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

by Karl Heinz Schlesier

  During these weeks I learned the exact locations at night of cities in the Ruhr and the Rhineland. “What burns there?” “Duisburg.” “There?” “Essen.” “There?” “Köln.” “And there?” “Dortmund.” Fire is not just fire. Like snowflakes, each fire is different from others. To a Flakhelfer, standing by himself, watching on in silence as the red glows on the horizon or close by painted the clouds, caused an unspeakable sorrow in the heart.

  The nightly raids did not end after these weeks. They only diminished a little, at least for a while. I had learned things I had never dreamed of or wanted to learn, gained knowledge I would never have any use for later, if I made it that far. These were fleeting thoughts. On July 3, I was granted a furlough for the weekend. The other kids on Bertha had been ahead of me. They had each gotten two days off because I had learned to fill in. On that Saturday morning I put on my dress uniform for the first time. To get to my parents’ place I had to use a bus service that skirted the eastern edge of the city. Streetcar connections through the center were still obstructed.

  First Furlough, July 3-4. It took me three hours to get to Gerresheim. I left the bus at the railroad station by the Glashütte factory main entrance and walked up Heyestrasse toward our house. I felt awkward in the Hitler Youth uniform with the swastika armband. Those of us who had attended two KLV camps had fallen through the cracks in the system and, although registered in the Jungvolk, had not been inducted into the Hitler Youth. But here I was, wearing the uniform. I hoped that people who knew me and saw me would recognize the small black triangle with the letters LH and the blue Luftwaffe eagle over my right breast pocket that identified me as Flakhelfer, not as a Hitler Youth.

  This particular section of Gerresheim had a history unique in Düsseldorf but similar to that of many cities in the Ruhr region. There, to serve the development of heavy industry, coal mines and steel mills, many thousands of workers, usually accompanied by their families, were brought in from the East, from East Prussia, the Baltic states, Poland, even Western Russia. The same happened in Gerresheim after a railway company built a railroad, in 1838, that connected Düsseldorf with the twin cities of Wuppertal-Elberfeld 50 kilometers to the east. This railroad, the first in Western Germany, bypassed the old Gerresheim and planted a station outside, “on the green meadow.” In 1864 a glass factory was started next to it. Highly skilled workers were needed, because bottles and other objects were blown by mouth, single piece by single piece. The founder of the factory, Ferdinand Heye, recruited glass blowers from all over Eastern Europe. He paid travel expenses for workers and their families and offered rent- free housing in specially built brick masonry housing complexes grouped around the factory and the railroad station. The number of the polyglot, truly international body of workers reached 2,800 in 1890. The Gerresheim glass works were considered at the time the largest bottle manufacturer in the world.

  But in 1890 the first machine was installed. Over the following years more and more machines were set up that made the old work force of craftsmen obsolete. Poverty of the unemployed, social decay and political unrest were the result. Police were brought in to evict the jobless from factory-owned housing. A great strike began in 1901 and lasted years. Social strife continued to 1914 and reached a higher level of intensity 1918, when the First World War ended. This part of Gerresheim had always been Socialist in political terms. After 1918, when the radical wing of the German Social Democratic Party broke away to form the KPD (Communist Party of Germany), most of the Socialists in the blue-collar part of Gerresheim joined.

  My family had played a part in the unfolding of these events. My father’s father had come from East Prussia in the 1880s and worked in the glass factory until he was evicted as an unremitting trade union organizer. He was not only kicked out of the factory, an order for his arrest was issued. He left the country with his wife. My father’s oldest sister, Anna, was born in Belgium, a second sister, Martha, was born in France, and my father was born in Milan, Italy. Because of his unrepentant trade union and Socialist activities my grandfather and his family were expelled from these countries too. His wife finally fled the status of a penniless refugee and returned to Gerresheim into the protection of her brother. He held a senior position in the glass factory. Thus the three children grew up in the household of a bachelor uncle who despised his brother-in-law and treated the children with suspicion and neglect. My grandfather returned once secretly to Gerresheim. When his wife refused to see him, he met with the children. He told them that he would immigrate to America and would send them money to follow them there “on a big steamship.” My father was four years old at the time of that meeting in 1899. This was the last time they saw my grandfather. Later, the children remembered, letters arrived from the US, but their mother destroyed them all and never said what their father had written or sent.

  Despite, or perhaps because of his uncle’s spiteful behavior, my father followed his lost father’s political conviction and became a Social Democrat (the party later outlawed by the Nazi government). Because of his painful personal experience, my father was never active in politics. After the First World War and after recovering from a near fatal chest wound he received in Flanders, my father joined the machine shop of the Heye factory where he later became its head (Werkmeister).

  During the rise of the Nazi party, lower Gerresheim, like the Ruhr area, was a Communist stronghold in Western Germany. Even before the Nazi takeover, Brownshirts (SA) were trucked in and fought street battles with local Communist commandos. I was an eyewitness to some of these as a boy five and six years old. Immediately after the Nazi takeover, in 1933, prominent Communists in lower Gerresheim were rounded up by Brownshirts and police in two purges and sent to “concentration camps.” It was a new term we learned. Fathers of some of my playmates were among the men arrested and carried away.

  This, perhaps, explains why I was embarrassed to walk Heyestrasse in my Flakhelfer uniform. Most of the people in this area, although silenced, remained hostile to the Nazi government. Not far from our house I met the father of one of my old buddies, Mr. Shimshok. Never prominent in the party, still he had always been a staunch Communist. I knew him and his family well. His youngest son, Heinz, a few years older than I, had been one of my earliest friends. I had lost track of him once I started Rethel Gymnasium and later went into KLV. When I was younger, Heinz had often read stories to me and introduced me to a bunch of kids with whom I ran around until school became too demanding.

  Mr. Shimshok eyed me curiously and with disappointment, maybe even disgust. It was not me. It was the uniform. With anger in his voice, he said, “Now they have made my Heinz kaput too.” His son had been killed in action in Russia. He looked at my uniform, the swastika. Heinz had grown up in a Communist family and now Russian Communists had killed him. I felt ashamed of my uniform. Perhaps he thought that I had become a Nazi. He could not know that I hated the uniform, too. How could I tell him. We stood for a long moment in silence. What could I say? Finally I mumbled something and walked on. The brief meeting stayed in my memory, and my conscience.

  My mother had not expected me. She threw her arms around me before she looked me over in my uniform. In her eyes I detected something similar to what 1 had seen in Mr. Shimshok’s eyes. Nothing accusatory, but sadness, a fatalistic expression. I went to my room and changed into civilian clothes I had brought back from the battery, short pants and shirt. They felt familiar but odd. I sat with my mother until my father arrived from the factory. We heard the front door close and his slow steps coming up the stairs. His face lit up when he saw me. Since I wore civilian clothes, he did not seem to see me as different from when he had seen me last. For me, that was already a long time ago. My mother had prepared lunch and afterward we went into the garden and sat on a bench. We talked about the two recent air raids on Düsseldorf and I added a bit about the raids I had witnessed from a distance. I said little about the Reisholz battery. My mother was pleased that the boys who had been in Einsiedel were able t
o stay together. My father was convinced that the war was lost. When the Nazi government declared war on the United States, in December 1941, my father told my mother and me that Germany could not win. He knew from the First World War that American resources and the two million fresh soldiers it brought to France led to the German defeat. On that mild July Saturday we did not talk about it. But it clearly was on my parents’ minds. Still fifteen years old, I could not be too serious all the time. I told them that I had adjusted well and that the people in the battery were pretty good people. I said nothing about the long hours at the gun and little about the shooting. My father knew pretty much what I was going through but kept silent so as not to further frighten my mother. She was already frightened enough. We spent a pleasant evening. Before we went to bed my mother asked whether I would go with them to church in the morning. I said yes.

  The alarm came before midnight. While the sirens screamed we quickly dressed and went downstairs. I carried a book and my mother’s little black leather suitcase! In the cellar, a room had been set aside as air raid shelter for us and the family that lived on the first floor – a husband and wife and a girl of eleven. They had arrived before us and occupied one of the two long benches in the room. We nodded to them and sat down. I had forgotten how it felt to be in a cellar and wait for a raid or the sirens’ all-clear. It was obvious that this lengthy waiting in air raid shelters was very different from our waiting in gun revetments. In the latter, we stood in the open, able to see what was going on around us. In air raid shelters the people sat densely packed in closed spaces, the elderly and infirm next to children of all ages, their mothers, and men too old for the military, all listening for sounds that penetrated from the outside. I looked at the curved vaults of the cellar of the house and wondered how much weight they would stand in case of a direct hit. I felt uncomfortable, caged. I was sure I was not alone in this. Once I went up briefly with my father into the court outside the house. We saw no searchlights testing the sky and heard no artillery fire. The night was still and clear. Later we learned that Köln had once again been hit that night.

  In the morning we walked to St. Margaretha Basilica in the old part of Gerresheim for the 10 P.M. High Mass. The church, built in the 13th century in the Rhenish mixed Gothic-Romanic architectural style, was undamaged but for a few blown windows and scratches on its façade from bomb fragments. Three houses near the church were burned out. The pews were filled with worshippers. My mother found a place to sit but my father and I stood in the back. I had celebrated my First Holy Communion here when I was ten years old. I looked at the remaining windows high in the walls, with their colorful, stained glass, and their motifs, the figures of saints. The organ above us sounded with might, performing a Bach oratorio.

  I knew the ritual but felt distant. The pastor gave a sermon from the pulpit, trying to be uplifting. Before communion the pastor read the names of six or seven members of the congregation who had recently died in combat. With the names he gave the locations where they had died. He read place names in Russia I had not heard before, Orel, Bjelgorod, and others. They had died, the pastor said, “Für Führer, Volk und Vaterland” (for the Führer, the People, and the Fatherland). After this he led the congregation in prayer for the Führer, Volk und Vaterland. This practice was repeated at every Catholic and Protestant church in Germany in every Sunday mass. I looked at my father. He stared ahead. I knew how he felt about the betrayal of the people by the Catholic Church hierarchy when it actively supported the chancellorship of Hitler that made him head of the new government. Like many others that Sunday, my mother went to receive Holy Communion. My father did not. Neither did I.

  We spent a good day together. In the afternoon I took the .22 and briefly visited my hunting ground around the Ruine, looking for rabbits, not looking for rabbits. On this weekend I got closer to my parents than I had been a few weeks ago. Perhaps I had learned something in between. There was no alarm during the night. Early in the morning I got back into my uniform and left for Reisholz.

  School Again, July 5. At 2nd Battery Headquarters I checked in from furlough. I was informed by the sergeant-major that school would be held in the mess hall after lunch if the scheduled teacher from our gymnasium was able to come. In our shack I changed into fatigues and went to Bertha. Only the three boys were present. The gun chief and K 3 seemed to have other obligations, and the Russians were laboring elsewhere. We talked and did some routine work in the revetment. We wondered whether class would actually happen. For us latecomers it would be a first time experience, for the others it meant a resumption after an interruption of 25 days caused by the Düsseldorf raids.

  After lunch I spent the remaining time of the midday break with anticipation. At 1300 hours we were still waiting in the mess hall. When the teacher came, it was Dr. Peltzer, one of the Latin and History instructors from our school. In his early sixties, he was a warm and cordial man with a reputation of being soft on students. To his face, we called him by his title, but in general usage, to generations of students, he was Pedi. He knew his nickname and savored it because it meant students were fond of him. He was neither a member of the Nazi party nor of one of its organizations. In the recent past, during the many Nazi celebrations at our school, we were forced to wear uniforms. He and a few other teachers stood in civilian clothes while some of the teachers proudly wore their brown SA or black SS uniforms.

  It felt like we had not seen him for a long time, although it had been only half a year. He looked drawn. We of the Einsiedel group stepped forward and reintroduced ourselves. He remembered us. He smiled. We felt sorry for him, as I was sure he felt sorry for us. He added our names to the roster of students. We took our seats. We were 35 or 36 boys from Rethel in the room. He told us latecomers what the others already knew: that he continued to teach Latin but had dropped History. He felt that Latin was more important to us now than History, because every student needed the Grosse Latinum (six years of Latin) to be able to enrol in a university. He knew, and we knew, that our learning had already been severely handicapped. Those of us who had been in Bad Einsiedel had not had Latin for almost half a year.

  The teacher in Pedi prevailed. He gently led all of us back to the language of Gaius Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars, the old stand-by in Latin courses in all secondary education schools. Virtually every student had hated that text but never escaped from it. Now, in the Reisholz setting, Caesar’ reflections on his war with Celtic and Germanic tribes seemed absurd, but we grudgingly agreed that for our welfare and misty future we should make an effort to understand them. Slowly, we found our way back into the intricacies of the ancient language.

  After one and a half hours our next teacher arrived and Pedi took his leave. This was Wallerich, the mathematics teacher. He had no nickname because we did not know him well. He had been a teacher in Lessing Gymnasium, not our school. Those of us who had been in the KLV camp in Bad Spindelmühle in 1942 remembered him from that time. He was more impersonal than Pedi, a man with a dry humor and a good heart. We came to learn that he cared very much for us. He tried to make complex mathematics understandable to us in spite of the abysmal conditions we and he suffered. He was very good in his field but he never talked down to us. He tried to inform us about the logic of mathematics, the importance of thinking clearly, advising us to give ourselves to this fundamental, interdisciplinary tool of all sciences. He was gentle, hopeful. I don’t think he expected much of us, and he was right. But he tried, and never disparaged our failures. From tiny gestures, the rising of eyebrows at specific moments or a slight shaking of his head, we recognized that he despised the system under which we were all forced to operate. In the Nazi state, even such small indications of disagreement with official policy was considered traitorous. He had to be careful. His allegiance was to us, and we honored him for that.

  Like Pedi, he gave us homework to do. Both of them tried to show us we were still students, kids, that we still had a future when this period of the gun was over.

&
nbsp; Both remained fixtures in our lives for the time we were in Reisholz. As long as the English continued to fly at night, only a direct raid on Düsseldorf prevented them from coming to us. They were always on time. Things changed after the middle of August 1943, when American Viermots began to make themselves felt in and around our area in extensive daylight raids. After that, there were many days when the alarm sounded during school sessions in the mess hall and we had to run to man the guns leaving our teachers behind in hopeless confusion. Once or twice Pedi followed us and took refuge in a trench below the Anton gun revetment.

  Under these conditions school was a nearly impossible task. The teachers tried to make something of it and so did we. We had lost out on almost everything kids our age in normal times had access to and were able to experience. We knew that. We also knew we would have to make up later what we lost, including learning, if we made it to later. Despite everything we still thought we would. Sometimes, we came to regard our school sessions as an intermission from our daily and nightly activities, a breath of another world, perhaps a promise.

  I wondered where those teachers from our school had gone who appeared in the SA and SS uniforms in Nazi festivities in times past. For instance, the authoritarian director of Rethel Gymnasium, Herr Budde. He was an SS man of Wal1erich’s age, but never showed up at the battery. The younger Nazi teachers were probably in military service, but what about the older ones? Had they been freed from work in the battery and rewarded by the party with easier jobs elsewhere, far from danger?

  Life Becomes Routine. After the first weeks in Reisholz, we of the Einsiedel bunch settled in as well as the others who had been called up in February. A month ago, they had already been rewarded the Flakkampfabzeichen. It testified that they had served at the gun during the “kill” of eight enemy aircraft with which the Reisholz battery had been credited since their arrival. The medal, made of silvery metal, featured an oval wreath of oak leaves with an eagle on top holding a swastika. An 8.8cm gun inside the wreath pointed to the right at an angle of 45 degrees.