On June 7, 1944, the German public awoke to read a terse dispatch from the Military High Command in their morning papers: “In the night just past,” it announced, “the enemy began their long-planned invasion of western Europe, an attack which we have been expecting.”48
48. This announcement of the D-day invasion is quoted in Emmy E. Werner, Through the Eyes of Innocents: Children Witness World War II (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 120.
It was D-day. In the early-morning hours of June 6, 1944, some 175,000 Allied troops stormed ashore on the beaches of Normandy in northern France. Thousands of British, American, Canadian, and Free French reinforcements would follow in the coming weeks. By late summer, Allied troops had liberated Paris and reached the Siegfried Line, the so-called Western Wall (Westwall) of Germany’s fortified defense system. Their armies now pressed toward the German frontier, while in the East, Soviet forces pushed to the borders of East Prussia.
In the context of these mounting military defeats, Hitler decreed the creation of the Volkssturm, a home guard consisting of previously unconscripted men between the ages of sixteen and sixty.49 Individual Gauleiters were responsible for the organization and command of local units, while Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and Reichsleiter Martin Bormann undertook military and political leadership of the troops, respectively. Tasked with the defense of the immediate homeland, nearly 6 million men were drafted into this service. Three separate age cohorts were affected: those born between the years 1884 and 1924, who had previously been excluded for reasons of age or health; those men currently eligible for conscription but whose occupations had exempted them as essential to the war effort (Unabkömmlichstellung, or UK-Stellung); and those teenagers born between 1925 and 1928, who were not yet of draft age. In the last desperate months of World War II, young boys in their early teens were drawn into action as well.
49. The Führer decree establishing the Volkssturm proceeded on September 25, 1944, but was first made public on October 18, 1944, the anniversary of the Battle of Nations (Völkerschlacht), fought near Leipzig, in which Napoleon was decisively routed in 1813.
Lacking necessary materiel and qualified instructors, Volkssturm formations were poorly trained and inadequately armed. Germany had a long tradition of compulsory military service, so most older members of the Volkssturm would at least have received some military training when they previously served with the army. This was not true of conscripted teenagers, who received minimal basic training from the Hitler Youth organization or from the Reich Labor Service (Reicharbeitsdienst).50 Actual weapons training was often so deficient that Volkssturm members had to familiarize themselves with their firearms in the field. Chronically short of arms and ammunition, Volkssturm units fought with captured weapons, as well as with portable antitank rocket launchers (bazookas) and improvised light rifles, such as the Volksgewehr (people’s rifle); often they were armed with little more than picks and shovels. It was common to deploy such forces in digging antitank ditches and entrenchments and in building makeshift shelters and dugouts, but many units saw heavy combat. Although individual regiments were initially intended to operate in their home districts, numerous divisions were sent directly to the front. These ragtag forces were used extensively in the Battle of Königsberg (today Kaliningrad) (April 6 to 9, 1945) and in the Battle for Berlin (April 20 to May 2, 1945), one of the war’s bloodiest battles. Ill-equipped and inadequately provisioned, they suffered enormous casualties. Tens of thousands died in action. Nearly 1 million Volkssturm soldiers were prisoners of war at war’s end, while 175,000 were officially listed as missing.
50. For further discussion of the Volkssturm, see David K. Yelton, Hitler’s Volkssturm: The Nazi Militia and the Fall of Germany, 1944–1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002).
Volkssturm formations often fought with desperate courage, but the military value of their deployment remained insignificant. The Nazi leadership believed that the formation and presence of a home guard would bolster plummeting public morale, but the sight of ragged boys and graybeards marching into combat presumably did little to restore citizens’ belief in ultimate victory. Nevertheless, Völkischer Beobachter, the official newspaper of the Nazi Party, often carried stories heralding the valor and tenacity of young boys dispatched to the defense of their embattled Fatherland. In early 1945, it printed an interview with fifteen-year-old Harry Bahrmann, whose courage and quick action halted the entry of a Soviet tank into a village in eastern Germany.
Document 7-15. Interview with Harry Bahrmann, Völkischer Beobachter, c. March 1945, in Franz Seidler, Deutsche Volkssturm: Das letzte Aufgebot, 1944–1945, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Herbig, 1991), 322.
Harry Bahrmann, Hitler Youth member, fifteen years old:
I lie in the roadside ditch in the middle of the village. In the area before me, the street comes to an end to my right. I lie where the road makes a sharp bend. The ditch is not deep, but I duck down. I can see for about fifty meters [164 feet] down the street, then the corner of the adjacent house cuts off my view. I hear the tank coming and duck down even lower. He must not see me first. He shoots and [the shots] resound in my ear, but I think, “He cannot see me and is shooting over me.” I want to let him come up very close. I’m almost lying completely on my stomach on the embankment, releasing the safety catch of the bazooka and pressing it against me. I try to decide how I will do it. The roar of the turret gun almost knocks me over. Then I see [the tank] and quickly duck my head away. I didn’t think any more, except that it was almost directly upon me. I see it suddenly, although I keep my head low. It is no more than six meters [twenty feet] away. I really wanted to shoot from a prone position, but I spring up halfway and discharge the weapon, and I cannot miss. There was immediately a dense cloud of smoke about the tank, from which a cascade of bright lights appeared as if someone were doing welding. The tank half turned, blocked the street, and burned out. I was completely dirty and wet from the culvert. I thought, “Now you can really come out of the ditch.” From the entryway of a nearby house, someone ran out to me and said, “You shot the tank.”
“Yes,” I said.
On January 12, 1945, the Red Army launched its last major offensive against German forces, beginning from its start positions on the Vistula River in Poland and fanning out along a broad front. On the fourth day of the endeavor, Soviet army groups broke German lines and advanced rapidly westward at the rate of approximately thirty to forty kilometers (twenty-five miles) per day. In swift succession, Soviet forces captured the German territories of East Prussia, East Pomerania, Upper Silesia, and Posen (today Posnań) before halting on a line along the Oder River some seventy kilometers (forty-four miles) from Berlin. The German Wehrmacht had lost more than 1 million troops since the Allied invasion of western Europe in June 1944, and it lacked sufficient men and material to adequately defend the capital. As the Soviets pushed toward the gates of Berlin, the U.S. Army Air Force launched a number of devastating daytime air raids upon the city, while the RAF rained bombs on the capital for thirty-six consecutive nights before the arrival of Red Army forces. Soviet artillery units began shelling the metropolitan area on April 20, 1945, and did not halt their efforts until the city’s surrender.
The Battle for Berlin had begun. By April 24, units of the First Belorussian Front51 and the First Ukrainian Front completed an encirclement of the capital. The German defenses consisted of some forty-five thousand disorganized and ill-equipped Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS troops, as well as police, Volkssturm, and Hitler Youth units. Following one of the most fiercely fought battles of World War II, Soviet troops reached the Reichstag and the adjoining government district at the city’s center on April 30. That afternoon Germany’s Führer, Adolf Hitler, committed suicide in his subterranean bunker beneath the New Reich Chancellery building on the nearby Voßstrasse. On May 2, Berlin capitulated, although fighting continued on the city’s outskirts until Germany’s official surrender on May 8, 19
45. While precise mortality statistics are difficult to attain, scholars estimate that as many as 125,000 civilians perished in the Battle for Berlin.52
51. The term front described a major military organization in the Soviet army during World War II; it was roughly equivalent to an Allied army group.
52. See Earl Ziemke, Stalingrad to Berlin: The German Defeat in the East (Washington, DC: Center for Military History, United States Army, 1968).
Seventeen-year-old Lili G. experienced the collapse of the Third Reich in Germany’s capital. From her home in the Kaiserallee in Berlin’s Tempelhof district, the teenager recorded in terse journal entries the arrival of Soviet forces and the intense aerial and artillery bombardment that confined her and her family to their cellar as fighting raged through the streets. As the Red Army took possession of the city, vengeful Soviet troops spread terror throughout the capital, looting homes, arresting anyone in uniform, and sometimes murdering civilians in cold blood. As in Vienna, which had fallen to the Soviet army on February 13, some 10 to 20 percent of Berlin’s female population was raped in the first days of occupation,53 among them Lili’s mother. On May 1, the family fled to Lichterfelde in the city’s southern suburbs to escape the chaos of the battle’s final days and the excesses of Soviet soldiers. Following the city’s capitulation on May 2, Lili, her mother, and her younger sister, Margit, returned to their shell-ravaged neighborhood to await the war’s end and to begin picking up the pieces of their shattered lives.
53. See Stargardt, Witnesses of War, 316–20.
Document 7-16. Journal of Lili G., entries for April 15 through May 9, 1945, in Reinhard Rürup, ed., Der Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion, 1941–1945: Eine Dokumentation zum 50. Jahrestag des Überfalls auf die Sowjetunion (Berlin: Argon-Verlag, 1991), 257–58 (translated from the German).
April 15, [1945]: Air raid siren! The British are in Magdeburg, the Russians have reached Frankfurt [an der Oder].
April 16: Air raid siren! Digging around for things [in the old house] in the Jagowstrasse.
April 17: Air raid siren! Was paying off accounts with our ration coupons.
April 18: Air raid siren! Retrieving things in the Jagowstrasse.
April 19: Air raid siren! Retrieving things in the Jagowstrasse. Can already hear shooting.
April 20: Air raid siren! Little water, no electricity. The siren no longer sounds during air raids.
April 21: The train doesn’t go out to the Jagowstrasse anymore.
April 22: We are now sleeping in the cellar. The Russians have reached Berlin. Uncle Willi is now a refugee and has come to stay with us.
April 23: Went out to the Jagowstrasse with Uncle Willi. Visited Papa. He had got drunk from his alcohol rations.
April 24: Five people dead through a grenade blast in the Trautenaustrasse.
April 25: No water! No gas! No light!
April 26: Artillery fire!
April 27: The enemy is at the Kaiserplatz.
April 28: Our house was hit for the fourth time by artillery!
April 29: Our house was struck about twenty times [by artillery fire]. It is very difficult to cook anything because of the constant danger to life and limb when one leaves the cellar.
April 30: I was standing up on the stairs of the cellar with Mrs. Behrendt during a bombing raid. The Russians are here. They are completely drunk. There are rapes at night. Not me. Mama yes. Some five to twenty times.
May 1: The Russians go in and out [of our house]. All of our clocks and watches are gone. Their horses lie in the courtyard on our bedding. They have broken into the cellar. We have all fled to Stubenrauchstrasse 33.54
54. This refers to a street in Lichterfelde, a quiet, affluent neighborhood in southern Berlin and thus away from the chaos of the city center.
May 2: The first night of quiet. We have moved from hell to heaven. We cried when we discovered the lilacs blooming in the courtyard. Everyone must give up their radios.
May 3: Still in the Stubenrauchstrasse. Can’t go to the window, lest you are seen by the Russians. We’ve heard that there are rapes everywhere.
May 4: No news from Father in the Derfflinger Strasse.
May 5: Back to the Kaiserallee. Complete chaos!
May 6: Our building took twenty-one hits! Cleared things away and packed all day. Attack at night. Crept under the bed for fear the Russians were coming. But the building was just rattling because of the shelling.
May 7: The street has been cleared of rubble. I got numbers for our bread ration, cleaned things up, washed up.
May 8: Cleared rubble in the street. Stood in line for bread. Got news that Father is alive.
May 9: Armistice. There is milk for Margit.
Document 7-17. A German mother shields the eyes of her young son as American troops force her and other townspeople to view the bodies of Soviet civilians from a mass grave near Suttrop, Germany, May 3, 1945, USHMMPA WS# 08197, courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.
Chapter 8
The World of the Child
Understandably, children and adults contended with the persecutory policies of the Nazi period in markedly different ways. Child victims and survivors of genocide were, after all, still children. This chapter reflects the events of the Shoah, or Holocaust, through their eyes and explores the ways in which youngsters coped with the menacing world in which they found themselves.
Learning and play are two elemental activities associated with childhood. During the Holocaust, children used both to adapt to their difficult circumstances and to restore a sense of normalcy to their disordered lives. In many ghettos throughout eastern Europe, Nazi authorities forbade formal educational instruction for Jewish children. Yet, thousands of school-age children defied such bans by attending a network of clandestine schools organized by education and welfare agencies in many ghetto communities. For young people, such secret study was a means of transcending the narrow walls of the ghetto and fulfilling important intellectual and emotional needs. Teenagers also took pleasure in participating in extracurricular educational and cultural events, such as literary circles, exhibitions, and musical recitals, which offered an important conduit for creativity and artistic collaboration within a captive community.
Play provided children with another powerful outlet to give the terrifying world about them safer contours. Entering a realm of daydream and imagination allowed youngsters to escape their harrowing and uncertain existence and eschew the fear and hunger that tormented them. With a creativity and ingenuity that surprised adult observers, youngsters invented new toys and games with the very limited resources available to them. Often children incorporated the macabre realities of their camp or ghetto surroundings. Integrating the horrors and tragedies that they witnessed into their play may have helped young children to absorb and assimilate the traumatic events that punctuated their everyday existence.
Like learning and play, innocence is another element closely associated with childhood. But were children in Nazi camps and ghettos innocent of the dangers that awaited them? Could children comprehend the malignant forces that they faced? Documentation concerning innocence and knowledge examines the degree to which children lived aware or unaware of their perilous circumstances. In most cases, youngsters matured quickly, gaining experience beyond their years, witnessing unimaginable horrors, and shouldering grown-up responsibilities. With a flexibility that many adults lacked, children often found highly creative ways to cope with the difficulties they confronted. Through imagination, play, and their dreams for the future, young people managed to transcend the physical and emotional traumas they experienced and cling to their hopes for survival.
Escape into Learning
Learning is an essential and indispensable feature of childhood, the school years being part of a youngster’s evolution to adulthood. Yet, during the war years in German-occupied
Europe, a majority of Jewish children were denied the possibility of a formal education. In November 1939, just weeks after the Polish army capitulated, German officials in the General Government banned Jewish children from all public and private schools. In the Polish capital alone, forty thousand Jewish youngsters of school age were barred from attending classes.1 With very few exceptions, as in the case of the Łódź ghetto, which boasted an impressive array of officially sanctioned educational institutions,2 prohibitions or severe restrictions upon formal instruction for Jewish children remained in effect when Jewish populations were ghettoized in Poland and other German-occupied territories in eastern Europe. When the largest of these communities, the Warsaw ghetto, was enclosed in November 1940, German authorities imposed a ban on the establishment of schools, citing the threat of contagion. Only a select number of vocational-training courses were permitted in August 1940, and only in September 1941 did German officials countenance the opening of a number of elementary schools for ghetto pupils.3
1. Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to a Perished City, trans. Emma Harris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 343.
Children during the Holocaust Page 40