Mail Correspondence with Soldiers at War (“Feldpostbriefe”): Letters of German soldier Wolfgang Kluge from Russia, October 1943 (Published on 02/05/2025)
(source: Bähr/Meyer/Orthbandt, Kriegsbriefe gefallener Studenten 1939 – 1945, p. 286 ff. [translation from German language]):
“13 September 1943
Weimar – Russia! Certainly, Weimar has never seemed more beautiful to me than in this lonely, endless land, where the reality of the Weimar spirit fatamorganically dominates the starry nights. The longing of the German spirit for the spirit will never be stronger, but also never more bleeding, than in this realm of eternal horizons, where the land is like the sea.
In action, man lives only outwards, away from himself. So today, although the noise is deafening, these are very quiet hours in which I go back to my memories with the few images I have with me.”
“19 September 1943
The city will be cleared of the civilian population tomorrow. Day and night, the vehicles are pulled four abreast along the arterial roads. Day and night, Soviet planes attack bridges and railroad facilities in low-level raids.
The people held their last service in the cathedral, which served as the first movie theater before our occupation. Rarely has anything moved me so deeply. It was at dusk when the last blue light fell through the few domed windows into the center of the church and enchanted the otherwise simple building. The eternal lamp was burning in front of all the images of the saints, and a sea of candles was burning on the altar, in front of which smoke rose from the ruby-red incense burners, which were wielded by decorated boys. A priest sang the litany; he was apparently still very young, tall, very slim, with brown hair flowing over his shoulders, in white, purple and gold embroidered robes. The poor, ragged crowd knelt on the ground, stunned and weeping, and the priest slowly came down from the altar and walked among them, a figure of Christ, and spoke to them, as man to man, until they became quiet.”
“3 October 1943
Yesterday I was ordered to bring back a Russian officer who had been lying in the field for two days because they wanted to question him. As dusk fell, I took a Panje wagon and two men with me. We drove up to a hill, where we had to leave the wagon behind, as the enemy could see down the slope. I went ahead with one man to look for the Russian, who was supposed to be lying near a tank that had been shot up. When we found him, we waited for darkness. Then I sent the man off to lead the wagon and horse here under cover of night. But the boy, just eighteen years old, got lost and it was probably an hour before he came back.
This hour was more gruesome than any hour in battle, since one can no longer come to one’s senses in the midst of all the elemental horror. Here I stood alone on the field with the wounded Russian, on a field where the battle had taken place two days before. All around me were countless dead bodies, already decomposing, still lying in their holes in the black-brown fields. Above them was the disgusting, sweet smell – above it the flickering starry sky with the narrow crescent of the waxing moon – and above it all an eerie silence. Only now and then the soft hissing of rising flares, in the light of which I could recognize the face of the Russian, who always clutched my feet and pleadingly asked if he could be allowed to live – for an hour. Anyone who hasn’t experienced it for themselves will never be able to imagine it.
This is a particle of this ‘life’ here, in which, every day, you die and are resurrected.”
“5 October 1943
We, who have to walk on the dark side of life, are more attached to the beauty of life than those who possess it – even today. And those who are unhappy at home sin against our lives, for how gladly would any of us here, standing on the tangents of the world, give up our possessions for the sake of breathing German air!
Today I am grateful that I can still spend this night in our clay cave under the ground, because who knows if tomorrow we won’t spend the day and night like game on the bare ground, always fighting.
I lie down firmly on the earth’s breast
I cover myself with the night
I pull the stars up to my chin.”
“9 Oktober 1943
[Last letter to his mother]
I’ll be here for another two hours. Then I’jll go to the new position. A few hours ago it began to rain softly. The landscape is becoming more desolate than ever as it loses its colors – brown-black fields, furrowed by tanks, rutted by trenches and foxholes, in the distance a gray-yellow, dried-up field of sunflowers and a gray sky, clouds and clouds in gray.
Summer is passing with its scorching heat, fall is coming with its mud and wet cold, and winter is looming behind it.
You gave me life and light once – can you do it a second time? I almost shudder at such a thought, but it’s true. Maybe you don’t normally speak it out – or only when you’re in a deep trouble.”
The whereabouts of Wolfgang Kluge, born on 29/05/1918 in Leipzig-Lindenau, are unclear. According to the aforementioned book, he fell in October 1943 “on the Dnieper”; the Volksbund, however, lists him as missing since 01/10/1943 in the Andriyevka Dnieper area and has added him to the memorial book of the Kharkiv/Ukraine cemetery.
(Head picture:
German military cemetery Ysselsteyn/Netherlands, May 2023)
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