. Despite that development, Fritz was glad they would winter in their current location. “The units that have been deployed out of here are not being sent back to Germany or France, but rather are being called back to the Ukraine so they do not cause such a drain on supplies from the West.”
Fritz’s letter penned on October 9 painted a far bleaker picture. All assurances to the contrary, Fritz’s company had been uprooted from their location close to the Don River. They were now situated much closer to Stalingrad.
The move had added stress and complicated Fritz’s duty to his men. They had been camping out in a gully created by the spring melt, since their nice – completed – “permanent bunkers” had been left behind. Two-hundred-seventy men, with no roof over their heads. And he as Commanding Officer had no idea how he could possibly provide shelter for them.
There are no construction materials available for us [to build with]. The only source for such material comes from the shot-up houses in Stalingrad. You will likely be able to imagine that the task of constructing shelters out of nothing for 270 men for a Russian winter presents all kinds of problems. At the same time, the planning itself is the simplest, but we have no wood, no nails, no bricks, no glass panes, no straw, no coal, and the worst thing is, we don’t have enough tools.
Every day there are innumerable questions both great and small that are asked of me, and all of them require a decision. And time has become so urgent that we get underground before it begins to freeze.
Fritz himself noted that he was so distracted by the overwhelming nature of his duties, that he could hardly concentrate enough to write Sophie a coherent letter. His son Thomas confirmed his father’s state of mind. In the middle of one paragraph, he had drawn an asterisk with an additional asterisk in the margin, as if he intended to add a comment. But no comment appeared.
His distractions, preparations for the coming winter, and general worries prevented Fritz from writing another letter to Sophie until October 18, a full nine days since his last missive. Following months of near-daily correspondence, that gap loomed ominously, a sign of things to come.
Fritz had also found himself once more the sole defender of his point of view in an argument with his Commanding Officer and lieutenants from a neighboring unit. They argued (and Sophie would have agreed with them) that Nature was good since God created it. Fritz debated the opposite viewpoint.
“One law of Nature, however, is the instinct of self-preservation, that life came from death, the eternal dying and becoming,” he wrote Sophie, describing his side of the discussion. “Therefore even wars in which one country is pitted against another, with the elimination of the weaker people, is also a law of Nature and therefore good.”
As alone as he had felt himself in that dispute, he understood that things were about to go downhill. With winter coming on, the German military had ordered the separate “casinos” or mess halls shut down. His company would now have to share facilities with other companies, meaning that Fritz would have less control over the tone of conversations.
Worse yet, “The most intelligent of my officers is now going on leave to study.” And, “It just started to snow for the first time.” Only time would tell which of those two portended the most damage to his physical and emotional well-being.
Mid-October, Fritz wrote Sophie that he feared that the war could quickly take a more gruesome turn. A “gas war” – that is, use of toxic gases or biological warfare – was inevitable, he believed. “During the last army reports they were openly talking about a breach of the Geneva Convention!”
On November 7, Fritz updated Sophie on the progress his men were making at their second round of building “permanent bunkers” for the winter. If he did not fulfill his duty as their Commanding Officer, he said, “only my men would have to pay for my neglect.” That thought weighed him down and pushed him to the brink of despair. At the end of the first week in November, Russian winter had already set in. Fritz worried what that could mean for his company.
His “boy” had requested – and been granted – a transfer to an Air Force Assault Battalion, Fritz said. It was a great loss, but understandable that the young man had not wished to be Fritz’s “maid” on the front lines.
Fritz also told Sophie that the Russians were stepping up their attacks. The intelligence he had gathered puzzled him. According to their data, Russians occupied only a few square kilometers along the other side of the Volga River. It therefore was incomprehensible that they were able to hold out against what Fritz perceived to be a much larger German force.
“Our Stukas incessantly hurl their bombs into these piles of rubble and our artillery hurls its bombs and grenades there, so that one cannot believe that any kind of human being is able to hold out there,” Fritz wrote. “Nevertheless, the battle rages for weeks for this tiny spot of land. One would almost assume it is a second Verdun.”
It wasn’t just crazy Russians on the other side of the river that presented a mystery to Fritz. Russians had also increased the number and intensity of their air raids.
Fritz and his First Sergeant had been working on a rather aggressive furlough list a few days earlier. Suddenly and without warning, fifteen planes attacked their position. “First they bombed us, then they roared overhead at an altitude of about 10m [32 feet] and let loose with all their cannons. Four bombs fell in the vicinity of my company, albeit without causing much damage.”
It was bad enough that Fritz and his First Sergeant took cover under a table. While bombs still fell and planes still soared, that man asked Fritz, “Hopefully we won’t need to strike anyone from the list of vacationers!?”
Thomas Hartnagel noted that Fritz was unaware that the USSR had stationed approximately one million soldiers north and south of Stalingrad, along with a large number of artillery, tanks, and airplanes. Nonetheless, Fritz recognized that the battle for Stalingrad would likely last through the winter, and that it would claim countless lives. Therefore he decided to furlough as many of his men as he possibly could, which would mean their survival.
As hard winter drew ever closer, Fritz’s unit prepared to dig in. They had received about 11,000 pounds of potatoes in early November. A temporary halt had to be called to digging bunkers, so they could create a potato cellar. If they did not hurry, the potatoes could freeze. Since they had been down to ‘no provisions whatever’ before the potatoes arrived, it wasn’t something any of them was willing to risk.
Fritz’s men had found new motivation for the digging of their personal bunkers. In addition to the bitter cold, the ground had frozen solid. “Every shovelful of dirt must be arduously quarried out,” he wrote.
The toughest part of his job? Maintaining morale among his men. Fritz had become cynical about the military’s ability to make rational decisions. “And of course, once we have everything wrapped up, we will assuredly receive transfer orders! Currently this is our greatest speculation, what will happen to us.”
They were not thinking in terms of wintering at Stalingrad any longer. Fritz and his men focused on the impossible, the transfer orders they would like to receive. “Transfer to Germany, there prepare for redeployment to Africa, and in the spring, be sent to Morocco.”
It was as good a dream as any. Military High Command had reassigned one-quarter of his company to Air Force infantry divisions. On November 11, Fritz assumed that would be the fate of all of them, himself included.
Fritz had lost his entire officer staff. “His” lieutenant, the former Hitler Youth leader, had been furloughed for his wedding. Another lieutenant was confined to sick bay with jaundice.
So he had been given a replacement, an “older” officer already over thirty years old who had been a sales rep for baby clothes before the military drafted him. The man had long been a sergeant in Fritz’s company and had only just been promoted to fill the unexpected vacancies.
Normally he was the kind of man Fritz would not have tolerated. He always had a clean and freshly ironed handkerchief in his breast pocket. Fritz told Sophie, “He has a travel iron with him.” Despite his obvious character flaws – flaws that Fritz would have mocked only a year earlier – they got along well. The man was agreeable and modest. On the Russian front, those were rare qualities indeed.
Fritz’s dreams of Morocco and light-hearted jesting ended suddenly. When he wrote Sophie again, he confessed that the three days between the two letters had been difficult. No new bombings, no transfers with new bunkers to be built. Once again, Fritz was called upon to render judgment upon a sergeant he respected.
He had sent the sergeant “into the rearward areas” to procure food for the company. The sergeant was to find fresh vegetables and potatoes to supplement the potato delivery they had just received. He started off well, “procuring” 440 pounds of white cabbage from a Russian. (Although Fritz did not say so, they were almost certainly impounding Russian crops without payment.) Then the sergeant turned around and traded the white cabbage for a pair of ladies’ shoes.
Fritz did not find out about the fraud on his own. A soldier in his company reported the sergeant’s deception. Therefore Fritz could not ignore it or deal with the matter lightly. He had to handle it in such a manner that his company knew it was a serious offense, yet refraining from any action that could ruin the man’s otherwise exemplary career.
“As I have already often experienced,” Fritz mused, “sometimes a person who is condemned to a hard sentence becomes even more adrift, because he thinks he has already lost everything.”
Fritz’s last letter to Sophie had been dated November 14. Almost a month later, on December 9, he finally could grab a few free minutes to let her know he was still alive. In the intervening weeks, that Lebenszeichen or sign of life had lost its clichéd meaning.
“On November 22,” he wrote Sophie, “we had to quickly abandon our airport because of the Russians and were only able to battle our way to the eastern bank of the Don River with a great deal of difficulty. In so doing, we lost a large part of our vehicles and equipment.”
Suddenly Fritz and his men were back at their next-to-last location, only without benefit of the permanent bunkers they had built there. In addition, the German military abandoned all pretense of intelligence gathering. Fritz’s signal corps unit was transformed overnight into an infantry battalion. Fritz had been given six hours to retrain his men so they could take over a defense sector.
For two weeks, they faced off against the Russians. His toughest decisions to date had involved sentencing soldiers to prison terms that could possibly destroy their careers. These days, his decisions were a matter of life and death. Fritz told Sophie to listen to the news to understand what he was going through, unaware that bad reports were being filtered out for the supposed benefit of the nation.
The day before, Fritz had experienced one of those little moments that changed his perspective. Ensconced in his foxhole, Russians firing at their position, the sounds of war raged all around him. “Suddenly a little bird sat on the edge of my foxhole and peeped contentedly, as if absolutely nothing could bother it. I do not know what moved me in that moment to accept this so certainly as a greeting from you [Sophie]. Then all at once I felt so secure in my foxhole, as if nothing in this world could harm me.”
Three days later, a plane left their embattled location for the homeland. Fritz dashed off another quick note to Sophie, hoping against hope that his words would make it out of the Stalingrad Kessel where he was “stuck.”
In one breath, he told Sophie their sector was quiet for now. In the next, he described constant machine gun fire from Russians entrenched only 300m (1000’) from them. “Since they don’t have to save ammunition like we do, they shoot at our position all day long with mortars. But our position is constructed very well, so they cannot harm us very much.”
In the brief lulls, Fritz and his men wondered how long it would be before the military extricated them from this hopeless situation. “Indeed, we do not doubt it will happen.” Again, they did not know that Hitler had doomed them to certain death. They still believed they would be ordered to retreat.
Fritz did not deem death the greatest danger he faced. Rather, the apathy and loss of conscience for killing so many “enemies” represented an even more insidious risk, he said. “One calls this apathy ‘becoming hard’ and sees it as an outstanding virtue!”
In the few days since his last letter, the situation on the ground had worsened. His battalion had been assigned to a new sector the night of December 18/19. “In the morning, the Russians attacked it with a ferocity to which our infantry is not accustomed,” he wrote. “The earth shook and seethed all day under the artillery fire. One could have believed that nothing would be left living on this little plot of earth. Our losses were such that from my battalion, only the strength of a company was left alive.”
Oddly, the worse things were, the more detached from reality he became. Death no longer was something to be dreaded. If anything, he had become “free and easy.”
Fighting all around him, Fritz suddenly recalled the passage from Augustine he had intended to send Inge Scholl when he heard that Ernst Reden had fallen in battle. “My sorrow was so great only because I poured out my heart into the sand in that I loved a mortal as though he would not die.”
January 17, 1943, Fritz penned the most frantic, despairing words of his life. For eight days, he and his men had been on the run from the Russians, trying to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the relentless Russian attack. When they could snatch a few hours sleep, it was in the open air with temperatures hovering around -30C (-22F).
Between the arctic conditions and artillery fire, Fritz’s battalion had been wiped out. He had frostbite in both hands, two fingers with third degree frostbite. He sought medical attention at the nearest field hospital, but they turned him away. Badly wounded men only, they told him.
A “hospitable officer” with a warm bunker took Fritz under his wing. Fritz knew that death was certain. If he was not killed on the battlefield, then he would be captured and sent to a Russian POW camp.
“But I have not yet given up all hope,” he wrote Sophie. “And if we do not set our hopes on this life, what can be taken from us? I will pray and pray again in these days, and you and those you love are most fervently included in these prayers.”
Recognizing that he could only write this one letter, and that he likely would never see Germany again, he asked Sophie for a small favor. “I would like to ask that you also greet my family, in case I should not be able to do so.”
And indeed, they would never see one another again.
This Substack post is a summary-excerpt of content in White Rose History, Volume II — Journey to Freedom. Substack post © 2002, 2007, 2023 Denise Heap. Translation of excerpts from Fritz Hartnagel’s letters © 2007 Denise Heap. Please contact us for permission to quote. Please note that everything in this post is fully documented and footnoted in WRH2.