SOLDIER IN AFRICA (LORENZ KNORR)

Yes, I was sent to Africa. I had to fight in a motorbike patrol. I have to say that we agreed before we became soldiers we would never shoot somebody who had been said to be an enemy. We would shoot into the air, we would never shoot anybody, except in self defence; that was something different. There I kept going on with my illegal work; e.g. in the military hospital in Tripoli I was approached by an anti-fascist medical group and an anti-fascist radio operator group, whether I would be able to get fuses, as in Benghazi some comrades were ready to blow something up. They had enough explosives, but no fuses. I had to organize this by taking the alarm post together with two reliable men. Soldiers from the military hospital were used for that, convalescent soldiers, because there were not enough available and there we got the fuses. A few days later, in Benghazi, a quarter of the biggest ammunition depot the Rommel-army kept in Africa was blown up. With this a difficult problem emerged for us: Six Arabs and one German soldier were shot dead, who had not participated at all and now the question came up: “It is your fault that innocent people got shot by the ‘Wehrmacht’!” It had to be weighed up: Which side has to take the higher blame? If you don’t do anything against this criminal regime, if you join in silently, how much are you then to blame? War costs so many deaths - don’t you have to consciously consider that even innocent people loose their life in the fight against fascism? That is already a difficult question in civil life, it was the same under war conditions, that we said the fight against the fascist regime had to come before anything else; a very difficult ethic decision. Well, the question of desertion was obviously discussed between all the people who were active as anti-fascists. Only in Africa there was no front which’s lines could have been passed. In Africa warfare was mobile. There you could only change fronts if a unit was enclosed by the ‘Tommies’, the English. Then it was possible to say: “I would like to run over” and so on. Or to say: “I’ll run away”, then you avoided captivity; even that worked as well. When I came to Poland and Russia, that did not work because, as a radio operator, you were too far away from the front. As a radio operator you are, if you are no army operator, if you are not near the front, relatively far behind where the general staff sits. And they sit 50 to 60 km behind the front, if it is not a division staff. But most of the time I was with the army, army corps, at the higher posts. We were away from the front, so it did not work there, but the opportunity had to be taken. I would have done it like many others as well if the option had occurred.

more clips: Contemporary witnesses of the Nazi-Regime • 1943 • THE SECOND WORLD WAR • Knorr, Lorenz
more information: www.resistance-archive.org
Team: ERA - European Resistance Archive