Dear Peter, right now we should be in our little boat and either rowing or paddling. Do you know what my greatest dream is? To one day ride the waves behind a motorboat. When one day we have the money for this, we should buy a beautiful boat with which we’ll take many long tours.
I remember once in Swinemünde, there were such beautiful large yachts in the harbor. But I think they are too showy for me, really. I prefer small and sporty ones because the so-called gentleman’s sports are not my particular passion.
Oh, dear one. I love you so much, and am so happy, thinking about you and about this lovely summer. If I had my way, I would put on a rucksack and make the trek to see you.
Off into the wilds
With a butter sandwich and some bacon.
I send you sweet greeting and kiss you with love,
Your Grete
3 June 1945
Dearest Peter,
Today I was in a deep depression. I believe that you don’t love me anymore, and that you found a replacement companion long ago. Yes, I would be very sad over this. Because I was always faithful to you, and only because of my trust in you did I manage to live through all the frightful horrors of the last two months. But you know my stubbornness. And you know I always find my way out, rise above it, and know exactly where I am headed in life.
So now, with both hands and both feet, I will attempt to study again. I have discovered that this service is my life’s calling, and I can see I have an inclination and a talent for it as well. Even colleagues who know me, and who themselves have been declined for these positions, believe that I, in particular, will be able to, and should, continue my studies. They also believe I’ll never finish, because I will surely marry first. I should see to it that I complete my studies anyway. You see, this is my opinion—that I must advance in my career, as I need to be able to earn a living.
And I don’t want to run around in a nurse’s cap anymore! I want to further my studies. I’m beginning to work my way through the Tuchel textbooks in Organic Chemistry and then will work my way through the Physiology book of Landois-Rosemann. If, then, I could also go to a lecture or two, or find a doctor who is willing to take me under his wing … ! Tomorrow I’ll attempt to find a position as an assistant lecturer.
Today we discovered that our government gave us counterfeit money at the end: The paper money does not have the watermark in it anymore. In fact the 100 Deutschmark and the 50 Deutschmark bills—these out of all of them—are counterfeit. We, and many others like us, went to the bank so that we would have some cash—all of it was counterfeit! Such an insult!
It’s Sunday today, a lovely, beautiful summer day. Yesterday I even went for a little walk. It did not go well, but it was at least something. Slowly everyone is crawling out of his hole. It was all a bit much for me, as this morning I felt wretchedly ill again. But I intend to take another walk today. Summer seems to pull us like a magnet out of the house.
5 June 1945
Dearest Peter,
The program has been changed! The Lazarett has let me go. As a civilian hospital it will now only employ fully registered nurses. The whole thing came about quite suddenly, much faster than I had thought. So today, first of all, I went to the magistrate to register myself at the Health Department.
I heard that the universities will reopen in October. I will try to find out from a colleague if the medical faculty will be teaching. Tomorrow I will go directly to the university to find out what they anticipate will happen. Besides that, I’m still looking for a position as an assistant lecturer. May my lucky star be with me so that I find something!
Yesterday I ran into my old boss, the director of the emergency services from the DRK.53 The Red Cross is organizing crisis centers for which they will be hiring women who have proved themselves as nurses. Such luck. They want to recommend me for the position! They even want to arrange for me to attend lectures on the side. At least this is something in the right direction.
For several days now, it has been impossible to let this feeling go, that you are making a little side trip. Hopefully you will not forget me completely as you go about your business. You know how sensitive I am. And of course you know about my stubbornness. Can you tell I am having one of these pig-headed moments? It makes me happy to be concentrating on my studies again, which is something you never really liked. But surely you can see that I am able to master my own life, and that I’m happy doing so. I’m not the sort of person who will simply fall into your arms with my own outstretched. And I really don’t need to wait for you forever with such uncertainty!!! You know that!
Oh well, I’m very upset with you today. Unfortunately you are sitting here passively by my side. But perhaps, too, my feelings are not deceiving me. It’s difficult, I know, to begin such a fruitless effort, to search for a girlfriend who is somewhere within the Russian-occupied territory where the last of the battles took place. A girl who, for all you know, could be dead or has been carted off to a prison somewhere. There’s no mail service, the trains aren’t running. It’s impossible to contact one another. Oh, why so many difficult circumstances because of one stupid cause? Let things roll as they do. She’ll get over it eventually. No one really is to blame.
So, with that, everything is finished. I really wonder now if you even still think of me. Men are always so different about these things than women are. Women are much more faithful. But then, maybe today you’re thinking the exact same thoughts about me as I am about you. Yes, my dear, I’m not a silly young virgin either, whose “love has only this one thought—to be true to her impatient yearnings until the very end.” But nonetheless I have always been true to you. Even when one may fall in love a little here and there, it was never done in any sort of serious way, and we’re still so young. I just couldn’t handle it if there were another woman you loved more than me. Then just stay with her!
Oh, I’m in such a mess of a mood today. Do you still wear my ring? I’ll bet it doesn’t want to fit you right today! It should hurt you a bit and stick to your finger so it can’t move. Your subconscious should torture you today and make a martyr of you. It’s your good luck that you’re not here today, or that my letters can’t reach you today, because it would have been another stupid fight with me. Do you remember what it was like three months ago? It’s that same sort of mood I’m in today. I was very angry with you, and thought, “Wait a minute! I can have it be otherwise! I can get along without him just as well. That is what he should know today. He should not feel all that sure about himself, because that security is not written in stone—not just yet!”
Best wishes to you, then, dear Peter, for today,
Your Grete
7 June 1945
My dearest Peter,
How many more books laden with letters to you shall I write, before we see each other again? Where, oh where, can you be? How are you? Oh, my dear Peter, I can hardly imagine that we will really see each other again. Keep my ring close to you. It was to bring you luck and be your talisman.
A friend of the family’s, a pensioned admiral, came to visit today. I asked him if he had any news about the troops in Denmark, and he said that some of you have already been sent to Schleswig-Holstein to be held in a reentry camp. When will you be released? I wonder. How much longer must the cleanup work continue? Will you soldiers be able to write soon? Oh, my dearest, if I could only have some news from you. Hopefully you are at least well enough to do so. I love you so very much. You probably don’t even know how much I have loved you. I would be so sad if you were never to return. That would be such an unspeakable sorrow that then I would only want to go to where you have gone. In my deepest beliefs, there is a reunion on that other side. Can you fathom what I mean by all this? Franzel, if I could show you, just once, that there is no one else in the world I love as much as you. Oh, how horrible it would be to know that you love someone else more than me.
Oh, my dearest love, I pray to God every night that He keep you safe, and that you are well, and that
He will reunite us soon. It was so incredibly beautiful that we ran into each other that winter night just before the “locking of the gates.”54 And that 14th of December came, and everything was so lovely. I’m so very thankful for that moment, and I take it as an omen that our future is protected.
Would that you could be with me now, and I could lie against your chest and just cry till there were no more tears left. Then we would both take up our walking sticks and march into our new lives together. I know that you, too, are sitting somewhere today, having these same thoughts about me. Yes, dear one, we’re both still alive and we do still have our sights on our new life together.
14 June 1945
Auf Wiedersehen, my dear Franzel. I will return to you, if you’ll let me know where you are. I think only of you, and love no one as dearly as I do you. This is true, and I’ll stay with you forever.
All my love,
Your Grete
Epilogue
After the official end of the Second World War, May 8, 1945, 2.6 million German people, most of whom were women and children, died from starvation or lack of medical care. Of the 1.2 million German prisoners of war who died, over one million died in Soviet camps. In all, twenty-two million people of all nationalities continued to die in eastern European and Russian prison camps during the first years after the war.
What is written here in Margarete’s letters is all that is known of Peter’s whereabouts. Margarete makes one reference to a Frau Steffens and hints that he lived on the Rhine River, and we know he was a German soldier in Denmark, but those are the only clues we have. Trying to track down a man named Peter, or Franzel, who had been a German soldier in Denmark, who lived on the Rhine and who was known by a Frau Steffens, brought me few answers. I contacted as many school friends and relatives of Margarete’s as I knew. Many had died. One, I was told by her daughter, had Alzheimer’s disease to such an extent she would not even remember Margarete. The answer to my questions “Did you ever know a man named Peter? Or Franzel?” was in all but one case negative.
It was an e-mail I wrote to the daughter of a school friend, who kindly responded, saying yes, indeed her mother remembered Margarete and a man named Peter. “His name was Peter. I do remember that. They met in the S-Bahn one day. He was a soldier, that’s all I know. I believe they knew each other for several years. But that’s all I remember.”
Alas, Peter, or Franzel, remains to this day a mystery man whom my mother loved and never reconnected with. As I read and reread the letters—as I have so many times over the years since I found them—I can only conclude that they, and her undying love for this man, gave her the will to go on living through those most unforgiving months of war.
In November of 1944, Karl Spaeth fled Albania after its liberation from German control. Through the bitter winter months of 1944–45, he and two comrades crept through forests and over the rugged mountain passes of the Balkans, running at night and hiding in chicken coops and barns during the day. All three arrived in Germany safely sometime just before the war’s end in the spring of 1945.
Bound by duty, Karl Spaeth traveled on to Berlin, came home briefly to tell Helga not to worry—he’d be home in a few weeks—and left for Flensburg, where he was in attendance as the capitulation negotiations took place between Grand Admiral Dönitz and the Allied commanders. Afterwards he was held in American detention for several months, where, in his words, he was treated very well.
Upon his return to Berlin, Margarete and Helga had already left for Sweden on the infamous “Raoul Wallenberg” train. By the time he learned of their departure, it was clear they never made it to Sweden—he had contacted relatives there who said they had never arrived—and the Russians were unwilling to give any word about prisoners. Although Margarete and Helga were told so often upon their reentry to Germany, “We thought you were dead,” there must have always been some hope that they had been taken prisoner. After all, fourteen million Germans and East Europeans, and countless others from countries as far away as Japan and Greece, were released from Russian Gulags in the decade to follow.
Alone, with everything in ruin and his military career dead, Karl Spaeth, at the age of fifty-six, decided to study medicine. He moved to Göttingen in northern Germany, where he spent the next several years studying. Eventually he and Helga reunited and for a brief period immigrated to the United States. After a year, they returned to Germany and took up residence in Hamburg, where Karl practiced medicine as a private physician until his death in the late 1960s. Helga lived to be seventy-two and died in a convalescent home in 1973.
Jürgen Möller followed Margarete to Sweden several months after she arrived, and there he concluded his medical studies. They were married on April 16, 1952, at the Tyska kyrkan, or German Church, sometimes called St. Gertrude’s in Gamla stan, the old town in central Stockholm.
I was their first child, born to them eight months later, to the day, in Stockholm. Within a year, they received their residency papers for the United States, immigrated to St. Paul, Minnesota, and eventually became U.S. citizens.
Here Margarete took a job as a nurse’s assistant while Jürgen finished his medical residency. She never did realize her dream of becoming a doctor. Rather, she spent the remainder of her life as a mother and homemaker, conforming to the norms of a wife in the 1950s.
After raising three daughters and a son of Jürgen’s from a previous relationship, Margarete and Jürgen eventually divorced in 1978. Jürgen moved back to northern Germany, where he lived with his second wife until his death in 1983.
On July 12, 2005, two days after her eighty-first birthday, Margarete died in Boulder, Colorado. The cause of death was heart failure.
Dieter was killed on February 15, 1945, on the outskirts of a village then named Wildforth, now Prostyna, in Poland. One evening many years after his death, Dieter’s commanding officer came to Mutti’s door with an official letter, explaining what he believed had happened.
According to this officer, Dieter was with his platoon in an area near Stettin, which is now in Poland. They were in a forest with a clearing, a meadow of sorts, just in front of them. On the other side of the meadow were several farmhouses, and they knew there were women and children in those houses because they could hear them screaming. Dieter, as did all the men, understood very well the probable cause of their screaming with the Russians so nearby. They would surely be raped, and then murdered.
Dieter and a friend, another soldier, ran across that field to save them. Neither he nor any of the men he was with had weapons; they had been sent into the field without them, as there were no weapons left to give the soldiers at the end of the war. Dieter and his comrade crept through the field and reached the farmhouse. Quickly they snatched two children and a woman, and, showing them how to stay low to the ground, they ran back across the same field in hopes of reaching the safety of the forest. It was in this field that a hand grenade exploded and killed all of them at once.
The officer told Helga that he was very sorry to report that they were not able to identify Dieter’s body, and what they were able to find of the bodies was placed in a shallow grave. They had to do it quickly, and left no marker. But the officer had felt personally obligated to share the story of Dieter’s death with his family, “to let you know who this son of yours was.”
That was the last news anyone would ever hear of Dieter.
His remains have, to this day, not been identified, and the field that was described by his officer has been overgrown with forest. A stele, however, was erected in Stare Czarnowo, Poland, near the site of his death, on July 15, 2006. Upon it, the names of thirty German soldiers have been engraved. Dieter Dos is one of them.
Hilde and her family lived out the war in Berlin. Neither her Jewish mother nor any of the rest of her family was ever sent away during the pogrom. Berlin, in fact, had the greatest number of Jews of any city in Germany still living at large by the end of the war. Those who survived either looked “Aryan” enough to pass, or were
simply protected by neighbors and friends.
Kerstin Jurke, Susanne Erichsen, Ilse, and Brigitte Martins all remained close friends with Margarete throughout the remainder of their lives.
“What became of the six paintings?” I asked my mother.
“The Dürer, yes. That one was valuable. All the others weren’t so. We had, you remember, stored all the valuable art in a bunker outside the city. Of course, when the Allies came through, all those things were plundered and we never saw a bit of it again.”
“But what happened to the paintings?” I asked again. She didn’t know. I only know of one—I have it in my possession. It is an oil painting, about eighteen inches by twenty-four, and hangs in my bedroom. It is signed by an artist unknown to me, and dated 1926. It is a melancholic scene—a Russian, or perhaps a Polish, farmhouse in the snow. The scene is reflected in the water of a flowing river, and there are bare trees in the foreground, maybe birch. The back of the painting has a note from my mother: “To my daughter, Kerstin. This picture has been hit by grenade slivers in Berlin during the war, 1945. It has accompanied us through Russia’s Gulag camps, 1945–1947. The damage shall be remembered forever!”
Acknowledgments
My immeasurable gratitude goes to my uncle Axel, my mother’s cousin, who was eight years old when the war ended, and who lived through the terrible famine during the early postwar years in Germany. When I asked for his help with this book, he was delighted and graciously went to work. There were many things that I, as an American, did not understand from a German perspective—the German politics of the time, the prewar state of that country, or how it affected its civilians—and on these points Axel was of tremendous help. He spent countless hours correcting my history when I wasn’t sure of it, correcting my German when I misspelled it, and in all cases he helped to verify events Margarete talked about.
Letters From Berlin: A Story of War, Survival, and the Redeeming Power of Love and Friendship Page 32