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

by Hans Werner

  Remembering and telling, as I have done in this chapter, produce an account that is not my father’s story, or mine, or that of the war diaries but some combination of all of them. Geoffrey Cubitt suggests that stories of our past can be of a number of kinds: “an account of things that is coherent, or that commands general assent, ...or that minimizes friction, or that enhances self esteem, or that legitimizes certain claims or structures of authority.”30 Most listeners to my father’s stories, while they might recognize them in these pages, would soon also conclude that they acquired a significantly different texture after the collaboration of a number of alternative ways of telling that produced this account.

  9

  The Collapse

  The push to cross the Rhine River in northern Germany by General Montgomery’s armies began in earnest on 23 March 1945. The 401’s 5th Battalion diarist recorded that at 4:00 p.m. the enemy was creating a smokescreen along the entire front and that at 5:00 p.m. a “drum roll” artillery barrage began. Military histories would later note that by 8:00 p.m. that evening 3,500 guns were firing to prepare for the Rhine crossing.1 The Allies soon had a bridgehead at Wesel, and the 401 was forced to move, first to Dorsten, then north of the Lippe Canal, which ran parallel to the Lippe River. My father’s account of trying to stay ahead of the advancing Allied offensive conveyed the sense of confusion and danger that gripped the remnants of the Wehrmacht.

  When they crossed from Holland into Germany, they had to cross a small river. The bridge had been damaged, so they had to drive through the water in the dark. The artillery shelling was behind them but coming ever closer. When Johann got to the river, there was no option but to go through it. My father thought he must have been going quite fast because the front of the machine went under water, but when it straightened out it was just above water enough to keep going, even though water was coming in under the doors. When he had trouble getting up the far bank, he applied all the power the machine had to get up the bank. He drove for some time before stopping, and when he did someone came running up to thank him for pulling him through the river. Johann had not realized that someone had hooked his truck to his machine before he entered the river.2

  In another account, my father described their arrival in a forest, where it seemed they would attempt to hold their position. They were soon on the move again and driving over flooded areas due to Allied bombing of a dam.3 In his recollection, they crossed over into Germany after driving the last distance through water. The British, or Americans, he could not remember which, had seen them drive their machines with the cannons into the forest, and they were soon bombarded with phosphorus bombs. Two of their machines went up in smoke (though Johann’s machine and its cannons were spared), one soldier’s clothes were burned, and while the flames lit the forest on fire there was hardly any underbrush to really fuel it. Although they could drive, my father noted they could not go far because by this time they were surrounded in what was called the Ruhr pocket.4

  Desperate measures were taken, but a dismal sight greeted them as Johann’s unit was pushed farther into Germany. Civilians were being pressed into fighting roles in a last-ditch attempt to defend their cities with whatever was available. Hitler had dubbed this effort the “Volkssturm”—literally the “people’s storm.” When Johann’s unit entered Germany from Holland, it came across a scene of old men being assembled to defend the country; “they were between fifty-five and sixty-five.” The absolute devastation that surrounded them prompted one of Johann’s fellow soldiers to remark that Hitler had always said “Sonnige und luftige Wohnungen sollt ihr haben” (“You shall have sunny and airy homes”) and claim that, “Now we have them!”5

  In the confusion of retreat, some of the battalions became separated from the others, and they lost contact with each other as the German front collapsed. Johann’s 2nd Battalion ended up being pushed south into the Ruhr industrial area, while the 5th Battalion went north to fight for another month until Germany finally capitulated. Johann lost his Zugmaschine because airplanes found it whenever he left the forest. He received a new twelve-tonne Zugmaschine, his third, while they were already surrounded by the Allies. The end of the war came quietly for Johann.

  On 11 April, he left Unna to go to Dortmund to pick up vehicles for repair. The vehicles were the shoemaker’s truck with its crew of four shoemakers and the truck of the tailor who repaired the uniforms. Johann hitched them together to follow his machine because the trucks no longer had their drivers, and the cobbler and tailor did not know how to drive. On the way back, when Johann was about twenty kilometres from Unna, a dark object loomed ahead on the road, and someone signalled with a flashlight. By this time, as my father put it, “everybody knew that at any time we would be captured, or we would die, one of the two, there was no other alternative.” Johann had already removed his helmet because it was too hot and the belt with his pistol so as not to be confused with someone who still wanted to fight. When they realized that the moment had come, he and his companions calmly surrendered. They were taken to Unna in a jeep, and “our entire company was there—all prisoners, even our officer, everyone had surrendered.” When the officer called the roll, only four members of the unit were unaccounted for. He released the unit to the Americans “on the condition that the promises they made in their propaganda leaflets that those who gave themselves up without shooting would receive better treatment than others.”6 The war had finally come to an end for Johann.

  We tell our life experiences using the tools of narrative, including turning points to mark where we want to convey major changes in the directions of our lives—what Frank Kermode calls the “point from which all can be seen to cohere, and so achieves a kind of closure.”7 One would think that 11 April 1945, the day my father was captured, would have been such a day—it was not. The war was over for Johann, but the dying continued.

  In my father’s memory, the soldiers who initially guarded him and his fellow prisoners were all African American: “they were not very polite, they tore up the pictures you had and ground them in the dirt; they were very rough.” In my memories of the stories my father told, I seem to recall him saying they were then put in large fenced-in enclosures for a while before being shipped off to France. The US Army established large enclosures on the east side of the Rhine River where they collected the large numbers of prisoners captured in the last months of the war. These camps, known as Rhinewiesenlager, were rudimentary and overcrowded. Here my reading of Second World War history might be creating my own false memory. In the taped interviews with my father, and in a further conversation with him after I did more research, he maintained that he was immediately loaded onto a train and taken to France.

  He and many other captured German soldiers were packed into steel rail cars at the Unna train station, about forty soldiers per car. Some prisoners were loaded into open cars, but the one that Johann was in was completely closed. My father recalled that POWs who travelled in the open cars had things thrown at them when they passed under bridges in France, and he heard rocks hitting the roof of the car he was in. Their transport to France turned out to be on unusually hot days, and somewhere between the Ruhr area and their destination east of Paris the oxygen in the car seemed to disappear. There were no windows, they could not see what was going on, and it was getting terribly hot. Johann was in the front corner of the car, where one of the floorboards was damaged, so he was able to get fresh air through the opening in the floor. He sat there motionless taking in the fresh air. Around him, however, the soldiers were panicking: “they were cursing and moving around, the sweat was running down.” Someone managed to pry a board loose, and the soldiers used it to smash a hole in the roof of the car to get some air. The U.S. soldiers, patrolling on the roofs of the train cars, thought an escape was being attempted and fired into the hole with their machine guns: “there was blood and everything all over.” Seven soldiers died, and a number of others were wounded. The train did not stop. The incident took place in the afterno
on, but the train continued through Luxembourg toward Paris before it arrived at its destination the next day. The less seriously wounded were “bandaged, and we applied tourniquets, some of them stayed alive, but some of them died.”8

  The train unloaded its human cargo at a place my father called “my little camp”—at least that is how I understood it. Given that he had been under American guard and never acquired a good command of English, that was how it sounded; as he said, “what that means I do not know to this day.” The camp was on a hill, he recalled, and probably sixty kilometres from Paris. He thought there were 48,000 POWs in the camp, the same number he had used for the mass of male humanity in the camps on the eastern front, where he had been captured by the Germans in 1941. Arrival at the camp meant they were now in French hands. They were whipped as they entered the camp by what my father believed were Jews but could have been French guards avenging themselves against their German occupiers. They had to strip to the waist and raise their arms for inspection so that the blood type tattoo that marked SS members could be detected and they could be separated from the others. The Wehrmacht soldiers quipped that “before they [the SS] had always been the first, they might as well be first now.”9

  Conditions in the camp were horrible. It was out in the open, with no shelter from rain or wind. The latrine was a hole in the ground with a board across it. There was not enough food, and the weakest of the soldiers fainted while relieving themselves and drowned in their own excrement. A truck that drove to the edge of the camp just outside the wire fence provided water by pouring it into the enclosure from a hose. Prisoners fought each other to get water. Every day trucks came to load up dead bodies.

  Johann had been in the camp for a few weeks when the Red Cross came to inspect it in the morning, before the dead had been picked up. The camp was then taken over by the Americans, who provided adequate food, but the dramatic increase in the amount of food caused more deaths. Prisoners consumed too much food too quickly despite the warnings of doctors among them. A call for prisoners who had a valid driver’s licence was Johann’s ticket out. The U.S. Army was assembling a group of prisoners to clean up ammunition stockpiled in the French countryside and needed drivers who were also mechanics. Johann volunteered since he had managed to keep his German driver’s licence.10

  Some ten years after my father told me these stories, a Quebec novelist published a controversial account of the treatment of German POWs at the end of the Second World War.11 James Bacque’s book Other Losses was widely rejected by historians. His thesis was that Eisenhower deliberately allowed a million German POWs to die of starvation because he hated Germans. Bacque was accused of misreading documents, ignoring evidence that did not support his thesis, and using statistical methodology that was “hopelessly compromised.” In his review of Bacque’s book, Steven Ambrose, Eisenhower’s biographer, grudgingly admitted, however, that “there was widespread mistreatment of German prisoners in the spring and summer of 1945” and that “men did die needlessly and inexcusably.”12 It was almost surreal to read Other Losses and related sources. I realized that my father’s reference to “my little camp” was the POW camp at Maily-le-Camp, about 220 kilometres east of Paris. On 16 March 1945, a month or more before the events my father described, 120 German prisoners were found dead on trains that arrived there. They had suffocated in their tightly sealed train cars. Directives were issued to correct these problems, and according to Bacque, Eisenhower reluctantly issued an apology. It seems, however, that the problem of poorly ventilated train cars with large numbers of prisoners in them was not solved quickly.13

  At Maily-le-Camp, the enclosure adjacent to Johann’s, and separated only by a barbed wire fence, was filled with Ukrainians and Russians. The Germans had forcibly moved workers from occupied areas of the Soviet Union to work as virtual slave labourers in German factories. It was these ostarbeiter and remnants of the Vlasov Army, former Red Army soldiers whom the Nazis had recruited to fight Bolshevism, who had been assembled next to the prisoners of war at Maily-le-Camp. Early in his stay there, Johann frequently talked to the soldiers, who encouraged him to come over to their enclosure because he spoke Russian and because they received better rations. He declined the offer, suggesting that he “had been treated as a German while in Russia” and had no desire to go back there. One day it seemed that preparations were being made to send them back to the Soviet Union, and Johann went over to talk to them, advising them not to return, especially not those who had served in the Vlasov Army. But they were excited to be going home, back to their families. Johann volunteered to help prepare the train cars on which they were to be transported; it was an opportunity to get out a little. The train was decorated with evergreen branches and the hammer and sickle emblem of the Soviet Union. Each car got an allocation of ten boxes of K-rations, enough for two days of travel for twenty or so people in one car. When the train left, an American officer commented that they had just experienced their last moment of joy, suggesting he knew more about their fate than they were being told. Two trains had left when four of the Vlasov Army soldiers from the second train showed up again at the camp. They described the sudden change as soon as they had crossed into the Soviet-controlled zone of Germany. Soviet soldiers had opened the train cars, accused them of being traitors, and told them they would be sent to Siberia or shot as soon as the train was on Soviet territory. The four men who had returned had been in one car and managed to break the floorboards, so that the entire group of twenty had escaped. These four were the only ones who had made it back; Soviet guards had recaptured the rest. The return of the Russians caused quite a stir in the camp, and the remaining Russians and Ukrainians refused repatriation. They went to the American commanders and pleaded with them not to force their repatriation to the Soviet Union. Thereafter, it seemed that only those who wanted to go back left the camp. Soviet officials, however, were still allowed into the camp to attempt to repatriate their citizens. On one occasion, camp inmates overturned their vehicle when it entered the camp, and military police had to intervene.14

  Volunteering to join a group of prisoners to clean up ammunition was Johann’s salvation, though it meant that Johann and his friend Milostav Zacharda were separated. Zacharda declared himself Czechoslovakian and went home. Johann was moved to Étain, France, just west of Metz, not far from where his unit had first fought in the Saar battles six months earlier. Two POW camps were located in the area. His group of truck drivers stayed in barracks inside the town where they were properly fed; about six kilometres away was another camp with barracks. They picked up prisoners of war at the other camp just outside Étain who loaded and unloaded the trucks and then went to clean up ammunition. They drove all over southern France, always under guard. The first task was to clean up ammunition in the area around Verdun. The roadsides were piled high with ammunition, enough that my father thought there were sufficient shells “to fight a war for another five years.” The ammunition was piled as high as their trucks on both sides of the road for twenty or thirty kilometres. Their task was to load the ammunition for delivery to the train station where it was shipped to harbours in the south of France. Damaged ammunition was collected in large pits. The shells were slid down planks into pits as large as a house, and with forty trucks hauling shells it took all week to fill three holes. On Saturdays, the pits were detonated, and my father remembered the resulting explosion being “like an atomic bomb.” On one occasion, when the wind was from the wrong direction, windows in the town some fifty kilometres away were blown out, and the U.S. Army had to replace them.15

  The POWs that Johann and his fellow drivers picked up at the other camp were under French administration and poorly fed. On one occasion, they came upon six POWs who were near starvation and unable to work. Johann’s group asked their guards whether they could deliver excess food to the other prison camp and were given permission to do so, but guards had to accompany them when they entered the camp because of the turmoil that ensued among prisoners eager to
get to the food.16

  Some prisoners saw the work of loading and unloading ammunition as an opportunity to escape. Once, when they became aware that the train they were loading was headed for Munich, they left an opening among the shells large enough for six of them to hide. With the assistance of others, they hid in the opening with some rations they had stored and had others conceal them with the rest of the shells. Some POWs who knew them later received letters from them telling of their escape. When they had heard only German spoken while stopped at a train station, they had left the cars and gone home.17