From School to War: Growing Up in Hitler’s Germany (Contemporary Nonfiction)

by Wolf Dettbarn

  “Of course, I will now,” he said, and I continued the meeting. Yet while I did not lose a boy this day or on other days, I still worried a lot about the boys doing their rounds. As the group’s leader, I of course felt responsible for them. So each day after they headed out on their routes, I returned to the camp and waited for them to return. Generally, I waited at least an hour or two, and I spent a lot of time pacing while I waited.

  At least I found others in the camp I could talk to, such as the camp medic who was stationed there in case someone was hurt. We talked about the war and what to do in case of bullet or machine-gun wounds, or other casualties. “The casualty count is going up,” the medic told me. “Before the bombing I had so little to do that I spent a lot of time waiting for someone to come here, someone who was hurt and bleeding and needed to be fixed up. But since the bombing I have been constantly busy.”

  I felt some irony at hearing the medic say this. Like others, he hated the bombing, especially because it upended everyone’s life and ruined their town. But at the same time, the bombing enabled some medical practitioners to see injuries they would never see in peacetime, though they would have gladly exchanged this increased experience for peace. The injuries they saw were often gruesome, including severed limbs and other extremely severe injuries.

  One night, shortly after I arrived in Kassel, there was a heavy bombing attack.* Upon hearing the sirens, I led the boys in my group to a knoll about a mile from town, where we watched the attack. We were safe from the bombs because the trees in the forest protected us, though we could feel the hot air blow in when the bombs exploded in town.

  Down below, we watched as the planes selected their targets. First, scout planes flew by and dropped bright, glowing markers to indicate the targets for the bombers, who called their targets “Christmas trees” because of their shimmering lights.

  Soon the whole city turned into a flaming inferno, with hot yellow flames burning everywhere. Before the bombing, only a few buildings were still standing in the city center, and many had already been hammered into pieces by the bombs. After the latest heavy attack, as we walked down from our high perch in the forest, most of the buildings were gone, and the city lay in ruins. The bombs had uprooted trees and scattered the remnants of buildings everywhere. Here and there red embers from the fire simmered for days in the crevices and valleys between the hulks of buildings, ready to burst into flames again with the slightest stirring.

  As we neared the city, a small convoy of soldiers in trucks passed us on the road and stopped. The soldiers eyed us warily, as if trying to determine why we were walking along a road with no vehicles on our way toward a city with virtually nothing and no one left. “Why are you here?” one soldier asked.

  “We’re here to help with the evacuation of buildings,” I told the soldiers. My answer seemed to satisfy the convoy’s leader in the first truck. With a wave of his hand, several other soldiers appeared beside him. They directed us to get into the open back of one of the trucks, which could each seat ten to twelve people. Once we were seated, the driver headed toward what was left of the burning city, while a few soldiers sat in back with us. “We’d like you to help the people whose houses suffered a direct hit,” one of the soldiers said. “Then we’re going to help clear the rubble out of the streets and basements,” another commented.

  “We’re glad to help,” I said, and the other boys eagerly agreed. We felt excited and heroic to be doing something noble and good that would help restore some semblance of normality in this decimated and grieving town. Yet, while we were glad of the assignment, we were wary there might be some catch. Also, we were aware that we soon would have to face the destroyed reality from the bombing, and we realized that our elation could soon change to fear, because we could be among the next targets marked for destruction.

  After about a half hour, we arrived at the entrance to the town, where the convoy of trucks with students and construction workers stopped. “Here we are,” the soldier driving the truck said. As we got out of the back of the truck and waited for the local police to come by to give us our specific assignments, the soldier-driver pointed around the road. “This used to be the marketplace,” he said.

  After a few minutes, a Red Cross truck with an ambulance just behind it drove by. As the truck continued along the rutted road, we saw a barbed-wire cage, about the size of a small prison cell, pulled by the truck. Inside were twenty or so men who looked like strange waterbirds—tall, emaciated figures with thin heads. Their bodies and faces were covered in filth, and they reminded me of caged flightless birds with legs like sticks. In front of the cage, a half dozen German women of different ages in ragged, faded dresses stood crying, horrified by the condition of the caged men and perhaps thinking of their husbands, who might be suffering a similar fate if captured by the Russians.

  Top: Wolf’s mother, Maria Dettbarn (3rd from right) as a volunteer with a Red Cross unit, 1939.

  Left: Maria Dettbarn (left) and another Red Cross volunteer, 1939.

  After a while, the women dried their tears and returned to what was left of their houses. A few minutes later, they came back with sandwiches and fruit and handed them through the wire to the men in the cage, who turned out to be Russian prisoners of war. Meanwhile, a half dozen guards who marched up and down outside the cage let the women feed the men. Perhaps they did so because they were worn down by the horrors they had seen and discouraged by the progress of the war.

  When a police officer arrived, he got out of his car and gave us our assignments. “Form into pairs,” he said. “Then each pair get a stretcher from the back of the ambulance.” After we moved around and found partners, several more ambulances pulled up, and he continued: “Now your job is to run into any still-standing houses with stretchers to help the old and injured get out. Then load them into the ambulances to take them to the hospital.”

  We went into the burning city two by two. We walked gingerly, looking closely at the street ahead since each step was like picking our way through a minefield. The streets were filled with flaming debris, and once in a while we heard the pop of a window burst from the heat. On either side of the road, the houses we passed stood like skeletons with empty eye sockets. Fortunately they had collapsed inward, not outward, so we could more easily maneuver through the streets without encountering any flaming timbers barring our way.

  As we pressed on, we passed patches of land where the flames climbed higher and sometimes licked at our feet. When I looked up, I saw an eerie sight. One of the bombed buildings still had two walls standing, and projecting from one of the walls was a floor, probably the second story, that had a bed with all its bedding. Alongside the bed was a chest of drawers. It looked like a normal, very dusty, bedroom, and I felt like I was peeking into someone’s apartment to which I had not been invited. On our way back from our rescue efforts, I looked for the bedroom, but it had finally collapsed and was now in a heap with the rest of the building.

  Whenever we came to one of the many houses where fires raged, our goal was to find any people still inside and get them out. Once we went in, we had to search around for anyone living there and guide them out with us, while avoiding the shattered glass, falling pieces of hot wood, and floorboards that could collapse if we stepped on them the wrong way. Often we had to climb burning staircases that were built as high as the fifth floor. We were like firemen going into a burning building to rescue people, except unlike firemen, we had no heavy protective jackets, pants, or helmets—we just wore our regular uniforms, so at least we looked official. We were fueled by fear and adrenaline.

  When we found a person who was unable to walk, two of us helped him get onto a stretcher. Then we carried each stretcher down the rickety stairs on beams weakened by the flames. We had to tread carefully and quickly as we hurried with our fragile and very scared cargo because sections of most buildings continued to collapse long after the bombing stopped.

  What made the rescue even more difficult is that most o
f the people in the buildings were mute with shock and horror as they carried the few belongings they were allowed to take under their arms. Usually they took an armload of warm clothes and photographs from a happier time, including pictures of family occasions and famous landmarks they had visited while on vacation.

  After four hours of rescuing as many people as we could, and occasionally evacuating a dead body, the same soldiers who had put us on the trucks drove us back to our quarters to rest. As the trucks headed down the winding road from the village, I, like the other boys, was covered in a film of dust and ash, and we felt sad and shocked by the devastation. Even so, like the others, I felt a surge of pride at what we considered heroic efforts—rescuing the old, young, and helpless from burning buildings. We were just boys—fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. Yet we felt like supermen, an image much beloved by the Nazis—the German man as “superman.”

  As horrifying as my experience was carrying stretchers of wounded and dead through the raging fires, I felt lucky to have survived, since so many people I knew did not. I discovered this a few days later when I got my letter from the post office and found out that forty-three of my classmates from the Friedrich Wilhelm Schule had died after the military transferred them to Kassel. The boys had come with a math teacher to calculate how high the bombers were when they dropped their bombs so the German anti-aircraft cannons could more accurately shoot down the enemy planes. At the height of the bombing, the unit’s commander decided to put the boys in the safest place he could think of—a bunker. But, like the tunnels under the city of Kassel, the bunkers were not safe at all. Instead, they could be deadly, for as the boys sat in the bunker working on their calculations, a bomber dropped a bomb directly on the bunker that collapsed, crushing all forty-three boys. They all died together in one night, and none was older than eighteen.

  I felt tears come to my eyes as I thought about the loss of my schoolmates. What a horrendous tragedy to have to absorb at the age of sixteen. But I knew I still had to be strong because so many more difficulties lay ahead, so I pushed those tears away. I would never forget the boys, but for now I had to think about the postal deliveries and the rescues our team might make in the following days.

  Notes

  * This was the bombing of October 3–4, 1944.

  Chapter 7

  Joining the Volkssturm

  After we returned from Kassel, we settled into our cottages again. The next morning, an army officer stationed in Kassel called us to assemble and told us that we had now joined the new Volkssturm,* a home army consisting of all men between sixteen and forty-eight who were not serving in the regular army. Since I was now almost seventeen, I automatically became a member.

  The army officer gave us our orders and weapons. “You are now members of the Ulrich von Hutten tank-hunting brigade,” he announced, as several soldiers standing nearby gave us our weapons. One was the Panzerfaust, a powerful handheld tank-destroying gun, and also an old rifle, previously used in the Italo-Ethiopian War. This was a colonial war that lasted for about six months from October 1935 to May 1936, and ended with Italy occupying Ethiopia. Germany got the guns after entering into an alliance with Italy.

  Once we held our weapons, the army officer continued: “Your mission is to locate and attack the Americans who are now driving across Germany, traveling through the fields and streets. Once you find them, shoot to kill.”

  Yet, could we really carry out such a mission? Some of the other boys and I were already dubious of what would prove to be an exercise in futility. How were we, a straggly group of boys, to attack tanks with outdated hand weapons? Besides, we were afraid to shoot these rifles, fearing they might fall apart in our hands or shoot us in the face. But, as usual, no one expressed any doubts, afraid to become targets ourselves for attack by Nazi soldiers.

  After we got the weapons and our mission, we left for the street and marched up the road. I led the group of boys, most around sixteen, though a few were seventeen. Just like we had learned to march under any circumstances, from a military parade to a troop going to war, the boys formed into several rows and walked in lockstep behind me. After we marched through town, we marched up the road toward Brocken, in the Harz Mountains, the highest mountain in Germany.

  Soon we came to a fork in the road, and turned right into a quarry, where several wounded soldiers who had returned from the front were waiting for us. “We’ll show you how to use the weapons,” one of the soldiers said. He pointed to our target, a cardboard figure in an old tin bathtub with lion claw feet. “Now line up,” he said.

  One by one, we each aimed at the target, as another soldier instructed us on what to do. “Point the muzzle of the gun directly ahead of you. Get the target in the middle of your sights. Aim at the target’s chest.” But in spite of the soldiers’ best efforts at teaching us, none of us hit the target. Still, the soldiers praised us for our valiant efforts and as we stood in formation in front of the head soldier, he gave us each an armband. “Thank you for training with us,” he said. As the other soldiers handed us each an armband declaring us members of the Volkssturm, he assured us, “Be sure to wear these armbands now. They should protect you, so you won’t be treated as partisans or deserters.” But would they really protect us? Besides the guns blowing up in our faces, whether these armbands would be recognized was something else to worry about. Deserters were summarily shot on the spot or hanged, no matter what their age.

  After we walked on along the road, we marched for hours, farther and farther into the Harz Mountains, densely covered with pine trees, and full of folklore—goblins, and witches who, according to tradition, met there for their rituals. Some people even claimed to see witches riding on their broomsticks, and many years ago, in the 1830s, the famous writer Johan Wolfgang von Goethe included some of these legends in the play Faust, which features the witches meeting there to dance on Walpurgisnacht. I thought about his play as we walked through the dense, dark woods, imagining what it might be like to see these witches perform their rituals.

  As we kept on marching, we saw the distant hills dotted with rustic houses with flowers still hanging from the windows and balconies. At times we walked along the streets of small towns and then plunged back into the dense forests without any trails. From time to time, we also walked by underground tunnels, including ones that the scientist Werner Von Braun and his team had constructed to hide planes and rockets.

  Unfortunately, our march on the roads left us vulnerable to attacks from any enemy on the road or those seeing us from above. Several times strafing and spitfire attacks interrupted our march, sending us racing from the road into the forest for protection. We were terrified when the shooting started, feeling like a line of ducks, easily shot down in a shooting gallery. But after the all-clear call sounded from a nearby town, we went back to the road and kept marching ahead, looking up fearfully from time to time for Allied planes. Though we experienced a few near misses when bombs burst as we sped from the road into the forest, none of us were ever hit.

  Then back on the road, we saw some reminders of the horrors of war. Men from the town or nearby farms were perched on the fenders of cars as lookouts for approaching aircraft. Burnt-out cars that had suffered a direct hit now sat like odd coffins with bodies and limbs hanging out the car windows. I shuddered as we passed these remnants of war, feeling more than ever the futility of what we were doing in a war that was surely lost. Still the boys in my group and I pressed on.

  At last, as we climbed higher into the mountains, we saw less and less evidence of war, and we loved the trees for the protection they afforded us. Sometimes I wished I could dig a hole to China to get away from the war.

  On the way up a little hill, we saw a small crowd of ten to fifteen German soldiers standing at a crossroads. This was our meeting point where we were to get a further assignment on how to pursue Allied tanks and kill the soldiers operating the tanks. As we came closer, I saw a well-decorated NCO, about thirty years old, sitting unsteadily on
a horse in the middle of the soldiers. He wore the Knight’s Cross, the highest military honor, and immediately the other boys and I thought he could protect us, even though he was slumped over. Perhaps he had been wounded, I imagined, as I walked over to him. “We’re here from Kassel,” I told him. “We’re here to help find and attack the tanks.” Hearing this, he sat up straight and showed me a map of the Harz Mountains and indicated where we should go. “Just continue across the Harz in pursuit of tanks,” he said. But while he spoke with assurance, as my group and I walked on again, I realized that he had smelled of alcohol, so I felt less confident in what he had told me. Still, there was nowhere else to go. An army officer in Kassel had given us our assignment, so based on the NCO’s directions, we continued on.

  Soon, as we marched, we saw a large group of fleeing German soldiers on the other side of the road. Most of them had thrown their weapons away, and their faces were ashen. It was clear that they were terrified. None of them stopped to tell us what they were fleeing from, but given the repeated strafing and bombing attacks, it seemed probable they were running from American tanks.

  So it didn’t make any sense to continue walking in the direction from which they were running, since we might be likely to encounter enemy fire. We decided to march up a narrow street to the top of a hill, where we saw a dairy farm ahead with cows in a pasture.

  A few minutes later we turned into the yard of the farm. I went to the door and knocked. The farmer came to the door with his wife close behind, both clearly surprised to see our troop suddenly turn up, so I explained, “We’re members of the Volkssturm, and we’re here to attack any American tanks we find.” The farmer stood silent, not very impressed by us and clearly unhappy we were there. His wife, standing beside him, however, smiled at us with a more welcoming look.