I asked the farmer, “Can we sleep in one of your barns for the night?” At first he looked at us carefully, as if considering the risks of strangers sleeping at his farm. Finally, he responded, “No, I’m sorry. I’m afraid you might smoke in the barn and burn it down.”
Fortunately his wife was more reassuring. “Don’t be silly,” she told him. “They are not even old enough to buy cigarettes in the store.” The farmer reluctantly nodded and said, “Well, all right.” We all breathed a sigh of relief. We were so tired from our long march, and desperately wanted a place to rest for the night.
“Now come with me,” the farmer said. He took us to the barn, made of wooden planks and full of hay and straw, which we could use to make temporary beds. As the farmer walked toward the barn door to go back to the house, he hesitated and turned to us, as if he were still worried about his barn. For a moment, I worried that he might change his mind and ask us to leave. But he turned away and walked back to the house.
After he left, we all lay down in our sleeping bags on the hay, with our Panzerfaust guns and rifles from the Italian campaign by our sides. At least the farmer’s wife had seemed warm and accepting of us, for soon after we settled down, she came out with a tray of ham and sausage sandwiches and milk. It felt reassuring to eat this traditional German combination of ham and sausage—it seemed we had come to a pocket of normality in the hills.
In the morning as I began to wake up my group, I saw that at least two boys had taken off, leaving their weapons behind with a scrawled note attached to one of them. It said, “We’re close to home, and we’ll be of more use there than with the group.” Their note closed with the statement, “Long live Germany. Heil Hitler!”
I’m sure they wrote this last statement to protect themselves by showing that even though they had left, they were still loyal to the Reich. Yet I was sure the Nazi army officers wouldn’t see it that way. Still, I wanted to protect them, so I tore up the note and hoped they would not run into the arms of the German military police, which would mean they would be summarily hanged or shot. I didn’t confide in any of the boys in my group, so none of them might talk about the deserters or be inspired to desert themselves. I never found out what happened to the boys.
After the farmer’s wife treated us to a light breakfast of eggs and sausage, we left the farm and marched on away from the direction of the fleeing soldiers. Our march led us up a hill in the forest. Halfway up the hill, we saw a German tank with a wood gas generator attached to the back and two bags filled with cut-up wood planks. The tank also pulled a large van, and about ten soldiers on bicycles had attached themselves to the van, which pulled them along. It was such a surprise to see this—it was like seeing some Rube Goldberg contraption that had been thrown together as a joke. But this was no joke. Seeing this line of vehicles and bike riders robbed me of any belief that the Germans had any hope of winning the war. They were clearly in retreat, reduced from a proud war machine to a tank depending on wood shavings to keep going. Yet, I certainly didn’t want to let the boys I was leading know this; I felt I had to keep up the façade of strong leadership for them and avoid any more desertions.
The “Prussian Miracle”
As night fell, we saw a red light in a house, and we marched toward it, hoping this would be a Gasthof, or guesthouse. It was a large brick building with two gables. Just outside, at the door, two guards in uniform stood watching and assessing us, making sure we were safe to let in.
“Please leave your weapons with me,” one guard said, so we put down our guns and left them with him. It felt odd and vulnerable to be suddenly without the weapons we had been carrying with us for several days. Yet I also felt some relief at finally putting them down, as if by leaving behind the weapons of war we had temporarily left the war itself.
Then, free of our guns, we walked into a large room that contained a number of wooden tables pushed against the wall around the room. The room had a dim red glow, as a result of a red scarf thrown over a table lamp on each table. As we looked around, I noticed that several soldiers and German women occupied each table. The soldiers and girls seemed relaxed and were smiling, and some were holding hands.
Then a group of soldiers and women got up from one of the tables and danced to music playing on a radio in a cleared out section of the room that formed a sometimes stage. The radio played the song “Red Poppy,” a romantic song of love sung in Spanish by Rosita Serrano, one of the most popular singers and most popular songs in Germany at that time.
Suddenly, the music stopped abruptly, and an announcer came on the air saying, “I’m sorry for interrupting the program, but I have to make an important announcement. This morning, the American president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, died.”
The response from the room was stunned silence. The soldiers and women had already stopped dancing when the music stopped. Now they just stood in the middle of the room, staring ahead blankly. The boys and I just stood quietly near the entrance and waited to hear what Roosevelt’s death might mean to the war.
Then the oily voice of Joseph Goebbels’s came on saying, “Congratulations, my leader. You have won the war. This is the second Prussian miracle.” The reference to a miracle was one that all Germans would know from their teachers or parents, since this referred to a major change in the fortunes of German soldiers. The first Prussian miracle occurred in 1762. Frederic, then king of Prussia, was fighting a coalition of Russian, Austrian, and French armies. His chances of winning were slim, and the battle would probably cost him his kingdom, and even his life. But suddenly an event occurred that changed everything. The czarina of Russia, Elizabeth, an archenemy of Frederic, died suddenly, whereupon her son, an admirer of Frederic, took over the throne. Immediately he withdrew all his troops from the coalition, which quickly fell apart without the participation of Russia. Thus, Frederic and his troops won the war. This was known as the Prussian miracle.
With the song still ringing in my ears, we left the building, picked up our weapons, and continued marching. While the boys seemed elated, I felt depressed after hearing Goebbels’ optimistic statement that seemed to have no basis in reality, no recognition of what was happening on the ground. So I wondered, did Goebbels never step out of his bunker and see the destroyed German cities and the American tanks advancing in the countryside? Did he not see the wood gas-driven tanks? This demonstration of unrealistic optimism further convinced me that the war was over, and the only thing I could do was to save my boys.
We continued to march, though from time to time we rushed into the woods to escape the strafing airplanes that were shooting and sending their bombs everywhere throughout the German countryside, blowing up whatever happened to be along the way.
At last, we came to a small tourist train, formerly used to take tourists up the Brocken Mountain. We pushed into the train, and as we walked along the narrow corridors, passing a number of empty compartments, we saw a small group of German soldiers in dirty, tattered uniforms. They looked war-weary and very tired. One of the older soldiers had a younger soldier lying across his lap. “He was shot by one of the strafing airplanes,” the older soldier explained.
Then the old soldier stroked the young man’s hair and talked softly to him, like a father consoling his son who had fallen from a bike. The young man was moaning, and blood ran from his mouth.
When the train pulled into a station, the other soldiers ran out of the compartment onto the platform. I watched from the window as they hailed an ambulance, which pulled over. Two paramedics jumped out of the ambulance with a stretcher, boarded the train, and took the soldier away. Back at the ambulance, they pushed the stretcher with the soldier through the rear doors, hopped in, and the ambulance sped away. We all just stared, saddened and frightened by the scene. We never found out if the soldier lived or died.
As I watched the ambulance speed away with the young soldier in back and its sirens blaring, I kept thinking how different this scene was compared to the fleeing soldiers in the street
s. At least the running soldiers had a hope of achieving safety, but here the young soldier was helpless, perhaps dying, and he had no escape.
After the ambulance left, we left the train station too. I led the boys across the road alongside the station, and we vanished into the woods. For a while, we felt safe as we marched along, enjoying the protection of the tall trees and feeling relief that we would soon be up the mountain and at our new camp.
But our feeling of security didn’t last long. After we left the woods, in order to cross to the other side and continue on our trek, we came upon a troop of about fifteen dead soldiers lying on the road. They had clearly been surprised by artillery fire, and now lay as stiff as statues, indicating they had been dead for some time. I felt so sad that the youngest was a fourteen-year-old Flakhelfer, one of the young students who carried the ammunition of the flak soldiers to help them fight. Apparently, an artillery grenade had hit the boy and had torn open his abdomen, so his small intestines had fallen out of his abdominal cavity. But I could still see the peristalsis moving his intestines, which looked like a can of worms.
Then, as I gazed around the road, I saw several dozen abandoned corpses of more boys who had been left there to rot or be eaten by predators. It seemed so fruitless that whole classrooms of these boys had been recruited to fight, along with their teachers, and were attached to a flak battalion. There, the boys mostly helped the flak soldiers with their weapons, and afterwards their teachers held classes for them when it was quiet. But now, the young soldier and the other boys who died in the same attack would not have lessons again.
When I looked back at the boys in my group, to sense what they thought of their experiences today, I saw the disgust and fear on their faces. “Quickly, let’s get out of here and go to our camp,” I said, and pointed to the road leading toward the mountain. They readily followed, eager to be away from this place of doom.
Just as we began marching again down the road toward Brocken Mountain, I looked back and I saw a lonely figure. He was standing on the top of a grassy knoll looking down at us and at the growing flood of fleeing soldiers who were running, since all military codes and formations had broken down. The soldiers just wanted to escape.
After I looked back at this lonely figure silhouetted against the darkening late-afternoon sky, I realized he was a German general, who was dressed in his great brown coat with a pistol at his side. He reminded me of the typical German general in late-night movies, with his gray hair, blue eyes, hooked nose, and jowls. I imagined what he must have been thinking, watching his life’s work falling to pieces around him.
I turned away as we continued marching, though now I felt it was hopeless to continue onward, like a troop of soldiers moving on to the next battle. I had seen and heard too many things in the last few hours that convinced me the German cause was hopeless. There was the drunken NCO who gave us our instructions and the announcer and Goebbels who prattled on the radio like foolish clowns, believing that Roosevelt’s death would mean a victorious Germany. Also, there was the wood gas generator on the back of the tank, and the dead soldiers in the cars and on the roadside.
All of these observations convinced me that this was the end of the rope for Germany. Clearly, we had lost the war. Despite all the bravado leading up to it, the Germans had gone down to defeat, and their proud marching in lockstep had turned into a rout of bedraggled, war-weary, and wounded troops.
Thus, it made no sense for us to keep marching, so I led the boys following me back into the woods. As they gathered around me, I explained the grim outlook. “I think it would be senseless for us to keep on. We have lost, and there’s no hope to keep fighting.” They all agreed. So we unpacked our sleeping bags, lay down in them under the open sky, and quickly went to sleep.
Notes
* The Volkssturm was formed in October and formally announced on October 16, 1944; all eligible men were conscripted, but they received very little training.
Chapter 8
Captured
I woke up with a start when I heard a droning noise a short distance away. It sounded like the cry of a dinosaur in a Hollywood movie. As I pulled myself up from my sleeping bag, the droning noise came closer and closer accompanied by the clank of chains. Although I couldn’t see anything in the darkness, I realized from the clanking that a tank was approaching.
What should we do? Though we had a few Panzerfaust guns, which are designed to blow through the heavy armor of tanks, none of us had ever shot the gun at a moving target. We had only shot the guns in training at a stationary target on a gun range, and we never hit the target. Surely we would miss now, and if we failed, the soldiers in the tanks would fire back with machine guns and certainly hit us. Then that would be the end.
I felt certain that any attempt to fight back would be hopeless, so I looked at the twelve boys in my command and told them, “Let’s go.” We each immediately dropped our weapons, which would only slow us down, and quickly ran deeper into the forest. We kept peering behind us to see if someone was in pursuit as we ducked in and out of the trees, which loomed over us like very tall menacing giants because of the darkness and our fear. We ran for about fifteen more minutes, when the forest finally ended at a freshly plowed field that surrounded a little island of beech trees.
“Let’s head for the island,” I called out. We got rid of anything that might resemble a weapon, including our Swiss army knives, since we didn’t want to give anyone who stopped us a reason to shoot us, thinking we appeared armed and dangerous. Also, the weapons were heavy—particularly the Panzerfausts, and we had to hurry to avoid the well-armed and well-supplied invaders.
Then we raced across the field, thinking this was it. We would soon be free of the war and could wait out the war without fighting until it finally ended. But we were too late. A few minutes later, the feeling of exhilaration at flying to freedom ended. About twenty heavily armed American soldiers approached us, their weapons pointed at our heads.
“Nemen Sie die Haende hoch,” which means “Raise both hands,” said a twenty-something captain, who appeared to be the group leader. Immediately we complied, stopping in our tracks like statues. Though we were all very scared and ready to do whatever the soldiers wanted, so they wouldn’t shoot us, I was surprised that the captain used the polite form of “you.” I thought that maybe things weren’t so bad after all. But I was badly mistaken, since the captain was simply using his high school or college German, where the familiar is rarely used.
For a few minutes, the soldiers searched us, looking for weapons. As they did so, at the troop commander’s signal, American soldiers strode up to each of us and patted us down. Then, satisfied we had no weapons, each soldier returned to his unit.
“Now follow us,” the American captain said, again speaking in German. As a few soldiers marched on either side of our group to guard us, we followed them into a thicket of small bushes and trees in the middle of the field, where about ten American soldiers lay on the ground smoking. Nearby a young lieutenant on the phone shouted something excitedly about “prisoners” and “teenage boys.” As we later learned, his excitement was due to the lieutenant calling in our capture to his commander, as if his unit had just won a big prize for capturing us.
A few minutes later a jeep stopped, and out came uniformed men and women journalists from the Stars and Stripes, the American Army newspaper. They had arrived to interview the infamous Werewolves who had been caught by the Americans. The Werewolves were gangs of Nazi Party youths and some elderly party members who roamed the forests and attacked American army camps, though they had no uniforms or other identification as a fighting unit. But they were very successful in attacking lone Americans and even small groups of Americans wherever they found them, taking them by surprise. Thinking we might be Werewolves, the Americans began asking us a series of questions, until they realized that we were only a ragtag group of teenagers who were ready to surrender.
After the journalists vanished, the captain ordered us
onto the back of an open-backed truck, which drove us to another small town in the Harz Mountains. It turned out to be a collection point for prisoners to be sent to different POW camps. On the way, the truck stopped and about ten American soldiers climbed onto the truck. They searched us, patting us down and looking through our pockets. At first, we thought they were simply looking for weapons. But they actually hoped to rob us, and they took our watches, cameras, rings, and money, before a lieutenant chased them off.
“Get out of here,” he screamed. “American soldiers are not thieves!” The robbers ran hurriedly off. But the lieutenant’s admonition did no good for us, for we did not get our things back. The robbers were long gone, and the lieutenant was not about to send out any American soldiers to look for them.
Soon the truck continued on, and after an hour or so, it entered a typical Harz Mountain village dating back centuries. Surprisingly, the small wooden houses were still well kept in spite of the war. Many houses even had flowers on the balconies, harking back to a more peaceful time. Now large white flags of surrender hung from the windows, where not long before swastikas had hung as symbols of Nazi rule. But the Americans had won, and the flags showed the people were ready to stop fighting and subject themselves to American rule.
The truck stopped at the entrance to a side street, blocking it, and the captain ordered the soldiers to release us on the street. At this point, we had nothing—no backpacks and no other personal possessions.
An officer pointed a gun at us and told us, “Lie down on the sidewalks and street, and go to sleep.” Fearfully, we lay down, feeling there was nothing else we could do, though we were very frightened. Were they going to shoot us, as we lay there totally defenseless?
From School to War: Growing Up in Hitler’s Germany (Contemporary Nonfiction) Page 12
