Destined to Witness

by Hans Massaquoi

  After his lecture, Erdmann told me that the big boss wanted to have a word with me, then walked me to the administration building where he asked to see the plant’s general manager. The prospect of facing the company’s omnipotent, yet seldom visible, top executive caused all of the cockiness I had felt earlier that morning to evaporate and make room for feelings of unmitigated terror.

  When we were admitted to the vast, wood-paneled executive office, the general manager, a corporate-type white-haired man with dark horn-rimmed glasses, was seated behind a desk. Seated in front of him was the plant’s chief engineer, Erdmann’s boss. The two men, apparently already well briefed by Erdmann regarding my act of “criminal nonfeasance,” looked at me with grave expressions.

  “What um Himmels Willen (in heaven’s name) was on your mind when you decided not to show up for work as you had been ordered?” the general manager finally broke the silence. “Didn’t it occur to you that willfully interfering with war production is sabotage?”

  Trying to sound as convincing as I could, I told him that sabotage was the farthest thing from my mind, that the only reason I disobeyed Erdmann was that I felt I had been unfairly and arbitrarily singled out to give up my free Sunday, to which I felt I was entitled, since nobody had ever told me otherwise.

  When I had finished, the general manager unleashed a tirade, pointing out that working a few hours on one Sunday was nothing compared to the sacrifices made day after day by our brave soldiers at the front. “What gives you the right to question an order from Meister Erdmann?” he shouted. “You have endangered the lives of our fighting men by depriving them of urgently needed weapons.”

  In my mind, I cursed my stupidity in not carrying out Erdmann’s order to work on Sunday. I wholeheartedly agreed with his diagnosis of my predicament; I certainly was in big trouble. Just when the panic that gripped me was about to make me physically sick, the general manager calmed down. “Since your mother has been a valued, long-term employee with us, I have decided not to report the matter to the Gestapo this time in order to spare her any grief,” he told me. “But,” he continued, and his voice rose again, “I cannot let your flagrant disobedience go unpunished. So for the next five weeks, you will report for work every Sunday—or else! Is that understood?”

  After I assured him that he could count on my compliance, I was dismissed, greatly relieved to have gotten away so cheap. There wasn’t the slightest doubt in my mind that, had my “act of sabotage” been reported to the Gestapo, my fate would have been sealed.

  Calling myself lucky, I silently endured five Sundays of backbreaking work and other punishments Erdmann had cooked up especially for me. Trained machinists were traditionally exempted from unskilled labor, but Erdmann ordered me to perform one of the most menial tasks he could find. “Let’s see how good you are at cleaning the inside of boilers, my friend,” he told me with a sneer that dared me to refuse. He was talking about the giant steel tanks that were used for generating steam. Unwilling to make Erdmann’s day, I had no choice but to go along with his program. After entering through a narrow manhole, I spent hours attacking stubborn layer after stubborn layer of limestone deposits on the boiler’s interior walls with an air chisel until the deafening staccato of the chisel and the thick choking dust it created forced me to come up gasping for air. At the end of a day spent inside a boiler without a mask or ear protection, I would be semi-deaf and coughing up dust for hours, only to return to the same job the next Sunday.

  Yet even the physical hell I suffered inside the boilers didn’t compare with the psychological torture I endured each time I encountered Erdmann’s grinning face. It took all the willpower I could muster to keep from telling him how much I despised him, or worse, beating him to a pulp. By constantly reminding myself that Erdmann was hoping I would lose my composure and that the Gestapo was only a telephone call away, I managed to keep my cool.

  One Saturday, again shortly before quitting time, Erdmann once more ordered me to weld a steam pipe that had sprung a leak. This time he got no argument out of me. But when I was about to start the repair, I noticed that the pipe and the ceiling to which it was attached were covered with a thick layer of a gluelike substance that I was unable to identify. When I reported this to Erdmann and suggested that the substance might present a fire hazard, he interrupted me. “Why don’t you just for once do as you were told without opening your big mouth?” he hollered.

  To avoid another incident, I closed my “big mouth,” turned around, and started to do as I had been told. But as soon as the relatively small gas flame of my welding torch touched the pipe, it set off a gigantic column of fire that soon enveloped the entire ceiling. I was certain that the building would be destroyed and that this time there really would be a Gestapo inquiry into my “suspicious activities.” Fortunately, somebody sounded the fire alarm and within a few minutes the plant’s fire brigade was on the scene. A brief dousing with power hoses put out the fire.

  As soon as Erdmann heard of the mishap, he nimbly tried to avoid blame by going on the offensive. “This time you’ve really done it!” he screamed. “I told you to weld the pipe, not to set the building on fire.” Luckily I had already compared notes with a fellow machinist who had stood just a few feet away when Erdmann chewed me out for “opening my big mouth.” So when Erdmann told me that on Monday we would have to see “the Big Man” again to make sure I’d get what was coming to me for my second act of sabotage, I was ready for him. “In that case,” I replied calmly, “I shall bring along someone who heard you shut me up when I tried to warn you of a fire hazard.” That was the last I heard from Erdmann regarding the incident.

  But I soon discovered that I wasn’t out of the woods just yet. I don’t know what possessed me, but emboldened by adolescent insouciance—read “stupidity”—I had made it my habit each morning when arriving at our men’s locker room to greet my coworkers with an exaggerated cheerful Heil Hitler salute. Foolishly assuming that everyone present was as fed up with the Nazis as I was, I intended my greetings to be a bit of clever sarcasm. But that’s where I made my big mistake. One day, Carl Wedemayer, a veteran Harburg machinist who, it was rumored, had passed the Aryan test by the skin of his teeth, called me aside. “There have been complaints about you,” he confided. “Some of the Harburgers, who can’t stand you guys from Hamburg anyway, have been taking exception to the way you come on with that ‘Heil Hitler’ each morning. They know you are not sincere and they don’t think it’s funny.”

  I immediately realized that I had overplayed my hand and thanked him for tipping me off. If there’s anything I should have learned by then, it was that the Nazis did not have a sense of humor when the joke was on them, and that if made fun of, they were known to strike back with unrelenting brutality. Hoping against hope that Wedemayer’s warning hadn’t come too late and that there wouldn’t be any repercussions because of my stupidity, I promised myself to henceforth keep my big, smart-alecky mouth shut. Fortunately, my indescribable luck held up.

  Two unforeseen developments helped lessen the ordeal of living and working in Harburg to a considerable degree. One was that my mother was being transferred to the Harburg plant’s kitchen. The other was that she had found a place for us in Hamburg where we could live together under the same roof again. The place was the former public elementary school on von Essenstrasse, one of a handful of buildings in Hamburg’s Eilbek district that had survived the July 1943 bombing. The school had been designated as a shelter for bombed-out homeless people like us. It had a house manager, a stern no-nonsense matron, who registered my mother and me and assigned us to classrooms that had been converted into dorms and were located on opposite ends of the school. She explained to us that up to 9 P.M., husbands and wives—like sons and mothers—were allowed to visit each other in their respective dorms. Although my mother and I had to rise as early as 5 A.M. six days each week and commute for at least an hour to Harburg by streetcar, and I usually didn’t get back until 7 P.M., my mother and I wer
e ecstatically happy for the first time in a long while. All that mattered to us was that we were together again. Nothing had worried us more than the thought of one of us being caught in an air raid while we were apart. As absurd as it seems now, we derived a strong sense of safety simply from being together.

  Life for my mother and me was still hard, but it had assumed a certain rhythm of normalcy. We’d get up early in the morning and walk ten minutes through the ruins to catch a streetcar at Denhaide, where we would meet fellow workers from the rubber factory. Since my mother’s kitchen job required fewer hours than my ten-hour daily schedule, she would catch an earlier streetcar back to Hamburg, and begin preparing our meager supper in the school’s basement community kitchen.

  In our daily preoccupation with surviving the war, my mother and I had almost forgotten about the racial problems that had plagued us in the past. But an incident that occurred when we least expected it jarred us back to reality. It happened on a streetcar on our way to work. Since seats were hard to come by, my mother and I had made it a habit to take turns sitting down if one of us was lucky enough to find a seat.

  This particular morning, I was seated and half asleep while my mother was standing in front of me when a much-decorated, one-legged soldier on crutches grabbed me by the lapel of my coat and yanked me to my feet. “Get up, you auslandisches Dreckschwein (filthy foreign pig) and let this German woman sit down!” he shouted at the top of his lungs while pointing at my mother. “We didn’t fight at the front so that Dreck like you can enjoy themselves at our expense.”

  Obviously, the good warrior had totally misjudged the situation in which he found himself, especially the German workers’ growing disgust with everything that smacked of war, including its heroes. “Why don’t you shut up and mind your own damn business,” one of my fellow workers with whom I had only a casual acquaintance offered in response to the soldier’s insulting remarks.

  When the surprised infantryman challenged my colleague to a fight, the latter told him cruelly but truthfully, “You’re not going to fight anybody. You may not realize it yet, but your fighting days are over, comrade. Now stop bothering our friend or I’ll throw you off this streetcar.”

  Looking at several dozen pairs of hostile eyes and realizing too late that he had opened the wrong can of worms, the soldier let go of my lapel. Thoroughly humiliated, he awkwardly moved to the exit and quietly hobbled off the streetcar at the next stop. I watched him lean dejectedly on his crutches as the streetcar pulled away and tried—without quite succeeding—to rejoice over the well-deserved humiliation he had brought on himself.

  Both my mother and I were moved by our fellow worker’s display of solidarity. When I later thanked him for coming to my rescue in a moment of need, he told me to forget it. “It’s high time these so-called war heroes realize that their glory days are over and that their medals and their missing arms and legs don’t amount to much anymore.”

  His remarks, spoken quite openly for others to hear, made me realize how much the tide of war had shifted, but an incident a few days later served me as a grim reminder that at least for the time being, the evil forces of Nazidom still prevailed. It was on an icy cold winter day. Erdmann had sent me to a building to repair a broken metal window frame. From the first-floor window, I had a full view of the street that connected Harburg with Hamburg via the Elbbrücken (Elbe bridges). Suddenly, I noticed a strange procession of women, flanked by steel-helmeted, rifle-carrying SS men, headed slowly in my direction. As they came closer, I could see that they were mostly young women, some still in their teens, and that all of them were wearing the yellow star of David with the inscription JUDE, in keeping with Nazi law. While their guards kept watchful eyes on them and on passersby, the women cleaned the street with heavy brooms and shovels. The punishing cold notwithstanding, most wore only thin coats and some wore neither gloves nor hats, in contrast to the guards, who wore heavily padded winter gear. Despite their obvious misery, none of the women betrayed the agony they were suffering. Instead, they went about their task in absolute silence and without the slightest expression on their faces, like living dead.

  Within a few minutes, they had disappeared around the bend of the street and I returned my attention to the task I had been assigned. But throughout the day and in the days that followed, I was haunted by the memory of that silent group of young women who had briefly crossed my path, wondering what horror they must have seen that had transformed them into mute and expressionless zombies, and what additional horrors their captors had in store for them, or for that matter, whether a similar fate was yet awaiting me.

  The chilling news I received a few days later, when I accidentally ran into a former friend and neighbor of ours in downtown Hamburg, did nothing to lift my spirits. Gerda Bayer, a girl my age, and her parents had been with us in the air-raid shelter the night we were bombed out. Now living in Finkenwerder on the other side of the Elbe, she told me that when her family and other bombing victims were being evacuated from the burning city on that memorable morning, Jack Spederski, our friend who had been on furlough from the Russian front, changed into his civilian clothes and joined their group of refugees. She recalled that they wound up in a small village where they were given shelter and food, and eventually jobs. Jack, she said, lived an idyllic life, doing some farm work but mainly carrying on a hot romance with Ilse Kormann, a beautiful, dark-haired girl from our old neighborhood. But the idyll didn’t last for very long. Perhaps on a tip from an informer, a uniformed Nazi from the village started making inquiries about Jack. When Jack got wind of this, he left in a hurry without leaving a forwarding address. Shortly thereafter, Gerda said, a detachment of soldiers from the Gross-Deutschland Division in Berlin arrived with bloodhounds and began to search the nearby woods. Within a few hours, Gerda said, they had found Jack and dragged him away in shackles. She said that since he had claimed her family as his relatives, the Bayers were informed a short while later that Jack Spederski had been shot by a firing squad after having been found guilty of desertion. While Jack and I had not been best buddies, the news of his death hit me hard.

  TOTAL WAR

  My dorm at the school on von Essenstrasse was sparsely furnished with a dozen or so steel bunks and as many lockers. Seated around a table in the middle of the room and listening intently to a small radio were five old-timers, typical Hamburg blue-collar types. Their advanced age had put them beyond the reach of the military draft; nevertheless, they worked in a variety of menial jobs around the city.

  After eyeing me suspiciously in the beginning, they soon accepted me as one of them. To my continual amusement and entertainment, they turned out to be the most contentious bunch of people I had ever met. From the moment we got up in the wee hours of morning until the 10 P.M. lights out, they bickered and argued. Their perpetual quibbling notwithstanding, they were firmly united in their shared contempt of Hitler and the Nazi regime, a contempt they vented freely without regard for their safety. Their most scathing sarcasm they reserved for the daily radio reports from the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht), the military headquarters, which informed the German people of the progress of Hitler’s war. Disagreeing openly with everything the announcer said, they delighted in predicting that the Schweinehund Hitler and his fellow Schweinehunde would soon reap their just reward in front of an Allied firing squad.

  Those words were music to my ears, but, remembering my close call with Reingruber, the treacherous journeyman from my apprentice days, I thought it wise not to contribute to their seditious discussions. I also made sure never to take sides in any of their numerous arguments.

  On July 20, 1944, our dorm’s radio crackled with the most sensational news of the war—a group of German army officers had tried to assassinate Hitler in a bomb plot at his Rastenburg headquarters. Miraculously, the Führer had escaped with minor injuries.

  My dormmates could hardly contain their disappointment. They cursed and some of them threw themselves across their bunks in a show of mock
despair over the fact that “the Schweinehund had gotten away.” As more and more details of the failed plot and the identity of the main conspirator, Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg, were released, that sentiment was echoed among many workers throughout the Hamburg area, although with considerably more restraint.

  My dormmates consoled themselves with the hope that another plot was just around the corner and that the next time, the plotters would not fail. I wasn’t so sure. The swift and exceedingly brutal retribution against the plotters and their families seemed to me too strong a deterrent against another attempt to end the dictator’s life.

  The immediately noticeable effect of the failed coup was an order from the Führer’s headquarters that all members of the Wehrmacht adopt the outstretched-arm Heil Hitler salute, previously used only by units of the Waffen-SS. The order was undoubtedly meant as a constant and grim reminder to the army, which had supplied the plotters, of who was boss.

  With fighting morale sinking rapidly both at home and on the front, Hitler still had an ace up his sleeve in the form of a frail, club-footed man with thinning dark hair on an oversized head and huge, piercing dark eyes: Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, the greatest spin doctor of all time. Within weeks of the failed coup, Dr. Goebbels was charged with the responsibility of mobilizing the country for the Totalen Krieg (total war), which he had proclaimed the year before. My dormmates and I listened incredulously as he appealed to the German people to dedicate their last ounces of energy toward the achievement of the “inevitable” Endsieg (final victory). Now he hinted at the deployment of secret Wunderwaffen, which, he promised, would turn the tide of the war in favor of Germany. Due to his relentless exaggerations, distortions of facts, and broken promises of victories just around the corner, his name had become a synonym for liar. It seemed ironically fitting, and had not escaped the masses, that he was an admirer of literature’s greatest teller of tall tales, the legendary Baron von Münchhausen, so much so that he ordered an epic movie made about him that is still regarded as a cinematic masterpiece. Most people regarded the entire “total war” campaign as what it turned out to be, a criminal effort on the part of the doomed Nazi elite to prolong their lives by a few more months at the expense and peril of the people. But those who had been quick to dismiss “total war” as an empty PR slogan were proved woefully wrong.