German immigrant to Britain who took indirect revenge on me for the bitter experience he had endured before departing Germany. Otherwise, in my experience, the British troops behaved correctly and professionally, though they appeared to be wary of us.
From the checkpoint, I immediately joined about two or three thousand German soldiers piling aboard a large freighter. Recognizing no one, I mostly kept to myself during the 20-hour voyage south. However, I felt an obligation to do what I could to assist other German officers attempting to maintain military discipline among the enlisted troops, a problem which had become a mounting challenge.
Another officer told me that an ad hoc court-martial committee comprised of four or five colonels had conducted a trial and issued a death sentence against an enlisted man who had attacked a German officer aboard ship. Attaching a heavy base plate from a mortar to the convicted soldier’s back, they shot him and threw the body overboard.
When we entered the small harbor of Heiligenhafen in the Schlesweig-Holstein region of northern Germany the next day, British troops were again waiting at the end of the gangplank, this time to hand-pump a delousing powder on us before we marched off to internment.
The harbor was located about three or four miles from the entrance to a sprawling, open-air POW camp established in the region’s rolling farmland. Like sheep herded into a pen, hundreds of thousands of surrendered German soldiers crowded into a roughly 30-square-mile area around the small villages of Gremersdorf, Nanndorf, and Altgalendorf. A few British soldiers patrolled the boundary of the territory, but the perimeter remained unfenced.
Inside the internment area, the British delegated to Wehrmacht officers the responsibility for maintaining order among the interned troops. They even authorized us to carry sidearms, apparently unconcerned how we might have retained such weapons.
Upon reaching an isolated farm, I was charged with the supervision of an improvised company of a couple of hundred men from the ship. While making little effort to assert control over my assigned soldiers, I soon realized that it would be difficult to maintain even minimal discipline, even with an Astra in my holster.
Shortly after our arrival at the farm, one of the soldiers passed by me with his hands in his pockets, neglecting to make any effort to salute. When I protested, “Where is your salute?” He simply laughed at me and walked away.
Though I called out to him twice, he continued to ignore me. This complete lack of respect for my rank left me furious, but he perhaps recognized that an officer was not likely to shoot a man for gross insubordination in the existing circumstances. Or maybe he was simply apathetic about his fate.
Following Germany’s defeat after six years of fighting, most of us indeed just felt numb and utterly powerless to control our own destiny. There was no sense of relief about the end of the war, only a somber resignation to our circumstances and anxiety about the future. The Germany we had known was gone. There was no leadership. There was nothing.
Escape from the camp would have been a simple matter, but nobody attempted it. There was no place to go when the whole of Germany was under occupation. Furthermore, anyone who succeeded would lack the necessary discharge paper from the British that would provide a man with the legal status necessary to obtain employment. It also reflected the German respect for rules and authority as well as our submissive psychological state following defeat.
On the farm, a large, empty wooden cow barn provided the company with adequate shelter. There were few opportunities to wash or shave, but the lack of food was by far our primary concern. The British supplied each of us with a daily ration of four or five crackers about the size of a small piece of bread, but this inadequate diet made hunger our constant companion. At one point I became so desperate to fill my stomach that I began eating dandelion leaves, having learned in my childhood that these were edible.
When the men asked me if they could set up a primitive kitchen, I told them to go ahead, while we scrounged the area for something to cook. Discovering a little barley at a neighboring unoccupied farm, we intentionally burned the grain on our improvised stove in an effort to give it some flavor. The taste was awful, but it at least it provided us some needed nutrition.
The scarcity of food in the camp meant that everyone lost weight. At 6 feet tall, I generally had maintained a weight of 180 pounds throughout the war. At the end of a couple of months in the camp, I dropped to an emaciated 150 or 160 pounds and again began to wonder about my survival.
No recreational activities were organized, but there was no interest in such things anyway since most of the men had little energy and wanted to keep to themselves. There was finally the time and peace to write to the families of my soldiers who had died in the last weeks of the war, but I lacked names, paper, and addresses.
Even if the fate of many of the troops in my company was uncertain in the chaotic conditions of the final days and weeks of fighting, I knew that at least some of those listed as missing had actually been killed. It saddens me greatly to think that none of these families received any closure regarding their loved ones who never returned.
Reflecting on my own survival through years of combat, I am convinced of divine intervention in my fate. Despite four minor wounds over the course of the war, our medics were able to treat all my injuries at the front and never even needed to send me back for more extensive care at a field hospital. God simply had other plans for my life and spared me.
Of course Anneliese and my family remained unaware of my survival, just as I remained ignorant of their fate. Writing letters at the camp was generally impossible, but the Red Cross provided all POWs with a couple of postcards to notify our families shortly after our arrival. In separate cards, I jotted short notes to Anneliese and my family, informing them that I was alive and in relatively good health in a British POW camp in Schleswig-Holstein, hoping that the postal system would manage to deliver at least one of them amid the postwar chaos.
Through the course of the summer, a number of the soldiers on the farm had received notice of their release from the camp and been sent to the exit area for processing. In late July, I learned that my turn would soon come. Aware that there would likely be British checkpoints where I would be frisked, I decided to bury my Astra pistol and Soldbuch to prevent their potential confiscation.
Just before leaving the farm, I walked into some woods about a mile away. After carefully wrapping the items in waterproof material,I buried them and covered the hole with earth, marking the spot with a rock. A year later, I would return to retrieve the package.
When I arrived at the exit processing center for the huge internment area, I was stunned to run across Otto Tepelman, my old childhood friend from Puggen. It turned out that he too had served in Russia and escaped capture by the Red Army. Despite the presence of Soviet occupying troops in Puggen, he now planned to return to our village.
Because former Wehrmacht officers were still being shipped to POW camps in the Soviet Union after the war, I knew that my own return would be too risky and decided to claim Luneburg rather than Puggen as my hometown. Just before Tepelman’s discharge, I wrote out a short note and asked him to deliver it to my family personally, since I was still unsure whether they had received my Red Cross card.
My own departure came only a few days later on July 27, which was fortunate since the small exit area of the camp lacked any shelter other than a network of holes dug into the ground. As we prepared to leave, the British placed me in charge of two dozen other German troops who were returning to Luneburg. We were soon loaded aboard three trucks driven by British soldiers under the command of a corporal.
Meanwhile, a couple of days before our departure, Anneliese had learned of my survival and internment, after finally receiving my Red Cross card. Determined to see me again, she immediately left her nursing duties in Suderdeich without even seeking permission from her superiors, who were now under British supervision. Walking to a crossing point on the nearby Elbe River, she smuggled herself aboard a ferry.
When it docked on the eastern bank, Anneliese somehow acquired a bicycle for the 100-mile journey to my internment area in Schleswig-Holstein. Utterly exhausted, she finally reached the main gate of the camp, only to learn that the British had released me the day before her arrival.
For the time being, I remained ignorant of these events. At the end of our roughly 100-mile trip south from the camp to Luneburg, I directed the British driver of the leading truck to head for the employment office in the center of town. After the men piled out into the courtyard in front of the building, I lined them up before issuing my final orders: “The war is finished. Go home.”
And so, at the end of July 1945, at the age of 25, I was once again a civilian after six years of war.
