of hundred of the soldiers. A half hour later, a mile or so outside the harbor, a giant shadow loomed up in front of us. A brand new destroyer of the Kriegsmarine (German Navy) was readying to sail for Germany.
After climbing up a net hung down the side of the ship, we were warmly welcomed by the crew and directed where to go. While the enlisted personnel bedded down in the cool night air on the deck, I was escorted to one of the cabins below.
Despite the recent torpedoing of other German ships sailing west, I finally felt a flicker of optimism about my chances of survival as I lay in my bunk. What would happen now?
Early the following morning, a sailor came to my bunk and woke me. In a somber voice, he announced, “Herr Oberleutnant, der Krieg ist vorbei.” (“Lieutenant, the war is finished.”)
The date was May 9, 1945.
Looking back, my lucky escape from Hela that night probably saved me from making a choice between going into captivity in Russia or taking my own life. Yet at that moment when I learned of the surrender, my mood was neither one of joy nor sadness. Instead, I felt only numb disorientation at the loss of all that I had known, and deep uncertainty about what lay ahead for me and for Germany.
Chapter 1
A VILLAGE UPBRINGING
JUST FIVE YEARS AFTER the Second World War ended for me on that destroyer, the ominous specter of a new war with Russia haunted my thoughts and dreams.
I knew what war meant. Relentless heat and dust in summer. Bone-chilling cold in winter. Bottomless mud in fall and spring. Insatiable mosquitoes and incessant lice. Sleep deprivation and physical exhaustion. Bullets whistling through the air. Shells and bombs shaking the earth. Stench from rotting corpses. Constant fear of capture or death. The agony of losing comrades. Numbing brutality. Painful separation from my loved ones.
As the tensions between the Soviet Union and the West increased during the late 1940s, war again darkened the horizon. Having barely survived my years of combat in Russia, a return to soldiering and the battlefield weighed heavily on my mind. As a still young veteran who had served as a junior officer in the Wehrmacht, it was almost certain that West Germany’s Bundeswehr would call me back to duty if another war broke out, but I wanted no part of it.
Confronted with the prospect of a new military conflict in Europe and the still grim economic conditions in post-war Germany, my wife and I debated whether to leave behind our families and Fatherland to seek a better and more secure future abroad. The decision to emigrate from Germany was one of the most difficult and momentous choices of my life. In retrospect, it was the turning point when I put Germany and war behind me to begin a new life, first in Canada and ultimately in the United States.
Yet, as I grow older, the past increasingly draws me back. They say that the older you get, the more you remember what happened long ago. Perhaps that is true. Even after more than a half-century, memories of my childhood in Germany, the years of soldiering in the Second World War, the struggle to survive in post-war Germany, and my first years as an immigrant remain vividly and indelibly etched on my mind.
My generation was brought up differently than are young Germans today. The family was at the center of German society and worked together with the schools, churches, and the government to reinforce the social order and conservative values. In Germany, families and schools taught my generation a respect for our fellow men and for authority that is absent today.
This respect for others was perhaps best manifested in the basic courtesy that we were taught. If a man was riding a full bus or train and a woman or an elderly person boarded, he gave up his seat. If a man came into a house, a church, or a school wearing a hat or cap, he removed it. When a gentleman met a lady, he lifted his hat from his head and made a slight bow to her. He always escorted a lady on his right arm and opened the door to allow her to enter first. Such practices may appear quaint today, but they were the reflection of deeper values of society in Germany at that time.
The society at large accepted and respected authority because we grew up with it, particularly in the more conservative rural areas away from the big cities. There were strict rules for social behavior and official permits for everything from marriage to a change of residence. Public protests were uncommon and were generally small affairs in comparison to the frequency and scale of those today.
When demonstrations did occur in the 1930s, they were limited to the large cities and organized by a political party like the Nazis or the Communists. Most German citizens would never have considered going into the streets to march and chant for any cause. The amount of protesting and demonstrating in modern Germany would be unimaginable to my generation.
Long before the Nazis came to power, Germany’s military had internalized a culture of respect for order and authority that was rooted in every social institution: the family, the schools, churches, the law, and everything else. When training for the army, our instructors drilled discipline and obedience into us. We obeyed the commands of our officers without question, regardless of the casualties we might suffer.
The German people at home, in turn, had long given their respect and patriotic support to the military, much like the esteem that Americans today feel for the U.S. armed services. During the war, the speeches and rallies, propaganda posters and films, collection drives for precious metals to make weapons and munitions, the hardships, and even the Allied bombing reinforced the sense of unity between the German population at home and the German troops fighting abroad. This was the social fabric that made Germany so strong during the Second World War.
FAMILY HERITAGE
I grew up in a farm family.
Although my maternal grandfather, Gottlieb Matthies, originally trained as a schoolmaster and taught in a one-room schoolhouse, his life changed when he met my grandmother, Luise Schulz. Luise’s parents owned a farm of about 200 to 250 acres that had belonged to her family since the 1700s. When my grandfather and grandmother married in 1889, he stopped teaching to run the farm because Luise’s father was ready to retire and there was no male heir in her family to inherit the property.
My mother, Margarete Matthies, was born to them in 1896. She, with her older brother and younger sister, grew up on this farm in the small village of Puggen, typical of the small towns and villages that dot Europe’s landscape. Located among the rolling hills of the Altmark agricultural region, midway between Hanover and Berlin in north central Germany, the village’s roughly 200 residents lived between a pinewood forest to the north and meadows to the south.
As in other German farm villages, the homes and other buildings in Puggen were clustered in a central location surrounded by the farmland. The closest train stop, stores, and policeman were located in larger neighboring villages, the nearest being a couple of miles away.
Born in 1892, my father grew up as the second son of the Lubbecke family with one older brother and seven sisters. They lived on a large farm of about a thousand acres dating from the 1700s. It was located in the village of Hagen, which is now part of the city of Luneburg. Because the law of primogeniture at that time dictated that the oldest son received all the family’s property when the father passed away, my father eventually left Hagen to train as a manager on several different large farms in northern Germany.
During the Great War of 1914 to 1918, later called the First World War, my father was drafted into a cavalry unit, as was customary for members of the landed gentry. He joined the 2. Hannoversche Dragoner Regiment Nr.
