Quiet once more. Then an angry barrage of artillery fire enveloped our line. Some of the foxholes of our company were caved in or blew up with direct hits. Screams of wounded. Ulli and I sat against the wall of the foxhole, wishing we could crawl into the earth. A nightmare. There was no escape from it. Finally we looked at each other. Pale faces. Our dead were left in their foxholes. The wounded were carried back to Kirchhellen on stretchers made of ponchos. We never saw a medic.
Our numbers had shrunk. But there was not another attack. We had no communication with the companies to the left and right of us. We only saw and watched the ground directly in front of us up to the farms in the distance. No movement there. No one came and talked to us until that evening. The sergeant of third platoon came by our foxholes. He thought the companies had withdrawn to Kirchhellen. Those from our company who had carried the wounded or helped the walking wounded had not come back. He thought they had been held and added to a new defensive line farther back. He said we would remain where we were until orders came to pull back. We waited.
The night passed. We were uncertain. We didn’t know what to think. We spent an uneasy night. A bad smell still came from two Shermans brewed up closest. It started to rain. We were soaked in our wet pits. Rain covers everything, washes everything, cleans. Or does it?
Third Day. Morning came, a grey misty day, March 28. We saw no movement across the fields to the right of us or before us. To the south, on our left, we couldn’t see farther than about 70 meters. 2nd Company was supposed to be there. Were the few of us being surrounded? We were jittery. We waited in an eerie silence as if war held its breath. I looked at the farmhouse close to us. There was a gaping hole in the roof from an artillery shell. I saw a movement in the rafters and brought my carbine up, fired a couple of quick shots, and sat down. Ulli looked at me curiously.
Why? Why a couple of shots? An impulse? A response to the unnerving quiet? What reason was there?
No answering shots. Silence. A voice. “Come on out! Come on out!” Someone came toward us, repeating, “Come on out!” We looked over the rim of our hole. An American soldier in khaki, holding his rifle in the crook of his left arm. He walked straight up toward us. “What do we do?” someone called from a foxhole to my right. No one answered. No word from the sergeant. The American soldier did not dodge or weave. Two MGs and our rifles were trained on him. He kept coming, shouting, waving his free right hand. So we didn’t shoot him. It would have been murder. He walked up to Ulli’s and my foxhole. I guess we were the closest. He looked down at us from where he stood. “Come on out.” His face was that of an American Indian, a face I had seen in some of my books. It had all the physical features.
I climbed out of the hole, Ulli following. He took my helmet off and threw it down. “Drop it,” he said to the others who were getting out too. When I tried to reach down to grab my canvas bag to retrieve my Egyptology notebook, he held me by the arm and said, “Let’s go. Put your hands on your heads,” or something like that. So I lost that notebook but perhaps gained my life. He turned and walked away without looking back. We followed him. We walked around the bullet-scarred farmhouse into the farmer’s inner court.
One M 3 Stuart light tank stood in a corner. It had probably slipped in during the night. There were about 30 to 40 soldiers. Some pushed us against the wall of the house. Ulli was on the far left end, I next to him. Willi and Helmut were to my right. I guess we were seventeen in all, the sergeant at the end to the right. He had been the last to come. Soldiers came forward and took our watches, rifling our pockets. In my left breast pocket I had Sherriff’s play, Journey’s End, in the right pocket my diary. The soldier who checked me took the English play but gave me back my diary. He looked at my tobacco pipe and gave it back, too. I didn’t see the Indian soldier who had brought us in.
A bright flash. Our sergeant still had the flare gun on his belt. A soldier had taken it and fired it into a trench the farmer had built as a shelter. The flare exploded and bounced out, burning harmlessly. The soldiers around us hit the ground. We kept standing, too tired to react, too worn from what had happened, what was happening.
A sergeant among the soldiers became enraged. He grabbed a BAR from one of his men. He pushed our sergeant with the muzzle of the gun toward the farmer’s dung heap a few meters away. He shot our sergeant in the back. The sounds of bullets hitting flesh. He came for the next one. I only saw the first two executions. I looked into the faces of the soldiers in front of me. Clouded, troubled faces, but no one protested or interfered.
What does one think in this situation? Nothing. The world becomes a blank, an empty slate. Nothing matters anymore.
Suddenly a jeep. An officer shouted. Stopped it. Four of us were left. We were made to run behind the jeep over the torn fields. The officer drove. Two soldiers had gotten into the back of the jeep and covered us with their rifles. We must have been very dangerous kids. German artillery shells exploded around us. We got to a farmhouse and were taken to a barn. Six more German prisoners were there, none from our battalion. I asked one of the two soldiers who had brought us – both wore the Combat Infantry Badge on their chests. “Why did he kill?” The man shrugged. “You killed two of his old buddies yesterday.”
So. On the Sagan shooting range and before Kirchhellen a seventeen year old in a German uniform was worth only a few bullets.
We sat in the barn, prisoners of war. Alive. Alive, when so many others on both sides were not. Without the Indian stepping in, I was sure that I would have died in the foxhole. This unknown Indian soldier, one like the old-time warriors in the books I had read, was one of the bravest men I ever met. Yes. I owed him.
7
POW
March 28-September 24 1945
On the Road. No more prisoners joined the four of us. After two hours a truck came and took us away. Again, two soldiers kept their rifles trained on us. On the road to Wesel, twenty kilometers to the northwest, we went by such an accumulation of material and equipment that it shocked us: ammunition and gasoline dumps along the road in the open, vehicles of many kinds in a profusion beyond our imagination from jeeps through various types of trucks to armored personnel carriers and tanks, mostly Shermans. Batteries of different caliber guns, supply depots. They had it all. They had it in such amount that it was demented for Germany to continue fighting against this. And soldiers – where we had a hundred they had five times that number, or more. For every tank of ours they had fifty. What did it matter if ours were better? For each shell that reached our batteries after running the gauntlet of their fighter-bombers and the carpet bombing of their big planes, they had a thousand at their disposal. They did not have to fear air attacks from our side. The Luftwaffe was no longer a viable force. Their supplies were endless.
But despite their colossal superiority in numbers we still made them bleed. We saw first aid stations and field hospitals, Red Cross vehicles going our way or going in the opposite direction. In the fields we also saw the burned-out hulks of Shermans and a few of ours, three Panthers and one StuG III. A cratered landscape, broken farms, wrecked villages. We also saw the first black American soldiers; they were driving trucks and working in kitchens and supply areas. Later we learned the American brass did not trust blacks in combat.
Now we were onlookers, not targets anymore. We saw no German civilians. Where were they? What happened to them? We were taken to a collection point on a farm where we were joined by about 30 German POWs of all ages, from kids like us to veteran soldiers. There were none from our battalion. We asked. A few were lightly wounded, with blood-soaked bandages. From there we were trucked farther west in the afternoon, crossing the Rhine on a pontoon bridge near the former Wesel stone bridge. The great bridge had been blown, its middle part now an obstacle in the river where debris and some bodies had accumulated. The bridgehead on the east bank, where the US 82nd Airborne Division had forced a foothold a week ago, still showed the wreckage of battle.
Our truck took us to a wide meado
w on the west bank where perhaps 500 German prisoners were confined to a narrow space within a parameter marked with a red rope. Machine-guns were posted on two sides. What were the Americans afraid of? A riot? We were glad to have the war behind us.
We sat or stood densely packed. We were given neither food nor water. Water we needed most. I was dehydrated. Once, when an American soldier walked by, I asked if I could go to the river for some water. He looked at me curiously but made a sign that I could go. I slipped under the rope and walked to the river’s edge, about a hundred meters away. I drank deeply.
It was a very bad mistake. Father Rhine gave me a terrible dysentery. It combined with jaundice, and the two together almost killed me. It took me many weeks in the POW camp to recover.
Rennes. We spent two miserable days by the Rhine without food, water and shelter. On the morning of the third day black soldiers trucked us to the Belgian city of Namur, about 200 kilometers to the southwest. On a wide open square we climbed from the trucks and were marched to the railway station. We had been expected. We passed through a crowd of enraged citizens that showered us with insults and thrown objects, from soft eggs to stones. Our guards had an interesting time watching our misery. They couldn’t have stopped it if they had wanted to. We marched in ranks, the wounded in the middle. No command was given, but we marched in step to show our disregard, our defiance to this humiliation. We stared straight ahead, ignoring insults and missiles as if they did not concern us. All of us had experienced worse. The entire world had become our enemy. We made the station with more injured than we started with, and were packed like sardines into closed cattle cars. Each car had one bucket to urinate and defecate in, and one bucket with drinking water. We were starved on the slow, long haul to a POW camp near Rennes in Brittany, France.
On the train my dysentery and jaundice came into full bloom. I was wet and weak and stank like hell. My three buddies, the other survivors of the Kirchhellen shootings, formed a protective cordon around me. I lay helpless on the floor in a corner below the slit of a window. There was a murmur among bystanders that I should be thrown from the train if that was possible. I could not hold down the water my buddies gave me. My empty bowels ejected blood.
I do not remember how long the train ride lasted. Part of the time I was unconscious. The doors opened from the outside. Soldiers shouted, “Mack snell! Mack snell!” We lumbered out and were pushed to form up and hurry. I remember that I was more lifted than dragged by two of my buddies. I had my arms around their necks. I couldn’t walk. We made it to a place where we got hot food, the first meal in days. It was a red vegetable soup, dipped into empty tomato cans from a trash barrel that had been transformed into a soup pail. We stood in line. Each of us got a full ladle. The four of us sat together. I could not eat. I gave my portion to my buddies. The soldier at the soup pail, the master of the food, called out. Something was left. My buddies encouraged me to get a refill. They helped me up and moved me toward the pail. A crowd had gathered. The pail master pointed at me and called for me to come forward. I looked behind me. I didn’t understand that it was me he wanted. But my buddies shoved me on. So I was the first. I didn’t know how pitiful I looked. For four or five days or more I had not only eaten nothing but lost everything short of my intestines. A few days later I was weighed. The scale said, 95 pounds. I must have lost about 40 pounds. Surprise.
This was our welcome to the POW camp near Rennes. We were registered and given American Army blankets. They quartered us in large tents, each POW with about one meter in space in a row on the barren ground. It was a rectangular space, counted from the tent wall to the walkway through the center of the tent. Prisoners lay on both sides of it. For a cushion I had a brick with a GI cap on top to rest my head on. Important objects were one can for coffee and one can for soup. Each POW regarded his array of empty cans as his personal property.
The Rennes camp was a well-established camp when we arrived. Two food items were plentiful: coffee and lemon juice water, the latter available all day long in canvas bags on stands spread around the camp. We lined up for food twice a day: at 5 A.M. and 5 P.M. Each time we got a watery vegetable soup and coffee, good coffee. At the 5 P.M. food serving, each of us, in addition to the soup, got one slice of soft white bread (one loaf for twelve men). These were starvation rations. Although no one died of hunger, hardly anyone was nursed back to health either.
There was no hospital for our treatment. A group of German doctors, POWs themselves, were housed in a tent in camp and did what they could. I was helped to see them. I was weighed and examined. The physician who checked me diagnosed that I had dysentery and jaundice. He had no medicines whatsoever. He suggested that I should eat coffee grounds. I did. But it took a long time, it seemed, until I could eat normally.
As the Holocaust came to Rennes. Five weeks after our arrival the war ended with Germany’s capitulation. A newspaper in German was handed out in camps with information on Hitler’s suicide. There was more news. Pages and pages of photographs taken by Allied photographers in such liberated concentration camps as Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and others that showed mounds of nude, emaciated dead bodies.
We looked at these pictures and said, no, that can’t be. That can’t be true. This is Allied propaganda. We looked again and again. Eventually we understood: these pictures must be true. This could not be staged. Finally the full horror of the Nazis revealed itself to us. What was also revealed was that we had been suckers, fighting a war while, behind our backs and in secret, the SS slaughtered innocent men, women and children by the hundreds of thousands, even millions, as we learned later.
We were shocked, dumbfounded, depressed. I had known since I was six years old that there had been concentration camps. That they had become death camps where people were systematically murdered was something we had not known. We were so ignorant that sometimes we even thought that being an inmate in a concentration camp might not be so bad. Inmates didn’t have to become soldiers and get killed or crippled like so many of us on the outside. We finally realized how badly we had been betrayed.
What the Allies had done by bombing cities and killing civilians in great numbers had been bad enough. It stiffened our resistance. Sometimes it seemed there was a reason to fight on because the Allies were determined to destroy everything German, to wipe out German culture once and for all.
But now we saw that it had been our people, the Nazis more than the Allies, who were the destroyers of Germany. Looking at the pictures we said, “They will never let us go. They will work us in their mines and camps until we are dead.” We were a depressed bunch in that huge prison camp. What did it matter that we had fought honorably, we thought, for our homeland ravaged by vicious bombing. At least we Flakhelfer had thought that. But we were Germans. After the Bergen-Belsens, even though we had not known about them, we were all considered criminals.
We witnessed individual acts of cruelty from some of the American guards. They were fresh from the US and had not been in combat with German troops. They, too, had seen the concentration camp pictures and read about it. They must have thought that we, behind the barbed wire, and at their mercy, had been complicit in mass murder. I saw a guard flip a lit cigarette from the watch tower down to the interior wire, then shooting dead the POW who went to get the cigarette he thought the guard wanted him to have. Or a guard shooting a POW during the night, under blazing lights, as the POW walked to the latrine. Sometimes, during the night, a guard, probably bored, shot rounds into our tents. Some POWs were wounded that way. We were only Germans. We heard that General Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe, said after Bergen-Belsen, “The only good German soldier is a dead German soldier.” We were the new Indians, I thought. Never mind that the SS had committed the murders without the German public’s knowledge. Those who had known kept silent, fearing for their own lives.
In May a ragged new bunch of POWs was added to our camp. These were survivors of Bad Kreuznach, one of the many American camps for Ge
rman POWs hastily put together after the German surrender. They told horror stories. They knew of dozens of such camps along the Rhine and farther west. In these, POWs died by the thousands. It seemed that American officials in charge of POW camps took the Supreme Commander’s verdict to heart.
But our POW camp at Rennes was not a death camp. American authorities let us starve a little, and sometimes a POW was shot for no reason. Bad enough, but that was all. In late June all POWs under eighteen were called up and marched to the railway station for transfer. Where, we were not told. We feared that we might be shipped to coal mines somewhere or to some other nasty place. My three buddies and I were part of the “Children’s Exodus.”
Once in the Rennes camp we had gotten tobacco: two red cans of Prince Albert tobacco for each POW along with paper to roll cigarettes. I still had my pipe. I enjoyed the Virginia leaf tobacco tremendously. It seemed a gift from another world. The red cans of Prince Albert I have always remembered warmly.
Train to Ste. Mère-Eglise. We were allowed our customary vegetable soup and coffee at 5 A.M. before we marched. We got no rations for the journey. The train was long, consisting of open cars that had been used for transporting coal. The cars, therefore, were full of coal dust. In each car was one bucket for lavatory use and one with water. We were told that we were not to leave a car without a guard’s permission; if a POW did he would be shot. The train passed slowly through the Brittany countryside in a north to northeast direction. It seemed we would go to Normandy. Why?
People gathered on some railroad bridges near villages or small towns, shouting insults and throwing objects into our open cars, anything that was at hand, usually stones, but I also saw an old bicycle frame lifted and thrown. We had no protection against it. A couple of kids were injured from bricks. Our guards saw it all but did nothing. We gathered the smaller stones thrown and, after a while, waited for the next bridge. When people there started throwing objects we threw stones in return. That sometimes ended it.
Flakhelfer to Grenadier: Memoir of a Boy Soldier, 1943-1945 Page 18