Adventures in My Youth

12 April 1945–April 1946: Captivity and recovery from wounds

In Holy Week of 1945 the destruction of the old German town of Danzig was completed. It was the eve of that dreadful night, the 27 March. On that fearful night, the city of Danzig and all the Vistula area were in flames. An eyewitness report stated: ‘From as far away as Hela, a wall of flames and smoke, 3000 to 4000 metres high, could be seen over the city’. It had been caused by air-raids with high explosive and incendiary bombs. The book Unvergänglicher Schmerz, or ‘Endless Agony’ is a record of the history of Danzig’s fateful year of 1945, by Peter Poralla. The section Das Inferno (p. 378) reads as follows:

That the city of Danzig was an ocean of fire was also described in the Divisional history. Hauptmann Franz Hrabowsky described it there and added to his description of the misery of the refugees: ‘In addition the women, concerned for the lives of their children, begged the soldiers many times to give up the fight. So it happened that in many places the officers, even using all their authority, did not always succeed in getting their people back out of the cellars. That was supplemented by an eyewitness account in Poralla, according to which in the Halbe Allee, and also in the Grosse Allee, deserters are said to have been hanged in rows.’

During the next few hours, our rooms were entered again and again by other Russians who behaved very differently. Many threatened us with their weapons. But, in many, you could see something like pity. Young members of the Komsomol, perhaps 16 years old, were the worst. One waved his machine-pistol slowly from bed to bed and then stopped in front of Franz Manhardt, aiming at his head. I can still see Franz’s profile with the questioning expression on his face, especially the detail of the eyelid of his left eye opening and closing while the young Russian – it seemed to last minutes, but it could only have been seconds – had him in his sights. I can still see too how another held a pistol, a German 08, at Oberleutnant Nabert’s temple. I can see Nabert turning his eyes upwards in order, in the last second of his life, to look his murderer in the face. But on both occasions the Russians did not pull the trigger. From that I concluded that they obviously did not have a general order to kill wounded men, nor particularly officers.

Almost amusing, when compared with the situations mentioned above, in which you were hovering between life and death, was how our watches were taken away. They were collected up, in a procedure to which the main interest of the individual members of the Red Army seemed to be directed, as they said, Uhr ist? Because I had left my service watch behind at my unit when I was wounded, I no longer had a watch, and had to try to express this with gestures of helplessness. That seemed to be incomprehensible to one of the busy plunderers, because, with his index finger on my forehead, he pushed my head back on to the straw filled pillow. Officers also came into our room. I can clearly remember a tall, blond young major who spoke German and was an artilleryman. When he asked how I had been wounded, I replied, to please him, ‘by artillery’, which in fact did please him.

In conversation one of us said that the war was over for us, to which the major replied that it was only just beginning. In actual fact, at that time many Russians were convinced that with the downfall of Hitler’s Germany the capitalist Western powers would then turn against Russia. I found it to be more than a friendly gesture when a captain, before the officers moved on, brought out a bottle of plundered schnapps from his overcoat and reached it over to me in bed. Of course none of us exhausted wounded men would have been capable even of taking one gulp from it. So I hid the bottle in my bunk under the straw mattress.

After some hours of continually being visited by Russians we were pleased that the last assault had passed off so lightly for us helpless men. The fact that we had not yet received any food that day was unimportant. Indeed none of us felt hungry or thirsty. After all we had escaped with our lives. We also did not see anything of the medics who had stayed behind. We understood that none of them risked coming up to us on the second storey. Similarly, little was to be seen of the two doctors. I still know their names and can remember what they looked like. One of them was the Munich surgeon Dr Stadel-Eichel. He was compact in appearance and gave the impression of being busy. The other was a senior doctor from the Greifenwald University Clinic by the name of Dr Wolf. He was tall, slim and with a relaxed manner.

Meanwhile, there was no question of a ‘normalisation of conditions’ so soon after the hospital was handed over. German shells were still exploding. However, a new development was that the unmistakable smell of burning was spreading through the building. The air in the house was thickening into fumes heavy with smoke. Nobody knew whether the building had been set on fire by German gunfire, or had been set alight by the Russians, or perhaps even by the Poles. It later turned out that it was arson. In fact it was said that, of the 800 seriously wounded men who had remained behind, 150 lost their lives in that fire.

The saviour of the men in our ward was Franz Manhart. It must have been after mid-day and the fumes were apparently preventing the Russians from moving about freely in the building. Franzl took advantage of the opportunity to seek out a way that we could save ourselves. He succeeded in discovering a staircase close to our ward. Although wide, the stairway itself was blocked with the furniture that had been in the rooms before the hospital was set up. Nevertheless, enough space had been left for one man to get through between the banister and the furniture. For us it was a matter of leaving our beds and struggling through that exit to freedom. For Eberhard Nabert and me – I can only remember the two of us – it was a risky undertaking. Neither of us had left his bed since we had been wounded. I was so enfeebled that I could scarcely stand. With little time, I did not know what I should take with me. I can still remember that I only had on my collarless soldier’s shirt, and that I put my field tunic on over it. I needed both arms to hold on to the wall and to the banister.

Under Franzl’s direction we managed to get out into the open and into a sort of yard. There were remarkable scenes that I can only recall happening in a blur. Wounded men who seemed to have just got out into the open were lying on the bare earth and only crawling or scrabbling about. Others were being taken by helpers, including Russian soldiers, to an undetermined destination. Russians seemed to be still plundering and arguing over plunder. One of them had several wristwatches on his arm. Smoke was still belching from the building. Flames could not yet be seen. The following night, according to an eyewitness account from the book mentioned above, the ‘TH’ went up in flames. It shared the fate of many buildings that were destroyed by fire only after they had been taken over by the occupation forces.

Free of smoke and fumes was a single storey building that had served as a physics laboratory, as could be seen from the wide windows reaching to the roof. That area had similarly been set up with basic bunks that were all occupied of course. Because of the fire it had been necessary to fill each bed with two or three wounded men. I had the good fortune to have to share such a bed with only one comrade. In the next three days and nights it was our refuge. My comrade must have been wounded in the head, because they had bandaged his skull in such a way that only one eye, his nose, and his mouth could still be seen. When he spoke, he spoke incoherently, but soon I could tell, at least by his accent, that he must be from Vienna. When during the night he was rambling in his coma, I began to recognise him more and more, and finally I was able to identify him as a comrade from my own regiment. He was Leutnant Robert Kelca, who had relieved me in the summer of 1944 as second orderly officer with Major von Garn. It was a sad, but unusual reunion.

It was dreadful that German women and girls had hidden themselves between and under the emergency beds. Of course, the Russians noticed. Again and again a Russian would come past, track down a woman and wave or drag her out. According to their temperament, the women would be led out of the room by their violators either resisting or resigned. The next day or the day after that the Russians were looking for men who had not been wounded who might have been able to go to ground among us. One Russian went from bed to bed and ordered, Aufstehen, which for most of us was not possible, whereupon he shouted, Schlaffen, after which we were allowed to stretch out again. I have to say that no healthy man was among the wounded. That was on Easter Sunday.

Women continued to hide in the room, and when their torturers had let them go, returned to us again. A certain Friedl obviously felt particularly attached to me. On Easter Sunday, after something dreadful had apparently happened to her, she came back into the room, visibly overflowing with emotion. Without a word she dashed over to me.

In the week after Easter we were transported to the complex of the Medical Academy. It seemed to be an intact hospital and not a temporary military hospital as the ‘TH’ had been. We were moved over there in Sankas. The drivers were Russians, but the porters were German prisoners. As we were being loaded up and unloaded we were surrounded by Polish civilians who followed the proceedings with hostility.

It is true that Danzig had not possessed a university, but as well as the Technical High School it had had this Medical Academy, where it was possible to study medicine before the ‘collapse’. Head of Surgery was Professor Klose, an old gentleman. His senior registrar Dr Johanssen was middle aged. The rounds of those two gentlemen provided a welcome change. As civilian doctors in a university clinic, the operation of a military hospital was strange to them. They carried out their work as they had been accustomed to do and as the conquerors permitted. There were even private consultations.

Professor Klose, as we found out, enjoyed a measure of respect in the eyes of the Russians. In 1932 he had operated for acute appendicitis on the Russian State President Kalinin who had been on a cruiser on the way to a state visit to Sweden. Professor Klose, a worthy and corpulent gentlemen, told us that he spent his summer holidays in Pechtoldsdorf near Vienna, where he had a house. One day he reported – but this was certainly not true – that the express train connection from Danzig to Vienna had been re-established. The senior registrar Johanssen was a cheerful, bright man who shared our pleasure when a cure was progressing well. From the conversations I had, I recall the theme of the future, which, in accordance with the euphoria of the convalescent, appeared to us in rosy hues. Conversing with Dr Klose and Dr Johanssen, I told them about my parents’ parsonage and told them that I, too, would most want to study theology.

We did not stay long in the Medical Academy. Instead of the many Russians, who at the beginning continued to come, then it was Poles in some kind of official capacity. The hospital was evidently taken over by a kind of Polish civilian administration. Various commissions came, of which it was said that they were ‘Lublin’ Poles, that is, they belonged to the wing of the Polish resistance that was allied to Russia. I can recall a civilian doctor who had a seven-figure number tattooed on his lower arm. He showed it to us and said that he had got it in a concentration camp. In the Third Reich we had heard by hearsay of the existence of such camps, above all Dachau. But we knew nothing at all of their extent and of what their inmates had to suffer. At one of those inspections by Poles, a German-speaking Communist was present. He had fun rocking on my bed in order to hurt me. He succeeded, too. But I was even more astonished at the sadistic temperament of a man expressing itself in such a way.

From the shell splinter injury on my left buttock an abscess had formed. It required opening by a lengthy cut at the top of my upper thigh. Today I cannot recall whether this intervention was carried out while we were still in the ‘TH’ or whether it was carried out by Dr Johanssen in the Academy. But I do remember that afterwards for some weeks I was only able to lie with my leg drawn up. There was as yet no question of getting out of bed, especially as I was also really weakened by hunger. In the sick room, food was an important topic of conversation. Doubtless it was a sign that we were getting better. We imagined what sort of celebration meals we would have if, with God’s help, we were once again able to eat them.

It must have been about 20 April that we were moved in cattle wagons by rail to Thorn. That was about 150 kilometres away up the Vistula. In Thorn there still remained from the war a large barracks camp, in which Allied prisoners of war had been held after the German victories. So the camp was filled with us, the final losers. As far as I could establish, as well as soldiers and officers who had been taken prisoner uninjured, the camp also came to house many wounded and sick men. Dysentery and typhus were rife. Those who had become sick with those diseases were isolated in their own barracks. From them, day after day, were brought out in the morning the bodies of those men who had died the previous night. Most of the camp inmates were dystrophic, recognisable by their oedemas due to hunger, by swollen legs and faces. On their arrival in the camp, both the healthy and the sick had to go into the sauna, the banja. No consideration was given to fever and the danger of pneumonia. I saw wounded men, running a temperature of 40 degrees, who had to go into the hot sauna and afterwards would lie for hours on end in the train on the way to the barracks.

The wounded not only died of dysentery and typhus, but also, it seemed to me, simply of debility due to their wounds and a lack of sufficient nourishment. In our sick barracks, in which I had ended up with Franzl Manhart, the thin soup handed out twice a day, by way of food, was distributed out of a pot. The pot, after it had been brought in, was set up in the barrack block, and then every man received his dollop from the ladle into his canteen. The many men who were confined to their beds were served their food by medics. One thing remains unforgettable to me. In that barrack block officers and men were not separated. One comrade was at the point of death. The medic, who had seen this, quickly put next to his pillow the canteen of the man who was lying at his last gasp. After the wounded man was dead, the medic hurriedly removed the canteen. In that way he got a second portion for himself. Even today I can see the scene. The medic lurked there watching the man, who was still alive. Then, after the man’s life was over, he tucked into the dead man’s soup ration.

After our arrival in the camp and before we were put into the barracks I had lain in one of the several Finnish tents which were provided for seriously wounded men. The Finnish tents were made of plywood and were taller than a man, so that the people lay in two layers over each other. I lay in the lower layer and I remember a Latvian SS Leutnant who lay diagonally above me. His arm had suffered paraplegia and dropped everything down. It was terrible, because his arm was not cleaned. Beside me there lay another Kriegsfreiwilliger Latvian officer. His Christian name was Antons. He had had one leg amputated and in the other had an extensive flesh wound. But he had still kept his leg. As well as his native language, Antons spoke fluent German and Russian. So I was able to have some good conversations with him. He was completely without illusions in contemplating his future. He was enormously collected and self-controlled. As a Soviet citizen who had opposed the Bolsheviks, he might expect their revenge and a completely uncertain future. The Russian medical officer, a major, who came on his rounds once a day, was called Raskolnikov. His hair was already grey and he had a moustache. We could tell how to a certain extent he ‘put up with’ the misery which surrounded him. But he clearly regretted that he was not able to give better help.

Time alone had been left to heal my wounds. There were neither medicines nor fresh dressings. I was urged by the German doctor to diligently practise stretching my left leg. A final test tap revealed that there was no more coming from the injury to my lungs. In Thorn, in the barracks, I was allowed to get out of bed and could move around the camp with a single crutch. As the doctor had threatened that he would sit on my crooked leg if I did not soon stretch it out again, I carried out the exercise diligently. Slowly the condition of my leg returned to normal.

In the camp at Thorn for the first time we came into contact with political propaganda. On large banners were written so-called ‘sayings’. They were mostly words of Lenin or Stalin, with which we were confronted. ‘The Hitlers come and go, but the German people, the German state, will remain’, went one Stalin quote. It had a surprisingly prophetic ring to it. As we received no kind of news or situation reports, we knew nothing of the progress of the war or even about the death of the Führer.

Towards noon on 8 May 1945, it is true that the camp loudspeaker quite unexpectedly announced to us that the war was over. Germany, it said, had ‘unconditionally surrendered’. Sometime afterwards the sentries appeared also to have heard the news. They celebrated the event in their own way, by firing their ammunition off into the air. For us, this was not without its dangers, because ricochets were buzzing through the air and bullets came through the wooden walls of the barracks. We, the conquered, meanwhile, lay on the floor of the barracks or on the sandy ground of the camp, scrabbling for safety on the ground. Hopefully it was for the last time.

The camp complex included a sports ground, at the edge of which the convalescent officers lay in Finnish tents. I often visited them to get a change and to exchange ideas. They were waiting to be transported away. No-one dared to think that some would be released and sent home. Perhaps one small Hauptmann would be lucky. Both his lower legs had been amputated below the knee, and he had thus become even smaller than he had otherwise been at his scant 5 foot 2 inches. He moved around on his hands and knees and made tiny leaps just like a sick frog.

Among the closed circle of the officers there was still the accustomed politeness. You addressed each other with Herr, whereas elsewhere it was soon the fact that you were addressed as du by a ‘class-conscious proletarian’. In the company of those officers was a girl of 20, pretty as a picture, dazzlingly blonde, with bright blue eyes. She was the daughter of General Lasch, the commandant of Festung Königsberg, who had surrendered there. I wondered where and how such a girl could have survived the first assault.

The Thorn camp was so gigantic that, with my limited sphere of movement, I was not able to get an idea of the extent of it. It was said that 30,000 men lay within its barbed wire fences. Every few day transports of ambulant prisoners left. They had been gathered into groups of a few hundred men and had left the camp. In Thorn, incidentally, I had met another man from Stockerau by the name of Franz Heinz. We had exchanged addresses and I had given him a slip of paper for my relatives, as I suspected that he, because he was only a private soldier, would be released earlier than I would, because I was an officer. It actual fact he was released as early as 1945 and my parents received the news I was alive only on Christmas Eve, 24 December.

As it turned out, the next destination of the marching column was Graudenz, some 55 kilometres away. But the march had to be made on foot. There could have been 500 to 1,000 men who set off, after the fashion of the Red army, each section consisting of five men. At the head there marched some 30 officers from Oberstleutnant to Leutnant with quite varying amounts of baggage. The gentlemen who had surrendered and had been taken prisoner uninjured had generally a lot of baggage. I and others only possessed the little we had been able to salvage from the military hospital in Danzig and had been able to supplement during the course of the following weeks. I had only the underclothes I was wearing, my uniform tunic and trousers, a haversack and canteen and an overcoat. Added to those, I believe, were a toothbrush, my pay-book, my identification disc and a couple of photos in my old plastic wallet.

Franzl Manhart had already been allocated to an earlier transport and we had therefore been separated. Another comrade whom I had found in Thorn I had lost again. He was Dr Walter Rath, a Viennese whose home address was Hütteldorferstrasse 333. Rath had studied Latin and Greek, was an educated Mittelschule teacher, but in the bad times before 1938 had been unemployed. He had therefore become a leader in the Labour Service. At first he was in the Austrian Labour Service and afterwards in the Reich Labour Service. Towards the end of the war he had been transferred to the Wehrmacht as a Feldmeister and had thus become a Leutnant. In the hospital barracks in Thorn he had been in the next bed.

In about 1960 I met him again in the Salzburg officers’ mess. He had transferred into the Austrian Bundesheer and then, as a major, he was commandant of the Telegraph Battalion. He regretted that he had not met me years earlier. He had had trouble in proving his officer’s rank, something to which I could have attested, at least for our time in Thorn, when we were still wearing badges of rank.

The highest-ranking officer and therefore the right-hand wing man in the first unit was Oberstleutnant der Reserve Dr Josef Deckwitz. He was a lawyer from Münster in Westphalia. From then on until I was released, with some interruptions, I was always together with Deckwitz. I shall speak of him many more times. Although by age, he was born in 1896, and could have been my father, we had a close comradely relationship with each other. I owe him much for expanding my horizons. Deckwitz had been a flak officer. He had a huge ribcage and possessed a loud voice. He had, he said, been much in demand as a defence counsel in criminal cases and his legal pleas were something worth hearing.

Once, he said, in a trial before a jury, knowing that from midnight of the next day an amnesty would come into force, he had pleaded for many hours to benefit his client. The court, he said, had patiently tolerated his constant repetitions. Before 1933 Deckwitz had been a Social Democrat. His wife was the niece of an SPD, if not a Communist, member of the Reichstag who had emigrated to the Soviet Union. (After graduating to my doctorate in 1952, I visited him in Münster and was delighted to see him again. His wife was interesting and clever. The great misfortune of the two of them was that their son, their only child, had ‘completely ruined himself’ with drink.)

Although many healthy men capable of marching were in the column, it was still an unparalleled trail of misery. The armed sentries walked on all four sides of the column, but took careful notice of the many weak and feeble men. The distance of 55 kilometres, which healthy troops could have covered in one day’s march, was tackled in three stages. Half was done on the first day, something that made demands on many men, leading to exhaustion. The other half was tackled in two days’ marches each of 12 kilometres. Obviously the weakest men did not have the strength to walk further. I had recovered to such an extent, and had in the meantime learned again to stretch my left leg, that I managed all right. The worry of every man was always not to drop out of the column or be left behind, in order not to be shot by the guards, as had often happened. We spent the nights in barns on farms. If the sentries had not just dug out some women and the women were not screaming out for help, you could get a bit of rest and sleep well in the straw.

On the first day’s march we passed through the little town of Kulmsee. It had obviously been taken without any fighting. We were stared at by the Polish civilian population without visible hostility. I saw it as a particular irony of fate that on the last day of the march we moved along the very that five months before had been one of the roads along which we had been retreating. That was before we had crossed the Vistula over the ice bridge to the south-west of Graudenz. It was a particular sign of our having been beaten. In Graudenz, so word had gone round in the meantime, the transports were being assembled that would take us by railway into the interior of Russia. In Graudenz we were gaped at by the civilian population. They were evidently more hostile than the population of Kulmsee, but there were no incidents. Our destination in Graudenz was a barracks complex. We were placed in groups of many men, in completely empty rooms. But they were dry and everyone had enough room to be able to stretch out. We remained in the barracks for two or three days and nights. Then it was time for us to march to the railway station to be loaded on to the trains.

Today I can no longer remember whether the railway in the area occupied by the Russians had at that time already been converted to the Russian gauge or whether this was not yet the case. But I do know that 20 men were stuffed into one goods wagon. Half way between the floor and the roof a shelf had been placed on both sides of the wagon doors. There we lay on the bare wood. There was no kind of comfort, neither straw nor hay, to relieve the hardness of the floor. The only necessary luxury was the availability of a hole in the floor of the wagon, some 20mm in diameter, that served for the purposes of defecation. It was a simple solution, but an unpleasant one for those who, like me, were lying near to the hole. Fortunately it was not necessary for urinating. That was done through the open wagon door.

The transport train left Graudenz about 20 June. Nobody knew what its destination was. The rumour was that we were heading for Murmansk. It was one of the many topics of conversation in our officers’ wagon. Nobody had been on the Murmansk front. But many of us knew what had happened there in the First World War. 70,000 of the German prisoners of war and 20,000 of the Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war set to work on building the Murmansk railway had died. But as things turned out everything was quite different than the Parolen, that is the rumour, would have it.

After a relatively short journey, via Deutsch-Eylau and Allenstein, the transport came to a halt. It was the time before and during the ‘Potsdam Conference’. That was to be the last summit conference of the ‘Big Three’ of the anti-Hitler coalition of the Second World War. It was held in the Schloss Cäcilienhof, in Potsdam, from 17 July to 2 August 1945 and was between Truman, Stalin and Churchill or Attlee. The result of that conference was the ‘Potsdam Agreement’. In that agreement, subject to a final settlement of the territorial questions in a peace treaty, the town of Königsberg and the adjacent district of East Prussia were placed under the administration of the USSR. The border had hitherto existed between the USSR and Poland and ran approximately along a line between the towns of Braunsberg and Goldap. The area to the north was allocated to the USSR. For our transport and us it resulted in our destination being the part of East Prussia occupied by the USSR. We were not sent further on into the interior of the Soviet Union.

The train was on the tracks for five weeks. I recall the summer of 1945 as being very hot. During those five weeks it did not rain on one single day. For a fortnight no one was allowed to leave the wagon. Only after that, during the remaining three weeks, did the guards allow us during the day to camp in a meadow alongside the train beside the tracks. Being allowed to do this made our stay more bearable than the first fortnight had been. The constricted conditions and the heat had thoroughly irritated us prisoners. Many of them worked themselves up into a proper fury. In our wagon, too, hostile words were exchanged. For instance, men who were on the lower bunks were disturbed by the feet of those lying above them. One man complained that, when eating it was so dark that ‘you couldn’t even find the way to your mouth’. He who said it was a Leutnant Dr Hess from Frankfurt am Main. He worked as a translator at IG Farben, spoke fluent English, French and Spanish and had some interesting things to tell about his job. Hess was my neighbour and we were both lying directly beside the notorious hole.

Then there was a Hauptmann der Reserve Stölzner. He came, I believe, from Upper or Central Franconia. He was about 40 years old, and told of an elder brother who during the First World War had been taken prisoner by the Russians and had been sent to Siberia. From there he had fled to China and had attached himself as a military adviser to Marshal Chiang-Kai-Shek. His brother had married a Chinese woman, a fact that led in the wagon to a debate over the virtues of the women of another race. With the most earnest face Stolzner told of a peculiarity of Chinese women. His assertion caused among some men a short astounded amazement, until the laughter of the other men told them that Stolzner had been leading them ‘up the garden path’.

As one of the naive and, moreover, still visibly fearful comrades, I recall Staff Paymaster Uhland. He was a descendant of the poet of the Schwäbische Kunde, but evidently was not so fearless as his ancestor was supposed to have been. While the war was still going on, rumours had been circulating that the poor quality soap there was at that time had partly been produced from human bones. That was something that seemed completely incredible. But then after the war had ended, assertions concerning the atrocities practised in German concentration camps were doing the rounds. It is true that our fear of being shot had in the meantime abated. But the future was completely unknown and it seemed quite probable that we would be consigned to years of forced labour under inhuman conditions. It was therefore black humour when, in order to worry Herr Uhland, a man in the wagon asserted that the German officers who had been taken prisoner were going to be taken and turned into soap, and that well nourished paymasters, such as Uhland, would be made into toilet soap!

During the time we were kept in the transports there were some deaths. The causes of death could not be established. Since there were no lists in existence, the only responsibility of the guards was to replenish the number of prisoners being transported. That was achieved by the guards swarming out and grabbing male German civilians, of whom there were still a few, there in Masuria. During the first period of our captivity in the East there were no lists and the prisoners were not recorded by name. The many who died of epidemics and hunger were never recorded. In my opinion the real reasons that many years later, long after 1955, when the last prisoners were released, that people believed in the existence of so-called Schweigelager. Meanwhile, it is a fact that one in three soldiers who had come into the custody of the USSR did not survive his captivity, and never returned. From my personal experience I attribute that to the reasons I have mentioned above and to the wholly insufficient medical care which they received initially.

Before the summer of 1945 I had not been acquainted with East Prussia. If there had not been the sadness that we experienced at the loss of a land through which we slowly travelled, it would have been a pleasure to see this friendly and cultivated land. From the train, as it travelled past the settlements and even the town of Allenstein much seemed to have remained intact. But everywhere was depopulated. Only the summer sunshine stopped the landscape from giving a ghostly impression. Wistfulness seized the sensitive ones among us, as we travelled through the station at Tharau, because many knew the song Ännchen von Tharau.

I must mention one more stop in Deutsch-Eylau, where several thousand prisoners of war were encamped in a meadow. It was there, and not in Graudenz, that the final allocation and assembly of the transports for the East took place. In that meadow, as elsewhere, the officers were separated. It was there, completely surprised, that I met some gentlemen from our Division. They were Major Östreich, the Divisional Adjutant, and Hauptmann Franssen, the commander of the signals battalion.

From the latter I learnt that the Division, before the surrender, had got to Bornholm by ship in a fairly good condition. They had thought themselves to be safe, when two Russian torpedo boats appeared. The Danish island was occupied by the Russians, and all the Germans were taken prisoner. Östreich did indeed know that Regiment 7 under Oberstleutnant von Garn on the destroyer Karl Galster had not made for Bornholm, but had set course for the Danish mainland. But it was not known whether the destroyer, and with it the remnants of the regiment, had got through. Östreich, Franssen, and the other Bornholmers had until then been able to keep all of their baggage. They had evidently until then not been searched and not been plundered. A not so pleasant memory is that none of them offered me even a cigarette. Compared with them I had nothing. I enjoyed smoking again, ever since the senior registrar Johanssen in Danzig gave me a cigarette. He had said, with a smile, that I could forget my fear of not being able to smoke after the injury to my lung. But I could once again have that pleasure.

In Deutsch-Eylau I also saw again the medic who had shamelessly bitten into the full block of chocolate in front of all the hungry men in our room. I refrained from speaking to him. Elsewhere on the meadow a soldiers’ choir was singing a song which at that time belonged to the firm repertoire of German Gesangvereine: Wenn ich den Wanderer frage, wo gehst du hin? Nach Hause, nach Hause, spricht er mit frohem Sinn. (‘If I ask the wanderer, where are you going? I’m going home, home, he says cheerfully’). Here at least the German spirit, which had evidently remained intact, was still alive and kicking.

We stayed a week in the area of the border that had just been drawn in Potsdam between Russia and Poland. There would not be a journey into the unknown lasting for weeks, as many men had feared. In Insterburg we had already reached our destination. I recall marching past the huge undamaged Martin Luther Church. Then the column moved along the road over a valley bottom lined with poplars that stretched for a few kilometres. Our destination was the Georgenburg camp, an old estate. In previous decades it had been home to a stud farm. Georgenburg was the home of the Barrings and was known to the educated German middle-class from the novel of the same name. It was only after I returned home that I read Die Barrings and its sequel Der Enkel by William von Simpson. But even in 1945, without knowing the novel, I could imagine clearly enough how things had been before, and the defeat that had taken place. We marched along the drive and through a gate on which there was the date 1268 in old figures.

There in Georgenburg was Main Camp 445. Later it was called 7.445. It was the headquarters of the prisoner of war camps in the Russian-occupied part of East Prussia. From there, camps were established in Königsberg, in Tilsit, and in other locations in East Prussia. At that time there was still the infectious diseases hospital in Insterburg that was later closed down. I cannot recall many facts from our short first stay there in Georgenburg in the summer of 1945. The main thing I recall is the soup made out of turnip scraps. They constituted the main part of our food. The turnip scraps had been used as fodder for horses on the stud farm, and I cannot believe that this was unknown to the Russians.

Then I recall that many officers, particularly staff officers, were there. Amongst them, was an Oberst Remer, the elder brother of Major Remer. After 20 July 1944 Remer, on Goebbels’s orders, had occupied the Bendlerstrasse with the Berlin guard battalion. He had crushed the rebellion, and for that had been personally promoted by Hitler to Generalmajor. By contrast to that Remer, who was said to have been something of a simple unit officer, our Remer was a real man of the world with the best address and international experience. He had himself been military attaché in Spain or had been attached to the military attaché. He could speak several languages. As once many Russian noblemen and Tsarist officers had done, after the First World War, he had hoped to be able to see out the rest of his life as a hotel porter. I also recall the appearance of a quartet of men who sank the famous French hit song Parlez-moi d’amour to great applause. ‘Tell me of happiness’ was the first line of the song in German. That much I understood.

But I also recall some political speeches made by officers. They were attempts to come to terms with the new situation. They were completely apolitical men. Their world, their only world, had collapsed. Finally, I can still remember that there in the Georgenburg camp all insignia of rank had to be taken off and all heads had to be shaved. We officers found that to be an additional humiliation. It was the intention that its main purpose was a hygienic measure to prevent epidemics. In the Red Army shaven heads were the regulation, even if not for officers. Most of the prisoners in any case were suffering from diarrhoea mixed with blood, like dysentery, for which there was no kind of help.

Among the most significant industrial plants in East Prussia, where there was little industry, were the pulp factories attached to the Feldmühle concern. In Königsberg they were the Werk Sackheim and the Werk Zosse. Those factories were supposed to be rebuilt by German prisoners of war as part of the restitution process. For that reason there was a camp in Sackheim and another in Holstein, below the town, where the Pregel emptied into the freshwater lagoon.

We had been transported on lorries from Georgenburg to Königsberg. The town appeared to have been dreadfully destroyed. In Danzig, while being transported from the Technical High School to the Medical Academy, I had happened to get a glimpse of the Marienkirche, the landmark of the town. There on the journey through Königsberg was offered sufficient opportunity to imagine how beautiful that town must once have been. We drove past the destroyed castle and a comrade from Königsberg showed us where Kant’s grave was.

The British air-raid of 30 August 1944 had turned the inner town into a heap of rubble. Before the town surrendered on 9 April 1945 the Russians had circled it to the north. The first suburb they had taken was Metgethen. The Russians were in fact driven out of there again. But the fate of the inhabitants and of the refugees who had been caught by surprise was a terrible indication of what was waiting for the German civilian population. General Lasch, conscious of his responsibility for a large civilian population, and for his troops who were uselessly shedding their blood, had surrendered the town on 9 April. He may thus have saved the lives of countless other people. But Hitler personally sentenced him to death by hanging, because he had not fought to the last man. Unspeakable things had then indeed gone on. In their despair, women and young girls had thrown themselves into the Pregel, or committed suicide in some other way. After the rapes, murders, arson, and plundering, there came hunger and many deaths.

Hugo Link, one of the few Protestant pastors to stay behind in Königsberg and survive, tells in his book Königsberg 1945 bis 1948, that in autumn 1945 the number of Germans in Königsberg was still 96,000. The number of civilians in Königsberg during its last period as a Festung had been 126,000. Thus, in the course of half a year 30,000 people must have died. Epidemics and hunger decimated the population still more, so that finally only 24,000 were left. They were to be transported away. According to that, more than 100,000 must have been snatched away by death.

The prisoners of war were hermetically sealed off and guarded so intently, that for most of them or even all of them, no contact was possible with the civilian population. I cannot recall any particular occasion, even if now and again news of the civilian filtered through. The German camp leader of our small Holstein camp, which was supposed to hold 200 men, was Oberleutnant Kahl from Königsberg. It was said that his family was still in the town. The process of living, suffering and dying thus went on unseen by the prisoners of war.

Meanwhile, they had the certain feeling that their life was no longer directly under threat. I also, looking back, cannot say for certain that we were systematically exposed to starvation. The dreadful turnip scrap soup of Georgenburg was replaced by sauerkraut, kapusta. There was a litre of that soup twice a day. The calculated ration of meat and fat, both of which were mixed into the soup, was 9 grams for meat and 12 grams for fat. There may well have also been at that time, I cannot now recall exactly, a tablespoon of sugar and bread, the ration for which was 600 grams per day. But the sugar, it was always unrefined sugar, was hardly ever edible, but mostly damp and heavy. It was generally known in all camps that the Russians responsible deviated from the set ration of food for the prisoners of war.

The calculation was simple. If you mixed to the quantity of 10 grams of sugar 1 litre of water, you had got an additional kilogram left for private barter. It was a similar case with the bread, the khleb. There was an unimaginable difference, even while the war was still going on, between what we considered to be bread, and the bread that the Russians provided. It must have been baked in moulds, in tin boxes, because with the unimaginably high water content the dough would have run away. But the moulds had to be lubricated, and we never got to the bottom of the question as to whether this was done with petroleum or with engine oil. The crusts, the only parts that were baked through, sometimes tasted disgusting and smelled unpleasant. From time to time a lot of oats were also mixed in. Many could not face the damp, badly baked bread, and for that reason often, if an oven was nearby, it was toasted, which gave off quite considerable clouds of steam. The weight of the toasted slices was considerably less than it had been before.

‘Camp Holstein’ was in a plant that had been built in the inter-war period, probably after 1933. It had housed an ‘Army Optical Research Institute’, or something of a similar name. Two buildings measuring some 20 by 10 metres stood at right angles to each other. They had two storeys and were built of red brick. The area was no larger than 2,000 or 3,000 square metres and had been securely fenced in by the builders. The building to the right of the entrance, ran at a right angle to the road, and had been a workshop. From its roof you could see across the freshwater lagoon far to the west and to the south. The plant lay alone outside the settlement. In the first building there was still a lot of equipment from the time of its earlier use, in particular binocular periscopes, for which the Russians obviously had no use.

The other building, lying parallel to the road, was where we were housed. The officers were quartered in some smallish rooms on the ground floor and on the first floor, and the other ranks in two large rooms. We officers had individual wooden beds, whereas the other ranks lay on bunks one above each other and subdivided. The German camp leader, Oberleutnant Karl, had a room of his own in which he lived with his assistant, another officer. In front of the accommodation building was the kitchen block from the time when the plant was in German hands.

The running of the kitchen was the responsibility of two officers. They had been taken prisoner unwounded and were a picture of enviable strength and health. They used their position to divert rations to themselves. From the roof they had thoroughly observed the terrain, and one day in the spring of 1946 they disappeared. Many months later there was a rumour that their escape attempt had succeeded and they were supposed to have written from Germany.

Our workplace in the Holstein factory was about three-quarters of an hour away. We went there on a country road and passed a solitary house, that had earlier been a simple inn. Oberleutnant Kahl told us that, on our road over 200 years earlier, Immanuel Kant, the Königsberg philosopher, had gone for walks. He was said never to have left Königsberg, and yet in his lectures had been able to give exact descriptions of London and Paris etc.

The factory was already partly in operation again. We prisoners were detailed, in the Russian fashion, into so-called brigades, groups of about 10 men each. My brigade worked on making multi-layered wooden trestles that were used in the construction of a larger container. We worked under the direction of Russians, who were all members of the technical units, as shown in the names of their service ranks. So, for instance, the normal sub-lieutenant was called Mladschy-Tjechnik-Litenant, in German Unter-Technik-Leutnant. The so-called Natschalnik, the commandant in our area, was an elderly first lieutenant, of good-natured appearance. He was a teacher from Tambov, a provincial town halfway between Moscow and Samara. The foreman was a sergeant-major from Tomsk in Siberia, a skilled craftsman as far as I could judge. He must have been a mix of Russian and Mongolian. With him I had the impression that it embarrassed him that officers were performing menial tasks for him as prisoners.

During the fighting the high factory chimney had received a direct hit from an anti-tank gun. But it had only made a hole and had not brought down the chimney above it. To all appearances the Russians had suspected there was an artillery observer on the flue and had wanted to clear him out. A topic of conversation was how, and by whom, the hole could be repaired. Rumour had it that a specialist, a Russian buzz-word, had been offered 8,000 roubles to repair it. Such a specialist had been requested from Moscow and was already on the way.

It was autumn. We had been working for some weeks in the factory. Our working hours were 10 hours a day, only Sunday was a day off. But one Sunday there was a ‘voluntary’ work detail in which every prisoner capable of working had to take part. However, the unusual thing about it was that we did not have to go to work in the factory. We were loaded up on lorries and driven into the area of the new frontier between Russia and Poland. The process of drawing the frontier had apparently not yet been fully accomplished.

In the frontier area we had to gather up stinging nettles and similar weeds that were supposed to serve as fodder for horses. On that work detail I must have caught cold. The following Monday I felt ill. With difficulty I dragged myself to work in the factory. I was completely weak on the march back. I felt a stabbing pain in the right side of my chest that I could not explain. The lung that had been injured had been the left one. My strength deserted me more and more, and I was in danger of being left behind. The men next to me and behind me had apparently not noticed, and gradually I had reached the end of the column. I was afraid that I would soon collapse, when quite unexpectedly I got a hefty blow on my back.

The frequent cries of dawai, dawai by the sentries who brought us, or rather drove us, to work, was something that we were used to, and were part of the prisoners’ every day experience. Until then and, I have to say, also later, there had not been any mistreatment. I fell, and it was only with difficulty that I could pull myself up again. But two comrades got hold of me under my arms, and supported me on either side. They saw to it that I did not drop out of the column again. It was not the physical pain that hurt me and brought tears to my eyes, it was the mental torture I suffered through the degrading and humiliating mistreatment. I can still see the guard who hit me with the butt of his rifle in the small of my back. He was a young chap with a pretty face, if it had not been disfigured with pockmarks. Back in the camp I reported the incident, but Herr Kahl could do nothing. The only thing was to be treated by a doctor. By the evening it was obvious that I was running a fever.

Meanwhile, there was no doctor in our camp. Only a ‘field medical assistant’ who was a medical student without qualifications. As best he could, he fulfilled the function of camp doctor. It is true that he had a thermometer, a wooden stethoscope, a few dressings and iodine. He was an Upper Silesian by the name of Lebek. He listened to my chest and diagnosed an inflammation of the lining of my lungs and my ribs on the right hand side, but could only prescribe ‘bed rest’ for me. Of course I was incapable of working. I had a fierce stabbing pain in the right side of my chest. The only treatment Lebek could give me was repeatedly painting that side of my chest with iodine. He monitored my temperature and my general condition, but apart from that had to leave me to my fate.

During the following weeks I ran a heavy fever. I lay on my bunk without straw mattress or blanket, dressed in my uniform and covered with my old overcoat. The days were bleak while my comrades were at work and, God knows, I felt myself to be abandoned. There were no scales in the camp, so that it was only by seeing my bones protruding more and more, that I realised that I was losing more and more weight. We did not have a mirror in which I could have seen what I looked like. One time, when I had got out of bed, I saw that my knees were thicker than the bones of my upper leg. I was wasting away to a skeleton. I presented a similar picture to those I afterwards saw in photographs of the inmates of concentration camps. Night and day I used an empty jam tin as a urine bottle. I had to stand it next to my head, so that I did not accidentally knock it over, and I could reach it with less effort.

Throughout the winter, sick and weak, I remained in the camp. I could not and did not work. The winter, with temperatures as low as minus 15 degrees, was said not to have been a harsh winter for East Prussia. We had a stove in the room, so that at least cold was not added to hunger. There was also a good feeling of camaraderie in the cramped room. There was no one who acted in an underhand way, with one exception. He was, of all people, a circuit judge and a Reserve Oberleutnant. He was once seen drinking a comrade’s soup as he brought it from the canteen. Everyone could see how he was tortured by shame over this lapse, and so the incident was passed over in silence.

It was a different kind of anger for the community when Herr Rauchfuss, in civilian life a police official from Potsdam, sold his watch. He had been able to hold on to it through several ‘friskings’. But then he did a deal with a Russian sentry who obtained for him some additional rations. In particular he paid for a tin of American corned beef with a label in Cyrillic script. It was as painful for the rest of us to know of the existence of that supply, as it must have been for Rauchfuss to eat those additional rations alone! He knew how much the others envied him. But camaraderie no longer extended to giving to other people even a bit on the end of a knife.

Another man in our room was an artillery Oberleutnant Theo Krühne. He came from Leipzig, was a junior lawyer, and the son of a Reichsgerichtsrat. He occasionally spoke with pride of his father, who in his job was a leading jurist. After I returned home I found out through Paul Eberhardt what a dreadful fate Krühne’s family had met. In the artillery school in Jöterbog he had become acquainted with and married a girl from the nearby small town of Kalau, from where the Kalauers come. In the little town near Berlin the family thought they would be safe and had fled from the bombed city of Leipzig to Berlin to his young wife’s parents’ house. Krühne spoke with great pleasure of his wife and his small son. He had a red moustache and had striking blue eyes. It was a cruel stroke of fate that the house in which the family was living, including those who had fled, received a direct hit. A total of nine people lost their lives as a result.

Paul Eberhart, whom I have just mentioned, was Krühne’s close friend. He came from Augsburg and had relatives in Bregenz. This had given him the idea of passing himself off as an Austrian. It was not important in the Holstein camp, but only later in Georgenburg. In Holstein I was already instructing Paul about the importance and the significance of the Heimatschein for him, as an Austrian. In actual fact he did succeed in getting released with us and in getting back home to Augsburg.

In later years, after my studies, I met him in Munich, where, with a PhD, he was working as an occupational psychologist. Paul Eberhart was the same age as I was, but he looked a lot younger. He had a somewhat round face with blue eyes, and for a grammar school boy he was very well educated. In fact he had already studied philosophy for one semester. He spoke about the art historian Worringer in Munich and about other professors. He was acquainted with publishing houses and had an eye for valuable books. It was he who brought back to the camp many books while on work details in Jüditten and Metgethen.

One day Paul had been in the library of a Königsberg lawyer, Egon Fridell. He turned up with a three-volume cultural history of modern times from the C.H. Beck Verlag. It was a large first edition in greenish yellow. He worked his way through those volumes during the winter. He always underlined important parts as he did so, somewhat as my father and his father too had done. He also let me work on Fridell. I can still remember how we both agreed that we had found studying the introductory chapter particularly difficult. Of the books that Paul brought back with him, and which I then read for the first time, Rudolf Georg Binding’s Erlebtes Leben, and Hans Carossa’s Führung und Geleit, were the best known.

Other comrades in our room were Herr Straub, a lawyer from Düren near Aachen, and Herr Korte, who was a singer, a bass or baritone. I can remember that Korte would toast his bred on the stove in small strips and slices, and carefully distribute his sugar ration over them. A particular personality was Herr Böhm, a Reserve Hauptmann who had taken part in the First World War. Böhm called himself a lyricist, but I can no longer remember the quality of his poems. He was a gentleman of refined appearance with excellent manners and a cultured way of expressing himself. His Hochdeutsch had that certain East Prussian ring to it. I had the feeling that the downfall of his home city was a dreadful blow to him. I can still hear his voice when, in his East Prussian fashion, he would say to me Härr Schejderbauerchen. I had the impression that he was a prosperous man and a bachelor. One time he gave us a laugh when he sang a popular song, full of black humour, from the period after the First World War. Wenn der weisse Flieder wieder blüht (‘When the white lilacs bloom once more’). Remarkably, I can still remember the title of one of his lyrical poems. It would have marked him out as an East Prussian dialect poet. I do not know whether that was really the case, but the poem was called Schalche Flack, in Hochdeutsch, Ein Schälchen Fleck, or ‘a little bowl of Fleck’. It referred to the sour Kuttelfleck, a favourite East Prussian dish.

When my 22nd birthday came round, on 13 January 1946, I had recovered sufficiently to feel able to walk. It was a Sunday. I can remember it clearly because for the first and only time there was meat in the soup for lunch. Because it was my birthday, like all birthday boys, I received an extra helping by order of the camp leader. I devoured it with the greatest enjoyment and without the slightest prick of conscience towards my comrades!

After the meal I realised that Fritz Seyerl, a staff vet and Sudeten German, had not eaten with us. No one could explain why he was already full, but he was occasionally taken out of the camp by the Russians as a vet. So we thought he must have already eaten. On closer questioning he replied, after the meal, clenching both hands into fists, Solche Kavernen. He meant the state of the lungs of the horse he had been treating, and at the slaughtering and inspection of which he had been present.

My first trip out beyond the camp fence may have been in January or February. In the camp a comrade had died who had to be buried outside the camp. Herr Kahl, the camp leader, took me with him a few steps outside the camp. There the grave had already been dug. It was by a hedge. The body was laid in the flat grave. Oberleutnant Kahl said an ‘Our Father’, then the grave was filled in. Then we went back to the camp. We were the few prisoners who were capable only of working inside.

My last recollection of Holstein dates from March or April 1946. At that time we had received orders to erect round the camp a fence that was to some extent permanent. The Russians provided posts of over two metres high and many rolls of barbed wire. The posts were dug in or even concreted in, and then the wire was stretched over them. Stretching the wire with a tool designed for the purpose, I was able to get to work again for the first time. Slowly I felt my strength returning, even if I was still only capable of working inside. I even felt a certain satisfaction when I saw how tightly I had stretched the wire after the staples had been hammered in. But by the next day the tension had slackened because the material was already over-stretched.

The man directing the work was a Russian captain by the name of Mironov. He was the friendliest Russian that I met in captivity, not yet 30 years old, good-natured and kind. Blue-eyed and black-haired, he was smaller than me. He spoke a little German and was polite, almost comradely. But the notorious Skogo damoi, i.e. ‘home soon’, was no more convincing from his mouth than it was from other Russians. Doubtless it was decently and sincerely meant.

Meanwhile, we certainly were not going home soon. Although one day in April, we officers, with what little baggage we had, were loaded up on to lorries. But I was to encounter one more grotesque episode in the Holstein camp. For years I had carried in my right hand top pocket a marching compass. It was the compass that had, in February 1945, prevented me from going in the wrong direction with my men. But then I thought that the possession of it might lead people to think that I was planning to escape. It was too risky to keep it, even if my physical condition ruled out any thought of escaping. On one occasion as I went into the unused building in the camp where there were various types of optical equipment, I simply hid it. I decided I would certainly not need it any more. In the event that it was found on me during a frisking, it would lay me open to extreme unpleasantness.

But I was plain astonished when, a few weeks later, that very compass of mine was offered to me ‘for sale’. A Landser had been rooting about in the building and had found my compass. He decided that it was very likely that an officer might be interested in acquiring it as such an instrument would be necessary in any escape plan. Thanking him, I declined, without batting an eyelid.

Soon afterwards our miserable time in Königsberg came to an end. We officers were transferred back to the Georgenburg camp. Of course, once more we were completely unsure as to what was going to happen to us. Indeed, right up to the last day of our captivity, there was complete uncertainty, and unending anxiety. By then, the spring of 1946, the general situation had to a certain extent stabilised, if not improved.

Our return to the ‘main camp’ of Georgenburg, which was probably better organised than the Holstein camp, seemed at any rate to be advantageous to us. In fact the organisation and accommodation in the many barracks did indeed seem to be better. That was evident even as we arrived. We were subjected to a thorough ‘frisking’. My pay book and my New Testament were taken away from me. Losing my pay book felt to me just like losing my identity. From then I no longer had any document that could show who I was. I had nothing to show my name and rank, my date of birth, nor any other important dates. The seizure of my New Testament also hit me hard. It was the small pocket edition with the psalter I had received as a present from Father. It had his dedication, ‘A thousand shall fall beside thee, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee’. From then I had to summon up from my memory the consolation I had often felt in reading it. But I had to continue to trust in my Father’s dedication. The Russian guards evidently had orders to confiscate all written and printed material. Even my request for them to leave me with my New Testament ‘for cigarette papers’ met with no success.

We new arrivals were also given an immediate medical examination. The examination was not even ‘purely clinical’, but really consisted in viewing the naked prisoners and pinching their backsides in order to determine the degree of dystrophy. Since I was extremely emaciated, I could not be put down as capable of working. I was quite happy about that. But I considered myself to be even more fortunate not to be placed in the tuberculosis barracks. The ‘pointed’ noses of the men who were in the process of slowly dying there, beyond recovery, were frightening enough.

In the spacious barracks where we Holsteiners joined the other officers in the camp, there was at last enough room for an individual to lead an existence that was halfway human. We slept on single beds placed in the room either individually, against a wall, or in twos next to each other. Every bed was provided with a straw mattress and a blanket. Among the inmates of the barracks I was reunited with a whole series of acquaintances. Above all was Oberstleutnant Joseph ‘Job’ Deckwitz, whose Obermann in the bunk I was to be for a long time.

Another sign of the organisation in force was the fact that we were recorded on a register. That involved, at least for all officers, filling out questionnaires of several pages. Everyone had to answer 42 questions concerning his personal dates and, above all, the activities in which he had been engaged in the military. Our answers, in conjunction with denunciations by informers, provided the material that served as documentary evidence in the many war crimes trials that resulted in their cursory sentences of 25 years’ hard labour. From the start I had provided true information. For instance I had not concealed my rank as an officer, as many had done.

Even in the camp at Thorn, when informally that was still possible, officers who had ‘lost’ themselves in the ranks had acknowledged their rank. The constant fear of discovery, by comrades or fellow-countrymen, in which those men lived, would have prevented me from taking such a step. That was quite apart too from the fact that it would not have been in line with my natural honesty. As long as I had been with my unit nothing had happened that could not be militarily justified or that could have qualified as a war crime. So I was confident that no undeserved fate would overtake me. In actual fact I had had nothing to fear.

Even during our first stay in Georgenburg in the summer of 1945, the heads of men and other ranks had been shaven. What we took to be a measure intended to humiliate us, had obviously been necessary due to the completely unsatisfactory hygienic conditions. Many others suffered under such degradation. However, I resigned myself to the measure as a fateful means of enforcing conformity. I can still remember how many of us looked at each other in surprise. The disappearance of their hair had significantly altered the appearance of many men. The shape of the skull became a particular distinguishing feature. But we did not have to be subjected to that procedure a second time.

Our insignia of rank had long since been removed, and a man who had previously been an officer could only be recognised by the material and cut of his uniform. But nevertheless there were other signs too that distinguished the prisoners of war from each other. We could not believe our eyes when we saw on some caps small red, or white and red coats of arms and even some others of different colours. As it had been ordered by the camp authorities, it was pointless to let oneself be upset by it. It was an expression of the existing political situation, as it was known to us, by hearsay.

The German Reich, Greater Germany, had been completely conquered and shattered. Germany and Austria had each been divided into four zones of occupation, and no one knew what the borders of Germany would be in the future. So the Sudeten Germans cherished the illusion of eventually returning again to their homeland that had once again become part of Czechoslovakia. That was the case with Staff vet Dr Seyerl and another comrade. Herr Grün, a qualified businessman from Saarbrücken, had studied in Paris before the war. He was distinguished by his knowledge of French food, and reckoned that the Saar would become French. Thenceforward he considered himself ‘French’.

For most Austrians the situation seemed to be simple and clear. Of course many of us could not hide the feeling that it was a shabby trick, after our common defeat, now to separate ourselves. Should we follow the motto ‘every man for himself’, and abandon our German comrades-in-arms to their fate? I also remembered literature concerning the First World War. The members of the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy had then deserted the flag that they had once served in common. I recalled the snide commentary with which that act had been portrayed.

So now we were in the same situation. We deserted our common flag and for this were given dirty looks by many of our ‘German’ comrades. But no one knew how to answer the question as to what else we Austrians could have done. The thought that the Austrians would generally be released earlier than their comrades from the old German Reich was also by no means irrelevant to this issue. Who could have been criticised for trusting in that hope? Should we be like Paul Eberhart who, in the light of it, passed himself off as an Austrian? The fate of the Sudeten Germans had no doubt long since been decided. None of them knew what that decision was. We were cut off from our homeland. Until then we had not even been allowed to write. The coats of arms on caps indicated at a stroke the problems thrown up by that completely new situation. The Greater German Reich no longer existed. Hitler, to whom all of us had sworn an oath, was dead. It was therefore morally right, and even necessary, to declare our allegiance to our small Austrian homeland.

We prisoners were each assigned to work details, according to our physical constitution. Work details 1 and 2 were completely capable of working and had to work outside the camp. Work detail 3, to which I belonged, was only capable of Innendienst, that is, we could only be used for work within the camp. We still had a few Staff officers in the camp, including Dr Deckwitz, and they too had to be employed within it. Of those, I can recall an Oberst der Reserve, about 50 years old, by the name of Kassl. He was a pharmacist. He had lost an arm and feared that he would not be capable of carrying out his profession, because he would no longer be able to mix up ointments.

The oldest was Major Kischke, owner of a small East Prussian estate. I thought him to be between 60 and 70, he appeared old to me. Then there were a few gentlemen from Peenemünde, the experimental Army rocket station. They had not been able to get to safety in time before the Russians arrived. An ‘old’ Major and former ‘12-Ender’ was called Hinz. He had been the so-called Platzoffizier in Peenemünde. He had the furrowed face and the tanned skin of a native of the Alps, but in actual fact he was not.

The most distinguished among the officers present was Oberleutnant Jürgens, a fighter pilot with, it was said, 88 victories. A young East Prussian was ‘Hänschen’ Wieberneit. The nerves in both his lower arms had been damaged, but all the same he was capable of working.

There was an established hierarchy in the camp. At the head were two former officers who had already been prisoners for some years and who had been in the National Komitee Freis Deutschland. That Nationalkomitee had come into existence under and promoted by the Russians. It was composed of Communist emigrés such as the writer Eric Weinert and other prominent officers. It became well known after the disaster of Stalingrad, and especially through the name of General von Seydlitz. It claimed to be against fascism in the form of the Hitler dictatorship, and in this sense claimed to be collaborating in the political reconfiguration of the Germany of the future. Under the name Antifa the group developed anti-fascist activities, in which, speaking reasonably, there was nothing to object to. The fact that it was actually the activity of a communist cell was something which, in my youthful naivety, I neither recognised nor realised, particularly since its officials with whom I came in contact were, to all appearances, reasonable and decent human beings. The two officers just mentioned were called Kubarth and Gless; one of them was the first camp leader, while Willi Gless was in charge of political indoctrination.

Among the camp officials there were also three Austrians. They were Alois Strohmaier from Donauwitz, a Styrian Communist, Karl Koller from Eisenstadt, the son of a Social Democratic member of the Landtag, and the camp clerk Oscar Stockhammer, an active Unteroffizier in the Austrian Bundesheer, who later became a police official in Salzburg. Stockhammer was not a Communist. He had an unhappy marriage, but was a good Catholic. Until he died he could never bring himself to get divorced from the wife whom he did not love and who was considerably older.

I came into friendly contact with Stockhammer who was my elder by 10 to 15 years. It was with his help that I became involved in the area of managing the camp. There were many German books in the camp, and many more had been brought into the camp from outside, by the work details. Orders were then issued that those books should be checked, in order to weed out not only National Socialist literature, but also literature that did not accord with the anti-fascist ideology. All that came about as the unexpected result of contact with the camp leaders. In my naivety, that was something I had not reckoned with. It meant that I was then morally compelled to take part in the recruitment, and educational events, organised by the Antifa.

13 April 1946–January 1947: Prisoner of the Russians

The word Weltanschauung had until then meant virtually nothing to me. The word implies and includes ‘a coherent, scientifically or philosophically formulated, i.e. represented in a philosophical system, an overall view of the world and human beings, itself directed towards action’. (Meiers Enzyklopädisches Lexikon, vol 25, 1975, page 184). Until then, when there had been talk of the National Socialist Weltanschauung, I had connected it with phrases such as Blut und Boden i.e. blood and soil, and with slogans such as Recht ist, was dem Volke nützt, i.e. justice is what serves the interests of the Volk, and Du bist nichts, dein Volk ist alles, i.e. you are nothing, your Volk is everything.

My ‘service’ in the Hitler Youth had never taken the form of ideological education, because my parents had not allowed me to go to camps. It is true that I had participated in the afternoon Heimabende, but all I had taken away from those was, at best, a form of pre-military training, not associated with any ideology. The fact that National Socialism, as it asserted, had introduced a new epoch in the history of the world, that the Volksgemeinschaft, i.e. ‘community of the people’, could be an important philosophical concept, was something that I had never known, nor would I have believed it or considered it to be correct.

The Christian faith, and the traditional middle-class way of life on the one hand, and the force of what was happening in the war had hit me hard. On the other hand, there was the undefined feeling that it was not unconnected with the Weltanschauung that so many villainous types had surfaced. In any case, it prevented me from getting more closely involved with it. Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf was something that I had never read.

In the camp, things were completely different. My mind was full of uncertainties. My untrained intelligence was exposed to everything that streamed in on me under the apparently scientific cloak of Marxism. Marxism, the whole of the teachings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, concerns ‘a theoretical interpretation of historical development, and in particular, of the motive laws of the capitalist means of production. That facilitates and accelerates the struggle for emancipation of the working class’. It was ‘the doctrine of dialectical and historical materialism. It led to a critique of political economy, a critical representation of the dialectical structure and motive laws of the capitalist means of production. It led to scientific socialism, to its statements concerning the future social order and the means of struggle leading to that social order being implemented’. Marxism starts from the basic premise that the material world is the only real world, and that human behaviour, thought and will, can be understood only in the context of material production. In its view, consciousness is ‘nothing other than material being, transferred into the mind’. Nature is interpreted as a unity based on its own materiality, which develops from the lowest forms of material being (and material movement), from dead material, through living material up to material which is capable of consciousness. The transition from one stage to the next occurs by means of a ‘qualitative leap’, so that this materialism is not required to reduce higher forms of being to those forms of being which are lower, but is capable of acknowledging the qualitative differences.... The historical function of the dialectical-materialistic theory of historical development principally consisted in the ideological confirmation of a belief in the progress of the working class’ (see Maiers Enzyklopädisches Lexikon, vol 15, page 693).

Quite simply, it was impressive, and entirely new to me concerning materialism and dialectic, their essence and subject matter, concerning the law of coherence, evolutionism, its necessity and the ‘leaps’ and the law of opposition. No less upsetting for me was what I learned of historical materialism, of its basis, the doctrine of basis and superstructure, the doctrine of development, theory and practice, and ideology with its general features and its influences on philosophy, science, morality, and also on art and religion. My mind was not equipped with the weapons to make any kind of sound objection to what was being drummed into me. It was simply new territory into which I was being led at that time.

But course it was not as if those new ideas occupied my mind day and night. Our existence was too hard for that. The harsh reality we experienced, in the prisoner of war camp and outside it, was too much at odds with the theory that was being put forward. Once it was announced that a lecture was to be given by Strohmeier, entitled ‘What is to be done?’ It recalled one of Lenin’s writings of the same name. Even Communists, for whom this was right up their street, had to smile to themselves at this surreal question, to which there was only one answer, that was, ‘Go home’! But everyone was exposed to the suggestive effect of the slogans, and it affected many men as it did me. ‘The doctrine of Marx is all powerful, because it is right’, was one of the slogans, but there was also another Marxist slogan that said, ‘The idea becomes material power if it seizes hold of the masses’. Lenin’s slogan, ‘Learn, learn, learn!’ not only hung over the camp like a watchword, but it was ever-present at all the Antifa events.

Only many years later, after my own studies, when I was already working in my profession, did I find the time to come to grips intellectually with Marxism, and in particular to study controversial literature. I did that with the aid of the Handbuch des Weltkommunismus, published by Bochensky and Niemeyer, 1958. I used the judgement of the German Bundesverfassungsgericht (Constitutional Court) of 17 August 1956 concerning ‘The prohibition of the KPD’, or German Communist Party. It was a special printing of the judgement from the third volume published by C F Müller Karlsruhe. That judgement (pages 655–656) contains the following notable passage:

In our Russian captivity in the Georgenburg camp, Lenin’s slogan ‘Learn, learn, learn!’ was exclusively restricted to the ‘all-powerful’ teachings of Marx. In the camps run by the Western Allies, especially before the end of the war, it went without saying that the prisoners were given the opportunity to learn. That was not the case with prisoners of war held by the Russians. The 10-hour day on our work for ‘restitution’ did not allow tired bodies and minds to concern themselves with anything else. It was not even possible to hold Russian language courses. Remarkably, among the many books in the library there was no Russian language primer. Thus, almost no prisoner of war was able to learn Russian. I, in my two-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war, was scarcely able to learn more than 200 Russian words, ‘parrot-fashion’. There were indeed other comrades who, thanks to their basic knowledge of Polish and Czech, easily mastered Russian. I came across two comrades who could speak Russian but only because they had spent some years in Russia.

One of them was Willi Jelinek who came from Stockerau. At the end of the 1920s and beginning of the 1930s, as ‘companion’ to elderly rich Vienna Jewesses, he had spent some time on the Riviera. He had then taken himself to the ‘Workers’ Paradise’, from where, after a few years, he returned disillusioned. He made no secret of how disappointing his time in Russia had been. The other man was the Viennese Reservehauptmann from the Luftwaffe, Alfred Tunzer. Taken prisoner by the Russians during the First World War, he had learned Russian. On his way home he had got caught up in Moscow, and had lived there until the 1930s, working in the ‘Many Peoples Publishing House’ of the USSR. He spoke excellent Russian. But because of that, and because of what he had done in his life, he was, in his own words, an object of suspicion. He was often taken to night-time hearings and was actually held back when we others came to be released. Tunzer had to remain in captivity until 1949. I chanced to meet him after 1950 when I was studying in Vienna. Characteristically he did not say much about how things had gone with him. In 1947, in the camp, he had suffered from painful facial erysipelas. His whole attitude, and the expression on his face, gave away the fact that life had given him a bad deal. Fate had not looked kindly upon him.

For almost a year, as a member of work detail 3, I worked in the camp library. In the circumstances that work had been a stroke of luck for me. I always had something to do. Many books from the abandoned houses in Insterburg came into the library. To recognise National Socialist literature was not difficult. Whether my work was in line with the censorship measures that had been ordered, I must most conveniently doubt. It was not only that I knew too little of the Marxist class struggle, but in the field of literature, and above all of belles-lettres, I was not sure enough of myself to be able to judge whether a book would be ‘acceptable’ in the context of the class struggle. Of course I kept Die Barrings and Der Enkel. I owed that to the spirit of Georgenburg – but not in the sense Karl Marx meant!

The library was located in the single-storey house beside the offices of the camp leadership. The bookbinder there always had plenty to do because the books were subjected to a great deal of wear and tear. He was the former Feldwebel Hans Adam. Slowly and deliberately he carried out his work, and made the best of the scanty possibilities for his beautiful handiwork. He had cardboard and glue, together with some presses and clamps. He did not need anything else.

In the autumn of 1946 the camp pulled off a great achievement. They got hold of a X-ray machine, which made it possible to X-ray the sick men. It was an old model, and of course was not able to produce photographs. The doctors in the camp were Dr Eitner and another with a thin face, glasses and dark hair, whose name I have forgotten. The two of them used the machine to prepare drawings of the chest cavity and hand those out to their patients. The inflammation to my ribs and the linings of my lungs, that I had suffered as a result of my wounds during the previous winter, were set down on the drawing. Because of the massive lesions in the lining of my ribs, the doctor had sketched the lower halves of both my lungs. That made a great impression at the frequent examinations under the supervision of Russian medical officers and assistants. Thus, doubtless because of my condition, I continued to be excused from heavy work.

At about the same time, the infectious diseases hospital was closed. Until then it had been used in Insterburg. The remaining personnel joined us in the camp. Among them, were the surgeons Dr Walter and Dr Drechsler, the pathologist Dr Schreiber, and a certain Dr Kindler. However, they were not employed as doctors any longer, as there was obviously no need for them. With the exception of Dr Kindler, I came across those doctors again, while I was studying in Vienna. Another man who had arrived from the infectious diseases hospital was the pharmacist Wilhelm Cellbrot. He became a close comrade and friend, and has remained so to this day. I will be speaking of him again. From Dr Fritz Walter I learnt that he was one of the many pupils of the surgeon Eiselsberg.

I must add that the doctor who had X-rayed me ordered me not to expose myself to the sun. His advice clearly indicated that I had contracted tuberculosis. At that time tuberculosis was still a disease that was feared, and was often fatal. I was shocked. But that was mitigated by the fact that I was not running a fever, and did not have to go into the Tuberer barracks. Thus I could evidently consider myself to be cured.

Uncertainty about what was going to happen to us was characteristic of our time as prisoners of the Russians. It lasted from the first day almost to the last day. It was gradually alleviated, but never quite eliminated. A great relief, and a great step towards certainty and towards the hope that we might some day be able to go home again, was the fact that in June 1946 we were allowed to write to our relatives. For many men that raised the question as to whether their relatives were still alive.

I too was uncertain. Both Rudi and I had urged Mother, if the front was getting closer and there was real danger of being occupied by the Russians, to flee to the West in time. To whom and where, was I to write? My feelings for Gisela had cooled. In the light of what we had heard about the political situation in eastern Germany, and since the last time I heard of her she was in the labour service in Saxony, it seemed pointless to send post to her. Therefore I addressed the postcards that were handed out to us to my mother. I sent them to our home address in Stockerau, and to Aunt Ilse Steinbach in Vienna.

The first news that my relatives received was the postcard sent to Aunt Ilse on 27 June. She received it on 21 September, nearly three months later. She immediately sent it to my parents. But it was to take until January 1947 until the first reply arrived. On 20 January the first prisoner of war postcard from my Mother reached me. She had written it on 20 October 1946. The postcards were in Cyrillic characters, that is, in the Russian language, and each was subtitled in French. The name and the address of the recipient had to be printed in Latin characters. A Red Cross worker, who knew the language, added names and addresses in Russian. The large heading referred to the organisation of the Red Cross, and the Red Crescent in the USSR. My address as a prisoner of war was Moskau UdSSR, Rotes Kreuz, Postfach 445.

The news that post was coming had already been rumoured for weeks. Waiting for the first post, for half a year and more, was agonising. Who would receive post? Would it be good news? When the time came and I recognised my dear Mother’s handwriting, I was glad. But I gathered that news from my father had been sent previously.

To my great surprise the address from which the card had been sent was Braunau am Inn, in Upper Austria, Linzerstrasse 41. But what really disturbed me was the fact that Mother wrote nothing about Rudi. I immediately had the ominous suspicion that he was no longer alive. My suspicion was confirmed six days later when I received Father’s first card, undated. He wrote that they had not received the news I had written to Stockerau, but only that which I had sent to Aunt Ilse. The one and only piece of news that they had had from me was the slip of paper which I had given to my fellow Stockerauer Franz Heinz and which the family had received with great joy on Christmas Eve 1945. Then came the shattering news.

I received the third card on 16 February 1947. In it were more details about what had happened to the family. On 15 December 1946 it had been Father’s induction. In Braunau, the card said, there was no grammar school, only a high school. Liesl was in primary school and in addition she was doing a Latin course. Otherwise, it said, many things were better there than in Stockerau. They were not able to continue to live there because of the bomb damage. In Korneuburg both the vicarage and church were totally destroyed on 20 March 1945. Frau Spindler, Rudi and Christl were killed. ‘Father came home on 9 March 1945. The burial of Frau Spindler and her children was his first official duty. On 2 March 1945, after a day’s leave, Rudi left home for the last time. Your Father never saw him. Now he is resting so close to places we know so well. He is in Kreis Hildburgshausen, near to the Gleichberge. Fräulein Weidmann has visited his grave. It is being loyally taken care of by the teachers and pupils of a rural grammar school. May God protect you and send you home soon’.

I deeply regretted the loss of my brother, companion of my youth who was always so cheerful, with whom, particularly during the last years, I had had such an excellent understanding. Aunt Ilse too, deeply disturbed, had informed Mother that Jörg, the father of her three children, had been killed at the end of the war. So, after the death of Uncle Erich Scheiderbauer, in November 1942 at Lake Ilmen, three men from our closer family had been killed in the war. In the light of what had happened to them, at the same time I felt myself to have been unjustly treated. Because those three had not been so often and so continuously in mortal danger as I had, in all probability I felt it should have been me killed before them. Not they, but I had been held and protected by the invisible hand of God. I had felt it over me so often during the war and in my captivity.

Nevertheless, I knew that my good parents and my little sister were alive and had a roof over their heads. I knew also that they did not have to suffer hunger. All things being well, I knew that I would be able to return home to them. Compared with many other comrades who had not received any news from their dear ones for a long time, things were all right with me. It had been two years since I had heard anything from the family, and everything might have been a lot worse! The postal connection, which was functioning again, even if only very unreliably and incompletely, was a contributory factor in strengthening the new feeling of life that I felt within myself.

I believed that at any rate after my happy return home, a completely new and completely different part of my life would begin. Everything that I had gone through would drop away from me without leaving behind any noticeable traces. It is true that soon after I returned home I realised my mistake. But at that time I did not see it. The Antifa propaganda had raised in me the expectation that the future of Austria lay in a form of democracy under Socialist leadership. As a person interested in politics, I might play some part. The fascist dictatorship was dead and the restoration of earlier conditions, i.e. those which I had known in the Third Reich, were out of the question.

In the camp there was a modest ‘cultural life’, in the organisation of which Dr Deckwitz was involved. One day a competition took place. It resulted in an exhibition of artistic creations such as drawings and literary productions. Few took part, and interest in it was small. I can remember none of the works exhibited apart from my own productions. Those were two poems, one of which was a love poem. It spoke of longing for an unknown girl. I know that in it I was no longer thinking of Gisela, but of another girl, unknown to me, to whom I would give my love. The other poems had been entitled ‘On looking at the last photograph from the old times’. It said that everything that I felt when I looked at my uniform, like a dream, was lying behind me. Everything was past and gone like the glimmer of joy on my cheeks, and now everything was new. ‘Now everything is new’ was the last line of that simple poem. My poems caused no sensation. They only received one vote each, from Dr Deckwitz.

The main attraction of our ‘cultural life’ was the orchestra. During the course of time they had succeeded in getting hold of instruments and in forming an ensemble of about 20 men. The conductor was the trained conductor Kurt Forst. He looked quite pleasant, and had a gentle appearance. The musicians had the advantage of not having to go on work details. They also had special clothing, namely a kind of shirt that they wore, in Russian fashion, over their trousers. It was made of heavy material and replaced the uniform tunic. Apart from the musicians and the tenor, Benno Stapenbeck, only the leading camp officials, Gless and Schubert, had such shirts. The last two also wore newly tailored breeches to indicate their positions of importance within the camp.

The orchestra gave occasional concerts, some even outside the camp for the Russians. It was also involved in the so-called Bunte Abende. As had been the case in frontline entertainment, individual artists of different kinds, mainly nonprofessionals, did their bit. Such a non-professional was Gottfried Stadler from Timelkam near Vöcklabruck. As he had already shown in his unit, he was a gifted compere. The programmes for these Bunte Abende were very mixed. Of course they also appealed to the emotions, for instance when the tenor sang the Italian song of the Chianti wine. It was popular at that time, as were other songs that 20 years later would be called ‘schmaltzy’.

Gottfried Stadler had been assigned to a work detail involved in unloading duties at the Insterburg railway station. He and his comrades worked for months on end loading on to trains of Russian gauge for transport to Russia, vehicles that had been plundered or had been requisitioned by the Russians. Many a time, with anger or shock, he said that, from what he saw every day, the whole of eastern Germany under Russian occupation must be in the process of being plundered. Sewing machines and bicycles, crockery and other household goods, furniture and machines, pianos and such like from private households were all there. But the objects were mostly in a poor state, having stood for weeks or months on end out in the open. They seemed to have been randomly and aimlessly snatched together. One day he told us of the stock from the Weimar National Library. Unbelievably, he had held in his hand a folder with line drawings by Goethe. Other museum objects too, confiscated by the victors, were there in Insterburg, passing through German hands for the last time.

In the spring of 1947, soldiers fleeing from other camps who had been taken prisoner again were often brought our camp. According to their accounts, in the interior of Russia they were not guarded as strictly as we were. Some of them had travelled unmolested among Russian civilians, by railway, to the area of the border. Since the new border with Poland had for a long time been strictly guarded, they had easily been caught and were with us in the camp. Among them was a man who, with some thousands of others, had succeeded at the end of the war in fleeing across the Baltic to Sweden. As is generally known, Sweden, contrary to all the provisions of international law, responded to Russian pressure. They handed back those interned German soldiers to Russia. Some of the men had been forcibly loaded on to ships and carried across the Baltic. Our man came from a camp at Libau in Estonia. He had also been picked up close to the border.

I only knew of one man who escaped from our camp. He was the former Major Witzel, whom I have mentioned before. He was brought back after three days. He was given a few day’ solitary confinement, which he had to sit out in a so-called bunker. Then he was brought out to the camp company, who were assembled to be counted. After that he took up again the quarters he had had before he escaped. He was with the group of former staff officers who worked inside the camp in a primitive workshop making nails.

I have not yet spoken of the daily counts. Morning and evening, the camp had to assemble and form up into ranks of five. Then the Russian who was on duty walked through the ranks and if the numbers agreed, the count was quickly concluded. Once there was an amusing incident. Because smoking in the ranks was of course forbidden, burning cigarettes had to be put out at the beginning of the count, during which we had to stand to attention. Once, in the winter, a man near to me had not properly put out his roll-your-own Kippe, i.e. fag. During the count, smoke was visibly coming from his overcoat pocket. The comrades standing around him had long since spotted it, but he himself had not. The incident had no unfortunate consequences. Probably the Russians carrying out the count had appreciated the comedy of the situation.

In Georgenburg the food situation in the second half of 1946 had improved and it remained that way. I have already mentioned that in the daily sugar ration a distinction was made between officers and other ranks. It was the same with tobacco. For the officers there was only rarely the usual crumbly makhorka often given to the men. For the most part we had fine cigarette tobacco, sometimes even the black Caucasian tobacco. Ready-made cigarettes, papyrossi, we never received. Only the guards smoked them. Also there were never any cigarette papers or pouches in which you could put your tobacco. But in Georgenburg we had enough newspaper and were all old hands at rolling our own cigarettes.

Of course everyone had to be careful to keep back a certain small supply of newspaper, because that was also needed for toilet purposes. Mostly the ‘business’ had to be done in the so-called Dutschlandhalle, a simple barrack block about 30 metres long, through the length of which ran a Donnerbalken. On it prisoners usually sat really close together. It would never have occurred to anybody to feel disturbed by his neighbour. We had long since had to accustom ourselves to such sensibilities. The art of switching off and keeping oneself to oneself, even if everybody could be seen by everybody else, was something that we had long since learned. The most popular method was to pull the blanket over your head when you were lying on your bunk.

After the turnip scrap soup of the summer of 1945, there followed, for at least a year, cabbage soup twice a day. Then, in Georgenburg, twice a day, one litre of soup made from cabbage or various types of grain and in addition a quarter-litre of kascha. That was a moderate, sometimes very glutinous brew, mostly made from buckwheat, and also, rarely, from millet. In the morning there was one litre of tea, and those of us who were good managers still had left a remnant of the spelty bread from the previous day’s bread ration. In Königsberg there had still been the risk of starving to death. But that was not so in Georgenburg. In 1947 some comrades even succeeded in bringing in with them, from places of work outside the camp, provisions that they had exchanged or that had been given to them. Of course nobody knew how long we would be staying there, or when our captivity would come to an end.

Little was known about the situation at home. Remarkably, at about the turn of the year 1945 to 1946, the results of the first election of the Austrian Nationalrat had trickled through. I can still remember today, that the ÖVP received 85 seats, the SPÖ 76 and the KPÖ 4. But it was particularly the bad result for the Communists that no-one had expected. We did not dare to believe it, so reassuring was the result. At that time, the sentences in the main war crimes trials in Nuremberg were also being talked about. I recall that I felt it to be light at the end of the tunnel. There was a glimmer of hope that such distinctions were made in those sentences. Papen, Schacht, and Fritsche had even been released. Also from the Tägliche Rundschau, a newspaper that appeared in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany, much could be picked up concerning the general situation. Generally speaking, it had an anti-fascist, that is a communist slant.

All the time I worked in the library and was exposed to the Antifa influence, I struggled with myself for a new, correct view of the world. It was not an easy job for me. Traditional bürgerlich values had been handed down to me. My deep-rooted child’s faith, it is true, was based on no firm certainty of belief. So I struggled with what I had recently heard. It seemed to sound so simple and convincing, supported by my dull imaginings of a new life. What Father had written about Rudi’s death did not fit in at all with all the talk of the ‘superstructure’. I simply could not believe that ‘spirit’ came out of material. What moved me was what I talked about in long conversations with Dr Deckwitz. He understood my needs. He offered me something of a way out. He referred me to the religious socialist movement of the Swiss Protestant theologian Leonhard Ragaz. Fortunately, in the meantime, the problem soon sorted itself out.

My days in the library were numbered. All in all it had been a good year spent in that work. With the help of many books, I had been able to keep my mind fresh and active and to acquire a bit more learning then I had already. I had read Goethe’s Faust in a connoisseur’s pocket edition, bound in dark red leather. On the inside of the binding in front of the title page the owner had stuck a photograph. It was the picture of a young woman, obviously his own. She was standing naked on a beach by the sea, behind her waves were curling; she was happy and ready for love. She must have been very fortunate and the owner of the book must have been very fortunate too. When the book, the contents of which had been spiritual nourishment for him as they had for many Germans, was taken away from him, he must, in the face of this double loss, literally have felt himself to be, like Faust, a ‘poor fool’.

I have already spoken about the Deutschlandhalle as the camp’s great public lavatory. I must add to this by telling of the large tin drum that stood outside the barracks door for use at night. Since it was in the evening that we had the greatest intake of fluid in the daily rations, the drum, which once had served to carry petrol, was often used, particularly during the late hours of the evening. On cold days my bladder was particularly sensitive, and for a long time, two to three times a night, I had to get out of my bunk and run outside the barracks until my bladder was emptied and I found peace until the morning.

It was particularly during the warm seasons of the year that bugs made their unpleasant presence felt in the barracks. In the last summer, 1947, Willi Cellbrot and I had an idea. Instead of sleeping in the barracks, we would sleep outside in the open air. The barracks containing the kitchen and canteen, had a front building with a roof that was ideally suited for our purposes. For some weeks of the very warm summer we slept on our straw mattresses with blanket and overcoats over our old uniforms, free from bugs, that alone was some pleasure! Out there in the open air we were also not bothered by rats. They occasionally made their disturbing presence felt during the night. Sometimes such a creature would take a nibble at your bread ration kept on the board over your head, or give you a shock by running over your feet.

I had a remarkable experience the night before New Year 1947. Just as I was standing for the third time at the drum, I could not believe my ears. From far away, coming from Insterburg, there was the sound of music. It must have been an Austrian transmitter that was broadcasting it, because the music was unmistakably that of the ‘Blue Danube’. This seemed to me to be a hopeful omen that this was the beginning of our last year in captivity, and this was in fact the case.

It must have been in May when my everyday life suddenly completely changed. In all the regular physical examinations I had always been put down for work detail 3, but all of a sudden I was designated as completely capable of work. That was in line with my general physical constitution. For some time I had no longer felt my knees trembling, and by and large felt that I had recovered my strength. So I had to give up the work in the library that I had come to like. But it was the right thing for me. From then on I was no longer close to the Antifa officials, who always, so to speak, forced me to think and speak in ‘political’ terms. From then I joined the so-called forest commando.

The forest commando consisted of the few Hungarians in the camp. There were about 15 of them, including a lieutenant. He had remained to his fellow-countryman their superior, a person whom they respected. He was called Nyiri Antal, was about 28 years old and came from Budapest. Amongst his men there were some ethnic German farmers, including a father and his son. Nyiri spoke a little German. With him and with the Hungarian soldiers of German ancestry I could make myself understood very well. Also members of the forest commando were the Austrians amongst the officers. There was Willi Cellbrot and me, but Paul Eberhart belonged to another commando. Every morning at 6 o’clock our small group got into a rickety lorry. When it had barely reached the road to Insterburg, it turned off sharply to the right to drive along the highway to the woods in which we carried out our tree-felling work. Those woods must, at one time, have been the pride and joy of their owners and of those who took care of them. In the meantime the bark beetle had infested wide stretches, and we prisoners had to chop down kilometres of forest.

Peace and quiet reigned there in the forest. The only sentry, who drove with us and stayed with us after the lorry gone, was just as peaceful. Boris would immediately find a sunny spot for himself, while we spread out over a small area and got to work. Boris more or less dozed away the rest of the day. Lack of movement and at a lot of kascha made him drowsy. He always looked as if he was just about to fall asleep and could only with an effort keep his little brown eyes open. He came from around Gorki, the earlier Nizhni-Novgorod. If there had still been peasants there one could have spotted him a hundred yards away as a peasant lad. His vocabulary was no more than 400 words, and it was simple Russian that he spoke. But for the most part he was quiet. He only occasionally summoned up the effort to make a necessary announcement that his position as sentry required of him.

I was not in a position to judge Boris’s linguistic knowledge, because I only knew about 200 words of Russian. But Willi Cellbrot, who had studied at Polish universities, was in a better position to judge. He spoke excellent Russian, which was obviously attractive to Boris. Probably because of that, and not because we represented any particular risk of escape, he liked to sit near to us. Perhaps he was also amazed that we two and the Hungarian officer as the only officers, had no fascist brutality. We worked hard to boot. We always fulfilled our norm, although that was not small.

The forest commando was organised in such a way that two men always sawed with a bow saw, while the third, with an axe, took care of removing the branches. It was amazing how quickly we mastered the rules of tree felling. At first you had to assess how the tree was to be felled and accordingly how the saw was to be placed. The trunks, 20 and more metres long, then had to be cut up into pieces four metres long. They were then piled up at the edge of the road ready to be loaded up. While our young Hungarian was engaged in removing the branches, Willi and I were sawing at the next trunk.

Once there was a short-lived misunderstanding that spoiled Boris’s rest. Willi and I were supposed to be cutting up gigantic oak trunks that had been felled years before and had been dragged to the edge of the road. With our relatively short saw blade the work would not have been pleasant, even with softer wood. The hard oak of the thick trunks, however, made our progress very slow. Because of that, Boris thought we were lazy and cursed us. He grunted curses at us, culminating in a shout of Sibir nada. He said our laziness should send us to Siberia, and that was what he wanted say.

We were furious and Willi began to argue with Boris. He told him that he did not understand anything of working with timber. He challenged him to pick up the saw and to try it himself. That would convince him that oaks are harder than pines. Boris put down his rifle and loosened his belt. Sweeping his arm right back, he waved Willi over and said Dawai! They knelt down and began to saw. Boris, from his little eyes, threw half mocking, half poisonous looks at Willi. The unaccustomed work quickly got him into a sweat. He also expended too much strength on it instead of matching the regular strokes of Willi, the trained forest worker. The tense situation was resolved when the lorry arrived. Afto gommt said Boris relieved, and stopped what he was doing. He got up, put his belt back on and picked up his rifle again. From then on there was no more talk of cutting oak trunks into smaller pieces.

The ‘Afto’ was sometimes a rattling ‘Sis’, but often also a heavy German artillery tractor. But instead of pulling a field howitzer, it was fully loaded with trees. On the last run of the evening the prisoners got on. As had happened to me in the war, sometimes the heavy vehicle from time to time sank into swampy areas of the forest floor. Then the driver brought out the steel cable, tied it round the nearest thick, firmly rooted tree trunk and turned on the motorised windlass, with the aid of which the vehicle pulled itself out.

By the time it was evening, the norm was fulfilled and tiredness would overcome us. We the prisoners, and Boris too, would listen for the ‘Afto’. Mostly it came at 5 o’clock as planned, but sometimes it was delayed until 8 or even 11 o’clock. Then we arrived in the camp towards midnight and received our mid-day and evening soup all in one. After that our bellies were so full they hurt. No food was brought to us in the forest, so it took a while until our stomachs had got used to not having the midday meal. But just as sore muscles had gone after a few days, our bodies also adjusted to this. In the lunch break for the most part we would swarm out and go in search of berries. Once Willi caught frogs, roasted the legs over the flames of the fire, and he and I devoured the few tasty delicacies.

If the place where we were working was close enough, we visited abandoned foresters’ houses. In their gardens, wild and overgrown with weeds, there were sometimes berries and green fruit. It was unbelievable how good that tasted when we were short of everything. After the monotonous diet, low in vitamins, that we had had for two years, it was invigorating to feel the effect of those ‘shots’ of vitamins. In the houses everything made of wood, doors, lintels, windows, stairs, everything flammable had been destroyed, or torn out and taken away. It had been done by the Russians and the civilian population, scanty numbers of whom had settled near and further away.

Boris had another two surprises for us. One particularly sultry June day, on the drive home he had the Russian driver make a detour that took us past a little pond. It was an incomparable joy and pleasure that we had long done without when he let us take off our sweaty old clothes and go into the water. He too allowed himself the pleasure of bathing, without paying any attention to his rifle while he was doing so.

The second surprise was quite different. One lunch break he took us, without saying anything about it beforehand, to a forester’s house about a kilometre away from where we were working. The red brick building, still clean, at first looked to be in no way different to the other houses and farms that we had seen in the district. Shell splinters had left deep gashes in the walls. The garden was growing rampantly in luxurious green. Boris’s destination was a store not far from the house. We went down into the half-buried vegetable cellar by a few steps. It was roofed by a brick vault. The wooden door, pushed outwards, lay on the ground in front of the entrance, in the middle of it there was a sharply jagged hole. Anxiously we went in and peered into the dark interior. We could see the dull gleam of steel helmets.

It was a day sultry with the threat of thunder. Outside it had become weirdly dark. There were black clouds in the sky over us, pushing themselves together into a huge pile. Then there was a gust of wind and lightning flashed luridly. After it came a huge thunderclap and from the clouds burst streams of water. The raindrops crashed into the ground and exploded like little bombs. We fled into the cellar. Carefully and curiously our eyes got used to the darkness and we could look about us in the room.

On the floor men were lying soldiers, stiff and motionless. They were dead, but looked as if they were still alive. They had not decomposed, but had only dried out, in full equipment. The scanty military, half-civilian clothing showed that they had been men from the Volkssturm. Some had artificial limbs. They were invalids from the First World War. But they were lying there, 2, 4, 6, 10, 20 altogether. What had happened?

They may have had a kind of command post in the cellar. Probably the bunker, at that time in the winter of 1945, after they had stood guard in the cold, was where they had got warm again. The door of the cellar had been facing in the direction of the enemy. Obviously that had not bothered them, perhaps because they did not know of the danger. Perhaps they knew but did not take account of it. Perhaps it was all the same to them if only they could find a little warmth, shelter, concealment, even if that had been deceptive. Their attacker’s shell, which may have come from a tank, had hit the door and burst through it. No doubt it exploded on impact. The massive blast of the explosion had suddenly and painlessly killed all the men in there.

The event was two years in the past. In the meantime we had been weaned away from death. That evening, depressed by what we had seen, we drove back into the camp crouching on the high laden tractor. Along part of the way we could see the last rays of the sun in the west transfiguring the image of the town of Insterburg. It lay on the other side of the valley. The tower of the Lutheran Church stood on a hill, towering up alone. Was the Prussian eagle that had once adorned it, still sitting on the top of the church spire?

But physical work in the forest commando, which in a certain sense had made me ‘free’ and had contributed towards my regaining my self-confidence, was soon at an end. It seemed as if the Austrians among the prisoners of war would soon be released. In July something actually happened that pointed in this direction. Even the Russian camp personnel appeared to be remarkably busy. The captain with the German name Enter, and the dreaded sergeant major from the MVD, often stayed in the camp. They came from the successor organisation to the feared GPU, and following Stalin’s example, mostly worked at night. Accordingly they were pale in appearance and spread fear about them.

We Austrians were kitted out with fresh clothes. By this I mean that we received new field grey tunics with Navy buttons, and trousers from clothing stocks of the former coastal artillery. It was almost painful when I had to take my leave of the three-year-old tunic in which I could still see the holes made the last time I had been wounded. In addition there were two sets of underwear of Red Army pattern. They were vests and underpants made out of thin linen, provided with laces to tie them on, the vest on the chest at the front and the underpants above the knees. The Austrians were supposed to be assembled in Tilsit, the former border town of the Reich, which by then was called Sowjetsk, hopefully the last station of our existence as prisoners.

14 January-September 1947: Freedom – aged 23 years

In 1939 the town on the Memel had been home to 58,000 inhabitants. Then it had been completely deserted by Germans and only a few Russians had settled there. We came across the wide town square. There was a memorial to Max von Schenkendorf, the poet who wrote the song Die Wacht am Rhein, a son of the town. Here too was a pulp factory that had belonged to the Feldmühle concern. But we did not think that we would be set to work again, because it had been said that we were actually going home. No fighting had obviously taken place around the town. Even the barracks in which we were quartered was intact, but indescribably bug-ridden. The nights were sheer torture. On the walls there were spots of blood in abundance, the remnants of bugs, gorged full of blood that had been squashed to death. We tried to counter the scourge by moving our bunks away from the walls, but of course it was in vain. Faces and hands, the parts of the body that during the night were not covered, the vermin could gain access. We were studded by lumps left by the bites. Some could count themselves fortunate whose blood did not attract the bugs that supposedly only went for ‘sweet’ blood.

There in the Tilsit camp, the great brick barracks from imperial times, I had once again met and got to know, other Austrians. From Georgenburg I already knew Franzl Reisegger. He was born in 1914, a master-shoemaker from Ranshofen near Braunau am Inn, who also worked as the camp cobbler. Franzl had married young. But with his first post he learnt that the child conceived on his last leave, his wedding leave, had died after it had been born. I became friends with Franzl because we were to be released to the same place, Branau am Inn. It was the same with Othmar Hadaier. He was born in 1926, and from Ranshofen. However, I did not have as close a friendship as I had with Reisegger.

After we were released I often met with both of them. Othmar, who still had to complete his degree, lives as a tax adviser in Ried in the Inn district, Franzl in Ranshofen. I became a close acquaintance, if not a friend, of the Protestant pastor Ernst Hildebrandt. He was some 10 to 15 years older, and had also been a Leutnant. He had managed until then to hold on to his New Testament and occasionally I was able to borrow it from him. But the religious discussions to which it had prompted me did not come about. The exertions of our work left us too tired.

It had been wishful thinking that we would not any longer be assigned to work in Tilsit. First of all there was a sawmill, in which the officers’ brigade had to work. For a week, Willi Cellbrot and I stacked five metre-long beams. It was hard work and demanded all our strength. But we managed well, and I can still see our muscular upper bodies. Apparently ‘sweet on us’ was the 20 year old Russian girl Veronica, who worked in the office of the sawmill. She was a pretty girl, who looked at us half mistrustfully, half pleased, when she was checking whether we had fulfilled the Schto prozent, i.e. the hundred per cent of the prescribed norm. After our work stacking planks we were detailed to work on lathes. I worked on one with which I made chair legs and chair backs, and also the frames of the seats that were later filled in with plywood. The work involved a certain craftsmanship or even sense of taste, needed to ensure that uneven parts were avoided. Of course you had to take care not to get too near the electrically driven blades. I learned to take a certain pride in my work. It was not just unskilled work but already skilled work, which pleased me more than the other kind.

Other kinds of work to which we were assigned were unloading small freighters that brought timber for pulp and paper production from Finland or Sweden. We unloaded railway trains that brought coal, no doubt from the Upper Silesian coalfield. While unloading those trains, we discovered one day a wagon bearing the inscription Österreich. We felt that to be not only a greeting from our native land, but another good omen that our return home, even if it was obviously to be drawn-out, might be soon. Unloading the charcoal and the coal demanded all our strength.

With coal, the norm for the 10-hour working day was, for two men, to unload a wagon of 20 tons. Whether you finished in time depended upon the kind of coal. It had sometimes been cut in large pieces that you could only get hold of with your bare hands. It could be relatively easily pushed out of the wagon. The work was also easy when the coal was in small pieces about the size of an egg. Then you could get a reasonable pile on the big shovel. The most unpleasant and the most unpopular work was when the coal was in medium-sized pieces, about the size of a cobblestone. Then it was difficult to get several of the pieces on your shovel or to throw or push them individually out of the wagon by hand.

But the hardest work was in the factory boiler house. There, work went on non-stop in three shifts and our brigade had to take over the night shift for a week. We had to shovel the coal with which the several furnaces were heated. It went into tippers and we pushed them to the furnaces. That was a very hard kind of work that not only called for strength, but also cost a lot of sweat. But, like the images of the forest commando, I recall the scenes from Tilsit, especially those from the night shift in the factory, before my mind’s eye. It still fascinates me today to see the dark figures, their faces wet with sweat, in front of the bright flames of the furnace. I can still also remember the tiredness and exhaustion that set in towards morning and that everyone could feel as they marched back to the camp. Yet how releasing and healthful the sleep was, on the bright day after the night shift and before the next one.

At that time I thought that I had recovered my strength, that I was fit and that I had nothing more to fear from my last wound and its consequences to the lining of my lungs and my ribs. But one day I suddenly got quite a high fever and I was brought into the barracks’ sick bay. I had, it was ascertained, contracted malaria tertiana, which also occurs in temperate zones, where the attack of fever follows a fever free day. I must have been infected by a mosquito of the genus anopheles in the East Prussian woods in the forest commando. That explanation was consistent with the one to six week incubation period. I was not the only one who was treated in the sick bay for malaria tertiana. The sick bay was equipped to provide the proper treatment, because it had atebrin. After about a fortnight, I believe, the illness was cured. In the sick bay I had been cared for by a Brother of Mercy from Vienna, by the name of Maly. (I chanced to meet him years later near to his hospital in the Second District of Vienna, wearing the religious habit of his order.)

The high fever of over 40 degrees, affected me every other day and of course brought with it renewed debility. For the next few days, the last in Tilsit, I was no longer capable of work. In the sick bay Willi Cellbrot, who during that last year had become my closest comrade, visited me after work. Once he brought well-nigh a miracle, a fresh hen’s egg that he mixed up with my sugar ration. In doing that he gave me an indescribable pleasure such as I had not experienced for years.

It was the beginning of September! We set off from Tilsit. The journey was partly made in open wagons without sides. I had the bad luck of sitting on one of those wagons which only consisted of a platform. Everyone who sat on it was blackened by soot from the steam from the locomotive. It took hours and hours for the men who had been affected in that way to get their uniforms even half way clean. In Georgenburg there was a great process of registration, parading and frisking. We were called by name several times. When our surnames were called out we had to answer, Russian fashion, with our Christian name and that of our father. To the guttural shout ‘Scheiderbauer’, I replied loud and clear, ‘Armin Anton’.

No one doubted any longer that those whose names were being shouted out were going damoy, home! Those who remained behind looked wistful. I could not refrain from sadness. I was particularly sorry for Dr Deckwitz and Alfred Tunzer. From July, Deckwitz had been working on a version of Fidelio that could have been produced without female parts. A camp choir assembled for a short time under the direction of Kurt Forst had been practising the ‘Prisoners’ Chorus’. Oh, welche Lust, oh, welche Lust, in freier Luft zu leben. ‘Oh what joy, Oh what joy, to live in free air’ I had sung. Even years later, when I was at home with my parents, I had played variations on the theme on the piano. Because of that chorus I had taken my girlfriends to the Theater an der Wien to see Fidelio when I was a student. The emotion it raised in me was something that for years never left me.

During the last great process of ‘frisking’, every prisoner had to spread out his possessions in front of him. The Russian guards and the officers of the MVD carried out a precise check of what everyone possessed. In the case of Oskar Stockhammer, the camp clerk, they discovered his pay book that he had held on to until then. He was separated from us. I can still see him today, pale as wax and bereft of all hope, sitting staring into space. (Later he became a police inspector in Salzburg. When we used to meet, we always thought of those 20 sad hours.) But he was then allowed to rejoin the column.

When we at last formed up to march out of the camp, the camp band had taken up position beside the barbed wire at the gate. Marches were not part of their repertoire, and to play a march would no doubt have been out of place. So they played the American popular song whose German title was Wochenend und Sonnenschein. The ‘wing’ man on the bass drum was a certain Paul Padurek. He looked like a Sicilian, but was a homespun Saxton from Grimmitschau in the Vogtland. When we were already far beyond the camp fence, on the march to the station, the jaunty notes of the song kept reverberating within me.

It was inconceivable that this captivity, after two and a half years, was to come to an end. Many could simply not believe it. I was exceptionally sceptical. Indeed the feeling had begun to set in that I could not have stood it for one day longer. However, I knew that none of us, if we had had to stay behind, could have done anything about it. There had been the constant uncertainty about what was going to happen to us, and what the future would bring. If we had possessed the fatalism characteristic of the Russians, then camp life might have been tolerable. But we could think of many things that could have been improved. Still, no one knew whether our journey was really taking us home or whether some developments in world politics, of which nobody knew, might not influence our fate. The orders over the camp loudspeaker and the daily playing of the martial Soviet anthem in the evening at 10pm would, it was clear, not have been missed by any of us. But would the journey really be taking us home?

Our mistrust grew after we had been loaded into the goods wagons and the train had begun to move. It was not westwards or southwards that the train was going but, to our horror, it was going eastwards. Only when we were not far from Minsk in White Russia did it to turn southwards and we went as could be seen from the landscape, through the Pripet marshes. Then we went south-westwards towards Galicia. Lemberg, Kolomea and Stryi were the stations that we reached after many stops, often lasting for hours.

It was in Kolomea or Stryi that a check was carried out of a type that we had not seen before. All the men on the train, each with his baggage, had to parade on the embankment in front of the wagons. Then they had to pull their trousers down, everyone had to turn round and, bending over, present their naked backside to the authorities carrying out the check. The most fanciful rumours rushed in a flash through the ranks, all more so since some poor devils were separated off. People suspected that they had had special tattoos, similar to those carried by the Waffen-SS showing their blood group, although no one had heard of such measures being taken before. Gradually the opinion grew that it must have been a sanitary check. The Russians had been looking for men with crab lice or in any event for men whose buttocks marked out their owners as suffering from dystrophy. It was an unmistakable sign that we were going home. It indicated that the Russians were concerned that their prisoners did not arrive home like walking skeletons.

The mood improved as our train approached the Carpathians. We went on many double bends through green woods and past picturesque villages. In one of those villages, one Sunday, we saw men and women standing in bright coloured costumes in the church square. It was a totally unaccustomed picture of the deepest rural peace. In a high pass we had a shocking experience. Our train was standing beside another one that was heading in the opposite direction. In the same kind of cattle wagons that we occupied there were, in the other train, German women and girls from Transylvania who were being transported to Russia for forced labour. It seemed incredible that we ‘Plenny’s’ were travelling home to be released, whereas those young German women did not know what fate awaited them.

Through the Carpatho-Ukraine, which before the war had belonged to Czechoslovakia and by then had been annexed to the USSR, the journey went further southwards. After Tschop, which in Hungarian was called Csop, the train left the Soviet Union. It was night when we crossed the border. The wagon doors had to remain closed. Scarcely did we seem to have passed the border when from wagon to wagon the doors were opened. But at the first glance out into the darkness of the forest a Rumanian guard could be seen. It was a further step closer to freedom, although we continued to be under Russian guard.

Marmarosch-Szigeth, the Rumanian border town with a Hungarian name, was the destination of this penultimate stage of the journey home. A gigantic barracks area built in the old Austrian style received us. Thousands of Austrians from the former German Wehrmacht and Hungarian prisoners of war were held there. We stayed there for some days. The main purpose of the stop seemed to be relaxation and food. There was plenty of food. It was Hungarians who were doing the cooking, because it was an excellent peppery millet kascha that was served to us. There was a more or less happy atmosphere and you were reminded of Wallenstein’s camp, although there were no camp followers.

The transports of Austrians going home were supposed to depart daily. The first and the second transports had already left. We should have been on a third, but, by way of a last minute fright, we officers were kept back. It was uncertainty, literally until the last minute, that dominated that period of captivity. Carelessly I had done a deal with a Hungarian officer. I had swapped my rucksack, an item of Luftwaffe equipment, for a simple Army haversack and 100 grams of fine cigarette tobacco, because I had thought that I would not need the rucksack any more, and I could carry my few possessions in a haversack. Indeed, apart from what I was wearing, I possessed very little. I had a second set of underwear, a tin of tobacco, my three-year-old toothbrush, my eating irons, and, the most important item, a spoon. Many prisoners carried one in their outside left top pocket so as not to lose it, and to always have it ready. But we had a rucksack at home, I knew. If this had not been the case, it would have been a poor swap.

A fortnight had passed since leaving Insterburg. With the fourth transport, we officers were also allowed to travel. In broad daylight we went across the Hungarian plain through Szolok and Debreczin. Everyone who caught sight of our train, which was not travelling very fast, waved to us. When we stopped, Hungarian women brought to us watermelons in large slices. The pleasure that the civilian population shared with us seemed to us like a foretaste of our reception in our native country. The train remained in Györ (Raab) overnight in order to ensure that our arrival on Austrian soil would be in daylight.

In Raab we also changed locomotives. It seemed to be a first greeting from home when, from there on, an Austrian engine driver drove the train. When the train started off from Raab and the Austrian border was coming closer, the excitement was well-nigh unbearable. We arrived at Nickelsdorf. You could tell that you were on Austrian territory because the second track of the line had been dismantled. That was part of the reparations that the Soviet Union had demanded. Well, that did not bother us. Wherever civilians caught sight of the train they waved to us. It was harvest time and many men and women were in the fields. They stopped their work and waved to us joyfully. It seemed almost too good to be true.

Meanwhile, we had heard that the station at which we would arrive was Wiener Neustadt. There the formal process of release was to take place. The closer we came to that destination, the more emotional did the mood become. It was on the morning of 19 September 1947 when our train reached Wiener Neustadt.

Of the partially destroyed city you could see very little. Our attention was directed to the reception that was awaiting us. Many hundreds of people had turned up at the station. After we had got out of the old familiar cattle wagons, the column formed up to cover the short distance to the barracks in which the Heimkehrer-Entlassungsstelle Wiener Neustadt was located. The way to the barracks was lined by relatives of Heimkehrer or those who hoped to see them. It was clear that many Viennese had come to meet their Heimkehrer. It was shocking that many women and also many elderly men were holding photographs in front of them, and placards on which was written something like ‘Who knows him?’ These were relatives of people who were missing, asking for information, but none of us Heimkehrer had the time to carefully look at the pictures and the names individually.

It took hours until the release certificates were issued. In the meantime we were fed. We had our first meal on our home soil. If I remember rightly, it was a goulash, the first meat we had had to eat in two-and-a-half years. The ‘Heimkehrer Release Certificate’ I of course still have today. At the top right-hand corner of it there is a stamp ‘Declaration on Oath. I declare on oath that the information given is the truth’. Under that is my signature. As profession I gave ‘student’. Under the rubric ‘Return from captivity, from which captivity, when captured’, are the dates 19. 9. 1947, in Russian 27. 3. 1945. The release address is shown as Braunau am Inn, Linzerstrasse 41. The day of release is 19. 9. 1947 at Braunau. A further stamp certifies that I was free of lice and infectious diseases.

On the back of the release certificate there are many stamps. From the date of release they go on for several weeks. They indicate that I received 50 schillings federal assistance and 10 cigarettes. Again, on 20 September from the Heimkehrer control point Bahnhof-Linz, I received loose change, cigarettes and a brochure. I was fed until the evening of 20 September. On 23 September an identity card was issued to me by the town of Braunau. On 2 October I received vouchers for two pairs of socks, two pairs of underpants and two vests.

The Heimkehrer who arrived on our transport were during the course of the day sorted into groups according to the places they would be released in the various Bundesländer. They were assembled into small groups. So, within our small group of officers, it was time to say farewell. Willi Cellbrot was going to Styria, Paul Eberhart to Vorarlberg and the Vienna doctors, I remember Fritz Walter, Kindler and Drechsler, to Vienna. The men from Upper Austria, including me, were travelling on overnight. So we were put in passenger carriages. The train drove through Vienna at night on the connecting line from the southern to the western railway. I recall passing the level crossing on the main Hietzing road. There I thought of Aunt Ilse, who lived not far away from there in Ober-St.Veit.

But we were not yet completely free. That became apparent to us when on the Enns, the demarcation line between the Russian and American zones of occupation, there was a last stop. For one last time we had to get out and form up to be counted, even if it was without the familiar and yet so annoying dawai. That last count has remained unforgettable to me to this day. Every time I cross over the Enns bridge, I look at the place not far from the large farm, where the small barracks of the Soviet border guards used to be. That time the Russians were friendly, there was no longer any reason for them to object, and we were allowed to get back into the train. On the western bank of the Enns the American guards were waiting for us, without us having to get out of the carriage. They went from compartment to compartment and looked at us half curiously, half with pity. Their casual manner and the jaunty cut of their uniforms were in striking contrast to the usual appearance of the Red Army troops.

In half-an-hour we had reached Linz. The train drove in to the ruined station. It had not yet come to a halt when a band, probably that of the railwaymen or of the police, was already striking up Oh, du mein Österreich. In front of the railway building, in the midst of the rubble, an area had been cleared into which we were led through a cordon of people. Here too, many were happily excited and many looked anxiously and searchingly, holding their pictures and placards of their missing relatives before them. I can still exactly recall the feeling of wonderful release and relaxation. Even as we were passing over the Enns bridge a final weight was lifted from me, and the tormenting uncertainty that had weighed heavily on us during our time as prisoners of war of the Russians, was at last gone.

As we walked through the cordon to the station, I literally had the feeling of being outside myself, of standing beside myself and observing everything as a spectator. The province of Upper Austria greeted its sons through the representative of the Landeshauptmann, Dr Lorenzoni. I can recall nothing of his speech. But I do know that Lorenzoni spoke warmly and kind-heartedly. I can still see before me the distinguished head of the speaker with his silver hair. Afterwards the three Pichler sisters sang the Hoamatland from the text by Franz Stelzhammer, Upper Austria’s provincial anthem. That too was deeply moving.

In Linz the Heimkehrer were sorted into groups according to their districts of residence. From the Bezirkshauptmannschaft Braunau am Inn a young official by the name of Bautenbacher took charge of us. Later I often used to meet him and he told me of his remarkable war experiences. He had been the pilot of one of the three gliders, loaded with members of Otto Skorzeny’s Waffen-SS unit, that had landed in September 1943 on the high plateau of the Gran Sesso and had freed Mussolini who was being held prisoner there. In Bautenbacher’s charge, Franzl Reisegger, Othmar Hadaier and I travelled from Linz to Braunau am Inn. In Wels, Grieskirchen and Ried im Innkreis we left the Heimkehrer who lived there. From Ried im Innkreis the journey took about another three-quarters of an hour.

It was on 20 September 1947 when my journey home came to an end and our train arrived in Braunau am Inn. Then, at the end, anxious questions had surfaced. How had the family survived the time during which the Russians were in Stockerau? What was known concerning Rudi’s death? But I would soon know. It was certainly a different kind of homecoming from anything we had imagined. But it was good for all that. I was lucky to have come through. At the station about 100 people were waiting. As soon as I got out I could see my family. My Father, was bearded as ever, but older. My joyfully excited Mother was looking youthful. Liesl was now 13 years old. After we had greeted and hugged each other, we Heimkehrer were taken into the small waiting room of the station, where Bürgermeister Fageth welcomed us home. After a while we went from the station, outside the town, into the town where at that time the Protestant rectory was in Linzerstrasse No. 41. It was located within the medieval centre of the town in a narrow row of houses. Over the front door there was written, in white on a red background, Herzlich Willkommen, surrounded by a garland. I was moved that it was there for me.

My homecoming was described 40 years later by my sister Liesl as follows:

I went into the house. It was a different house from the one I had left in July 1941. But it was the goal of my homecoming, after six years, one month and twenty days of war, and as a prisoner of war.

Thus ended the adventure of my youth. I was not yet 24 years old.