WORLD WAR 1 BLOODLINE: BACK TO SIBERIA 1923-1927

Wilhelm Salzmann could not get used to life without his new Russian wife, Tatiana. His circle of friends in the Ruhr valley from the prison camp, such as Bruno Streich, still lived happily with the brides they had brought with them from the Great War. Shortly after Tatiana's departure, he decided to go and look for her. How my grandparents, first Tatiana and then Wilhelm following behind, managed to get back to her village near the remote Western Siberian town of Barnaul, all the way from Germany in 1923, remains a mystery. It can't have been easy. The country was now firmly in Soviet hands, from the Polish border to the Pacific Ocean.

Western Siberian Red Army Officers in 1924

Barnaul, south of the Trans Siberian Railway between Tobolsk and Lake Baikal

My grandmother Tatiana was horrified by the changes in her village of Lugovaya, on the river Ob north of Barnaul. It seemed to her that most of the decent people had disappeared and foul-mouthed drunkards had been promoted to positions of power by the Reds. Her former business associates among the Orthodox priesthood were in hiding, afraid for their lives. However, life was bearable because Lenin had replaced War Communism with his New Economic Policy. This form of 'State Capitalism' enabled enterprising Kulaks like her to survive and even prosper. A move towards total collectivisation had been postponed by Lenin to avoid further disruption while the war-torn country teetered on the edge of starvation. He envisaged gradual progress towards full communism over a decade or more, in the teeth of left-wing Bolshevik opposition. The radicals would have to wait for the time being. However, Lenin was dying, possibly of syphilis contracted in a Parisian brothel in 1904. The pockmarked Georgian gangster, Josef Stalin, quietly maneuvered behind the scenes, to eliminate any possible successors to the leadership. Stalin would soon prove to be much less squeamish about 'breaking eggs to make an omelette' than Lenin, especially if they were Kulak eggs. For now, Stalin concentrated on driving Trotsky, with his wild ideas of permanent international revolution, out of the country. This proved to be easier than he anticipated, due to the Red Army's defeat in Poland, Trotsky's arrogant 'Jewish' manners and illusions about his own invincibility. By comparison, Stalin could pose as a reasonable pragmatist.

Lenin died in 1924. While Stalin carefully prepared for power, he kept a beady eye on the economic situation in Western Siberia. An enterprising Kulak population of efficient pioneers posed a threat to his vision of a centrally organised peasant workforce, whose sole function was to feed the growing industrial urban proletariat. Kulaks like Tatiana would be on his hit list, as a class to be annihilated, once he was in undisputed control. He began to have the remaining revolutionary leaders killed, starting with the moderates. He'd show the radicals how left-wing he could be during the coming years, and eventually turn on them too. For now, the New Economic Policy continued as Lenin had planned, to prepare the conditions for 'Socialism in One Country'. This sounded suspiciously like 'National Socialism', and the final result was to be almost indistinguishable from a Fascist dictatorship. 
In Lugovaya, Shura, one of Tatiana's sisters, had married a rising young Communist. He would become the Party Boss in Alma Ata, capital of Kazakhstan, in due course. Another sister, Olga, on the right of the couple in the photograph below, could not adapt to the new regime and committed suicide.

Meanwhile, Wilhelm and Tatiana tried to make a go of it in the new Russia. However, it was clear that the vice was tightening. They noticed that many of Tatiana's former business partners simply disappeared. Trying to remain unencumbered, Tatiana practiced a traditional Siberian form of birth control by riding unbroken horses. In spite of this, a baby was born, prematurely, in temperatures below 40 degrees celsius, during the cold December of 1926. The little girl was incubated on the clay stove in the log cabin and fed warm chicken broth. She grew up to become my mother. The family poses in the picture below, which I copied in pen and ink from a 1927 photograph.

  

My grandparents tried to settle down under the new regime, but the vice was tightening. Tatiana's brother-in-law, as a local commissar, realised that she, and her German husband, would certainly be included in the death lists that were being prepared in advance of the compulsory collectivization campaign and the extermination of the Kulaks. She dug up the gold czarist rubles from their hiding places in the taiga and strapped them round Wilhelm's waist in a heavy money belt. He was told to go ahead to Germany and buy a house for the little family. As the months went by, he waited in Bochum, but began to despair of ever seeing his wife and child again. Then, suddenly, late in 1927, they appeared with what little remained of the gold. A new life began during the final years of the Weimar Republic. An even more dreadful war lay ahead, but, thank God, they couldn't know that.

BERND MUELLER FIGURES

Excellent models produced by Bernd Mueller from Soltau near Hamburg

Die Internationale (deutsche Version)

WORLD WAR 1 BLOODLINE: HOME FROM THE WAR 1921

Wilhelm Salzmann before and after; thinner and wearing Russian clothes

The 1921 photograph below shows my grandparents in a group of returning German POWs from Siberia. The couple are third and fourth from the left, sitting on the ground. They have disembarked in a Baltic port and are ready to go home, to the Ruhr. By now, a few Germans had Russian wives and small children. Many spoke more-or-less fluent Russian. Rita Streich is the baby in white, in her mothers arms, on the right. They must have been apprehensive about what awaited them in the defeated country, but relieved to be out of the turbulent finale of the Russian Civil War.

During the previous year, the victorious Allies had insisted on collecting extortionate reparations from Germany as part of the peace treaty. Local authorities produced their own currencies in an attempt to keep their economies afloat. Communist uprisings and mutinies were suppressed by Freikorps volunteers and the new Weimar Republic's army. In 1920, marines under Corvette Commander Hermann Ehrhardt attempted a monarchist coup in Berlin; the so-called Kapp putsch. The Ruhr valley responded by raising a Red Army of roughly 50,000 armed Communist and Socialist workers, which included many war veterans. After the Kapp putsch failed, the Freikorps and Army invaded the Ruhr under General Oscar von Watter to crush the Red Army militia and execute thousands of captives without trial. Wilhelm and Tatiana must have arrived in Bochum in the bitter aftermath of these events. It is unlikely that they would have been greeted with enthusiasm in their distinctly Russian clothes. At least, judging by the photograph, the weather was warm at first.

However, the welcome from old Peter Salzmann was distinctly cold. He was not pleased to see that his oldest son was now apparently married to a Russian peasant woman who spoke no German, and proceeded to treat her like a barely-tolerated servant. He did not realise that Tatiana was, in fact, better-educated than anybody else in his family and had been a wealthy woman in her own right, with her own Siberian timber business. 

On the map of the Red Ruhr below, Bochum lay at the heart of the 1920 disturbances in the valley. Tatiana had fled from Trotsky's Red Army only to find herself among recently-defeated Marxist coal miners and steelworkers. Not only had the industrial proletariat of the Ruhr lost the Great War, but also the class struggle against Weimar's Reichswehr Army and the monarchist Freikorps. The new SPD government, although nominally socialist, had shown itself more willing to kill workers than unrepentant militarists. The situation may not have been quite as dangerous as in Siberia, but it was still desperate and uncertain. Wilhelm had never been particularly interested in politics, so Tatiana was forced to try and understand these confusing events alone, in an unaccustomed urban environment, thousands of miles from home and in an incomprehensible language. To her, German sounded like the grunting of pigs. Her father-in-law's hostility was the final straw. It was only a matter of time before she began to plan her return to Siberia, leaving her husband behind if necessary.

The map also shows the proximity of British, French and Belgian occupying forces on and beyond the Rhine, to the south and west of the Ruhr valley's coalfields. All in all, there were considerably larger numbers of heavily-armed troops in the vicinity than there had ever been in sparsely-populated Western Siberia.

Under the weight of the war reparations and social unrest, the German economy went into free-fall. The local emergency money, or Notgeld, was useless for larger transactions. The Reichsmark plummeted in value. The once-powerful industrialised German state suffered the most dramatic example of hyper-inflation in history. For the miserly Peter Salzmann, who had considerable savings, this was an absolute catastrophe. In 1922, he could have acquired enough property to set himself up for life. A year later, in 1923, he was, effectively, broke. A sum of money that could have bought, say, a house was suddenly barely enough to buy a packet of cigarettes. 

One could be a billionaire with a single, badly-printed, worthless banknote. The lower middle class, especially, saw all its hopes shattered and became the natural constituency for extreme, undemocratic parties. In the photograph below, Wilhelm, complete with Kaiser moustache, and Tatiana pose as a respectable, upwardly-mobile young couple before the Great German Inflation made this highly unlikely.

 Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler, in his comfortable prison after his failed beer-hall putsch, dictated 'Mein Kampf' to his boyfriend/secretary Rudolf Hess, with Jewish financiers like Tatiana's erstwhile role model, Baron Rothschild, firmly in his sights. He also linked his economic theories, which may have had a limited factual basis, to primitive tribal fantasies about blood and earth. The Jews were actually not human, but devilish vermin. The Slavs were, as their name implied, only fit to be slaves. The blacks were part of the animal kingdom. These ideas were not new, and not particularly German, but they were to become so increasingly after the Great Inflation, replacing the International Marxist solution with a unashamedly racist National Socialist program. As a Slav, already smarting under old Peter Salzmann's insults, Tatiana doubted whether she had a future in her new husband's country at all. Perhaps she would be better-off with the devil she knew, on home ground, in Siberia. The gold rubles had been well-hidden, giving her a springboard to Shanghai or San Francisco. Her sister, Shura, had married a prominent Siberian communist, which might come in handy. At this stage, before Stalin took over, it was still possible to dream that a stable, egalitarian society might emerge from the revolutionary bloodshed. The Salzmann family looked more and more like a bad-tempered trap within the bigger poverty-stricken trap of Bochum. Could she convince Wilhelm to come with her? When he, understandably, hesitated, she decided he wasn't up to the challenge. She scraped the fare together and began the long, perilous journey back to her Siberian village without him.

Hitler devoured the popular press, identifying bigoted views to serve his ambition

DOCTOR ZHIVAGO ~ LARA'S THEME

Red Army Choir - The Cossacks Song

WORLD WAR I BLOODLINE : PRISONER IN SIBERIA

With the completion of the Murmansk railway in 1917, the prisoners were transported to Western Siberia shortly before the October Revolution. By chance, a French Army film unit captured a few fleeting glimpses of my grandfather's new POW camp at Barnaul in 1919. The distinctive wooden enclosures and towers must have been permanently fixed in his memory during the next three or four years.

Germans made up only 10% of the millions of POWs in Russian captivity. The vast majority, along with the Turks, were Austro-Hungarians. After the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power, Russia withdrew from the war. Conditions became more relaxed in the camps. In March 1918, the ratification of the Peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk meant that the Eastern Front no longer existed. Technically, the prisoners were free. However, in Siberia they were trapped. The country was in turmoil. Russia's railways were in a deplorable state. Barnaul, on the faraway Mongolian border, might just as well have been on another planet. In the camp, the gates were left open and some inmates began to guard their scant possessions with firearms. Escape was a pipe-dream, there was nowhere to run. Endless plains and forests stretched all around them, full of natural hazards and roving desperadoes. To the Northwest, a conflict between the Red and the White armies was brewing along the Trans-Siberian line. Nomadic bands of Khirgiz horsemen hunted to the South. East of Lake Baikal, the Japanese occupied Vladivostok and paid merciless brigands under the warlord Semenov to stir up trouble. It was the Wild East. British, French and United States detachments appeared, keen to wave their flags in case the White Army prevailed. A stranded force of 40,000 Czeck soldiers, originally recruited to fight the Austrians, was poised to attack the Bolsheviks and take control of the Trans-Siberian railway from Ekaterinburg to Irkutsk. The prisoners' best survival policy was to stay together for the time being and fraternise with the local population. On Easter Day 1919, my grandfather Wilhelm and his best friend, Bruno Streich, agreed to supply the music for a celebration organised by an Orthodox priest in the nearby village of Lugovaya. Bruno played the piano, Willi the violin. After the service, the Russians traditionally kissed everybody, saying, "Christ is risen!" The two musicians

took the opportunity to introduce themselves to the young Siberian women. Within a year, they both had Russian wives and Bruno awaited the birth of a daughter. She, Rita Streich, became a world-famous opera singer after World War II in Vienna.

Tatiana Kuznezova and her village school pupils before the war

In the photograph above, Tatiana Pankratyevna Kuznetsova, my grandfather's Russian wife, stands on the far right, with members of her family. The Siberian population differed from that of European Russia. Instead of huge estates with servile peasants, the Siberians lived on their own land like frontier pioneers. They were also used to mixing with many different types of people, from political exiles to nomadic Muslim tribesmen and Chinese traders. Some became rich. Tatiana owned a logging company and a sawmill, which was now under threat of expropriation with the coming of the Bolsheviks. In the photograph below, my grandmother Tatiana sits in the centre of her timber company's open-air boardroom.

Tatiana Kuznetzova's Timber Company

Pankrat Kuznetzov, Tatiana' father had produced 19 children from two successive wives. As so often happens, the offspring of the original mother resented the new one. In the long winter evenings, young Tatiana sometimes surreptitiously pushed the edge of her hated stepmother's dress closer to the fire, hoping to set it alight. The family was split on both ideological and maternal lines, tending to take opposite sides in the Civil War and the subsequent Red persecution of the 'Kulaks', or wealthy peasants, to which they belonged. Some became informers and, later, prominent Communists. The rest were killed, committed suicide or fled. Less than a handful survived. According to Russian Marxist dogma, the peasants were, by definition, poor and oppressed. Successful frontier populations did not fit into this picture. They had to be plundered and exterminated as a class. In Siberia, this took considerable time to achieve, well into the Stalinist era. Meanwhile, confusion reigned. The ragged White Army dragged itself eastwards, among pitiful crowds of refugees, while its senior commanders, like Admiral Kolchak, chugged slowly alongside in armoured trains. On the way to Vladivostok, the old Czarist Officer Corps jangled its spurs and sold its women in the brothels of the Far East, preparing to flee to China and America. East of Lake Baikal, the White Cavalry officers were no better than bandits, leading mounted patrols of Chinese thugs, Mongol cattle-rustlers, Japanese mercenaries and Cossack raiders in a reign of terror against anybody who crossed their path.

Baron Ungern Sternberg of the Special Manchurian Division and Outer Mongolian Horde

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In the Wild West, the American Civil War produced gangs of murdering thieves led by sadistic lunatics like Bloody Bill Anderson. In the Wild East of 1920, a Baltic aristocrat called Baron Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg was another example of this type. He fought heroically at Tannenberg and was with one of the few remnants of Samsonov's army to escape. Above, he appears in a Corto Maltese comic-book adventure by the great Italian illustrator Hugo Pratt. He operated out of Manchuli with the Cossack Ataman Grigori Semenov's degenerate crew. Eventually, he fell out with everybody and led the Outer Mongolian Horde in a mad, doomed effort to revive Genghis Khan's old empire. While the Czech legion, many of whom had socialist sympathies, handed Admiral Kolchak over to the Reds at Irkutsk, to be shot, Semenov's men loaded 30 hostages onto a boat in Lake Baikal. They amused themslves by getting drunk, stripping their victims on deck, clubbing them to death and throwing their bodies into the freezing water. The only female hostage was gang-raped before being dropped overboard. Eventually, wide-ranging elements of Trotsky's 1st Red Cavalry drove Semenov's men into Manchuria, where they enjoyed Japanese protection. The last Japanese troops did not leave Russian soil until 1922.

An armoured train on the Trans Siberian Railway

Most of the fighting in Western Siberia was done by ragged, starving infantry like those pictured above. It consisted of long marching and sporadic skirmishes rather than pitched battles. Bare survival in the extreme weather conditions was the main priority. Desertion was rife. The Whites often wore bits of British uniforms, like the puttees wrapped round their shins. The Red lower ranks in this photograph were barefoot. By instilling a measure of discipline under political commissars, Trotsky gave his troops a vital edge. They also had the advantage of moving outwards from a unified centre, while their enemies were scattered on the periphery. Surprisingly, horses were in short supply West of Lake Baikal. Perhaps, most of the animals in combat zones were eaten. Kolchak's men prided themselves on wearing epaulettes, which had been banned in the Red Army, as relics of  Czarist snobbery. Captured White officers sometimes had their epaulettes nailed to their shoulders and the skin of their hands boiled to resemble gloves, before being shot. Red prisoners too received little mercy, they could expect to be buried alive by Kulak partisans or flogged to death by Cossacks. The White armies routinely killed Jews on sight, after raping their women, especially since Trotsky and many other Bolsheviks were Jewish. Armoured trains, containing the warlords' headquarters, food supplies, brothels and barracks, were followed by death trains packed with starving prisoners, periodically emptied of corpses en route. Compared to this, my grandfather's camp in Barnaul, with its friendly neighbourhood villages, seems to have been a haven of relative safety.

TROTSKY AS ST GEORGE - KILLING THE CAPITALIST DRAGON

My grandmother, Tatiana, realised that the Romanov Czars and their lazy, parasitic aristocracy, were a disaster for Russia and should not be allowed to continue in power. However, she was no Bolshevik either. She was too much of an Orthodox believer. She shared some of the romantic, populist ideas of the Narodniks and their heirs, the Social Revolutionary (SR) Party. In the end, her main passion was her thriving timber business. She went so far as to hang a Russian version of the 1st Baron Rothschild's coat of arms, painted on a large wooden board, outside her Lugovaya sawmill, aspiring to become as wealthy as the Jewish plutocrat (see below, right), whose name translates as 'Red Shield'. The sign remained in place after Admiral Kolchak's execution at Irkutsk, in early 1920. Trotsky's Red Cavalry units occupied Barnaul and scouted around the neighbouring villages. At first, they mistook the sign for a distant red flag. This gave Tatiana a chance to bury a fortune in gold rubles under specific trees, deep in the surrounding forests. However, village gossip about the coming Red Terror and quarrels within her own family indicated that her life was in grave danger. It was time to take advantage of the end of the Civil War. The repatriation of the last German prisoners, including her new husband Wilhelm Salzmann, had started. It was time to get out alive. The money could stay where it was until the situation returned to some kind of normality. However, it was becoming clear that pre-war 'normality' had gone forever. Already, people spoke of 'the good old days' before 1914 as of a vanished fools' paradise. Now, more than ever, one was doomed if one did not change with the times and gamble on the future. With the exact locations of the buried gold committed to memory, she prepared to accompany Wilhelm on his long journey back to the Ruhr valley. In the summer of 1921, after a slow train back to Murmansk, a transport steamer took the released inmates and their new families to the German port of Rostov, on the Baltic Sea.

RITA STREICH - A VOICE FROM SIBERIA

http://www.youtube.com/v/dHtTN90ye8A?version=3&autohide=1&feature=share&autohide=1&attribution_tag=eBimgFIJjzAQeYWi-quCPA&showinfo=1&autoplay=1

The Assassination of Tsar Nicholas II and the Romanov Family

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WORLD WAR I BLOODLINE : PRISONER OF THE CZAR

Unique photograph of Wilhelm as a Murmansk prisoner. He is holding the horse's leg.

We left young Wilhelm Salzmann of the 18th Prussian Infantry as he was being carried off the Tannenberg battlefield by the Russians with a machine-gun bullet through his thigh bone. Presumably, he was cared for well enough to be taken to a POW camp after a few weeks. In stark contrast to Hitler's 1941-45 war against Russia, both sides made an effort to adhere to the Geneva Conventions in World War I. However, his destination, inside the Arctic Circle, guaranteed levels of deprivation and suffering that made these Conventions seem irrelevant. The Czar had decided to connect his only ice-free northern port, Murmansk, to the capital at St Petersburg in order to facilitate the movement of vital war supplies from his allies. He was having a railway built up there and was running out of manpower. He therefore permitted the use of German and Austrian prisoners for this task. It would become an Arctic precursor of the Japanese Burma Railway, as well as a prototype for the Soviet GULAGs. Wilhelm settled into his log barracks as winter, with temperatures of minus-30 degrees, gradually approached. He would have arrived in his Prussian summer uniform, but, as time passed, extra clothing could always be taken from the dead.

With the first snowfall, Willi tried to escape. Whether he hoped to reach Finland or stow away on a ship in Murmansk, he hadn't a hope in hell. A Cossack horseman followed his footprints for a few hundred yards and whipped him all the way back to the camp. In the morning he was laying tracks again. They say there is a prisoner's corpse under every sleeper. Freezing temperatures alternated with swarms of mosquitoes and malaria in the hot months. The huts crawled with lice, which is often a recipe for typhus. The rations of thin soup and black bread did not contain enough calories for the strenuous labour. The men wasted away. They were kept hard at it, under the whip, because the rail link was urgently needed. Although planned in 1905, the Japanese war had intervened. After that disaster, the Czar did not expect another major conflict to follow so soon.
Occasionally, prisoners resorted to drinking paraffin from the barracks' lamps, which must have made them more ill than drunk. My grandfather told me that he managed to get himself transferred to the camp orchestra, which, he said, saved his life. He could stand there playing merry tunes while the others broke their backs. Somehow, he acquired a violin. This made a great difference, relieving the boredom and raising the spirits of his comrades, especially since he could play their favourite tunes on request without sheet music. Singing together became an important survival strategy for the weary, homesick men. Once, almost unbelievably, he was rewarded for his efforts with that most exotic of delicacies, a banana. On which ship it had reached the remote, icy outpost is anyone's guess.
While Willy made himself as comfortable as he could in a hostile environment, he must have imagined all sorts of worst-case scenarios. At this stage, Russia still hurled gigantic armies at Germany and Austria. It would be years before the Germans played their luckiest card and launched the deadly human missile, Lenin, at St Petersburg in a sealed train. Willi went to sleep in his verminous blankets while the Czar alternated between playing soldiers and resting in the luxurious surroundings of his palatial retreats. It would never have crossed my grandfather's mind that he would live to a ripe old age, while Czar Nicholas II would soon be rotting at the bottom of an abandoned mine shaft near Ekaterinburg, riddled with bullets, surrounded by the corpses of his massacred family. However, Nicholas completed at least one project before he abdicated. The Murmansk railway became operational in 1917, just when he had no further need for it. After his abdication, Nicholas too became a prisoner, with a Red sword of Damocles hanging over his head. Now, the vast country began to tear itself apart in an orgy of bloodletting from Poland to the Pacific Ocean.

An Austrian prisoners' hut on the Murmansk line. Picture by the pioneer of colour photography, Produkin-Gorski

THE VIENNESE NIGHTINGALE

The vivacious lady I knew as Aunty Rita from Vienna was the daughter of my grandfather's best friend, Bruno Streich, his fellow prisoner in POW camps at Murmansk and, after 1917, at Barnaul in the Siberian Altai Region. She was born there in 1920. I last saw her after she sang a Lieder concert in London's Wigmore Hall during the late 1970s. While she gave me a warm hug backstage, I noticed the actor Edward Fox standing behind me with a bunch of roses. I felt I was upstaging 'The Jackal'!

FIRST WORLD WAR CENTENNIAL BLOODLINE

I am reminded of The Great War every time I look in the mirror because, of all the members of my family, I physically resemble my German grandfather, Wilhelm Salzmann, most closely. The story of his youth, as filtered down to me before he died in 1972, begins in the heartland of Germany's heavy industry at the beginning of the 20th Century.

Willi looks about 12-years-old in this photograph. His father Peter was a pit foreman in one of the many coal mines in Bochum, Westphalia. Old Peter Salzmann had, for a fee, married a teenage bride called Bertha, whom he found in an orphanage. He was, apparently, a strict disciplinarian with a foul temper. He later died of apoplexy after loosing all his savings in Germany's postwar hyper-inflation. Bertha, by contrast, was sweet and kind. I remember my great-grandmother's last years, in the 1960s, with fondness. As you can see, the boy had a mop of strong, very dark hair. Due to this, he was known as 'Der Schwatte', 'The Black One' in the Ruhr valley dialect. Willi possessed the rare talent of being able to reproduce any tune by ear on a variety of musical instruments. The violin suited him best. His father had no time for such frivolity and insisted that he take a job in the nearby Krupp steelworks. Things were coming to a head between father and son in 1914. By then, Willi was just old enough, at 16, to answer the Kaiser's call for volunteers.  He ran off to join the army, mainly to escape from the atmosphere at home.

                                  The Salzmann family at the outbreak of war; Wilhelm stands behind his mother Bertha, father Peter,  brother Paul and sisters Amalia and Clara.

From the number on the cover of his spiked helmet, I can deduce that he joined a Prussian outfit, the Ist Posen Infantry, Regiment Nr 18, named Von Grolman after Bluecher's Quartermaster-General during the 1815 Waterloo campaign. Westphalia had been incorporated into the Prussian state after Napoleon's defeat. Willi remembered the Prussian cavalry commander August von Mackensen, a hero of the Franco-Prussian War, recruiting volunteers in the Ruhr valley as the German Empire mobilised for the coming conflict.

The Russians mobilised much faster than the Germans thought possible. They launched a massive, two-pronged invasion into East Prussia. It looked overwhelming. Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes the subsequent events in his book August 1914.
The Germans had to divide their outnumbered forces, sending two-thirds of their men south, into the Masurian Lake district, to fight General Samsonov's 15th Corps of the Second Russian Army in the misty swamps and forests that led to the Polish border. At the time, Poland was part of the Russian Empire.
My grandfather Willi's 18th Von Grolman Infantry Regiment steamed down to the front near Tannenberg by train, as part of the 72nd Brigade of the 20th German Corps under Artillery General Friederich von Scholtz, another Franco-Prussian War veteran. General Paul von Hindenburg had overall command of the sector. During the ensuing march, an NCO screamed,"Du hast wohl Angst, du Schwein!" and kicked Willi into a flooded ditch.  "So! You're scared, you pig!" The raw recruit, unable to swim, had hesitated at the water's edge.Colonel Ewald Mecke's 18th Von Grolman Infantry Regiment was part of the 72nd Osterode Infantry Brigade under Major General Schaer, which in turn belonged to Lieutenant General Leo Sontag's 41st Deutsch-Eylau Division. One of the main reasons for the comprehensive Russian defeat at the hands of smaller German forces was their incredibly careless habit of transmitting battle orders on open, uncoded radio frequencies. The Germans could listen in, predict their movements and meet them with adequate force at every crucial point. It was as if blind men fought sighted ones. The wet, tangled and wild terrain invited tremendous confusion, but the Germans also had the advantage of operating on home ground. Many of the German top brass were aristocrats familiar with this part of East Prussia, even if the lower ranks often came, like my grandfather, from the border with Holland in the West.

At 08.30 on the morning of the 27th of August an intercepted Russian signal ordered part of Samsonov's army to advance South of the Muehlensee lake. At 11.00 AM, Hindenburg reacted by ordering a movement East of the lake, blocking the Russian move. General von Scholtz proposed to drive a wedge between General Martos' advancing 15th Corps and General Konratovitsch's 22nd Corps at Neidenburg with a single division, the 41st Deutsch-Eylau under General Leo Sontag. My grandfather Willi Salzmann's regiment, the 18th, would form part of the division's rearguard. General Sontag's instructions were to push forward Northeast of the lake and capture the small town of Waplitz. However, he stopped his advance along a line from the lake's southern shore to Janushkau at 12.15. It seems that Martos' Russians were swarming along this front in considerable numbers. So, I have to imagine my grandfather spending the warm summer night in a swampy East Prussian forest. It was, perhaps, at this time that the regimental cooks began to run out of sufficient soup and had to dilute it  with a hose pipe from a water tank.
A huge Russian army lurked in the trees all around, threatening to engulf the small German force. Untried volunteers like Willi, coming from urban industrial environments, would have been completely disoriented on this wild Eastern frontier, even in peacetime. I can't imagine he got much sleep, especially after being kicked and soaked earlier that day and hearing the increasing noise of the battle up ahead.

Russian cavalry charging the German lines

The situation was chaotic enough at the time, so it is impossible to say with certainty exactly when and where young Willi was wounded and left on the field. I will make an educated guess  by combining his reminiscences with the recorded movements of  the 41'st Division. He was probably hit during the morning of August the 28th. Looking at the map below, the number 41 follows a blue arrow skirting Waplitz. Clearly, the advancing 41st was sandwiched between two large Russian Army Corps. No wonder Major General Sontag did not go forward on the previous day, despite Hindenburg's order, as he would have been keenly aware of the threat to his right flank. His entire command risked encirclement and annihilation.

The 41st German Infantry Division advance between Muehlen and Waplitz

The order to attack Waplitz came through by radio at 04.00 - the crack of dawn. Hindenburg's Chief of Staff, Oberst (Colonel) Emil Hell, noticed that the entire area was covered in a thick fog rising from the lakes. By 05.30, Sontag had still not moved. At 06.00 Hindenburg reiterated the order from his battlefield HQ in a dairy farm at Froegenau. Soon he heard heavy gunfire coming from the East. Half-an-hour later, the fog lifted. By now the 41st Division's vanguard had run into strong Russian opposition outside Waplitz. Worse, the rear columns were under fire from their own artillery by the Muehlensee Lake. This makes sense, because the 41st Division was now behind Martos' Russian 15th Corps. If the shells exploded beyond the Russians, they would hit the force attacking Waplitz. By 07.30 Sontag had had enough. He sounded the retreat. The 41st had to rush back through a 2.5km gap between the advancing Russian lines, taking 30% casualties on the way. Oberleutnant (First Lieutenant) Schmidt wrote of "screaming men, unable to walk" left on the ground. I'm pretty sure my grandfather was among those "screaming men". The war was over for him, probably before he had fired a single shot.

                                                                                                                                                                                                

Russian Machine-Gunners

A machine-gun bullet smashed through his thighbone after being deflected downwards by his metal belt buckle. Looking at the map, I can see a wooded area to the east of Waplitz. I remember my grandfather mentioning a forest near where he was shot. For once, the "Gott Mit Uns" (God With Us) inscription on the buckle plate seems appropriate. The chances are that neither my mother or I, let alone succeeding generations, would have existed, at least in our present form, if that buckle had not been there. A belly-shot was much more serious than a broken bone. As it was, a Russian field-surgeon removed the bullet easily because its point stuck out of the back of Willi's thigh. Then, it was a question of a splint and a bandage, followed by a ride in a cartful of wounded men to the nearest railhead in Poland. I used to carry the twisted and slightly flattened projectile, with its sharp steel point, as a lucky charm at school. It got lost somewhere on my travels, but it was so distinctive that I can almost feel it in my hand to this day.

Wilhelm Salzmann was lucky in more ways than one. As one of the 14,000 Germans taken prisoner during the Waplitz debacle on the morning of the 28th, he was evacuated through the Russian rear. By nightfall on the 29th, that would have been impossible. Virtually all of Samsonov's huge army was encircled and captured by the Germans, among scenes of mass panic and confusion. Samsonov himself wandered off into the woods and was never seen alive again. Later his rotting corpse was identified by an amulet. It appears that he could not bear the shame of such a catastrophic defeat and shot himself.

The Russians flee in panic

The boy who ran away from his tyrannical father was swept away into the heart of Siberia. He would not see Germany again for five years. By then, the world would be utterly transformed and he would be a very different person, but that's another story.

Memorial to the fallen officers, NCOs and men of the Royal Prussian Infantry Regiment Von Grolman, Ist Posen,
Number 18, in a Polish Forest