79th Light Infantry Division

The 79th Light Infantry Division is the German formation that carries Hans Reiter through successive fronts of World War II, from the approach to Poland and the quiet months facing the Maginot Line to Romania and the invasion of the Soviet Union. Its movements organize a large portion of Reiter’s wartime trajectory: he is drafted into its 310th Regiment, assigned first to machine-gun support and then to an assault company, and eventually wounded in Crimea. He survives, receives the Iron Cross, and remains unable to speak after treatment for a throat wound. The division’s name thus belongs both to military chronology and to the intimate record of what war does to the person moving through it.

Formation and Reiter’s Assignment

In 1939, after several months of training, Reiter was drafted into the 310th Regiment, one of three regiments in the 79th Light Infantry Division. At the time, the division was commanded by General Kruger and formed part of the 10th Infantry Corps. The regiment, commanded by Colonel Von Berenberg, consisted of three battalions; Reiter served in the 3rd Battalion, initially as an assistant machine-gun operator and later in an assault company.

Before joining the infantry, Reiter had tried to obtain a place on a submarine. His height—six feet five—made that ambition impractical, and it also shaped Captain Paul Gercke’s assessment of him as an assault soldier. Gercke thought Reiter’s size might inspire fear in drills and parades, but would be a liability in real combat, where a shorter, lighter soldier could move more effectively. The assignment places Reiter’s unusual physical scale inside the practical logic of the division: a feature that seems useful in display is judged differently under fire.

From Poland to the Maginot Line

The division was stationed about twenty miles from the Polish border. Reiter took part in fighting around Kutno, where a German attack on a farm and another in a forest caused casualties, but he himself was unharmed. A sergeant later described him as strangely difficult for the opposing side to hit, though he did not explain this as a change in Reiter’s conduct or as a trance. The account leaves the quality of Reiter’s survival unresolved rather than turning it into a clear military skill or supernatural power.

Before the end of September 1939, the division was transferred by train to the western border and joined the rest of the 10th Infantry Corps. From October through June 1940, it remained in place near the Maginot Line, concealed in forests and orchards. The long pause contrasts with the division’s later forced marches: the soldiers listened to the radio, ate, drank beer, wrote letters, and slept, while rumors of a future advance toward the French fortifications circulated among them. The campaign’s quiet interval is not an independent escape from war but a waiting period organized by the prospect of renewed fighting.

Transfer to Romania

The division’s next movement came when leave was canceled without warning. Reiter’s battalion, then at Besneville, joined other battalions of the 310th Regiment at St-Sauveur-le-Vicomte and Bricquebec. The troops traveled east by military train, joined a train carrying the 311th Regiment in Paris, and crossed Germany and Hungary before reaching Romania. The 79th had been reassigned to a new corps, the 49th, which at that point consisted of a single division.

The division’s forces were distributed near the Soviet frontier and the new Hungarian border; Reiter’s battalion was stationed in the Carpathians. Headquarters were in Bucharest, and General Kruger, now commanding the corps, and General Von Berenberg, promoted to command the division, periodically visited the troops to inspect their preparation. Reiter was now far from the sea and temporarily gave up the idea of deserting. The account sets the division’s military geography against his private attachment to the sea: a change of station changes not only the front but also the possibility he had imagined for himself.

The Soviet Campaign

On June 22, 1941, the attack on the Soviet Union began. The 79th was attached to the 11th German Army. Its advance troops crossed the Prut alongside Romanian army corps, whose fighting spirit exceeded German expectations. The division’s progress was slower than that of Army Group South, in part because its resources were smaller and the region offered difficult terrain and few roads. It nevertheless crossed Bessarabia, passed the Dniester, reached the outskirts of Odessa, crossed the Bug, and continued east while fighting retreating Soviet troops.

The text emphasizes the division’s reliance on movement by foot. As a light infantry formation, it depended on soldiers and mules rather than the speed suggested by the broader language of mechanized warfare. Its soldiers marched repeatedly across the countryside, through areas where villages, granaries, and woods were burning. Reiter and other soldiers questioned who was setting the fires, but they did not establish an answer. The division’s advance therefore appears not as a clean sequence of mapped victories but as a physical passage through a landscape whose destruction exceeds the soldiers’ understanding.

The fighting continued toward Crimea and the siege of Sevastopol. Reiter was wounded during this period, after standing in the trenches and looking toward the distant city. The division’s campaign proceeds around his injury, but the injury sharply interrupts his participation: the soldier who had crossed long distances under his own power is removed from the front and sent through military hospitals.

Wounding, Award, and Aftermath

Two weeks after Reiter was wounded, he received the Iron Cross at a field hospital in Novoselivske. A colonel presented it and cited outstanding reports of his actions at Chornomorske and Mykolaivka. Reiter could not speak during the presentation because a bullet had pierced his throat. His chest wound healed, and after transfer to a larger hospital at Krivoy Rog he underwent another operation on his throat. He could eat normally and move his neck again, but still could not talk.

The doctors considered whether to send him back to Germany or return him to his division, which remained engaged in the siege of Sevastopol and Kerch. Winter and a Soviet counterattack that overran parts of the German line delayed the decision; ultimately, Reiter was neither sent home nor reinstated with his unit. Since he could not remain in hospital, he was sent with three other wounded members of the 79th to Kostekino, a small settlement on the Dnieper. His separation from the division is therefore neither a chosen departure nor a straightforward recovery: the military situation and his condition leave him suspended between front-line service and return to civilian life.

Narrative Role

The division’s history is told through changes of station, pauses, marches, and reversals rather than through a continuous account of its institutional life. The narrative names its command structure and attachments, but gives most weight to what those orders mean for Reiter: where he is sent, what sort of movement the terrain demands, and whether he can return after being wounded. The division is at once a concrete military organization and the framework that exposes the difference between the institutional recognition of a soldier and his damaged capacity to resume service.

Its route also links several distinct modes of wartime experience. Near the Maginot Line, the division waits; in Romania, it prepares; in the east, it advances on foot through a changing front; in Crimea, Reiter’s injury removes him from the fighting. The Iron Cross affirms the military record of his actions, while his continuing mutism makes the consequences of that record impossible to reduce to an award or a transfer order. The 79th Light Infantry Division’s importance in the novel lies in this conjunction of large-scale movement and individual interruption.