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

by Karl Heinz Schlesier

  In the afternoon we reached St. Lô at the bottom of the Cherbourg Peninsula. The city had seen some hard fighting after the Allied landings in June 1944. Allied bombers and house-to-house fighting had wrecked the city as badly as Essen, Düsseldorf, Köln, Duisburg, Wuppertal, etc. The train came to a stop at the main railway station. Many people stood on the platform waiting for trains. But no insults were hurled at us here; the people stood quietly.

  Something happened there I will always remember. A lone Frenchman in his thirties ran along our train from car to car and took empty water buckets and rushed to fill them. He worked to supply as many cars with fresh water as he could before the train pulled out. He had been a prisoner of war in Germany and spoke our language well. Apparently he had had good experiences. This one man was, to me, a bolt of lightning in the darkness.

  The train turned north toward Cherbourg. This confirmed our worst fears. They will ship us from Cherbourg harbor, some said. They will never let us go home. Home, where was that? Did home still exist? Our parents and others we knew, were they still alive? Those whose homeland was in East Prussia or other areas overrun by the Russians, did their loved ones still live? Had they been displaced, were they on roads somewhere, or had they disappeared in the great killing frenzy?

  As the train trundled on, one by one the guys in my car lay down to sleep. We were weak, underfed, and emotionally exhausted. But I could not sleep. As the night came on I stood at the sidewall of the car, my elbows on the wooden rim, my chin in my hands, staring into the dark. The train pulled into Carentan, another damaged city, and stopped. A well-lit passenger train drew up on the track next to us. A window was directly in front of me. If I had stretched out my arm I could almost have touched it. The window was rolled down and four young people peered out, two French soldiers in immaculate uniforms and their girl friends. These four were pretty and full of life, well-dressed, clean, laughing happily. Their faces and mine were on the same level. I kept staring, looking through them, through these happy faces. They looked at me and then into the car where my guys lay bundled up in the black dust, looking dead. Their smiles faded from their faces. They became sober, serious, perhaps even worried. I neither changed my position nor my stare. I meant them no harm. These four had done nothing bad to us. They were not enemies, just strangers who had suddenly, without preparation, been confronted with a train that appeared as a train of the damned. And damned we were. The four became very still. And then their train left. As I remember this incident they probably remember it too. Perhaps they thought I was the last one alive. It looked that way. I rather saw myself as a guard, a watcher over my slumped buddies on the road to perdition.

  St. Foucarville. When the train rolled into St. Mère-Eglise it halted for the last time. Shouts. Shouts. “Get out! Mack snell! Mack snell!” – familiar sounds. We had barely climbed out when we were driven like sheep. “Snell! Snell!” In the dark, under the headlights of trucks, we were forced to run on a narrow road. We staggered for six long kilometers. Many, many collapsed on that road and were thrown by soldiers into the trucks like sacks of garbage. I remember the clanking sound when someone fell, the empty cans of his “dinner ware” making a din. Eleven kids died that night we heard, perhaps more. Ulli of my old buddies, a kid of great strength, helped me to stay afoot and on the road. There were jeeps and more soldiers when we reached the POW camp of St. Foucarville. We were pushed into a prepared “cage” among a row of cages already filled. Each held 2,000 kids. That night all of us lay as still as the dead, like the ones who actually had died. The war was supposedly over, or was it? Later we learned that the guards who picked us up in Ste. Mère-Eglise had been told we were members of the SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend.

  The St. Foucarville POW camp consisted of two camps. One was an officers’ camp, the other was a camp for us youngsters. Both camps were separated within the larger camp. The officers’ camp housed a few thousand German officers, from generals to lieutenants. Our camp housed perhaps 50,000 kids or more in barbed wire cages (that is what they were called by our American guards), 2,000 to each cage. Each was separated by barbed wire from the next. Cages were located in two rows on both sides of the camp’s main street. Both the officers’ camp and our camp were enclosed with double rows of barbed wire and spaced guard towers. Some of the kids in our camp were Flakhelfer barely sixteen years old who had been captured in western Germany and brought in by train. We wondered why we had been concentrated there. What was the purpose of it? We still believed that “they,” the “others,” had planned something sinister, something special for us, something like shipment overseas for slave labor.

  The camp was two kilometers off the coast, near Utah Beach, one of the beaches where American troops had forced a landing during the Normandy invasion. All day long we heard explosions as either mines were detonated or wrecked ships or landing craft were blown up. Once, on a work detail, a guard took six of us to Utah Beach. He had not yet seen it himself, so we saw it with him. He had not been in combat so what he saw meant little to him. Bullet-scarred bunkers, many wrecked ships run aground during the battle, others with hulls sticking out of the waves. It all contrasted sharply with the wide sweep of the ocean, so peaceful now.

  On my second and last work detail we had some chores to do in the officers’ camp. We met Hans-Ulrich Rudel there, the famous Stuka pilot who, with his “tank busting” Ju 87G, armed with two 3.7cm guns, had scored more than 500 Russian tank “kills”. We sat with him and looked at the highest decorated German soldier of the war. He had been shot down a number of times and lost his right foot in one crash. Fitted with a prosthesis he had flown against the Russians to the last day of the war. The Americans had confiscated the prosthesis along with his medals. He was pleased to be with us, he said. He was a friendly man. He certainly was a German nationalist, but a soldier, not a Nazi hack.

  It seemed that authorities in charge of POW camps followed the same routine everywhere. We were still fed as at Rennes, first at 5 A.M., then at 5 P.M. The amount of food and its consistency was the same as in Rennes. One could live on it. Barely.

  Summer on Cherbourg Peninsula. It was a warm and pleasant summer on the peninsula. The weather was good, we had a lot of sun. I used the time to read a lot while sitting outside the tent in the sun. I was able to get some second- or third-hand American paperbacks, a few very good ones, among them a book by William Faulkner and one by Raymond Chandler. The Faulkner was hard to read. Much of it I didn’t get, certainly not without a dictionary. I no longer made entrances in my diary after becoming a POW. Instead, I wrote poetry. I had the stump of a pencil left. Poetry does not take up much space, and space in my diary was limited. I also had lots of time to think. My eighteenth birthday came on July 31, and went.

  I wondered how all of this had happened. The Nazis, of course. But why had so many people gone along with them? Why had German generals sent men into battle when they knew the war was lost, and by perpetuating it, they squandered so many lives and so much more? Why the desperate fighting to the end? Was this a German thing? What was German in that? And what should I do with that knowledge now? How could things be changed if we were given a chance? Should we be given that chance, I promised myself, I would work for change, for truth. I would never again be on the side of injustice. I thought often about my grandfather. He had been in this fight all his life.

  Once, when our cage was marched somewhere, I don’t remember the reason, black guards told us to sing a song. This had been our procedure: someone, an officer or whoever, called, “Ein Lied!” The right front man in the column called the song, “Heidemarie!” Then he called out, “Three, four!” The whole column started to sing after “Four,” soldiers marching in step. That’s what happened on the march when the soldier suggested a song. The right front man called the song. Our column, 2,000 kids, fell into step and we sang, “Wo König Ortler seinen Speer steil in die Lüfte…” Our singing reverberated through the whole camp. Everywhere kids and officers ran to the ba
rbed wire fences to see what was happening. Not much. We blared our German marching song in the face of the world. For a few moments, we were POWs no more, a unit again. Perhaps, ready to fight once more?

  The exercise, harmless as it was, must have scared the camp commander. Perhaps he realized that our spirit was on the mend. It never happened again that German soldiers (from fifteen to seventeen years of age) were encouraged to “sing a song.”

  After the initial cruelty that occurred upon our arrival I saw no acts of violence against us and did not hear of any. St. Foucarville was not a bad camp. Around the middle of September 1945, we were questioned about where we came from in Germany. It seemed we were going to be sent home! Home? Incredible. Nothing was done for those who came from regions no longer part of Germany, as for instance, East Prussia, Silesia, and areas east of the Oder River or under the control of Russians, Poles, Czechs, etc.

  Those of us who were from the “British Zone of Occupation” in western and north-western Germany got orders that would take us by train to Weeze, a military camp southwest of Wesel. We could not believe it. But we were assembled, there was really a train, and it really took us away south and east. We were going home! We were going home after all.

  Once again we rolled through “enemy territory,” but this time there were no angry people to threaten us. What had happened? We came to the Weeze camp. Barbed wire still, but a different attitude among the English officers and men. With the place under English control, for once things were fair and reasonable. We were de-loused and given good meals, the best we had had since we became POWs. We received discharge papers to the British Zone of Occupation, a 20 Mark bill to pay streetcar or train fare, and were released in small groups over a period of a couple of days. Free. Unbelievable. Actually free!

  Düsseldorf. The Way Home. Outside the gate I suddenly stood all by myself. The others who had left with me had rushed in different directions. For a long time I had been in the constant company of many others, now I was alone. It was unnerving. I missed my buddies. They had kept me alive when I was deathly sick. Where were they? I pulled myself together. I slowly set my feet.

  In the camps we had very much looked alike. Our German uniforms had long ago worn out. We had been clothed in surplus American khaki uniforms or hand-me-downs, stamped with the POW sign on backs and jackets. Our underwear had long perished also, so we wore yellow T-shirts and white cotton shorts. I had acquired a small canvas bag with a shoulder strap, US military equipment. Walking toward the streetcar stop I felt like a canary, like an outsider, a stranger among civilians who were supposedly my people. They looked me over briefly and knew immediately: I was a POW coming home, as in Draussen vor der Tür, an important radio play by Wolfgang Borchert of the period. People were extremely friendly and tried to be helpful. But I wasn’t used to this. I had not seen regular people, civilians, for a long time. I was a stranger used to places and people they knew nothing about. It wasn’t their fault, but I felt as estranged as someone coming from another planet. Was this Germany? I saw the ruins, all right. I had seen them before. I had seen them in St. Lô, too.

  I made it by streetcar from Krefeld to Oberkassel, on the left bank of the Rhine opposite Düsseldorf. The bridges were still blown and the only way to cross was by boat. There was a line half a kilometer long, people waiting patiently for the one white-painted boat of the Köln-Düsseldorf Line that was going back and forth. I walked to the end of the line but people waved me on. As I walked along the line, people kept waving me on. One of the lost sons coming back.

  I moved to the head of the line feeling dizzy. Why were all these civilians, older men, women, so friendly? What had I done? I stood as if I were a foreigner thrown into another culture. What did I have in common with them? I didn’t know anymore. Was my home St. Foucarville and my buddies, the food lines at 5 A.M. and 5 P.M., nights on a small blanket covering my space on the ground, my head on a brick?

  The boat came and everyone made space for me. They had been through hell and more. Was I somebody special? I did not think so. But that was what happened. The boat crossed and docked on the Düsseldorf side. I was let off first. I walked along the long line of people waiting to cross to the other side, feeling like a freak, like a copy of an American. Everyone looked at my American clothes and at my hollow, stony face.

  The “alte Schlossturm,” the castle keep on the Rhine, one of the city’s landmarks overlooking the river, had been destroyed. So was most of the Old Town behind it. Of the large buildings along the river front most were burned out. Where were my parents? What should I prepare myself for? Streetcar no. 3 to Gerresheim had its end station near the ruin of the Schlossturm. A lot of people waited there. I went over and ran into a guy I knew, Manny Wilke, a guy my age from Gerresheim, a future soccer star. He made a ruckus, greeting me. I shrank back. I was not used to expressing emotions. As soon as I had a chance to speak I asked, “The villa, next to the Krone, is it still standing?” His answer was, yes. “Was the house hit?” No, he said, it wasn’t.

  I did not know what else to ask. Our house undamaged meant my parents should be alive! The tram came and we got on, again people letting me go first. I watched passively as the tram rolled through the rubble of the devastated heart of the city. Only on Grafenberger Allee and in Grafenberg, among the demolished houses were others, often bullet-scarred but intact. Manny was talking without pause but I didn’t listen. I was distant. I don’t remember what was going on in my head. I know I felt out of place. Here was the moment I had imagined so often in the camps – with fear, with hope, and knowing if it happened, how crucial it would be for me. It would decide my life. If my parents were dead I knew I would not want to live.

  The long climb of the streetcar through the woods to the Hardt, then the slow descent down into upper Gerresheim. Blackened skeletons of buildings here and there, not too many. The center of the Old Town was bombed out. Then came Schönau-Strasse, from where I had left for Sagan Kaserne it seemed half a life ago. Finally, the streetcar stop near our house on Dörpfeld-Strasse. I got out and walked. I don’t remember how I felt. Not joy, I was still estranged. I went through the gate to the house. I passed the big trees, including the one my father had marked before I left.

  Someone had seen me from the window. A strange man in khaki coming toward the house. It was my aunt Lisbeth who gave the alarm. As I went up the stairs and rang the bell, my mother was already rushing down the stairs to open the heavy iron door. My mother’s eyes were wide. “Jung!” She fell into my arms. We stood for a while. I followed her upstairs like a sleepwalker. My aunt, a heavy-set woman was there and hugged me hard. I wanted to get away from the commotion but I couldn’t. I sat in the living room. It was not the way I remembered it. It was the first time I had been in a normal house for a long time. My mother told me that my father would soon be back from the factory, but she would have to tell him carefully that I was home. He was ill; his heart was weak and he had developed asthma.

  She told me that he often stopped returning soldiers on the street and asked if they knew me, if they had seen me. I had been reported as “missing in action.”

  I looked out the window. Outside familiar trees, in the distance the cluster of old trees around the decayed observation tower, the Ruine. My old hunting ground.

  Then my father came. My mother caught him on the stairs, informed him. He came through the door, breathing with difficulty. My mother was as I remembered her, but my father looked haggard and aged. Our eyes locked. We put our arms around each other. And so we stood. Yes, they were alive. I was alive. I was home.

  Epilogue

  Egyptology was not to become my profession although I always remembered how my reading about the mysteries of the Old and New Kingdom helped to protect my sanity. Instead I became an anthropologist.

  But that came later. Back in Düsseldorf, from September 1945 to March 1946, I worked downtown on a team cleaning Bismarck-Strasse from the main railway station to Blumen-Strasse of mountains of rubble and
debris. When school started again in April 1946, I returned to my old school, now under new leadership and a new name, Jacobi Gymnasium. We ex-Flakhelfer and ex-soldiers had to take a special two-year set of courses to make up for our lost time and lack of knowledge. We received the Abitur, the diploma that allowed us to attend a university, after a three-day exam in April 1948.

  German universities, many damaged by bombing, restarted also in 1946. Due to sparse facilities and a shortage of professors, enrollment was limited to older students returning from POW camps and injured veterans. As anti-Nazi professors who had escaped the Holocaust returned to Germany, the universities regained new life. I enrolled at Bonn University for the Winter Semester 1949.

  At Bonn I started with courses in German literature and Classical archaeology. Soon I switched to a double major in anthropology and the history of art. My Ph. D. dissertation was on the pre-Inca Nazca culture of the south coast of Peru (published in Annali Lateranensi, Monograph 23, Rome 1959). Perhaps my grandmother’s stories about Inca treasures worked subconsciously on my mind. After the Ph.D. I worked in the Bonn Anthropology Department as a research assistant until I was awarded a post-doctoral Fellowship in anthropology at the University of Chicago in the summer of 1958.

  At Chicago, I was strongly influenced by Sol Tax, who became my main professor and mentor. I had arrived at the end of the Fox Project, a ten-year program by Sol Tax and his graduate students with the Fox Indians in Iowa. During this program the principles of action anthropology were initiated, a new way of applying anthropological knowledge for the benefit of a host population. In 1969, when I was at Wichita State University in Kansas, I started a program with the Cheyenne in Oklahoma based on what was learned in the Fox Project.