Neitzke

Neitzke is one of Reiter’s fellow soldiers, a practical comrade whose brief appearances connect a clandestine nighttime expedition at Dracula’s castle with the later fighting near Sevastopol. He acts quickly when Reiter mistakes Kruse’s whispered approach for a threat, then accompanies the search through the castle’s concealed passages. Later, he is killed in an attack, a loss that makes the danger surrounding Reiter’s company concrete rather than imagined.

Identity and introduction

Neitzke appears among the comrades sharing a cellar that serves as sleeping quarters. The narrative offers little personal history or physical description of him; instead, it defines him through his conduct among the soldiers. He intervenes when Reiter, startled awake, grabs Kruse by the neck, telling him not to hurt their comrade. Once Reiter lets Kruse go, Neitzke helps bring him into the group’s proposal and the night’s journey through the castle.

The search beneath the castle

Neitzke joins Reiter, Kruse, and Wilke in leaving the cellar and entering a hidden route. Wilke removes an old mirror from a stone wall to uncover the secret passage, and Neitzke supplies a flashlight, which Wilke uses to guide the party. Their progress is uncertain: the passage branches repeatedly, includes numerous stone stairs, and even Wilke loses his way. The men also notice the absence of rats, an unexpected feature of the old castle’s corridors that gives their exploration an unsettling edge without explaining it.

After they have searched for a time, the group turns back, with Kruse leading. At the mirror room, Neitzke and Kruse say goodbye and leave Reiter and Wilke to continue alone. Their separation is practical, not a falling-out: Reiter and Wilke return to the maze because they have not yet found what they were seeking. The episode gives Neitzke a role in the expedition’s first stage, before its most consequential discovery.

Hidden rooms and the castle’s inhabitants

Reiter and Wilke eventually locate a narrow side passage running within the stone walls. Tiny openings in the walls allow them to see into rooms that would otherwise remain concealed. Neitzke is not present for this final stretch, but his participation in the search helps establish the route as a collective undertaking rather than a solitary excursion by Reiter.

Through the openings, Reiter and Wilke see an SS officer writing by candlelight and later observe General Von Berenberg kneeling beside a canopied bed. The general’s posture and expression lead the two watchers to understand that he appears burdened by conscience. Neitzke does not witness these scenes in the narrated account; his earlier departure marks the boundary between the party’s shared exploration and Reiter and Wilke’s private act of observation.

Combat and death

Weeks later, during the attack on Sevastopol, Neitzke and several other members of the company are killed in one of the assaults. The fighting is described as repeated attempts to establish a defensive line under artillery fire, with close combat in the trenches and fresh Russian sailors joining the battle. Neitzke’s death is stated plainly, without an account of its exact circumstances. It stands amid the campaign’s accumulating losses, against a landscape where German and Romanian dead already lie in heaps outside the city.

His death provides a sharp counterpoint to the castle episode. There, Neitzke helps Reiter through a moment of panic and joins him in an uncertain but shared undertaking; on the battlefield, the company’s shared life is broken by an attack that kills him. The narrative gives no separate aftermath or memorial for Neitzke, leaving his loss as one part of the larger wartime toll and of Reiter’s continued exposure to death.