“I’m Max Roepke,” the big man introduced himself while extending a ham-sized hand. “I own a trucking firm in Hoheluft and I could use an all-round machinist who can do just about anything.”
I explained that I didn’t know much about engines since I wasn’t a mechanic, but that there was nothing a machinist was supposed to do that I couldn’t do. Roepke studied my employment record, then nodded to the official and said, “I think he’ll do fine.” Then, turning to me, he said, “Well, then, that’s settled. You’ll start right away.”
After signing a few papers, shaking the official’s hand, and whispering something that sounded like “I’ll take care of everything,” Roepke became formally my master, whom I couldn’t leave even if I wanted to. Suddenly, I had the distinct feeling of having just become the object of a deal, not unlike the slave trade in America. That impression deepened when, once outside, Roepke told me to get into his car, a sleek, canary-yellow BMW roadster. It became increasingly clear to me that my new boss was a man of considerable influence. The mere fact that he could still get his hands on critically scarce gasoline for use in his private automobile at a time when such use was largely restricted to the military indicated to me a man of formidable clout. In a matter of minutes, we arrived at his place of business, a two-story brick building that housed a small workshop, a garage, and several storage rooms inside a large fenced-in yard. Except for a young blond man in coveralls and an olive-drab Polish army cap, the place was deserted.
“This is Stanislaus, my yardman,” Roepke explained. “He’s going to be your helper whenever you need one. He’ll show you where everything is and fill you in on the details. There isn’t much work right now, but don’t let that worry you. There’ll be plenty for you to do.”
With that, Roepke climbed back into his roadster and drove off.
Stanislaus assured me that my new job was a piece of cake, or, as he put it in half German, half Polish, “kein Problema,” and that I could count on him to show me the ropes.
In the weeks that followed, I saw very little of Roepke and had virtually nothing to do but polish up my Polish. One day, for no apparent reason, Stanislaus “filled me in on the details” all right—undoubtedly to a far greater extent than Roepke had intended. In his colorful, broken German, which he said he had learned during five years as a prisoner of war, he told me that Roepke was a big-time Schieber (black marketeer) who, in cahoots with high-ranking Nazi officials, operated a lucrative smuggling operation between German-occupied Holland and Germany. Roepke, he explained, ate better, drank better, and dressed better than Hitler. His trucks brought things, he said, that most Germans had forgotten existed.
To make his point, Stanislaus reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out a bar of chocolate. Breaking it in half in its wrapping paper and foil, he handed one half to me. I immediately saw what Stanislaus meant. I had almost forgotten what chocolate smelled and tasted like. “Where did you get this?” I asked.
“Come; I’ll show you.”
I followed him upstairs where, after telling me to keep an eye out for Roepke, he opened a door. What I saw inside the storage room made my eyes pop. Stanislaus was right. Many things I and most Germans had dismissed from our conscious minds because they had been unattainable for so long were staring at me in profusion from a number of piles that reached nearly to the ceiling. There were mounds of chocolate bars, cans of sardines, corned beef, ham, coffee, cocoa, cigarettes, cigars, pipe tobacco, quality soaps, hand lotions, perfumes, lipstick, and nylon stockings—you name it.
Before I could get over what I had just seen, Stanislaus told me that for a change there was a grosses Problema, or big problem. He then confessed that for some time, he had entered the room with a primitive skeleton key he had made and helped himself “eine kleine Bischen” to the goodies. This morning, he said, when he tried to lock the door after getting “us” a chocolate bar, his key broke off inside the lock. If Roepke found the door unlocked, he said, he’d be up the Polish equivalent of shit’s creek. To keep that from happening, he begged me to put my machinist’s mind to work and fix the damage.
All of a sudden I understood Stanislaus’s sudden urge to share. My first inclination was to tell him, “No! Hell no,” and leave it at that. The prospect of becoming an accessory to burglary seemed less than inviting. Then it occurred to me that, if pushed into a corner, Stanislaus might tell the boss that I, not he, had been breaking into the storage room and pilfering the goodies. Since Roepke didn’t know me at all, whom would he believe, Stanislaus or me? I persuaded myself that I couldn’t take a chance to find out. Keeping my thoughts to myself in order not to put ideas into Stanislaus’s head in case they hadn’t been there all along, I agreed to see what I could do about the door. Since time was of the essence, my plan was that he would make another skeleton key while I would work on extracting the broken key from the lock.
Once we had decided on a course of action, we proceeded with the efficiency of a Mission: Impossible team. Within a few minutes, I had removed the lock from the door, extracted the key portion, and reinstalled the lock. By the time my job was done, Stanislaus was putting the finishing touches on his skeleton key. But before we had a chance to put the two together and try locking the door, we heard Roepke’s car drive into the yard. Trying not to look like cats that swallowed the canary, we busied ourselves with furiously sweeping the garage floor just as Roepke walked through the door. “Everything all right?” the boss wanted to know.
“Yes, Pan; kein Problema,” replied Stanislaus, while I, my heart pounding through my chest, nodded agreement. I almost had a cardiac arrest when Roepke walked toward the stairs.
“What do you want me to do with the broken tailgate one of the drivers dropped off yesterday?” I asked in a desperate attempt to stall him. The ruse worked. Roepke turned around and, trailed closely by me, walked out in the yard to inspect the badly damaged tailgate.
“Do you think you can fix it?” he asked.
“I know I can. It’ll be as good as new,” I replied.
“Good, see what you can do.”
With a look at his wristwatch, Roepke climbed back into his BMW, waved at me, and drove off. Stanislaus’s and my sighs of relief were more like yodels that could be heard nearly half a block away. As soon as Roepke was out of sight, we rushed upstairs and tried the key. After a few minor adjustments, the key turned smoothly in the lock, both closing and opening it.
Now that the crisis had been averted, we calmly deliberated on what to do about the cornucopia room upstairs. While we conceded that the ill-gotten contraband did not belong to us, we rationalized that neither did it belong to Roepke, to whom rationing of food and other scarce items should apply as much as it supposedly applied to all German citizens. Since Roepke hadn’t shown the slightest inclination to share with us, we decided we were justified in giving justice a hand or two from time to time. This we thought to accomplish by an occasional raid of the room upstairs.
That evening, during my fifteen-minute train ride home, paranoia had me regard most of my fellow passengers as Gestapo agents in disguise who were out to get me. Any minute I expected someone in a long black leather coat to touch my arm and tell me that I was under arrest and order me to let him take a peek at the contents of the bulging briefcase I was clutching under my arm. But nothing of the sort happened. When I reached the school and saw my mother’s eyes light up as I presented her with my treasures—a couple of chocolate bars, some sardine cans, and a few bars of soap—I felt like Robin Hood must have felt when he robbed the rich to give to the poor.
FREE AT LAST!
News of Hitler’s death on April 30, 1945, did not reach Hamburg until the next day. But befitting the man who had lied to, betrayed, cheated, and finally all but destroyed the German people while wreaking worldwide havoc, the official announcement of the circumstances of his death was one preposterous lie. “The Führer Adolf Hitler,” the terse announcement from the Führer’s headquarters in Berlin claimed, “has
this afternoon on his command post in the Reichchancellery, while fighting to his last breath against Bolshevism, died a soldier’s death for Germany.” No mention was made of the cowardly way in which this man for whom so many Germans had given their lives, voluntarily and otherwise, escaped accountability by committing suicide and leaving the German people holding the bag. But even the lie of a hero’s death did little to restore the heroic image many Germans had once had of their Führer.
Many times during Hitler’s heyday, I had wondered how Germans would react to the news of their leader’s death. Giving my imagination full rein, I tried to conjure up the cataclysmic outburst of sorrow, the utter agony that I was certain Germans would exhibit at the death of the man they had elevated to near-godlike status. Thus, I was totally unprepared for the way my countrymen actually reacted to the announcement. When the news flashed repeatedly over the radio at our shelter, it was met with neither jubilation nor sorrow, just monumental, yawning indifference. Except for an occasional “good riddance,” my roommates all but ignored the historic event during their inevitable daily arguments. Examining my own feelings, I was surprised to notice that I, too, did not react to the news of Hitler’s death the way I had always imagined I would. Instead of the dancing-up-and-down kind of joyful relief—the kind I felt the morning after my mother and I survived Hamburg’s firestorm—all I experienced was an apathetic sense of “so what?” I concluded that since I had lived with the prospect of my own death for so long, the death of a supervillain like Hitler, by whatever means, was too anticlimactic to arouse strong emotions.
More sensational than the news of Hitler’s death itself was the revelation through Allied sources a short while later that the Führer had died in a suicide pact with his mistress, whom he had married the day before he blew out his brains with a pistol and she took her life by swallowing poison. Only when the name Eva Braun appeared in the news did Germans learn that this blonde, who was twenty years Hitler’s junior, even existed. Now we learned that not only did Hitler have a bona fide romantic mistress, but that their close relationship had lasted almost the entire length of his twelve-year reign as chancellor. How was he able to carry on such an important affair for such a long time right under everybody’s nose without anyone finding out? Most people had accepted the official explanation that the Führer lived a celibate existence in order to devote all his time and energies to his people. No one had an answer to explain how this exceedingly public man, whose every living minute seemed to be under the scrutiny of the national and international press, could keep Eva Braun hidden.
Prior to being informed of Hitler’s death, and in open defiance of the Führer’s orders to defend Hamburg to the last man, woman, and child, Karl Kaufmann, the city’s Nazi governor, decided to surrender the city. He explained that he did this in order to save what was left of Hamburg and to spare its people further bloodshed and suffering. The news of Hamburg’s pending surrender, which had been anxiously awaited by the war-weary citizenry, came to us via an extra-edition page of the Hamburger Zeitung, a joint venture of Hamburg’s three major dailies, which read:
* * *
Hamburgers!
After heroic fighting, after untiring toil for a German victory, and under boundless sacrifices, our people have succumbed to a numerically and materially superior enemy. The enemy is preparing to occupy the country and is standing before the gate of our city. Units of the Wehrmacht and the Volkssturm have fought valiantly before our city against a vastly superior opponent. Undaunted, Hamburgers have discharged their obligation, at the front and at home; tough and unwavering you accepted what the war demanded of you.
The enemy is preparing to attack Hamburg from the air and on the ground with his enormous superior force. For the city and its people, for hundreds of thousands of women and children, this means death and destruction of the last means of survival. The outcome of the war can no longer be changed; however, combat in the city would mean its senseless and complete destruction. Those whom soldierly honor commands to continue the fight will have the opportunity to do so beyond city limits. Personally, I am guided by heart and conscience, in clear recognition of the conditions and with full awareness of my responsibility, to save Hamburg, its women and children, from senseless and irresponsible destruction.
I know what, in doing so, I take upon myself. I shall leave the judgment of my decision to history and you.
Hamburgers! All my work and concerns have always belonged to you and the city, and thusly, to our nation. That shall continue until fate recalls me. This war is a national catastrophe for us and a disaster for Europe. May all those who are responsible realize this.
God save our people and our country!
—KARL KAUFMANN
* * *
The news of Kaufmann’s intention to surrender Hamburg came as a great relief to me and my mother, and, I am sure, to most of Hamburg’s citizens. I was thoroughly convinced that the slightest German resistance would have resulted in an Allied military response of such magnitude that it would have ended all chances of survival. I suddenly felt that Mutti and I had passed the last hurdle that stood between us and liberation and that, barring any last-minute glitches, our survival seemed assured. Unlike many of my countrymen, who were uncertain as to what kind of treatment to expect from the conquering enemy, I looked forward to the day when the Allies were running the show, confident that I had nothing to fear from them. How ironic, I felt, that although I had never committed a single hostile or criminal act against the German state, I was forced to live for years in mortal fear of my own government and its henchmen.
The day before the scheduled takeover of Hamburg by the British on May 3, 1945, I had gone downtown to take one last look at the city while still under Nazi rule. Mainly, I had come to look for more visible signs of the pending collapse of German resistance. I was not to be disappointed. There was utter pandemonium as thousands of German soldiers poured into the city on trucks, cars, motorcycles, bicycles, and on foot. Some had deserted, while others had become separated from their units in the confusion caused by the total disintegration of the German military chain of command. Despite their uncertain futures, all appeared relieved to have escaped the fate of so many of their comrades, who had become eleventh-hour combat casualties in a war that they knew had already been lost.
Conspicuously absent from the milling throngs, I noticed, were members of the Waffen-SS and the heretofore ubiquitous Nazi functionaries in their beloved brown uniforms. Where had all the Nazis gone? It was a question that was to be asked by many with increasing frequency in the days, weeks, months, and even years ahead.
When I finally went to bed that night, it seemed sleep would never come. I heard the rumbling of the British artillery and, looking out of the window, saw lightninglike flashes illuminating the horizon in the south. No one insisted any longer that the lights and rumbles were caused by German, not enemy guns, as many Germans had still argued just a few days earlier. By this time, even the most die-hard believers in a German victory—people who had lived in total denial for the last couple of years—reluctantly conceded that the war was lost.
As much as I had waited for the moment, somehow I could not imagine that tomorrow the British would be here and that the Nazis would be gone for good. It was easier for me to imagine that the sun would no longer shine. After twelve years under Nazi rule—at that point nearly two thirds of my life—it seemed inconceivable to me that the Third Reich, which Hitler had boasted would last at least one thousand years, had come to such a sudden and ignominious end.
Despite my great excitement, I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I remembered was the voice of one of my dormmates.
“Hey, wake up! Your friends are here!”
Suddenly, I was wide awake as the meaning of those words penetrated my sleepy brain. It was broad daylight. I rushed to the window to take a look but was cautioned, “Don’t let them see you. They might think you are a sniper and shoot up here.”
; Carefully, I peeped out from the corner of the window. What I saw was too good to be true. In a reversal of scenes depicted in hundreds of Nazi propaganda newsreels, a long row of olive-colored tanks, armored cars, and trucks lined up along our street, which was flanked on both sides by Tommies. They were armed to their teeth and wearing their characteristic flat steel helmets draped in camouflage nets. The long column of vehicles had come to a stop at a twelve-foot barricade in front of the school. Part of a citywide antitank fortification system that had been hastily constructed during the last few months, the barricades were among several last-ditch Nazi efforts aimed at slowing down the approach of the inevitable. They consisted of large cobblestones dug up from the streets and reinforced by heavy steel girders that had been salvaged from bombed-out buildings. Under the Nazis’ scheme, Volkssturm units and civilians would ambush tanks with Molotov cocktails and small antitank weapons, including the vaunted Panzerfaust. Thanks to Kaufmann’s decision, that frightening scenario never materialized.
The Tommies were looking suspiciously at the school—the only intact building in a sea of destruction. Next, a small detachment of perhaps ten men climbed over the barricade and approached the school entrance, their automatic firearms at a ready position. Minutes later we heard loud English commandos from the hall. It sounded to me as though someone was shouting, “Everybody outside!”
“Why don’t you find out what they want,” one of my dormmates suggested nervously. “They won’t do anything to you. Besides, you speak English. Just tell them that we’re your friends, we’re ready to surrender, and that none of us have been Nazis.”
I deeply regretted ever having made the highly exaggerated claim of speaking English. At best, my meager vocabulary amounted to just a smattering. It certainly wasn’t enough for negotiating terms of surrender with the occupation force. But having been appointed spokesman of the group, I saw no way to refuse the dubious honor. So I quickly dressed and went out into the hall. At the sight of the heavily armed combat soldiers and their grim, dust-covered faces, my courage waned and I wished that I had refused my ombudsman’s role. But for that it was now too late.
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