I’m a German soldier on the Eastern Front, my name is Franz Hauser. I am a private in our once, superb Sixth Army. We had been victorious in battle after battle; we drank wine and celebrate our triumphs until we met our match at Stalingrad in 1943.  Since then our morale and behaviors have turned from glorious conquerors to rats fleeing an army of stalking, hungry cats.

We head for the Fatherland through blizzards of blinding snow. Our uniforms are rags clinging to our wet skins.  Our feet are bleeding and frozen, we have little to eat, we argue and curse each other, as we stumble back in a headlong retreat. As has been said, “Being hated while you’re wining is one thing; it’s quite another to be hated while you lose.” My head explodes with the question, Why, oh why did I listen? I don’t want to be here.

I patriotically listened to those puffed up speeches of the responsibility of Nordic superiority, of the revenge that we Germans had a duty to exact on our World War I enemies; and of the divine right of the German people to expand beyond our borders and seize land and enslave foreign people in the cause of Lebensraum.  War is not glorious as Goebbels wants us to believe, winning or losing war is still hell.

The Russians are killing us for invading their lands, punishing us for our units of Einsatzgruppen whose job was to murder civilians. We have seen the results of their work during our retreat. We came upon the outskirts of a demolished village and I saw dangling from the branches of a large oak tree many bodies of young and old swinging in the breeze. Crows had pecked their eyes out and lips were gone, their skin dripping, and their bones exposed. Sour bile rose in my throat as I faltered and then struggled on.  

Our little band of men is exhausted; we stop and dig in. I'm hover in an icy foxhole; don't know if I will be piereced by a Russian bayonet or be run over by a tank. The smell of diesel fuel wafts in the air. I hunker down, squeeze myself into a fetal position. I'm so tired it feels like my insides are slipping out of me. Anger boils in my heart; my soul is brused and battered. I'm so helpless. My mind is dark. Shall I put my rifle barrel in my mouth and pulled the trigger or simply stand up when the shooting starts? Will I then achieve the Führer’s promised ride with the Valkyrie and achieve my place in Valhalla or if I don't die in this frozen land, will I return home and be condemned as a losing, dastardly coward. I truly don’t know how this war will end.