Letter 425

October 19th 1941

Dear Liesel.

I was going to answer your letter from August 11th a long time ago, but at that tempo we advance, I had no time to answer my mail. I thank you also for the dried flower you included in the letter, especially here we appreciate something from home like that. We don’t see nice things here. We are now in front of Leningrad, and therefore we can sit back and rest a bit. We arrived here with the Panzers and we have seen and experienced a lot. But most we saw were terrible things. I always have kept myself busy too, we advanced through Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia , at times we did some heavy fighting and took many casualties , but ours were light against compared to the Russians. Once I almost was wounded but then, an idiot is always lucky and nothing happened. We have much snow here now, nad it is cold, there are no mountains here and to go for an outing on skies is to dangerous because the huge forest are full of partisans. These Bandits are very hard to catch, the forest are 50-60 Kilometers long and like Jungles, big swamps inside them makes them ideal cover for Bandits. If we catch any, we hang them, yes, war is a hard and gruesome business. They do not understand the doctrines of the Communist Party and hate them too. We can not comprehend their attitude with our central European thinking. He who has been in a GPU cellar before and got out of it alive, will never forget it, If there is only 1 Communist amongst us Soldiers, I bet you he had enough of Communism for the rest of his life. The papers and weekly film news do not show enough of this misery here. You wrote about air raids? We too have a few Rhinelanders in our unit and they get all raked up about the English raids on their towns. Well, as soon as our Luftwaffe has done its job here, these people will see what happens. I believe there will not be a dry eye in all of England. A few days ago we also were the chosen lovers of Russian air raids, every day and 2 or 3 times at night they came. It was a big firework, but all we had were a few broken glass panes. Now they lost interest. It seems we will be here all winter, we already get winter clothing, well ,its nothing to be happy about , but we have electricity, with a few power failures of course , but we don’t mind. All we need now is something to read, but that will hopefully come too. I am well, maybe soon I get furlough, maybe yes. If you have the time, write to me please, I am glad to hear from you. Despite being married now, I have not forgotten you.

Greetings from Kurt.

From.Kurt Baumgartner FP # 15834 Pionier Bau Stab 32

To:Miss Liesel Gemein, Bingen, Horst Wesselstr 42