The Outermost Frontier

• 'A German masterpiece - the posthumous diary of a young soldier, Helmut Pabst. Written at grave risk, it told of day-to-day events including the most horrifying, with a simplicity that could move one to tears' The Observer
• 'A diary of the Russian campaign from July 1941 to September 1943, when Pabst was killed' Samuel Hynes, New York Times
• Memoirs by ordinary soldiers on the Eastern Front are incredibly rare.

Ordinary German soldier, Helmut Pabst, was one of the thirty-million combatants of the Eastern Front campaign, the largest and bloodiest military confrontation in history. The thirty-year-old, former law student would fight his way across nearly a thousand miles of hostile Russian territory. The Outermost Frontier is Helmut's secret diary of his experiences, written by candlelight in the numerous dugouts he rested in from the launch of Operation Barbarossa to the day before he fell in battle in September 1943. Helmut's unit was part of Army Group Centre, and forged a devastating path due East battling the Red Army at Bialystok, Smolensk, Vyazma, and the 'Meat Grinder' of Rzhev. Helmut chronicles the firefights, the endless marching, the freezing Russian winters, day-to-day life in dugouts, trenches and observations posts, and the constant scavenging for food and supplies. It is an extraordinary, visceral, first-hand account of the bitter fighting on the Russian Front.

About the Author

Helmut Pabst was born in 1911 and studied law at Frankfurt. Already a veteran of the Battle of France, he served on the Eastern Front from the very first day of Operation Barbarossa with the Infantry Regiment 427, 129 Infantry Division, part of the German 9th Army. Helmut acted as a forward observer and radio operator of an artillery unit providing close-range fire-support to the German infantry. His diary was written in a detailed series of letters he sent to his father, who had himself fought on the Eastern Front during the First World War. Helmut died sometime in the second half of September 1943 in an in obscure and unrecorded action on the retreat from Briansk along the Moscow-Minsk highway in the north-west of modern-day Belarus. His diary was first published posthumously in German in 1953, and then in 1957 in English translation.

About the Translator & Editor

Andrew Wilson, MC, was an English journalist and writer whose career spanned the Daily Express, the BBC World Service to his long-term home at The Observer. Born in Herne Bay, Kent he volunteered on his 18th birthday and served in the Buffs (Royal East Kent Regiment) becoming a captain commanding a troop of Churchill Crocodile flame-throwing tanks from D-Day through France, Holland and into Germany. After the war he read PPE at Oxford University and embarked on his almost 40-year journalism career. He wrote several books including his first-hand account of his experiences as a tank commander, Flame Thrower, and as co-translator of Helmut Pabst's Eastern Front memoir, The Outermost Frontier: A German Soldier in the Russian Campaign. He was awarded a PhD in military history from the Catholic University of Leuven in 2009. He died in 2020 aged 97.

From the Diary

'My magazine was quickly empty. I jumped on them and managed to stop a couple, including the patrol leader... No more prisoners are being taken in the front line.'

'You can avoid bullets, if you know how. And believe me, I've got a nose for flying metal.'

'Suddenly there was the sigh of the treacherous mortars once more, and the howl of high-velocity shells. The man at the machine-gun tore back the cocking handle and fired burst after burst. At the same time the Heavies were searching for our gun positions. One of our batteries replied. To the left, on the edge of a wood, an enemy patrol was being wiped out with grenades.'