True Soldier Stories

"Courage is the ability to move; when all around you are frozen in fear
and no one would blame you if you did nothing at all." Capt. Click. Phx. PD

My Name is Horst Kurt Hilbert

Taken from the book Think About it... for your reading convenience

I was born July 10th 1919, in Leipzig, Saxony, Germany. I served in the 75th Infantry, 13th Company of the German Army during WWII and served on the Russian front. I was LDS then too. There were about 600 Mormons who were killed in Hitler’s Army in WWII. We tried to keep track of each other, but I never knew any others besides myself. I fought on the Russian front. One day we were clearing a small Russian village. I can’t remember the name, there were so many. We were going house to house. The unofficial order was to kill whoever we found, but not everyone followed that. I came to a cellar door. I opened it and inside was a woman with her two children. She was trying to hide them from me. She was holding them behind her. Terror was on the woman’s face. Her two children had their arms wrapped around the woman’s legs and were peering out from behind her dress. In front of the woman was a half bottle of milk. The woman picked up the milk and offered it to me that I might take it instead of their lives. As I stood there, my rifle still pointed at the woman, I said,

                “Woman, your children need that milk more than I do.
                                                    ...and I shut the cellar door, and walked on.”

I had a friend in my outfit that had a Jewish girlfriend. When the SS found out about it, they took him and told him he could either choose to die by shooting himself or they would hang him. I didn’t ask what the soldier chose! I was told about a 17 year old LDS boy that was taken out of school by the SS and beheaded with an ax for speaking out against Hitler. That story is also documented in the book, Mormonism in Germany by Gilbert Scharffs, p102 and 103. Hitler pushed us to the limit! Many soldiers had it up to here with Hitler. [hand leveled to chin]

In December of 1941 it got very cold. My unit had to march to the village of Melichowo, 30
kilometers north of Belgorod. There we had to establish an outpost and hold it. That day, December 6, the temperature dropped to about minus 45 degrees. I did not have any gloves nor warm underwear, only a summer coat. Many soldiers got injured by frostbite or even worse. They lost their ears if not their legs. My buddies demanded of me to drink alcohol to keep myself from getting sick. I asked for one more day to stay away from alcohol, and the next day they were sick and I was still healthy. They quit trying to force me to drink. And I did not have to break the Word of Wisdom.

One early morning, the 6th of January 1942, I had to stand guard duty with a buddy, Hans Plank. We were standing beside a little shack, the straw roof covered with snow. A Russian machine gun started to shoot at us. I could see the tracers hitting the ground before my feet, skipping off to the sky. Other rounds hit the straw roof and I could see the bullets hitting rows of holes making the snow coming down like sugar coming out of a bowl. I was very afraid and since I was forbidden to leave the post, I wanted to pray. I could feel the power of the destroyer. But I could not utter one word of prayer. My tongue felt like paralyzed. To think, that the first words in my life were prayers on my mother’s lap. All I was able to say:

              “...if my mother could pray for me right now,
                                  so the Lord might hear the prayer of a righteous woman!”

With this thought I looked to the east and felt prompted to look north. When I did this and turned, a bullet passed and in passing hit the coat at my stomach. Had I not turned, it would have struck my stomach. After this incident the shooting stopped. Some days later I received a letter from my mother. In this letter she wrote me, that in the night of January 6, she woke up hearing me calling her "Mama," also she heard the sound of shooting. She got up quickly, woke up my four sisters and said:

            “We have to pray fast, Horst is in mortal danger and needs our prayer!
                       The five women knelt down, and my mother pleaded with the Lord
       to keep His protecting hand over me. After the prayer my mother told
                     my sisters to go back to sleep and be of good cheer.
                                  Horst has been in danger, and the Lord has helped him.”

In Besdrick the war was kind of quiet, the Russians were regrouping and preparing for their next big offensive. We had to man an observation post in a house outside the village, on a hilltop. I got a turn of two hours a day. An old man was living there. He looked like a patriarch. Old with long whiskers and his appearance was of noble design. One day he took a Russian printed Bible from a hiding place. It was forbidden to the Russian people to have a Bible in their possession, or at least they faced insult and ridicule. So the old man read in the Bible, and he came to me, tears in his eyes, and showed a passage to me. I could not read it, but my heart was moved by so much faithfulness. I said to him, "Read the Bible, and the Lord will be with you." Suddenly he knelt down and invited me to kneel down with him. He first prayed in Russian and then I prayed in German. After this we got up and after Russian custom, he kissed my cheeks and called me brother.

In July 1943 it got hot in more ways than one. The battle of Kursk was on. In the course of two months the Germans had a casualty list of more than 400,000. The feeling of having been sold out, to be senselessly sacrificed, made itself known to many men. And yet, there were a number of fanatics who believed everything what the German propaganda fed them. On the evening of August 14, 1943, as we were moving to a new position, we found a wounded Russian soldier by the wayside. One fellow, his name was Hugo Panten, took his machine pistol and held it on the head of this Russian. I immediately pushed the muzzle aside and said to him, ‘This man is wounded, we are soldiers and not murderers.’ He said to me ‘You and your sentimentalities will not win the war for us.

I answered "You and your senseless cruelty will not win it either." Then I picked up the Russian. He begged for water, and I was sad that I did not have a drop with me. We went to the next road crossing where the field kitchens might come by and will help him. I said a short prayer for him and told him, that I have to go on. I feel the Lord has seen it, for two days later I got the answer directly from this incident. On the 16th of August 1943 I was standing at an somewhat elevated railway track, talking to a friend, Otto Becker. Suddenly I saw a big flame to my right, maybe ten feet away. Then I felt like having evil smelling smoke pressed into my mouth and felt a hard blow on my right side. When I tried to assess my situation, I found myself laying on the ground with a terrible pain, all at the same time, in my head, right arm, shoulder, breast, stomach and hind part.

                             Blood was streaming all over me,
                                                   ...I had been hit by a mortar shell.

Otto Becker got one piece of metal in his neck, and was killed instantly. I got about 30 pieces, and I was luckier. But at that moment I did not know, whether I will die or be a cripple, or if the
Germans, who were getting ready to give up the position in a hurry, will take me with them or leave me. And what kind of Russian will I meet, one like Hugo Panten or a better one. Two buddies put me in a blanket and carried me to a first aid station. There I saw rows of wounded soldiers. The doctor gave me a tetanus and a morphine shot and put me on the next ambulance. It was a bumpy ride and it hurt. I could not afford the luxury to pass out. Soon I came to a field hospital, was put on a table, and a doctor took several shrapnell out of my body, all without anesthesia. But I did not mind. Then I was taken to a hospital train, got a place on the floor, covered with straw and the train soon took off for a ride to Kiev. When I looked around me and saw the mangled bodies, I felt grateful that my injuries were not that serious.

One day after the war on a Sunday morning I was stopped by the Communist Police because they always saw me in a suit carrying a small bag on Sundays. They demanded to know what was in my bag. I gave it to them for inspection. They pulled out my Bible and in looking at it, they demanded;

              “What is this good for!’ I replied, ‘It is good for you to read!’
                                       They tossed it back into my bag and told me to be off!”

Authors Note: Horst Hilbert is a friend of mine and has since passed away since he gave me his story. But when he was alive, one of the many things he told me was this about freedom.

                       “Freedom can be compared to health.
                                        If you have never been deprived of it,
                                you are in danger of losing the appreciation for both.”


                                                                                                 Horst Kurt Hilbert

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