Flakhelfer to Grenadier: Memoir of a Boy Soldier, 1943-1945

by Karl Heinz Schlesier

  Prologue

  SEPTEMBER 9 1958.

  On a balmy, sunny morning, I made my first visit to downtown Chicago. I had arrived a few days earlier from Germany to continue graduate studies in anthropology at the University of Chicago on a post-doctoral fellowship. Making my way into the Loop I was awed by the spectacle of the great city, the packed traffic, the bustling crowds, the huge, shiny, unmarred buildings, so different from the battle-scarred cities of my homeland. In the middle of Michigan Avenue stood a blue-uniformed city cop directing traffic.

  I readied my camera to take a picture to memorize the day, the beginning of something new in a world as yet unknown to me. The cop eyed me briefly as I approached him and snapped a shot. Without taking his eyes off the traffic he waved me to his side. Tall, slender, with an attentive face, he was a few years older than I. When I stood next to him, he quickly looked me over and asked, “Where are you from?”

  “Germany,” I said.

  “Where in Germany?”

  “Düsseldorf.”

  He nodded and looked at me directly. “I bombed Düsseldorf.” It was a blunt statement of fact. There was neither regret nor satisfaction in his voice.

  Taken aback, I blurted out, “I was an anti-aircraft gunner in “Düsseldorf.” He smiled. Suddenly we were two survivors who had once experienced dread at the same place. Bending close to me, he said, “Isn’t it great to be alive?”

  1

  Going Home

  Leaving, June 7, 1943. At 7 o’clock in the morning, as on every morning over the past five months, we stood in ranks on the open square between the buildings. We stood at attention as the flag with the swastika was raised.

  We were 38 boys of Rethel Gymnasium in Düsseldorf. Most of us were fifteen years old, a few were sixteen. I was fifteen. A boy a year older from our school stood at the head of the three-ranks formation. He was the Lagerführer, charged with keeping discipline in our camp. In front stood the teacher who also served as the director of the camp, the chief. We watched as he saluted the flag when the cloth crept upward on the flagpole and billowed out under a brisk wind from the north.

  This was our last day in Bad Einsiedel, a spartan, weathered old spa on the main ridge of the Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains) in southern Saxony, a few stone throws away from the Czech border. Since early February 1943, and for a second time in two years, we had participated in the Kinderlandverschickung (KLV), the mass evacuation of many thousands of school children from western cities suffering from Allied air raids to rural areas in eastern Germany. For five months Bad Einsiedel had been our home far away from the raging war. We had lived in isolation, without neighbors, in the great silence of the forests surrounding us, a world that seemed unreal in the calm eye of a violent storm. Our only connection with the outside were letters from home that sometimes included newspaper clippings, usually with bad news, and packages with cakes and cookies and books sent by worried mothers. The delicacies were widely shared among us. The long- awaited order to return to Düsseldorf had arrived a few days earlier.

  When the flag-raising ceremony was over we were dismissed and headed to the dining room. The mood was subdued at breakfast that morning. Gone was the friendly noise, the ribbing and the laughter that usually accompanied meals. We ate in silence. We were given extra rations for the journey home. As I walked out I cast a long look back over the dining room the place that had also been our classroom during the day and our meeting room on many evenings. We went to our rooms and fetched our gear, already packed. We carried it downstairs and gathered on the open square, waiting for the trucks that would take us 50 kilometers to the city of Chemnitz, the railroad, and a special train.

  Bad Einsiedel, built in the late 19th century, lay in the middle of two long meadows extending north and west. All around were huge, dense forests of mixed leaf and needle trees that held red deer, roe deer, wild boar, and an occasional lynx. Game was numerous; hunting had ended because of the war. The open square was surrounded on three sides by buildings with thick, white-painted walls and wide, overhanging roofs. To the north, in the center, stood the two-story cookhouse with an adjoining dining room and the quarters of the chief and the kitchen and maintenance personnel. To the east, was the one-story barn for two draft horses. To the west, the two-story guest house with guest rooms, our sleeping and living quarters on the second floor, washrooms and utility rooms on the first floor. Behind the dining room lay the bath house over the hot springs that once had made Einsiedel a spa.

  It had been an untroubled place for us although we fretted sometimes about relatives in the war and our families, endangered in Düsseldorf. It had come as a shock to us when we heard that the Afrika-Korps had surrendered in Tunisia in May. It was a second major disaster, following on Stalingrad three months earlier. Still, as long as the snow lasted we skied and sledded. In the spring we hiked in the forest, watching for game, and on some evenings we played soccer on the meadow below the bath house. The man who doubled as our single teacher and chief of the KLV camp, Dr. Koetter, a bachelor in his late fifties, had been educated at Harrow School in England and had taught us the Harrow Football Song. Sometimes, when we walked to our soccer field, for fun we burst into “Forty years on when afar and a thunder… “

  Compared to an earlier KLV camp we had attended in 1942, located in the Riesengebirge in southern Silesia, Einsiedel was a pretty enlightened and relaxed camp. The only concession to demands made by the government was the flag-raising ceremony in the morning. Formal events that required us to wear the regular Jungvolk uniform were rare. We usually wore civilian clothes. We were grateful for the informal and free atmosphere.

  School had been easy and creative. Because our teacher was certified to teach German Literature, English, and Sports, we missed instruction in Latin, the natural sciences, and another foreign language that would have been in our gymnasium program in normal times. In April and May, under his direction, we prepared a stage version of selected parts of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in German, fashioning the props ourselves. Women from the kitchen staff helped us make the costumes. When we were ready, after a couple of rehearsals, we performed Shakespeare before a select audience, the kitchen and maintenance personnel and the local forester and his family. I suspect we had more fun than the spectators. I was too shy to try for one of the more prominent roles. Instead, because everyone had to be in it, I portrayed a senator in the group of Brutus and Cassius before the knifing. I spoke only a few lines. In another scene I was a Roman soldier, expected to look fierce in his armament, but mute.

  School had been held weekday mornings between breakfast and lunch. Afternoon, after homework, we had much time to read, socialize, play games or hike in the woods. There was a good library next to the dining room and I made much use of it. In the evenings we often met in the dining room. Chairs were placed in a circle and we listened to readings of poetry and short stories in German and English followed by discussions. Two weeks before our departure we had begun to read in class, in the original with roles assigned to different readers in every session, the World War I play Journey’s End, by R.C. Sherriff. We were in our fifth year of English in Bad Einsiedel and had an extended English class every weekday. Each of us owned a copy of the play. We were not able to finish it.

  When the trucks arrived on that last morning we said goodbye to the personnel, four middle-aged women and two old men. The chief cook, a heavy-set, warm and friendly woman, was crying. Some of us tried to make jokes to take the sting out of our farewell. The rest of us stood rather frozen, hiding emotions. These people had done well by us. We knew what we had had in Einsiedel. We did not know, anymore, what we would go back to. Letters from our parents had attempted to be reassuring, but we had learned to read between the lines. The general news was disheartening. Cities in the Ruhr area and the Rhineland were under repeated air attacks. When the trucks spun away we were certain that we would never see this place again.

  There were three trucks, more than seemed necessary to mov
e us. But these could only be lightly loaded because they were running on wood gas, not gasoline. Each truck had a steel boiler fitted to the hood next to the cabin, a cylindrical device that burned wood and supplied the gas produced in the process to a motor modified to take it. Gasoline was reserved for the military. Its civilian use was severely restricted. As long as the trucks ran on level ground and downhill the ride was smooth. We made the little town of Olbernhau without difficulty. But past Olbernhau the road occasionally climbed rises and low hills. Then the motors sputtered and moaned and slowed down, gaining speed only on downhill stretches. It was clear, sunny day and we watched as we passed isolated farms and sawmills. We cruised through villages nestled into grassy slopes and green forests. It was a ponderous but peaceful journey through charming scenery. It took us three hours on a winding road to get to Chemnitz and the railroad station. We disembarked and settled with our gear on the designated platform.

  Our group was not the first to arrive. A boys’ camp from Lessing Gymnasium in Düsseldorf was already waiting. In the course of the next hour two more KLV classes arrived, one from Scharnhorst Gymnasium of our city and one of a girls’ gymnasium from Neuss, a city across the Rhine southwest of Düsseldorf. The four camps filled the platform. While the chiefs of the camps stood together in a little circle, chatting, we and the other kids sat in four tight clusters, each separate from the others, each confined to itself. Each, over time, had become its own small, closed world of comradeship not shared with outsiders. Although three of the camps on the platform came from the same city and would experience a similar future, we had nothing to say to each other.

  It was the same with the girls from Neuss. We registered their presence, having hardly seen a girl during our time in Bad Einsiedel, but our minds that day were on matters other than girls. We sat in a glum mood, barely talking, waiting for the special train to take us home.

  We knew that our close-knit group would split up when we arrived in Düsseldorf. Those of us born in 1928 would go back to school on a rotating schedule with another school. Our old school, Rethel, had been destroyed by British bombing in 1942. Before we went to Bad Einsiedel in early February 1943, we had shared in the facilities of a girls’ gymnasium, Augusta Victoria, a school only lightly damaged. When the girls had school in the morning, we used the rooms in the afternoon. The schedule was reversed every week.

  Boys born in 1927 would be drafted into anti-aircraft service as Flakhelfer, officially called Luftwaffenhelfer (LWH). We knew that draft notices were waiting at home. Eleven of us would go into the flak batteries, me included. This weighed on our minds. We were thinking of our imminent separation.

  The train arrived around noon. It had been put together in Dresden and half of its passenger cars were already filled with children being returned to the West. Two cars had been reserved for the groups waiting in Chemnitz. We climbed aboard and sat closely packed in compartments as the engine whistled and puffed smoke and the train departed. The first stop was in Gera, a town 75 kilometers west of Chemnitz. Boys and girls of five more KLV camps climbed in, and the train rolled on through Weimar to Erfurt to pick up another batch of children. As soon as they were loaded, the train continued under a late afternoon sun. It did not stop until we reached Bad Hersfeld in the evening. Here the last empty cars were filled, and the train moved through the night toward its destination, 400 kilometers farther west.

  At railroad stations that day, we had seen soldiers on furlough preparing to leave, surrounded by family members saying emotional goodbyes. A couple of times we had been passed by military trains going east, two with tanks and trucks on flatbed cars. In spite of the canvas covers we had identified the freight. Once our train had been halted and placed on a sidetrack to let a train with a more urgent purpose pass. This was a long hospital train, its cars painted with red crosses.

  I woke up when our train came to a halt. Looking through the window I noted that the sign under the station roof read Giessen. We waited in the train for four hours, then started moving at dawn. By the time we reached Siegen all of us were awake. Here the train halted again for an hour or more, letting other trains pass in both directions, military and freight trains among them. We were not allowed to leave the train but walked freely about our car, visiting other compartments. Our mood had shifted. We were going home and were getting closer. We were getting excited. We dug into our food rations. We imagined seeing our parents again and others we had left behind, eager for places that meant much to us, the places where we had grown up.

  When the train started again, we continued northwest toward Hagen, a city located on the southeast edge of the Ruhr industrial center, a mere 50 kilometers east of Düsseldorf. We crowded the windows and looked into the land of low, forest-covered hills, green and yellow fields, farms, the neat villages and scrubbed little towns of Westphalia. So far, on this rail trip, we had not seen evidence of damage done by the war. It seemed the Allied air offensive concentrated on targets elsewhere.

  At noon, close to Hagen, the train once more came to a halt in the little town of Altena. The platform was crowded with people. Whole families, with the young and old, were sitting between packs and bundles looking tired and despondent. Our good feelings died quickly. We had seen this before. These people were refugees from some catastrophe and were being evacuated. What had happened? Where? We watched, concerned. We saw the KLV chiefs and railroad men of our train gather around some officials. A serious discussion appeared to take place. When the meeting broke up, the chiefs returned slowly to the train. We wondered what was going on. Dr. Koetter called our group together. We stood in the narrow space of the clogged aisle. His face was solemn.

  “Jungens, I have bad news,” he said. He paused, looking at us. “Wuppertal was bombed nine days ago, Essen and Dortmund a few days earlier. “

  He swallowed. “A lot of people are being evacuated. Our train was supposed to go through Wuppertal but the station master here and authorities are not sure whether we can. They said that the center of the city was destroyed, including the railroad station. They don’t know whether the tracks have been repaired yet.” His voice faltered. “They will find out.”

  He looked out the window and back at us. “There is more bad news. Düsseldorf was hit again, twelve nights ago, but not as bad as Wuppertal.”

  He shook his head. “I’ll let you know what I learn.” He turned away and shuffled off.

  We slowly went back to our seats. We did not look at each other and no one spoke a word. We sat like that until he came back and went from compartment to compartment. When he came to us he put his head through the door and simply said, “We have been cleared. We are going through Wuppertal.”

  The locomotive slowly began to move. After we covered the short distance to Hagen the train was switched to another track and continued without delay toward Wuppertal. We went through the valley of the Wupper River, a small stream running through a narrow strip of flat ground between steep, slanted slopes dropping down from plateaus above. As we neared Wuppertal-Barmen we saw fire-blackened façades and remnants of walls and cracked chimneys standing around collapsed interiors of houses and buildings – block after block, street after street, lying in ruin. The train moved slowly through a kilometer or more of mounds of broken stones on both sides of the tracks along the walled-in river. Islands, scarred buildings still standing, had survived the inferno when everything else seemed to have perished. It was hard to imagine that any living thing could have survived. But we saw a host of people working in this devastation. Civilians and men in army and firefighters’ uniforms, along with women and older men and youths, cleared passages through the rubble. The reeking smell of dead fires still hung in the air. Seeing this numbed us. Once the train stopped briefly, then went past a caved-in railway station and continued on.

  We spoke little after that. We were more eager than ever to get home. Now the train rattered down from the Bergische Land, the hill country east of Düsseldorf. Past the Neandertal and Gerresheim, the
easternmost suburb of the city, the train slowly reached the large central station badly battered in earlier raids. It was the end of the line for us in late afternoon.

  We disembarked quietly. We did not say good-bye to each other, we just separated, each hurrying on his way. On the train there had been KLV classes from Neuss, Mülheim, Duisburg and Mönchen -Gladbach, too. They needed train connections to their cities and blocked every platform of the station. With two of my classmates, Ferdi and Thei, I walked through the main exit to the wide square in front once surrounded by tall, elegant hotels. They were burned-out ruins now. We waited and took the crowded streetcar 9 to Grafenberg. I watched passively as we passed through Flingern, the suburb directly to the east of the heart of the city. Previous raids had taken a toll. Among demolished houses were others, pocked by bomb fragments but intact. The Grafenberger Alley had been fortunate. I saw no recent damage. At Burgmüller Strasse, end of the run of 9, we got off and waited for streetcar 3 to take us to Gerresheim. It came and we climbed aboard. It made the long climb through the woods to the Hardt and the slow descent into upper Gerresheim, where Thei left. Blackened ruins, here and there. Not many. The center of the Old Town of Gerresheim around the 13th century basilica had suffered. But these were wounds from past raids. The streetcar stopped on Dörpfeld Strasse. Ferdi and I got off and walked, he one house down, I a little farther, past the ruins of our neighbor’s house. I came to the wide wooden gate. A load lifted from my shoulders. I passed under the tall trees and went up the few stairs to the large metal- covered door. I rang the bell. Everything looked as it had when I left it.

  Home Again. My mother was at the door on our second-floor apartment. Her face broke into a wide smile when she recognized me. I felt a bit awkward as she gave me a long, emotional embrace. I had not experienced such affection for quite some time. My father came into the hall. His usually stern face relaxed and he smiled. A short hug, a deft handshake. I knew both so well and knew how much they loved me, but I felt distant. I had become accustomed to the constant company of other boys. I had learned to be solely responsible for myself. At least that is what I thought. It seemed that my ties to my buddies had become stronger than to my parents. I had to remember the bond between us and relearn our relationship.