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One Man's War

1:01:32 recording · EN · 2 speakers

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Brief overview

Wilhelm Prüller's diary shows Barbarossa's first weeks won on the road and lost to attrition and delusion.

  1. One man inside the giant arrowsThe hosts drop the big picture to follow a single staff NCO of 9th Panzer Division across Ukraine.
  2. Ideology holds until the shells landFlat in a ditch under fire, Prüller thinks of Henny, his children and his parents, not of saving Europe from Bolshevism.
  3. Winning and being worn away at onceVictories at Tarnopol, the Stalin Line and Ternovka cost the battalion 350 men by early August, with officers hit hardest.
Executive Summary AI
  • Episode seven of the We Have Ways Barbarossa series, with Al Murray and James Holland, turns from maps and arrows to the diary of Unteroffizier Wilhelm Prüller, opening with his entry of 22 June 1941 welcoming the fight against communism.3:13
  • Prüller was an Austrian born in Vienna on 14 January 1916 into a working-class Catholic family, joined the Hitler Youth at 11 and the Nazi party at 17, ran a Kraft der Freude district on 350 reichsmarks a month and a chauffeur-driven car, and by June 1941 was the 1A of 2nd Battalion, 11th Schützen Regiment in 9th Panzer Division, part of von Wietersheim's 14th Motorised Corps in Army Group South.6:49
  • Stuck in gridlock behind the border, he frets about missing the victory while the reports pile up — 40,000 POWs, 4,107 enemy planes, 600 artillery pieces — and only crosses into Ukraine at 9.30 p.m. on 29 June, to sand, craters and columns moving a metre at a time.17:55
  • In the first fighting his 8th Company loses 80 men in a wood, and Prüller answers the horror by calling the Russians beasts, while in Tarnopol on 2 July he watches self-propelled guns destroy a Soviet armoured train carrying 40 tanks and loses friends on the bridge.25:53
  • By the attack on Ternovka on 4 August 1941 the battalion has taken 350 losses, more than a third of its combat strength, and Prüller — newly awarded the Iron Cross Second Class on 18 July, and told the campaign will be over by mid-September — is asking his diary how long his luck can hold.56:57
Key Quote
“You simply cannot imagine, Henny, what the concentrated fire of a reinforced motor battalion means.”
— Wilhelm Prüller28:30
Key Quote
“It's frightful and beautiful.”
— Wilhelm Prüller28:46
Key Quote
“It's not people we're fighting against here, but simply animals.”
— Wilhelm Prüller39:21