Unknown German soldier of the Nazi Wehrmacht, who was shot in the head with a rifle by a Russian sniper on the Eastern Front.
‘Things and values changed. Money had become meaningless. We used paper money for rolling cigarettes or gambled it away indifferently.’ There was a feeling of impending gloom. ‘Only a few sought intimacy, most drugged themselves with superficialities, with gambling, with cruelty, hatred, or they masturbated … Our comradeship was made from mutual dependence, from living together in next to no space. Our humour was born out of sadism, gallows humour, satire, obscenity, spite, rage, and pranks with corpses, squirted brains, lice, pus and shit, the spiritual zero.’ Willy Peter Reese, A Stranger to Myself. The Inhumanity of War: Russia, 1941–1944 memoirs of a twenty-three-year-old Wehrmacht soldier.
Location: USSR