Russian Front vet recalls Hitler's hell

So what happened to free thinkers in Hitler's Army? All put against the wall and shot, or forcibly re-educated in internal concentration camps? Lee Matthews talks to Palmerston North's Rolf Panny, who survived Hitler's war on the Russian Front.

Rolf Panny was a soldier without rank, sent without a gun to Hitler's Russian Front, in 1943.

He's still not sure how he survived; he thinks his own rampant individualism, so frowned on in Germany at this time, was what saved him. Living on his wits.

He's just written a book, Between Hitler and a Hard Place, about his childhood and the war years.

It describes a free-thinking young man who loved learning foreign languages and electronics, and who was out of place in Hitler's Germany, where everyone had to think alike, talk alike and kill the enemy alike, standing to the last man – or be shot or forcibly re-educated in Germany's internal concentration camps.

Mr Panny, who came to Palmerston North in 1971 to lecture German at Massey University, was a bright young man growing up in Hamburg when World War II broke out.

It was a time when young Rolf, ear glued to swing and jazz music being played by the BBC and mad on dancing, could have been shot out of hand for daring to listen to anything other than Hitler's radio-broadcast German supremacist propaganda.

In a country where everyone dressed in uniforms and conformed – "a uniform makes people obedient; it implies a hierarchy" – he managed to avoid joining the Hitler Youth, the junior Nazi party. Some of his ruses included living with friends to avoid being searched at his own home, or pretending to be a waiter when dance clubs were raided by the police checking identities and party memberships.

Yet his father was a Nazi Party member.

"There were four children in our family. My father was lucky enough to be offered a job in a bank. It came with the condition that he joined the Nazi Party," Mr Panny said. "Join the party, have a job, and eat. Don't join, and watch your children slowly starve ... what choice is no choice?"

Hitler's tactic in the 1930s of re-employing Germans, with the party membership string attached, was based on deficit spending. Broken and beaten by World War I, backed into a debt of impossible reparation payments to the rest of Europe by the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was like a punch-drunk boxer, starving on the ropes with nowhere to go, Mr Panny said.

And Europe after World War I was pincered by two political extremes – communism after the Russian revolution, and fascism.

"The political middle got squeezed out."

He qualified to go to university, so was automatically drafted to train as an officer.

After six months in boot camp, more time in officer school, it was obvious that young Mr Panny didn't have the correct German instant-obedience setting. He kept asking awkward, unmilitary questions such as: "Why?"

His essay about German superiority suggested the poet Goethe was a better German than Hitler. In a training exercise, where he was supposed to be commanding a machinegun encampment against imaginary foes, his attack-handling suggestion to fall back to a better-fortified area was met with incredulity and demotion.

"Hitler's motto was Fight 'til the Last Man. I was demoted and sent to the Russian Front."

It was 1943, he was 19, and his home city had just been comprehensively bombed by the Allies.

His street was flattened; bomb craters, dust, wobbly walls, and he couldn't find his family. The smell – unburied dead bodies – lingered. He left messages with friends and went east. He had no rank, and as an "on probation" infantryman, no gun.

He was with Regiment 26, 30th Division, at the front line at Staraya Russa, near Lake Ilmen, south of St Petersburg. White, red and green flares lit the sky, the night ripped by machinegun stutters and artillery bombardments from the advancing Russians.

He reported for duty and found soldiers puzzled by a radio they couldn't get to work.

Young Mr Panny got it going – "it helped to switch it to transmit when you wanted to send, and to receive when you wanted to hear" – and got a job; electronics, signals, radios and running phone wires.

He wondered what the dickens the Germans were doing there, in Russia, trying to hold the eastern front of a battlefield that spanned all Europe, with a maximum of six million men.

In the east, their numbers were so stretched that single soldiers were stationed every couple of hundred metres along the trenches, with bullets and mortars rationed. Mr Panny was lucky, just before Christmas 1943 he was issued with warm gear; a padded snowsuit and felt boots.

They saved his life. Leather boots froze feet at the front's minus 30 and 40 degrees Celsius temperatures.

Pushed by the Russians, the Germans slowly fell back. By March 1944, the retreat was in full flight.

Mr Panny recollects walking 100 kilometres through snow and slush in a single day, conscious that just behind them, just through the trees, just over that rise, were Russians.

He was shot in the shoulder and flown back to Germany. His right arm didn't work well; he ended up helping refugees, civilians who had fled the Red Army's advance across Poland to East Prussia.

After the war he was a prisoner of war in a Brussels camp, run by the British. Boredom was the biggest problem; slowly the German prisoners produced banned books they'd hidden during the Nazis' regime. Mr Panny had a copy of Holderin's Hyperion, a Christmas present sent to the Russian Front by his sister. The prisoners set up a book circle. Mr Panny produced Hyperion and a bit of Russian shrapnel fell out. It had gone right through the book, at least 100 pages, and been stopped by the back cover.

"It was amazing, we had to be behind barbed wire in a prisoner of war camp, before we could bring out these banned books. It had been too dangerous under the Nazis to freely speak one's mind on anything."

Mr Panny still has Hyperion, held together with frontispieces made of blankets issued in the POW camp.

After the war, Mr Panny studied in France for three years, and lived in the United States for 17; teaching at the University of California (Berkeley) and the University of Wisconsin. He is planning a second memoir about the importance of freedom of speech.

Between Hitler and a Hard Place, by Rolf Panny, is available in Palmerston North from Bruce McKenzie Booksellers.

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