to vacate, the owners had only a few hours to pack a suitcase and leave their property. One family had to depart their farm at five o’clock in the evening on Christmas Eve. If the owners failed to vacate, they would be placed in concentration camps. In these circumstances, most owners crossed over to the western zone.
Frequently, the new owners were already waiting out front of the farm to take control of the property. These new owners were selected by German Communists with the assistance of the Russians. For farms 100 hectares or larger, there were typically 10 to 15 new owners, consisting mainly of those who had previously worked as hired laborers or were simply good Communists.
Every new family looked out for its own interests, which often led to serious clashes with the other new owners. Due to the high production quotas demanded by the Communists, some of these new owners did not stay very long. Generally, they departed in the dark of night, taking every portable item they could. Those who stayed ran into other problems since all machinery and other equipment was tailored for the operation of larger farms rather than smaller plots.
Because the Communist authorities gave the new owners more rights than the remaining established farmers in a village, disputes among them were common. This conflict was magnified by the quota system. While the quotas for the new owners who were natural supporters of the Communists actually decreased from year to year, the established farmers had to meet ever larger quotas.
With a growing portion of the harvest delivered to the Communist authorities for distribution in Germany or shipment to the Soviet Union, there was a diminishing amount left over to feed the farm families and their animals. In particular, there was a constant shortage of butter, eggs, and meat.
The psychological stress was perhaps even worse than the shortages. Farmers remained constantly anxious that they would be unable to fulfill the unrealistically high quotas for grain, meat, eggs, and the like. The great fear was that their failure to meet the designated quotas would lead to their deportation to a Siberian labor camp.
Unable to meet the burden imposed on them, some of these families who had farmed a piece of land for generations ultimately decided to flee to the west as refugees. In other cases, children left for the west while their parents stayed behind on the farm. If someone was caught trying to escape, they could be sent to Siberia, thus succumbing to the very fate they had sought to avoid. This was the reality of life under postwar Soviet occupation.
Chapter 18
POST-WAR GERMANY
REBUILDING OUR LIVES
July 27–December 24, 1945
After dismissing the men outside the employment office in Luneburg, I set out on the five-mile walk to my uncle’s farm in Hagen. Dressed in the same uniform I had been wearing since Fischhausen, it was strange to be returning to the place where I had first received the telegram ordering me to report for training almost six years earlier. So much had happened.
Arriving at the front door of the familiar home, I knocked. When the door opened, my aunt stood before me with an expression of deep disappointment on her face. In a sorrowful voice, she said, “And I thought it was Heinrich.”
My aunt and uncle’s oldest son Heinrich had achieved the rank of captain in the artillery. In the last weeks of the war, he had been on his way back to the front from a furlough when he was ordered to take command of one of the ad hoc units formed to help defend Berlin. Only sometime later did my aunt and uncle learn that he had been killed during the Russian assault on the city.
Despite their natural concern for Heinrich’s fate, my aunt and uncle tried to make me feel welcome. To my great relief, they passed along a card from Anneliese that she had sent to their home when she learned that I was alive. It was the first time that I had any word from her for over six months.
Following a couple of days in Hagen, I caught a train to Hamburg. When I reached Anneliese’s home in the suburb of Wandsbek, her father greeted me warmly and told me that he himself had just recently returned home after duty with the Volkssturm in Belgium and Germany. He generously invited me to stay in the house that he shared with his relatives while I waited for Anneliese to arrive and sought a place of my own to live.
After years in combat, terrible nightmares regularly plagued my sleep. Shortly after my arrival at the Berndts’ home, I had a dream that I was trapped in a bunker in Russia and began pounding the wall beside my bed. Because the nearby explosions of Allied bombs during the war had loosened its plaster, the wall quickly gave way under my unconscious hammering, collapsing onto my bed and the floor in a pile of dust and debris.
Hearing the loud noise, everyone in the house awoke and rushed to my room. Upset and embarrassed by the episode, it was hard for me to explain the damage. While I continued to suffer the psychological effects of post- traumatic stress, I knew many other former soldiers who found it much more difficult to cope. Only with the passage of five or ten years did the war gradually fade from my thoughts and dreams.
Following her failure to find me at the POW camp, Anneliese had returned to Suderdeich where she obtained an official discharge from her nursing duties on August 6, 1945.
When she came through the door to her father’s home in Hamburg later that day, she flung herself into my arms. Holding each other tightly in a long embrace that I will never forget, we both cried tears of joy and relief. It was my love for her and my hope for this moment that had kept me going through the darkest moments of the war. Against all odds, we were together again at last.
During these months, Anneliese had suffered emotional confusion and turmoil. With no letters from me following our retreat from Memel in January, she had no way of knowing whether I had been captured or killed. Given the huge scale of German losses, it was completely understandable that she would believe I was gone from her life. Now, against all odds, we were together again at last.
Soon after our emotional reunion, I learned the fate of the money that I had saved during the war. Throughout my years of service, I was paid a fixed salary according to my rank as well as supplemental pay for combat duty. Because I was almost always in combat, I was able to use the supplement to provide my spending money at the front, while the army deposited my regular pay into the army bank in Bremen. Since 1941, I had been saving these funds to pay for college after my discharge from the army.
When the war ended, however, the army collapsed and the bank disappeared. I never saw any of that money. Perhaps it would have been wise for me to have shifted it somewhere else, but by the time I realized that Germany’s defeat was likely I was more concerned about staying alive than protecting my money. Still, it was very hard for me to accept that all my savings had simply vanished. With our families able to offer little assistance, Anneliese and I would be building new lives almost from scratch.
Before entering the Wehrmacht in 1939, I had already finished about a year and a half of the two-year apprenticeship required of everyone who wanted to pursue an engineering degree program. In case my educational plans did not work out, I now decided to complete the longer four-year apprenticeship necessary to obtain the status of journeyman (licensed professional) electrician before attending college. While the electricians guild waived a year of my journeyman’s apprenticeship in compensation for my years of military service, my remaining year and a half as an apprentice provided an hourly pay that only allowed a very meager standard of living.
Soon after Anneliese returned, I found a job as an apprentice electrician with the A. Lehmann Company, which subcontracted me to Blom and Foss, the largest shipbuilding company in Hamburg. After a fifteen-minute train ride from my new apartment to the harbor, I would take a short ferry ride to the shipyard.
Arriving for work one day, my foreman ordered me to wait in front of the high-voltage electrical breakers while he went next door and flipped on the power. As he intended, the thunderous noise produced by the sudden surge of current scared the heck out of me. With an occasional prank to liven things up, the work was interesting and I learned a great deal.
