After about ten hours of quality sleep, I get up to take a close look
around the captured village. Groups of refugees, mostly women and
children, arrive from all directions; they had been hiding out in the
surrounding woods. The men of the village were forced to fight for the
Reds and have fallen dead in their houses and on the streets.
There are shocking scenes everywhere we turn. Women are looking for
their dead husbands and brothers. Children are finding the torn apart
bodies of their fathers. Horrible images. A woman with an infant in
her arms tries to pull the dead body of her husband into an old
foxhole in order to bury him. An elderly couple is seated at the
[Russian for grandmother] leans against her husband, her eyes fixated
on the horror surrounding them. Their sons and grandsons lie inside
the house in large, black pools of blood. She has lost her voice, and
her soul is forever dead.
A little further away, a group of about twenty of our comrades lie
mowed down from machine gun fire. Two dead fighters gripped in a
deadly man-against-man fight lie dead in the neighboring garden. The
Red is still grasping onto his bayonet in his rigid hand. Gauging from
Russian like iron clamps. I know all too well the horror of man
fighting against man. We are unable to separate all the bodies, so
both friend and foe are buried together. In hole after hole we bury
twenty-one of our best comrades. Fifty-eight Russians are buried in a
mass grave.
The heat is unbearable. The stench of decay is disgusting. We hold
handkerchiefs in front of our faces to protect ourselves from it. We
have to use force to pull the women and children away from their dead
relatives. The risk of infection is also very high.
My knees are weak on the way back home.
Eastern Inferno-The Journals of a German Panzerjager on the Eastern
Front 1941-43-Hans Roth
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