Under a Bomber's Moon: The true story of two airmen at war over Germany

by Stephen Harris

  The real fear, when it came, rolled in from the east. As 1944 tipped into 1945 and the realisation of inevitable defeat solidified, a new type of refugee began arriving in Penzlin, bringing horror stories of what the Russians were doing to German civilians, particularly women, as they advanced westwards through the Baltic coastal region of East Prussia. The nearest the actual fighting came to Penzlin was the shelling of Neubrandenburg, the larger town where Köhn went to school, and where a defensive line had been established beyond its medieval walls. Köhn’s Hitler Youth troop had helped to dig antitank trenches east of Penzlin. But the only serious defences were those at Neubrandenburg, their real purpose to slow the Russian advance and thus buy time for the German troops to withdraw westwards and surrender to the British or Americans. Penzlin lies 130 kilometres north of Berlin, far enough away for its boys and older men to escape being sucked into the suicidal defence of the capital ordered by Hitler. Penzlin’s boys were trained to fire rifles and the Panzerfaust anti-tank grenade launchers, but the weapons remained firmly locked away in the town hall. When the rumble of Russian artillery could be heard in Penzlin, the Wehrmacht officers guarding its small arsenal told the boys, ‘Go home to your Mummies.’

  By the time the first wave of Russian troops reached Penzlin on 29 April 1945, nine days before the German capitulation, Köhn and most other townsfolk had melted into the surrounding countryside, finding refuge with friends and families at isolated farms. The Russians found the town deserted. The next day – the day Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker – the Red Army began putting Penzlin to the torch. The soldiers spared the 11th-century Marienkirche, but razed the town hall next to it, destroying seven centuries of public records and igniting the small arsenal’s ammunition, which boomed and crackled in accompaniment to the mayhem. One elderly woman remained in her home, rather than flee the arsonists, and burned to death. As I drove out of the town to the site of the Lancaster bomb crater with Köhn and Pastor Reincke, they gave me a commentary on the destruction that April night: ‘This was the main street and that’s where the town hall stood.... All the houses along here were burnt down.... This grassed area had shops on it....’ Penzlin is a smallish town, its population in 2008 just 2500, but the roll-call of that 1945 destruction took a dispiritingly long time to run through.

  News of this destruction was carried out to the dispersed townsfolk on a column of smoke. Four neighbouring towns were also set alight – ‘pure retribution’, Köhn said, for what the Germans had done on the march to the gates of Moscow. None of these towns had provoked its fate by offering any resistance to the Russians. The first wave of Russians had been combat soldiers who, after destroying the town, moved on quickly, intent on staking the Soviet territorial tide-marker as far west as possible. It was the second echelon – the supply companies and the ‘politicals’ – who meted out vengeance against the people, not just their buildings. With what struck Köhn as a practised savagery, they set about raping the women and pillaging everything still standing. Fear and despair turned to desperation. In his office beside the Marienkirche, Pastor Reincke leafed through page after page of the church register, the columns that record the deaths of April and May 1945. The many entered as ‘name unknown’ reflect both the number of refugees by then in the town and also the fact so many died violently, often by their own hand. Köhn estimated that the Russians murdered only a small minority – about 20 – while most victims killed themselves rather than submit to what they thought lay in store. The mayor shot himself, as did several other prominent Nazi Party members, but many more drowned themselves in the deep lake nearby.

  The Russians remained fearful of the prospect of attacks by the so-called ‘Werewolf’ partisans – die-hard Nazis who continued guerrilla attacks in areas already captured by Soviet troops. According to Köhn, this fear was unfounded around Penzlin, but it provided a useful pretext for the harsh measures against the civilian population. By mid-May, the occupying soldiers had set up an administrative command centre amid the smouldering ruins of the town. This restored some control, including over their own men in uniform. The Russians also set about arresting anyone who had exercised authority under the Nazi regime. Leading Nazi Party figures were sent to Neubrandenburg, where they were interned with thousands of others awaiting their fate. The leader of Köhn’s Hitler Youth brigade received an 18-year sentence – the term of his natural life thus far – and was deported east. A friend of Köhn’s, slightly older than him, was also interned, returning to Penzlin only in 1954.

  The end of the war also meant the end of Köhn’s schooling at the age of 14. He could not travel to school in Neubrandenburg because the Russians had commandeered all the railways and restricted their use. He remained at home with his mother and worked on the Boldt farm, turning peat, close to where the Lancaster had come down. Penzlin’s school reopened three months after the war’s end. In 1951 Köhn returned to this school, but as a music teacher and choirmaster. Ingeburg Barz’s father returned from Russian captivity in 1946 to the home left in ruins by Col’s bomb and resumed farming. He was among the few soldiers from the village to survive the eastern front.

  The undamaged Marienkirche became the centrepiece of Penzlin’s regeneration. A new town hall was built down the road and the site of the old one now serves as a car park. The destruction of the historical archives left a gap that can never be filled. Compounding this, however, was what Köhn described as the deliberate effort by the authorities of the post-war East German regime to suppress living memory as well. How else could such wanton, vengeful destruction be recast as a ‘liberation’ on which the future brotherhood under socialism could be built? The regime frowned on Köhn’s efforts to collate some of the town’s history. Little wonder he and Pastor Reincke are among a handful now trying to make up for lost time.

  Leutnant Otto Fries ended the war with his life but almost nothing else to make a new start. It felt like Year Zero – no country, no future. ‘We were shattered. I reflected on how many comrades I had lost – young, intelligent men – all for nothing. I cried real tears. We realise now that a German victory would have been a terrible thing for Europe, but at the time we felt we had lost everything.’ Stationed in Germany’s far north at Westerland-Sylt, Otto joined all his comrades in surrendering to the British. Their ‘prison’ was a school at Mildstedt, beside the town of Husum, described by its most famous son, author Theodor Storm, as ‘the grey town on the grey sea’. Soon afterwards they were transferred to a larger camp close by in Schleswig-Holstein, near the Danish border. Then, in late July 1945, all airmen whose homes lay south of the Main River, which runs through Frankfurt, were transferred to another holding camp in preparation for release.

  As part of the pre-release formalities a British soldier called the airmen one by one to a barrier. He instructed Otto to turn out his pockets and, curious, asked him to explain what all his medals had been awarded for. The soldier’s eye fastened, magpie-like, on the German Cross in Gold, a glittering decoration awarded to Otto for completing 100 operations against the enemy, and which his comrades called the ‘fried egg’. Would Leutnant Fries sell it? ‘No, take it – you’re the victors.’ ‘I’ll pay you for it – money? Coffee?’ But Otto would not yield: ‘That’s a badge of honour. I won’t sell it. You’ll have to take it from me.’ The soldier smiled and shook his head. ‘British politeness,’ Professor Fries chuckled, recalling the episode as he showed me the medal.

  His other medals were among the few things Otto Fries retained from the war. He kept three parachute grips from all but one of the times he was forced to bale out, a small piece of Heinkel from one of those occasions – complete with a Mosquito bullet hole – and his flyer’s watch and Knemeier wind direction calculator. When defeat was imminent he left his logbook with the father of one of his squadron colleagues, whose home was near their last base. Otto had planned to collect it on his release from internment, but the father burned it, fearing the British would punish him if he was found with evi
dence of such extensive combat against them.

  The British sent Otto home, but that was literally a bridge too far. The French controlled the few remaining Rhine crossings to his home in the south-west and he had been warned they ripped up the release papers presented by any German trying to make it across to the western bank. This put his own home out of bounds to him. Otto’s Bordfunker, Fred Staffa, could not go home after the war either. He came from the Sudetenland, the German-speaking territory of today’s Czech Republic that had been ceded to Germany as a result of the ‘appeasement’ of Hitler by Neville Chamberlain and France’s Premier Edouard Daladier at Munich in 1938. The Czechs expelled the German majority from the Sudetenland immediately after the war.

  Otto went instead to his old university town, Heidelberg. When he presented his ration card for the first time, the German distributing the food – a communist, Otto later learned – looked at his Luftwaffe uniform and snatched his card with the denunciation: ‘War criminal!’ Some were clearly already constructing the ‘new Germany’ by purging the memory of the old. Germany’s communists were among the few groups to resist Hitler, and most paid with their lives. Little wonder those who survived felt justified by history, and believed that strong measures would sometimes be needed to snuff out the embers of any of the ‘anti-proletarian’ tendencies they blamed for giving rise to Nazism. The communists’ perverted ideals, however, dealt Otto a serious blow a few years later.

  It happened after he had made his home in the part of Berlin that belonged to the new ‘workers’ state’ of East Germany. Immediately after the war the occupation authorities told Otto he would not be allowed to finish his chemistry degree: that line of education was now barred to German students. German had been the language of chemistry in the earlier decades of the twentieth century, but the indelible stain of products like Zyklon B, used in the death camp gas chambers, put chemical experimentation off the syllabus for many able German students in the late 1940s.

  With the route to becoming a research chemist blocked, Otto retrained as an architect. He made it home to the Pfalz, writing his doctoral thesis on the design features of wine houses in his home region. In 1948 Otto married Irmgard and they settled in her family’s house in an eastern suburb of Berlin. In 1953, eight years before the communist regime built the Berlin Wall, many city workers rebelled against their ‘paradise’. Under great pressure from an exodus of skilled workers, East German authorities persisted with unrealistic production quotas, heaping more and more demands on workers earning far less than their equivalents in the western part of the city.

  When the inevitable backlash against the repressive authorities occurred, in mid-1953, Otto was one of the strike leaders in the state architecture workshop in East Berlin. The Stasi – the secret police – had infiltrated the workforce and identified him as a ringleader. Otto, tipped off just minutes before police entered the building to arrest him, escaped down a back stairway and fled to West Berlin. His wife, Irmgard, and her daughter, Renate, joined him, abandoning the house. Russian tanks took to the streets of East Berlin, firing on protesters and suppressing the ‘17 June’ uprising. The Frieses started a new life in the west.

  Paul Zorner, who had flown to intercept the bombers the night Col died, faced a much harsher exposure to the historical reckoning of victor and victim. Though his wife and daughter lived in Germany’s south-west – the French zone – Zorner ended the war stationed near Vienna. When he heard of the German surrender on 8 May 1945, he travelled with an English-speaking colleague and a driver through a series of American checkpoints to a large compound and walked through its gates past scores of redundant, high-ranking German officers. There he offered to surrender the 80-strong fighter group under his command to the US Army. The ranking American officer said they would take Major Zorner but not his men. ‘I can’t leave my men.’ Then he would have to take his chances with the thousands of German soldiers being kept nearby in an open field. Zorner and his men remained penned in the open without food for a week. Then the Americans turned them over en masse to the Russians, who immediately separated Zorner and all other officers from the lower ranks.

  Thus began the 25-year-old Zorner’s 55 months of captivity in a Soviet labour camp in the Caucasus, though he had never fired a shot against a Russian. He spent much of his time in the prison camp mining limestone in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia. Zorner returned to Germany in 1950, to his wife and a six-year-old daughter he had not seen since she was a tiny baby. Despite the hardship he had endured, he told me he was ‘fortunate’ in that he had remained healthy. His childhood home in Silesia is now part of Poland.

  The family farm where Otto Fries’s wife, Irmgard, had spent many happy times as a child with her grandparents – and some not-so-happy times escaping the wartime bombing with her daughter – is also in modern-day Poland. But the loss of her family’s property did not end with the division of Europe in the immediate post-war years. After Germany reunited in 1990, Frau Fries expected to regain ownership of a large apartment building in eastern Berlin that her father had bought in 1935. She still had the deeds of sale and title, all registered with the authorities. Her father bought it from a willing Jewish vendor nine months before the Nazis introduced the anti-Semitic laws that persuaded many Jews of the need to sell up quickly and get out of Germany. Frau Fries said her father and the vendor agreed to lessen the transaction tax by declaring the sale price as below what was actually paid, and with the remaining portion paid under the table.

  But there was no documentary proof of this supplement, and in 1996 the Jewish Claims Conference – an organisation set up to investigate the expropriation of Jewish property by the Nazis – determined that the house had been sold ‘under duress’. By order, the JCC took ownership of the property and quickly sold it. The Frieses were given no opportunity to make up the small price difference to what the JCC deemed should have been paid back in 1935. Irmgard Fries remained bitter about this, but Otto Fries said it paled in comparison with what the Jews lost under Nazi rule. They did not shy away from the enormity of the Holocaust and the need for Germany to atone for it, but they believed their loss was a travesty committed as part of redressing that far bigger injustice.

  But the Frieses bore a deeper wound. By early 1945, Irmgard had lost her first husband, also named Fries, a trainee doctor serving as an orderly with the Wehrmacht. He had been shot while attempting to escape from a British POW pen near Cassino, Italy, in January 1944. Then in April 1945, Irmgard was travelling through Berlin with their daughter Renate, not yet two years old, when they were forced into a shelter by an air raid. In the cramped, airless fug of the shelter the little girl caught measles which, because of the lack of medicine, developed into a deep-seated infection that permanently damaged her lungs. A doctor said her condition would be serious even if she were able to be treated in a clinic with the drugs she needed.

  The doctor advised, however, against staying in Berlin. By mid-April 1945 the Russians were already at the eastern gates of the capital and horror stories about Red Army atrocities against German civilians were commonplace. The doctor could not promise that the clinic’s nurses would stick around to meet them. Irmgard juggled the risks and decided to accept a ride in a car with others fleeing to the north-west. Renate, though afflicted by gasping for the rest of her life, lived until she was 13. Every Christmas Eve the Frieses lay a wreath on her grave near their home in western Berlin. Renate died in 1956, but was she a victim of the bombing? ‘She was a casualty of war just as my first husband was,’ Irmgard Fries said simply.

  CHAPTER 16

  UNSETTLED HISTORY

  The Western allies kept their part of Berlin as a showcase of capitalism during the Cold War – a contrast to the gritty reality of life for the East Berliners surrounding them. I was reminded, one spring morning in 2008, that the gap in living standards was still wide, even so many years after the Berlin Wall came down. The further east I drove, the more I became numbed by the unrelieved, pac
king case character of the Plattenbau block housing along my route. Much of this had been put up on the cheap and in a hurry, to accommodate the swelling numbers of Berliners repopulating the city after the wartime exodus to escape the bombing and then the Russian onslaught, though most at my destination, the suburb of Marzahn, had been erected in the 1970s.

  I had spoken by phone to the woman in charge of administration at the Marzahn Cemetery, Frau Laubner, who had told me I had to turn up in person to check whether the records contained details of Col and his crew being buried there before their remains were reinterred at the new Commonwealth War Cemetery at Heerstrasse, near my home. Frau Laubner brought out two dusty volumes covering the mid- to late 1940s, one with names arranged alphabetically, the other by year of burial. Neither contained any details of Col or his crew. Frau Laubner phoned the person at Berlin city hall responsible for war graves, Frau Gutte, and handed the phone over to me. Frau Gutte sounded sympathetic but discouraging, and next day phoned me to say, most apologetically, that she could find no record of RAF crews ever having been buried at Marzahn. The conversations reinforced my impression that the German authorities took very seriously the matter of ensuring their country’s former enemies were fully honoured in death.