Invasion, Pirates and the Shrinking Reich - Hitler's Home Front: Memoirs of a Hitler Youth - Don A. Gregory, Wilhelm R. Gehlen

Hitler's Home Front: Memoirs of a Hitler Youth - Don A. Gregory, Wilhelm R. Gehlen (2016)

Chapter 9. Invasion, Pirates and the Shrinking Reich

On 7 June 1944, an important announcement came over the radio and the next day the news was carried in all the newspaper: ‘Die Invasion hat begonnen’ (The Invasion has begun). Almost 200,000 Allied soldiers had landed on the beaches of Normandy the day before. Many more would come ashore in the months to come. By July, the Allied troops had captured the first German fighter bases in France and this brought us within easy range of the fighter-bombers. They descended like locusts and we soon learned how to recognise each one. Things got busy at the quads; the schools soon closed and did not re-open until after the war. We were busier than ever trying to keep the invading planes away from our towns and factories. Their targets were also our food supply.

Hitler, in desperation, called on the youth of Germany to help resist the Allied invasion and they volunteered in droves. Many still had innocent kindergarten faces, but each wanted to do his part. They dug ditches, cleared rubble, helped at anti-aircraft batteries or learned how to operate Panzerfausts. Others volunteered for sniper training and the American 84th Infantry had to deal with them in Aachen. Some were as young as ten years old. Himmler in an October 1944 speech said that, ‘Our children will fight like Werewolves and defeat the Allies’. One involvement of ten- and twelve-year-old boys and girls that I know something about was in November 1944 during Operation Clipper (the British attack on Geilenkirchen). Near Leiffahrt, about six miles north-east of Geilenkirchen, the Germans were trying to slow the Allied advance. A US M3 halftrack with ten soldiers on the back had hit a road mine just outside Würm on the Leiffahrt road and two GIs were injured. The other soldiers and the driver scattered and took cover in a partially-destroyed barn. They watched four kids who were pulling a two-wheel cart loaded with anti-personnel mines. They were placing them on a footpath along the railway track. That they were kids was obvious. The boys wore short pants despite the late November cold, and the girls, with pigtails and skirts, were helping pull the cart. The GIs didn’t see any firearms on them so they decided to rush the group and after all four had been captured, they asked the children their ages. ‘Zehn, Zehn, Zwölf, Dreizehn’ (ten, ten, twelve, and thirteen), was the answer. I don’t know what those ten GIs did with the kids. That detail was not recorded in the company record that I had a look at after the war. One of the girls, I actually knew. Her name was Liesel Keuper and I think she was killed after the war, in late 1945, when she stepped on a mine in a Geilenkirchen suburb. Another German boy died in the same explosion. He was buried by the blast and a wooden cross was stuck in the ground on the spot. A sign was quickly put up that read ‘Achtung Minen’. During the clean-up of that minefield, his body was exhumed and buried. The devastation of Operation Clipper was complete and the scars on the countryside are still visible today.

Some people might think that all the children of Germany were so indoctrinated by the Nazi political system that they readily looked forward to the day they would be old enough to be sworn into the Hitler Youth and march through the towns with banners waving. I can tell you that this was not the case. Long before the outbreak of the war, there existed a youth movement that opposed the strict discipline of the Hitler Youth. They wanted freedom of choice, to go where they wanted, and to spend their free time the way they chose. They were of course a minority, but nevertheless they became a nuisance to the Nazis. They called themselves ‘Edelweiss Pirates’ and ‘Navajos’. One group of Navajos operated in our area. They had their own flags, sang their own songs and despised the traditional Hitler Youth uniforms. The Edelweiss Pirates wore an edelweiss flower pin on their shirts or caps. On many occasions these groups attacked small Hitler Youth detachments, usually late at night. They carried no weapons, except perhaps a knife of some sort. They painted anti-Nazi slogans on walls, pulled down Nazi flags and were called vandals by local Party members. To say they were well organised and politically motivated by some nationwide anti-Nazi conspiracy would be an exaggeration, but they were a thorn in the side of the establishment. In Germany at the time, a child could leave school at the age of fourteen and work in a factory or become an apprentice for a trade, become a member of the Hitler Youth, and at age seventeen, be called into the RAD. Most were satisfied with this life because they knew nothing better; not much else to do anyway.

Some of the Edelweiss Pirates and Navajos were sons of Communists or Social Democrats, whose fathers had been locked up in concentration camps long ago or murdered by the Gestapo. Some were sons of criminals, and only a very few of them were truly politically motivated. They did not align themselves with any Allied-supported resistance groups. By 1944 the Edelweiss Pirates became such a nuisance that the Gestapo headquarters (in Düsseldorf) for our district and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD - the SS Security Police) office in Cologne decided to do away with them once and for all. Cologne in 1944 was a huge pile of rubble and the Navajos had successfully evaded the Gestapo by living in the cellars of bombed-out buildings. Some enemies of the Nazis such as criminals, escaped prisoners and even a few POWs and Jews were harboured by them. They were all awaiting the end of the war, which was on the horizon by mid-1944. Somehow, the Gestapo infiltrated this group and in the autumn of 1944, they raided a cell in a Cologne suburb. The ‘enemies of the Reich’ they were harbouring went back to the concentration camps and the young boys were imprisoned and tortured. In November 1944, a group of about a dozen was publicly hanged in Cologne.

Brother Len told me about the Edelweiss Pirates and said that they had to be caught. The activities of the Pirates were well known in the Rhineland long before 1944. A few investigators have suggested that the Edelweiss Pirates were somehow connected to the assassination attempt on Hitler of 20 July 1944. That is absolute nonsense; nor can it be said that this group took their ideas from the ‘Rote Kapelle’ (Red Orchestra). This was a group of university students, mainly from southern Germany, and almost all had been arrested by 1944. The July 20th conspirators would never have trusted a misguided group of teenagers with their plans. After the occupation of the Rhineland in March 1945, the Pirates by no means folded; they denounced former Nazis to the Allies, who were only too eager to get their hands on anyone who had proudly worn the brown uniform. Then the Pirates started to attack German men and women who associated with the occupation powers. That attracted the attention of Allied military personnel assigned to keep the peace in the area. At least one Pirate, named Heinz Deventer, was sentenced to death by a British military tribunal in 1946 in Uelzen (Lower Saxony). I don’t know if he was executed or what specific crime he was charged with.

* * *

Unlike the Nazis, who had strictly enforced a law that forbade us listening to enemy radio broadcasts, nobody cared what we listened to after our area was occupied by the Allies. Some writers, long after the end of the war, maintained that Allied forces confiscated all radios from German families. That simply is not true. No one confiscated ours and I don’t know anyone in our town who claimed theirs was taken away. I remember well a squad of Dutch volunteers listening to a Berlin speech by Goebbels on our radio. This was on 5 or 6 March 1945, after our town was occupied. They had been fighting alongside the US 104th Division and were using our house for temporary quarters. Our electricity was working again after five days in the dark. The town had its own power plant and it had escaped the bombings that began in February. The Dutch soldiers understood German perfectly and had a heck of a good time poking fun at what our Propaganda Minister was saying. The speech by Goebbels made it clear that he still believed in final victory and that we should as well. He said that if the war was lost, Germany would be better off living under the hammer and sickle than the British and Americans. He had detested the British for years, particularly Churchill, whom he described as the arch enemy, a gangster and the destroyer of Europe. By this time however, a separate agreement with Stalin was out of the question, but Goebbels had high hopes that the West would eventually fall out with the Communists over who would exercise control over Poland. Since the Yalta Conference in February, Stalin had broken every agreement he had signed with Roosevelt and Churchill. Goebbels wasn’t so very wrong in his predictions. The ‘Iron Curtain’, a phrase he himself invented, came down across Germany soon after the end of the war.

The secret Werewolf organisation had been founded by Himmler in September 1944, but Goebbels mentioned it openly in his speech and called for Germany’s youth to join it. They were a group of fanatical Hitler Youth volunteers who still believed that the war was far from lost for Germany even in 1945. Some were brave enough to get within forty yards of a Sherman tank with a Panzerfaust. Shooting one at this range was just about suicide. The Wehrwolves were assigned to operate behind American and British lines on the left bank of the Rhine River. The intent was to sabotage Allied installations, assassinate those who were responsible for surrendering cities without a fight, and generally create havoc in the occupied areas. No mention was made by Goebbels of the Eastern front. The Werewolves were supposed to strike fear in the Allies, but not much came of the organisation. The mayor of Aachen was assassinated and a seventeen-year-old girl who was supposedly a member of the Werewolves was said to be involved in the operation. A few attempts were made to destroy bridges, and a small convoy of Canadian trucks was attacked in the Reichswald, but that was all.

All this was far removed from our limited universe. Before we were occupied, our local Hitler Youth detachment was far too busy digging defence ditches or helping bring in the crops to be involved with such last-ditch attacks. Everyone knew ‘no farms, no food’. By late 1944, Brother Len had also started working on the local farms, sometimes being gone for days, and with Dad far away and Granddad Willem dead, the task of supplementing our meagre rations at home fell to me. Even a twelve-year-old can become an expert gardener when starving is the only other choice. Watching the vegetables and rabbits grow made me proud of the work I was doing for our family. A fully grown cauliflower is a beautiful sight if you’re hungry. Being hungry also improves your sense of smell I discovered. We could smell fresh-baked bread from a mile away and on Pannas day, the smell of meat fat cooking travelled even farther.

Because of the downturn of the war and the advancing Allies in the summer of 1944, there were no more Hitler Youth parades in town. It was ditch-digging time and the boys (and at times girls) had to bring their own food for the day. Len, who was their number-one digger, missed the pea soup they had been fed after their parades most of all. He had to live on black bread and turnip sandwiches from home. I was lucky, the quads’ cook had to feed the crew, alert or no alert, and if they were having something good, I made sure I got my share. Food is not the only essential thing to keep one alive, however. You can freeze to death much quicker than you can starve to death. The government’s WHW organisation was always begging for warm clothes for the front-line troops, but civilians feel the cold too and it was common for the temperature to fall to well below freezing. We made mittens from rabbit skins, untanned of course, so that after a few days on our hands, they stunk to high heaven. Old wool coats with holes in them were made into hats and chicken feathers were washed and dried and stuffed into pillow cases. Wool socks were darned and I darned more than my share of them. Even spinning wheels were dug out of attics and barns and once again put to use turning sheep wool into knitting yarn - when we could get the wool.

* * *

One night in May 1944, a raid was in progress on the cities of Moers and Rheinhausen (near Duisburg); with the Thyssen steel works the target. From the top of the hill where the quads were, we could see the chimney stacks of the Rheinhausen Steel and Copper mill. In clear weather, we could see the coal slag heaps of Essen Krupp. The eight huge chimneys of the DEW in Krefeld were only ten miles away. It was a commanding high point where the quads stood. To the north, only six miles away, the huge copper dome of the M-G water tower could be seen. Over the years, the copper had turned green by oxidation and was clearly visible from the air, standing smack in the middle of the city. Krefeld had one too and both were easy reference points for attackers. We were close enough to the attack to be a possible target as well so our air-raid sirens were screaming.

The streets were empty except for Mr Vink who was doing his rounds. Brother Len and I took the opportunity to sneak across a few fields to a nearby Wehrmacht bakery. The bakers were not to be seen. They were probably hiding in the deep cellars outside in the yard. Under a canvas canopy stood rows and rows of freshly-baked loaves cooling down. There were round ones, short ones and long ones, but in the dark, we just grabbed the longest ones, not knowing what kind it was. Running back home across the railway tracks, my still warm loaf broke in half. I picked up the two pieces and got home without encountering a soul. Len suggested another raid on the bread wonderland right then and I would have agreed with him, but alas, the RAF finished their destruction of Thyssen and headed for home. We liberated about fourteen pounds of black bread that night and we hoped to get more in the future. A few nights after that, the smell of fresh-baked bread wafted across the fields to us and we knew where that smell was coming from. We knew it was wrong, but we prayed for a full alert. We even prayed for the RAF, and both prayers were answered. We didn’t know it, but this time the target was supposed to be Düsseldorf. For some unknown reason, the bombers dropped most of their load far off target and hit a few roof tile factories in our area. Our second bread raid was thwarted by two Wehrmacht guards and a bunch of POWs who were already loading the bread onto trucks. Nevertheless, fourteen pounds of black bread during the previous raid wasn’t bad for one night’s work, and for a considerable time after that, we lived on black bread and prune soup. This soup was Mum’s own invention. We had plenty of prunes courtesy of a large plum tree in our garden. Mum would soak about two pounds of the bread for a night in water and the next day, put it in a pan with a handful of prunes and boil it for about two hours until it had the consistency of black mud. Then two tablespoons of vinegar were added and eight ounces of sugar or molasses, along with some cinnamon or ground cloves. We ate it hot or cold, but because of the coarse barley the bread was made from late in the war, it never seemed to get soft even when it was boiled with the prunes.

All this foraging for something to eat to supplement our rations and home-canned food was Brother Len’s and my responsibility. Other people had kids too and they did the same thing, but there was never any rivalry. We were all in the same boat and we knew it. After years of war, we more or less treated pilfering as an adventure. We didn’t think of it as a crime anymore. This was a war the whole nation was involved in one way or another and our simple lives were at stake almost every day. I’m not saying that we were explicitly targeted, but German children grew up to be German soldiers; we knew that and so did the Allies.

Up to the summer of 1944, we hadn’t felt much of the war’s destruction. We lived away from the big cities; Dusseldorf was thirty-five miles and Cologne forty. That doesn’t sound far today, but even ten miles away from the exploding bombs seemed safe at the time. With fascination we watched the red skies above the burning cities, the burning distant Ruhr area every night, and the plying searchlight beams. We cheered when a bomber was hit and came crashing down in flames and were eager to read the news next day in the paper: ‘Last night enemy bombers crossed into the north-western Reich area and bombs were dropped on several locations in the Rhineland. Cultural establishments, churches and hospitals were hit and the civilian population sustained some losses. Twenty-four of the attacking bombers were shot down by our defences. Night fighter patrols shot down another seven of the attackers.’ We didn’t believe everything we read, but there was no hiding from a shooting war after June 1944 when the Allies landed at the Normandy beaches. A few airfields the Allies captured in northern France a month later added to our misery and the area behind the German front line as far east as the Rhine became a hunting ground for fighter-bombers. From then on, digging potatoes, weeding or watering the garden or simply walking to the shop for half a loaf of bread became a dangerous business.

From their elevated seats, the pilots could see every movement and they shot at anything that moved. We jumped from one house’s front-door lintel to the next as the noise of the engine receded into the distance and listened to hear if another plane was following. Night time was the best time to go out, but if there was an alert on, no one was allowed in the streets except the air-raid wardens. For October 1944, I remember that in our logbook at the quads was recorded 340 alerts for that month alone and that’s about ten per day. These were just the daylight alerts, as our 20mm quads were only on standby at night in October 1944. Evening alerts were for our big brothers, the 88s. The air-raid warning system in Germany worked very well with a few exceptions. The Drathfunk, a radio transmitted warning system, would warn us of any approaching bomber force from the direction of the Friesian Islands. Terschelling was our main warning station; there were also stations on Helgoland and Norderney and we knew what the number of our area was on the alert grid map.

By October 1944, many town and villages west of the Rhine had evacuated children and old folks to Saxony, Mecklenburg or even Silesia, but many were reluctant to leave their homes. After all, it wasn’t only the Western Allies advancing toward the German border; out in the East there was a far greater menace poised to storm into the Fatherland. In October, this enemy was still far away, even though a few Russian attacks had brought the Red Army into the south-eastern parts of East Prussia, capturing a few places like Goldap in Poland. According to reports, the Russians had raped every woman and child and had nailed Party officials to barn doors. We heard the Party leader of one village was tied between four horses and pulled apart. The vengeful Russian soldiers were showing no mercy; they hadn’t been shown any by their conquerors in the past three years. When these tales of terror were heard by the people who had been evacuated from the west to the east, many chose to pack up and go back to their homes, fighter-bombers or no fighter-bombers. They’d rather be shot by a .50 calibre bullet or pulverised by a bomb than be nailed to a barn door.

Wehrmacht soldiers of lower ranks at the front had it even worse than us later in the war. My dad told me that in Russia they mostly lived off the land. Those soldiers who were stationed at home bases in Germany had their own company kitchens and were reasonably well fed. In September 1944, a tent city of Wehrmacht sprang up about five miles from our house and sometimes civilians would stand in the queue hoping to get a bowl of something from the cook. I don’t know why the soldiers were there. Perhaps it was an assembly point for a division assigned to reinforce the expected Hürtgen Forest battle that would begin in October, or they might have been there awaiting the ‘Go’ for the Ardennes battle of December. The camp was well camouflaged in a pine forest. A few fighter-bombers flew right over the assembly and missed the comings and goings, but then on a sunny September day, the tent city was not so lucky. Several field kitchens were in use that day and the smoke from burning pine branches that the cooks used to heat their stoves gave them away. This was just too tempting a target. Probably it was a lone Mosquito that spotted the smoke and reported it to a fighter-bomber base in Belgium. By then there were almost a hundred Allied bases behind the lines.

Soon the first wave of Jabos arrived and circled around to get oriented. The kitchen fires were immediately doused with water but it was too late. Several civilians, including children, were at the campsite. Soldiers and civilians scattered in all directions looking for shelter. There were only a few slit trenches and one Westwall bunker that could hold at the most a hundred people. The rest just crouched down behind trees. About twenty P-47s raked the forest over from end to end. No bombs were dropped, but it was carnage of the first magnitude. Being about five miles from the attack, our quads were out of range most of the time, but we nevertheless let loose with all we had. The 88s were out of it; the Jabos were too low and they couldn’t lower their barrels to that shallow an angle. The attack lasted about six minutes, and when it was over, 120 dead were counted, including fifteen children. I didn’t see the camp after the attack, but Brother Len’s Hitler Youth group went there to help out, and from what he told us later, it must have been an awful sight. Even the search for a mouthful of food was a dangerous undertaking in those days.

* * *

The Hürtgen Forest battle soon got in full swing; Operation Clipper was set to go off shortly just north of Aachen and far to the south, General Patton was hammering at the door of ‘Fortress Metz’. Only the centre, from the Eifel Hills to the Ardennes, was quiet. The border area was, and still is, the nearest thing to a jungle in central Europe. There were deep gullies, majestic pine trees, raging creeks, forest trails and only a few rough roads, unsuitable for heavy armour even in good weather. But good weather in the autumn in this part of Europe is rare. The area is often shrouded in fog and it rains for days on end, and in the winter of 1944, it must have reminded the Wehrmacht soldier of deepest Russia, with strong blizzards and ice storms.

After the Western Allies reached the German border in September-October 1944, and Operation Market-Garden and Operation Clipper ended, the front lines south of the Hürtgen Forest went into hibernation, only to be rudely awakened on 16 December, the beginning of the Ardennes Offensive. In the interval, civilians travelled from west to east and east to west, often in plain view of half-asleep German guards in Westwall pillboxes or American GIs brewing coffee along the Lanzerath Highway. I can vouch for that as my mother and I crossed these lines in late October 1944 into Luxembourg on a trip to Wiltz, but we got delayed on our way home in mid-December by Germans preparing for the coming battle and Americans who had no idea it was coming. We didn’t get out until the end of December. Farmers were still tending their fields when the battle began, harvesting beets, ploughing, and sowing while shells going both directions whistled overhead. In the late months of 1944 through early 1945, it was not uncommon to see civilians travelling across front lines, either to get away from the Allied bombing or to put some distance between themselves and both armies. The front-line soldiers, Allies or Wehrmacht, couldn’t do much for the civilians. The days of orderly evacuation had long since passed, but Mum and I reached Wiltz without incident. Where were the P-47s then? Well, the weather in those border areas is usually lousy from October to January and Hitler knew it. The Allied pilots didn’t fly and the Germans sat in their bunkers with GIs only a mile to the west of them. ‘Leben und leben lassen’ (live and let live) seemed to be the order of the day for a brief period before the Battle of the Bulge began. Winters can be extremely cold in that part of the country, with temperatures of -25°C common and no soldier is going to move if he doesn’t have to.

Our seven-week journey to Wiltz and back opened our eyes to the overwhelming force that Germany was up against. It was also the first time in my life I tasted coffee made from real coffee beans, corned beef, spam, chocolate raisin bars, and above all, chewing gum. The first time I was given a stick of gum by an American GI, I flatly refused to put it into my mouth. It made me think of chewing tobacco and I wanted none of it. Eventually, I got up the courage and tried it. I was surprised that it had nothing to do with tobacco. We made it home by New Year’s Day 1945 and things there had really gone from bad to worse. Food was almost non-existent; Brother Len had lost a few pounds, Aunt Carol looked like a spider with a few legs missing, and the winter vegetables were buried under two feet of snow. Mum immediately set about making things right. She really could make a meal of nothing and that’s about all that was left. We brought a few goodies from the Americans back with us which were shared with friends; like powdered instant coffee and real bread.

We had been told that the American GIs had even less to eat than our Wehrmacht troops, but Mum and I found out differently during our trip behind the Allied lines. We saw how the GIs lived for ourselves, which made us think that maybe the rest of the propaganda was lies too. Maybe General Patton wasn’t a coward and maybe Eisenhower wasn’t a Jew after all. We had the good fortune to come in contact with a mortar platoon of the US 28th Infantry Division that was billeted in our relatives’ house where we were staying. Their rations and food supplies were out of this world. Our visit with them only lasted a few days, but it was a real education. That mortar platoon was detailed to guard a river bridge, but was subsequently driven off by overwhelming German forces. The wounded, and we knew their names by then, were treated by my relatives and me. The Germans held the western part of the town, so we made sure that the wounded GIs were sneaked out of Wiltz in an M3 halftrack and taken to Bastogne, some fifteen miles away. One of the wounded was a Texan named Oddis; at least that’s what I understood from the other GIs who called him by that name. Whether they reached the safety of Bastogne, I didn’t know until fifty-five years later. On a Battle of the Bulge website someone asked for information regarding a mortar platoon that had been in Wiltz on Tuesday 19 December 1944. I replied in an email and said that I knew of a mortar platoon that was there and a wounded guy named Oddis and told the whole story. Well, the soldier’s name was actually Odis Wise, and it was his son who had posted the inquiry on the website. I wrote to him telling him the story of the bridge, his father’s specific wounds and we both knew then that we were talking about the same person. Sadly, Odis died in 1998, long before I read the website post. Another GI named Dellora was the mortar platoon’s machine gunner, and he was killed that 19 December. I visited a Second World War museum in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee in 2002 and went to the wall of remembrance, and there I found the machine gunner’s name and the following statement: ‘C. Dellora, Killed in Action December 19, 1944, ETO (European Theater of Operations).’

* * *

Our Volkssturm unit was officially formed in M-G in late September 1944 and called up for service the next year in early February. These were sixty-year-old and older granddads and young boys from the local Hitler Youth. A retired colonel who lived up the street from us was made their company commander. Now, during Hitler’s reign there were very few retired officers. If a general lost a battle and was scolded by Hitler, the general’s first words were, ‘I resign my command’. Hitler always refused to accept the resignation, and rightly so.

‘I am the one who decides who resigns’, he would say. No soldier, and that included generals, could simply resign and go home because something didn’t go well at the front. The colonel who commanded our Volkssturm retired long before Hitler came to power. As I remember, he was seventy-four in 1945; a bit too old to be fighting General Patton.

The weapons they had were a conglomeration of rifles from Denmark, France and Italy with hardly any ammunition. The villages in our area managed to mobilise nearly 200 men and boys in September and they were out almost every day in early February for training. Only about half of them even had a rifle. They only had five rounds of ammunition for practice and five more rounds to keep with the rifle. Each man was given a Panzerfaust, but no uniform or helmet. Some showed up for training wearing their Sunday hats and armbands with a swastika and ‘Volkssturm’ stitched on it.

Mr Geisler, our town barber, was also a First World War veteran and well over sixty years old, so he was never drafted, but he was called up. He could cut a head of hair in five minutes with his hand-operated clippers. You never knew exactly what it was going to look like, but we boys knew it would be short, very short. Girls had pigtails that their mothers braided for them and most kept that style well into their twenties. I remember one Sunday afternoon seeing Mr Geisler marching with a group of other old men. He had a Panzerfaust over his shoulder and could hardly keep up. They certainly didn’t look like our Wehrmacht we saw marching through town only a few years before. I didn’t see how we could ever win a war with that kind of army.

On 26 February, this motley collection of ‘Reich Defenders’ assembled and I heard that only a few diehards showed up; twenty-seven of them to be exact and that no amount of propaganda could persuade the others to fall in. I was told they were ordered to assemble at a local farm the following day to be fed into a defensive line. What happened to the twenty-seven men and boys that did show up? I have no idea, but I think it’s safe to say they did not take on the American 104th Infantry Division. Before they were dismissed by the colonel, the first American artillery shell to hit our village fell into the garden of a neighbour. Everyone heard the whistle of the incoming round and the explosion but it was a 105mm shell and no big deal to people who had lived through four years of 1,000lb and bigger bombs being dropped on them. But those who were there said that first shell scattered our Volkssturm and the roll call the next day brought only nine dedicated men to the assembly point. A local 63-year-old watchmaker and First World War veteran assumed command and sent them home. He then jumped on his bicycle and left, not to be seen again until April when the fighting was all over in our town. This was the end of our local Volkssturm defence. Their equipment and weapons turned up years later in garden sheds, ponds and septic tanks. The farmer who found such weapons would throw them into their sludge ponds or manure heaps rather than having to answer questions from the advancing Allies. Many a Panzerfaust and machine gun disappeared in that way under tons of horse and cow manure. Even tanks and anti-aircraft guns were pushed or pulled into slurry pits. Some were dug out sixty years later to be sold to reenactors who restored them to working condition and use them today in recreating long-forgotten battles. I remember a local farmer who found a Nebelwerfer (rocket launcher) when he drained his pond in 1983. A restoration team from Holland bought it and restored it for a Second World War museum.

Little Fred and I were cutting clover for our rabbits along a footpath near our house when that first shell landed. I knew it wasn’t very far away. We jumped into a slit trench and then heard the downtown air-raid siren start to wail. The artillery fire continued for several minutes before all was quiet again. The quiet after an air raid was a very strange kind of quiet out away from the city. Everyone listened and tried not to breathe too loud, as if the bombers could hear and know you were still alive and come back. As soon as we could move, we raced home and I deposited little Fred with Aunt Carol and went up to the quads. The bombing was all over and the planes gone before they even got off a shot.

After February 1945, not much news reached us as to how the war was going, but we could easily guess. We heard second-hand that BBC broadcasts had mentioned a few towns captured by the Allies. Krefeld, Cologne, and Moers were taken at the beginning of March. During the time from 1 March to 8 May 1945, the news about how the war was going came from our radio. We could only pick up the Deutschlandsender station, which was in Berlin and still held by the government. German stations in the medium-wave band had either ceased transmitting or were severely jammed by the Allies. The Deutschlandsender was a special pet project of Goebbels and was so powerful that it couldn’t be jammed very well, but the news we got from it was taken by all with a grain of salt. Most of the broadcast was propaganda anyway. We heard ‘Hold out for final victory’, over and over. We also heard things like: ‘Yesterday over a 150 enemy bombers were shot down. Russian attacks near Stettin were repulsed with heavy losses to the enemy; seventy-two tanks were destroyed. On the Hungarian front, our SS troops re-took the city of Stuhlweissenburg, and south-west of the city, the Bolsheviks gained only two kilometres of ground. On the western front, all American attacks near Griesheim were contained and in Frankfurt, heavy street fighting is in progress.’

We could read maps, and it was easy to see who was advancing and it wasn’t us. We did believe a few of the Berlin broadcasts however. Around the middle of April, the radio gave us the news that three looters who had participated in a bread riot in Rahsfeld had been beheaded on orders from Goebbels. The announcement went on to say that this should be a warning to others not to break the law. This was more frightening to us than the bombers overhead. It seemed our own government had turned against its citizens. Sure, catch a thief and put him in jail and we would all cheer, but to execute people for trying to steal bread, which all of us had done, was just terrifying.