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

Chapter 11. After the End: Refugees from Trizonesia and God Bless George Marshall

Before March 1945, the NSV had seen to it that bombed-out citizens and those who were really starving were given a hot meal once a day. It might have been just cabbage soup and two slices of bread or barley porridge, but it was food. This organisation was banned, like anything else Nazi, immediately after the war. The Allies had no intention of allowing this organisation to continue feeding a population that had supported the Nazis and was still filled with Nazi sympathisers. With shops closed and the whole food supply in turmoil, people lived on handouts from those who still had a little more than those who had absolutely nothing. There was no local government, no town council, no school system and no institution to turn to for a loaf of bread. The transportation system was in ruins and things got worse once winter arrived. Farmers who still had a horse or two were, to some extent, able to till their fields, but they had to search their barns for scattered seeds to plant.

After the war, fledgling political groups such as the Social Democrat Party, the Christian Democrats and a few other minor ones set up welfare programmes that had the blessing of the Allied administration. They eventually began taking on some of the former duties of the NSV in 1946. With the promise by the Allies of a future general election, these would-be parties clamoured for support and they knew how to get it. Soup kitchens were set up again, with the NSV labels on the distribution pots having been removed. Not much had changed, except maybe the soup was even worse than before the end of the war. The Allies supplied the Germans with some basic food, but the German cooks, who couldn’t read English, didn’t know half the time what they were making or how to make it. For instance, soup kitchens were given sacks of biscuit flour. Now, in Germany a biscuit is something like a cookie and there was no yeast, sugar or fat to make cookies, so they invented biscuit-flour soup. That was bad enough, but the flour hadn’t been stored well so it was often mouldy and came with a good supply of worms. We also got cornmeal, but we were suspicious of it because it was yellow. German cornmeal was always made from white corn. We soon figured out it was edible, with or without worms. The Social Democrats used an air-raid shelter near the school as their soup kitchen. The Falcons collected old Wehrmacht mess kits, filled them with soup and added a crust of cornbread, then delivered them to people who could not come to the distribution centre. They never failed to tell the recipient that the food came from the Social Democrats, even though it had first come from the United States. Since the Christian Democrats had been mildly tolerated by the Nazis, former NSV workers were soon drawn to their kitchens. In 1947, the woman in charge of the soup kitchen was the former chairwoman of the NSV in our town. This didn’t please the Social Democrats, but the woman did have previous experience. The job (and most of the food) was the same, only the uniform had changed - so much for de-nazification.

Anyone over the age of eighteen, or for that matter even younger, who had served in any service branch of the Reich, went through a de-nazification process that was instituted by the Allies as soon as possible after the surrender. Many thousands slipped through this net and became ‘respectable’ citizens under the new rulers. We lost half our teachers in town who had been Party members out of necessity. The other half were allowed to resume teaching by the autumn of 1945, but a lot of schools were still closed a year after that. Late in the summer of 1945, our school reopened but most of the teachers were new to us. Our teacher had been discharged from an Allied POW camp in June. He hadn’t become a Party member and was relieved of his job early in the war. All teachers during the Third Reich had to be affiliated with the Nationalsozialistische Lehrerbund (the National Socialist Teachers Organisation). Most who joined were given a cushy job and those who didn’t were put into a Wehrmacht uniform in short order. I guess it’s no surprise that by 1944 some classrooms had sixty-plus children for one teacher. Our new teacher had been part of a Luftwaffe ground crew, refuelling fighter planes at an air base near Luneburg.

Many schools had bomb damage and when our school reopened, we were sent home when it rained because of all the holes in the roof. In the winter there was no heat and we were often sent home when the weather was really cold, although it was not much warmer at home. Writing pads were sold by two school supply merchants who demanded a permit signed by the school principal before you could purchase them. To us, that sounded like the way things had always been. Our principal was a refugee from the city of Breslau in Silesia and had not been a Party member. His son, however, had worn the uniform of the SS Totenkopf and soon enough the ever-present Allied agents looking for ex-Nazis were tipped off. A search of the house revealed the son’s SS uniform hanging in a closet. Alf, as the son was called, was arrested and went into a POW stockade, then for good measure, they arrested our principal for failing to report his son to the authorities. They released him six weeks later. Alf came back home in 1947 after spending two years in a re-education camp in deepest, darkest Oklahoma. While we were literally scraping the bottom of the barrel to find something to eat, this SS guy was fed white bread, real coffee and Spam, and smoked Chesterfields in a camp near Tishomingo.

* * *

The European Recovery Plan (ERP), better known as the Marshall Plan, was not introduced until 1947 and we didn’t get our first CARE (Cooperative for American Remittance to Europe) packages of food until the spring of 1948. The years 1945 to 1947 were the worst for us and without some outside assistance, mostly from the United States, a lot more German adults and children would have starved during that time. Help was offered to all European states that had participated in the war, regardless of which side they were on. Even Russia was offered help, but they refused. The Iron Curtain was already coming down between East and West. The ration cards and coupons introduced in September 1939 were still issued, though not in great quantity and without the swastika and eagle on the front. Fresh fruit was not rationed - after all, there were many orchards around and those people who had no fruit to pick and no garden could always jump a fence and pilfer. Verboten? Yes it was, but a lot was verboten then, even more than during the Third Reich. The civil servants who had made laws while wearing a brown shirt were still making laws. Some eventually died of old age at their posts; others were pensioned off after serving the occupation government for a few years.

When the ERP became operational, things improved slightly. The Caritas Catholic Organisation received CARE parcels and distributed them to the needy. The eastern refugees in the camps were the first in line. They needed assistance more than anyone else. They had no gardens, no work, and lived on handouts and food from former NSV soup kitchens. One day we also got one of these CARE parcels and in anticipation, we crowded around the table to inspect the goodies. Alas, the labels were all in English and to figure out what was in some of the packages required some guessing and tasting. A packet of powdered egg stumped us. We tried boiling it, brewing it and roasting it. We finally gave up and asked a British soldier who was standing guard at the depot across the road what the stuff was. The guard drew a chicken on a piece of paper and an egg under it. When Len came back and showed us the paper, we were none the wiser. Was it powdered chicken or powdered egg? Finally Mum mixed water with it and put the mixture in a frying pan for a few minutes, and there it was - a fried egg. Orange and lemon juice powder was also a challenge. I had never tasted anything so sour. It took some experimenting before we finally mixed it with enough water and found it to be good to drink.

Black marketeering then became not just a pastime, but a way of life. It was still illegal, but at least they couldn’t send you to a concentration camp if you got caught. The police would just confiscate your items in most cases and send you off with a warning. The black marketeers had meeting places, mostly in pubs, and these places were known under code names. The Alfa Hotel and Pub was known as ‘The Elastic Corner’. The Black Horse Pub was ‘The Dirty Spoon’ and the old Brauhaus was ‘The Bloody Rooster’. Scores of other seedy trading places were established. They were called ‘Puffs’ and usually a woman was in charge, called a ‘Puff Mutter’. The main currency was Chesterfield, Camel and Lucky Strike American cigarettes, Nescafe instant coffee, or nylon stockings. The girls without a GI boyfriend had to make do with ‘1A Plus’ leg paint, a sort of eyebrow pencil used to draw seams on their legs for the appearance of wearing stockings. When the American GIs left in July 1945 and the British moved in, nothing changed except the cigarettes. They were now Players, Navy Cut, Woodbines or Senior Service and there was more tea than coffee being traded. The British Military Policemen were also more eager to stop and search a suspected black marketeer than the Americans had been.

Most men and a few women smoked when I was a boy and they were issued ration cards for cigarettes, cigars, or loose tobacco with rolling papers. By 1942 the popular brand name was Sondermischung (Special Mixture) R 6, but what exactly was special about the mixture, nobody knew. When I was younger, nobody smoked in our family except Granddad, and he smoked a pipe. He grew the tobacco himself, dried it and cut the leaves with our bread slicer. Later, even until 1948, the tobacco stalks were also ground up and rolled into cigarettes. Someone always had a few tobacco seeds to swap for a pound of margarine or a linen towel. After March 1945, American brands of cigarettes like Camel, Lucky Strike or Chelsea were for Frauleins only. We had no Frauleins in our family and by that time Granddad Willem had died, so we had no need for tobacco except as trading material.

Some non-smokers rolled cigarettes after the war from the loose tobacco they could get on their ration cards and sold them for twenty Pfennigs each. If you wanted to buy more than twenty, money was not accepted. Payment was then a cabbage, a jar of pickles or even a pair of scissors. The have-nots took to the streets as they always had and picked up cigarette butts and re-rolled them when they had enough. Giant told me after the war that at Christmastime in 1944, he swapped a large jar of pickled onions for forty home-rolled cigarettes. Who knows where the tobacco had come from but he said he was glad to get them.

* * *

I remember one day in the winter of 1946 when Brother Len and I went by tram to Düsseldorf to visit an old aunt in Hilden, just east of the city. The area was in shambles due to the continuous bombing of 1943-4. Women were clearing rubble, sorting good bricks from bad, hammering, nailing and cutting half-burned beams for firewood. Their children stood in long queues at open-air kitchens hoping to get a ladle of watery soup and a slice of hard black bread. If they were unlucky, and many were, they went home empty handed and lived with another twenty-four hours of hunger. This aunt in Hilden had a large garden and was a bit of a miser and hoarder. Her husband had been killed in Norway and they had no children. She was nevertheless an energetic person and grew most of her vegetables herself. Brother Len and I did some repair work on her house over the three days we stayed with her and as a reward, she gave us about fifty pounds of potatoes. We had two sacks, one with about twenty pounds in it for me to carry and Len had the heavier one.

We decided to make our way home early on Sunday morning to avoid crowds of beggars and we managed to get from Hilden to the city centre to catch the #14 tram to M-G without a problem. About thirty people were also on the tram, suspiciously eyeing our sacks and no doubt they knew what was in them. We moved to the rear door with our treasures and some of the people edged nearer. Only the stern eye of the conductor kept them at a respectful distance. A woman seated near us whispered to Len, ‘Potatoes huh? I’ll give you twenty-five Marks for that bag’. Len declined of course, so the woman tried her offer on me. I looked for help to Len and he grabbed my sack and put it under his seat. We eventually disembarked the tram in München-Gladbach without further confrontation, but in order to catch the next one, we had to pass a Ross Schlächterei (a horse butcher) and a long line of folks waited by the door to get a pound or two of horsemeat. We quickly marched past with our sacks over our shoulders, but a little girl, about ten or eleven years old pulled at my coat. ‘Please, do you have a potato for me?’ she asked.

‘How do you know I have potatoes in this sack?’ I asked in reply.

‘I can smell them,’ was her answer. ‘I’ll pay you for some.’

‘Pay me? How much?’

‘Twenty Pfennigs is all I have, and I only want one potato. My mother is in the horsemeat queue but I don’t think she will get any; we were last in the line.’

I dropped the sack. Her eyes, big as saucers in her skinny face, lit up. I took three potatoes out and handed them to the girl.

‘And you can keep your twenty Pfennigs.’

Len was mumbling something like ‘ungrateful brats’, but we went on at a brisk pace and got the #9 tram just in time, before the crowd at the horsemeat shop was told that no more meat was available.

* * *

Brother Len eventually got a new job in a factory that made kitchen stoves. He operated a sheet metal press that made the necessary holes for the fire and ash boxes. With him knowing it all, he used his fingers to remove punched metal sheets when they got stuck in the press instead of using the tool made for the job. One day the press came down before he got his fingers out and both his index fingers were cut off. He was taken to the local hospital and we went to see him that night. Considering the pain it must have caused him, he was in good spirits, but I couldn’t help remarking to him that his nose-picking days were over. This meant now that he was exempt from house and garden work for the foreseeable future. He got through six years of war, being shot at by fighter planes and bombed by bombers and never got so much as a scratch and then, a year after the end of the war, he lost two fingers. There were far worse accidents than losing fingers, however. The amount of unexploded German and American ordnance that was just lying around was unbelievable. There were grenades of all shapes and sizes, and artillery and tank cannon shells, but most dangerous of all were the mines and unexploded bombs. Mines were laid by the thousands by both sides during the war. Paths were cleared by engineers during the fighting, but after the war, if you strayed off the path they had cleared, you most certainly bought yourself a ticket to eternity. If you wanted to steal cabbage from a farmer’s field in the night, you had to make sure you stayed on a beaten path.

The forests near us were full of mines. It has been estimated that there were 15,000 of them laid in the Hürtgen forest alone. To venture out into this area to collect firewood was strictly prohibited. Mother Nature eventually helped out. During a huge thunderstorm in 1946, lightning set the forest ablaze and most of the mines exploded from the heat. Others in fields and gardens are still being discovered to this day.

On one hot summer day after the war in 1945, Len and I cycled a few miles toward the forest where he had dug anti-tank ditches the year before. We went through the fields because there were cows in them so we figured there must not be any mines about. We rode through the ‘Dragon’s Teeth’ (reinforced concrete tank-traps) and came to a part of the anti-tank ditch that had filled with water. There was no one around, so we decided to have a cool swim in our underwear. I was the first to dive in and a few feet below the surface, I knocked my head on something. I called Len over to have a look. It was a heavy box. Len and I dragged it to the bank and opened it up. There were several German ‘potato-masher’ type hand grenades in it. They were a little rusty but we could clearly read the label that said: ‘Zündung 7 Sekunden’ (seven-second fuse).

‘Let’s make a few bangs,’ Brother Len suggested.

‘You ever thrown one of those things?’ I asked.

‘No, but I’ve seen an instructor demonstrating how to do it in HJ camp.’

‘Look Len,’ I warned, ‘we’re not in an HJ camp now and there’s no instructor, and if it says seven seconds fuse, I bet it will go off in three, so let me get out of the way first.’

I was glad Len took my advice just for once and we carefully slid the box back into the water. That ditch was later filled in with debris from the town and I daresay the box is still there.

The Westwall, or Siegfried Line that had been praised so much by Hitler during the war, and was breached by the Allies in short order, was another source of exploration for us, although it was verboten. In Germany everything was (and still is) verboten. I recently heard a saying that describes post-war Europe pretty well. ‘In England, everything is allowed, except that which is forbidden. In Germany, everything is forbidden except that which is allowed. In Italy, everything is allowed, including that which is forbidden. In Russia, everything is forbidden, including that which is allowed.’ One needs to be a lawyer to know what is allowed and what is verboten in Germany even today. Anyway, most of these bunkers had been blown to kingdom come by the Americans as soon as they captured the line. They pumped the bunkers full of water and used high explosives to crack the concrete so it could be broken up and hauled away. The Allies didn’t find all of them however. I found one in 2004 near a village in the Saar province. It was completely overgrown and not even the owner of the land knew it was there. It was a small bunker, about eighteen by fourteen feet, but the machine-gun mount was still there and a rusty camp bed. Those bunkers that are still in good shape and situated on privately-owned land are used as toolsheds or hay barns, but those on government land are out of bounds - verboten. Some are excellent places for growing mushrooms. The railway tunnel that ran to the bridge at Remagen is now a mushroom farm and the bridge towers house a museum.

* * *

Just after the war, the first groups of refugees arrived from East Prussia and Silesia. Some had been walking west for a month. As a predominately Catholic region, we naturally looked upon these mostly Protestant transients with suspicion. They were looking for ‘Brot und Arbeit’ (bread and work) like everyone else. This was a slogan the Nazis claimed to have invented, but it was the Communists in 1917 who first used it. Hitler, when he came into power, ordered Göring to get the economy going again after the Depression, producing weapons that would be needed in the war he saw coming. This put people to work on a scale that had never been seen in Germany. People bought bread and a lot more. During the war, however, this slogan soon fell flat. Yes, the work was there, but the bread was nowhere in sight. Some wise guy claimed he had overheard a speech by Göring once, saying that there was enough food for all Germans to last for a lifetime. Sure, there was enough I suppose, as long as you didn’t eat it or died young. For those who did eat it and didn’t die young, there was far from enough bread or anything else to eat for that matter. Another popular slogan of the time was, ‘Jeder muß Kartoffel pflanzen’ (Everybody must plant Potatoes). We asked ourselves if that included those with no garden and not even a balcony. Did it include the aged and the infirm, the disabled war veterans, and the children? What about the nurses and doctors who were on call twenty-four hours a day during the worst air raids? You can’t grow potatoes in a pot on a windowsill in the city.

‘Wheels must turn for victory’ was another hollow saying we heard all during the war. By early 1945, the only wheels turning were the wheels on carts and prams being pulled and pushed by the millions of refugees trying to escape the advancing Ivans. There were soup kitchens set up along the way for the refugees (and soldiers too), but there were so many of them, the kitchens couldn’t keep up and anywhere civilians or soldiers congregated was a target for the fighter-bombers. Refugees died or were killed by the thousands and had to be left by the roadside. Even though she had a family to feed herself, my Mum joined in and helped the NSV feed as many as possible. We had a hundred-litre (about twenty-five gallon) galvanised steel tub we bathed in which was used to make potato soup for the refugees. They originated from places I had never heard of but I could find them on a map. One group was from the far away Masurian Lake district in eastern Prussia, near the Lithuanian border. We used to describe that area as the country where foxes and hares say ‘Good night’ to each other in Kauderwelsch, which was a mixture of German, Polish and Lithuanian, but they understood my mother’s shout of ‘Kartoffel Suppe, Kartoffel Suppe’, and lined up in an orderly manner. There was no pushing or queue-jumping; they were too tired after the 600-mile trek.

Mother made simple potato soup for them in our bathtub: ten pounds of potatoes, boiled with the skin on. Five stalks of leek were added along with a few strips of pigs’ trotter, pepper, salt, a few handfuls of barley and finally a pound of flour was thrown in to bind the concoction together. The poor people fell on the soup like the French fell on the Saarland after the First World War. More refugees came a few weeks later from Pomerania and Upper Silesia, but eventually, the welcome by local people wore off. The area of Germany occupied by France, the US and the UK, which we called ‘Trizonesia’, became an overflow destination for people from Upper Silesia. This inspired some clever writer to create the saying, ‘We are the occupants of Trizonesia, and you are the displaced mob from Upper Silesia’.

There was not enough housing for our own bombed-out people after the surrender, so some sort of temporary accommodation was needed for all the refugees. The community air-raid shelters were all that was available. They were equipped with metal bed frames and a table or two and the men subdivided the shelters with blankets hanging down from the ceilings. One such shelter near us housed 600 men, women and children. Living conditions were not much better than in a concentration camp. Cooking was done in shifts or food was supplied by local welfare organisations (the former NSV). There were four toilets and four baths for all of them. Many took advantage of the public baths in town rather than wait two weeks for a reservation in theirs. Washing was done using zinc tubs and cold water. There was not enough wood or coal to heat water just for washing clothes. There was nothing for these poor people to do; no radio, no entertainment for the children and no work for the men. Of course the women always had plenty to do. To Brother Len this was a good place to canvass for new Falcon members. Once he gave them the propaganda line about a future socialist government with equality for everyone, the youngsters from ten to sixteen came to the meetings in droves. Not all of them fit in well, claiming they had been a ‘von’ (higher Prussian society, estate owner) in East Prussia or Silesia. But a von or a Graf (count), or a Freiherr (baron), or a Freiin (baroness) was not treated with any more reverence than the fourteen-year-old boy with the Polish name of Frantek who had arrived without any relatives or parents and only knew his home city had been Elbing.

I took Frantek to the next Falcons meeting. We had somehow acquired a table tennis set from somewhere and a few musical instruments so there was some entertainment for youngsters. It turned out that Frantek was an excellent table tennis player and a year later he helped the Falcon team win the local trophy and get into the regional league. I asked him what had happened to his parents on the trek from Poland. At first he wouldn’t answer, but a week or so later, when I took him to our home and we shared a meagre meal of fried potatoes and onions, he opened up. The story he told us made our hair stand on end. We knew that the Russians had taken terrible revenge on the German population once they crossed the border into the old Reich, but we never knew the details.

Frantek and his mother (his father had been missing in action since 1943) had left Elbing with a large group of other refugees on a cold and snowy January day in 1945 and took to a road that was supposed to take them to the Vistula River. The Soviet Army was twenty miles south of them at the time. The group was moving in a westerly direction and making about fifteen miles per day. Frantek estimated there were about 500 people in that trek, some pushing prams, some with hand carts and some with just a bundle slung over their shoulders. On their second day out, during a blinding snowstorm, they heard the sound of engines and the clanking of tracks to the south. Occasionally they could also hear cannon and machine gun fire. Then suddenly the dark shapes of Russian T-34 tanks appeared out of the blizzard, and seeing the trek, they opened up with all they had, raking the group from left to right with machine guns. The tanks just smashed into the humanity and rolled forward and back over prams with babies in them, over men, women and children and their carts. Those who could still run managed to reach a forest a mile or so to the north. The blinding snowstorm prevented the tanks from chasing them. They turned east and disappeared into the whiteness. Hundreds were killed. The badly injured froze to death.

Frantek never knew what happened to his mother. He just ran and never looked back. He finally met up with another trek going west and stayed with them all the way to Berlin. There he joined another group that eventually brought him to our area. Many other refugees had similar tales to tell and just how many died or were murdered on these frozen treks will never be known, but estimates run into the hundreds of thousands. Eventually over seven million refugees arrived in the four zones of Germany. By 1950, many thousands had emigrated to countries like Argentina, Brazil, the United States and Canada. All these people fleeing the Russians had to be fed somehow. It was impossible to give them a decent place to live, so a lot of them moved into two-room pre-fabricated huts, but at least they had a roof over their heads and a small cooking stove to prepare a meal and could keep reasonably warm in the cold winter months. The winter of 1946/47 was brutally cold. At times, the temperature in the mountains fell to -40°C. Welfare organisations worked overtime but with the limited amount of food they had, it was necessary to return to the substitutes that were used the year before. Dishes were invented that no one would touch today. I remember in that winter we had crow once. Even after cooking the thing for twenty-four hours, it was still as tough as old leather, but it was protein. With hardly any meat or fats, people ate what was available.