Luftwaffe Fighter Pilot

by Wolfgang Fischer

  It was only after a couple of weeks, when the first of us began keeling over during morning parade, that the Americans noticed that something was amiss. To their great credit, it must be said that it wasn’t in the GIs’ nature to treat their prisoners inhumanely and our daily rations were quickly increased to 1,200 calories. This enabled us, if not exactly to thrive, then at least to vegetate in peace and quiet without fear of starvation.

  All plans for summer 1945’s ‘sports term’ had to go by the board, of course; we were simply too weak for any sustained physical exercise. I didn’t even feel like scraping away at my cello any more. Under the circumstances, I decided to test the validity of the old adage that ‘a useful trade always pays good dividends’ by volunteering my services as an apprentice baker to the Betriebskompanie. The camp’s master baker was the plump and jolly Obergefreiter Katzlberger from Vienna. I’ll never forget one piece of good advice he gave me, delivered in his broad Austrian accent: “You’ve got to knead the dough with as much passion as you would a lovely buxom girl, Herr Leutnant.”

  The dividends promised by the old saying were duly forthcoming, and my roommates and I soon began to put on a bit of weight and regain our strength. In fact, rations in general were gradually being increased to a more acceptable level. This resulted in an improvement not only in our physical well-being, but also–and this was no doubt the real reason for the Amis’ new found generosity–in our mental state. It ensured that we would more easily be able to follow and take in the programme of ‘re-education’ that had been ordered from above.

  Our re-educators were German high school professors, some of them of Jewish descent, who had emigrated to the USA before the war. It has to be said that they too were most correct and punctilious in carrying out their duties, the primary purpose of which was to instil in us a proper understanding of democracy and responsible civic behaviour.

  The manner in which the discussions were conducted was an absolute eye-opener to me. They were quite open and we were perfectly at liberty to express contrary, even critical points of view without the slightest fear of any reprisal. It was astounding to discover just how many among us–mainly among the older ones–were democrats of long standing who had always been against the Hitler regime.

  One of these ‘oldies’ had a vision for the future that none of us could quite grasp in those still chaotic early post-war days. During one of our re-education discussion sessions he put forward the proposal that the victorious allies should change their policy of punishing Germany into one of forging a new beginning for European politics that would include Germany as an equal partner. He foresaw a kind of ‘United States of Europe’ with France and Germany together forming its seed crystal. We tapped our foreheads behind his back, suspecting that he had partaken of too many additional calories too quickly.

  In actual fact, what we were witnessing was the birth of an idea that was to change the history of Europe in a way that nobody could have possibly imagined at the time. Our ‘fantasist’ was an Oberleutnant Hallstein, to us just a weedy, even slightly comical figure with glasses perched on the end of his nose and thin legs protruding from a pair of baggy shorts. Ten years later he was Professor Dr. Walter Hallstein, founder of the Hallstein Doctrine and first president of the European Economic Community Commission.

  As officer prisoners-of-war we could not be forced to undertake any work for the enemy as long as hostilities were in progress. But now, in the summer of 1945 and with the war between Germany and the Western allies over, we were offered the opportunity to do various kinds of jobs. They were all of a menial nature, of course. But we younger officers jumped at the chance. There was no way of telling how long it would be before we were released and permitted to return home. And quite honestly, despite all the cultural diversions, life at Como was becoming ever more miserable (as for sporting activities, our still far from plentiful diet wouldn’t allow for much more than a brisk stroll round the perimeter these days).

  And so, in August 1945, almost half of the camp’s inmates, a good 400 of us in all, left the state of Mississippi for Winston-Salem in North Carolina, where we were split into a number of smaller working parties. I was one of a group of about thirty POWs who were billeted in a sports hall in the centre of town. The hall, together with a small playing field outside, was surrounded by a high wire fence. Very sensibly, there were no longer any armed guards actively watching over us. But it was made abundantly clear that we were not allowed to go wandering off into town.

  It would not have been at all difficult to sneak out of our improvised work camp, but with that tell-tale ‘POW’ writ large on the backs of our tunics we would have stood out like the proverbial sore thumb. There were compensations, however. We no longer looked out over a dreary wasteland, but on a vista of busy, pulsating everyday America, some aspects of which seemed decidedly strange to our European eyes. From the sports field I can recall being able to see the tower of a nearby church, which had some large letters arranged vertically down much of its length. When darkness fell these lit up in different colours to beseech: ‘Jesus save us’.

  The town’s major employer was–and presumably still is–the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, whose Camel cigarettes were already very familiar to us from Como (although we had been deprived of them since 8 May). When we were told that we would be working in one of the company’s branch factories, hopes were raised that we would at last be issued with proper cigarettes again.

  We were all sick and tired of trying to roll our own pathetic excuses for cigarettes from the little sacks of loose tobacco that now constituted our ration. This was little more than dust and was, we strongly suspected, the sweepings left over on the factory floor after the cigarette manufacturing process. To our great disappointment we discovered that the factory we worked in didn’t actually make cigarettes. It was a fermentation plant for the raw tobacco that came in from Kentucky and other growing areas in huge barrels, some two metres high and one metre in diameter.

  Our workplace was a large hall where numbers of black women and girls stood at a sort of conveyor belt pulling apart the tightly compressed bales of raw tobacco and placing the individual leaves on the metal belt that fed them into the fermentation chamber. Our job was to break open the barrels that were stored on wheeled pallets in one corner of the hall and roll the bales of raw tobacco across to the conveyor belt. The work wasn’t all that arduous, but we were kept constantly on the go as the nimble fingers of the black girls could pick a bale to pieces in next to no time and we were continually having to replace them.

  If we thought we would be permitted to chat to our co-workers, we were very quickly and emphatically advised otherwise; not because it might slow down production, not because we were prisoners-of-war…but because no personal contact of any kind was allowed between white and black.

  A lot of the younger girls were extremely attractive, however, and one of our number, whether as a result of long-enforced celibacy or from true feelings of affection, became totally smitten. He managed somehow to convey this to the girl in question and a relationship between the two soon developed. He even built a tiny love nest among the barrels stored in the corner where, hidden behind piles of tobacco leaves, he and his ‘inamorata’ could snatch a few moments alone.

  One day the inevitable happened and the pair were discovered together in their hideaway. Our comrade suffered no punishment, but was simply transferred to another working party. The unfortunate girl did not escape so lightly. She was found guilty of breaking the strict race laws then still in force. In the light of the allies’ wartime propaganda on the evils of oppression and our more recent re-education lectures on democracy, the incident left us in a somewhat puzzled frame of mind.

  It was not long after this that the various groups of prisoners within the factory were changed around and our party now found itself working in the so-called transport section. Our new job was to unload the large barrels of raw tobacco from the trucks delivering them from the growers, pla
ce them on the wheeled pallets and push them into the large storerooms. Physically the work was much harder than before. But it was a lot more relaxed and enjoyable than the rather strained atmosphere within the fermentation hall and, of course, we were outside in the fresh air for most of the time.

  Each barrel weighed about eight hundredweight, or some 400 kg, and our early attempts to roll them down off the trucks and then place them upright on the pallets were pretty feeble. The regular workforce, huge muscular negroes to a man, made it seem like child’s play. It took just two of them to wrestle a barrel off the truck and load it onto a pallet, while five of us weaklings would be struggling like mad to perform the same task, and risking life and limb in the process. After a little while we too learned the secret, which was to combine strength with momentum. This made the job a lot easier, but we never did manage to do it with anything fewer than three men.

  Our foreman was an elderly white man, stockily built, with snow-white hair and a healthy ruddy complexion. We christened him ‘Old Gold’ after a rival brand of cigarette. Instead of the Reynolds’ Camel (actually a dromedary, as one of our more pedantic professors never tired of pointing out), advertisements for the Lorillard Company’s Old Gold cigarettes often featured an illustration of a typical American farmer that bore a striking resemblance to our new boss.

  At first, this inherently straightforward and friendly character faced a serious dilemma: how to treat these new additions to his work gang. On the one hand, the war was not long over and the reports of atrocities were still fresh in everyone’s mind, which surely demanded that he keep his distance. On the other hand, however, his southern upbringing meant that he regarded us not just as Germans but also, and perhaps more importantly from his point of view, as whites.

  And this automatically made us much more socially acceptable than his black workers. In the end, I think he reached a compromise in his own mind and at 7am, when it was time to start work, his shout would ring round the yard: “OK! Let’s go, boys and niggers!” He was certainly not unsympathetic towards us, he himself had a son who had fought in the war, and in time came to accept our presence completely. Now and again he would even give us a lunchtime treat by handing round some of his wife’s–‘Mom’s’–home-made cakes.

  The drivers of the delivery trucks proved equally generous. After a while they entrusted us with the job of removing and folding up the large tarpaulins that covered their loads. The results of our labours were rarely as neat and tidy as they might have been, but we would each be rewarded with a pack of Camels all the same. And if we had thought that the little drawstring sacks of dusty sweepings that constituted our official tobacco issue was an inferior product only good enough for us, we were astounded to discover that some of the truckers actually preferred it. One of the drivers even had the extraordinary knack of being able to roll himself a cigarette with his hands in his pockets!

  But our Old Gold didn’t hold with manufactured tobacco products of any kind whatsoever. His liked his tobacco raw. Whenever he felt like it, he would simply tease a wad of compressed leaves out of a gap between the staves of one of the barrels, pop it into his mouth and start chewing. The amount of saliva this habit produced was phenomenal. He would spit frequently and copiously, and could hit a target several metres away with amazing accuracy.

  It was an education to watch him on those occasions when he rolled up his sleeves and lent us a hand. This usually happened when, for some reason or another, we couldn’t get a barrel on to a pallet and had to roll it along the ground. The damned things were almost uncontrollable and we would be veering about all over the place. That was when he would take over. He would bound along, his great mitts guiding the barrel as straight as a dye, letting fly with gobbets of brown tobacco juice to left and right every five metres. It was said that if you couldn’t find him, all you had to do was follow his trail.

  Our time with the transport section finally came to an end. Although the work had been hard, the friendly atmosphere had made it a far from unpleasant experience. Unfortunately, the same could not be said of our next–and final–place of employment in the United States, which proved to be something of a major disappointment. It was not that we were treated badly. It was just that we had been transferred to an artificial fertilizer manufacturing plant and the conditions were, to put it mildly, pretty horrific.

  Even at first sight the place had a neglected and rundown appearance. It was just a bare patch of ground dominated by a very large, but very dilapidated wooden building. Inside it was no better. High up in the barn-like structure, just below the roof beams, ran a narrow-gauge track. There was no flooring of any kind between the sleepers, or ties, and no guardrails at either side. Incredibly, men were pushing tipper trucks, presumably containing the various ingredients of the fertilizer mix, along this rickety track and emptying their contents from above into seven triangular-shaped silos. It was certainly no job for anyone who suffered from giddiness, but would have provided ideal employment for an out of work circus high-wire walker.

  To our great relief, we were not sent up into the roof, but were allowed to keep our feet firmly on the ground–quite literally, for the floor of the barn was just bare earth. In front of each silo stood a wheelbarrow. Our task was to fill the barrow with whatever stuff that particular silo contained and then push it across to a weighing machine. Here, according to the final mixture required, the black foreman would add ingredients from one or more of the seven little piles of unidentified substances that surrounded him. Then the barrow would have to be pushed to a trap in the floor and its contents tipped into the underground mixing and bagging machine.

  The whole process resembled some idiotic human conveyor belt as we pushed our wheelbarrows at the double from silo to weighing machine to trapdoor and back to silo again. The black foreman kept us on the move without pause. We had nicknamed him ‘Knickebein’–‘Knock-knees’–by the way, as he had been wounded in both knees during the First World War and walked with a peculiar knock-kneed gait.

  But what we suffered from most of all was the pungent, evil smelling dust that hung permanently in the air inside the barn. It formed a constant all-pervading cloud. And without facemasks we could not avoid breathing it in. The company’s black employees, who had been working there for years and no doubt still had years of the same ahead of them, were completely unaware of the danger this posed to their health.

  Our protests on site had no effect whatsoever. So we lodged an official complaint via our camp administration with the Red Cross. Amazingly, this produced almost immediate results. Not only did representatives of the Red Cross turn up at the factory, so too did a commission from the workers’ own union. The validity of our complaints was demonstrated in dramatic fashion even as the gentlemen of the commission were gathered in a corner of the barn discussing the situation.

  With a blood-curdling scream, one of the workers pushing a tipper truck high in the roof fell from the overhead rails. It looked terrible. But, in fact, it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. He landed on top of the softest and highest of the many piles of fertilizer mix scattered about the factory floor. Even so, the hoped for improvements failed to materialize. No planking was laid between the ties of the tracks up in the roof. No guardrails were fitted. And no facemasks were issued.

  But for us, at any rate, the matter soon became academic. For after about six weeks of hard labour in this ‘lung clinic’ it was officially announced that we were in line for repatriation. Our excitement can be imagined. Letters containing the tidings of joy were quickly despatched home. Among those I informed were the Schlossmann family on their Hubertus farmstead in South Africa whom, for safety’s sake, I addressed as ‘Uncle and Aunt’.

  At the end of April 1946 things started to happen. With a group of about another 100 prisoners we were put on a train back to New York. But this time there were no armed guards, locked carriages or closed windows–nor, sadly, any delicious meals in station restaurants served by wide-eyed black waitresses.<
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  If I remember rightly, it was on 1 May 1946 that our American adventure ended where it had begun, in New York harbour, with our boarding the ship that was to ferry us back across the Atlantic to Europe. Here too things were very different from the outward crossing. We weren’t cooped up in cabins behind barbed wire, but were allowed to stroll around on deck, which we did for almost the entire crossing.

  This time, however, the captain didn’t welcome us aboard as ‘guests of the United States Navy’, for we were no longer classified as officer prisoners-of-war. Now, according to an American Joint Chiefs of Staff ruling of April 1945 (JCS 1067: 4b), we were regarded as members of a ‘conquered enemy nation’.

  Not worrying a great deal about our official status and what label had been pinned on us, we spent our days up on deck getting to know many of the other prisoners we had not come into contact with before. We had lengthy discussions about what the future held, both for us personally and for our country. These sometimes got quite heated. Most of us were convinced that we would be released immediately upon arrival and sent straight home.

  But there were some nasty rumours going around to the effect that German prisoners–as we still considered ourselves–were being sent to a temporary camp in France and there ‘auctioned off’ for further labour in either France or England. After about ten days we docked at Le Havre in France. From here we were taken first to the tented encampment of Bolbeque not far from the port.

  The camp was a very primitive place with a bad reputation. And rightly so, for it now transpired that the shipboard rumours were at least partially true. Bolbeque served not only as a transit camp for those going on to Marburg, north of Frankfurt, to be released. It was also a redistribution centre where prisoners arriving from America were being handed over to the British or French for further terms of captivity working, for example, in coalmines or stone quarries.