Wehrmacht

The Wehrmacht is the German armed forces in the wartime narrative of 2666, where its organization determines Hans Reiter’s passage from conscription to the eastern campaigns of World War II. The account presents the army not only through ranks, units, and movement across territory, but through the distance between military routine and the violence it carries forward. Reiter’s assignment to infantry, his division’s advance into Poland, and its later march across Soviet territory place his personal trajectory inside a much larger machinery of war.

Organization and Reiter’s Assignment

In 1939, Hans Reiter is drafted into the Wehrmacht. After several months of training, he is assigned to the 310th Regiment, a light infantry regiment based about twenty miles from the Polish border. The 310th, together with the 311th and 312th, belongs to the 79th Light Infantry Division. General Kruger commands the division; it is part of the 10th Infantry Corps under General Von Bohle; and Colonel Von Berenberg commands the regiment. Reiter first serves as an assistant machine-gun operator and is then transferred to an assault company in the 3rd Battalion.

The officer responsible for the second assignment is Captain Paul Gercke, who regards Reiter’s height as an advantage for inspiring respect or fear in exercises and parades, but a liability in actual assault combat. The army’s treatment of Reiter is thus presented through a specific contradiction: a physical feature that can serve a ceremonial purpose may prove ill-suited to the practical demands of the battlefield. Before joining the infantry, Reiter had tried to secure a place on a submarine. Halder encouraged the attempt, but Reiter’s height made him an unlikely candidate for the cramped conditions aboard.

The Invasion of Poland

When the war begins in September, Reiter’s division advances into Poland behind the Panzer and motorized infantry formations that have cleared the way. Its initial march is by forced stages, but the division sees little combat and takes few precautions. The men pass through towns in an orderly fashion, sometimes smiling at children and young women, while motorcycle couriers carry orders between the marching troops and the staffs. The movement has an almost festive surface, at odds with the war toward which the division is advancing.

The first encounters Reiter’s unit expects do not always materialize. At one village, the men cross a river after dark, pass through a forest, and approach what they have been told is a defended settlement. They find it deserted. On another occasion, a Polish detachment holds a bridge and opens fire after the Germans demand its surrender. The fight lasts less than ten minutes, and the battalion suffers only two lightly wounded soldiers. The narrative’s measured account of these early actions emphasizes the irregularity of combat: the regiment moves through stretches of apparent quiet, then meets resistance that is brief but real.

Around this time, beneath the Wehrmacht uniform, Reiter imagines himself wearing the clothing of a madman. The thought cuts across the outward order of the campaign without turning his experience into a simple explanation of what he sees. His unease develops alongside the army’s movement, as routine marching and military designation coexist with a private perception of disorder.

The Eastern Campaign

The German attack on the Soviet Union begins on June 22, 1941. The 79th Division is attached to the 11th German Army, and its advance troops cross the Prut River with Romanian forces. The division’s progress is slower than that of the more heavily resourced formations of Army Group South. It has fewer human and material resources, faces difficult terrain and a scarcity of roads, and cannot depend on the element of surprise that benefited other army groups.

The narrative follows the division’s route across a succession of named geographical thresholds: it crosses the Prut, fights in Bessarabia, crosses the Dniester, reaches the outskirts of Odessa, and continues across the Bug. As it advances, Ukrainian villages, granaries, and woods are left burning. These fires punctuate the account of the march, but their cause is not established. Reiter asks Wilke who is setting the woods alight. Wilke, Neitzke, Kruse, and Sergeant Lemke deny that their own men are responsible for the fires in the woods, even while acknowledging that the troops have burned or bombed villages. The soldiers offer possible explanations involving other German units, but the narrative supplies no confirmation. The uncertainty is part of the episode, not a mystery it resolves.

Military Routine and the Meaning of Violence

The 79th is described as a light infantry division that moves under its own power, with mules drawing heavy equipment and soldiers walking and fighting. Wilke compares its forced marches and countermarches to Napoleonic warfare, observing that the division’s organization seems untouched by the idea of lightning war. That contrast gives the campaign a material scale: the advance depends not only on strategic labels and command structures, but on exhausted men, animals, equipment, roads, and repeated marches.

The fires bring that ground-level perspective into uneasy contact with the army’s larger operations. The troops see dark woods burning amid fields, yet cannot say who set them alight. They have witnessed their own unit’s violence against settlements, but distinguish it from the unexplained destruction around them. The Wehrmacht narrative therefore refuses a clean separation between organized military action and what soldiers cannot, or will not, account for. Its institutional history is conveyed through concrete formations and routes, while Reiter’s unease and the unresolved fires expose the limits of what the marching men understand about the violence accompanying their advance.