20. German POW in Russia. Source: Ruth Bulwin, Spätes Echo.
During the dissolution of the Wehrmacht, young soldiers desperately tried to avoid being killed in the final battles or being taken into captivity by the victors. If they were stationed close to home, they could hope to escape the military police who shot deserters, as well as the advancing enemy forces, which were focused more on military targets than on taking prisoners. When sixteen-year-old flak gunner Martin Greiffenhagen heard officers plot their withdrawal into private life, he “decided to end the war” too, by shedding his uniform. Putting on shorts and a colorful shirt made it possible for the harmless-looking teenager to simply walk home. Joachim Fest’s brother Winfried managed “a small escape” of his own by going into hiding when he received his call-up papers. Caught by the Gestapo and marched toward a safer prison, he suddenly threw himself down a slope, ran away, and hid from the search party.7 Other, older soldiers also shed their uniforms, dropped their weapons, and shredded their service records in order to reemerge as civilians.
Even after having been officially captured, some Wehrmacht troops managed to escape from the chaos of improvised POW camps. Fearing retribution, SS officer Rolf Bulwin ignored the order “to go voluntarily to a collection point” in northern Bohemia. Stopped during a patrol by the lights of a Russian truck, he leapt into the shadows and hid in a succession of barns. Bulwin walked at night and eluded all checkpoints for ten days. He barely escaped renewed capture several times while struggling toward Rudolstadt in Thuringia. With exceptional luck and daring, he actually made it back to his wife by hiding his Soviet POW identification card (image 20). When baker Gerhard Baucke realized that he was destined to become a slave laborer in Russia, he likewise decided that, although he liked his Soviet captors, “I must get away from here.” He used a drive to the black market during a torrential thunderstorm to jump out of their truck in Berlin, duck into the subway, and walk freely to his home. After hiding for a while with a friend of his father’s, he hired on with the US Army, thereby getting the papers necessary for receiving food and housing.8
The great majority of the Wehrmacht soldiers, however, became prisoners of war during the final battles or as a result of surrender. Defending the Remagen bridge across the Rhine, Joachim Fest “almost bumped into an American GI who was holding his submachine gun at the ready and instantly started shouting, ‘Hands up! Come on! Hands up, boy!’” Utterly surprised, Fest obeyed, dropped his weapons, and went into captivity. Similarly, Karl Härtel “suddenly ran into about ten Amis [US soldiers] who held their machine-pistols ready in their hands.” Using the surprise, he quickly shouted “Don’t shut we surrender” [sic] as instructed by American leaflets and thereby remained unharmed. By contrast, on May 7 Horst Andrée’s commander announced the capitulation of the Wehrmacht in Italy to his troops and explained: “Every soldier is relieved of his duty and can try to get home. But those who stay have to go into American captivity with all the others.” Far from home and attached to their comrades, they had no choice but to risk becoming POWs.9
Most German soldiers wanted to go into American custody in the hope that treatment would be better and release would come more quickly. On the Eastern Front, a mass migration developed trying to reach the Elbe River, which marked the border of the US zone. Seeking to cross the icy water, Martin Sieg built a small raft. It capsized, but several black GIs dragged him to shore and their campfire and revived him—a surprising gesture of humanity. Others, such as Karl Härtel, fared less well in US captivity, losing their watches, sleeping in tents on muddy soil, and receiving only minimal food. An American lieutenant with a Palatinate accent shouted at Fest, “You Nazi louts will have to get used to the fact that you’ll have no say about anything now.” Horst Andrée experienced the whole gamut from a relaxed imprisonment to a merciless captivity, commanded by a Jewish officer bent on revenge.10 Some of the appalling conditions in the Rhine meadows camps were simply the result of the US Army’s being unprepared for handling up to two million POWs.
According to many testimonies, imprisonment by the Americans was nonetheless the best of the lot. Treatment there was less brutal. The fresh captives were debriefed by US intelligence officers like Tom Angress—often themselves refugees—and then checked for SS membership. (Himmler’s guards were subjected to more punitive handling.) Wehrmacht prisoners such as Karl Härtel were astounded by the informality, loose discipline, good health, and ample supplies of their captors. Finding it hard to understand how such soft “Yanks” could have defeated the battle-hardened Wehrmacht soldiers, he attributed their victory to superior resources. After the POWs were transferred to established camps, most were happy to be well-fed, decently housed, and allowed to compete in sports. When reeducation lectures and camp journals promoted a critical view of the Third Reich, some irreconcilables defended “Hitler’s greatness,” while others denounced the “idiotic war.”11 When Joachim Fest was recaptured in France after an escape attempt, his punishment of six weeks in a cage was relatively light.
A British camp was also acceptable, for the treatment was correct, even if the resources were less abundant. Horst Andrée reported a happy camp life in Italy in which “all institutions like kitchen, clothing supply and shoemaking were run by German prisoners.” To escape boredom, the lightly guarded prisoners played cards, chess, and soccer. POWs were even allowed to go to the beach and fraternize with Italian farmers. Though living in tents, they had “all the conveniences, a theater and movie house.” There was even “a kind of university in which captive German professors gave lectures.” By contrast, in North Germany “terrible hunger arrived with the British.” Because escaping POWs were shot, Martin Sieg volunteered for agricultural labor, for which he would be released. Erich Helmer faked being a chemist to get his walking papers, while Horst Andrée aggravated an irregular heartbeat so as to be discharged for medical reasons. Robert Neumaier got out of a miserable British camp by altering his military record and jumping from a POW train.12
French imprisonment was tougher yet, for the destroyed country was poorer and hostility toward Germans consequently greater. “As putative chief victim of the war, which it had declared, France needed cheap slave laborers for the rebuilding of the thinly settled country.” As one of about two million soldiers imprisoned there for several years after the war, Karl Härtel loathed the camp in Poitiers. He wrote, “We suffer much from the unacceptable hygienic conditions, the complete lack of drinking water and a starvation diet, which is far below the minimum for existence, in a totally overcrowded tent city in almost subtropical temperatures.” To counteract depression, he filled out forms in the camp administration and attended lectures by a professional mathematician. Later on, in Le Pallice, he seized the chance to volunteer as technical draftsman and helped to “draw a series of wiring diagrams” of the German U-510 submarine, restored by the French Navy. Though this job improved his condition and his engineering skill, he remained bitter about being cooped up for so long.13
Wehrmacht soldiers captured by the Russians expected brutal treatment, which inspired them to flee if they could. Frisked and forced to bury corpses, eye doctor Günter Gros had to watch women being “dragged in a beastly manner into the woods and raped. We hear[d] their cries and calls for aid, unable to help.” When he was about to be transported to the Soviet Union, he stayed behind in an abandoned factory building and walked for three weeks on aching feet, crossed several rivers, and evaded patrols until he finally reached his home in Giessen. Similarly, while en route to Russia, truck driver Paul Frenzel used a knife and cramp iron to pry away a rotten board of the cattle car, open the door, and jump out of the train. Landing in Transylvania, he begged for food, clothing, and advice from Hungarian farmers and managed to walk over two thousand kilometers. He was able to fool Russian patrols by posing as a shepherd, escaped renewed capture by the United States, and finally reached his East German hometown.14
Captivity in the Soviet Union was even more lethal becaus
e the living standard was lower and resentment against Nazi atrocities stronger. The lives of POWs were cheap due to the destruction, poverty and corruption of a Stalinist system with its own internal gulag where millions of prisoners were incarcerated. Captured in Bohemia, Gerhard Krapf was initially taken to Auschwitz, where, in an irony of history, Wehrmacht soldiers were collected. He found “that being bereft of the most basic freedom of movement was the single most wearying aspect of imprisonment.” As a wounded officer, he was initially better off, but soon he was put to work digging coal in a mine, working at a breakneck Stakhanovite pace on inadequate food. Shipped to a series of different camps, Krapf experienced “a distressing existential pattern of hunger, boredom, hunger, exhaustion, hunger, fading hope of repatriation,” and so on. Only his Christian faith and dedication to music kept him alive, until by chance he was selected to fill a homebound quota for a rejected SS man after three years of imprisonment, weighing only ninety pounds.15
In spite of much “unrestrained hatred,” a few prisoners were so fortunate as to experience exceptional moments of humanity. Air force trainee Horst Grothus was captured in the East and transported to Gorkij in the Soviet Union. Tormented by lack of food and water, he was horrified by the “general neglect” that reduced Russians to spiritless automatons. After unloading barges, he had to lay electrical cables and sort scrap metal in a tank factory. The Soviet commander raked off profits and resold food meant for the prisoners. The condition of the POWs deteriorated rapidly so that many succumbed to starvation. While unpacking a freight train, Grothus’ shoes caught under a rail and a freight car rolled over his ankles. After stopping the hemorrhage, a Soviet doctor who had himself lost a leg amputated both of the young man’s feet, reassuring him, “you should not be sad. You will be able to walk again.” Only through the subsequent care of several nurses did he survive a series of other diseases and begin to grow ashamed of seeing “the vestiges of the German atrocities.”16
One lifeline during extended captivity was correspondence with home, which reassured POWs as well as families that their loved ones were alive. The collapse of the civilian postal system, the changes of address due to bombing and flight, and the prohibitions against prisoners writing letters had kept husbands and wives in the dark about each other’s fate at the end of the war. Even if its content was rather banal, Karl Härtel was all the more overjoyed when “after a year full of uncertainty he received the first sign of life from Germany”; it renewed his flagging hopes of an eventual return. In March 1946 Horst Andrée similarly experienced “the day which I won’t ever forget in my entire life.” He had received mail that reassured him that his parents and siblings had “survived the flight from Pomerania.” Desperate for a sign of life, Jakobine Witolla was also overjoyed when the first preprinted prisoner postcard arrived from her fiancée, Wilhelm Homeyer, whom she would later marry: “I could have cried and danced.”17
As a result of the terrible conditions in the camps, Soviet efforts at anti-Fascist indoctrination generally had little success. Many prisoners were impressed by the size of Russia and its capacity for suffering, and even willing to listen to agitators explain the Marxist-Leninist classics or read leftist writers such as Friedrich Wolf. Happy that “the war was over for us” and Germany liberated from Fascism, deserter Gerhard Joachim “felt the breath of a new and different world, which also inspired our reorientation” toward “the dream of a just society.” But the vast majority of the homesick prisoners rejected the lectures of the National Committee for a Free Germany, focusing instead on their lack of food and day-to-day survival while hoping against hope for a rapid release. Cut off from reliable news about the world and hearing only rumors about the fate of Germany, most POWs rejected “the seemingly neutral anti-Fascism.” Hans Queiser recalled that Soviet efforts “to win us openly for Communism” generally failed.18
The longer captivity lasted, the stronger the urge grew to escape somehow, even if failure threatened massive punishment. Fleeing from a Russian POW camp was virtually impossible due to the size of the country, difference of language, and controls on travel. Getting away from a French POW facility seemed easier, but required extensive logistical preparation. When he failed to win release, Karl Härtel decided that “the last way out of this misery was flight.” By selling submarine models and purchasing food for the cafeteria in town, he had accumulated sixteen thousand French francs, bought civilian clothes, and obtained tickets as well as a Michelin map through the girlfriend of a comrade. Firmly resolved “to risk everything,” he absconded on December 17, 1947, took the night-train to Paris, and bought a ticket to the Saar border. Secretly he crossed the frontier on foot and reached a friend’s family, who supplied him with discharge papers. Using this fake release form, he traveled on, reaching his wife in the Soviet zone at Christmas.19
Trying to speed legal release, every POW thought up ways to hasten the end of his captivity. The victors used positive criteria for letting prisoners go (such as the need for reconstruction skills) and negative standards (such as involvement in atrocities) for delaying discharge. The Russians used a fitness test in which the camp doctor pinched the buttocks of a naked POW to classify him in one of four levels according to the remaining muscle mass. Those close to death were retained as being unable to stand the transport; those too weak for heavy labor were the first to be sent home. Hellmut Raschdorff used his asthma brought on by shaking straw pallets in order to obtain a medical release. But the stronger and younger men were kept “to bring in the harvest, repair streets and railroads,” or work in the mines. While Wilhelm Homeyer tried to ingratiate himself with the Communist camp authorities to be released, Dieter Schoenhals used fake Yugoslav papers to escape imprisonment under the Americans.20
Among the last prisoners to be discharged were civilians and soldiers who had been locked up for being leading Nazis or members of the SS. In internment camps in the West and so-called Spezlager in the East, several hundred thousand men were intensively scrutinized for their actions. Gerhard Baucke’s father was arrested when “the renters of mother’s apartment denounced him.” Because he had joined the party early on, served in the city council for the NSDAP, and led the local chapter of HAGO (the Nazi Craft, Commerce, and Business Organization), he was thrown into a British military prison and only freed in 1948. Similarly, SS member Rolf Bulwin barely escaped a routine screening when he switched from the “to be examined” to the “finished” line during a moment of inattention by British officers. But his wife’s father was arrested for being a party and SS member and having commanded a resettlement camp in Poland. Though his family could visit him, it took a long time to get him released when “there was no one to accuse him.”21
After so many years of war and captivity, the returning POWs experienced tearful reunions, with families crying for joy to see each other alive. In order to cushion the positive shock, Krapf called his incredulous father from the station, asking, “Pastor, do you know who is speaking to you …? It is Gerhard, your son.” Rolf Bulwin stunned his young wife Ruth when he walked in unannounced: “I sat as if frozen and hardly wanted to believe it.” As a result, “happiness overwhelmed us, and everyone in the small kitchen had tears in their eyes.” Hellmut Raschdorff remembered, “I cannot express in words how great the joy of reunion was on this Sunday, since my parents had not heard from me for over a year and had long feared that they had lost me like my brother Ernst.” Horst Andrée’s parents were utterly astounded to see him in a tattered parachutist’s uniform; his “mother cried for joy” to have him back, while “I could also hardly say anything myself.” Only Joachim Fest noted how much his parents had aged.22
Though they were glad to have survived, returning prisoners were in for a shock, for the country had changed fundamentally during their absence. “Berlin took my breath away,” Fest remembered, for “there was nothing to be seen but a grey-brown desert of ruins, stretching to the horizon.” Even after their release, former soldiers had to accept the domination o
f the occupation forces whose controls complicated their lives and whose edicts, tacked onto walls, had to be obeyed no matter what one thought of them. Moreover, the division into occupation zones forced Erich Helmer to undertake hundreds of anxiety-evoking border crossings in order to visit his parents in the East while finishing his schooling and theological studies in the West. Many former POWs such as Horst Andrée no longer had a home to go to, with East Prussia now under Russian and Polish administration. He was shocked to find the six members of his refugee family crammed into a single small room on a West German estate.23
While coming home was “a wonderful thing,” the reintegration of physically shattered and “psychologically broken” POWs was a lengthy process. Bathing extensively and burning all clothes to get rid of lice and bedbugs was a pleasant first step. More complicated was eating the right amount of food to restore health, for the craving of hunger often led to overindulgence that made people sick. Gerhard Krapf even found the “comfortable luxury” of sleeping in a bed difficult and instead lay down on the floor. “True enough, I had difficulties at first getting used again to the niceties of civilized society.” Overcoming the recurring nightmares of war or imprisonment took even longer. Admitting to fear was not considered “manly” and often went untreated. Then there was talking to catch up on missed experiences, with civilians showing only limited interest in POW suffering and many things remaining unsaid. Finally, disappointments had to be gotten over, when a girlfriend had decided to move on in the meantime.24
Obtaining the right kind of papers was the next challenge. Living in an occupied land under rationing required a series of officially stamped permits. For Erich Helmer, “the first day of ‘freedom’ was really a day of unfreedom, since it consisted of running from one office to another.” The most important certificate was one’s proof of orderly discharge. Rolf Bulwin created his own with a fake stamp, made from a potato; others used blank forms stolen by students. With this document, a former POW then had to go to the local mayor’s office for a “residence permit” entitling him or her to stay in a certain town. This permission enabled him to get a coveted rationing card, an essential requirement for buying food from stores and without which one could not survive. He also needed to get a housing assignment, since so many dwellings had been destroyed. When a bureaucrat questioned Karl Härtel about why he was living with two unrelated females, he simply decided to marry his girlfriend immediately.25
Broken Lives Page 28
