大象传媒

The first five parts of this story are posted in the Axis Forces section of this Forum. This last part deals with my immediate post-1945 experiences, my not-so-smooth return to civilian life. It takes up my story at the point of my release from Russian captivity in mid-October '45.

After crossing the bridge over the river Oder into Germany I and my fellow ex-PoW's have spent a couple of days in Frankfurt dealing with a string of bureaucrats. There were interviews or de-briefings to do, formalities to satisfy, forms and declarations to sign and who can remember what else. Life in Germany was slowly trying to return to peacetime normal. German normal, of course, because by that time hardly anyone in Germany could recall what European normal used to be around the turn of the century forty years before. We were issued D.P. (Displaced Persons) identity cards, ration cards, travel documents, letters of referral and the restrictions! and on the backs of these we soon started collecting a growing number of rubber stamp impressions and endorsements. Life, it seems, was heading towards even tighter controls and restrictions than those, which were imposed by the Nazis. In Germany has struck, what one writer has called, 'the twenty fifth hour'. Start of a new day, not necessarily better, but most certainly different, of a kind not experienced before. As I write these memoirs, sixty years on, we all know Big Brother. Well, in 1945 he was a little boy with a big future.

Finally, when we had all our papers in order, we could say 'Good-bye!' to one another and head home in all the different directions. No, not really, because the trains were operating only on lines to and from Berlin. One could not by-pass the bombed-out capital. And so, in company with a friend, another ex-SS man from Strassburg in Alsass-Lothringen, the French-german disputed territory, we have set out by train in the direction of Berlin. The journey took a long time and when we have eventually reached our destination it was about noon of the following day, 18 October 1945. The daylight hours in late autumn were rather short and it was necessary to find a place for the night before the time for curfew. My friend steered us into the French sector of the city, because he was now a French national and that's where we had hoped to find a bed for the night. (Well, two beds, really!). We ended up in the Wirchow hospital. After hot bath and good feed we spent the night finally sleeping in real beds, between real sheets, wearing real hospital pyjamas and we were feeling great. In the morning, after enjoying a fine breakfast, we were told to report at a certain address at a certain time. And we said good-bye to the nice people at the hospital. On the way to the appointed address my friend wanted to find some place where he could get a beer. He hadn't tasted one in many months. But I pointed out to him that we were running a bit late for that and told him that we can have that beer a little later. Neither of us had an inkling of how long that 'little later' was going to take.

The address, to which we were directed, was a French military police station. The gendarmes there have unceremoniously checked us out for the tattooed blood group marks and totally ignoring our Russian release papers, transported us both, in hand cuffs, under heavy guard to the prison in the suburb of Tegel, which was also part of the French sector of Berlin at the time. Arriving at the prison we were separated and I have never met my Alsatian friend again. He was doubtless transported to France and had to face his Nemesis there. As for me, I was put into a solitary cell about 2metres by 3陆 and there I spent the next 16 months of my life. I was 21陆 years old at the time of my incarceration and I would be almost 23 before the gates opened again. Of course, I was given no indication how long I was about to stay under lock and key. The often used phrase 'they threw away the key' applied in my case almost literally. No-one had any interest in me, no-one cared. One month followed another in a long succession and no-one talked to me, no-one investigated anything, I was not a German citizen or French and in the end, when the Frenchmen got around to contacting the Czechoslovak post-war authorities, they were told that as far as they were concerned, I myself had deprived myself of my Czechoslovak citizenship the day I joined the Waffen-SS. So there I was, alone in the world, a Stateless Person.

But, before this, my new status, finally crystallized, I had to suffer sixteen months of solitary confinement without contact with the outside world. The first nine months I didn't have even any contact with the occupant of the neighbouring cell. At first I tried to occupy my mind by reading a few books. Of course they were written in German, but I remember mainly my attempt to read the story of 'Madame Bovary' by Gustave Flaubert in the original French. You may remember from an earlier chapter of these recollections that only a few years earlier at school I had been more proficient in French than in German, but I must admit that reading the longwinded French novel was for me hard going.

The prison administration made some token attempts to keep mainly long-term prisoners like myself from getting too depressed by giving us something useful to do. Unfortunately it was still the sort of activity that continued to keep us in solitary confinement. For two or three months we were kept busy pasting blank pieces of paper over the top left corner on tens of thousands of official envelopes in order to cover the eagle and swastika emblem and so make them acceptable for use by the post-war German public service. Then one day the guards brought into each cell armfuls of straw. No, it wasn't for us to lay on, instead they sprinkled it liberally with water and left more water in a bucket in each cell for us to keep the straw moist. That moisture kept the straw suitably pliable and we were instructed in the art of producing neat plaids of consistent width for the use by the footwear industry. It didn't take long for the initial half-hearted interest to wear off partly due to the monotony of the whole exercise but also by the pervasive smell of the wet straw.

It took the French gendarmes sixteen months to arrive at the conclusion that no-one has any interest in me, or in my past. But by then I had already been punished by sixteen months of rather harsh imprisonment and there is no official entry anywhere in any file stating the reason why. I had not met either a solicitor or prosecutor or seen a judge or the inside (or outside, for that matter) of a courthouse. All I did see day after endless day was the same cramped cell, where the bed had to be lifted up and pinned to the wall, before I could walk five paces from the door to the little barred glassless window high up, just within the reach of my fingertips when I stood on my tiptoes, then make an about-turn and walk five paces back to the door. The food we were given was not quite enough for survival, only for gradual dying. About the quality of the food it is best to say nothing. But, to be fair, few people even outside the prison gates were eating very much better. By the end of the first nine months of this existence my weight was down to 47 kg (I was 181cm tall), and my moral was lower than the proverbial snakes belly. During one of the periodic surprise cell inspections the wardens have come across a small box containing, at that time, 12 aspirin tablets. I had heard someone say that fifteen Aspirins would kill a person. So I was saving them by complaining from time to time of headache or some such thing. When they now asked me 'What are these for?' I told them straight, 'I intend to kill myself, - just look at me!' It worked. A day or two later I was taken to the cookhouse where from then on I worked every day in company with other 'privileged' prisoners. Even though after each days work I still had to return to my single cell both my spirits and my body soon recovered and when the time came and I was finally released, my weight was back in the low eighties, and I was feeling good and fit.

On release from Tegel prison I was handed a slip of paper, a document of release on which, as I fortunately noticed, there was entered only the date of release ,,,19.2.47. I was about to step outside into a strange world full of suspicions, spies, black-marketeers, deserters, thieves and escapees from a thousand-and-one lock-ups and I would not have been able to account for the sixteen months since my release from the Russian captivity. Though I normally don't stand up for myself in the presence of Authority, I handed the release paper back to the officer at the desk and asked him to enter on it the date of incarceration. And there it is, in his handwriting, in German, in ink, in the top margin: Einlieferungstag ,,,19.10.45. Sixteen months to the day.

It was cold outside but I did have somewhere to go. One of the men I have befriended while working in the prison cookhouse, a Czech black-marketeer, gave me the address of his German girlfriend and I took to her a message from him. I spent a night in her flat, quite innocently, I assure you. I was still a virgin at the time, in spite of being a twenty-three-year-old returned soldier. In his message he most likely asked her to help me, because after a good nights rest in a comfortable bed and a fine breakfast, she packed for me a small travelling bag full of goodies, mostly food and clothing. Her boyfriend was apparently a good provider and even while he was in jail, his associates were taking care of his lady. For all I know, there may have been a place for me in his little enterprise, but all I could think of was how to return home to my folks as soon as possible. My Czech friend in Tegel informed me a little about the then prevailing situation in the post-war Republic. Even the army Major at the Czechoslovak military mission in the Soviet sector, into whose care my French jailers tried to hand me, a good-natured old 'Uncle', advised me to stay outside Czechoslovakia's borders for the sake of my continued good health. So, I asked the Frenchmen to enter on the release certificate as my home address the place, where I used to spend a few days every time I was in Vienna, during my association with the Danube Shipping Company. It was then the home of the family of one of my mothers former school friends, who was also instrumental in my getting the job with the Shipping Company back in 1942

And so Vienna, then Graz and eventually the little town Anger bei Weiz became my next target on the journey back to civilian life. That's right, I was living in a kind of no-man's land between soldier and civilian, because I have not yet been discharged from the now dysfunctional service organization. How I ever found my way through the complicated maze of post-war bureaucratic red tape I shall never be able to re-trace and neither will the other millions of people whose lives were disrupted by the crazy politicians of those days. The more I think about it the more I feel that it wasn't so much a matter of skilful steering as simply rolling over on one's back and concentrating on staying afloat in the troubled waters.

After my release from the French-administered Tegel prison I wasted no time to get as far away from Frenchmen as possible. I took a train to Munich and from there in company of another returning soldier, an Austrian, tried to cross the border to Austria. He seemed to know his way around that part of the world so I have entrusted my fate into his hands and that is why to this day I have no idea at which point he has decided to cross the border. The Ggermans let us cross without any problems but when we came to the Austrian border post, manned by, as far as I could tell, only one old man in an even older uniform, we did strike a problem. The post was located on an unimportant little track through the mountains and the road down into the valley was buried deep under a blanket of snow. The nearest Austrian village, we were told, was about six kilometres away and we will have to get there on foot. We did set out downhill, but after less than half a kilometre it became obvious that we would not make it, certainly not before darkness fell. Back at the border post the old man advised us to go back to Munich and from there to the American PoW transit camp at Dachau. There, in due course , we would be given all the proper documents and could travel to our specified destination by train in comfort. The word 'comfort' worked like magic, we had not experienced much of it for some time and so we have taken the old mans advice and spent the following two months in what was during the preceding several years a concentration camp. Our existence there was dull but, for ex-soldiers not particularly uncomfortable. The food was good and the bunks comfortable and so the two months have passed quickly enough.

Nothing much has happened to me during the two months I spent in Dachau. Most of the time we were just playing cards. But this story of mine is not the listing of important events, it is a collection of an ordinary mans memories. Only very seldom and then only very briefly has my life journey taken me close to someone important. One such occasion was my stay in Dachau. Just at that time in another section of the complex of buildings was waiting for his trial to come up SS colonel Otto Skorzeny, best remembered for his spectacular rescue of Benito Mussolini from his prison on Gran Sasso. Skorzeny, just like everybody else, had to wait for the post-war authorities to furnish him with the necessary personal papers in order to be able to start a new life as a civilian. But the need to be patient didn't stop him from simply vanishing pretty well whenever he chose to visit his wife in Munich. Several times he packed some hard to find things like chocolates, cigarettes, soap and such stuff, disappeared for a couple of days and eventually reported back at the main gate, sometimes wearing the uniform of an American officer. It did our subdued little hearts good to know that there is still someone there who can thumb his nose at the 'victors'.

One other memory may be of some interest (or amusement). Many of the PoW's waiting in Dachau for their release documents were in sore need of replacement items of clothing. Preferably not service uniforms. The Americans were freely handing out American uniform jackets, trousers and boots to all who asked for clothing, but they insisted on one rule: on release the jackets must be returned to the store unless we managed to dye them some other colour. That was not easily done, because we could not go to town and buy the necessary dyes and , anyway, they would have been, like many non-essential goods, rather hard to find. Luckily, probably by accident, someone came to notice that beetroot juice leaves a permanent spot on an American uniform jacket. From then on the Americans needed to secure increased supplies of both jackets and canned beetroot. The men were leaving the camp in some horribly spotty jackets but on arrival home they simply dyed their new clothes black and all was well

Pretty soon my turn came to leave and with the release papers in hand and my address now stated to be Anger bei Weiz I have finally reached the place, where I last saw my parents and siblings two and half years earlier.

OOO

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