Flakhelfer to Grenadier: Memoir of a Boy Soldier, 1943-1945

by Karl Heinz Schlesier

  Kleine Oma. Reporting back to 2nd Battery Headquarters, Ferdi and I filled out applications for reserve officer candidate for the Heer. This was duly registered in our papers, as was the earlier award of the Flakkampfabzeichen. German bureaucracy, civilian and military, never missed recording details. It took a few weeks, however, until our applications were formally accepted and confirmed. In order to meet with Elinor again I switched a furlough due me from October 23-24 to October 30-31 so I could go with Thei. It worked both ways – without me and Elinor he would not be able to see Edith.

  During the following three weeks we stood-by twice during American daytime raids. On October 14, once again, Schweinfurt and the ball-bearing factories were hit, and on October 20, the Düren airfield, 45 kilometers southwest of our battery. We waited by the guns for hours but never saw a Viermot. We watched quite a few German fighter planes rushing southwest. That was all. There were three night alarms, but we only had a chance to shoot at formations of the RAF returning from an attack on Leipzig, deep in Eastern Germany (October 21-22). On that night the sky was clear. Three Lancasters were riding the cones of searchlights, allowing visual ranging. Two were brought down around Düsseldorf, one crashing close by, on the west bank of the Rhine, half a kilometer away.

  The RAF attack on Kassel, October 22-23, was the worst since the Hamburg raids. The bomber stream, 150 kilometers long, flew in from the southwest of us, over Koblenz and Bonn. At 2200 hours we waited by the gun. It could be Düsseldorf again. At 2300 we listened to the endless thunder in the sky, but the fleet passed us without us getting a shot. An hour later we heard that it was Kassel’s turn again. The newspaper reported two days later that the firestorm created by the bombers in Kassel killed ten thousand people. Excluding the Wednesday of the Düren raid, we had eight days of school, ranging from the Gallic Wars to the intricacies of math. On the Saturday afternoon of the furlough, October 30, Thei and I met with the girls. We went to the Germania theater and saw a silly, totally unrealistic, sentimental movie. We didn’t care as long as it provided an antidote to the grim world out there. We were happy sitting together, feeling each other’s presence. We took a long walk after that, Elinor and I, like Thei and Edith, arm in arm.

  On Sunday morning I went with my parents to Erkrath, a little town at the opening of the Neandertal, three kilometers east of Gerresheim. We went to the cemetery with flowers for my grandmother’s grave. The holiday of Allerheiligen (All Saints) was on the following Monday. It was custom in Germany to visit the graves of the dead on that day and place flowers in remembrance. Because I had to be back in Reisholz on Monday, we decided to go on Sunday.

  It was a small grave with a headstone engraved with my grandmother’s name. My mother cleared dead leaves away and placed the flowers we had brought in a metal vase. We lit a candle that would burn for 24 hours.

  My grandmother. For the first six years of my life she was my guardian angel, my teacher, my inspiration, my guide into worlds distant and colorful and strange, my everything. I called her fondly. “kleine Oma,” because of her small size. She was born in Erkrath on July 28, 1862. Her maiden name was Gertrud Kloft. She married Johann Kopp on September 30, 1889. My mother Maria Kopp, was born in Erkrath on October 12. 1896. She was the youngest of three children. A brother, Peter was two years older, a sister, Lisbeth, three. Their father died when my mother was two years old. He had been called up for army fall maneuvers and came back with pneumonia. It took his life within a few weeks. He had been the manager of the Erkrath railway station and my grandmother had to live with three small children on a modest pension from the railway company, the Rheinische Bahngesellschaft, and from the work she did from her house. These were years of hardship. She grew much of the food for the family in her large garden. When the children finished elementary school, they each learned a trade. My mother spent four years becoming a dressmaker. Afterward, she worked in a fashion house in Düsseldorf.

  My mother met my father in 1922. He married my mother on October 15 1924. He worked in the Heye glass factory then, that had once evicted his father and, in many ways, had been a big part in shaping his life. My grandmother’s left leg had been amputated due to an illness, so my parents moved into her home. I was born on July 31 1927, and I spent the first three years there under my grandmother’s constant attention and care. In 1930 my parents and Kleine Oma moved to lower Gerresheim, where my father rented the larger part of a house across from the factory-owned library, well stocked with books. My grandmother had a prosthesis, but she had difficulty walking. In Gerresheim, as in Erkrath before, she rarely left the house. She spent almost all her time with me, an only child.

  The two of us became frequent visitors to the library across the street. Lugging books from the library to our house and back was my mother’s task. Kleine Oma opened the world of books for me. I learned that through books, one can travel anywhere, to the most distant, wonderful, and exotic places. One could hide in books. It was a valuable lesson. I found it life-saving later.

  We would sit side by side, my grandmother showing me pictures and telling me about them, inventing stories. Later I understood that among the volumes she had gone through with me were those of the Theodore Roosevelt African Expedition where species were collected for American museums. There were a great many photographs of African plains game published there. She sat me on a cushion on the kitchen table as she sat on a chair before me while I held my arms around her. She would whisper stories into my ear. When she paused, my mother told me later, I would say, “Mehr, Oma, mehr.” I could not yet speak well but I listened very well.

  The stories she told me sank deep and did something there inside me that, many years later, came to the fore. I remember that she told me Sami stories of white reindeer and sleds and magicians and a sacred mountain, a mountain spirit called Hitzi. She told me many others. These were not the Brothers’ Grimm or Hauff fairy tales; she told me those too, but where many of the others came from I do not know. She told me of Maya pyramids and lost Inca treasures, of ancient cities in the green jungle. These I somehow remember. But I have lost so many others – or have I?

  She died on February 4. 1933. I was almost six years old. I was scared, befuddled, and uneasy for a long time. I could not understand that she would not come back. In the early mornings I listened for the tap-tap of her cane as she came down from the two rooms upstairs where she had lived. The familiar sounds signaling her arrival came no more.

  Later, in elementary school, I was the first in class who could read, the first to enrol in the big library next to the school. That was my grandmother’s legacy. She would have been smiling, wherever she was.

  On that Sunday with my parents I knelt and touched the earth on her grave before we walked away. She had taught me that the world was a place of wonder, of miracles, of meaning, and for a long moment I remembered all that, remembered her face below the black stone inscribed with her name.

  Düsseldorf Again. The expected attack on our city came during the night after All Saints, on November 2-3. The alarm bell woke us at 2200 hours. We took to the bunker in the Bertha gun revetment because of a drizzling rain. Tylia reported leading formations over Zeeland, the southern tip of Holland, 225 kilometers almost due west of us. If they aimed for the Ruhr or the Rhineland, they would arrive in less than an hour. Perhaps it was another faint? We took our stations after the bomber stream was passing Antwerp, continuing in direction 3. In the city the sirens screamed. Searchlights aimed their beams at the cloud cover. Tylia reported us ready to the command post. We waited. Finally, “Gun position 9.” The faint sound of aircraft. The windows before the K 1, K 2 and K 6 lit up, command pointers began to move. “Covered.” Flak started up west of the city. We heard the roar of many aircraft, closing in. Red light cascades, Christbäume, emerged over the city, slowly passing through the clouds. It was our turn, again.

  Green Christbäume followed the red. The attack lasted about 25 minutes. The explosions of blockbusters roared even over the noise o
f our shooting. We fired well over a hundred rounds that night. The ground within the revetment filled with the clutter of empty brass cases. Only after the last of the bombers had vanished did we have a chance to breathe, to look around, to think. North of us we saw great blossoms of smoke against the bluish-white beams of the searchlights. There, three kilometers away, people had died. More were suffering. We, in our battery, had been spared again. Why, and for how long? The question left me with a queasy feeling in my stomach.

  For us, the next two weeks were quiet ones. The RAF paused. Perhaps their crews were exhausted, too. They lost a bunch of aircraft every time they crossed into Germany to nightfighters and Flak. It did not deter them much. Their resources in men and material seemed inexhaustible. We had long regarded the English and their Commonwealth Allies, the Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders as tough and resilient in war. Their bomber squadrons were no exceptions. True, they dealt in death, but death cut into their formations, too. On average they lost somewhere between fifteen to 25 planes in a raid, sometimes more. Still, they kept coming. We never knew what they expected to gain from burning civilians in one city after another, and attacking the same targets again and again. If they thought the stricken population would buckle, they were mistaken. People living under the constant threat of death, with no chance to change it, were forced to accept it. When the sirens blared, people went into concrete bunkers, into tunnels dug into rises of the ground, and cellars. There they huddled and waited, suffering in silence. The general frame of mind of our people under such horror was apathy, resignation, impassivity. Soldiers on the battlefields fought on with desperation, more so because they knew what was happening to their families back home.

  I saw it in my parents’ eyes on my next furlough. November 13-14. I saw it in their expressions, their bearing. In lower Gerresheim a three story concrete bunker had been finished that no blockbuster would be able to penetrate. It was over half a kilometer from our house. My father had become a slow walker. If my parents tried to get there during an alarm they might not make it if Gerresheim was a target. So they stayed in the cellar of our home, hoping that the thick walls and the solid vault would protect them.

  My father, always an introvert, looked drained and impassive. He was withdrawing within himself. He tried to be more positive because I had come and he did not want to burden me. Even trying was hard for him. My mother, always the optimistic, encouraging, practical one, tried to shift us into a more amiable mood. Eventually she succeeded because my father knew that gloom did us no good. And, after all, I had come on furlough.

  At first I saw my parents’ discomfort, their unhappiness, almost as an outsider. Although I lived under conditions similar to theirs, I had a different opinion about the overall situation. Strangely, the bombing and the killing had not yet made an impact on me as severe as it had on them. It must have been youthful ignorance on my part. I still saw, my buddies saw, some hope where my parents saw none. I realized that something was happening to them, changing them. For the first time in my life I felt sorry for them. For the first time after Einsiedel I felt the kind of closeness to them as I’d felt when I was a little boy. They were my parents and I knew I loved them. I didn’t tell them and I carried my feelings to our Saturday evening meeting with the girls. Perhaps that was why I kissed Elinor then – an overwhelming sudden awareness that there is love despite grime and misery.

  Fortresses. During the following two weeks there were only three days without a night alarm: November 15-16, 16-17, 21-22. During the other nights we spent many hours by the guns. The English had flown through and attacked away from our area: Berlin, four times, Ludwigshafen, twice, and Mannheim, Frankfurt and Stuttgart. The only exception was the raid on Leverkusen, November 19-20. This small town, home of the Bayer Werke, was just twenty kilometers to the southeast of us. That night we were heavily engaged and fired around 80 Gruppen. As so many times before, we could not prevent disaster. We glumly watched the sky redden. Twice during that time period we shot at Lancasters returning from one of the cities mentioned above. Often, the bomber stream flew in to the north of us and returned to England across the North Sea, where the planes were preyed upon by nightfighters. American daytime raids during these weeks focused on German coastal cities, such as Emden, Bremen, Wilhelmshafen. We were glad to be overlooked.

  My furlough on November 27 and 28 was uneventful. For some reasons the girls were elsewhere, so I spent the whole time with my parents. We hardly mentioned the most recent attack on our city. The northern part of Düsseldorf had been hit again. Some bombs had fallen into the already devastated downtown area. They had severed a section of the surviving streetcar tracks among the rubble, one of the lifelines of the city.

  We knew this would continue. There was not much to say about it. I spent some time again with the .22 on my old hunting ground near the Ruine, mainly to be by myself for a while.

  Our first American raid came two days later, on the afternoon of November 30. The Fortresses came at a height of 5,000 meters (18.000 feet). We thought we were in for it. We saw the first of the combat boxes as they flew in from the northwest. The sky around them came alive with the puff balls of exploding shells. These were from guns of calibers heavier than ours, 12.8cm and 10.5cm, stationed on the other side of the city. The 8.8cm batteries joined in as the planes came closer. A little later they were in our range. My last look at them, before the command pointer in the K 2 position in front of me began moving, was not in awe, as before. This time I felt deadly fear. Here they were, coming for us. At English planes, we as gunners shot blind, in the dark. We only saw those planes in rare situations. The sky had to be clear, us out of range and watching as searchlights picked them up and made them visible. But here a whole fleet converged upon us in broad daylight. Still, the command pointer required my attention. I could do nothing but cover it with the position pointer. While Bertha roared and shook and empty cases clattered behind us, I listened for the terrible sounds of bombs coming down.

  That sound never came. The Fortresses passed over us, enduring our fire, our anger, oblivious to our fear. They went by and did their part in the continuing obliteration of Solingen, the place my relatives had left to find a better life in America. So had many Germans from other towns and villages. Among them my grandfather. Now the American planes were doing during the day what the English did at night, killing civilians. I wondered what in Solingen was of military value. America had a good name in Germany. In the past she had always been a haven on the other side of the ocean. We felt angry and disappointed.

  We shot a lot that day as their formations came, one after the other holding a steady course at the same operational height. After our guns became silent, we still saw the Solingen Flak fire. We heard the rumble of heavy carpet bombing as one Pulk after another unloaded on the city. And then they were gone, leaving their vapor trails behind them. Tylia told us that he had seen three Viermots going down.

  The next American attack came the following day, December 1. This time Leverkusen was struck. The English had hit the town eleven nights earlier. We could see the bomber boxes clearly to the west, in a sky filled with vapor trails but out of our range. Something must have been left standing in Leverkusen, before this. We watched the long snake of planes passing by, dragging vapor trails and barely touched by anti-aircraft fire. It all seemed to happen in slow motion.

  Over meals in our hut or in the mess hall, or during the time we met for class, we didn’t talk about what was happening or what we were doing. Neither did the teachers. They kept silent. So did we. There was nothing to talk about. We went to the guns when we had to. We did what was expected of us. When it was over, we went back to our quarters. We had become stoic, impassive. During attacks we had no time to think about anything. We worked the machines. When we could, we cracked jokes and made fun of each other. We were not unhappy. I guess we had become as weird as the world we lived in. We still read books in our free time and did class work, the latter more out of neces
sity than for love of learning. School, although somewhat unreal in our world, at least distracted us from the other things we had to do.

  My next furlough, December 11 to 12, was the last time I met with Elinor. She told me she and her mother would be leaving Gerresheim for a place her father had found for them in the south, away from any city. Although we had not been more than friends, it was a sad loss for me. She had been the first girl I had known, and I liked everything about her. We both knew that if our lives had not been overshadowed by the darkness around us things could have been different. Our relationship might have become closer, perhaps something precious. She gave me her new address, a village in the Taunus Mountains, and promised to write.

  Ilya, Vassiliy, Piotr. They were three Russian soldiers who, as many others, had volunteered to serve in the German anti-aircraft. As volunteers they were called Hiwis (Hilfswillige, “willing to help”). We never called them Hiwis, we called them by their first names. They didn’t call us by name but used the informal, personal “Du” instead of the formal “Sie,” and our last names, the way we were addressed by commissioned and non-commissioned officers. Tylia was the exception; he called Paulchen “Du” and “Sie” at different times.

  The three Russians were in their late twenties. Ilya was a high school teacher from Orenburg, near the southern edge of the Ural Mountains. Vassiliy was from Irkutsk, a city on Lake Baikal in Siberia. Piotr was from a village 300 kilometers south of Moscow. The three were our ammunition gunners. The K 5 and K 7 removed the shells from the ammo bunkers in the revetment walls and passed them to the K 4, who slipped them into the two receiving cups of the fuse setting machine worked by the K 6. We Flakhelfer rotated from the K 1 to the K 2 and the K 6 positions, but among the Russians, their positions, once established, remained the same. Vassiliy was the K 4, Ilya was K 5, Piotr was K 7. They had chosen these positions, and Tylia did not interfere. What mattered to him was that we were a smooth-working unit.