Helmut Walz: A German Soldier

Words of Helmut Walz, a german soldier: “On the day when I was wounded, that was the 17th October 1942, we went towards the red barricades. I think it was a metallurgical factory, and behind it was a gun factory. And what else was there? There was also - what do you call it - a steelworks? Yeah, that’s the Red October steelworks. And we were outside. That’s where the rubble field was. You had bomb craters and grenade craters and nothing else. So we fought our way to the factory yard of the red barricade. Schaubel runs with his machine gun as if he was on the parade ground. He had the machine gun shouldered and he just keeps on running straight. Then he was shot and fell into a grenade crater or a bomb crater. There he lies and I had to take care that I could get towards him without being shot. So I listened out whether they were still shooting, and for one or two seconds it was quiet, so I jumped over it into the crater towards him, and I saw that his mouth was all dirty and his nose as well. So I wiped that away and then I said to him, ‘Schaubel, you are seriously injured.’ And he said, ‘Yes, yes, and now I will be taken back home, now I’ll be brought back home.’ And that’s when I saw that he had bullet holes and exit wounds and bullet wounds and exit holes at the back. And you could see his lungs …show more content…
Lyudmila M. Pavlichenko was the top-scoring woman sniper of all time, with 309 confirmed kills, of which 36 were enemy snipers. A rifle club sharpshooter before the war, she had worked as a grinder at the Kiev Arsenal and earned a Master’s degree in history. Wounded in June 1942, she was pulled out of combat and sent on a propaganda tour of the U.S., Canada, and Great Britain, becoming the first Soviet citizen welcomed at the White House by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Woody Guthrie even wrote her a