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

by Karl Heinz Schlesier

  After a brief return to Germany, where I worked at the University of Freiburg, I was invited, in 1962, by the University of Wichita (later Wichita State) to join the faculty as an anthropology professor. My wife and I went. We remained at the university for 30 years until I became Professor Emeritus in 1992.

  During these years I have written six books and published 56 essays and articles in the scholarly journals of ten countries. I have been to Peru for my studies and have done fieldwork in the French Pyrenees, on the Arctic slopes of northern Alaska, on the Columbian Plateau, and through much of the Plains. I have served as a jury member on the Fourth Russell Tribunal, “The Rights of the Indians of the Americas,” Rotterdam 1980. I served as an expert witness on two Cheyenne cases in Federal Court in Oklahoma City. I was guest professor in Germany twice, at the University of Göttingen and the University of Münster.

  All my publications focus on American Indians. This book is the first one that steps outside that tradition. I wrote it as an old man, one of the still living survivors of the 1926-1927 generation of Germans that is called the “silent generation.” We were silent because the horror we lived through paled against the horror of the Holocaust. I have broken my silence now. I hope that it measures as a contribution to understanding a time gone but not forgotten.

  Afterword

  Dr. John M. Janzen, Professor of Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas

  Flakhelfer to Grenadier is a highly personal account of a now old man who was drafted by the German army at the end of World War II. Karl Schlesier is a well-known anthropologist in the United States, living in retirement in New Mexico where he has continued his scholarly career. His best known works include Wolves of Heaven: Cheyenne Shamanism, Ceremonies and Prehistoric Origins 1985, and his edited volume Plains Indians, AD 500-1500: The Archeological past of Historic Groups 1994. Most recently he has published a trilogy of carefully-researched historical novels on American Indian groups that resisted containment by the United States in the late 19th century: Trail of the Red Butterfly is about a Plains Indian expedition into Mexico to rescue a captured relative; Josanie’s War: A Chiricahua Apache Novel is about the last Apache rising in 1885; Aurora Crossing: A Novel of the Nez Perces is about the war of 1877 in which the Nez Perces refused white domination and sought refuge in Canada.

  Schlesier’s memoir has the same careful attention to detail as his other writing, but the source, its “data”, is unique: his own memory, reinforced by the diary he kept as a 15-17 year old youth. With the goal of presenting a narrative that avoids any influence of subsequent scholarly research on World War II, the diary guides him to recount those searing experiences as an anti-aircraft gunner in the heavily industrialized Ruhr region of Germany, the fierceness of Allied bombing and strafing, the destruction of the cities around him; witnessing slave labor; being drawn into the infantry on the North-West European Front late in the war; digging trenches, receiving artillery fire and all the details of battle. He also describes his brief furloughs home, the books he read supplied by a librarian determined to keep him going as a student, despite his and his comrades growing disillusionment with the war. The narrative’s climax occurs as the German front is overrun by the Allies. Boy soldier and his small isolated unit are captured by a lone American soldier walking across the field in a non-defensive posture toward the German trenches, telling those before him, who have their guns trained on him, to “get up, come out.” The American soldier is an American Indian; the boy soldier is hugely impressed by his fearlessness, his bravery. He and his comrades, sick of the war, obey; they are taken to a farmyard, believing they have survived. But another American soldier, crazed by recent casualties of comrades, begins to take revenge on the enemy captives. An approaching American officer intervenes. After describing a few months as a prisoner of war in France, the memoir closes as he makes his way home to his parents, who are overjoyed to have their only son back safely. A brief epilogue summarily notes that he finished high school, went on to get a PhD in anthropology from the University of Bonn; received a postdoctoral fellowship to the University of Chicago, studied “action anthropology” with Sol Tax and went on to direct one of the more successful long-term action anthropology projects with the Southern Cheyenne traditionalists. For the duration of his long career he helps them with legal arrangements that assure their legitimacy vis-à-vis the tribal council and the US government, and supports them in their struggle for cultural survival.

  I have known Professor Schlesier for 50 years, and we have been together recently regarding this memoir. There is something enduring and poignant about it as written; it is like a primary source, a clinical transcription, a confession. In the words of recent anthropological writing, it is an “auto-ethnography,” an account of an author’s own experience within the context of a larger event or cultural setting. Rather than being a script that can be endlessly edited and manipulated for a publication, it has a certain inviolability. Upon reading Schlesier’s memoir I suggested, and he endorsed, the idea of a document that would situate his wartime experiences, as presented in the memoir, within an anthropological framework. I recognized in the memoir several themes that have shown up frequently in anthropological writing on violence, trauma, and memory. When he asked me to do this, I willingly consented. This afterword therefore offers three framing ideas that situate the memoir within anthropological scholarship, at the same time demonstrating that anthropologists are human beings whose priorities and judgments are shaped by their experiences.

  Survival and a life. Although Schlesier, with the help of a diary, adheres fairly strictly to the self-imposed discipline of recreating his boyhood soldier experiences as they occurred in 1943-45, “uninfluenced by objective historical scholarship…”, readers may ask if this is really possible, or what other factors may have shaped the memory of events during and just after World War II. One of the most influential factors that has shaped his memory is surely the relationship of his survival to his career. Only in recent years has he even begun to talk about his war survival, and still today this is accompanied by palpable agitation and self-consciousness. Those of us who know Karl well understand the intimate connection between the events of the war, especially his survival at the end, and in his decision to commit himself to serving the Native American community in some way as an anthropologist. But he is too modest to shout this connection from the rooftops. It is very personal for him. Recently he related to me that even the Cheyenne priests who helped him with his vision prior to signing the action anthropology contract with him only realized later, when they were together on Bear Butte Mountain in South Dakota, a sacred site for the Cheyenne, that his war experience was a strong motive in his desire to work with them.

  Yet it is my distinct impression that the years of his professional career and his work with the Cheyenne have shaped his memory of that moment. The moment of his rescue is, narratively or rhetorically speaking, the pivot of the memoir. Several of my family members who read the memoir thought that this connection was the main point of the memoir. Schlesier himself speaks of “coincidences” surrounding his survival. In any event, it is the climax of his war experience as well as the beginning of the rest of his life and career. It is the cathartic moment of the memoir that juxtaposes the immanent threat of death with double rescues. The ineluctable logic of the moment requires that the life saved so dramatically is not lightly lived out. This association of a searing moment’s experience to an entire life reminds me a lot of the testimony of the Rwandan genocide survivor Bugingo. Recounting his narrow escapes with death produced great agitation, as well as the need to situate these moments within the narrative of his entire life thus far.1

  Testimony and trauma. The association of testimony to trauma is a further dimension that may be lifted out in the memoir, with the ample assistance by Schlesier who, repeatedly, alludes to the failure of words in a situation of perplexity, shock, and deep sadness. On seeing their first destruc
tion of a German city from the train, “ … the rest of us stood rather frozen, hiding emotions ….” or, on seeing bomb damage in Wuppertal, a neighboring city, “seeing this numbed us … we spoke little after that;” or, again, on seeing totally destroyed Wuppertal, “ … slowly the horror of it seeped into our minds. We spoke little that evening … we were tired, physically and emotionally.” And as the surrounding cities of the Ruhr were reduced to rubble by Allied bombing, “fear gripped me as it had last night. I tried to shake it off but could not;” and “watching in silence as the red glows on the horizon or close by painted the clouds, caused an unspeakable sorrow in the heart.” Again, while trudging to their anti-aircraft battery post, “we did not speak.” What is the full depth of this failure of speech? How does it play itself out? Later on, the repeated confrontation with horror, terror, and the blasts of bombs, and of anti-aircraft guns, took their toll: “We had become numb to disasters, apathetic, locking our feelings away…” “I suppose I was in shock…” seems a glib way of stating an enormous emotional condition leading to an overwhelming sense of helplessness: “there was nothing we could do.”

  One of the insights of anthropological studies of war experience is that this paralysis of words is accompanied by the internalization of impressions deeper into one’s psychic and physical being. The memory of the experience becomes embodied; it lives on in semi-conscious ways to be aroused by association with a similar sensation.

  Schlesier recounts exactly such a connection between his harrowing first experience of heavy artillery fire, and reflexively reliving the experience years later when he walked by a party where fireworks were going off. Despite being dressed in suit and tie, he impulsively dove for cover. Veena Das describes the traumatic impact of violent attacks, rape of women, killing, flight, and being forced to make a new life upon thousands of individuals and families of the partition of India and Pakistan at the close of British colonialism. She also describes the violence against Sikhs in the aftermath of the assassination of Indira Gandhi by a Sikh bodyguard. Although apparently her own family, and she personally, were not directly affected, as an Indian anthropologist she understands that there is no healing, no ending of the internalized trauma. Rather, the “violence descends into the ordinary,” it becomes “everyday.”2 Certain particularly painful aspects, like the rape of women, is collectively suppressed. For Sri Lankan anthropologist E. Valentine Daniel, the internalized violence of the civil war in his home country is closer, in that he is Tamil on one side of his parentage, Sinhalese on the other. His relatives carry the embodied memories of torture and violence.3 Here too particularly intentional violence induces deeply seated fear that can only be spoken about with difficulty. Some of his interviewees sat quietly for long periods of time before they could bring themselves to relate their experience.

  Schlesier illustrates a number of the themes of these two anthropological studies of memory of violence and trauma. Like their insights to their national narrative on societal wide traumatic experience, he provides an insight into an entire category of World War II “victims” whom he has called the silent generation of boy soldiers. Similar, yet more poignant, is his first person singular ethnographic pen writing, buttressed by his diary, about his own personal experience.

  Preserving sanity in the face of war’s chaos. This book offers a fascinating record of Schlesier’ s emotional register as the war moved toward its climax. He notes the growing nihilism in his unit, “we believed in nothing anymore.” On the other hand, as still “kid[s], sometimes serious, sometimes playful, [we were] able to switch from one emotion to the other, not really knowing …” This emotional quavering led most of his unit to volunteer for one-man torpedo suicide missions, a program that thankfully did not materialize. Reflecting on their embrace of this way out of their situation, Schlesier comments that “we were all seriously messed up.” These comments are eerily similar to those collected in recent ethnographies of child soldiers, forced into service in many recent wars because of their plia-bility.4 This impact of war on moral sanity was apparently not a strange thing to Schlesier even as he entered his service. He recalls a World War I veteran having told him that the war had been a “trauma for all who had been there …” accompanied by a descending helplessness, “a mood, a feeling that what was happening was inevitable, beyond anyone’s power to change …”

  Yet Schlesier appears to have been blessed more than most of his peers with support and strong role models to keep him going in the midst of the moral and emotional chaos of war. He corresponded regularly with his parents, they were the only parents who came to visit one of the boy soldiers at Sagan barracks. He had home leaves. Most remarkable was the librarian who kept him supplied with books, some even banned by the Nazi regime. His grandmother, the librarian, his parents, all nurtured his development as a scholar and human being. He mentions the memory of his grandfather, a trade-union leader, as a thread of hope and stability that kept him going in the midst of disillusionment with the Nazi government and war machine. He was not drawn to false hopes of a secret weapon that would rescue the German war effort from defeat. Nor did he, like others, embrace the NS ideology, relish their brown shirts, or become brutal.

  Schlesier’s ambivalence toward the war so many years later harbors both the boyhood glorification of powerful guns and their bravery in defending their cities and communities from an enemy, as well as a memory of deep skepticism of the Nazi regime’s claims and ideologies. He records glimpses of the horrors we associate with the Nazi war machine, such as the slave labor in a factory his unit protected for a time; but he also says he did not know the full horrors of their war program.

  From Flakhelfer to Grenadier harbors philosophical elements conveyed by the words ‘Truth”, “Witnessing”, and “Redemption”. Truth is what he seeks, and what keeps him going. Schlesier’s effort to write it the way it happened is a psychological defense against the sometimes automatic charge that all Germans bear the blame of the Holocaust.5 The reader should be able to judge whether Schlesier’s account is “true”, and what this truth reveals. Witnessing is what he is doing with the memoir; his experience and his understanding of the Nazi world is what he is reporting, like it was on the inside, from the perspective of a youth who did not have knowledge of the whole. Yet he did have his suspicions. Redemption is a fitting notion to describe Schlesier’s decision to dedicate his life to working with, helping, the people of the individual who saved his life. He finds redemption in scholarship, but especially in his devotion to action anthropology.

  1 John M. & Reinhild Janzen, Do I still have a life? Voices from the aftermath of war in Rwanda and Burundi. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Monographs in Anthropology, 2000.

  2 Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007.

  3 E. Valentine Daniel, Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1996.

  4 See for example, Alcinda Honwana, Child Soldiers in Africa. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. The importance of this issue in reviewing Schlesier’s Memoir was suggested to me by Marike S. Janzen, Ph.D, personal communication. June 15, 2010.

  5 Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Knopf 1996.

  Further Reading

  Because this memoir is based on the author’s diary notes from June 10 1943 to March 19 1945, little if anything of the volumes of historical information is considered here. Dates in my diary of air raids on specific cities during the time covered could be compared with RAF and USAF records and would be found accurate. For readers who would like suggestions for further reading, a brief list is entered below.

  Bacque, James. Other Losses. New York: St. Martin’s Press 1991.

  Bishop, Chris and Adam Warner. German Weapons of World War II. Edison, New Jersey: Chatwell Books, 2001.

  Boiten, Theo. Nachtjagd. The
Night Fighter versus Bomber War over the Third Reich 1939-45. Marlborough, England: Crowood Press, 1997.

  Boiten, Theo and Martin Bowman. Battles with the Luftwaffe. The Bomber Campaign against Germany 1942-45. London: HarperCollins, 2001.

  Grayling, A.C. Among the Dead Cities. New York: Walker & Company, 2006.

  Friedrich, Jörg. The Fire. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.

  Knopp, Guido. Die Gefangenen. München: Bertelsmann Verlag, 2003.

  Kucklick, Christoph. Feuersturm. Der Bombenkrieg gegen Deutschland. Hamburg: GEO Ellert & Richter Verlag, 2003.

  LeTissier, Tony. Death was our Companion. Stroud, England: Sutton, 2003.

  Lowe, Keith. Inferno. New York: Scribner, 2007.

  MacDonogh, Giles. After the Reich. New York: Basic Books, 2007.

  Tewes, Ludger. Jugend im Krieg. Essen: Reimar Hobbing Verlag 1989.

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