Fortunately, the soldiers just left us. But we had no food, no water, and no toilet facilities, and the Germans living in the houses along the streets were too scared to come down to help. They just looked out their windows at us, and then turned away. A few came to their doors and looked out but quickly closed their doors.
As the day wore on, we felt the chill of the cold air, and the hard streets hurt our backs. But we continued to lie still, afraid to move. Meanwhile, we were surprised to see the American officers and enlisted men playing ball and chasing each other around the street in fun, playing a sort of tag. This playfulness was so surprising, since one would never see soldiers and officers play together in Germany, with its strict hierarchies and delineation between officers and enlisted men. But here the American soldiers played like comrades while we continued to lie nearby, feeling even colder in the brisk spring air.
At last, in the morning we could get up from the cold stone streets and move again when several American soldiers screamed at us, “Up and out.” Quickly, we jumped up, and again, the soldiers began to load us onto the trucks. But this time, as we lined up to get in the back, some women opened their windows and threw down sandwiches. We eagerly grabbed the sandwiches off the ground and wolfed them down, before the Americans saw us and could take them away.
As the truck drove off, we felt grateful to the women for their kindness and hoped they realized how grateful we were. But the American soldiers wouldn’t let us go into a house and use the toilet or shower, so we were reduced to urinating off the side of the open truck.
Soon the truck drove along the Rhine River and passed several prison camps, part of the infamous American Rheinwiesenlager camps. These camps were typically set up in fields enclosed with barbed wire and surrounded by several watchtowers. But these camps had no buildings for shelter and no outhouses, so the prisoners had to live in the fields. If they had any injuries or illnesses, they had to suffer and hope to heal on their own, since no Red Cross or medical support was available.
Then the truck drove on to Remagen and stopped at a large open field, which was pockmarked by bomb-made craters, much like the fields we had passed before. Aside from the crater holes, the field was mostly grass. The camp had no barracks, tents, or other types of shelter, since the Americans slept somewhere else, leaving only the tower guards on night duty.
“Get out of the trucks,” some American soldiers ordered. They led us to a schoolyard where the captain ordered, “Now line up against the wall.”
A half dozen other prisoners wearing torn and faded German uniforms were already standing at the wall. So we feared the worst as we joined these men, who were much older than us in their thirties and forties and were experienced soldiers who had seen combat.
Two American NCOs with about ten other GIs shouted at us, “Stand up tall,” and we all did so. Then one of the NCOs shouted, “Comrades from the SS, please come forward!” Five German soldiers who were SS members stepped forward. Immediately, five NCOs and a half dozen GIs surrounded them, pushed them to the ground, and began beating them to a bloody pulp with their bare fists. Several American soldiers joined in with baseball bats. The German soldiers could do little but hold up their hands to protect their faces, and they curled up in a fetal position, as the blows fell on their backs, arms, legs, and the backs of their heads. Meanwhile, we watched, terrified that we were next.
When the American soldiers finished beating the German soldiers, they ordered the bloody men to stand up against the wall as before. The Germans staggered up and dripped blood as they walked haltingly back into position.
Seeing this carnage, we were even more terrified, expecting that the American soldiers would order us to come forward at any moment, so they could begin beating us. And whatever happened, I felt the whole process was so unfair. It was like a trial and punishment without any due process. But apparently, the trial was over. The Americans had satisfied their rage at the soldiers from the SS, which had perpetrated the worst atrocities of the war. Then they ordered us back to the truck.
After the truck drove on to another bleak, barren field, the American soldiers ordered us to jump from the truck at our final destination. This was the POW camp in a field surrounded by towers with one or two soldiers with guns posted on each one. It was encircled by barbed wire, and inside, deep craters from the bombings pockmarked the earth.
The sight of this desolate camp was overwhelming, and as we piled out of the truck, a cold wind whipping by, I lost control over my troop of a dozen bedraggled teenage soldiers. Everyone ran into the camp with little regard for anyone else in the group, as if propelled by the saying, “Each man for himself. God for us all.” They all scattered around the camp, and I only saw two members of my troop again. The others simply disappeared, and I have no idea where they went.
As we all ran through the camp, I saw several others in front of me take cover from the cold wind by sliding down into one of the bomb craters, which were about twenty feet deep and twenty feet across. I ducked into one of the craters too and had to steady myself by pushing my hands against the muddy sides to keep from sliding down, since they were very slippery because of the constant rain.
When I came to a stop at the bottom, I saw five or six German soldiers in their thirties and forties, who were sitting around, talking and laughing.
“Welcome, young man,” one said to me and motioned for me to come over and join them. After I sat down beside the soldiers, I learned they had known each other from their school days in the same village and during the war. “We don’t know how the Americans found us, since we were trying to hide from them in a barn,” one soldier told us. “But they marched in, and we all surrendered to them very quickly.”
I soon learned that these soldiers were a close-knit group, and I felt that they adopted me as a kind of mascot, since I was only a young boy. It’s good that they did, because I later realized that prisoners in units with commanders had a better chance of surviving than a lone prisoner. So their acceptance of me, a young boy on my own, helped me survive being a captive in the camp.
The next morning my fellow prisoners gave me their tin cans and sent me to get their rations. They gave me my own tin can too. To get the rations, I had to first scale the crater walls, which were more slippery than when I entered. Desperately, I grabbed onto any branches sticking out of the walls to help pull myself up as I climbed.
Once on solid ground again, I headed for the food table near the camp entrance. It was a long folding table, and on the other side a tall ramrod stiff soldier stood overlooking several bowls of milk and egg powder, and a plate with bread slices. He was like a hawk, ready to pounce, if any of us coming for food tried to take more than our daily ration—a teaspoon of milk powder, a teaspoon of egg powder, and a slice of bread.
A Rheinwiesenlager, a prisoner of war camp in Allied-occupied Germany, 1945.
Quietly, I held out each tin cup, while the soldier behind the table plunked down the rations in the cup. “It’s for my six comrades,” I said when the soldier looked at me strangely and hesitated, his spoon of milk powder in the air, as if he wondered why I had so many cups. For a moment, I was afraid he would stop dispensing the rations. But after saying a reluctant, “Okay,” he continued filling the cans.
When I returned to the crater, I saw that my comrades had gotten water, which the Americans pumped from the Rhine River into barrels along the fence. I handed my comrades the cups of egg and milk powders, and they each poured in water from their tin cans and stirred the concoction. “Here’s a spoon,” one of the soldiers said, after he had stirred his cup, so I could stir my cup of egg and milk powder too.
I felt relieved to be taken in by this small community of older soldiers, though thinking back on how my troop members scattered when we arrived at the camp, reminded me of the line from Berthold Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children: “First comes food, then comes morality.” It’s hard to stay true to one’s principles when one is hungry.
As I got to know my new comrades, who ranged in age from thirty to forty-five, I found they came from many walks of life. Most had been farmers, but a few were teachers and shop owners. They were fatherly toward me because of my young age, since they all had children at home who had grown up without them.
Yet, as much as I appreciated the men as my newfound family, which helped me get through the worst of times, I later came to realize how really bad the conditions in our camp were. I did so when I discovered that the conditions in some American camps were much better. The prisoners in some other camps had real clapboard shelters, along with cots and blankets. They had more and better food, as well as better treatment, including medical care if needed. But we were unlucky to be in the worst of the worst camps, though not realizing it at the time helped us adjust better to the terrible conditions. We didn’t have to factor in our regrets that other prisoners were being treated so much better than we were.
After our so-called supper, we tried to fall asleep, though the splash of rain along the sides of the crater kept us awake for several hours, until we were so tired the noise and dripping water didn’t matter. At least the mud on the crater’s sides didn’t fall in on us, as happened to some soldiers in another crater. They had dug holes in the sides with a tin can, but it was very dangerous to do this, since the soil was soft and could easily slide down the sides. That’s what happened to several hapless soldiers. In the middle of the night, I and the other soldiers in my crater awoke to hear muted cries for help. We quickly rushed to the area where the noise was coming from. There, the sides of the hole had collapsed and the group was buried by the soil. Some of the men coughed and retched for air, because they had swallowed mud.
My fellow prisoners and I dug quickly through the mud, and some of us reached down and pulled the soldiers to safety with our bare hands, while others from our group held us around the waist so we, too, wouldn’t end up buried in the mud. Afterward, the exhausted soldiers we rescued sat around in our crater sharing their horror stories about how frightened they were as the walls fell down and began to engulf them. They kept telling us, “Thank you . . . Thank you . . . You saved our lives.” Miraculously, no one was killed despite not one of the American guards showing up to help.
The next morning the traditional routine of a prison camp began as usual. The American soldiers directed us to line up in several rows, and two soldiers walked by counting us—a typical prison routine done virtually everywhere to make sure that all of the prisoners were accounted for and no one had escaped. The count turned out to be a long and tedious undertaking because at the end of each count, the counters compared their figures, but they never agreed. Why not? Because the prisoners constantly changed places in line, one of the small ways the prisoners used to get some revenge for the misery of the camp. It was our way of messing with the guards. The process was very simple. Whoever was at the far end of the line would step backwards and run behind the other prisoners to get to the front end, only to be counted again. We probably all looked the same to the Americans, and no one thought to look behind the lineup of prisoners to see if anyone was out of line. Eventually, the American soldiers gave up on getting an accurate count and assumed that all the prisoners were still there.
News of Hansi
Shortly after I arrived at the camp, I met two friends from my hometown of Eschwege, Karl Heinz and Wolfgang Mueller, who had some terrible news for me. “Your brother was killed in the last days of the war,” they told me.
But how? Why? The news sent shock waves through me, as they explained what happened to my brother, who was then sixteen. “A group of Hansi’s friends from the Hitler Youth wanted to participate in the war in some way. They were all fifteen and sixteen years old. One day, while they were roaming the forest near Eschwege, they came upon a group of German Army paratroopers, so they knew the enemy was in the area and closing in. The paratroopers asked the boys the shortest way through the forest, which the boys, native to the area, knew well.
Hansi’s hunting permit, issued in March 1945.
“Hansi volunteered to guide them, taking the shortest route, and the paratroopers accepted his offer while Hansi’s friends stayed behind. Moments later as Hansi led the paratroopers through the forest they encountered an American tank. It immediately fired all its guns, and Hansi, at the front of the group, died in a volley of machine gunfire, and a paratrooper also died. It happened so fast, that Hansi probably never knew what hit him.
“His friends waited, and when he didn’t return and they felt it was safe, they went looking for him. They found his body, riddled with bullets. One of the boys ran to a nearby farm and fetched a wagon. The boys loaded Hansi’s body into the wagon and wheeled it through the streets in the town. Soon they met two teachers from the Friedrich Wilhelm Schule. One said, ‘We’ll do this,’ and they pulled the wagon to your house and later to the cemetery for burial. So now Hansi’s grave sits among those of the other young boys killed in the war.”
When my friends finished their tale, I didn’t feel sorrow about my brother’s death. Instead, I was angry with him. Why did he have to be a hero and volunteer to help the German paratroopers, when his friends who were there too, were now standing in front of me alive? Only years later did I feel his loss and begin to grieve for him and miss him. So now when I visit Germany, I always visit his grave and mourn for him, thinking of him as my twin, since we were only eleven months apart. I often speculate on what Hansi would have done with his life, given his enthusiasm and spirit.
Camp Life
As the weeks wore on, the other prisoners and I gradually adjusted to camp life, although this was hard to do because we were always hungry, and the camp had no shelter and no proper latrines. Instead, the Americans had dug out shallow ditches in the earth, and we had to squat over them. Since there was no toilet paper, we used grass and sometimes grabbed nettles by mistake, resulting in a rather stinging surprise. Another danger was sitting too close to one another on these holes, so we sometimes deposited feces on one another, resulting in angry words as well as great discomfort and embarrassment. Sometimes fellows in a hurry could not stop in time and slid into the dirty ditch, resulting in their being covered by wet, slimy mud and feces. Though some guards hosed the prisoners down, this made their condition even worse, as they now had to stay in their sopping wet clothes in the bitter cold for some time. No one thought about his personal dignity anymore. It was a question of survival.
Yet there were some bright spots and one was telling stories in the crater. The younger men described their families and school friends, while the older soldiers talked about the big meals they had eaten and exchanged recipes. At times everyone laughed when someone told a story with a strange accent, though no one else could understand most of what they said. Perhaps to better adjust to camp life, most of the men did not complain about the conditions, which might only depress them. Instead, everyone tried to stay as positive and upbeat as they could, despite the grim circumstances.
Because of my young age, I couldn’t participate in these conversations with the other soldiers. Instead, I spent much of my time in the crater designing and drawing pictures of houses in my diary, the only possession I had managed to keep. I imagined the beautiful big houses I would like to live in—luxurious castles with big bathrooms, since I was free to dream. But I showed my designs to no one, thinking they would laugh at me. Instead, I kept my diary and my designs in them close to me.
Meanwhile, above our craters, the guards stomped about, making sure we remained inside. So we had no interaction with the guards and were glad we didn’t have to relate to them. After all, they were our jailers in a bleak, miserable camp, and we didn’t want to be reminded of that. Rather we preferred to stick together and share with each other, while above us the German soldiers often joked with each other, showing that some people could keep their sense of humor even in these darkest of times.
One cold, rainy morning, a soldier who had saved his trumpet played a German ditty,
“Not Every Day Is a Sunday,” as we sat around in our crater. As he played, everyone sang along and later we all applauded. For all of us the words really resonated, since none of our days were Sundays. Rather, our days were filled with boredom, hardship, and never-ending hunger, since the stale bread, powdered milk, and eggs mixed with water didn’t go very far. On the bright side, though, at least none of us was sent to a labor detail, so we didn’t have the backbreaking work and injuries common to work gangs.
When the weather improved, and it wasn’t so cold and the rain stopped, some of the older men organized hours of instruction. We sat on top of the craters, while the instructors, who were teachers at a gymnasium, which is like a high school, or university professors, stood below us giving their lectures. Since we were under an open sky, one teacher started with a description of the constellations. Another lecturer talked about German literature, and a third spoke about jurisprudence. The literature teacher quoted Goethe and Schiller, and many of us recited the poems along with him. While the setting was grim, the lessons from these experienced teachers and professors were first class.
Yet, as much as the teachers tried to inform us, we were living in a bubble, where we knew nothing of what was going on in the outside world, since all the news was kept from us. At one time the guards shot their guns into the air and shouted, “War kaput! The war has ended!” Yet, even if the war was officially over, nothing changed in our lives. According to The Hague convention, the Red Cross should have been allowed to examine us, but no Red Cross employees ever visited. Once in a while, the loudspeaker announced that prisoners under fifteen should come to the gate, but when they got there, no one from outside the prison was there, so nothing happened. Again and again, this kind of scenario with false hopes played out, tantalizing us with the prospect of getting out but then nothing. Were the American soldiers toying with us like animals on exhibit in a zoo? Or did they get the wrong information, so they were as deluded as we were? None of us ever knew, so we kept following their orders, even if the outcome was that nothing changed.
From School to War: Growing Up in Hitler’s Germany (Contemporary Nonfiction) Page 13