than along the main street, shells and bombs continued to crash around me.
On reaching the far side of town, I moved back toward the main street about half a mile beyond where I had turned off to the shore. As I approached it, a Soviet Yak fighter plane came streaking toward Fischhausen, strafing everything in its path as it flew low above the road.
Spotting a row of foxholes next to the street, I instantly dove into one for cover. Yet, instead of sliding down to the bottom of the fivefoot-deep hole, I remained where I could observe the action, compelled by an insatiable curiosity to know what was happening around me.
Evidently having seen me take cover in the foxhole, the Yak pilot angled his aircraft directly toward my position. With my eyes protruding slightly above the rim of my foxhole, I felt almost mesmerized by the bright muzzle flashes of the fighter’s machine guns as it hurtled toward me through the sky.
Bullets began pelting the ground in front of me, spewing a cloud of dirt into my eyes and shattering into a hail of shrapnel that sprayed my face. As the plane roared low above me, I reeled backward in pain to the bottom of the foxhole.
A moment later, my brain began to evaluate my condition. My wounds felt slight, but my eyes revealed only blackness when I opened them. Huddled in the foxhole, I wondered anxiously whether my blindness would be permanent.
At the end of a couple of long, apprehensive minutes, my sight began to return, though I was still barely able to see through the crusts of blood and dirt.
Hauling myself up from my foxhole, I staggered onto the main street and surveyed the scene around me with hazy vision. Despite the steady rain of shells, a few troops were in the process of rendering their surviving artillery pieces inoperable by disabling the barrels, unable to haul them further after the horses had been killed.
Only an hour or so had passed since I had first entered Fischhausen about a mile back, but during that time most of what remained of the German Army in the Samland had been destroyed. With the Red Army’s capture of the area imminent, my only course was to search for any survivors from my company and seek new orders. The disaster at Fischhausen signified an end to much that I had known, but it also marked the start of my almost miraculous escape from Russian captivity.
Stumbling westward from the town as shells sporadically fell around me, I soon located a small remnant of men from my company beside an empty ammunition bunker a couple of miles away. My subsequent hunt for Lt. Colonel Ebeling proved nearly fatal when a squadron of Russian bombers pounded the area in which I was searching. Only just managing to take cover in a trench at the last second, I again eluded serious injury from my second air attack in a few hours.
Perhaps ten minutes later, I finally came across Ebeling attempting to organize a new defensive line in an effort to resist the enemy’s expected advance from the east. However illusory, my new written orders directed me to return to Hamburg to serve as part of the leadership cadre for a new division. While offering me a chance to escape back to central Germany, these orders required me to transfer command of my company’s surviving troops to the 32nd Division, an action which caused me lasting grief since it likely meant either death or captivity for them.
Two days afterward, on April 18, Senior Sgt. Juchter and I made our way westward toward Pillau, under intermittent Red Army artillery fire. Crossing the narrow channel separating Pillau from the Frische Isthmus, we journeyed three dozen miles south by truck to an area on the Gulf of Danzig. From there, we boarded a ferry that took us to the port of Hela, isolated at the end of a long peninsula.
Juchter’s death in a Russian artillery barrage two and a half weeks later reinvigorated my efforts to seek a way off Hela. The following day, I linked up with a Silesian infantry unit ordered to sail for central Germany. That night, we boarded a German destroyer heading west. All those who remained behind fell into Soviet hands.
Chapter 17
THE PRICE OF DEFEAT
PRISONER OF WAR
“Herr Oberleutnant, der Krieg ist vorbei” (“Lieutenant, the war is finished”), a sailor’s somber voice announced to me in my bunk on the morning of May 9, just hours after our destroyer had departed Hela.
Germany’s unconditional surrender had officially come into effect at 2301 hours Central European time on May 8, though the process had already commenced several days earlier.
Hitler had committed suicide in Berlin on April 30, and been succeeded in power by Admiral Donitz, who became Reichsprasident. On May 4, the British had accepted the military surrender of all German forces in Holland, northwest Germany, and Denmark in a ceremony held at the training area near Wendisch-Evern, where I had undergone much of my drilling during boot camp.
On the night of May 4, Donitz, with British consent, ordered all available warships to sail across the Baltic Sea to the port of Hela and the Weichsel River Estuary near Stutthof. Their mission was to evacuate as many German soldiers and civilians to the west as they could in the short time that remained before the final surrender. The last of these ships, including the destroyers Karl Galster and “25,” left Hela at midnight on May 8. Only by chance had I joined the troops of a Silesian infantry regiment boarding one of those destroyers that night.
Though our small convoy of ships was still closer to territory occupied by the Red Army on the morning of May 9, we were determined to avoid surrender to the Russians. Ignoring Soviet demands for us to proceed directly to one of the ports under their control, the commander of our small convoy contacted the British for instructions. In addition to allowing the convoy to proceed to the Danish port of Copenhagen, the British authorized our commander to resist any attempt to force him to do otherwise.
Our failure to obey the Russian demand to sail for a harbor under their control brought an assault by a group of Soviet patrol boats later that morning. With German sailors firing every available weapon aboard the destroyers, the enemy boats quickly broke off the attack and escaped into the fog. Though not witnessing the engagement, the loud thumping of the ship’s guns was audible to me in my cabin below deck. It would be the last time I heard the fire of heavy guns in combat.
Years later, Lt. Col. Ebeling told me he had been evacuated at about the same time aboard a tug pulling a barge crammed with about 200 troops. As they were crossing the Baltic Sea, a storm struck. The tug survived, but all those on the barge drowned in one of those countless tragedies of the war’s final days.
When our destroyer arrived in the harbor at Copenhagen that afternoon, all personnel were ordered to disembark down a gangplank onto the dock. At a checkpoint there, waiting British soldiers would relieve us of any weapons as we began our internment as prisoners of war.
While still aboard ship, I withdrew my Luger pistol from one of my tunic’s pockets. To make the weapon inoperable, I removed its firing pin and tossed it overboard into the harbor. Replacing my superior Astra pistol in the holster with the now useless Luger, I then slipped the Astra into my tunic pocket, anticipating that I might need it for some unforeseen eventuality. Last, I took off my Iron Cross First Class and dropped it into one of my pockets.
Reaching the checkpoint, I handed the Luger to the waiting English soldier. Much to my surprise, he angrily shouted at me in perfect unaccented German. With a hate-filled expression, he proceeded to rip the officer’s shoulder boards and decorations from my uniform leaving me stunned and humiliated.
Without another word, he gestured for me to move on. Retaining my composure with great difficulty, I resigned myself to my new status as a POW. In retrospect, I suspect that the soldier might have been a Jewish-
