Crimea is the setting for the most consequential campaign in Hans Reiter’s wartime trajectory: a succession of battles in which he repeatedly risks death, is wounded at Sevastopol, and emerges unable to speak. The peninsula is both a military landscape and the ground on which his longing for an end meets the stubborn continuation of his life.

Campaign Across the Peninsula

After crossing the Bug and the Dnieper, the 79th Infantry Division advanced into Crimea. Reiter fought at Perekop and in nearby villages whose names he never learned, clearing bodies from the streets and ordering older people, women, and children to stay indoors. His participation in these operations is set against a private wish for death: he sometimes threw himself into assaults without taking precautions, acquiring a reputation for daring and bravery even though he hoped a bullet would bring peace to his heart.

The danger did not remain an abstraction. During the fighting at Chornomorske, Reiter’s battalion was involved in the division’s advance, and he came close to death at least twice. In the first episode, his company lacked mortar rounds and called for volunteers to storm a brick fort near Kirovske. Reiter stepped forward first. As he and Voss advanced along the fort’s left flank, rifle fire came from inside. Reiter kept running despite bullets passing close to him; Voss eventually pulled him down, and the attack continued until the fort was destroyed by grenades thrown from the other flank.

In the second Chornomorske episode, Reiter’s battalion entered the attack’s second wave after the initial assault had been repulsed. The soldiers crossed barbed wire under fire and passed through a field and a garden, where an old man watched from a small window. They then encountered five Soviet soldiers dragging a field gun; the Germans killed them and continued. The sequence places Reiter’s exposure to danger amid the forward movement of a larger military operation, rather than as an isolated act of individual courage.

Sevastopol and Reiter’s Wounding

The third near-fatal episode occurs weeks later in the attack on Sevastopol. German advances were repeatedly driven back, and the city’s artillery struck the troops as they tried to establish defensive lines. Reiter fought near trenches held by Russian sailors, whose presence he experienced as ominous: he imagined that one of them would kill him and that he would disappear into the sea. The sea thus becomes part of the way he understands death, a destination beyond the battle rather than merely a feature of the military terrain.

During one night in the trenches, Reiter stood upright and looked toward Sevastopol, which appeared in the distance as a dark mass punctuated by flashes. Sergeant Lemke ordered him down. Reiter removed his helmet and scratched his head; before he could put the helmet back on, a bullet struck him, followed by another in the chest. The wound ended his active fighting and turned the campaign’s repeated danger into a lasting physical consequence.

Hospitalization and Departure from Crimea

Two weeks later, Reiter received the Iron Cross at a field hospital in Novoselivske. The colonel presenting it praised reports of Reiter’s actions at Chornomorske and Mykolaivka. Reiter could not answer: one bullet had pierced his throat. After his chest wound healed, he was transferred from the Crimean Peninsula to a larger hospital in Krivoy Rog, where surgeons operated on his throat again. He could eat normally and move his neck as before, but he remained unable to speak.

The doctors could not decide whether to grant him leave to return to Germany or send him back to his division, which was still involved in the siege of Sevastopol and Kerch. Winter and a Soviet counterattack that overran parts of the German line delayed the decision. In the end, Reiter was neither returned to Germany nor reinstated in his unit. His departure from Crimea was therefore not a straightforward homecoming or a return to combat: the wound left him suspended between those possibilities.

Narrative Significance

Crimea marks a reversal in Reiter’s wartime story. He enters its battles seeking a death he does not take steps to avoid, yet survives several near-fatal encounters and receives official recognition for the very conduct driven by that wish. The Iron Cross confirms his military distinction, while his inability to speak makes the cost of survival unmistakable. The campaign therefore binds public reputation to private despair without treating them as the same thing.

The peninsula’s significance also rests in the way Reiter’s experience shifts from combat to silence. His wound removes him from his division, interrupts the expected choice between returning to Germany and rejoining the siege, and begins the period of uncertain displacement that follows. Crimea is not simply a backdrop to his military service; it is where the desire to disappear gives way to an enforced inability to speak, while life continues along a course he had not chosen.