In Europe

the thought of my own death.
    ‘Then we went in and the fighting started. The first person I saw die was a young fellow officer. After the war had been going for a few days, we had discovered an abandoned estate. We went into the grounds, there were a few cars parked there, there was a lovely patio, a dining room, and in it a big table set with at least twenty plates, with everything still on them, ham, butter, cheese, poultry, you name it. The occupants had obviously rushed off and left their meal behind. I casually picked up a slice of ham and, as I turned around, suddenly saw three Poles standing among the trees, their rifles aimed at me. Two young officers came up behind me right then. I was paralysed with fear. The Poles shot them, then jumped into a car and drove off. One of the officers behind me died on the spot, the other one eventually recovered. That was the first time the war really closed in on me.
    ‘A few months later, in November 1939, we were sent to Krefeld, close to the Dutch border. I had to keep watch on a road that led into the Dutch city of Venlo, had to report on everything that happened there. We spent that whole winter on alert, ready for the invasion. In the end our division moved a little further south, to Aachen, and on 10 May, 1940 we rolled into Belgium and France, past Maubeuge. I didn't send my father a postcard.
    ‘The campaigns against Holland, Belgium and France were quite different from what I'd heard about the First World War. I never sensed among my men the hatred for the enemy that was apparently so common in 1914. We were proud of our victories, but no one even dreamed of torching French villages. And I didn't sense much hatred among our adversaries either, at least not during those first few weeks. The French didn't cheer us along, of course, but we also never came across a waiter who refused to serve us. At least, I never encountered anything like that. We didn't have to post extra guards, we could sleep easily at night.
    ‘There are all kinds of theories these days that say the French Army was better equipped in May 1940 than most people thought, and thatthe Germans would have run into great trouble if only the French had been willing to fight. I can't say anything about that. Personally, I never ran into anything like really pronounced resistance, not of the sort I ran into later in Russia, in any case. During that whole campaign only three men in my entire company were wounded, including myself: a bullet nicked the back of my neck. That was all.
    ‘It all went so quickly and easily during those weeks in May that even my father began doubting his own judgement. “My boy,” he told me one evening, “I'm too old, I don't understand the way things go any more. What Hitler's done now is truly unbelievable. In four weeks, he's done what we failed to do in four years!”
    ‘That elation lasted less than two weeks. Right outside Dunkirk, we were suddenly ordered to halt. All our division could do was ask ourselves why, in heaven's name, we were being forced just to stand there for three days. It gave the British the chance, with the help of countless private boats, to evacuate almost their entire expeditionary force, that became clear afterwards. Why Hitler let that happen is one of the great mysteries of the Second World War. People who had been close to him told me later that he was actually hoping to sign a peace treaty with England. For him, England was something to love from afar; the British were, and remained in his eyes, a Germanic people.
    ‘I also experienced something which shows that, in late May 1940, Hitler actually thought peace was coming soon. While I was still in training at Potsdam I helped to arrange a few parades, including one by the Condor Legion that had just come back from Spain. Because of that experience, I was suddenly assigned to the group that was preparing for a huge peace parade in Paris. It was my job, for example, to make sure that the German tanks could actually take the corners at the Place de l’Étoile and the Place de la Concorde, and to see whether certain street lamps should perhaps be moved aside, that sort of thing. Our parade group was disbanded after only a few days, though: as it turned out, there was not going to be peace after all. And my father began saying again that things were going to backfire badly under this half-baked painter.
    ‘In winter 1940–1 we received new orders: we were to be sent to North Africa. First