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

by Karl Heinz Schlesier

  My grandmother, the “Kleine Oma,” once opened my mind and my heart to the beauty of the world, to the magic of far-away places, the exotic, the strange and wonderful. My mother had deftly supported my clumsy probes into these areas after my grandmother died, and then Miss Jonen had become my knowledgeable adviser and helper. Now, in this volume, I was looking into something utterly different, breathtaking, totally removed from the contemporary misery of life. There was something else in these paintings, these figures of gods and heroes and sacred animals that stood against mortality and the profane.

  So I lost myself in the book. There were three night alarms during these nights. On December 27-28, the RAF bombed Leverkusen, on 28-29, Mönchen-Gladbach, on 30-31, Köln – all more or less in our neighborhood. I took the Egypt volume with me into the basement shelter and read and took notes in a special notebook, ignoring the fury of the Flak heavies and the distant thunder of the carpets of bombs. My parents understood and were happy for me. The neighbors in the shelter kept watching me, perhaps wondering at my indifference to what was happening around us and the intensity of my reading. They didn’t dare to ask me about it.

  For the next ten days I read and took notes and made drawings, filling over half of the notebook. Later I took it into the war with me as sort of an antidote against the cruelty threatening to overwhelm us. I lost the notebook after I no longer needed it.

  In the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, American Viermots bombed Vohwinkel, a suburb of Wuppertal fourteen kilometers east of Gerresheim. We heard the bomber stream and the impact of blockbusters from the basement shelter where I held on to Egyptian mythology. But the evening, clear and cold, was peaceful. My parents and I had some wine and toasted the arrival of the New Year, wishing that it would bring something good.

  Eyes. On January 2 1945, our local newspaper was full of news about a massive raid by hundreds of German fighter-bombers on Allied airfields in Holland, Belgium and France. The paper called Operation Bodenplatte a great success, a stunning set-back for Allied air forces. If it proved true, there would be a lull in the bombing campaign. We would have to wait and see.

  In the early afternoon that day I went into the city for a movie, the first time in a long time. I took streetcar No. 3 to Grafenberg, then No. 9 to Graf-Adolf-Strasse past the railway station. Most of this street near the Düsseldorf center was in ruins. Before the war there had been four movie theaters on a section of that street alone. Now only one was left standing, damaged, but still operating. It doesn’t matter what the movie was; nothing remarkable. It was a brief escape from reality. But something important happened afterward.

  When the show was over I walked to Graf-Adolf Square to catch the No. 9 for the ride back. While I waited I met a kid from Rethel School I knew, a year younger than I, now a Flakhelfer in a battery north of the city. We talked a little. He asked me how I was. I said, “Good.” I just said it automatically. It didn’t mean anything and it wasn’t even true. Then I looked into the face of a woman standing next to us. She had heard me. She stared at me with huge, empty eyes.

  She was a middle-aged woman, clothed in a drab, tattered coat, with a face into which sorrow and sadness had cut deep lines. Who knew what she had suffered, whom or how many she had lost. And there I stood, rather well-dressed in an old but fairly good trench coat, well-fed by my mother. The woman couldn’t know me, that often I might feel as she felt. Perhaps, I thought, she saw me as a profiteer, some weasel who knew how to stay away from danger, somehow sheltered from the misery of others.

  I felt like a heel, a coward. Why was I still here? All my buddies were in the war, all the younger people I had known, many already dead. Everything was collapsing and here I was, biding my time. The eyes of this woman seemed to accuse me. She probably didn’t mean anything by the way she looked at me, or didn’t understand how it made me feel. But suddenly I was ashamed that I was hiding. I had to go where the others were, regardless of what happened.

  I could not forget her eyes, all the other eyes. Next morning, when a sergeant from the WBK arrived at our door and asked me if I was fit for service, I said yes. Had I let my mother answer the door while I played sick in bed, Dr. Strunk might have bailed me out one more time. Perhaps, but I could no longer accept that.

  Markings on a Tree. I went by streetcar to the huge, partly destroyed building at the edge of Old Town that housed the WBK. In the entrance hall sat a Waffen-SS sergeant behind a desk, waiting for kids like me. I had to walk past him to get where I needed to go. He got up and said, “You are coming to us, aren’t you?”

  He meant that I should volunteer for the Waffen-SS: I said, “No. I am a reserve officer candidate in the Heer.”

  I had to show him my papers. “What branch do you want to go to?” he asked.

  “Panzer,” I said.

  “We have Panzer, too. We have better Panzer than the Heer. You can become an officer in the Waffen-SS, too.”

  I said, “No. I want to be Heer.”

  He had to let me go. If I had not had papers documenting that I had already been accepted as a reserve officer’s candidate, he would have pulled me into the Waffen-SS. I knew that many kids who did not have my credentials were hi-jacked into the Waffen-SS, mostly harmless kids who were later treated as fanatical Nazis by the Western Allies and the Russians.

  At the Heer desk, they ignored my wish to be sent to an armored unit. Instead, I received orders to report the next day to the Sagan Kaserne in Wuppertal-Elberfeld, and the Grenadier-Ersatz-und-Ausbildungs-Bataillon 464, 1st Company. It wasn’t Panzer but Grenadier, and perhaps that was for the best.

  My parents did not take the news well. I knew they wouldn’t. But they were glad that I was sent to Wuppertal and not some place in the east. My father and I had one preparation to make we felt was important. We went to the front of the house and marked one of the old trees with knife cuts, crosswise. We agreed that, if my parents had to leave the house for one reason or another, but were still alive, they would leave information at the foot of the tree so that I would find them when I came back. We didn’t say if I came back.

  We spent our last evening together in a grave and thoughtful mood. We tried to be upbeat but it was hard. There was no alarm that night. I didn’t sleep much, and I am sure my parents didn’t either.

  In the dark, early morning of January 5 I said good-bye to my mother. She tried hard not to cry. My father walked with me to the streetcar station on the corner of Schönau-Strasse, a couple of blocks away.

  I took my old diary with me in which I had recorded my Flakhelfer and RAD times, the new notebook on Egyptian mythology, history and art, and R.C. Sherriff’s World War I play, Journey’s End. We had not been able to finish reading it in Bad Einsiedel but I had done so in Hüls. I took it for the English text and because it had meaning for me. My own journey’s end seemed to loom somewhere just before me.

  I did not want my father to go farther than the streetcar station. I hated goodbyes. We hardly spoke on the short walk. He knew better than I where I was going; he had been there. He was solemn, turned within himself. We did not know if we would see each other again. The streetcar came. We looked into each other’s eyes. What do you see when you see? We might have embraced briefly, but I don’t remember. I got in and the streetcar went away. The car was filled with people. I took a last look. How did he make it back to my mother on that morning?

  6

  Grenadier

  January 5-March 28 1945

  Sagan Kaserne. The twin cities of Wuppertal-Elberfeld, about 30 kilometers east of Düsseldorf, stretched along a narrow valley beside the Wupper River. Slopes on both sides rose sharply to plateaus above. It was a perfect setting for the demolition of a city with blockbusters. Pressure from the explosions intensified in the tight space as they bounced against the slopes and were thrown back. The English knew all about this, and their bomber crews did what they had been ordered to do. Perhaps they saw this place as another Sodom, one of many. The result was that the twin cit
ies had been about 70-80 % destroyed when I arrived at the shell of a railway station.

  I was one of a few people who left the train. I asked directions to the military base. A late-comer, once again. I walked past blackened ruins up a winding road to the plateau south of the city. Before me lay the Sagan Kaserne, a sprawling complex of stone buildings for military personnel with associated armories, motor vehicle parks, training areas, shooting ranges, etc. This huge aggregation of structures, one of the premier military training facilities in the region, had never been touched by the Allied air campaign. I hoped that it would remain so. But it did appear that Bomber Command preferred the twin cities, an oft-visited target, to the military base.

  I reported at the main gate and was sent to Headquarters of Grenadier E and A Battalion 464, one of a number of such headquarters. I showed my papers to a sergeant who passed me on to 1st Company. The staff consisted of a sergeant-major, two lance- corporals and two Wehrmacht Helferinnen – women in uniform assigned to office work. They were in their early thirties dressed in white blouses and skirts in Heer field grey. No officer was in sight. I approached the sergeant-major who sat behind a desk and handed him my papers. He looked me over and said, “You are late.” I explained. He nodded. He shuffled some papers on his desk.

  I had time to look him over. He was a thin man of medium height perhaps 40 years old. He had a chest full of medals. Most distinguished for an infantryman was the Nahkampf-Spange (Close Combat Badge) over his left breast pocket. This badge was granted by the Heer in bronze, silver, and gold. The gold one was for 50 days of close combat, obviously a rare decoration. His was gold. This was not the regular sergeant- major type. A surprise.

  While I was contemplating that he looked at me with a rather wooden face and the ghost of a smile. “You go to 2nd Platoon, 1st Company,” he said. He made a gesture with his hand that could have meant, “Good luck.” He called one of the lance-corporals and he took me to rooms where I was outfitted with the whole range of equipment a grenadier was supposed to need. He helped me carry it and led me to the second floor of a building where the company was quartered. The room was empty when we arrived. The guys were out on training. I picked one of the few unoccupied cots and the empty locker next to it. I changed from civilian clothes into army fatigues and stored my equipment in the locker. Then I sat down and checked the Mauser 98 carbine I had been issued. I hefted it to my shoulder. It weighed about the same as the Krag I had used in Eggebek. I worked the bolt action and looked through the barrel. Well oiled. There were two windows in the room. I looked out of one to the square below. This was it, the place where I would become a soldier.

  Becoming a Grenadier. 2nd Platoon was one of three that made up the company. A platoon consisted of three squads, each led by a corporal eighteen to nineteen years old. Each of them had combat experience. The platoon was led by a sergeant. A platoon comprised a total of 31 men, including the non-commissioned officers. The company, with a lieutenant as its commanding officer, numbered about 95 men. The total number in the battalion, consisting of three companies, was roughly 285 men.

  Compared with earlier compositions in the German Army, these companies were weak in manpower, and that made for a weak battalion. But all through the German Army of 1944-1945, the strengths of units had drastically declined due to losses in battle. We were no exception. The Heer tried to overcome the deficit in manpower with more advanced weapons. Each of our squads was equipped with a machine-gun (MG) 42 that had a rate of fire of 1,200 rounds per minute. Thus each platoon had three MG 42s, each company nine, and the battalion, a total of 27. The riflemen, because of the extremely high rate of fire of these guns, were required to support them. Each carried loads of machine-gun ammunition in metal boxes and wore extra belts of rounds around their necks when going into combat. In addition, each sergeant and corporal carried a Sturmgewehr (a new and superior type of machine pistol), also increasing firepower. I myself preferred my rifle, a weapon I had long been familiar with.

  The grenadiers in our battalion were generally seventeen years old. We all came from a region within a radius of 50 to 70 kilometers from Sagan Kaserne. Thus, we came from the Rhineland, from the Ruhr, and the hilly country around Wuppertal. All of us had witnessed major cities burned to the ground. A difference from my RAD experience was that no Hitler Youth believers were among us. Perhaps those guys had gone to the Waffen-SS from the various WBKs where they registered. There was a sizeable number of ex-Flakhelfer among us.

  We were a bunch such as the German Army had never known before. But then, never before had kids our age been prepared for combat. Having been trained for military work from Jungvolk times on, when we were ten years old, we were not bad in military craft and did well on the shooting range. But we believed in nothing anymore. The rhetoric of the Nazis, of nearly everyone in authority, we had found to be lies, empty promises. During the day, while on exercises or at the shooting range, we saw the vapor trails of American bombers and fighter planes crisscrossing the sky. Many a night we rushed to the basement because of an air raid alarm, wondering if it would be us this time. Sometimes we heard the faint clamor of heavy bombing, such as on January 10 when Düsseldorf was hit again, or the day following when Krefeld was struck. And Duisburg, January 22-23, Neuss on January 23, Köln and Duisburg, January 28, Dortmund on February 4, and Düsseldorf once more on February 20-21. And so it continued. In February we had to get used to hearing the distant, steady rumble of artillery fire from the west as American spearheads were moving toward the Rhine, our river. The war was getting closer, coming our way, unstoppable.

  I think there was not one among us kids who believed that the war could still be won. I was not sure whether the officers and non-coms thought otherwise; I doubted it. They were caught with us in the same trap. We had become totally nihilistic. We trusted only each other, no one else. We expected to be thrown into the great grinder. When volunteers were requested to serve in the one-man torpedoes (more or less a suicide commando), a number of us registered. I was one of them. We wanted to get it over with. We were all seriously messed up. A little later this appeal was canceled. There was no sea space left in which to launch one-man-torpedoes against Allied ships before Normandy or Antwerp.

  During all that time our training continued at a furious pace, perhaps to wear us out and prevent us from thinking critically about the condition of our world. What we did was more of the same things we had done in Eggebek and elsewhere, only more seriously: long marches (40 kilometers) with weapons and heavy packs; shooting rifles, MG 42s, Sturmgewehre, and the Panzerfaust. And there was hand grenade throwing, cleaning weapons, disassembling and reassembling them – all the exercises a sod infantryman is supposed to master before engaging in what the ancient philosopher called “the art of war.” By that time, however, we had long ago learned that war was not an art but a dirty, deadly affair. Our chances to survive were very limited.

  I exchanged letters regularly with my parents. We tried to be positive. During my free time I turned to my Egyptology notebook, reading and fantasizing myself into another time.

  About Enemies. Considering the situation and the apparent senselessness of it all, it was no surprise that some kids ran away. Given a chance we all would have done it. But run to where? There was no place to hide. The kids who ran away usually went home or tried to get to relatives or people they knew. Some of the latter, afraid for themselves, might turn them in. The Heer called it desertion and punished it with death. Military police or regular police were good at tracking deserters down and bringing them back to Sagan. There they were executed on the shooting range by a firing squad of their comrades. If there were trials we never heard about them.

  The shooting range was a large complex, consisting of perhaps a dozen or more long shooting lanes separated by longitudinal, sod-covered walls. This was where we fired rifles, MG 42s, and Sturmgewehre. One day I saw an execution by accident. Our platoon had a cigarette break. I was putting up a new target in front of the roof-
covered sandy backdrop at the end of the shooting lane. I heard voices across the side wall to my left. I crawled up and looked over.

  There was a pole in front of the backdrop. A kid stood limp at the pole. A sergeant tied his hands around the pole behind him. The sergeant walked away to stand by a squad of riflemen, kids. He barked a command. Ten rifles fired and hit. The body was slammed against the pole, then fell forward. He was held by the rope, slumped head down. The sergeant stepped close, removed the prisoner’s cap and shot him in the head with a pistol. I had seen enough. I slid back down the wall.

  Life was cheap. Who was the enemy? Our own or those others pushing toward the Rhine from the west? We never learned how many kids were executed this way during or before our time in Sagan Kaserne, victims of our own military.

  Two guys in my squad trusted me enough to tell me about their plans to run away, despite knowing what would happen if they got caught. Erich and Herbert, both from Neuss, great kids, bright, good-looking. “I know of a cabin near Schalksmühle,” Erich said. “It’s in the forest. No one lives there. It’s a hunting cabin. I have been there with my father. “

  “How far is it from here to the cabin?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe twenty kilometers.”

  We thought about it for a while. “How can we travel twenty kilometers?” I asked. “They will look for us at our homes. That would be all right. But everyone who sees us will know we are deserters. We can’t trust anyone. They will call the police on us.”