1945–1949
REBUILDING OUR LIVES
July 27–December 24, 1945
After dismissing the men outside the employment office in Lüneburg, I set out on the five-mile walk to my uncle’s farm in Hagen. Dressed in the same uniform I had been wearing since Fischhausen, it was strange to be returning to the place where I had first received the telegram ordering me to report for training almost six years earlier. So much had happened.
Arriving at the front door of the familiar home, I knocked. When the door opened, my aunt stood before me with an expression of deep disappointment on her face. In a sorrowful voice, she said, “And I thought it was Heinrich.”
My aunt and uncle’s oldest son Heinrich had achieved the rank of captain in the artillery. In the last weeks of the war, he had been on his way back to the front from a furlough when he was ordered to take command of one of the ad hoc units formed to help defend Berlin. Only sometime later did my aunt and uncle learn that he had been killed during the Russian assault on the city.
Despite their natural concern for Heinrich’s fate, my aunt and uncle tried to make me feel welcome. To my great relief, they passed along a card from Anneliese that she had sent to their home when she learned that I was alive. It was the first time that I had any word from her for over six months.
Following a couple of days in Hagen, I caught a train to Hamburg. When I reached Anneliese’s home in the suburb of Wandsbek, her father greeted me warmly and told me that he himself had just recently returned home after duty with the Volkssturm in Belgium and Germany. He generously invited me to stay in the house that he shared with his relatives while I waited for Anneliese to arrive and sought a place of my own to live.
After years in combat, terrible nightmares regularly plagued my sleep. Shortly after my arrival at the Berndts’ home, I had a dream that I was trapped in a bunker in Russia and began pounding the wall beside my bed. Because the nearby explosions of Allied bombs during the war had loosened its plaster, the wall quickly gave way under my unconscious hammering, collapsing onto my bed and the floor in a pile of dust and debris.
Hearing the loud noise, everyone in the house awoke and rushed to my room. Upset and embarrassed by the episode, it was hard for me to explain the damage. While I continued to suffer the psychological effects of post-traumatic stress, I knew many other former soldiers who found it much more difficult to cope. Only with the passage of five or ten years did the war gradually fade from my thoughts and dreams.
Following her failure to find me at the POW camp, Anneliese had returned to Süderdeich where she obtained an official discharge from her nursing duties on August 6, 1945.
When she came through the door to her father’s home in Hamburg later that day, she flung herself into my arms. Holding each other tightly in a long embrace that I will never forget, we both cried tears of joy and relief. It was my love for her and my hope for this moment that had kept me going through the darkest moments of the war. Against all odds, we were together again at last.
During these months, Anneliese had suffered emotional confusion and turmoil. With no letters from me following our retreat from Memel in January, she had no way of knowing whether I had been captured or killed. Given the huge scale of German losses, it was completely understandable that she would believe I was gone from her life. Now, against all odds, we were together again at last.
Soon after our emotional reunion, I learned the fate of the money that I had saved during the war. Throughout my years of service, I was paid a fixed salary according to my rank as well as supplemental pay for combat duty. Because I was almost always in combat, I was able to use the supplement to provide my spending money at the front, while the army deposited my regular pay into the army bank in Bremen. Since 1941, I had been saving these funds to pay for college after my discharge from the army.
When the war ended, however, the army collapsed and the bank disappeared. I never saw any of that money. Perhaps it would have been wise for me to have shifted it somewhere else, but by the time I realized that Germany’s defeat was likely I was more concerned about staying alive than protecting my money. Still, it was very hard for me to accept that all my savings had simply vanished. With our families able to offer little assistance, Anneliese and I would be building new lives almost from scratch.
Before entering the Wehrmacht in 1939, I had already finished about a year and a half of the two-year apprenticeship required of everyone who wanted to pursue an engineering degree program. In case my educational plans did not work out, I now decided to complete the longer four-year apprenticeship necessary to obtain the status of journeyman (licensed professional) electrician before attending college. While the electricians guild waived a year of my journeyman’s apprenticeship in compensation for my years of military service, my remaining year and a half as an apprentice provided an hourly pay that only allowed a very meager standard of living.
Soon after Anneliese returned, I found a job as an apprentice electrician with the A. Lehmann Company, which subcontracted me to Blom and Foss, the largest shipbuilding company in Hamburg. After a fifteen-minute train ride from my new apartment to the harbor, I would take a short ferry ride to the shipyard.
Arriving for work one day, my foreman ordered me to wait in front of the high-voltage electrical breakers while he went next door and flipped on the power. As he intended, the thunderous noise produced by the sudden surge of current scared the heck out of me. With an occasional prank to liven things up, the work was interesting and I learned a great deal.
During my days at the shipyard, I sometimes watched demolition crews across the harbor preparing to raze the giant concrete bunkers that had been built to protect German U-boats from Allied bombing raids. When they finally detonated the charges, the concrete roof was lifted up by the explosion, but only crashed back down into place.
Only after several attempts did the demolition effort succeed. It was natural to feel a certain pride in the quality of German workmanship, but I now realized that we needed to harness our energies and skills to more peaceful and productive pursuits in the future.
Meanwhile, Anneliese had taken an apartment located just across the street from her father’s nursery, where she was now working on an informal basis. Her apartment was also only a few blocks away from my own apartment, which made it easy for us to spend our free time together.
One afternoon, Anneliese and I paid a visit to Planten und Blomen, a pleasant park in the center of Hamburg. As we strolled through it, we witnessed a scene that left us shocked and embarrassed. Behind nearly every second bush, British occupation troops could be seen making out with German girls. Some couples were kissing; some had one partner laying on top of the other. It was a crude spectacle. We would never have dreamed of conducting ourselves that way in public.
That fall, a rumor began to circulate through the city that appeared to place our plans to marry in jeopardy yet again. According to the word on the street, the British occupation authorities planned to issue an order on January 1, 1946 that would strictly prohibit all marriages between Germans for the following three years in order to reduce Germany’s population. When the rumor persisted, Anneliese and I began to think that there must be some truth to it.
Concerned that we might have to wait years, we decided to advance our marriage plans to December 22, 1945. We set aside our more extensive plans for a big wedding, but I did manage to hire a covered carriage with two white horses to convey us to the church for the very small ceremony in the morning.
Afterward, the carriage took us to an intimate reception with Anneliese’s family and my brother Hermann in Aunt Frieda’s apartment, where I had just rented a room. While my sister Marlene had not been able to extend her recent visit to Hamburg in order to attend the wedding, she presented us a pork roast from our family’s farm to celebrate the occasion before crossing back to Püggen in the Soviet Zone.
Given my limited financial means and the devastation of postwar Germany, my effort to arrange a suitable hon
eymoon proved difficult. Much of Hamburg was flattened into rubble after the war, but one hotel still stood among the ruins in the center of the city, on the Mönkeberg Strasse, not far from the main train station. When my telephone call received no answer, I headed down to the hotel and asked the manager if I could reserve a room for us.
Initially informed that no rooms were available, I explained that we were getting married and needed a place to stay on our honeymoon. “Oh, that’s different,” the hotel manager replied. For two nights after our wedding, my new bride and I thus enjoyed a luxury suite with all the amenities, starting with a long bath in hot water that was still unavailable where we lived. It was a happy start to our life together.
STRUGGLING TO SURVIVE
December 1945–August 1949
As soon as the Allied powers in the western part of the country gave the Germans the authority to begin rebuilding their economy and industry, conditions started to improve. Although life gradually became better, the overall economic situation in Germany remained bleak in the years following the war. Even the rationing begun during the war continued for a year or two under Allied occupation. This limited the quantities that we could purchase of various products in short supply, such as food and clothing, as well as access to housing and transportation.
Following our wedding, Anneliese moved into my room in Aunt Frieda’s apartment. Fortunately, the Winterhude suburb of Hamburg where Aunt Frieda lived and ran her delicatessen was one of the few parts of the city that had not been completely bombed out.
Even renting a room from her, our financial circumstances were exceptionally tight. After our marriage, Anneliese stopped working in her father’s nursery. While we could have benefited from the extra income, married women rarely worked outside the home at that time. In any case, there were few jobs available.
As her husband, it was now my responsibility to provide for Anneliese. Despite our constant efforts to economize, my small income severely limited the amount of food we could afford. While our diet was supplemented by produce from Mr. Berndt’s nursery, our persistent hunger made me resort to other options.
One weekend, I took a train from Hamburg 100 miles south to the small town of Gifhorn, located near the farm of a distant relation. Reaching his home, I pleaded for my relative to sell me a few potatoes. Though grudgingly agreeing to my request, he made it clear that he did not welcome my visit. Like many farmers, he lacked much sympathy for those who came out from the cities looking for food.
That night I arrived home to my wife and Aunt Frieda with a sack full of potatoes, exhausted and humiliated. This terrible situation was far worse than anything my family endured during the Great Depression. After an additional journey to Gifhorn, it was clear by the fall of 1946 that we needed to find another way to meet our need for food.
Though my sister Marlene had risked several trips across the Iron Curtain to bring us food parcels from Püggen, it had been over two years since I had last visited with my family there. Naturally, I was anxious to see them, but crossing the border into the Russian-occupied zone was a perilous venture that Anneliese and I had previously avoided. Our hunger now left us no choice.
In spite of the danger that lay ahead, Anneliese fell asleep on my shoulder as our train rolled down the track on the 75-mile trip from Hamburg to the crossing point at Bergen an der Dumme. After it pulled into the station late that September afternoon, we made a short walk down the Bahnhofstrasse to the border, where we waited.
Nightengales were singing around us as Anneliese and I joined a number of other people crossing at dusk. Though barbed wire and mines had not yet been placed along the frontier, the Red Army heavily patrolled a two- to three-mile-wide security sector in which only local residents were permitted. About halfway across this frontier zone, a voice cried out, “Stoi!” (Stop!) in Russian, immediately sending a cold chill through me.
The two Soviet soldiers who approached us couldn’t speak German, but one of them gestured to Anneliese that she could proceed into the Russian zone, while motioning me with his hand to come with them. Since the troops were armed with submachine guns, it was pointless for me to resist or attempt to run. Trying to maintain my calm, I told Anneliese to leave me before they changed their minds.
After a moment’s hesitation, she headed into the forest, casting a frightened look back toward me with tears in her eyes. One of the border guards then shoved me with his submachine gun and we marched off. Just after dark, we came to a large stone farmhouse about a mile or so from where I had been captured. After I had been deposited in the living room, the farmhouse grew quiet.
As a former Wehrmacht officer, it was certain that I would be sent back to the Soviet Union as a POW if they checked the name on my documents against their records from the war. Earlier that year, the Russians had placed one of my distant cousins under arrest. A medical student at a German university in the Soviet zone, he had been sent to Siberia for two years with no explanation. If they treated him this way, I could only imagine how they might treat a former German officer.
After three or four minutes passed silently, I tested the door and discovered it had been left unlocked. Swinging it outward, I then circled behind it to hide. When no one came to check on me in the moment that followed, I decided to gamble on a dash into the night. Hearing my escape, angry shouts erupted from my Russian captors.
As I bolted into the pitch-black woods, the troops began blindly spraying bullets from their submachine guns, lashing the brush and pine trees around me. Long accustomed to the sound of gunfire, I never considered halting. Instinctively moving into a crouched posture to minimize myself as a target, I continued to sprint ahead, seeking to put as much distance as possible as between me and the farmhouse.
Afraid that Soviet patrols in the area had been alerted, I raced breathlessly through the woods in the direction of the village of Hohendolsleben, about three or four miles away, hoping that Anneliese had headed to my aunt’s home there. Exhausted, it was a huge relief when my wife met me at the door. We clung to each other for a long time, aware that I had once again dodged a terrible fate.
Despite my escape, there remained a real threat that German Communists in the village would discover me and inform the Russians of my presence. This danger was magnified by the fact that the family was under political suspicion due to my uncle’s involvement in the Nazi Party, even though he himself was already confined in a British camp.
Early the next morning, the local Communist officials made an unexpected visit to the house on a random inspection for contraband items. Racing upstairs to the attic, I concealed myself under a large pile of old clothes, while Anneliese remained downstairs with my aunt. As the search and questioning persisted, my anxiety mounted that they might come up to the attic. Even when the officials finally departed a half hour later, I knew that it was still not safe and that I was placing my aunt at grave risk.
The next day, Anneliese and I cautiously traveled the 15 or so miles from Hohendolsleben to the relative safety of my family’s home in Püggen, where we could more easily stay hidden from local informers. A couple of days later, we warily recrossed the border with two backpacks crammed with all kinds of food, fortunately encountering no further incidents. Given the risk of capture and imprisonment, I would only make one further journey to our farm.
Even with the underlying concern that our presence would draw the attention of the Communist authorities, Anneliese and I fell into the routines of farm life with surprising ease during our second visit to Püggen late in the fall of 1946. After spending most of the day with my father and sisters passing the harvested bundles of grain through a leased threshing machine, my father suggested that we quit and finish up the following day. Since it was still just late afternoon and only about an hour of threshing remained, I convinced him that we should go ahead and complete the job.
Soon afterward, the tractor engine driving the threshing machine began to shoot out sparks that ignited the highly combustible straw nearb
y. In spite of our vigorous efforts to quench the fire, the whole barn was soon engulfed by flames. Though we succeeded in preventing the blaze from spreading to the other buildings, it nonetheless proved to be the worst disaster that we ever experienced on our farm. Because I had urged my father to finish the job, I naturally felt responsible, but there was nothing I could do.
In the spring of 1947, after convincing me that she would be safe traveling alone, Anneliese made the border crossing to Püggen to retrieve another backpack of food for us. Her willingness to face the hazards involved reflected both daring as well as a little naiveté. While her first solo journey across proved uneventful, her second trip soon afterward ran into trouble.
Following her return, Anneliese recounted to me how she had almost stumbled into a Red Army patrol the previous night near the border. Fortunately, the troops did not see her and she was able to hide in a nearby farmer’s barn. In the morning, the farmer had come out to feed his cows and discovered her. Despite the risk to himself, he allowed her to leave without revealing her presence to the Communist authorities.
After hearing the story of her close call, I refused to allow her to attempt any further expeditions across the Iron Curtain. When I consider the danger now, it is difficult for me to understand how I could have consented to place my wife in such jeopardy even once. Indeed, my willingness to countenance the risk to her safety is the best illustration of the desperation we felt during those years.
In April 1947, I finally entered the electrical engineering program at the Federal Engineering College in Hamburg. Although I had been permitted to work and receive wages as a journeyman electrician for several months before entering school, I only officially passed the qualifying exam to become a journeyman in July. While a journeyman’s income was more than adequate to support my family, I realized even before beginning my college studies that I could not work even part-time as an electrician if I planned to be a full-time student.
At Leningrad's Gates Page 25