“We soon encountered fresh mounds of earth marked by rough birch crosses, topped with the unmistakeable steel helmets of the German Wehrmacht. These first silent, bloody witnesses on the highway to the east were arranged in regulation rows and columns, and we attempted to divert our gaze but were always drawn back to the graves. We marched on without speaking, and the silent red-brown mounds of earth seemed to beckon to us as if to say, “Do not leave us here,…do not abandon us in this strange place.” —

Gottlob Herbert Bidermann, a German soldier of the Wehrmacht’s 132nd Infantry Division, reflects while heading east on Soviet soil towards his first combat experience against the men of the Red Army - 3 July 1941

Passage from In Deadly Combat: A German Soldier’s Memoir of the Eastern Front

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