Despite windy, cold and wet weather that time of year, Anneliese and I still enjoyed strolling around the scenic resort area and watching the waves crash against the coast. After all we had been through during the previous six months apart, we were simply happy to have time together again.
On November 8, I returned south to the reserve base in Oldenburg, which served as the 58th Infantry Division’s primary processing center for soldiers departing and returning from the front. There was little for me to do, but Anneliese was able to follow me down from St. Peter-Ording for a two-day visit.
Just after she returned to St. Peter-Ording, Anneliese began experiencing stomach pains and underwent an emergency appendectomy on November 17 at a hospital in Tonning near St. Peter-Ording. Before returning home to Puggen for my three-week furlough before the start of my training at the Kriegsschule, I made a trip up to Tonning to spend a little time with her in the hospital.
Reaching home the next day, my family gave me their usual warm welcome. As always, my sisters wanted me to carry them on my back and play games with them. Despite such light moments, it was clear to me that life in Germany was growing harder.
Beginning in the winter of 1943–1944, the local authorities required children to bring a piece of peat coal to class each day in order to help heat Puggen’s one-room schoolhouse. If the supplies ran out, my sisters and the other students would have to bundle up in their coats throughout the day to stay warm.
By this time, Marlene had completed her elementary schooling and had entered an upper level school in nearby Salzwedel, where her main teacher was a strong Nazi. Aware of our family’s lack of support for the Nazis, this teacher caused Marlene many difficulties, especially for her failure to use the “Heil Hitler” salute in which the arm is thrust out. Politically handicapped and under constant scrutiny, Marlene had to work extremely hard to achieve a measure of academic success.
Her experience reflected the broader treatment that my family received because of its unfavorable attitude toward the Nazis. For example, when my family sought permission to butcher one of our pigs, it encountered problems obtaining authorization from the local farmer who had been granted such decision-making powers because of his Nazi loyalty. Likewise, when the higher authorities issued a directive requiring Puggen to supply a certain number of animals for slaughter or horses for transportation, this same Nazi farmer made sure that my family was the first one required to surrender the necessary livestock.
In other ways, my family’s experience was typical of that of other German families. Like many of them, my parents risked losing more than one son in the war. Earlier that year, the army had drafted my younger brother, Otto. When he completed his basic training, he was stationed with an infantry division in northern France, in the area south of Normandy. Because his twin Hans had suffered a childhood accident in which a wagon wheel ran over his left leg, he was unable to serve at the front, despite his desire to do so.
When we were away at the front, my mother would anxiously await letters from Otto or me each day. While eager to hear more news on the military situation, my mother did not trust the information presented by the tightly controlled German media.
Although risking harsh punishment for tuning into enemy broadcasts, she would regularly get out a small radio she kept hidden away and scan the dial for the BBC’s distinctive classical music call sign. Though occasionally joined by other members of the family, she frequently would sit alone in a back room listening to their German language program in an effort to obtain a clearer picture of the war. Closely following military developments on a map, my mother knew where the frontlines ran and sometimes even where our divisions were operating.
Upon her release from the hospital in Tonning on November 27, Anneliese was granted leave from her nursing duties and went home to Hamburg, where I joined her for four days. During this visit, she arranged for me to stay with her “Aunt” Frieda, a sweet elderly woman who was a close friend of her father’s and who had somewhat taken on the role of mother to Anneliese since her real mother was absent. She resided in a two- bedroom apartment in the Winterhude suburb of the city, located behind the popular delicatessen that she ran selling coffee, chocolates, and other desserts.
Like Aunt Frieda’s apartment, the house that Anneliese’s father shared with his sisters in the suburb of Wandsbek had escaped major damage in the bombing raids, but the magnitude of the devastation in the heart of Hamburg was astonishing. In tears, Anneliese finally described her horrible recollections from the previous summer.
In the aftermath of the bombings, she had only been able to reach the hospital where she had been training as a nurse with great difficulty. Once there, she treated many terribly burned civilian casualties. The giant inferno caused by the bombing had generated such intense heat that the asphalt roads had melted into a sticky tar. People trying to escape the firestorm became stuck and burned like torches.
In the tragedy’s grim wake, we found it difficult to appreciate fully our limited moments together. The war was now everywhere and impossible to escape. Yet, even as the situation at home and the news from the front grew more ominous, a surprising sense of optimism about the outcome of the war still prevailed among all those I knew.
Gobbel’s speeches promising the imminent arrival of miracle weapons, more advanced than anything Germany’s enemies possessed, inspired hope that our fortunes would soon change.
Chapter 13
KRIEGSCHULE
WHEN I ARRIVED FROM Puggen to commence my officer training at the Kriegsschule in the suburbs of Dresden on December 8, the old Saxon city was still beautiful. There was no hint of the terrible fate that awaited Dresden later in the war, when an Allied incendiary bombing would kill about 60,000 civilians.
In acknowledgement of our service at the front, the war academy tried to make our experience as officer candidates as agreeable as possible, providing us with comfortable rooms in the barracks and good meals in the mess hall. At the same time, the academy’s staff kept us constantly busy with a variety of tasks.
From morning until noon, we attended classes on leadership skills, tactics, and other military theory. Our instructors also taught military etiquette, such as proper conduct for an officer in the company of a woman and appropriate dining manners.
In the afternoon, we carried out field training in the snow-covered rolling hills of the academy’s firing range at Konigsbruck. Our instructors would assign us a platoon with a couple of 75-millimeter guns in order to assess our leadership skills and our ability to handle the howitzers in a variety of offensive and defensive tactical scenarios.
Because most of the soldiers we were commanding possessed frontline experience, the exercises were not too challenging. In fact, because of my years in combat as a forward observer, I was often able to pass along practical advice to the instructors.
On weekday evenings, we would study in our rooms after a meal in the academy’s mess hall. Although the academy arranged no dances or other social activities for us on weekends, I sometimes attended operas and operettas with other officer candidates at Dresden’s renowned Semper opera house.
Despite increasing numbers of officers from middle class origins, Germany’s officer corps was still filled with many blue-blooded aristocrats—“Von so-and-so”—who had been educated at the nation’s elite institutions. The majority of these high-born officers were decent men who treated the other soldiers with respect, but there were a few who held very superior attitudes toward others not of their social class.
While most of the ‘Vons’ were fellow Prussians, I was not from an aristocratic background and despised those officers who treated common soldiers like myself in a condescending manner. My experiences with one particular Prussian aristocrat illustrates the character of this arrogance.
The same first lieutenant who had once led his horse into our barracks at Luneburg in a drunken display of insolence had since achieved the rank of captain and been placed in command of a battalion-sized unit in the regiment.
At a regimental staff meeting I attended after becoming an officer, the captain exhibited his disdainful
