In the Fire of the Eastern Front

by Hendrick C. Verton

  My father had had a hernia operation, which was not post-operatively treated during his internment. Instead he was put to work. He had by that time written many letters, optimistic letters, with plans for the future, for when they were released. Some weeks later an obituary circulated amongst the prisoners. It was of my father, an obituary of 59 lines describing his heart felt longing to be re-united with his dear wife and children. His funeral could not have been simpler. We were thankful that one member of the family was present, Evert. An exception was made and Evert, under armed guard, attended the funeral of our father.

  Evert had been captured in the area of Arnhem, by the Canadians. They then delivered him to the Dutch, who delivered him into the notorious Harskamp prison. Before he could be sentenced he was put to work in the coal mine. With his escape he avoided the torture that was on the daily agenda. Allied war correspondents took many photos of the war. They took one of Evert, marching at the front of his men as company-leader, upright and marching into the POW camp.

  My family were finally released, one after the other in 1947, after two years of internment. Nothing but skin and bone, covered in lice, and careworn, my mother was also released from the Institution in the same year. She spoke unwillingly of her time there. She had a very strong, iron will and this helped her recover, helped her on to her feet and back to her place as head of the family. The youngest of my brothers who was just twelve at this time had spent the two years in different homes, not knowing where any of his family were. He had no news and no visits, which were forbidden. One is duty-bound to mention those who kept to good social behaviour during this misery. One was a doctor who secretly helped my mother. Another was a Jewish jailer, who was sympathetic to one of my brothers and was humane in his behaviour towards him.

  ‘Homecoming’, a drawing by the author made in 1946.

  Robbed of house, home and possessions, the family found a new abode in Woudenberg, in the province of Utrecht. In the countryside, they were surrounded by straightforward and helpful people. They had a very friendly farmer as a next-door neighbour, who even hid my letters to my family. Gradually the family almost returned to normal. Very soon the local police started to pay visits. They wanted to catch either Evert or me on our visits, particularly on public holidays, when they were sure that we would be foolish enough to return. One official would simply have loved to catch us. He accused the family of spying, having found a photo of our model aerodrome that we had built as children in the garden, complete with model planes. We were supposed to be spying on military establishments!

  The pressure on the civilian population gradually decreased which cannot be said for the ‘volunteers’. A further 5,000 were arrested and interned, without ‘due process’, for all the difference that would have made. Five years later, in 1950, Dutch soldiers who returned to Holland, having been released from Russian POW camps were immediately arrested and sentenced! The final insult came for those men, when they were visited in their cells by officers collecting information and experiences of the Russian-front soldiers, because of the ‘Cold War’ with the Communists. An anachronism of history? Upon being released from prison, those men lost their nationality. Holland made displaced persons out of their own countrymen.

  It was no better in other countries. The Norwegians too sentenced 7,000 of their ‘volunteers’ with a sentence of up to four years’ imprisonment. In Denmark it was more, with 7,717 men sentenced. The Belgians sentenced 3,193 ‘colt aborators’ to death. Even when the death sentences were not carried out, for the ‘volunteers’ it meant years of imprisonment. Switzerland was no better, with 1,300 men brought before courts martial. The sentences were harder than for the fighters in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.

  As late as 1952, 2,400 French ‘volunteers’ were interned for their part in fighting Bolshevism, which they could avoid by then fighting in Indochina, or serving in the French Foreign Legion. From the ‘volunteers’ from the Balkans and the Soviet Union 11,000 Slovenian ‘volunteers’ were liquidated by Tito’s partisans in May of 1945. Then a further 90,000 Croatian soldiers of the Ustascha Army were sentenced. The British delivered 35,000 Cossacks, without consideration of asylum, or of international laws, to the Russians. They were either shot on sight, sent to forced-labour camps, or into mines. The same applied to neutral Sweden that had profited so much from German trade. They gave their German prisoners, and those from the Baltic divisions, to the Russians.

  The hate-laden atmosphere of this European ethnic-cleansing did not allow for objective argument or explanation of motives. Only years later were approaches made to repair the association, without condemnation, between the Russian front-fighters and their accusers.

  Hans Werner Neulen, in his book An Deutscher Seite, asked the question, “Were they the best that prevailed at that time, or captive slaves in Prussian straight-jackets? When, between the Communists with their universal aims of remedial teaching, and the National Socialists with their expectations of Germanic control, the ideals of liberation did not materialise, then the foreign ‘volunteers’ chose the side of the German Reich”.

  Till today in the Netherlands, no one will accept that there were far more ‘volunteers’ wearing field-grey than those of the Allies wearing khaki.

  CHAPTER 22

  Constructing an Existence

  For a very long time after the war, Evert and I did not realise that we both belonged, due to our birth dates to an age-group that suffered the highest casualties during the Second World War. ‘Lady luck’ however, had decided that we would both survive and now we had to build an existence for ourselves.

  We both now had an identity, even if threaded with untruths, tricks and deceit, nonetheless it enabled us to live in the British Zone. It was far better than the alternative, but still not easy. So as not to starve we both needed work and a permanent roof over our heads, and neither was at a premium in Detmold. It meant looking elsewhere.

  We gleaned the information that miners were needed in the Ruhr area. It would be the hardest of physical labour, but every miner was sure of 2,864 calories per day, i.e. a full stomach! There were no other offers of work, so we used this as a springboard for our futures. Work in the mines was top of the list, as hard physical labour of course. Another perk was that accommodation was offered with the job as well. There was a little fly in the ointment inasmuch as, in this still conservative time, you had to be married before you received accommodation together. Brigitte and I could not bear the thought of another separation, and so there was no other choice, we had to marry. That meant waiting until the bans were hung in the local Registry Office which took three months. Due to his contacts with the local council, Mr Snuverink managed to have this three-month wait waived. The advantage was that no one had the time to snoop into my true identity or nationality. The only truth in the matter was my name of Verton.

  The date was set for 12 December 1947. It was a cold winter. Inside, the cold demeanour of the Registrar was just as ice-cold as it was outside. However, he married us, with Mr and Mrs Snuverink as our witnesses. Our romance had begun in war-torn Breslau eighteen months before, in the summer months. We sealed our fate together forever, giving our word to one another in the extreme of winter months, in Detmold. We are, after 55 years together, still as much in love as on that first day in Breslau.

  We neither felt the cold nor saw the greyness of the mist as we left the Registry Office. Our wedding breakfast was a stew with runner beans. For those times it was cordon-bleu and relished as such. Our honeymoon, of one night, was spent in the Railway Hotel. It was rather meagre, for despite it being December, the room was not heated. The next morning in wanting to leave, a dog baring its teeth barred our way, warning the proprietor of our departure. The dog was there to stop those crooks of society who had no intention of paying for their rooms.

  Our wedding was to prove to be the reason that the whole of my family left Holland and came to Germany. My brothers found their wives here, and in the words of Geothe, “we
formed a chain” of Vertons, a new one, which now stretched from France to Holland, and from Holland to Germany.

  The three of us then made our way to the Ruhr, the epicentre of coal-mining. Both Evert and I were engaged straight away by the Essen Coal Company in Dortmund-Dortfeld, which owned two-thirds of the coal works in that area. Brigitte and I were given a warm furnished room in the Karl-Funke Strasse. Only a couple of streets away Evert was given a room by one of the medics of the company. Among Evert’s duties was first aid to the injured in the mine. The medic was a Marxist and although he had never seen the Russian Steppes, a bronze bust of Lenin had its place of honour beside the highly polished coal-fired stove. Evert was to be found most evenings in our room, where we cooked and ate, and had to sleep. Brigitte knitted us pullovers from shredded parachute silk, and cut us trousers from tenting material.

  The whole nation heard about our record output in the tons of coal that we dug out of the earth. We were the heroes of the underground, but the population still froze. “Every ton is useful. For death lies in empty hands, for no coal, no food, no transport, therefore no production”. That was the declaration of the British military command, who urged for more and more, because more than a quarter of our coal was for their usage. Dismantling and demolition was now the order of the day. There was a hive of industry, for what the Allies had not destroyed with their bombs, they destroyed with explosives, such as the tall chimneys on industrial sites. Everything that was of use was dismantled, brick by brick. It was a ‘cold war’ and the continuation of war, but by other means.

  The increased pressure on the coal-miners did not ensure the upkeep of safety precautions in the mines. On the contrary, the training of new workers was simply not what it should have been. Evert and I belonged in that category, being fully-fledged miners after just three days of training. That was how we started. Our production was still not enough, and so POWs were released from the prison camps on the condition that they worked in the mines. The accidents underground increased, and at a shocking rate. 178,000 tons of coal daily was the record, 50% more than in 1936.

  We, together with a dozen other colleagues, entered the cage. It took us down below at a rate of 20 metres per second. But we were still not at our place of work when we reached the bottom of the shaft. We had two kilometres to walk, that meant being bent almost double, and having to step over rail-tracks and electric cables, and always knocking our heads as we went. It was unexpectedly vast. In our pit alone, there were 200 kilometres of tunnelling. In total it was 5,000 kilometres in the west German mines, longer than the flight-path from Hamburg to Cairo!

  I was plagued with a vision at the beginning of this work, of a worm being crushed from an avalanche of earth and stone. We were after all, a thousand metres below the surface, under towns, under cemeteries and to say nothing of rivers! Claustrophobia at this time, was the last thing that I needed. So it was nose to the grindstone and get on with the job.

  The pressure of this work played on our nerves at times. Some miners were liable to this more than others. It made them argumentative to the point of disputes, as Evert found to his cost one day when he landed on the wrong side of one. It really had started from nothing. It resulted in a punch-up and Evert and his opponent waltzed in the coal-dust, with blood on their bare chests. I was held back forcibly by the others, when wanting to help him. It was the ‘Inauguration to the Association of Moles’, for like animals, we had to learn who had the say, who was the boss and where our place was, which we had to keep. The supervisor of our seam separated the pair of them and the whole dispute was then forgotten. We came to be a close-knit band, for were we not all in the same boat? We all gritted our teeth, we gave sweat and blood. We soon learned to depend on the experience of our colleagues who had been miners for far longer than any of us. They saved our lives, more than once, from avalanches of earth and stone, which was my nightmare. We did not recognise the ‘stretching and groaning’ of the mountain that warned them far earlier than we realised.

  Somehow the sounds of the underworld were just the same as those of the war. There were pneumatic drills, replacing the machine-guns, and dynamite replacing the exploding bombs. There were injured and the dead, just as on the battlefield. The safety of the miners was not an important factor. It was not on the investment plan and there was a lack of the most experienced of the miners, for there were still very many of them sitting in prison as Nazis.

  Two years before Evert and I enrolled for this new work, there had been a loss of 411 men from the neighbouring Grimmberg Colliery. At mid-day on 20 February 1946, a blue and red flame shot out of the shaft, the earth shook like an earthquake as a mixture of methane gas and air caused an explosion. That happened eighteen months after a previous explosion caused the deaths of 107 miners, as the result of an air raid.

  We had deaths in our colliery too, and were witness to terrible injuries. Evert and I only ever had a graze or two. We most certainly did not believe in the ‘troll of the mountains’ and his ‘aggressive powers’ over those daring to intrude into his world which could certainly be ‘spooky’. Often there was nothing to be heard but a monotonous drip, drip of water whose echo mixed with the airwaves. When the old and porous support beams soaked in phosphor glowed in the dark, then the gullible could believe in a ‘something’ which they could not define, and so were willing to believe in that ‘little beast’.

  At the end of the day, and as Brigitte picked me up from work, she had difficulty in recognising me as we left the cage to cross the yard to the shower-room, for we all looked alike, like Blackamoors. So she waited until one of those black beings winked at her and it was me. It was like a conveyor-belt in the hot steamy shower-room. We stood in a long line and soaped the back of the man in front in readiness for a good scrub. We were always about an hour before we could be called clean, and then we all had black rims around our eyes, like women with eye make-up.

  One could not ignore the fact that many of the old miners were chronically, even terminally ill. One could hear the hacking, raw coughs of those invalids on the streets. There was no shower that could wash the dust-caked lungs of those men, trying to take some fresh air into their clogged lungs that no longer functioned properly.

  One day passed into the next. But one day was not like any other for Evert, for he was suddenly seized with miners’ claustrophobia. He simply had to leave the seam in which we were working and reach daylight. He never went underground again. That was not unusual amongst miners. I was not affected in the same way, but I too left some months after Evert. My next job was also underground, but not to the same extent, for it was a vaulted wine-cellar and only a couple of metres under the surface. I climbed inside the giant wine vats to wash and brush them, as I was the right size to climb into the small openings. I washed the wine-bottles and re-filled them too.

  We experienced a distinct improvement with the Currency Reform of 1948. Overnight the shops filled with all of the pre-war goods that we had been denied, with a shake of the head, from shop-owners. Every man received a one-off payment of 40 marks, but the rationing was not yet at an end.

  After five years of separation, came the day in the summer of 1949, when I could take my mother in my arms at long last. She arrived by train in Dortmund. It was extremely moving, for I had not seen her since 1944. Some of my letters had not reached her, so she did know that I had served some of my time in East Prussia, Silesia and Breslau. She had not known about my time as a prisoner under the Russians. Now we were all together and she met her daughter-in-law, although at first there were language problems.

  The presence of my family rather complicated my life. It appeared for some to have contradictions. As a ‘refugee’ from the east my mother was no longer my mother but an ‘aunt from Holland’. Brigitte and I had moved house since working in the mine. We now lived in a house owned by my former colliery director, who was always very friendly and sympathetic to us. I decided to make a clean breast of things to him. I was glad that I did, altho
ugh it had not been necessary, for he had guessed anyway. It was however a relief to no longer have to hide the truth.

  I was glad to have my work in the wine cellar. But it was not for life as it held no future, no advancement. With the land in ruins, the building trade offered work that did hold a future. The future Federal capital city, Bonn, seemed to be just the right place to look.

  We were very impressed with Königswinter and its district. On a visit we made, the countryside of the Rhine and the Siebenbürge area seemed so much nicer than the mountains of black coal and silhouettes of mine works visible in the Ruhr. Bad Gödesberg in particular, with its tree-lined avenues, plus the style of the old villas, which had been spared the bombing raids, reminded me of the sleepy suburbs of Holland. A Cologne-based firm engaged Evert and I and sent us to Bonn. There we became floor-layers, of every type. With the construction of this new federal capital, there was an excess of work to be found, in new buildings of government, universities etc.

  A year later, and with our move to Bad Gödesberg, we changed our work once more, to a firm in Königswinter, very near us. We had ended up with a former colonel who had been a commander in Hitler’s HQ in Prussia. He was the son-in-law of the owner of the perfume emporium “Eau-de-Cologne and Toilet-water”. He owned an estate, the Wintermuhlenh of near Petersberg and directed firms in different branches. Most of his employees were former officers. Most of his guests too, were from all branches of the former armed forces. They could be seen with him walking around the park. Although many impediments had been placed in the path of former German soldiers, many found their feet again quite quickly after the war. They were helped by having a positive mentality, and discipline from their soldiering days. Their behaviour towards their comrades, their conscientiousness and organisation, all of these were important assets for the reconstruction of the German economy.