Hitler's Home Front: Memoirs of a Hitler Youth - Don A. Gregory, Wilhelm R. Gehlen (2016)
Chapter 4. Duty to Führer, Volk, und Vaterland
My youngest years were dictated not by my parents, but by the Nazi system and as far back as my memory goes, Nazi doctrine was the only way of life. We were brought up under the clearly-defined rules of the Nazi government; parents played a secondary role. We were not capable at the time of understanding these rules but we obeyed them. Hitler’s aim was that from an early age children would be indoctrinated with National Socialist ideals and what better way was there than through the education system. Teachers were Party members; a few were old First World War veterans who didn’t always agree with the Nazis, but they were soon relegated to minor posts. When we were able to read and become members of the Jungvolk, each new member was given a leaflet explaining how to live up to the standards of the movement. It went something like this:
How can the Hitler Youth help our war aims? Wars are not only won with weapons but can also be won politically and economically. We must try in our total war effort to defeat the enemy of our Reich with our Wehrmacht, but we also have to defeat him politically and economically, so that he is forced to sue for peace. Therefore, the home front is as important as the military front. Men who are still at home, as well as women and children, belong to our inner front and should be an example to those who might think otherwise. Hitler Youths, always remember that you are the future of a new era. Modern warfare requires mobilisation of all our strength. Our Führer, Adolf Hitler, is with us always.
We had to digest this propaganda from our earliest years, but that wasn’t all. We didn’t just learn about gardening and growing food and Nazi propaganda in the Jungvolk; we also learned to cook, how to sew buttons on our uniforms and how to darn our own socks. Of course the Party had a doctrine for all this: ‘Sparsamkeitsparagraphen [frugality instructions] für die HJ’. We were proud of our role and acted like it, but that was long before the Normandy invasion. Up to then, we were out of harm’s way most of the time. Fighter-bomber attacks were not common until later and B-26s and A-20s were too high up for our quads. Even higher were the Fortresses and Liberators by day and the Lancasters and Stirlings by night. They flew in endless streams to the big targets further east, harassed by the 88s and our fighters. We had our share of bombing, but compared to targets in the Ruhr, we were safe. All this changed after D-Day. More and more kids were assigned duty on flak guns; the oldest I saw was sixteen, the youngest ten, but we all had the same goal, defending our homes from air attacks. We had said goodbye to school by then and our teachers had already been recruited into the Volkssturm (men too old or too young to be drafted) anyway. Schools were turned into hospitals or assembly points for the retreating Wehrmacht, or into recruiting stations for the Hitler Youth. Blackboards and desks were being burned for heating and cooking fuel.
The BDM girls had their own leaders and met on different days to learn about safety, first aid and homemaking. Girls were supposed to become mothers someday and bear children to make the Greater German Reich even greater, so they learned a lot about cooking, washing and running a household. They also had to do a Landjahr, or a year of service. That meant they had to work a year for the Reich and it was supposed to be in a job that was important for the war effort. Some worked at farms and lived with the farmer’s family. Some were lucky, but some were placed with a Party man’s family and were treated like unpaid maids or nannies. Most learned how to cook for a family, which was a useful skill during those times and I suppose it did sort of contribute to the war, but it was the RAD labour service for girls introduced later in the war that really contributed. They worked in ammunition factories and did a lot of the other work that men had been doing.
By the middle of 1944, time was running out for the Third Reich. New regulations came about that drastically changed the role of the youth organisations for boys and girls. Ten-year-old boys were now required to register for some sort of active duty and late in the war if you were nine and looked ten, that was good enough. I still have the leaflet that we received at home.
Ten year old boys, to your duty!
Death lurks above our flags, but God will judge our struggle as pure. Our fight and our life are hard, but the war does not rest. Fight for your nation. Do your duty; encourage the Storm Troops to hold fast! Do not despair; your will must be hard as iron. Remember, the enemy hates you, and there are many enemies against us.
If you despair, you must strike back. Even harder days are ahead of us, and much deprivation, but fighting means that you are one of us. Let the walls crumble around you; your fight is for a new day and a better future. Victory and death are never far apart. Yes, some fighters must die, but always remember that you, our youth, will live to see the dawn of a grand new day for Germany. Sieg Heil.
If that sounds rather silly today, remember that, seventy-odd years ago, these proclamations had to be taken seriously. Whether the brain of a ten-year-old boy could digest this propaganda is another matter, but the Party’s indoctrination of the youth was a very serious concern for the Third Reich. All this talk of victory, a better future and the Greater German Reich probably did sound grandiose in the 1930s, and up to 1942, but then came the six-month long battle and defeat at Stalingrad, followed by Kursk less than a year later, and then D-Day. The Allies were knocking on the Reich’s door. Goebbels had attracted millions of listeners in the early days, but now the people turned their backs on him. The novelty had worn off. The war was real. It wasn’t happening someplace we had never heard of; it was coming home to the Reich. Citizens demanded bread, but guns were more important. Morale among the average German citizen was even lower than it had been before the Nazis came to power. Only the Hitler Youth stood fast. They still believed in final victory and young boys volunteered in droves for the newly-formed 12th SS Panzer Division Hitler Youth. At the age of sixteen, these German youths fought in the Ardennes and Hungary. They died by the thousands for a Reich that was crumbling right before their eyes.
To the people outside Germany it was unbelievable that children were holding down the home front and in some instances, the fighting front as well. US divisional reports tell the true story:
84th Infantry Division, Aachen, October 1944: Two ten-year-old German sharpshooters taken prisoner.
4th Infantry Division, Hürtgen Forest, November 1944: Three boys ten to twelve years old observed pulling a daisy chain of anti-tank mines across the road in Scherpenseel.
9th Armoured Division, February 1945: A twelve-year-old knocks out a Sherman tank with a Panzerfaust [a single-shot bazooka] near Bitburg.
In late 1944, GIs of the 84th US Infantry Division captured the city of Aachen and had to deal with many ten- and twelve-year-old Hitler Youth sharpshooters. At the end of March 1945, the 3rd US Armoured Division approached Paderborn to trap 300,000 Germans in the Ruhr pocket. Ten miles south of Paderborn, a combat company of the 3rd Armoured Division with mounted infantry entered a village and came under Panzerfaust and small arms fire from a row of houses. Several of the Amis (Americans) were killed or wounded. The Sherman tanks returned fire, wrecking the houses with HE (high explosive) rounds. When the dust settled and firing had ceased, the men entered the ruins and found seven teenage boys and a girl not more than fourteen years old - all dead. They had single-handedly taken on a combat company of a US infantry division.
Not only did the Hitler Youth substitute as flak helpers, they dug anti-tank trenches, cleared rubble from bombed cities, and marched in useless parades. We also dug in gardens and even turned vacant fields into farmland for cabbage, potatoes, and turnips. Then there was the never-ending search for scrap metal, old wool or clothes, medicinal plants, and of course, school had to be attended, like it or not. Aluminium foil, used to fool the German radar, was another item we collected. The first drops of the stuff were treated with suspicion. Nobody knew what it was. We were told to collect the six-foot long strips and turn them in with the usual scrap collection but the housewives used them as batting for quilts and they made nice decorations for our Christmas trees. We also collected Allied propaganda leaflets which were dropped on us by the millions. They were welcomed because of the shortage of toilet paper. We didn’t hesitate to use Nazi publications for the same purpose.
At our annual Hitler Youth camps, we had a sort of cook from the NSV assigned to us. Cooking for 120 boys in a camp over an open wood fire is not every cook’s dream, but we loved it, even when the food didn’t taste like Mother’s. Just being away from the back-breaking labour of our own gardens made us a happy bunch of kids. Even the barley soup was appreciated. All the meals at camp were Eintopf and the fire was kept going all the time, except at night. One of the foods I was fond of was Bratwurst and they are simply fried sausages, but the German soldiers out in the cold winter of Russia seldom had a frying pan handy, so they boiled the sausages. If water was not readily available or suspected of contamination, they boiled them in beer with onions, if they had any. We tried it, but the brats would split open, until we were told to pour warm water over them before immersing them in the boiling beer. We had them with mashed potatoes and gravy made from the beer the brats had boiled in.
In July 1941 a decree by Hitler, # 613 published in the ‘Armee Verordnungsblatt’ (Army Regulations Paper) had something to say about the call-up of family sons. The gist of it was:
A decree by the Führer states that families with more than five sons, with four of them already serving in the Wehrmacht, will not have to give up their remaining sons. The fifth and any more will be exempt from service so that at least one male family member will be available to help with work at home. An investigation will be made to determine if a fifth or additional son is already a member of the Wehrmacht or hasn’t yet been called up. The wishes of the fifth and additional sons who can be exempted will also be considered. Career service personnel are not included in this decree. All applications for exemption have to be submitted to the local Wehrmacht service office.
Sounds good, yes? But in reality, it never worked because there were very few households with four sons already in the Wehrmacht and labour service did not count. Everyone, male or female, had to volunteer with the RAD for six months and later it was a year. That sounds not too bad, but it was also paramilitary training for the men. Some RAD units went straight to the front without Wehrmacht battalion or regimental status.
* * *
The winter of 1942/43 had been uneventful in our community, but March and Easter were not far away and for our family, the tedium was about to change. On Saturday 6 March, after a Hitler Youth parade in town, we were asked if we would like to participate in another parade the next Saturday on 13 March in Bottrop, a medium-sized city in the Ruhr north-east of us. The area was known for its coal mines, gas and petrol-related products, making it a good place for us to get bombed. We asked our HJ leader about the danger of air raids. ‘I don’t think so,’ was his answer. ‘Oberhausen and Essen are much more promising targets.’ What he forgot to say was that the three cities, Bottrop, Essen and Oberhausen, are next door to each other, without a real boundary between them. One blends into the other with just a yellow enamelled sign telling the traveller where he is. ‘And besides,’ he added, ‘there are high-rise air-raid bunkers in Bottrop if the RAF decides to come for a visit.’ The cost for the trip was one Reichsmark. Parents could come to the parade too, but they had to find their own way of getting there and they would have to bring their ration books if they wanted to eat out.
Thursday we set out at noon in a fleet of Borgward and Hanomag canvas-covered trucks with drivers from the Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrkorps (NSKK - the National Socialist Motor Corps). Our intention was to stay until Sunday morning and be back at home about noon. Bottrop was only some thirty miles away. We crossed the Rhine at Krefeld over the Adolf Hitler Bridge and rolled into Wanheim, a suburb of Duisburg. There was lots of bomb damage all around us. It was the same in every town we went through, Duisburg, Mulheim, Oberhausen, Sterkrade, and even Bottrop showed a fair share of ruins from previous bombings.
Like any good youth group of the time, we brought our musical instruments with us; drums, fanfares (flugelhorns), fifes and the always present ‘Dicke Doom’ the huge banging drum, usually carried by the strongest boy. We were ready for the parade and could play along with any of the usual marching songs. Our favourites were ‘Ein Junges Volk steht auf zum Sturm bereit’ (‘The Youth Stands Ready in the Storm’), ‘Der mächtigste König im Luft Revier’ (‘The Mightiest King in the Sky’) and ‘Rot scheint die Sonne’ (‘The Sun is Shining Red’).
Several mothers and other relatives showed up at the school to collect their boys for meals and Mum came by tram from her hotel at 5:00 p.m. to pick up Len and me, but we wanted to eat and stay the night with our friends. We thought it would be more fun staying with boys our own age rather than being with grumpy parents in an even grumpier restaurant and hotel. The parade wasn’t until Saturday so it was no problem. She said she would pick us up the next day at noon after she returned from visiting a friend in Karnap, a little farther north-east in Essen. Trams were running until midnight unless, of course, an alert was sounded.
That evening for dinner we had the obligatory stew-soup, the Eintopf, which one boy said must have been invented by a mean and not-so-hungry NSV woman. We ate whatever it was and complained to each other while she sat in a restaurant having truffles or caviar. That’s what we imagined anyway. The vegetables in the stew had no taste at all - if they really were vegetables. To wash down the soup, what of it we could eat, there was ‘no bean’ coffee, and if you think that all coffee comes from coffee beans, you are mistaken. No other country in the world experimented more with coffee-making than Germany in the Second World War. There was the ersatz coffee, made by the Kathreiner firm in Munich, which tasted the most like real coffee. There was also roasted barley coffee, wheat coffee, and even coffee made from roasted acorns, but the worst was chicory coffee that could turn your guts inside out if you drank more than one cup. There was no point in complaining to the NSV; they did their best with the things available. Of course, those of us who were younger couldn’t remember better days from before 1939, so we tried our best to eat the Eintopf and drink the coffee, all gorged down with a good slice of Kommissbrot (bread made from rye and barley flour).
The night passed without any alerts; not a sound was heard from above. Was it a holiday for the RAF bombers we wondered? The ‘Drathfunk’ radio stayed on all night in the leader’s room to warn us of any air attack. As long as it was quiet and the light on it blinked green, everything was all right above us. The Drathfunk was no ordinary radio; there was only one station. We got news, and music too if there wasn’t anything important going on. Listening to foreign broadcasts on a regular radio could get you into a lot of trouble if the wrong person found out. Mostly that only happened in the big cities. No one ever asked us what we listened to. Breakfast was at 9 a.m. and it put us in a better mood because we had cocoa instead of coffee with our bread and butter, jam of some sort and a slice of Jagdwurst, which was sausage that, at the time, could have been made from about anything, but it was good.
After breakfast we did a bit of band practice. Len and I played no instruments so we waited for Mum to come. We knew how to march, so no sense in practicing that. She arrived later and found us standing clean and neat by the gate. She had a look at us and decided we hadn’t suffered too much staying with the other boys. A few other mums and grandparents arrived too. Fathers and uncles were scattered all over Europe serving the Führer and Fatherland. We asked Mum what we were going to do all afternoon. ‘Does Bottrop have a zoo we can visit or maybe there’s a bicycle race?’ The answer was no to both and the public outdoor swimming pool was still closed; after all, it was only the middle of March. Mum had much more important things on her mind. She found her ration cards and searched through them for the shoe allowance points. There were enough for a pair of church slippers each for Len and me, so we proceeded to find the nearest shoe shop. The saleswoman there refused to serve us and it sounded like she had practiced her excuse a lot. Our cards weren’t issued in Bottrop, which meant we weren’t residents of that town, so no shoes for us. ‘Has it come to this? What a crummy world we live in,’ Mum said, loud enough for the woman to hear her.
‘Yes, I agree, the woman said, ‘Germany today is like Pandora’s Box; every time it’s opened, something else evil pops out.’ We were used to that kind of talk among older folks back home, but to hear someone younger in a town the size of Bottrop saying the same thing was a surprise.
‘It’s a pigsty.’ Mother added, seeing that she had found a kindred spirit.
‘That may be so, but I still can’t sell you anything. You have to be a registered resident of the city of Bottrop. I’d lose my job and could be brought up on charges.’ Len, who was always a bit too fast with his mouth and too slow with his head, almost told her what she could do with her merchandise, but Mum’s warning glance kept him quiet.
The hotel we went to was near the rail station and a fair-sized concrete bunker was only few yards away. ‘Räder rollen für den Sieg’ (‘Wheels roll for Victory’) said the black slogan painted on a large white panel above the station entrance. The room had two big beds with a table and a chair, but no radio. We washed up a little, combed our hair, and were soon ready for supper. I was looking forward to something better than what we had the night before. Our room was on the ground floor, so it was a short walk to the dining hall.
Before you could order what you wanted to eat in any restaurant, you had to show that you had the right ration cards, but unlike cards for slippers, food cards could be used anywhere in Europe where Hitler’s word was law and it certainly was in Bottrop. We had a big bowl of fried potatoes and bangers - made from what, we didn’t ask. In most restaurants, Bismarck herrings were the usual fare with fried potatoes and we wondered why we didn’t get any. Finally Mum asked our waitress about it. Waitresses knew everything because they heard everything. I was pretty sure they could hear the grass grow. Friday was the traditional fish day in Germany and it was Friday. Nazis or no Nazis, some holy dignity had to be preserved even in hard times. Good Catholics ate fish on Fridays but they had run out, serving sausages instead. We didn’t complain, but the waitress told us that a fishmonger across the street sold succulent Bismarck herrings out of a barrel and that no one would mind if we bought some to have with our potatoes. Len dashed across the street with a one Reichsmark note in his hand where the fishmonger had a barrel of herrings under a canopy. From where I was sitting, I could see the heavy lid secured with a padlock to deter thieves. I thought that nobody would try to take the whole barrel anyway. He returned with three herrings and some change; not a bad deal we all agreed. Our meal was complete and afterward we had some brause (fizzy) lemonade - so the herrings could swim, and listened to the radio in the hall.
It seemed all so peaceful with ‘Juliska from Budapest’ with her heart full of paprika, coming from the speaker, followed by music from The White Horse Inn on Lake Wolfgang. When they started with the news, we retired for the night because none of us believed the stories about how the Russians had done us a favour by chasing us out of Stalingrad six weeks earlier. In our room, Mum read a Free Corps novel by Erich Dwinger while Len and I played cards. He always carried a worn out deck with him and liked playing twenty-one. I lost almost every hand, finally gave up and went to bed. Mum had the little bedside lamp on while she read, and sometime in the night, it flickered and woke me up. I could hear a lone aircraft somewhere overhead, but no siren came on to alert us to anything important. That didn’t matter; Mum got us up and told us to get dressed as fast as we could. We went into the dining hall to see if there was any news on the Drathfunk and we had hardly sat down when the announcement came. ‘Enemy bombers are approaching Hook van Holland [in far south-west Holland], Terschelling, and the West Friesian Islands; course, south-east.’ That certainly meant western Germany. We knew bombers headed for Hamburg or Berlin came in through different air space. True enough, the preliminary alarm came directly; a long wailing sound, lasting thirty seconds, and then repeating itself. There was no danger as yet, but we grabbed our bags and things we had left in the room and went out into the hall again. Folks were assembled around the radio. Juliska was quiet and the white horse had galloped away.
Out on the streets it was pitch dark as expected in an air raid. A few lone aircraft could be heard a ways off coming nearer, but nothing that sounded like a stream of heavy bombers. All of a sudden the sky lit up like a peacetime fireworks display or a celestial-size illuminated Christmas tree. We knew immediately what was afoot; those were target markers and the planes above us had been twin-engined Mosquito Pathfinders. Searchlights swept the sky and some distant 88 flak guns opened up. ‘It’s time for the shelter now, Mum announced. There was flak shrapnel raining down on roofs and into the street; some ripped through the green and brown canopy over the fishmonger’s cart, only missing Bismarck’s favourite food by an inch. Then we heard the still distant characteristic sound of enemy bombers, and anyone who has lived through nights like this - nights of fire and destruction - will never forget the sound of four-engined RAF Lancaster bombers. Ami bombers only came during the day until near the end of the war. Folks from all corners of the city streamed into the shelter, which was a huge block of concrete six stories tall that could house several hundred people. An air-raid warden was stationed at the entrance, sorting out the incoming human traffic. ‘No pushing, no shoving; there’s room for all,’ he kept repeating. A few latecomers dashed in, among them a woman in a post office cap and uniform who sobbed the whole time. ‘Will you shut up,’ the warden blared at her, ‘You’re making everyone nervous.’
‘I can’t help it, I have two small children at home,’ she replied.
‘So what are you doing without them here in the middle of the night?’
‘I was visiting my sister and I’m on the early 6 a.m. shift at the post office.’ By now bombs were falling in the distance. Was it at Katernberg or even nearer? We couldn’t tell. Then a whole series of explosions shook the shelter to its foundations.
‘That was close,’ someone screamed and the post-office woman started sobbing again.
‘Where do you live?’ an old man smoking a pipe asked the woman.
‘Johannis Street, number 37, top floor.’ More explosions, some near some far away, but obviously they were all meant for Bottrop.
‘I hope we get home okay and I’d rather leave tomorrow than Sunday,’ Mum whispered to us.
‘And what about our parade?’ Len whined.
‘If the town’s been hit hard, there won’t be a parade and let’s hope those friends of yours in that school aren’t hurt.’
Finally, after two hours the all-clear sounded. People streamed from the shelter, behind the post office woman, who was the first one out. She ran down the street still sobbing. All around us houses were on fire and then a delayed-action bomb went off with a terrific bang a few hundred feet away. I think those were the worst, designed specifically to kill rescue workers. The hotel was still standing with some windows broken but otherwise no damage we could see. I noticed something silvery in the road and a strong vinegar smell was everywhere. ‘Look at all those herrings,’ Len shouted and began filling his Hitler Youth cap with the slippery fish.
‘Bismarck is turning in his grave,’ the warden remarked, watching people grab the free food.
‘Is he buried here in Bottrop?’ asked a dumb-looking fellow.
‘Where did you learn history - in Russia?’ The warden wasn’t pleased to see such behaviour and this simpleton just made it worse. ‘He’s buried in Friedrichsruh, Holstein.’
Yes, our parade was cancelled; many people lost their lives that night, but none of the other HJ boys and girls were hurt and we had enough herrings to last the weekend. Everyone went home on the train because the trucks had been hit and were sent for repair. None of us complained about that. In 1940, the events we had just lived through would have been reported all over Germany, but by 1943, such things were barely noticed and quickly covered up by propaganda that no one believed anymore.