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The following
excerpt is from an unpublished, copyrighted manuscript. The book details
Georg Rauch’s unusual and hair-raising struggles for survival on the Russian
front and as a Russian prisoner of war during the last years of WW II. He was
1/4 Jew, by Hitler’s calculations, since he had a Jewish grandmother.
Nonetheless, he was drafted into the German army, and sent as ‘cannon fodder’
to the Eastern Front. A secret notation on his ID papers listed instructions,
unbeknownst to him, that he was never to receive a furlough. In spite of this
and the terrors that were to come, his wit, special talents, strong
constitution, and a generous dose of luck led to his eventual survival. The Jew with the
Iron Cross A true story of
paradox and survial by Georg
and Phyllis Rauch PROLOGUE Our right hands
stiffly raised, we repeated the words of the oath as they were
pronounced: “...and I solemnly swear to defend Fuehrer, Folk and Fatherland...” The morning of
February 26th, 1943, was bitter cold. Individual ice crystals dropped
silently from the leaden, low-lying heavens. It was too cold to snow. On a large barracks
parade ground, just outside Vienna, 600 eighteen- year-olds stood at
attention, three abreast, in a long column. We must have resembled wooden
puppets or lead soldiers, neatly placed for some child’s fantasy. Our boot
heels were squeezed together; left palms were pressed to the seams of our
trousers, chests were puffed out, stomachs sucked in, and eyes stared straight
ahead. We were smartly outfitted in the parade uniforms of the
German Wehrmacht. The German soldier,
Prussias’s pride and invention, was expected to be “tough as leather,
hard as Krupp steel, fleet as a greyhound,” but after only three weeks of basic
training, we weren’t exactly the perfect prototypes. I can imagine that
Hitler wouldn’t have been very gratified to catch sight of me, had he been in
attendance, since I definitely didn’t conform to his ideal type. I measured only
5’10” tall, and my hair was a wild angle of black curls. My eyes looked green or
gray, depending upon the light, and the rest of my features were decidedly non-Aryan.
My physique boasted no broad shoulders or other impress- ive details, though
I was slim and well-built for my size. On this particular
day my large and curving nose was also red and runny, and my head was
aching under the unaccustomed weight of the heavy iron helmet. My thoughts weren’t
exactly lightweight either. It wasn’t one of the happier moments of my young
life. The small group of
German officers administering the oath stood facing us on the snow-covered,
hard-frozen ground. Oberstleutnant Kraus, the communication
training sections’s commanding officer, had just completed his speech, raving about
the inevitable victory of the German forces over capitalism and communism. We were all fully
aware that Stalingrad had fallen, that Rommel had been relieved from duty
in Africa, and that allied bombers were making cocky daylight raids on major
German cities. I don’t believe any of us expected the outcome of the war could be
changed by some miracle, such as the long-promised wonder or mystery weapon.
Inevitably the ever more powerful allied forces must finally bring Germany to its
knees. Oberstleutnant
Kraus, evidenty having refused to recognize these facts, reminded us of our
duty and described in glowing terms how thrilling it would be when we finally got
the chance to split a Russian skull with our spades. The military band
played “Deutschland, Deutschland Ueber Alles” and small clouds of
steam from the musical instruments drifted skywards. A review company presented
arms. As we were repeating the last words of the oath, “to defend Fuehrer, Folk
and Fatherland, unto the death,” I observed that two of the soldiers ahead of me
had the index and middle fingers of their left hands crossed, just the same as I.
I hoped that none of the officers were patroling behind us, recording for future
punishment the names of those taking refuge in that ancient childhood trick. We
were adolescents, still playing at the game of war, but after just a few more
months of training, we would be expected to perform as men, to take the lives of
strangers, on command, unquestioningly.
PART ONE Chapter l I shined my boots to
a mirror finish and polished my belt buckle. Then I rubbed, with
gasoline, a tiny grease spot I had noticed on my uniform jacket. I was
nervous. The other soldiers in the room had no idea of what I intended, why I was
making such a fuss over my appearance when we were only scheduled to attend
rifle practice on the shooting range. My heart thumping
faster than usual, I left the barracks at five minutes before nine and
marched across the enormous exercise grounds toward one of the administration
buildings. The November fog hung in the leafless chestnut trees, a bell in one of the
Brno churches began to toll the hour. I had an appointment
with the division commander, Oberstleutnant Poppinger, the man
distinguished by his red nose swollen from French cognac and the diamond-studded
Iron Cross that always hung around his fat neck. Considering what a tiny cog I
represented in the gears of the huge German military machine, my request to see
Poppinger was somewhat similar to demanding an audience with God Himself. At 9 a.m. on
November 10th, 1943, I stood in front of Poppinger’s desk, facing both him and
the large portrait of Hitler which hung on the wall at his back. My boot heels
clicked smartly together, my right hand snapped a lightening salute to the edge
of my cap, and, in the over-loud voice decreed by the German army, I yelled at
Poppinger, “Funker Rauch reporting, sir!” his desk, regarding
me with an expression that could almost be described as benevolent. Thereupon I bellowed
the sentence that I had been framing in my mind for weeks, “Funker Rauch
wishes to be permitted to report that he cannot be an officer in the
German Wehrmacht!” With an astonished,
almost idiotic expression on his face, the Oberstleutnant
sputtered, “Are you crazy? Did I hear you correctly?” “Jawohl, Herr
Oberstleutnant!” Poppinger, who was
almost a head taller than I, stood up. His face was becoming crimson. He
came around the desk to stand directly in front of me and snarled, “We decide
who will be an officer in the German Wehrmacht. Whoever refuses to serve his
fatherland as an officer, once we have deemed him acceptable, is a
traitor.” Turning toward the
door where the orderly was standing he said, as though seeking support,
“The man isn’t in his right mind. Denial of his abilities to serve his country as an
officer, that’s high treason!” By this time his voice had risen almost to a screech.
Visibly attempting to regain control of himself, he returned to his chair, sat
down, took a drink of water, and continued in a more factual tone. “I
demand an explanation.” Again I clicked my
heels together. As though charged by an electric shock, I pressed my hands
flat against my thighs and shouted once again, “I don’t feel able to become an
officer in the German army because I have Jewish blood.” Poppinger sprang up,
his face almost purple. “What did he say?” “I have a Jewish
grandmother.” “Mensch, how did you
get here in the first place? Jewish grandmother! You must be
completely mad.” He motioned the
orderly to his side and, after a few whispered sentences, turned again to me
and said simply, “Dismissed.” The orderly took me
to his office where I explained, in an atmosphere considerably calmer,
that I had included the fact of my Jewish blood, along with all the other
personal data when I had been drafted. He dismissed me then, and I returned to my
barracks. When I reentered my
room it was empty. The bunkbeds were all perfectly spread. The straw
mattresses had been shook, the two gray blankets folded as though with a
measuring tape and carefully laid over the rough, tightly stretched sheets, the pillows
positioned in exactly the correct spot at the exact angle. The smell of lysol was
pervasive. I had no idea what
would happen next as a result of my intervew with Poppinger;
nonetheless, I felt relieved. I climbed up to my bunk and, stretching 9 out, decided to
enjoy the unexpected bonus of a few free hours to myself until the rest of my bunkmates
returned from exercises. I reviewed the
events of my military existence up until now. How utterly hopeless I had felt
the day that draft notice finally appeared in our mail box. Though I was used to
enjoying the deep, dreamless sleep of the young, that night I had lain awake long
hours thinking of where I could hide myself in order not to have to become a
German soldier. I knew it was
hopeless. Hadn’t I already gnawed at the problem for a whole year, pedaling
hundreds of kilometers on my bicycle through large portions of the
Austrian Alps? That perfect place where I could be taken in, fed, kept warm and safe
while everyone else in Europe was annihilating each other, unfortunately didn’t
exist. Regardless of where
I might turn up in my civilian clothes, as an obviously healthy,
young man I would immediately be asked for my papers. Men out of uniform
between the ages of eighteen and sixty were practically nonexistent. World
War II had snatched up every possible man who was able to carry a weapon. On the day I
reported for duty to the kaserne in Vienna, I filled out all the forms, listing my
education in a technical school as well as six years of French plus my hobbies such
as radio building. I also indicated my familiarity with Morse code. As a result, the
Germans permitted me to choose the branch of service I preferred. I chose
the infantry, thereby proving my complete idiocy as far as my friends and family
members were concerned. After all, most other branches of the service were
cleaner and more comfortable: the air force, navy or even the tank corps. Although I was well
aware that soldiers in the infantry had to endure great hardships, filth,
hunger and lice, my instinctive decision was based on one essential fact: in
an all-out war like this one, I didn’t want to be caught sitting helplessly in some
iron box, whether in the air, on water or on land, just waiting for the whole thing
to explode from a grenade, torpedoes or mines. The ground, where a fellow could
walk, run or hide, seemed a lot more secure to me. If I could dig fast enough and
deep enough, I still might have a chance when worse came to worse. The camp where I
received my basic training as a telegraphist or “funker”, was a
complex of numerous ugly, gray, three-storied buildings which looked as though
they hadn’t been painted or renovated since the days of the monarchy. We sweated
through most of our first weeks on the parade ground, mastering the fine
art of Prussian drilling from dawn to sunset. Soon we were so
well-trained that most commands were carried out more or less
automatically, and we began to spend more time on our specialization: the installation and use
of short-wave sets and telephones. I enjoyed anything having to do with
electrical apparatus; the training came easy to me. My overall
transition form playful adolescent to disciplined soldier was far from simple,
though. The offspring of doctors, factory owners and architects, I had grown up with
the assurance that my personal opinion would always be heard and at least
taken into consideration. I found it particularly difficult, therefore, to follow
orders which often seemed illogical, serving only to produce a completely
submissive subject who could be depended upon to obey, without the slightest objection
or personal point of view. One of our training officer’s favorite sayings
was, “Leave the thinking to the horses. They have larger heads.” On three separate
occasions I was locked up for minor offences: failure to salute an officer,
unauthorized absence from the barracks, and going back to bed while the others
were out huffing and puffing on the drill grounds. But something a little more serious
occurred during one of our weekly field exercises. That lovely May
morning, two companies from my camp took the red and white Viennese
streetcars to a small mountain, the Bisamberg, north of the city. Carrying our spades
and rifles, bedecked with all the other equipment and gadgets, and wearing
our gasmasks, we were hounded, sweating and panting, up one side of the
mountain. On the summit, without even a chance to catch our breath, those of us
in company “red” were ordered to begin fighting company “blue”, which came
rushing at us from the opposite side. Through beautiful
spring meadows filled with tender flowers and grasses reaching to our
hips, we stormed the other company’s position, fell back, and attacked again. Back
and forth we went, bullied by constant shouts of “Hit the dirt! Get up! Crawl!
Attack!” until noon, when we flopped down, exhausted, to wait for the next
assault command. We lay there in the
high grass, spaced about thirty feet apart. The powder smoke from the last blank
cartridges had drifted away and was slowly being replaced by the
heady aromas of the flowers, the new grass, the damp spring earth. The pause
lengthened, and still the order didn’t come, so I decided to make myself a little more
comfortable. Detaching a few
pieces of equipment and placing them to one side, I opened my shirt and let the
sun dry my perspiration. I gulped thirstily from my canteen, chewed a
piece of bread. Honeybees buzzed amongst the flowers. Ladybugs crept to the ends of
the blades of grass, and jumped into flight. I sank back into the meadow, and
breathing in the soothing, springtime smells, fell promptly asleep. me awake. “Mensch, what are
you doing here?” yelled an angry voice. “Didn’t you hear the command to
attack? Do you need a personal written order to get your lazy ass into
motion?” Through my
sleep-fuzzed eyes I could see a black boot in the process of aiming a second,
more vigorous blow to my side. The angry face above it belonged to the officer in
charge of the entire maneuver. The shots and shouts
of the attackers rang out quite clearly, but were already some
distance away. Here I lay on my back in the warm sun, and, under the circumstances
would have been expected to spring to my feet and begin attempting to
justify my most awkward situation. Against all the
rules, still flat on my back, I cracked my heels together, threw my hand to my
forehead in salute, and yelled up to the Oberleutnant, “Funker Rauch, died
for Fuehrer, Folk and Fatherland!” Where there’s a war,
there have to be dead bodies, I reasoned, but I watched carefully
and with considerable unease the face looming above me, Suddenly I had
visions of disciplinary companies, prison, drilling until I fell over dead, or, at
the very least, peeling potatoes into eternity. Heaven only knows
what thoughts must have passed through that Prussian brain during the
endless seconds until I spied a barely perceptible twitch in the left corner of his
mouth, and he said, “When the troops
pass this way again shortly, would you be so kind as to rise from the dead
and fall in once more as a full able-bodied soldier?” “Jawohl, Herr
Oberleutnant!” I shouted up from my still prone position. A few weeks later,
at the beginning of our fourth month of training, Oberstleutnant
Kraus, the officer in charge of the camp, put in an unexpected appearance when we
fell in for the morning roll call. He exchanged a few words with our captain,
handed him a piece of paper, then left the parade ground. The captain turned
to address us. “The following soldiers are to take two steps forward as I
call out their names.: He began to shout, “Funker Sperling, Funker Magdeburger, Funker
Zoellner, Funker Rauch...” I stepped forward as
commanded, wondering which of the many rules I had broken now. As the
list of names grew longer, I comforted myself with the rationalization that
all of these soldiers couldn’t have done something wrong. There was a total of
forty names. “Those whom I have
called are to return immediately to their barracks, pack up and report
to Barracks number 28! You are hereby assigned to the course for
communications officers and raised to the status of officers’ candidates. Dismissed.”
After all my
misdeeds, how could it be possible that I was now supposed to become an officer?
The news was a complete surprise and my feelings were mixed, to say the
least. At any rate, this change entailed continued months of training in the hinterland,
away from any front. I even entertained a faint hope that the war might
be over before I could be sent into action. Best of all, I was still close to home
and could call almost every day. My great awakening
came a few months later in August of 1943. Halfway through the
officer’s course, eighty per cent of us received the order to report immediately to Brno,
Czechslovakia, some 150 kilometers north of Vienna. We were being removed
from our communications course and transfered to one for training regular
infantry officers. The reason for the
change was clearcut. The losses of men and material in the battle for
Russia were proving to be gigantic. Over one and a half million Germans had alreadyh
been killed, wounded or listed as missing. Infantry officers were needed
desperately, and now I was to become one of those, supposedly capable of ordering
hundreds of men to atttack, of screaming with conviction those commands that
would send them to their deaths. After two brief days
with my parents, I found myself on the train to Brno. Although it had
seeped gradually into my consciousness during the preceding months that I was
actually a soldier in the German army, until now somehow I hadn’t taken the
whole thing seriously . Those training months had been spent in Vienna, the city of
my childhood; I had still been at home, in a manner of speaking. This trip in an
express train, however, was carrying me away from my familiar territory.
My youth was slipping away with the city disappearing on the other side of the
Danube. This monster of a senseless war was on the point of swallowing me up. When I was drafted
at 19, I had been still very naive. My negative attitude towards Hitler’s war
and dictatorship had been adopted from my parents, without any particular
soul-searching on my part. All men were expected to become soldiers, and I had
observed that the majority of them submitted to the inevitable and did what they
were ordered just well enough so as not to give offence. But an officer, that
was something else again. Now they would expect me to be responsible
for many others, to use my brain for receiving and passing on orders intended to
win a war that in my opinion should be lost as soon as possible so that the
survivors could go home again. It was illogical and idiotic that I, a quarter-Jew and
therefore a citizen with limited rights, should have been selected for this
“honor.” Accustomed since
earliest childhood to the authority of my parents, teachers and
officials, I was slow to recognize the possibility that I might be able to put in a veto.
The closer I came to the Czech city where the course was to take place, the more
determined I became. Somehow I would get out of that training camp, and I would
not become an officer. The weeks in the
camp at Brno turned into months, and still I hadn’t managed to convince
those in charge of my unsuitability. First I had tried to act dull, but nobody
bought that. Then I simulated illnesses and physical weakness, but the strenuous
training had turned my body into a healthy bundle of pure muscles. Now, almost
at the end of the course, I had finally made my appointment with Poppinger. The day following
that meeting I learned the consequences. Not surprisingly, I had
been dropped from the officer’s course and was ordered to front line duty as a
simple foot soldier, albeit with special training as a telegraphist. On November 2nd, my
mother came to the train station in the small medieval town of
Krumau on the Austrian-Czechoslovakian border to say good- by. Central Europe
isn’t famous for its sunshine at any season, but November is the grayest month of
all. The trees have dropped their last remaining leaves; it rains most of the
time, and a damp fog draws the sky down almost to the ground. walls, gabled
houses, and lovely churches would have been an attraction, a pleasant destination
for a Sunday outing. But in the fifth year of a merciless war, on this damp cold
morning, Krumau was only a gray silhouette behind the freight depot, the perfect
somber background for possibly the last words that a son and mother would ever
exchange. Beatrix Rauch, or
Mutti, as I called her, was a strong woman in every sense of the word.
She was of medium height and slim, but sturdy, wiry, thanks to a great amount of
hard work. Her face was slightly asymmetrical because a case of meningitis
had paralyzed a few of the muscles around her right eye, but both eyes shone with
warmth and a sensitive intelligence. She always smelled faintly of lavender
because of the dried blossoms crocheted with bits of wool which lay amongst
her clothing in the dresser drawers. Although my mother
came into the world in Vienna in 1889 with the privileges of an
aristocrat, and spent her first twenty-five years in all the luxury that the
nobility enjoyed at that time, her personality was actually formed during the
following decades by the events taking place around her. World War I and the
resultant fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire took away her title and her wealth. As a
Red Cross volunteer, she obtained first-hand experience of war, of blood, of
the suffering and death of soldiers. During the inflation
and depression years of the twenties and thirties, she was a young, married
woman with two children who spent most of her time trying to refashion
our rags into presentable clothing, and helping my father in countless jobs
and activities to earn the necessary money for our survival. At the end of the
depression, Hitler entered Austria and with him new suffering and
desperation for those, like my mother, who were opposed to his regime. Considering
the general atmosphere of evil and supression, it must have been one of the most
difficult times for raising a child, but my mother was untiring in teaching
my sister and me the delicate values of true culture versus materialism and
brutality. During these years
diversions were rare. There was no thought of travel to foreign lands,
not even of a trip to the other end of our own small country. Once in a great while we
managed to scrape together something extra for a theater or concert ticket, but
most music or entertainment was provided by a small radio. We did go on outings
in the Vienna woods, carrying a thermos of tea and some slices of brown
bread spread with lard. There, in the woods and meadows surrounding Vienna,
in the city’s many free museums, and in our own home, we learned from her, directly
and by example, what it means to be a human being. I remembered
something that had happened the year I was fourteen. Cheering multitudes
had welcomed the Germans that year when they came marching into
Austria and shortly thereafter the streets had begun sprouting National Socialist
propaganda. One day I was
walking with my mother down a Viennese avenue spanned with enormous
banners bearing Nazi slogans. She stopped in front of one of these where letters five
feet high proclaimed, “Might comes before right”. Glancing up and down the almost
empty street, she turned to me and said, “Do you understand what those words
mean?” “No,” I answered,
feeling guilty and a little frightened. Her expression of
repressed anger and disgust had become more and more familiar of late.
“That banner means that he who has the power is automatically in the right. Our
current rulers intend to determine what that “right” is. Do you understand that no
civilized or humane person can accept such a philosophy?” At the time I had
but a vague understanding of what she was trying to tell me, realizing only
that it was an idea very important to her. In the intervening years, however, she
had made her point of view, her complete opposition to Hitler and all he
represented, very clear. That last morning at
the train station in Krumau, my mother and I walked back and fort for
half an hour on the platform. None of the hundreds of soldiers sitting on straw in
the cattle cars waiting to depart had any idea where the trip would end or whether
they would ever return. It must have been obvious to most of them that their
chances weres slim at best. All one had to do was take note of simple statistics,
counting up how many of one’s friends, relatives or work colleagues had been
reported dead or missing in the past four years. That is, if they hadn’t returned
home as cripples. I was very impressed
by two of the things my mother said to me that morning. I thought
the first seemed easy enough to understand. She said, “Please remember something
in the days to come. In case you don’t return, I won’t go completely to
pieces. I will continue to live a full life, no matter what.” To some this might
sound strange or cold, but with her words I could feel a great burden lifted
from my shoulders, the burden of having to survive out there for my mother’s
sake. I wasn’t to
understand her second remark until much later. She said, just as the train slowly
started to move and I leaned down to give her a last kiss, “And remember, what
doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” The train picked up
speed steadily. By sticking my head out the sliding door of the boxcar,
I could still see my mother, a slight pale figure in a thread- bare winter coat
standing in the same spot next to the tracks, her arm held motionless in the
air. Finally she
disappeared into the chilly morning fog. I knew that soon she would be on her way
back to the town square, walking with that typical hurried step. She would be
rushing to catch the next bus back to Vienna for, after all, the Jews hidden in the
attic must be fed and cared for, and life must go on. |
