[VideoView]
Friedrich Fritz
Petsamo-Kirkenes Offensive 1
video length:
01:55
interviewer:
Ruth Deutschmann
photography:
Benjamin Epp
copyright location:
Wien
date of recording:
2008-06-13
English translation by:
Sylvia Manning ? Baumgartner
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1944
transcription:
Three months before the battlefront at the Liza River was cut off from base camp, there was already talk behind the lines. Up there we were still building bunkers to deceive the enemy. What nonsense. There were spies everywhere and we knew that. The Russians were performing a pincer manoeuvre encompassing the whole front. Who knows how many thousand soldiers they had. They had already surrounded us when the order came to abandon our posts. The troops who had contact with the enemy were exchanged every month. So that everybody got a turn! Then losses were much higher because each unit takes some time to figure out how to behave. And to find out what the enemy is like. That's why we chose two hundred men by lots out of two whole battalions. They had to be the rearguard from the beginning to the end. They are always in contact with the enemy and are sacrificed as cannon fodder, so to speak. In the meantime the others could try to get out, protected by these two hundred. Of course I was also one of them, one of those two hundred.