Thoughts on war: German soldier Bernhard Rademacher on the value of human life in Russia, June 1942 (Published on 14/08/2025)
On 12/06/1942, he writes the following in his diary (source: Dollinger, “Kain, wo ist Dein Bruder? Was der Mensch im Zweiten Weltkrieg erleiden musste – dokumentiert in Tagebüchern und Briefen“ [“Cain, where is your brother? What people had to endure during the Second World War – documented in diaries and letters”] (1983), p. 146; translation from German language):
“The dust lies on the supply roads like a thick layer of flour. You can drive anywhere now, the fields are like threshing floors. Near Sergeyevka and Kschen, there are field positions and traces of battle everywhere. All the grain fields stink. In Sergeyevka, all the men, women, and girls are helping to bury the three hundred Red Army soldiers who have been lying there unburied or only lightly covered with earth for over eight days… A beastly stench and thousands of flies around the corpses, which are already half decomposed… They are buried in mass graves, the women have tied cloths around their mouths and noses, but they vomit anyway. How terrible it would be if our women and girls had to do that. Thousands, even millions of Red Army soldiers are buried somewhere in the vast Russian earth, without anyone in their homeland ever knowing when, where, and how they died. But the Russian people accept this as inevitable fate. »Kaputt«, they say with a wave of the hand, and life and fertility continue. What is such a small, shrivelled corpse in the middle of the infinitely vast and flowery steppe? It is soon forgotten, disappeared, overgrown by the elemental fertility of the land and the people. What is man? Whether a poor, unknown Russian or a German soldier with a life of his own and creative power – after eight days, the corpses all look the same…”
(Head picture: Russian Cemetery of Honor Am Gallberg
in Düsseldorf-Ludenberg/Germany, February 2025)
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