European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

We agreed before we became soldiers

we would never shoot somebody who had been said to be an enemy.

We would shoot into the air, we would never shoot anybody, except in self defence.

I kept going on with my illegal work.

In the military hospital in Tripoli I was approached by an anti-fascist medical group

and an anti-fascist radio operator group,

whether I would be able to get fuses, as in Benghazi some comrades were ready to blow something up.

They had enough explosives, but no fuses.

I had to organize this by taking the alarm post together with two reliable men.

Convalescent soldiers from the military hospital were used for that and there we got the fuses.

A few days later, in Benghazi, a quarter of the biggest ammunition depot the Rommel-army kept in Africa was blown up.

With this a difficult problem emerged:

Six Arabs and one German soldier were shot dead,

who had not participated at all and now the question came up:

“It is your fault that innocent people got shot by the ‘Wehrmacht’!”

It had to be weighed up: Which side has to take the higher blame?

If you don’t do anything against this criminal regime,

if you join in silently, how much are you then to blame?

War costs so many deaths - don’t you have to consider

that even innocent people loose their life in the fight against fascism?