BBC ArchiveWorld Conflict One broke out on 28 July, 1914. Fifty years later, one of many German troopers, Stefan Westmann, advised the BBC about his experiences preventing within the battle.
World Conflict One broke out on 28 July 1914. To mark its fiftieth anniversary in 1964, the BBC made The Nice Conflict, an bold historical past of the cataclysmic battle. One of many 280 eyewitness interviewees was a German soldier who gave a harrowing and unforgettable account of what it feels wish to be pressured to kill.
Warning: The next article, and video clip, comprise graphic descriptions that some readers and viewers may discover upsetting.
Stefan Westmann was a medical scholar who earlier than the conflict had barely even used a scalpel. Just a few months later, Westmann and his German comrades have been on a battlefield attacking a French place when he got here eyeball-to-eyeball with an enemy soldier. Each clutched their bayonets in dread of what should occur subsequent.
“For a second I felt the worry of demise, and in a fraction of a second I realised that he was after my life precisely as I used to be after his,” he mentioned.
“I used to be faster than he was. I tossed his rifle away and I ran my bayonet by his chest. He fell, put his hand on the place the place I had hit him, after which… he died. I felt bodily unwell. I almost vomited. My knees have been shaking, and I used to be fairly frankly ashamed of myself.”
In 1964, by then a grandfather with a distinguished medical profession behind him, Westmann was transported again in his thoughts to that discipline in France to relive a trauma that remained uncooked.
Earlier than the conflict, Westmann had been learning drugs in Berlin. Whereas his fellow troopers additionally had unremarkable backgrounds – “strange individuals who by no means would have sought to do any hurt to anybody” – he mentioned they’d not appeared disturbed by the violence they’d inflicted.
“How did it come about that they have been so merciless?” he mentioned. “I remembered then that we have been advised that the nice soldier kills with out considering of his adversary as a human being. The very second he sees in him a fellow man, he isn’t a superb soldier anymore.”
Westmann mentioned he had wished the lifeless French soldier might have raised his hand and proven he was nonetheless alive. “I’d have shaken his hand and we might have been the most effective of buddies,as a result of he was nothing, like me, however a poor boy who needed to combat, who needed to go in with probably the most merciless weapons towards a person who had nothing towards him personally, who solely wore the uniform of one other nation, who spoke one other language, however a person who had a father and a mom and a household maybe.”
After the tip of the conflict, Westmann resumed his medical profession in Berlin. He left Germany after Adolf Hitler got here to energy in 1933 and settled in England. Throughout World Conflict Two, he was a British medical officer in Scotland, that means he served on reverse sides within the two world wars. Shortly earlier than his demise in 1964, he wrote a memoir, Surgeon with the Kaiser’s Military. His grandson Michael Westman revised the ebook in 2014.
A 24-part sequence, The Nice Conflict was a landmark fee for BBC Two, the company’s new cultural channel. In addition to that includes veterans who had written books and different outstanding figures, the favored Tonight programme invited its older viewers to come back ahead and share their experiences. Sacks of mail flooded in, brimful with all kinds of mementoes comparable to diaries, medals and even tobacco tins.
Lots of the interviews have been carried out by researcher Julia Cave, who in 2003 remembered how tough it had been. She mentioned: “No person who wasn’t in that conflict might know what it was like, no person might think about the phobia of sitting in a trench, going excessive, and what would occur to you and these horrible issues. Generally males simply received misplaced on the earth that they’d fought in.”
The unique interview rushes have been resurfaced and restored for the 2014 BBC documentary I Was There: The Nice Conflict Tales, bringing them to new generations untouched by conflict. Some testimonies have been featured in Peter Jackson’s poignant 2018 documentary They Shall Not Develop Outdated, which sought to deliver World Conflict One to life by injecting color and sound into grainy outdated black-and-white footage. Even with out such fashionable film-making expertise, their phrases alone have the ability to cease you in your tracks.
Westmann mentioned he was nonetheless haunted by nightmares, questioning what might need occurred if that younger French soldier had been faster along with his bayonet.
“What was it that we troopers stabbed one another, strangled one another, went for one another like mad canines? What was it that we, who had nothing towards them personally, fought with them to the very finish in demise?
“We have been civilised folks in any case, however I felt that the tradition we boasted a lot about is barely a really skinny lacquer, which chips off the very second we are available in contact with merciless issues like actual conflict.
“To fireplace at one another from a distance, to drop bombs, is one thing impersonal. However to see one another’s whites within the eyes after which to run with a bayonet towards a person – that was towards my conception and towards my inside feeling.”
In Historical past is a sequence which makes use of the BBC’s distinctive audio and video archive to discover historic occasions that also resonate at this time.
