by Hans Werner
Once the ammunition work was done, Johann’s group of drivers transported supplies for the occupation army. Early every morning the convoy of 200 to 300 trucks left for the port of Marseilles in the south of France to pick up supplies and bring them to supply bases in Metz and Rheims before returning to their barracks at Étain late in the evening. They had to wear uniforms with a large “P” on one knee and shoulder and a “W” on the other. They were issued three sets of these uniforms, which Johann thought looked quite sharp. French civilians often thought they were American soldiers and were friendly to them, at least until they found out what “PW” stood for.18
Johann was finally scheduled to be released in the summer of 1946, but because of concerns for their safety the group of drivers he had worked with were to be released in Regensburg in the American zone. They were transported in a special train and housed in the former Messerschmitt factories, now converted to temporary barracks. When the American officials in Regensburg found out they were a group of prisoners who had specialized in cleaning up ammunition, they were held there for a few weeks longer to clean up a pile of munitions left by the Germans in the forest near Munich. The abandoned piles of shells were dangerous, and no one wanted to touch them, but prisoners of war could not refuse. Many POWs at Regensburg were SS soldiers, and they were to be used as labour for loading and unloading, while Johann and his fellow POWs were to be the drivers, as they had been in France. The difference was that a Polish guard always accompanied them; the entire camp guard contingent was Polish, likely members of the Polish Army who had served with the Allies under British command. The area was a mess of live and defective shells. Once a guard decided to have a smoke despite Johann’s warnings that it was too dangerous. When he tossed his still lit cigarette into the grass, it immediately ignited. Johann and the others ran as fast as they could to find cover behind some tree stumps, and not long after the spilled powder began to ignite, followed closely by the explosions of shells on the truck. Johann and the others had to run farther into the forest as the intensity of the heat set the whole pile of ammunition off. Shrapnel injured a few of the POWs and killed the Polish guard, who had waited too long before leaving. When U.S. Army personnel heard the explosions, fire trucks came and eventually extinguished the flames. Three trucks had been completely destroyed. Johann and his fellow POWs told the Americans they wanted to do their work without guards, as they had done in France. Consequently the Polish guards were taken away, and Johann’s group continued cleaning up ammunition without guards.
The war was not easily forgotten by those who had suffered atrocities at the hands of the Nazis, particularly those who had been victims of the SS in Eastern Europe. In the immediate postwar climate, the desire for revenge could not always be controlled. Just before Johann was released after returning to Regensburg, he watched a soccer game on a Sunday between the SS POWs and Jahn Regensburg, the city’s soccer team. The game was played in the POW camp, with the field separated from the barbed wire by a ditch. During the game, the ball rolled into the ditch, and one SS player ran to fetch it, forgetting the ditch was off limits. A guard in the watchtower fired at him, and he was killed. The SS POWs were sure the guard was Polish, and the incident fuelled their simmering hatred of Poles. The SS claimed “they would kill the first ten Poles they came across” after their release. The Polish guards gathered signatures from other prisoners to prove they had treated the POWs decently. My father maintained that he “had only been there a few weeks; we didn’t know anything about what had all happened before we arrived. We all saw this, and it was terrible.”19 The Polish guard was removed from his post and imprisoned. After about sixty or seventy SS prisoners were later released, word got back to the camp that a Polish man had been thrown off a bridge over the Danube River.
Once Johann and his comrades got to the actual release process, things went quickly though not without tensions. Before being released, Johann had to appear before another panel made up of Soviet, British, French, and American officials. He was asked to which zone he wanted to be released and chose the American one. The Soviet official asked why he did not want to be released to East Prussia, since according to his documentation he had been born there. The question created a moment of anxiety for Johann, but he answered that he wanted to stay in the Regensburg area.
The story of his release, along with the earlier story of his encounter with Russians and Ukrainians who were being repatriated, illustrated most clearly the complete separation from his former life in the Soviet Union. In my formal interviews, I asked my father at this point whether he had ever considered going back.
No, there was no chance, for me it was impossible. It was possible—
Yes, but you knew, and were completely convinced, that if you would go to Russia they would just shoot you.
Oh, yes, even the Germans said that. They told me they would not send me to the eastern front because, if the Russians got hold of me, they would shoot me. There were only a few Russians in German prison camps, and if they escaped the Russians didn’t accept them, they were spies to them, they just shot them. They were crazy, plain crazy. Almost nobody believes you—the American prisoners of war were given a heroes’ welcome when they came home; the same for the Germans. And for the Russians, they were all killed, or he [Stalin] put them in jail for ten years.20
My father’s stories about his prisoner-of-war camp experiences marked the culmination of a change in his identity that had begun with his capture by the Germans in 1941. His stories portrayed Poles and Jews in a negative light, probably much like the attitudes prevalent among the Germans who had become his comrades, but they were a change from his stories of living in occupied Poland in 1942 and 1943. There was still animosity toward the SS, not unlike the attitudes that pervaded the ranks of ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers, and his aversion to the Soviet system had become complete. His stories conveyed the absolute closure that Johann had made with the Soviet past, even though he was alone, had no home in the West, and had no connections to his earlier life. Surprisingly, perhaps, Americans were treated favourably in his stories. Although they fed him poorly, shot some of his fellow prisoners, and were sometimes abusive and disrespectful, Johann still wanted to be released in the American zone. In that sense, his personal story came to be framed in Cold War terms, much like the master narrative of “us and them” that quickly came to be the dominant narrative of the postwar period. Nazism faded into the past, and the new ideological enemy, the Soviet Union, emerged as the archrival.
Part 3
Becoming Normal
10
New Beginnings
On 21 August 1946, Johann obtained his freedom, and the war was finally over for him. His release was a turning point. As my father later put it in his stories, “after many years of being in the army, then in a prison camp, now finally you were a free person—and you didn’t know what you were supposed to do with yourself.” For ten years, he had always had orders, and his choices, while often important for survival, had been circumscribed by war, armies, and the commands of others. He was twenty-eight years old and had lost much. He had no home, his mother and siblings were on the other side of what Winston Churchill earlier that spring had called the “iron curtain,” he had left behind a wife in Siberia both emotionally and physically, and he knew nothing about what had happened to any of them.1
His stories about the next few years changed. They were on a different scale. As David Thelan notes, “the difference between personal memory and history is one of scale.”2 The end of the war marked the end of stories in which my father took an active part, albeit a small part, in large-scale and momentous events. After his release from the POW camp, his world and his stories were about the rhythms of work, primary relationships, and the everyday.
Johann was released together with a prisoner whom he had known for some time and who also did not want to go home because he was from East Prussia, now under Soviet control. The two made their way to the Regensburg train station.
They had received a railway pass good for four weeks of travel anywhere in Germany. They had also received ration cards that allowed them to eat at Red Cross stations anywhere. But they did not know where to go. They stayed in Regensburg for two nights, discussed what they should do, and talked to people they met about their plight. An older man advised them to go to Bamberg, which was not far away and had not been badly bombed during the war. It had a few factories, and he thought they might have a chance at a job. The next day they headed for Bamberg, where Johann saw trucks passing by with a familiar symbol on their doors, a round chain with an exploding bomb in the middle, the same symbol that had been on the trucks they had driven as prisoners of the Americans. He pointed out the trucks to his friend and suggested they follow them. They noted the direction they were heading, and at the end of the street they entered a large compound, a former panzer or artillery kaserne. They told the guard at the gate they were looking for work; he called someone who took them to the office. Sitting at the desk was the same commander Johann had worked for in France. He recognized him immediately, and when they asked about a job he offered Johann work on the spot because they were in desperate need of qualified truck drivers. The commander asked about his friend, who was not a truck driver, and offered him work in the mess.
They had both achieved an important beginning, a job, but they had no place to live. The commander mentioned that each day they picked up a group of workers from a nearby camp and offered to phone and check if they could live there as well. Luck was on their side again, and in the evening the truck came by, and the two of them went to their new home at Weide 28. It was a refugee camp, and they slept in one huge room together with at least 100 other people. There were rows and rows of beds with aisles between them, and one had to be careful to find one’s own bed. They used their ration cards to get breakfast, and their “new” employer provided the other two meals. In my father’s telling of this story, his new job was driving a truck on a long-distance route, from Bamberg to Hamburg in northern Germany. It was an International semi truck, and a U.S. Army MP was always beside Johann. He was armed, and when they stopped to eat either Johann or the MP always stayed with the truck because it was loaded with luxury goods: watches, rings, cigarettes, and chocolate. These goods were being transported to the PX department store where American military personnel shopped. The documents of his employment during this time suggest that his first job was with the 3492nd Ordnance MAM Company. On 17 January 1947, Johann was transferred to the Army Post Office, where he also worked as a driver.3
Other new beginnings followed. One day he and a helper were working beneath his truck repairing the transmission. When the wrench his helper was using slipped out of his hand and hit him on the head, he swore in Low German, though the way my father told it he uttered “a few Mennonite words, very unusual Mennonite words.” When Johann asked him about the Low German expression he had used, the helper claimed to be from Poland, but after further conversation in Low German they both came out with the truth. He was not from Poland, and Johann was not from East Prussia; they were both Mennonites from Russia. As far as my father could remember, his last name was Heinrichs.4 His new acquaintance told him there were about eighty Mennonites meeting together for worship in Bamberg and invited Johann to join them. They met in the same space as the Baptists, with one group holding services on Sunday morning and the other Sunday evening. The next Sunday Johann attended a Mennonite worship service, probably for the first time in his life. The other Mennonites were a little perplexed at his name, since the Werner surname was uncommon among Russian Mennonites. However, his fluency in Low German sealed his identity—he was clearly Mennonite. The leader of the small group was a man by the name of Wiebe who also asked if he had any relatives in Canada. When Johann told him he had a sister there, Wiebe assured him he could emigrate to Canada, a prospect that had been the furthest thing from his mind until that point. The small group of Mennonites provided a new and interesting social, though seemingly not religious, awakening in Johann. He got to know the Heinrichs, who had two small children, and was a frequent guest in their home.
My father’s stories of that time centred on work, but there was also time for recreation and visiting. Johann skied in Garmisch–Partenkirchen in the Alps and had fond memories of attending the New Year’s celebrations at the castle on the hill just outside Bamberg. It was during this time that he visited Schneider’s family in Wurzburg. Little in his stories concerned persons with whom he became friends or the daily life of the refugee camp where he lived.
The long trips to Hamburg with the truck did not occupy all of his working time; Johann often made only one trip a week, sometimes less. Since he was assigned to the Bamberg Military Sub Post motor pool, he had other driving assignments.5 One was to chauffeur two lawyers involved in the Nuremberg war crimes trials. Since they spoke no German and he no English, there was little conversation on the way to the trials. Johann took them to Nuremberg from Bamberg, a distance of about sixty kilometres, and then spent the day in the area of the trial building reserved for drivers and other support staff. The room was a kind of gallery with windows that looked down over the proceedings and with a sound system that enabled them to hear everything going on. According to his stories, my father was present when Hermann Goering told the court they would not hang him, and he was there when the defendants made their final statements.6 Although he was likely present for portions of the last few weeks of the trials, his account seemed to intermingle what he had heard and seen with newspaper accounts of the events, which were widely reported. My father seemed to hint at this in his interview when he acknowledges that “it was reported every day in the newspapers.”7
The casual comment made by the leader of the small Mennonite group he had joined in Bamberg that having a sister in Canada would make emigration possible did not end there. Wiebe was one of what were called vertrauensmänner, a refugee appointed as a contact person for a local area by the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). It was a North American relief organization that worked hard to gather the remnants of Mennonite refugees who had managed to stay ahead of Soviet armies and were scattered throughout the western zones of occupied Germany. In Canada, the work of resettling refugees was taken up by another organization, the Canadian Mennonite Board of Colonization (CMBC). Wiebe assisted Johann in contacting the MCC to try to find his sister in Canada. In a letter dated 2 May 1948 addressed to the Board of Colonization and signed by Johann, but otherwise not in his handwriting, he requested assistance in locating his sister. In his memory of these events, my father was not sure what “Steinbach” or “Manitoba” might be, but he remembered those two words in connection with her address. In the letter, he outlined details of himself and what he knew about his sister. He noted that he was single, mentioned that he had been born in Nikolaipol, and provided details about his parents. He mentioned his uncle Aaron Janzen, who had migrated to Canada in 1925, and his sister, Aganetha Werner, who was married at the time of writing but had emigrated from Silberfeld as the foster child of Aaron. The letter did not mention Steinbach as a possible address. It was sent via the MCC to the CMBC offices in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and within a few days they responded. In a letter dated 20 May 1948, Johann was advised that they had located both his sister and his uncle in Steinbach and that his uncle was being notified of his whereabouts.8 Johann seemingly did not take immediate action on emigration, but early in 1949 he was granted a leave of absence from his job to travel to begin the process.
A myriad of agencies and bureaucracies had to be navigated before ethnic German emigrants such as Johann boarded the ship at Bremerhaven headed for Quebec City or Halifax. Documents from his workplace suggest he was gone from 31 January to 10 February 1949, probably for a preliminary visit to the MCC offices. A few months later the seemingly unending process of trying to leave Germany began in earnest. He quit his job with the U.S. Army on 23 March and travelled to the MCC refugee camp in Backnang in southwest Germany for processing.9
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After a few days in Backnang, Johann was sent to Ludwigsburg to appear before the International Refugee Organization (IRO). The IRO was a UN organization charged with resettling displaced persons (DPs) in Europe after the war, though the Soviet Union ultimately did not participate. Canada accepted large numbers of DPs from a variety of nationalities as part of a humanitarian effort to alleviate the refugee problem in Europe. While in Backnang, Johann asked the MCC secretary, Marie Brunk, which questions he would be asked when he appeared before IRO officials. She indicated that he would not be granted IRO status if he had received German ration cards, if he had become a German citizen, or if he had served in the German military. Johann protested he had done all of them, but Brunk suggested he appear anyway to see what would happen. He took the hour-long train ride to Ludwigsburg, where he appeared before an IRO official who spoke perfect Russian.10 The official asked Johann if he had been in the Red Army and whether he had been captured by the Germans. He replied yes to both questions, whereupon the officer tested his knowledge of Russian, stamped his documents, declared him to be stateless, and granted him IRO status.
The next step was to go to the IRO resettlement camp at Fallingbostel to be processed for emigration by other agencies. As one MCC worker described it, Fallingbostel was “an insignificant little village in northern Germany, not much more than a wide place in the rough cobblestone road.” Just outside the village in a scenic spot in the landscape was a large former German military base used by the IRO to process refugees.11 The MCC had a presence in the camp and assisted Mennonite refugees who were eligible for IRO status.
Although seemingly having been granted IRO status, on 23 April 1949 Johann received word that his application to emigrate to Canada had been rejected by the Combined Travel Board, an organization of Allied occupying forces that controlled travel between zones, including granting permission to those wanting to leave Germany. The reason for his rejection was that Johann was a German citizen.12 The IRO considered the rejection temporary, with the MCC staff person noting that according “to the local IRO staff person—Miss Taylor—the case is not entirely closed.”13 Upon his rejection by the Combined Travel Board, the MCC pursued its second option, having Johann processed through another organization, the Canadian Christian Council for the Resettlement of Refugees (outside the mandate of the IRO), the CCCRR.
