It was a difficult situation to be in, because Russia is a very large place when you are trying to find a small Frikorps. However, we were lucky, as after some time a vehicle belonging to the corps came along, which we managed to stop.
The transport had now come by rail, and a gap had been created in the Russian encirclement of about 500 metres in width. Through this gap it was now possible to slip through with vehicles under cover of darkness.
With it we continued into a deep forest. We were several kilometres in when the vehicle stopped on the road.
Here, almost invisible from the road and completely hidden from the air, there was a camp on both sides of the road, deep among the dense spruces.
Here the corps’ vehicles were hidden together with kitchen wagons, depots of food, spare parts, equipment, and thousands of other things. It was like an entire invisible town of wagons, motorcycles, tents, and people.
There was a constant hum of engines, radios, and so on. A power station had been mounted on a vehicle; it supplied electric light to offices and living areas.
We had an enormous amount of machinery—cars, workshop equipment, radios, telephones, and much more—all built into or transported on vehicles.
We stayed here for one night and were issued the weapons and other equipment we needed, and then we spent a long time talking with our old friends who had arrived with the transports from Posen.
The following day we rode in one of our supply vehicles to the corps’ new positions, which were now on the other side of Biakowo, between that town and Lasnitzi, at a place called Point 33-4.
Near the main road (the Rollbahn), the staff had set up, and from there we were guided on foot out to the H.K.L., which was about half a kilometre from the road.
After reporting to the company commander, who after Boy Hansen’s death was the Danish Obersturmführer Eigil Poulsen, we were assigned back to our old group (1st Platoon, 1st Section), where, after Kling’s death, we now had the Danish Unterscharführer Laursen as group leader.
The rest of the day was spent settling in and greeting old friends.
Our comrades had experienced several heavy battles while we had been away. The night before we arrived, the company had slipped through the forests and around a small village lying directly opposite us, and driven the Russians out of it.
It had come as a surprise to “Ivan” that our men had taken many Russians, who were sitting peacefully in the houses eating (it was only in the early morning hours that they had stormed the town; during the night they had only crept forward in attack formation), including a couple of commissars. They were all taken along as prisoners.
After the Russian positions in this village had been cleared, it became a relatively quiet sector for us, and more than a month passed without direct combat, apart from scattered machine-gun fire, mortar and artillery fire, occasional air raids, and of course the “Stalin organ.”
All of it was not something we paid much attention to, and it caused little or no damage; it mainly served to keep us alert.
The Frikorps was flanked by a unit from the SS Totenkopf Division on the right flank and a Wehrmacht unit on the left. The 2nd Company had the SS Totenkopf Division on its right flank and the 3rd Company on its left, and Peder and I held the company’s far left outpost, with the 3rd Company as our nearest neighbour on the left side.
The terrain was, as usual, forest and open swamp areas. My position lay fairly exposed outside the forest in open ground, but it was well camouflaged with grass and birch twigs.
In the quiet month that now followed, we had it quite pleasant. We received excellent rations, plenty to smoke, and in terms of equipment we lacked nothing.
We all became thoroughly infested with lice by using Russian bunkers, and we never really got rid of them for the rest of our time in Russia.
My group had changed somewhat due to sick, wounded, and fallen comrades, and we had received new men, but they were still good men, and there was a fine comradeship among us.
The new group leader Laursen was a quiet and calm young man. We all got along well with him. He hardly ever gave us orders, but spoke to us in a comradely way about what needed to be done.
One might think there was not much to do, but the day was fully occupied; there were a thousand tasks to attend to. Improvement of positions was part of the daily routine, maintenance of weapons could never be neglected, collecting rations, ammunition, and so on—all of this had to be done, in addition to the constant guard duty at every strongpoint and machine-gun position.