The Constructed Mennonite - History, Memory, and the Second World War

by Hans Werner

  7

  The Fog of War

  As part of his repertoire of war stories, my father narrated a series of anecdotes that seemed to fit between his becoming a German citizen and his participation in an artillery unit in the later part of the war. In his memory, becoming a part of the Wehrmacht followed closely on the heels of the process of acquiring German citizenship. The way he remembered it, almost immediately after becoming a German citizen, he received his stellungsbefehl or “draft order.” In the same week that he was called up, the other nine in his group of friends also received their draft orders. Carl Leib, his employer in Pabianitz who was a lieutenant-colonel in the Luftwaffe, immediately offered to apply to keep Johann in his employ rather than in the military, but that was not possible. He then suggested that Johann report to his flying squadron in Prague, where he could train as a pilot and then fly under Leib’s command. By then, though, Johann had lost his desire for air combat. He declined, claiming it was enough to be shot at on the ground. In an airplane, if you survived being shot at, you could still be killed when you crashed. His draft order required him to report to a large base near Prague known as the Hindenburg Kaserne, where he once again began basic training. It had lasted only a few days when he was asked to step forward during a marching drill because his style of turning did not match what was being taught. The officer in charge asked him where he had learned to turn like that—probably in rather unpleasant tones. Johann replied, “Pardon me, but I have served before in another army.” The officer immediately wanted to know which army; when Johann indicated it had been the Red Army, he was immediately asked to “fall in.” Later that day he had to report to the officers’ quarters, where he faced more questions about his strange military history. By then, they knew more about him, including the fact that he was a trained mechanic and tank driver. Johann was not required to participate in marching drills after that. When the call came for those with inside duties to “fall out,” he went to the repair shop, where he spent the day repairing army vehicles. Over time, they promised Johann he would never be sent to the eastern front and changed his documents to indicate he had been born a German in Angerapp, East Prussia.1

  Later Johann became a driving instructor, a job similar to one he had had in the Red Army. His task was to train recruits how to drive a truck. Each day he took new drivers through the city in a medium-sized truck, like the one he had driven for Carl Leib, to a large training area where he taught them driving skills. When they knew the basics, he allowed them to drive in the city. Each morning he took a new pair of recruits, allowing one to drive to the training area and the other to drive back. The pattern was repeated each afternoon. Before he was ready for combat, he had to be trained to drive a half-track, known as a Zugmaschine, which pulled large cannons for an artillery brigade. This was not a difficult task, my father recalled, because he had driven a variety of combat vehicles and trucks by then. All of these activities, according to his stories, took place as part of his first and only unit, an artillery unit that he always referred to as the Heeres Artillerie Brigade 401.

  A dramatic story, which my father placed immediately after he completed his training in Prague, began with Johann and forty others being assembled to join the Afrika Korps, the popular designation for German forces fighting in North Africa under Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. In a formal interview with my father, he placed this event in spring, probably April. It seemed that a group of technical personnel, such as electricians, mechanics, and communications specialists, were being assembled to be sent to Africa to assist Rommel’s forces there. Johann had not volunteered for the reassignment but had been selected.2

  When asked if he wanted to join the mission to Africa, Johann declined, claiming to be unfamiliar with Africa and pointing out he had grown up in a cold climate and did not believe he was suited for the job. In his account, my father noted that, while one could express an opinion in such circumstances, it did not mean that anything changed, and while they chuckled at his reference to having cold climate origins he ended up being “volunteered” anyway. About forty people like him were assembled in Prague and given a few hours of instruction on using a parachute, and they made a few practice jumps. After this brief training, they were assembled and sent by train to Italy. Along with other such groups, they detrained at a large air base somewhere south of Rome. My father only vaguely remembered that they arrived at a place with a lot of soldiers’ barracks and a nearby village whose name he could not recall. They spent a day in Italy preparing for their mission. They received new beige uniforms with Afrika Korps and other insignias on them. Early in the morning, they were loaded onto airplanes. In my father’s recollection, some sixty airplanes took off for Africa. The twin-engine aircraft had no seats, so the forty or so in his group sat on parachutes and backpacks between the ribs of the fuselage.

  My father thought they had been airborne approximately half an hour when they came under fire from the British Navy. Although they were flying at a high altitude, anti-aircraft fire brought down a few of the planes. In their case, the left-side engine was hit and caught fire. The propeller made a few more revolutions and then stopped. Soon a long flame was streaming from the engine, and the pilot banked the plane to keep the flames from engulfing it. By then, all of the soldiers were being ordered to bail out because the airplane was too heavily loaded for one engine. It had a large door, and they were ordered to jump in groups of seven. The parachutes they had been issued automatically deployed when they reached a predetermined altitude. They were instructed to set the dial at a certain altitude, press the button that activated the release mechanism, and jump. Johann was one of the first to the door, and by the time he jumped out the interior of the aircraft was already filling with smoke, to the extent that it was almost suffocating. After jumping out, he remembered looking up and seeing burning pieces of the disintegrating aircraft falling to the sea below. By the time his parachute opened, he could no longer see the airplane and did not know what eventually happened to it.

  Although he did not think he had lost consciousness entirely, my father recalled being surprised at one point in the descent when he realized they were above water. The seven in his group all landed successfully near each other. One of them was the radio operator, who was unconscious when he landed; the others had to get to him quickly before he drowned. They cut the lines on their parachutes and used them to lash themselves together so they would not drift apart. After some time, they managed to use the radio to make contact with a German submarine. Then they waited. Eight hours later the submarine appeared, having surfaced nearby without them being aware of it. They were quickly taken aboard before the submarine submerged again. They had to be helped aboard because they found it difficult to walk after hanging for eight hours in salt water. When they were safely inside and the submarine was below the surface again, there was a lot of discussion among the submarine’s crew about firing torpedoes at an Allied ship, but that idea was abandoned, and they made for Italy.

  An ambulance was waiting for them when they arrived, and they were taken to a hospital, where they spent a few days. It was not clear from my father’s recollections whether they arrived in Venice or were taken there later, but after being released from hospital Johann ended up being part of the Venice harbour patrol. As my father recalled, the next few weeks were some of the best of his army days. He was part of a patrol boat crew that watched over the ocean near the entrance to the Venice harbour to prevent sea mines from floating into the city. A sea mine was a large metal sphere with spoke-like protrusions. It was filled with explosives, and each spoke had a glass end, which broke when it hit something and detonated the mine. The job for the crew of the boat on which Johann worked was to spot the mines, sound an alarm to warn people in the city to open their windows, and then use a machine gun to fire at the glass ends of the spokes to detonate the mine. My father recalled one occasion when they caught sight of a mine quite late when it was close to the city and had to detonate it almost imme
diately after sounding the alarm, hoping that the windows in Venice would not all shatter from the force of the explosion. If there were no mines to explode, the crew basked in the sun. According to his recollection, my father patrolled the Venice harbour for a number of weeks before returning to Czechoslovakia. During his time away, his unit had moved from Prague to Pilsen (Plzeň).

  The greatest threat to his life during the entire war came when Johann was wounded by partisans in the forests east of Warsaw. My father usually began this story by noting that there had been a call to donate clothing for transport to the eastern front, where the troops were in desperate need of winter clothing. In winter, probably January, Johann joined a convoy of eighty trucks after loading “furs, felt boots, whatever you could imagine.”3 The convoy drivers were warned that there were partisans along their route and that they should be careful, particularly after their last refuelling stop east of Warsaw. The convoy was accompanied by the NSKK (National Socialist Motoring Corps), a Nazi party organization involved in transport, together with a number of Panzerspeewagon, light armoured vehicles. True to the warning, the convoy was attacked by partisans and came under heavy fire in the forests east of Warsaw. My father recalled noticing the windshield break, and then felt warmness in his chest. He managed to stop the truck before he lost consciousness. A bullet from a partisan who had fired at them from the forested edge of the road had entered the rear of the truck cab, passing through his chest before exiting through the windshield. It had passed within inches of his heart, and while it had shattered some of his ribs miraculously no major organ had been hit.

  My father had no memories of what happened after that, but apparently he was taken to a first-aid station a few miles up the road, where he was stabilized. He was evacuated by a Fiseler Storch, a small airplane that made a number of cameo appearances in his stories. It was usually used as a reconnaissance aircraft, but some versions were also used as air ambulances. Johann awoke from his unconscious state in a hospital in Prague. It took time for the wound to heal since bone fragments from the shattered ribs kept on causing abscesses, and surgeries were required to remove them. Johann spent a number of weeks in the hospital, where he broke the rules by sitting up when he was supposed to be lying down. My father was apparently quite a hit with the nurses, and occasionally he told stories of how he flirted and went to the movies with them. On one occasion, his wound began to bleed while at a movie, but he put pressure on it to stop the bleeding until they got back. The story had different endings. In one telling, he simply returned to Litzmannstadt after recovering in the Prague hospital. In a more common version, he was in the hospital in Prague for a few months and then went to Bavaria for convalescence.

  The Bavarian connection came by way of a doctor in the Prague hospital who had family there. When the doctor realized Johann had no family to go home to for his convalescent leave, he suggested that Johann might enjoy visiting his brother on the family farm in Bavaria. Johann took the train to a village, Osseck am Wald, near the city of Hof in Bavaria, not far from the Czechoslovak border, where he spent a few weeks on a farm. He did farm work, mostly mowing hay, but was only required to work as much as his health allowed. The food was delicious, and with main meals and breaks they ate six times a day. My father received no salary, but the farmer gave him a little spending money.4 It was never clear from his stories who owned the farm. A widow whose husband had been killed in the war was there, as was an older man, either her father or the father of her husband. It seems the widow was attracted to Johann, and in a rarely told anecdote my father related how one day she had sat on her bed wrapped in paper with a large bow and presented herself to him as a gift. He had apparently graciously declined.

  The account of the end of his leave involved travel back to his unit by train. Johann was tired and had fallen asleep in his seat when an officer who had boarded at one of the stops came into the car. The officer severely reprimanded him for not promptly offering the Nazi salute. My father excused himself and in his later account of this event explained that, while he had been on leave, the attempted assassination of Hitler had taken place. As part of the retribution for the attempt on his life by members of the Wehrmacht, Hitler had ruled that Wehrmacht soldiers were also required to give the Nazi salute.

  My father also told somewhat unconnected stories of being near Paris as part of a transport unit. In one version, immediately after returning from patrolling the Venice harbour, he was part of a unit sent to France. The unit was not sent all the way to the Normandy coast, but somewhere west of Paris, approximately twenty kilometres from the point on the coast where the Allies landed on D-Day. He did not think the landings had taken place when he arrived; in his recollection, they occurred shortly thereafter. One story fragment seemed to corroborate that they arrived there before D-Day. Johann was occasionally called upon to serve as chauffeur for officers. On one such trip, he drove officers to the coast, simply because they wanted to see the ocean.

  My father remembered the retreat through Paris more than a month after D-Day more clearly. Parisians were already anticipating the liberation, and there were uprisings in the city. German tanks fired on the French resistance, and Johann and every other motorized vehicle “had to take everything in Paris,”“everything that was German,” with them. They loaded their vehicles with nurses, communications assistants, known as blitzmädchen, and other support personnel. When they had retreated some forty or fifty kilometres east of Paris, the various personnel they had collected were gradually reassigned.5

  Another story from the area around Paris involved flying. Johann was frequently assigned the task of getting parts to complete the repair jobs he undertook as a mechanic and driver. On one occasion, he was to use any available flight, and he joined a flight to Munich. A highlight for him was the opportunity to fly the airplane. My father claimed that for about an hour the pilot caught a few winks of sleep while he flew the plane.6

  As these vignettes demonstrate, most of my father’s war stories were told without reference to specific dates. As an ordinary soldier, my father was usually unconscious of the overall progress of the war or even the battles of which he was a part. His stories often began with reference to a month or season—spring, April, fall—but were otherwise seldom anchored chronologically. Occasionally he tied together vignettes, noting that a second story occurred after an earlier one. I heard these stories from when I was a boy and knew very little of the history of the Second World War. As I became more interested in history and began to interview my father formally, I probed his accounts more directly to try to fit his personal stories into the broader story of the war. Between the more formal taped interviews, I also searched for documentary sources that would corroborate his accounts or at least place them in historical context.

  The transcript of his military record from the Deutsche Dienstelle provides a way of grounding his stories of being drafted more firmly in time. According to these records, my father was drafted in October 1943, a full year after he first appeared before the naturalization commissions in the Warthegau. The first unit to which he was assigned was not the 401 but one denoted the Stm. Battr. le. Art. Ers. U. Ausb. Abt. (m) 103,7 a motorized light artillery replacement and training unit. It would take another eleven months, until September 1944, before the 401 of his memory would be formed.

  The story of the Mediterranean adventure offers the clearest example of the problem of locating my father’s memories in time. His story of this event never wavered from situating it in time after he was drafted. However, Germany’s hold on the African continent was eliminated when the German Army surrendered in Tunis on 12 May 1943. In the weeks before the surrender, Germany mounted a large airlift to supply the troops. In April 1943, a large number of these transport airplanes were shot down, most of them by fighter aircraft rather than by the British Navy.8 That suggests that the story of parachuting into the Mediterranean likely took place in April 1943, when Johann had not yet been drafted into the German Army. Clearly th
e Mediterranean adventure was not part of his experiences as a soldier but occurred the spring before he was drafted. Perhaps my father confused being drafted into the Wehrmacht with a call-up for service in one of Nazi Germany’s quasi-military organizations, such as the Organization Todt (OT) and the Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD), which provided engineering and labour for the German military effort.

  Johann’s neglect in saluting properly on the train because he was unaware of the order requiring the Wehrmacht to use the Nazi salute places the story shortly after the attempted assassination of Hitler in the summer of 1944. A group of conspirators had plotted to assassinate him by placing a briefcase with a bomb in the room where he was to meet his generals to plan and conduct the war. The bomb exploded, but another officer had moved the briefcase in the interim, and the heavy legs of the table apparently deflected the blast, sparing Hitler. Since the plot had been the work of Wehrmacht officers, Hitler responded a few days later, on 24 July, with an order that all Wehrmacht soldiers were to use the Nazi salute, previously reserved for the SS and party organizations. Since the attempted assassination took place in July 1944, Johann’s trip east of Warsaw and subsequent wound from a sniper’s bullet must have taken place in the winter of 1943–44.9

  The excerpt of his military service record offers little help in sorting out the temporal context of the vignettes in France. His military record notes that, as of 30 October 1943, Johann was assigned to his first unit, the 103, a motorized light artillery replacement and training unit. On 15 April 1944, the unit designation changed to the Marschbattr. Art. Ers. u. Ausb. Abt. 103, which in German military organization noted a change to non-active status, likely due to his being wounded. The change might have coincided with his convalescence in Prague and Bavaria.10 There is no recorded change to indicate that his transport experiences around Paris took place while Johann was assigned to the 103, but it is possible that, after returning from Bavaria in July 1944, he returned to his unit near Paris in time to be part of the retreat through the city in August. By September, however, he was back in Czechoslovakia, where the Heeres Artillerie Brigade 401, the unit that my father remembered most clearly, was being assembled. The timeline for being shot while he was travelling east of Warsaw would then shift back to January 1944, a few months after he became part of the replacement and training unit, the 103.