Yet while we shared nothing about our doubts, the teachers had a hard time dealing with us, because we were much more independent. While we were away in Slovakia, we had not been under their influence. So now we were more reluctant to take orders, though we had ultimately to obey, having little choice in the matter. The teachers were in charge, and if we disobeyed, they could always punish us; and the threat of being expelled for not following orders, for being incorrigible, always loomed. So though we did obey, the teachers could readily see that our enthusiasm for total obedience had waned. We were slower to respond or showed by our frowns and grimaces that we really didn’t want to do something.
The War Effort
Soon after we returned to school in early 1944, everything changed because of the expanding war and the need for students to help with the war effort. The government notified the schools that it needed more men to fight in the war, and the school officials soon recruited the older students who were around seventeen and eighteen to go to the coal mines in western Germany to learn how the working man thought and worked, so the Nazi leaders could better lead them. However, this goal of getting the students to better lead the workers had the opposite effect, since once they worked with the miners, they realized that these miners as well as others in Germany, did not believe in the Nazi ideology. They discovered what the miners thought when the miners took a food break and shared their opinions.
The men talked openly about how they felt about the Nazis and their system of discipline—the first time any of the students heard such critical thoughts, because the miners appeared to be unafraid of any consequences for their thinking. They felt confident they could say what they thought, since most of the male population was away at the war and it was not easy to find miners, so they knew they were indispensable. The Nazis couldn’t easily fire or jail them, because they desperately needed the coal the miners produced for their troops on the front lines, where most of the Nazi soldiers were now.
Of course, the miners could face some danger of punishment if the authorities found out what they told the boys about their attitudes toward the Nazis and their policies. It seems likely the authorities might turn a blind eye to the miners talking amongst themselves, but if the authorities discovered the miners had expressed these ideas to a group of impressionable boys, their response might have been different. Had the boys reported the miners’ attitudes, the authorities might have felt obliged to do something. But as it turned out, the boys were receptive to alternative ideas, so no one reported what the miners said. As far as the school and government officials were concerned, everyone was still a loyal, devoted Nazi follower.
Another factor that contributed to the boys’ openness to the miners’ ideas is that the boys stayed in the miners’ homes, and some became quite devoted to their hosts. While the boys may not have become vehement anti-Nazis, they returned from the coal mines more open- minded. For now they realized there was a whole different world outside the Adolf Hitler School, and that we had been living and studying in a kind of protected cocoon. In reality, our lives in Sonthofen were very different from those in the real world, where everyday life was a continuing struggle. But while we worked hard at our studies, we also had all the material comforts the school provided, so we lacked very little. We were like a protected class, being prepared to lead others as future successful professionals, business people, and soldiers. Our lives were nothing like those of the working-class miners—or anyone else in one of these lower-class positions.
Even so, the school’s main goal of producing Nazi leaders proved difficult, since there was no book or manual on how to do this. Then the growing devastation of the war in Germany after the invasion of the Allies made this dream exactly that—a dream.
The End of School Days
For a time, everything stayed as it was after our return, and during the next few months we had school as usual. The older boys were already in the mines, and the school days went on as before for us. We went to our classes in German, math, science, and other subjects, and participated in sports in the afternoon, just as we had before going to Slovakia.
But after several months, the school administrators gathered us together for a parade, where we marched in military formation, as we usually did, from one end of the campus to the other, while the school officials watched from a stage. We marched in the central square between the surrounding four buildings, and the stage was built on one side of the square.
Once the parade ended, while we were still in formation, the head of the school stepped forward looking somber. Slowly he told us the news: “I’m sorry, but your school days are over, since you are more necessary to the war effort than you are at school.”
Wolf outside Ordenburg Sonthofen, age 16.
The news, coming as it did so suddenly, was stunning. I and the other students listened in amazed silence. No more school. We would be going to war. What would happen to my plans for the future to become a doctor? The thoughts raced through me, as I looked ahead like the others in stony silence.
But there was nothing the others or I could do. It was up to the school administrators and party leaders to decide our fate. So that’s what happened. We had a few weeks while we rushed to finish the studies we needed to take the Abitur, the exam required before entry to university.
Then we had to leave to replace the men who had been called up and were away at war. We were dispersed throughout Germany, though we were usually sent to cities near our homes. As soon as we had completed the Abitur, we went directly to our assigned cities. We couldn’t even take time for a short detour to visit our families. Now that we were called up to fight or help out with civic duties, our service to Germany came before anything else.
Chapter 6
A Bombing Attack in Kassel
It was very traumatic for me when my school released all the older boys and sent us to various places in Germany to replace the men who had gone to war and had worked in vital occupations, such as mail delivery, farming, and coal mining. The school sent me to Kassel, in northeast Germany, about two hours from Frankfurt, where the district administration for Hessen was located. The school sent me there since I lived only one hour away in Eschwege, and the Nazi officials tried to send the boys to towns near their homes.
Kassel was one of the main centers for tank and aircraft manufacturing—industries that provided the military equipment needed for the war. However, that production made the town a focus for the Allied air raids, since the Allies wanted to destroy the Henschel & Sohn locomotive and tank manufacturers located there and the Fieseler aircraft plant in a suburb of Kassel. The Nazis had set up a subsidiary of the Dachau concentration camp near the city to provide slave workers for the plants.
I traveled by train on my own, the only boy from my school going to Kassel. When I arrived in 1944, the Allies had been bombing there since 1942. I was totally unprepared for the devastation I encountered. We had been kept in the dark about the extent of the bombing.
At least the bombing had died down to some extent after the worst attack in October of 1943, when the Americans, Canadians, and British Royal Air Force (RAF) launched a major bombing campaign. Though their goal was to destroy the manufacturing plants, they killed many civilians. In the two years before I arrived, and especially during the October raid, ten thousand people were killed. The raid also ravaged the city, with fires from the bombs raging for seven days after the bombing, and much of the population had left by the time I arrived. When the war began, Kassel had a population of over 236,000, but after the October raid, 150,000 people were evacuated, and many people who were not directly hit smothered to death in the underground cellars and tunnels they had gone to for shelter. So when I arrived, only about 50,000 people were left.
I saw the real horrors of war two days after I arrived on a trip into town from the camp where I stayed. It was a real eye-opener, since I came to Kassel from the Ordenburg-Sonthofen area that was untouched by bombs. Seeing the devastation, I immediately tho
ught of my father fighting on the Russian front and imagined the bombing and destruction he must encounter daily. Just thinking of him, I felt deeply disturbed and heartbroken.
Yet for my first two days in Kassel, I lived in a protective shell that sealed out these horrors. After my train arrived at the station, an assistant to the Gauleiter, or Nazi Party leader for the area, met me and took me to the camp in the forest just outside the city, where I was to stay by myself. The camp was a former private school for girls with a dozen small bungalows scattered around the woods. Ironically, these bungalows were brightly painted in yellows and peach, with similarly bright, cheerful curtains, having been designed for the wealthy girls who had attended the school. But now the girls were gone for their own safety, and the cozy bungalows that had escaped the bombing were a bizarre contrast to the devastation in town.
Though each bungalow had four beds, along with a small bathroom, I had a bungalow all to myself since I was a group leader. I unpacked my few belongings and prepared for my duties, still blissfully unaware of the rampant destruction just minutes away. When I looked outside, I saw the dense forest of mostly pine and chestnut trees surrounding the bungalows, and I could see why the area used to be very popular with hunters looking for wild boar, since they, along with wolves, deer, and foxes, roamed freely as many animals still do. However, now all the men from town were gone, hunting human victims at the front, and there was no more hunting in these woods for years to come.
The day after my arrival, I reported to the secretary of Gauleiter Weinrich, who told me my duties and responsibilities. “You’re in charge of the courier troop, and your job is to deliver the mail. You’ll be the leader, and the other members of the troop will be boys from the area.” I felt exhilarated at getting this leadership assignment despite my misgivings about the Nazi leadership and the war. But after Gauleiter Weinrich’s secretary took me into town and I saw the devastation there, I felt the war was almost certainly lost, though I said nothing to raise any questions about my loyalty to the Reich. I was just glad to have a chance to show off my leadership skills, so carefully honed in Slovakia.
To deliver the mail, we wore the usual uniform of a brown shirt, black shorts, and ankle boots. All the adult men, except for the old and infirm, were at the front; therefore we had to make these deliveries. We picked up the mail at the office of the Hessen state administrator in the town hall, located in an old building, hundreds of years old that looked like a stone fortress. It was one of the few buildings in town still standing, since most of them had been destroyed.
We tried our best to deliver the mail that had arrived, though any mail delivery was irregular. The enemy planes were strafing the railroads, using the trains for target practice. That bombing disrupted the mail delivery most days since all the mail came by train and the railroad depots were near the towns. Of course, any train travel was impossible during these attacks. The planes, early on primarily from the RAF, flew down low above the trains, so it was easy to see and aim at the targets below. Later in the war, the Americans flew these strafing missions too.
By the time I arrived, the planes no longer only targeted the trains. Instead, the Allies hit any civilians in the area of bombing. After several years of fighting, no one showed much concern about killing innocent civilians. The victims were just statistics, casualties of war. As a result, after the majority of people in town were evacuated due to insufficient and poorly constructed shelters, the fifty thousand or so people left were terrified of the bombs and had little opportunity to escape if they were near a bombing attack.
The people who remained included those in the vital professions, such as doctors, nurses, and factory workers in the plants that still had some manufacturing capabilities. Additionally, some holdouts refused to leave their homes—usually the old and sick, who could not bear to abandon what they had always known.
Trying to hide underground was often futile since the tangle of tunnels under the town was like a death trap. Many people fled to them but soon died there because many shelters had insufficient air and others had a maze of tunnels, so people could easily get lost in the darkness. Some went in thinking they would be safe but could not find their way out.
The houses weren’t safe either if the bombs exploded nearby. The power of the bombs was too much for the small houses that lined the streets in town and spread out along country roads. While many people rushed to hide in their basements, often the house collapsed on top of them like a pancaking box. Even if they survived the blast, they were covered by rubble that blocked their way out.
Sirens were supposed to sound a warning of a coming attack, so people could quickly attempt to evade the bombs. But by now the German infrastructure was increasingly undermined, as bombing was going on all over Germany. Sirens sometimes didn’t sound soon enough or at all, before the bombs started cascading from the skies.
One result of all this chaos was that Hitler and his closest aides later removed the town secretary, Gauleiter Weinrich, and increasingly they took power into their own hands. The Nazi high command held Weinrich responsible for the delayed sirens and unsafe underground structures, which meant the end of his career—and possibly his life. He soon left town and I never found out what happened to him. Once he left, Hitler and his cronies made the decisions for the town.
As I walked around soon after my arrival and surveyed what was left of Kassel, I saw the remains of several hospitals that had been set up for the wounded soldiers. Even these sturdy structures had succumbed to Allied bombs, and now only the foundations, hollowed-out walls, and burned equipment and tables remained.
But that was just the beginning of the devastation. As bad as things were when I arrived, things would soon become even worse because the RAF and Americans continued to bomb Kassel until the end of the war.
After I picked up the mail at the town hall, I gave the mail to the twelve boys in my group to deliver to the people who remained in town. I had to figure out what to do with the mail largely by myself since I had minimal direction from Gauleiter Weinrich, who was still in power, or from his secretary. At our first meeting at the state administrator’s office, I told the boys, who were fourteen to sixteen years old and from the local secondary schools, what to do. Fortunately, the boys all came eager to work. All of their fathers were away at the front and the work gave them a feeling of purpose. As a result, they took their jobs seriously. Since the boys were from the area, they divided themselves into twelve districts and chose to deliver the mail in the district they knew best. “You have to use your own transportation,” I explained. “So if you have a bike to ride, use that; otherwise, you can deliver the mail on foot. If you have a bike, you can make deliveries to the people who live farther away from town. Please share the bikes when necessary.”
I then showed the boys how the mail arrived and was divided into the different postal districts by the employees at the state administrator’s office, all of them women. “You’ll each have an area where you’ll be delivering the mail. It’s divided up so you’ll each get approximately the same amount of mail, so it’ll take about the same amount of time to deliver for each district.” I pointed to the return addresses on some of the envelopes: “As you can see, the mail comes from all over the country.”
I also explained that the mail was censored, though the boys probably already knew this—it was common knowledge that government officials reviewed every letter that everyone sent or received. Everyone knew not to include sensitive or controversial matter in a letter. But since I was the boys’ leader, I thought it best to remind them of this restriction on the mail.
Today such censorship might be considered a necessary evil in many countries because of the threat of terrorism. But back then, everyone accepted censorship as a patriotic duty to keep Germany safe from those using mail to plan attacks against Germany. Moreover, the populace now was largely ruled by fear. Few people would dare to endanger themselves, their family, or their friends to the increasingly paranoid and
vicious Nazi administration by saying anything critical of the regime.
Back then the mail also had an honored place in society. It was the only way that most people could communicate and share important updates about the progress of the war and the survival or death of loved ones. As such, the letters served as a lifeline to the front, for they were the only way to find out who had been caught in a bombing raid and was now wounded, dead, or surviving. The mail also included some business letters from companies that managed to survive or even thrive despite the bombings—or in some cases, because of them. For instance, while many munitions manufacturers had been bombed out, as in Kassel, some remained in other cities and continued to provide arms to the Nazi soldiers.
After showing the boys around the facility, I handed out the mailbags that the regular postmen had carried. Just as they did, the boys slung the bags over their shoulders when they set off to do their rounds—some whizzing out on bikes to distant locations, while others walked to nearby routes. Though the strafing was still going on along the tracks and elsewhere in town, the boys sought to find other routes. Listening to the sirens helped them know which areas to avoid, and they also listened to local people who told them where not to go. Still, for all their caution, they sometimes had to dodge burning debris left over from the strafing or from previous bombing raids.
I breathed a sigh of relief when the boys came back safely, and fortunately, I didn’t lose a single boy. We had a meeting at the camp at the end of the day to discuss what happened, and at one meeting, a boy talked of dodging bullets when he came too close to a railroad track. “Then avoid the tracks at all costs in the future,” I told him. “It’s not safe to be on the tracks anymore.”
From School to War: Growing Up in Hitler’s Germany (Contemporary Nonfiction) Page 10
