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

by Karl Heinz Schlesier

  Our lives centred on three locations that defined our situation: the shack where we lived, the gun revetment, and the mess hall. The mess hall was the place where we had lunch with the battery personnel, where we picked up our breakfast and supper rations and where we had school three afternoons a week if the teachers could make it. The gun revetment was where we spent much time with the crew, hours many a night, and later, many hours during daytime raids, too. Much of our time was routine work, and much of the time we waited for what came or didn’t come. When it came it was usually furious. Much was simply boring. The shack was the place where the six of us slept at night when we weren’t on duty, where we ate together, did homework together, and spent our leisure time together. There was no place to go elsewhere. We had to stay near our gun, ready to answer the alarm call. So we became even closer than we had in Bad Einsiedel. We joked a lot and played tricks on each other, perhaps as a relief. There was no amusement for us there. We had to make it for ourselves.

  My diary recalls important events that took place around us and elsewhere. Four days after my first furlough, Köln, was bombed again during the night of July 8-9, Gelsenkirchen again on July 10-11, Aachen on July 13-14. And Essen again on July 25-26. We did quite a bit of shooting during the Köln and Aachen raids. After the Essen raid we got to the English bomber stream as it came by after swinging around on its return. During these actions, as earlier, and during the time that followed, we four Flakhelfer on Bertha switched K 1, K 2 and K 6 positions between us constantly. It appears that I had become proficient at each.

  The Essen raid had been a disaster for the Essen Flak. For the first time in the Ruhr area, English Pathfinders dropped a profusion of tinfoil strips that rendered the Flak radar system useless. The batteries were unable to fire at recognized targets. They could only hang a curtain of barrages in front of the incoming formations. Under these conditions the number of Viermots brought down was minimal.

  In Russia a major German offensive called “Zitadelle” (the Kursk battle) had stalled, then was broken off when Allied forces landed on Sicily on July 10. We heard about it over the radio and read about it in newspapers. That was bad news, but it happened far away. What truly shocked us were the raids on Hamburg. They lasted from July 24 to July 30 – a “round the clock bombing” by English Viermots at night and American Viermots during the day. A firestorm was created that killed about 50,000 people. Reading about it left us with a doomsday feeling. This had been the worst attack on a single German city so far. Over Hamburg the English had used tinfoil strips for the first time in the war and had rendered the Flak impotent. But the Americans had bombed in daylight. They should have been targeted by optical fire control instruments called “Kommando-Gerät 40”(Command Device 40), but the planes had still gotten through. We wondered about German fighter planes. We had specialized nightfighters. The Me 109s and Fw 190s were supposed to protect us in daytime. Where were they?

  We thought about this, but not deeply. There were a lot of experts somewhere who were supposed to take care of it. We did what we could when the bombers came to us. We were but little cogs in the apparatus. We felt confidence in ourselves at least. What concerned me at this time most was my sixteenth birthday coming on July 31, a Saturday, and that my request for a weekend furlough had been granted.

  But on the night of July 30-31 (Friday to Saturday), the Royal Air Force attacked Remscheid, a mere 30 kilometers southeast of Düsseldorf. The bomber stream flew by us close enough that we hit it on the way in and, again, some of their formations on the way out. We fired many Gruppen that night during two different periods. I got back to our shack about 0225 in the morning. Because of my birthday, Corporal Tylia exempted me from helping to refill the ammo bunkers in the Bertha wall. After I left the battery on Saturday morning for the trip home, I took the swastika armband off. That had become a widely observed practice among Flakhelfer. On my first furlough I had not yet dared to do this. I boarded a bus, then, exhausted, fell asleep.

  A Birthday, July 31. I had promised my parents I would be back for my birthday. It was accepted by the battery chief that boys were given furlough on such occasions. My mother was expecting me. I quickly changed into civilian clothes. My father arrived from the factory at noon. It was a sunny day and the dining room was filled with light. The day before, my father had bought a rabbit from an older man in the machine shop who raised them as meat animals. Dinner was a delight: rabbit roast, salad from the garden, fresh fruit from the mirabellen tree and a vanilla pudding for dessert. Even a glass of wine. Next to my plate was a package wrapped in colorful paper. I opened it to find a five volume edition of Friedrich Hölderlin’s Werke, published by Eugen Diederichs in Jena in 1924. He was one of Germany’s greatest lyric poets (1770-1843). I had always loved his poetry and already owned one of his books, Diotima. Here were the complete works. I was surprised and moved. My parents had gotten them from a secondhand book dealer. I still have this edition today.

  My mother had also gotten four books for me that I wanted to take to Reisholz. They were from the Volksbücherei, the large city-owned and city-run public library housed in the main building of the elementary school Unter den Eichen where I had been a student for four years before I could enrol in Rethel Gymnasium. I had given my mother a list of books on my last furlough and asked her to talk to the librarian, Miss Jonen. I enquired about Miss Jonen.

  My mother shrugged. “She is all right,” she said “she asked about you. “

  I remembered how I met her. The first time I went through the huge double doors of the library and up the four stairs to the great room I was awed. To the left was a long counter behind which a stern-looking librarian, the master of the magic mountain of books, held sway, giving reluctantly of her treasures. Straight ahead was a stand with newly arrived books, not yet numbered and registered, and to the right was a wide reading room with journals, newspapers, encyclopedias, and the like. I gathered my courage and joined the short line of devotees waiting to approach the master. I was the only child there. In front of the librarian, spread over the counter, were wooden boxes that held thousands of index cards, one for each book on the shelves.

  From the high stand behind the counter she glanced, suspiciously, I thought, down at me, a little crumb below her, far below her. She asked what I wanted. I stuttered something like, “Books to read.” She sadly shook her head. “How old are you?” she asked.

  “Seven,” I said.

  After she asked whether I could read, and I said yes, she told me I needed a letter from my teacher and my parents. If I got these, she would help me filling out a library card with my name. She warned me that I could only get one book at a time, that I should never lend it to anyone else, that I should return it undamaged before the expiration date and that it cost 10 Pfennige for a total of 20 books. When she was through she smiled warmly, hopefully.

  Her name was Miss Jonen. She was a spinster whose world was in books. She became my guide into this world. From my seventh year on I was a regular patron of this library, my visits only interrupted by the KLV camps. Back in Düsseldorf, I intended to continue getting books there and take them with me to Reisholz. Because I could only get furlough over weekends, when the library was closed, my mother became my go- between.

  The books Miss Jonen started me on in 1934 were on the animal world and on American Indians. Of the books on animals of this period, I remember those written by Ernest Thompson Seton and Scandinavian authors, such as Bengt Berg, Egon von Kapherr, Fleuron and Foenhus. Among books on American Indians, she introduced me to the Leatherstocking Tales of J.F. Cooper and to the Fritz Steuben series on Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief. This was my beginning.

  On that Saturday of my 16th birthday, my parents and I had a good day in the house and the garden. I helped to pick berries and ripe fruit. I was sorry that I could not be around to pick the fruit trees and for the heavier work.

  There was no air raid alarm during the night. Through the open window I listened again to th
e melodious songs of nightingales, familiar magical sounds from a time that seemed lost, evoking memories of peace and beauty.

  My mother asked about Reisholz but I said little. My father understood. He did not press me. Both were happy that I was with them.

  In the morning they went to church but I took the .22 and went to the Ruine. I got two rabbits before they came back. I was not good at skinning but I managed. My mother did the rest. I was glad to leave something useful behind before I had to leave.

  We had a good Sunday together. I didn’t go anywhere. There were movie theaters close by and in the city, but I wasn’t interested. I enjoyed the quiet of the old house, the garden, the green jumble beyond. I felt at ease. I knew my parents watched me, seeing perhaps certain changes in me including a more sober frame of mind. Perhaps that was so, but I still was a kid, sometimes serious, sometimes playful, able to switch from one emotion to the other not really knowing

  I left early, taking Hölderlin and the library books with me. Becoming sixteen years of age did not seem to have been a particularly significant event. Not in my mind. Not with how our lives would continue. But I was pleased. I had made my parents happy.

  Visitors from Grandfather’s Land, August 12. School in the mess hall on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons went smoothly for the next few weeks, without disruptions. The Royal Air Force flew attacks elsewhere, outside our area. Although we had to man the guns twice on successive nights, August 9-10, when Mannheim was hit, and August 10-11, when it was Nürnberg’s turn. We only saw action after the Mannheim raid, when the returning bomber stream passed within our range.

  I learned something about the personnel makeup of the Reisholz Grosskampfbatterie. It seemed there was a total of about 55 Flakhelfer in both the Geschütz-Staffel and Mess-Staffel, some 50 soldiers (including two officers, a Captain and a Lieutenant) in the Geschütz- Staffel, Mess-Staffel, Tross-Staffel and the searchlight section, six Flakhelferinnen (girls in uniform who worked in Battery Headquarters and in the Mess-Staffel), and about 50 Russian Hiwis. The Russians worked either as ammunition gunners or in the Tross-Staffel that included kitchen personnel.

  This arrangement was probably average for an 8.8cm battery of twelve guns from early 1943 on when night raids (Royal Air Force) and day raids (US Air Force) on industrial installations and open German cities dramatically increased. Within batteries, personnel numbers probably fluctuated over time.

  We were told that the anti-aircraft defenses of Düsseldorf consisted of seven batteries of heavy flak, two batteries of light flak. News from the war continued to be bad. In Russia, German troops were on the defensive, losing ground. On August 8 our forces had abandoned Sicily and begun retreating through Calabria. We never talked much about it.

  There was a rumor afloat about the development of German “wonder weapons” that would change the course of the war in our favor. Many people believed it. The rumor was fanned by hope, the hope that something better could happen after all. We in our shack in Reisholz tried to believe in it, too. But I remembered my father had said to my mother and me that he believed the war was lost. This I never told anyone. It was too dangerous. If such a statement was brought to the attention of authorities, the speaker would be considered a traitor and punished severely. Was my father wrong? How could he know that the secret weapons would not do what the government said they would?

  My mother’s older brother, Peter, first a member of a Communist veteran’s organization, then a devoted Nazi, had whispered about these weapons already on the eve of the war. He had found work in the Rheinmetall weapons factory in Düsseldorf and pretended to know a great deal. When the factory was destroyed by English bombing in 1942, it was put back in production somewhere in Saxony. We had not seen him since. If he already knew before the war, where were these new, horrific weapons? Was it just a planted story? Was my father right?

  I remembered a family outing in which my father made some critical remarks. My uncle threatened to report him if he continued to find fault with the “Führer.” On the way back to our home I remember my mother saying, “This is getting dangerous. Either we don’t see them anymore or we don’t talk about politics anymore.” We rarely saw my uncle and aunt after that.

  The main event during early August was the first appearance of American Viermots in our area. It happened on August 12 in the early afternoon, a sunny day with light clouds overhead. We stood by the gun when reports came in that American bombers approached the Ruhr and were attacking Recklinghausen. We saw nothing but a thin cloud of smoke far to the north. We waited but nothing else happened. Then came a report from the Mess-Staffel that a second fleet of American bombers approached from the southeast.

  First, swarms of our Me 109 fighter planes passed over, carrying drop tanks under their bellies, rushing northeast for a rendezvous over the Ruhr. Then we heard heavy anti-aircraft fire to the southeast. “Leading enemy formations over Solingen, flying north,” Corporal Tylia laconically repeated the message from fire control. Solingen was only fourteen kilometers southeast of us. Over the rumble of gunfire and the staccato of exploding shells we heard another sound we had heard before, the steady growl caused by the engines of many heavy planes, Viermots, Dicke Autos (fat cars), as we sometimes called them. And then we saw them through breaks in the white clouds: a Pulk, “box,” of some twenty to 30 planes, flying close together, surrounded by puff balls thrown at them by heavy Flak. We recognized them immediately by the sloping shark fins of the rudders. These were B 17 Fortresses, large, silvery birds shining in the sun. They looked magnificent. The first Pulk passed. Keeping its distance, the second came up, following the same route, undeterred by the puffs that enveloped them. And another. And another. We watched, amazed, but also with a feeling of dread. The length of the stream of Fortresses was perhaps 100 kilometers long. We counted nine or ten Pulks.

  We watched the last of them disappear. We had remained onlookers, eyewitnesses to the opening stage of a deadly play that would create havoc beyond our view.

  I thought about my grandfather who had gone to America, the last place where he could live his life without being hunted by police. Had my father been able to join him there, and had I been born a few years earlier, could I have been in one of those silver birds? And what about our relatives from Solingen? Two couples had immigrated to America after the Great War. They lived in New Jersey and had come to us on a visit in 1937. Between them, they had two sons older than me. Could one or both of them be up there now?

  That evening, we were informed that two groups of American Viermots had attacked the Ruhr, one from the northwest, the other from the south – the one we had seen. They had bombed Bochum, Recklinghausen and Gelsenkirchen. Some 25 Fortresses were shot down by fighters and Flak.

  Two days later I went on furlough again. It was Ferdi’s turn, too. On Sunday we went to see a movie in a city theater, a revue with Marika Röck in the lead role. She was a famous dancer and singer, a delight to look at, even for kids like us.

  First Date. There were two false alarms during the next nights. We waited in readiness but sat huddled in the narrow bunker in the revetment because of a pelting rain. The Royal Air Force did not come near us. The English had introduced spoof raids. They sent Mosquitoes ahead that dropped Christbäume over a target to draw German nightfighters, then attacked elsewhere. We waited for hours but nothing happened. The real thing came early enough, on the night of August 22-23.

  The Royal Air Force had flown another faint past the Ruhr but circled back and once again attacked Solingen, Düsseldorf and Leverkusen. First it appeared to be another false alarm night but then it turned out that bombers were coming in from the east. After we heard the anti-aircraft fire from Solingen and the sound of heavy bombing, we realized we might be in for it too. The sky was closed with a thick cloud cover and rain came down hard. We stood in readiness by the gun, wearing our steel helmets and heavy overcoats. The overcoats were too large for our slight figures but offered good protection, not only aga
inst the normal rain, but also against shell fragments raining down. When our targets were directly above us, which happened sometimes, the clatter of shell fragments falling around us was like bursts of hail. On that night, due to the heavy cloud cover, many searchlights pointed straight up. Their light bluish beams in the Mattscheibe position created the Leichentuch effect in the clouds. Thus our night-fighters, flying above the bombers, were able to see the shadows of the Viermots against the Leichentuch and could direct Flak barrage fire if our battery radar was hampered. They could also pursue targets themselves.

  It did not take long before Christbäume in red and green drifted down through the clouds, marking an area close to us in the southwestern part of the city. First to fire was a 10.5cm battery to the west of us, at Himmelgeist. Other heavies, 10.5 and 12.8cm guns all around opened up. Then it was our turn. As the roar of the bomber stream passed over us, we fired Gruppe after Gruppe. We followed the enemy formations coming in, covering them nearly straight up, and switching to the next formations as they approached. I was K 6 that night, bent over the fuse setting machine, trying to be oblivious to the noise around us, the crashing of the gun, the inferno in the sky above us, and the earth-shattering impact of exploding block busters. The attack did not last more than twenty minutes but these were very long minutes. When it was over and I could look around, I saw a number of blazing fires to the northwest of us, growing, some merging, coloring the clouds. We wondered whether the Henkel Chemical Factory had been the target. If that was the case the bombers had missed and instead torched residential districts again. During the time I served as Flakhelfer in Reisholz, Henkel Chemical was never bombed although residential districts around the factory and beyond were destroyed.