'I realised that he was after my life': A WW1 soldier on the brutality of conflict

World War One broke out on 28 July, 1914. Fifty years later, one of the German soldiers, Stefan Westmann, told the BBC about his experiences fighting in the conflict.

World War One broke out on 28 July 1914. To mark its 50th anniversary in 1964, the BBC made The Great War, an ambitious history of the cataclysmic conflict. One of the 280 eyewitness interviewees was a German soldier who gave a harrowing and unforgettable account of what it feels like to be forced to kill.

Warning: The following article, and video clip, contain graphic descriptions that some readers and viewers might find upsetting.

Stefan Westmann was a medical student who before the war had barely even used a scalpel. A few months later, Westmann and his German comrades were on a battlefield attacking a French position when he came eyeball-to-eyeball with an enemy soldier. Both clutched their bayonets in dread of what must happen next.

"For a moment I felt the fear of death, and in a fraction of a second I realised that he was after my life exactly as I was after his," he said.

"I was quicker than he was. I tossed his rifle away and I ran my bayonet through his chest. He fell, put his hand on the place where I had hit him, and then… he died. I felt physically ill. I nearly vomited. My knees were shaking, and I was quite frankly ashamed of myself."

In 1964, by then a grandfather with a distinguished medical career behind him, Westmann was transported back in his mind to that field in France to relive a trauma that remained raw.

Before the war, Westmann had been studying medicine in Berlin. While his fellow soldiers also had unremarkable backgrounds – "ordinary people who never would have sought to do any harm to anyone" – he said they had not seemed disturbed by the violence they had inflicted.

"How did it come about that they were so cruel?" he said. "I remembered then that we were told that the good soldier kills without thinking of his adversary as a human being. The very moment he sees in him a fellow man, he is not a good soldier anymore."

Westmann said he had wished the dead French soldier could have raised his hand and shown he was still alive. "I would have shaken his hand and we would have been the best of friends,because he was nothing, like me, but a poor boy who had to fight, who had to go in with the most cruel weapons against a man who had nothing against him personally, who only wore the uniform of another nation, who spoke another language, but a man who had a father and a mother and a family perhaps."

After the end of the war, Westmann resumed his medical career in Berlin. He left Germany after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 and settled in England. During World War Two, he was a British medical officer in Scotland, meaning he served on opposite sides in the two world wars. Shortly before his death in 1964, he wrote a memoir, Surgeon with the Kaiser's Army. His grandson Michael Westman revised the book in 2014.

A 24-part series, The Great War was a landmark commission for BBC Two, the corporation's new cultural channel. As well as featuring veterans who had written books and other prominent figures, the popular Tonight programme invited its older viewers to come forward and share their experiences. Sacks of mail flooded in, brimful with all sorts of mementoes such as diaries, medals and even tobacco tins.

Many of the interviews were conducted by researcher Julia Cave, who in 2003 remembered how difficult it had been. She said: "Nobody who wasn't in that war could know what it was like, nobody could imagine the terror of sitting in a trench, going over the top, and what would happen to you and these terrible things. Sometimes men just got lost in the world that they had fought in."

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The original interview rushes were resurfaced and restored for the 2014 BBC documentary I Was There: The Great War Stories, bringing them to new generations untouched by war. Some testimonies were featured in Peter Jackson's poignant 2018 documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, which sought to bring World War One to life by injecting colour and sound into grainy old black-and-white footage. Even without such modern film-making technology, their words alone have the power to stop you in your tracks.

Westmann said he was still haunted by nightmares, wondering what might have happened if that young French soldier had been quicker with his bayonet.

"What was it that we soldiers stabbed each other, strangled each other, went for each other like mad dogs? What was it that we, who had nothing against them personally, fought with them to the very end in death?

"We were civilised people after all, but I felt that the culture we boasted so much about is only a very thin lacquer, which chips off the very moment we come in contact with cruel things like real war.

"To fire at each other from a distance, to drop bombs, is something impersonal. But to see each other's whites in the eyes and then to run with a bayonet against a man – that was against my conception and against my inner feeling."

In History is a series which uses the BBC's unique audio and video archive to explore historical events that still resonate today.

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