Luis Raffeiner’s Eyewitness to Wehrmacht Atrocities on the Eastern Front is his memoir of service in the Wehrmacht fighting on the Eastern Front. Raffeiner was born in July 1917 into a German speaking family living in Certosa in South Tyrol.[1] His father was a farmer and mill owner.[2] He grew up in the 1920s when his family and community were subject to a degree of harassment from local Italian fascist party officials.[3] This caused ‘bitterness and hatred’ and when members of his area were offered the chance to emigrate to Germany, they took the opportunity.[4]
He started Operation Barbarossa with Sturmgeschutzabteiling 243 and remained with them until he was wounded in the summer of 1942.[5] After a spell in hospital and in a training unit, he was probably sent to Panzerjagerabteilung 152 (Tank Destroyer Detachment 152) in the Autumn of 1944. This unit was deployed to the Carpathian Mountain passes in Slovakia.[6] At the end of the war he is captured by the Soviets and finally released in 1947. His account was written around 2010 when he was 93.
His account is unusual in that he is explicit about the war crimes committed by the Wehrmacht, SS and other units on the Eastern Front. On the initial advance into the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 he reports many incidents. In one town members of the Wehrmacht ‘fiercely torment[ing]’ members of the Jewish community. He was horrified at what he saw and ‘could not do anything to change the situation; it was only in dealing with people on an individual level it was possible for me to show a little humanity. The tanks were on a hill next to the church, and I had a Jew carry my tool-bag up. In exchange I gave him a loaf of bread. The expression of his gratitude went deep into my soul; it was an expression that struck me deeply.’[7]
He reported that ‘we could have done without such images of horror. During our advance, however, we experienced and saw the excesses of violence…corpses of fallen Russians, hanged ‘partisans’ or Jews who were rounded up and then killed, we witnessed all of this…At some point, however, you become deadened to such images and no longer noticed them.‘[8]
In Minsk, he visited the Jewish Ghetto. There one of his colleagues met a butcher from Berlin whom they had know before the war.[9] Raffeiner reported that the ‘The SS men boasted’ that they were clearing the ghetto and murdering 3,000 Jews ‘day after day’.[10]
Gradually, Raffeiner’s attitude to the brutality around him changes. During the winter, his units tanks became frozen in the extreme cold. To unfreeze them and get them operational, they had to start fires under the tanks. They demolished occupied houses to use the wood. He recalled he ‘had no other choice’ and the inhabitants became homeless in the depths of a freezing winter.[11]
He recalled, ‘we were no saints – not while we were advancing and certainly not while retreating. Especially not when we were hungry and had to fill up our ‘food box’ with provisions because our own supply was nowhere near enough. The we had to get ‘organised’ a bit, as we said at the time. Once we raided a small village and slaughtered hens, ducks and other livestock. We entered the huts, looed the cellars and looked for traces of buried food in the clay floor…Naturally they cried when we took their livestock away from them. But I had not feelings of guilt. In this world it was normal, it was not a crime, even if it is not understood in today’s world. That was war, that was part of it, it was about survival’.[12]
In one situation, he avoids being taken along by an officer to burn down a hut occupied by Russian prisoners. He recalled that he ‘profoundly relieved that I had been spared this terrible task. You could look the other way regarding the act of violence that you were not involved in yourself. Only when you were personally confronted with it did it ‘come alive’ in you and you thought about how you should decide what to do’.[13]
German historian Hannes Heer writes an afternote in the book. He notes that Raffeiner’s account is important as it shows the ‘clean Wehmacht’ myth is truly that. He points out how Raffeiner’s reaction to the atrocities he witnesses slowly changes over the course of the war. In the summer of 1941, Raffeiner is shocked and concerned and tries to make small personal differences to the people he encounters, such as giving the Jew who carried his bag up a hill a loaf of bread. After the winter of 1941/42, he becomes acclimatised and numbed to the violence and horror around him.[14] Heer points out that though Raffeiner was not a racist, he did not admit guilt or sorrow for the actions of which he was a part.[15]
This account is remarkable in the detail Raffiener gives to Wehrmacht actions on the Eastern front and also how his own attitude to the violence goes from actively trying to help to passively accepting it; from being very concerned about it to justifying his conduct.
[1] Luis Raffeiner, Eyewitness to Wehrmacht Atrocities on the Eastern Front (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2021), p.1
[2] Ibid., p.2.
[3] Ibid., p.14.
[4] Ibid., p.27.
[5] Ibid., pp.47, 173.
[6] Ibid., p.174.
[7] Ibid., pp.57-59.
[8] Ibid., pp.59-62.
[9] Ibid., p.78.
[10] Ibid., p.79.
[11] Ibid., pp.80-81.
[12] Ibid., p.86.
[13] Ibid., pp.89-90.
[14] Ibid., pp.170-171.
[15] Ibid., pp.177-178.