At Leningrad's Gates

by Wehrmacht Captain William Lubbec

  When our destroyer arrived in the harbor at Copenhagen that afternoon, all personnel were ordered to disembark down a gangplank onto the dock. At a checkpoint there, waiting British soldiers would relieve us of any weapons as we began our internment as prisoners of war.

  While still aboard ship, I withdrew my Luger pistol from one of my tunic’s pockets. To make the weapon inoperable, I removed its firing pin and tossed it overboard into the harbor. Replacing my superior Astra pistol in the holster with the now useless Luger, I then slipped the Astra into my tunic pocket, anticipating that I might need it for some unforeseen eventuality. Last, I took off my Iron Cross First Class and dropped it into one of my pockets.

  Reaching the checkpoint, I handed the Luger to the waiting English soldier. Much to my surprise, he angrily shouted at me in perfect unaccented German. With a hate-filled expression, he proceeded to rip the officer’s shoulder boards and decorations from my uniform leaving me stunned and humiliated.

  Without another word, he gestured for me to move on. Retaining my composure with great difficulty, I resigned myself to my new status as a POW. In retrospect, I suspect that the soldier might have been a Jewish-German immigrant to Britain who took indirect revenge on me for the bitter experience he had endured before departing Germany. Otherwise, in my experience, the British troops behaved correctly and professionally, though they appeared to be wary of us.

  From the checkpoint, I immediately joined about two or three thousand German soldiers piling aboard a large freighter. Recognizing no one, I mostly kept to myself during the 20-hour voyage south. However, I felt an obligation to do what I could to assist other German officers attempting to maintain military discipline among the enlisted troops, a problem which had become a mounting challenge.

  Another officer told me that an ad hoc court-martial committee comprised of four or five colonels had conducted a trial and issued a death sentence against an enlisted man who had attacked a German officer aboard ship. Attaching a heavy base plate from a mortar to the convicted soldier’s back, they shot him and threw the body overboard.

  When we entered the small harbor of Heiligenhafen in the Schlesweig-Holstein region of northern Germany the next day, British troops were again waiting at the end of the gangplank, this time to hand-pump a delousing powder on us before we marched off to internment.

  The harbor was located about three or four miles from the entrance to a sprawling, open-air POW camp established in the region’s rolling farmland. Like sheep herded into a pen, hundreds of thousands of surrendered German soldiers crowded into a roughly 30-square-mile area around the small villages of Gremersdorf, Nanndorf, and Altgalendorf. A few British soldiers patrolled the boundary of the territory, but the perimeter remained unfenced.

  Inside the internment area, the British delegated to Wehrmacht officers the responsibility for maintaining order among the interned troops. They even authorized us to carry sidearms, apparently unconcerned how we might have retained such weapons.

  Upon reaching an isolated farm, I was charged with the supervision of an improvised company of a couple of hundred men from the ship. While making little effort to assert control over my assigned soldiers, I soon realized that it would be difficult to maintain even minimal discipline, even with an Astra in my holster.

  Shortly after our arrival at the farm, one of the soldiers passed by me with his hands in his pockets, neglecting to make any effort to salute. When I protested, “Where is your salute?” He simply laughed at me and walked away.

  Though I called out to him twice, he continued to ignore me. This complete lack of respect for my rank left me furious, but he perhaps recognized that an officer was not likely to shoot a man for gross insubordination in the existing circumstances. Or maybe he was simply apathetic about his fate.

  Following Germany’s defeat after six years of fighting, most of us indeed just felt numb and utterly powerless to control our own destiny. There was no sense of relief about the end of the war, only a somber resignation to our circumstances and anxiety about the future. The Germany we had known was gone. There was no leadership. There was nothing.

  Escape from the camp would have been a simple matter, but nobody attempted it. There was no place to go when the whole of Germany was under occupation. Furthermore, anyone who succeeded would lack the necessary discharge paper from the British that would provide a man with the legal status necessary to obtain employment. It also reflected the German respect for rules and authority as well as our submissive psychological state following defeat.

  On the farm, a large, empty wooden cow barn provided the company with adequate shelter. There were few opportunities to wash or shave, but the lack of food was by far our primary concern. The British supplied each of us with a daily ration of four or five crackers about the size of a small piece of bread, but this inadequate diet made hunger our constant companion. At one point I became so desperate to fill my stomach that I began eating dandelion leaves, having learned in my childhood that these were edible.

  When the men asked me if they could set up a primitive kitchen, I told them to go ahead, while we scrounged the area for something to cook. Discovering a little barley at a neighboring unoccupied farm, we intentionally burned the grain on our improvised stove in an effort to give it some flavor. The taste was awful, but it at least it provided us some needed nutrition.

  The scarcity of food in the camp meant that everyone lost weight. At 6 feet tall, I generally had maintained a weight of 180 pounds throughout the war. At the end of a couple of months in the camp, I dropped to an emaciated 150 or 160 pounds and again began to wonder about my survival.

  No recreational activities were organized, but there was no interest in such things anyway since most of the men had little energy and wanted to keep to themselves. There was finally the time and peace to write to the families of my soldiers who had died in the last weeks of the war, but I lacked names, paper, and addresses.

  Even if the fate of many of the troops in my company was uncertain in the chaotic conditions of the final days and weeks of fighting, I knew that at least some of those listed as missing had actually been killed. It saddens me greatly to think that none of these families received any closure regarding their loved ones who never returned.

  Reflecting on my own survival through years of combat, I am convinced of divine intervention in my fate. Despite four minor wounds over the course of the war, our medics were able to treat all my injuries at the front and never even needed to send me back for more extensive care at a field hospital. God simply had other plans for my life and spared me.

  Of course Anneliese and my family remained unaware of my survival, just as I remained ignorant of their fate. Writing letters at the camp was generally impossible, but the Red Cross provided all POWs with a couple of postcards to notify our families shortly after our arrival. In separate cards, I jotted short notes to Anneliese and my family, informing them that I was alive and in relatively good health in a British POW camp in Schleswig-Holstein, hoping that the postal system would manage to deliver at least one of them amid the postwar chaos.

  Through the course of the summer, a number of the soldiers on the farm had received notice of their release from the camp and been sent to the exit area for processing. In late July, I learned that my turn would soon come. Aware that there would likely be British checkpoints where I would be frisked, I decided to bury my Astra pistol and Soldbuch to prevent their potential confiscation.

  Just before leaving the farm, I walked into some woods about a mile away. After carefully wrapping the items in waterproof material,I buried them and covered the hole with earth, marking the spot with a rock. A year later, I would return to retrieve the package.

  When I arrived at the exit processing center for the huge internment area, I was stunned to run across Otto Tepelman, my old childhood friend from Püggen. It turned out that he too had served in Russia and escaped capture by the Red Army. Despite the presence of Soviet occupying troops in Püggen, he no
w planned to return to our village.

  Because former Wehrmacht officers were still being shipped to POW camps in the Soviet Union after the war, I knew that my own return would be too risky and decided to claim Lüneburg rather than Püggen as my hometown. Just before Tepelman’s discharge, I wrote out a short note and asked him to deliver it to my family personally, since I was still unsure whether they had received my Red Cross card.

  My own departure came only a few days later on July 27, which was fortunate since the small exit area of the camp lacked any shelter other than a network of holes dug into the ground. As we prepared to leave, the British placed me in charge of two dozen other German troops who were returning to Lüneburg. We were soon loaded aboard three trucks driven by British soldiers under the command of a corporal.

  Meanwhile, a couple of days before our departure, Anneliese had learned of my survival and internment, after finally receiving my Red Cross card. Determined to see me again, she immediately left her nursing duties in Süderdeich without even seeking permission from her superiors, who were now under British supervision. Walking to a crossing point on the nearby Elbe River, she smuggled herself aboard a ferry.

  When it docked on the eastern bank, Anneliese somehow acquired a bicycle for the 100-mile journey to my internment area in Schleswig-Holstein. Utterly exhausted, she finally reached the main gate of the camp, only to learn that the British had released me the day before her arrival.

  For the time being, I remained ignorant of these events. At the end of our roughly 100-mile trip south from the camp to Lüneburg, I directed the British driver of the leading truck to head for the employment office in the center of town. After the men piled out into the courtyard in front of the building, I lined them up before issuing my final orders: “The war is finished. Go home.”

  And so, at the end of July 1945, at the age of 25, I was once again a civilian after six years of war.

  FOREIGN OCCUPATION

  Until they received the short note delivered by Otto Tepelman, my family still had no idea where I was, or if I was even still alive. In fact, they had received none of the letters that I had mailed since departing Memel nor the Red Cross postcard, so this note would prove to be the first word from me since January.

  Though my youngest brother Hermann had been adopted by my Aunt and Uncle Stork, my family was also naturally concerned for his fate as well. Drafted as a 16-year-old about six months before the end of the war, he had been sent to serve with an anti-aircraft battery in the Berlin area. Fleeing west just ahead of the Red Army, Hermann swam across the Elbe River and reached the home of his adopted parents in Lüneburg shortly after the end of the fighting.

  Even while Otto remained a POW, my family felt comforted knowing that he was at least safe. Interned in the United States, he spent most of his time picking oranges and grapefruits in Arizona and California. When so many German families lost two or three sons and brothers, it is truly remarkable that the three of us survived the war.

  Following Germany’s defeat, the victorious Allies divided the country into Soviet, American, British, and French zones of occupation. They also reduced Germany’s European territory on an even greater scale than after the First World War. Under the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, parts of the three large agricultural provinces of East Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia had been transferred to the new Polish state while Alsace-Lorraine went back to France. In 1945, all of Pomerania, Silesia, and Brandenburg east of the Oder-Neisse Rivers went to Poland, while East Prussia was divided between Poland and the Soviet Union.

  Beyond territory, the Russians also shipped whole industrial facilities from Germany to the Soviet Union as war reparations. In one case, a huge steel mill in Salzgitter near Braunschweig was dismantled and shipped to Russia by train. Because the railroad gauges changed size in Poland, all train cargo had to be unloaded and switched over to other trains at the junction points.

  When this dismantled factory arrived, the German POWs carrying out the transfer randomly divided up the equipment among different trains heading east so as to make it virtually impossible for the Russians to reassemble the factory. It was but one small measure of resistance against a tide of Soviet looting.

  On a much smaller scale, the Western Allies also took advantage of their position at times. For example, the British chopped down thousands of trees in the Lüneburg area and sent these back to the United Kingdom by the shipload. Germans were more accepting of the West’s occupation of Germany than they were of the Soviet occupation, but when the Western Allies did something like that people became bitter. “They won the war and now they want to take the rest of what we have.” It was only after the passage of two or three years that most Germans in the west would come to view the Americans and the British as allies in the emerging Cold War against the Soviets.

  At the end of April 1945, American troops had occupied Püggen and required all civilians to vacate the village while they used it as a base for further operations. My family camped out in one of the farm’s meadows, eating food they had carried with them and sleeping in our wagons. After ten days, the Americans pulled out of the village, though they remained in charge of the area around it. While no fighting occurred in the area around Püggen, the evacuated homes were in bad shape, mainly as a result of the actions of the Allied POWs who had been liberated.

  During this period immediately after the war ended, numerous former German soldiers wandered through the countryside trying to reach home. In an effort to help, my mother frequently provided the men with food and civilian clothes so that they could avoid drawing attention from the occupying armies.

  At the end of June, British troops briefly replaced the Americans in the area around Püggen, just ahead of the scheduled July 1 transfer to Soviet control that had been agreed upon by the occupying powers. Everyone in the village was fearful.

  Most of the refugees who were living in Püggen chose to head west with the departing British to escape Russian occupation. Many local residents decided to join them, taking only their horses and wagons and leaving most of their belongings behind on their farms. After debating whether to depart for the west, my family finally chose to stay and take their chances.

  Immediately after the British withdrew, Red Army troops began to patrol the border between the eastern and western zones, which was initially marked only by stakes. For a bottle of schnapps, they would allow those who had not yet departed to cross over. Meanwhile, those who had decided to stay on their farms awaited the arrival of the Soviets with great anxiety.

  As the ragtag Russian Army troops entered Püggen accompanied by small ponies pulling little four-wheeled wagons, they appeared to the residents more like a column of Gypsies than an army. Though the appearance of the Soviet forces who came later somewhat improved, my mother later told me that she felt an initial sense of surprise and disappointment that such a rabble could have defeated the modern and disciplined German Army.

  At first, the Red Army attempted to portray themselves as liberators who had rescued the Germans from Nazi tyranny, but Russian animosity toward the German people soon became evident, especially when soldiers had been drinking. The Soviet troops mostly remained invisible during the daytime, but they would come out at night and harass those who had not fled to the west. They would check German homes for weapons and force the families to prepare meals for them using the best food still available.

  If Russian troops were present, German women would hide because of their constant fear of being raped. When they made their initial visit to our home, only my mother’s intervention somehow dissuaded the soldiers from going upstairs where my sisters were hiding. Even after the initial period of occupation, females could only move safely around the village and the surrounding area if they had the protection of at least a couple of German males.

  While rape had been widely tolerated by the Red Army leadership during the war, some officers gradually began to impose harsh field discipline against troops who violated German women un
der Soviet post-war occupation. In one case in Thüringen, a Russian officer allowed a German female to identify the soldier who had raped her. He then shot the guilty party on the spot as a warning to the other troops.

  Of course, Germans living under Red Army occupation faced other dangers as well. Because the Nazi secret police had searched the homes of anyone suspected of disloyalty to the government, my mother expected the occupying Soviet forces to do the same. Fearful that our family could be placed in jeopardy if the occupiers learned that one of their sons had fought in Russia, she had wisely collected the spare uniform, Walther pistol, and military decorations that I had left at home and tossed them into the outhouse behind the pig barn.

  However, she had hidden my officer’s dagger under a mattress in one of the bedrooms, perhaps recognizing its sentimental value to me. When the dagger was discovered in a Russian search of our home, my family was taken for questioning at the local Red Army headquarters in Püggen. They were only released after undergoing an extensive interrogation.

  Perhaps the greatest risk for civilians came in situations where they encountered Russian troops while they were alone. Stories circulated about individuals who had been intentionally run down by Soviet trucks while innocently bicycling down the road. The situation was also perilous for those who lived outside the main local village. In the evenings, these families often came into town to avoid risking a nocturnal visit to their isolated farms.

  In their absence, however, Red Army soldiers would sometimes plunder their farms, seizing animals and all the property they could haul away. If the animals were too weak to move, the troops beat them. In some extreme instances, they even set the remaining animals loose in an act of sheer hooliganism. In the winter of 1945 to 1946, many stray animals wandered around the landscape.

  Every village was governed by a Russian commissar with the assistance of native German Communists who often proved harsher than the foreign occupiers. Under the commissar’s direction, leaflets were printed which specified the provisions that the German farmers were required to deliver. These items included food, clothes, and, most importantly, woolen blankets. If the commissar-appointed German Bürgermeister (mayor) failed to fulfill these measures, the Russians would simply go into the farms and seize what they wanted.