In Europe

parvenus.
    ‘By then my brother Heinrich had been promoted to lieutenant in the same regiment. What he had really hoped to do was study medieval history. But the Nazis had already politicised the curriculum, so he was having none of it. For him the regiment was a kind of intellectual island, you could call it a form of internal emigration. And there were more people for whom the
Wehrmacht
, strangely enough, served as a kind of refuge.
    ‘Did we have doubts about what we were doing? Some talking did go on within the
Wehrmacht
, but that wasn't very common. As a young soldier, I never talked to my comrades in the barracks about the things I heard at home. There was some serious criticism of the brutal actions of the SA and SS, though. Constitutional law was a part of Prussia. But you must understand: we were very young, in those years our lives were a mixture of light-heartedness and deadly earnest. It only dawned on us quite gradually that, ethically speaking as well, we now found ourselves on a battlefield, in the midst of a moral dilemma we could hardly deal with. In 1941, for example, the army leaders ordered us to advance so far in the direction of Moscow that, by mid-December, we finally broke down and froze where we were. We received orders from on high to defend positions that anyone in their right mind could see were indefensible. Could we actually pass along such orders to people for whomwe were responsible? And even though we didn't know much about the crimes that had been committed, one thing was clear by then: by performing our duty, we ourselves had become an instrument of evil. That is the situation in which we finally found ourselves.
    ‘Later, in October 1942, my friend Axel von dem Bussche saw with his own eyes how defenceless Jews were shot and killed, far behind the lines of battle. When he rejoined the regiment, he told me about it. He gradually arrived at the decision to make an attempt on Hitler's life, and to offer up his own life if need be. Through other friends of ours we established contact with Count Claus von Stauffenberg. It was his idea that a perfect opportunity would present itself in December 1943, during the presentation of the new
Wehrmacht
uniforms in Berlin. As a young, heavily decorated officer, Axel Bussche would present Hitler with the new uniforms, and would then blow himself up along with the Führer. I arranged the travel documents and the contact with Count Stauffenberg. But, twenty-four hours before the ceremony was to take place, the British carried out an air raid and the whole thing was cancelled. To be honest, it was a miracle that the Gestapo never got wind of that first planned assassination attempt by the Stauffenberg group.
    ‘But, anyway, in 1939 things had not yet reached that point. Right before the war started, I was at home recovering from an operation. Suddenly I received a summons from my unit, I was to report for duty right away. Three days before it all began, Heinrich and I marched together from the barracks to the railway station. The mood was completely different from all the stories you hear about the outbreak of the First World War. There wasn't a trace of popular enthusiasm. It all went quite secretively, in low spirits, quite literally by
Nacht und Nebel
, Night and Fog. We were put off the train close to Poland, and early in the morning of 1 September, 1939, they sent us across the border.
    ‘I knew almost nothing about the country I was entering. In the papers I had read about ethnic tensions, and that there was disagreement concerning the status of Danzig. That was it. Later on in my life, as politician and president of West Germany, my major political theme – besides continuing concern about the DDR, of course – was the restoration of good relations between Germany and Poland. But, as a soldier, it didn't mean much to me.
    ‘I don't remember passing a border post or anything. I do rememberthe quiet, oppressive atmosphere. That mood only changed on the evening of the second day, when I heard the loud crack of rifle fire and we ran up against our first Polish troops. It was close to the railway embankment at Klonowo, in the woods around Tuchel Heath. Heinrich was a few hundred metres from where I stood. He was the first officer in our regiment to be killed.
    ‘We buried him the next morning, along with the others, at the edge of those woods. That whole night I held watch beside him, beside my beloved brother.
    ‘My mother wrote: