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

by Karl Heinz Schlesier

  I carried my gear into my room. I glanced through the tall window that faced the street. Through the old trees, it was possible to glimpse the forested hills less than a kilometer away to the east. The room felt strange to me. Opposite the bookshelves was the .22 rifle on the wall below crossed dueling swords, the latter a gift from a distant relative who claimed he had once used them. Perhaps it was me who had changed. I felt the same when I sat with my parents in the large living room.

  They were both in their late forties, my father a year older than my mother. My mother was the same as I remembered her, a sensitive, friendly, outgoing person with dark curly hair, a quick laugh. She often sang in the house while working. My father, an introvert with a serious, sometimes austere manner, looked older than I remembered. What was happening everywhere wore heavily on his mind.

  My parents had expected me a day or two earlier and had worried greatly about me. I was only able to make small talk. When I told them about the delay in our travel and mentioned Wuppertal-Barmen, my father’s face darkened.

  “Wuppertal,” he said. “The newspaper reported that about 4,000 people were killed and 130,000 lost their homes.” He paused. “There are still bodies under the wreckage that haven’t been found. The British used incendiary bombs and air mines. The air mines had a terrible effect in the close space between the heights.” He looked at the table top before him. “Düsseldorf was hit during the night of May 25. The area around the zoo was destroyed. Many houses, the skating rink and the zoo are gone. Few of the animals survived.” He said it with deep resignation.

  “The zoo?” I asked. This was a shock. I had happy memories of the zoo and the skating rink. I had often visited the zoo with my parents when I was little. We boys from Rethel Gymnasium had gone to the skating rink in winters past after school, before the British air raids became serious. We went to play ice hockey and skated circles around girls in short skirts – an activity that seemed rather childish thinking about it now. But worst of all, the parents of some of my friends from school lived in upscale neighborhoods around the zoo. What had happened to them? We had heard nothing about this in Bad Einsiedel. Were they all right?

  We sat in distressed silence. Finally my father said, “There is an official letter to you from the Wehrbezirkskommando. Because you were not here we opened it.” He cleared his throat. “You have been drafted as Flakhelfer. You have to report to a battery in Reisholz, 4. Schwere Flakabteilung 177/0.” He was a veteran of the First World War and had lived through trench warfare of the worst kind on the Western Front, a trauma for all who had been there. He knew all about war. Now war again closed in on everything and everyone.

  I was still ignorant. Passing through Wuppertal-Barmen had been a heavy blow, but it did not last long. It added, however, to a mood, a feeling that what was happening was inevitable, beyond anyone’s power to change.

  The letter of induction was no surprise to my parents and me. We wondered why it had come so late. My father knew that the son of a colleague in the factory had been drafted on February 25. By that time our group was already in Einsiedel. Perhaps, other members of my age group were in other KLV camps. It seemed we had slipped by, escaped for a little while.

  My parents were grateful that I had been far from danger for a little longer, I was their only child. I always wanted a sister when I was younger, but it could not be. Now they had to give me up again, this time for something dangerous. My mother was clearly afraid for me. My father must have been, too, but he did not show it. I felt uncertain. Some of the kids I knew had already gone to the guns, or would be going soon. Nothing could change that. In some ways, I was looking forward to being with my friends.

  The draft letter gave June 3 as the date for reporting to the Reisholz battery. It meant I was already six days overdue. I would have to explain why I was late. I told my parents I would see whether Ferdi, whose parents lived two houses away, had a letter like mine and whether he was ordered to the same battery. My parents remained at the living room as I went to Ferdi’s place. His letter was identical to mine. We decided we would report to Reisholz two days from then, on June 10, a Thursday. We would go together.

  My parents accepted it as something impossible to change. They knew I would be in trouble if I stayed longer. My mother said sadly, “In five days is Whitsun. We had hoped we would be together. After all this time …” She did not finish the sentence. She got up and went to the kitchen to prepare supper.

  My father and I stayed. Our conversation was hesitant, certainly on my part. We had to learn to know each other again. He asked me about Bad Einsiedel. I said something general. My heart was not in it. We had other things on our minds.

  He told me about the situation in the factory. Before the war he had had 50 men under his supervision. Now his workers were a few German men beyond draft age, a handful of forced laborers from Czechoslovakia, and French and Russian prisoners of war. It was difficult for him to get along with this odd bunch. The foreigners were understandably less than enthusiastic about their work. The German workers caused friction when they tried to boss the foreigners around. The Germans complained that the foreigners were treated too well. My father let them know that he treated everyone according to their performance, not according to nationality. This stance was not in accord with the ideas of the Nazi authorities. Unofficially, he had the support of the factory administration. Nevertheless, I understood that he walked a fine line.

  My mother called and we went to the dining room. The table was set with care. A white tablecloth, a crystal vase with fresh flowers from the garden. My mother had used our best china, silverware, and crystal glasses for the mineral water. Supper was simple and not much different from pre-war times: a boiled egg, dark bread and sausages. We had a bowl of canned mirabellen – yellow plums – from our own trees for dessert, last year’s harvest.

  My mother offered a short prayer of thanks for the food and my safe return. She always started meals with a prayer. After supper I helped clean the table. When my mother had done the dishes we sat again in the living room. My father carefully loaded his pipe and lit it. He was a light smoker, and the tin of pipe tobacco and the few packs of cigarettes allowed on the monthly ration card were enough for him. For a little while, as the three of us sat together, it seemed like earlier, happier times. But when my parents began to speak about their world we were quickly reminded where we were.

  One of my cousins, Willi, had been killed in action in Russia. Another cousin, Paul, was a lieutenant in a Gebirgsjäger Division in Italy. I had been at his wedding in Gerresheim in 1942. A third cousin, Walter, was in the Navy somewhere, his whereabouts unknown. My parents spoke haltingly about night alarms, hours spent in the cellar, the rumble of heavy anti-aircraft fire, sometimes the dull concussion of bombs exploding. They lived in constant fear of the house being hit, worrying whether the basement ceiling would hold up. A fear of fire from incendiary bombs. Would they be able to get out or would the cellar become a tomb?

  I had experienced some of this before Einsiedel, but the memories had faded there, in the quiet, undisturbed splendor of the forests. It was obvious that everything had gotten worse in my brief absence. The air raids had accelerated, becoming much more devastating than earlier. Newspapers described British bombing, after March 1943 of cities like Essen, Stettin, Köln, Bochum, Dortmund and, recently, Wuppertal-Barmen, as “one thousand bomber raids.”

  We changed subjects and talked about more pleasant things. My parents wanted to show me the garden, so we went downstairs, through the court edged by the north wall of the house on one side and on the other by the structure that included the wash house, the garage, and the pigeon tower. A few stairs, and we were on the garden’s level. It was a productive garden with one morello cherry tree, a large pear tree, two small apple trees, three medium-sized mirabelle trees, berry bushes and the potato, onion and carrot patches omnipresent in German vegetable gardens. The garden supplied a valuable addition to food bought in stores on ration cards.
There were also flower beds and, on a long metal frame my father had built over the walkway cutting through the middle of the garden, vine boughs and shoots hung thick with curled leaves and green grapes. When ripe, the grapes were small and sour, and the birds, uncontested, got almost all of them.

  The garden was set apart from the wide, fenced park that surrounded the house on three sides and, on the west, extended for 500 meters to a rise crowned by a ruined tower that looked like a castle keep over the Torfbruch Valley toward the city, a few kilometers away. A twelve-cornered part of the tower’s cellar was exposed in the open, off to the side. It was visible through a round hole in the center where a part of the ceiling had fallen in. No one knew what the purpose of this underground chamber had been. In my fantasies it had once been a meeting place of a secret roundtable similar to the one King Arthur and his knights had attended. Nearby was a ruined swimming pool. The whole rise was covered with stately beech and oak trees and a jumble of shrubbery interspersed with patches of grass. There were lots of rabbits in this coppice and in the park. When I was still at home, I had shot a few with my .22 caliber rifle for the kitchen.

  The house, looking like a small French chateau, had been built around 1875 by one of the top managers of the Heye glass works. He had also established the park and filled it with rare imported trees and exotic bushes that yielded a profusion of fragrant- smelling blossoms in summer. A tennis court behind our garden had been turned into a vegetable garden by the people who lived on the first floor under us. Behind it, at the foot of the rise, was an artificial pond large enough for rowboats, and a grotto with a balustrade over it where musicians once entertained guests.

  There must have been great parties during the heyday of the estate until the creator-owner went bankrupt, took a pistol into the park and shot himself. It was rumored that he had meddled in alchemy. After his death the house fell into disrepair and the park into neglect. The estate became the property of the glass factory. A single woman lived for many years in the house and died there. Thereafter, the two floors were rented out to two families whose husbands held positions in the factory. That was how we came to live there. The park and the thickets around the tower, called “die Ruine” throughout Gerresheim, became my personal hunting ground where I roamed unobserved when I was home.

  We picked some ripe gooseberries and sat on a bench. My parents wanted to know about my time in Bad Einsiedel. I tried to tell them but I still felt awkward. When it was dark we went back into the house. My parents had to get up at 5:30 A.M. because my father had to be in the factory well before 7 A.M., when work started. His office and the machine shop were about one kilometer from our house. He walked. He had developed difficulties breathing, my mother told me, and he had to take his time.

  Before my parents went to bed, my mother put a little black-leather suitcase next to the door. She always took it with her into the cellar when sirens sounded the alarm. The suitcase held what little jewelry she owned and our family’s most important papers and documents.

  I said good night and took a bath. Afterward, in my own soft bed, so different from the Spartan cot in Einsiedel, I looked at my room as if I had never seen it before: the bookshelves, table and chair, the twelve volumes of the Brockhaus Encyclopedia, the two crossed dueling swords I would never have a use for, my rifle on the wall, the Plaster of Paris copy of the death mask of the philosopher F. W. Nietzsche above my bed, one of the writers I admired. The sweet song of a nightingale came through the dark. I listened and eventually I fell asleep. There was no alarm that night.

  After breakfast I talked for a while with my mother. Then I took the rifle and went down to the park, working my way slowly toward the rise and up to the tower. I sat down on a stone that had fallen from the crest. I saw songbirds and wild pigeons, but no rabbits.

  I was not really looking for them. I had only taken the rifle as something familiar, something to hold on to, something to suggest a direction, a purpose, although I had none. I was thinking about other things than game. This was my last day at home. I wondered what would happen to us, to me. After my time as Flakhelfer I would wind up in the Heer. My school days, in terms of an earlier sense of what school should be were over. Until the end of the war, whenever that might be, I would only return to this place on furlough, or not at all. I looked over the wild green jumble around me. How beautiful it was.

  2

  Flakhelfer, Reisholz

  June 10 1943-January 18 1944

  Arrival. June 10 1943. On a sunny morning, Ferdi and I took the no. 3 tram from Gerresheim at 7 A.M., switched to no. 18 downtown and arrived at 8:30 at the stop in Reisholz, a suburb on the southern edge of the city. We had just passed the spread of buildings of the Henkel Chemical Factory. The tram left, continuing toward Benrath, a small town grouped around a Rococo castle and a vast park. We were the only persons who got off. Directly west, across the road, a short distance away but hidden by a tree line lay the wide river bed through which the Rhine churned north. To the east was a large open rye field. From the standing waves of grain in the southeastern corner of the field rose twelve grass-covered revetments closely grouped in two clusters. From each of the revetments protruded the long, dark-grey barrel of an 8.8cm gun, all pointing in the same direction. Later we learned that the initial position of the barrels was 45 degrees in direction 10 o’clock (WNW). Before us was the 4. Schwere Flakabteilung 177/0.

  Ferdi and I stood for a long moment and gazed at the image before us. I looked with awe and apprehension. We had seen batteries like this one in many of the half-hour newsreels that were shown in movie theaters before the motion picture. They were usually filmed in action, with streaks of flames leaping from the guns’ muzzles into the night sky. But here, I was no longer a movie-goer seated in the comfort of a darkened theater. Before me lay my assigned place, my future. I was to become part of this. The guns lay silent at the moment but represented a constant threat. I felt small and vulnerable. I wanted nothing more than to turn back, away from this. I couldn’t. We gripped our small suitcases with essential books, writing materials, a few personal items – and trudged on to deliver ourselves. We did not speak.

  We took the dirt road to the battery and skirted the southern edge of the rye field. After half a kilometer we reached the underground bunkers of the Mess-Staffel, the fire-control post, with two radar stations on top and two revetments that enclosed fire-control predictors of the battery. The road curved past the wooden barracks of the Mess-Staffel personnel and the first of the gun emplacements and continued. Nearby stood two barracks closed in with a high wire fence. It was the camp of the Hiwis, Hilfswillige – Russian prisoners of war who had volunteered service as auxiliaries in the German anti-aircraft arm. Behind this camp a line of wooden barracks extended north along railroad tracks – the quarters of the Geschütz-Staffel, the gun crews. We crossed the railroad tracks that ran north to the factory from two depots below the southern perimeter of the battery and met a Flakhelfer dressed in Luftwaffe fatigues.

  He told us that he was from Hilden Gymnasium and had been with the first batch of students called up in February. He eyed us, bemused and a little condescending. He had the air of an alter Hase (‘old hare’), one who had been under fire and proven himself. To him, Ferdi and I were untested latecomers. He pointed to a group of trucks visible on the hardtop street ahead, at the edge of a birch forest. Barely protruding over treetops was the large circular shape of a searchlight, designed to illuminate enemy aircraft on clear nights. Covered with a tarp it was positioned on a wooden tower. Near the trucks we found the Tross-Staffel, a group of barracks set into the birch forest. They included the headquarters of the Abteilung, mess hall, kitchen, weapons’ and supplies’ depots, first aid and sick bay, and the barracks of the Tross-Staffel personnel. At the first barrack, we showed our induction papers to a Corporal. He sent us to headquarters.

  Through the open door we heard the clicking sound of typewriters and saw two Flakhelferinnen hunched over their machines. A he
avy-set man in the uniform of a sergeant-major viewed us suspiciously and waved us in. He rose from the chair behind his desk. In German Landser jargon the sergeant-major, any sergeant-major or Spiess, was cynically called “mother of the company,” suggesting usually the opposite, something like “son-of-a-bitch.” This man turned out to be no exception. He was brusque and gruff. We showed him our papers. He grunted and seemed to memorize our names. He did not ask us anything. He said curtly, “Nine others of your group came yesterday. I sent four to the Mess-Staffel. Six go to the Geschütz-Staffel.” He looked at Ferdi. “You are assigned to Corporal Waldmüller, gun Anton. You,” he turned to me, “go to Corporal Tylia, gun Bertha.” He signaled to a lance-corporal to take us outside. We noticed that the secretaries, girls in their mid-twenties, were dressed in white blouses and skirts in blue Luftwaffe colors. The sergeant-major, in a heavy South German accent, called after us, “Report to your gun chiefs. Come back tomorrow for your Luftwaffenhelfer-Ausweis (identification card).”

  At the quartermaster’s we tried on dark grey fatigues until we found some that matched our sizes. The dress uniform was the standard uniform of the “Flieger HJ” branch of the Hitler Youth: tunic, ski pants and ski cap in light blue with the removable swastika armband to wear on the upper left arm. A small black triangle in cloth over the right breast pocket with a blue Luftwaffe eagle in the center and the letters L H in capital on top identified the wearer as a Luftwaffenhelfer. Having never been members of the Hitler Youth proper, Ferdi and I accepted the dress uniform as a step backward, but inevitable. We also got the balance of our new dress: blue shirts and a tie, underwear, shoes and socks, towels, toiletries, heavy overcoats, gas masks, cumbersome steel helmets that did not fit our heads well, and cotton balls to plug our ears during shooting. We piled our gear on a little four-wheel cart and, with the lance-corporal leading, set off for our cabin by the depot.