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In the title which I originally chose for this lifes' journey of mine I refer to myself as uninteresting. And so I am, when compared with some of the people whom I met along the way. One of them is my Company 'Spiess' Neumann. In the days when, it seemed, the only acceptable hairstyle for a man, especially a man in uniform, was 'short back and sides' he was proudly showing off his luxuriant head-of-hair. No headgear, not even a steel helmet could fully cover it. In fact an army hat only seemed to make it more conspicuous. People who met him only fleetingly would go on their way somewhat puzzled, but those who got closer to the man soon heard his unusual story:- During the battle for Leningrad, before things have settled into a prolonged Siege, one day Neumann, then a Corporal was seriously wounded and when his unit was forced to withdraw, was left for dead, with a number of others, in the trench. Short time later the Russian troops reached those trenches and that's when one crazy 'Ivan' pulled out a hunting knife and - scalped him. Neumann survived, perhaps largely thanks to the terribly cold weather, and when the see-sawing situation brought back the German troops, he was finally rescued and rushed to hospital. He has recovered, was fitted with a silver plate for protection and for the rest of his life was wearing this, quite attractive wig. For him it was never a handicap, quite the opposite, it gave him an edge, especially in his dealings with the ladies.

Shortly before, in the autumn of 1944 russian-supported partisans and other elements staged an uprising in Slovakia and during that time my parents and siblings moved out of harms' way to a small village in Austria, in the province of Steiermark , called Anger bei Weiz. Here I was able to join the rest of the family, by co-incidence, during the Christmas Season. Father was teaching at the local primary school and, during Christmas holidays, we had a chance to spend a fair amount of time together. This proved to be a mixed blessing, because we could not see eye to eye with my father on the most important subject of war. He knew only what he was fed by the media and I, fresh from the front, was telling him that the war was all but lost. He could not see how I can believe that and still go back and fight some more. Well, I didn't go back because I wanted to, but because I had to. Perhaps by that stage I was also to a certain degree a robot. No matter what may have awaited me, desertion was absolutely unthinkable. And so, with three or four days of my leave still to go, I kissed them all good-bye and headed for Dresden. I didn't know that I shall never see either my father or my youngest brother ever again, and the rest of the family only 46 years later.

On arrival in Dresden I had to report to the Allocations officer. It was his job to decide the next posting for each man not able to return to his original unit. At that time my 16th Company 8th SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment was encircled in Budapest. It managed to fight its' way out of there and made its way to an area north of Berlin, where it eventually surrendered to the Americans in the final days of war. But I have only learned this long after the war. Until then I had assumed that they have either perished or were captured in Budapest. The Allocations officer in Dresden turned out to be Major Frencken who, as a Captain was commanding my company of raw recruits in those same barracks from March until June '43. He must have remembered me too, because the first thing he asked was: 'I suppose you have forgotten by now all that I taught you last year?'. And I replied: 'Not only have I not forgotten, but I have learned a bit more since then.' Then he asked me if I want to become an officer. He intended to send me to an Academy. And here I had to do some very fast thinking, because one of the things which I had learned since my recruit days was, that camouflage is very important. The better a man succeeds in blending into the background, the better are his chances of survival. So I managed to talk my way out of it mostly by stressing my inadequate command of the german language.

When he saw that he won't make a commissioned officer out of me, he settled for a non-commissioned one. Just then, the day after the Christmas break, there began in Dresden a one-month accelerated course of training for non-commissioned officers (sergeants), field engineers. Major Frencken sent me to that course. It was a terribly tough month. I would not have believed that a man could spend such a long period in a permanent state of utter exhaustion and still keep going. Each days' routine started at 4 a.m. when we were still tired from the previous day. We have worked hard all day, until two or three hours after darkness fell, then had something to eat and dropped off to sleep utterly exhausted. And at 4 a.m. we had to put on the muddy clothes, still damp from the previous day, eat a quick breakfast and begin another day of torture. European winter in January '45 was very cold and we were spending most of our time in muddy, wet clothes. Even during the brief rest periods, the heating facilities in the high-ceiling halls filled with double- and triple-bunks were fighting a losing battle. It is a wonder that we have not all ended up in hospital or, indeed, dead.

A few days before the end of January '45 we have sat for written exams and after that there remained only a small matter of a passing-out parade and we would have been split-up and sent as replacements to a hundred different units. But a different fate waited for us. Suddenly, without warning, in the middle of the night our barracks have turned into a disturbed ants' nest. The news came of a massive Russian break-through near the polish city of Poznaň (Posen) and our non-com course of one thousand newly qualified sergeants was formed into a field battalion under the command of Major Frencken and sent with all possible haste to that general area to help stem the Russian advance. The designation of our unit was Einheit (Unit) Frencken, or Kampfgruppe (Battle Group) Frencken. We were travelling to the front in some army vehicles but most of us in hastily commandeered civilian trucks and buses. Our equipment was rather basic, incomplete and along the way, wherever we could find something useful we had to help ourselves as best we could. Even clothes, from socks to great-coats we have found in storehouses abandoned by the construction units of the OT (Organisazion Todd). They were the wrong colour, but they were warm.

In one of these storehouses we came across something even more warmly appreciated by soldiers everywhere than a warm coat - alcohol. And, even though I wasn't a drinking man even then, I decided to put one bottle of Schnaps (favourite german hard liqueur made from pears) into my great-coat pocket. It was mid-winter, the whole countryside was covered by a blanket of snow, sooner or later, I thought, a swallow or two will help to warm me up. Pretty soon that 'good idea' came close to costing me my life.

Since that Russian break-through a few days earlier no hard and fast frontline had yet been established and our first contact with the Red Army units was bound to come as a surprise. And so it did. In the middle of the night in the middle of one of the countless nameless villages, some of us dozing in the busses or on the benches in the backs of trucks, suddenly found ourselves under fire from all sides. The fellows in the backs of trucks dismounted in seconds, and gave us covering fire, My group was travelling in a bus and that only had one exit - in the front. The Russians had the streets under control and we had to move over fences and stone walls from house to house, garden to garden. Our aim was to find the railway lines at the edge of the village and make our way back in the direction from which we had just come and there re-assemble. As I was jumping over those fences and stone walls, I was uncomfortably aware of the bottle in my pocket. I didn't want to throw it away but I had to do something. One thing I didn't need right at that time was a wet trouser leg and a boot full of schnaps. So I sat down in the snow and transferred the contents into my field flask. There remained on the bottom of the bottle about two mouthfuls and, very foolishly, as it turned out, I decided to drink it. There was no-one nearby to remind me that I had not eaten since breakfast about sixteen hours earlier. Within minutes my legs refused to work. When one is simply exhausted, in desperate situations the brain can force muscles to come up with some hidden reserves of energy, but that alcohol has done its evil work on my brain also. And so there was only one thing left for me to do - make myself comfortable and die. At the base of each telegraph pole along the railway line the wind forms in the snow an inviting-looking depression just big enough for a man to curl up in and go to sleep. People say that drowning is the most pleasant way to die. Well, I can tell you that freezing to death doesn't hurt either. Especially, if you are falling asleep under the influence of alcohol. I had already said good-bye to the world when, out of the darkness, from the direction from which I had just come, there emerged a few figures. The Russians - I thought to myself and was rather annoyed, that I wasn't going to be allowed to die in peace. But they weren't Russians. They were, perhaps, the last of our stragglers and one of them happened to be a young fellow from my own section, powerfully built, in civilian life a butchers' apprentice and he was determined not to leave me there. Seeing that my brain was temporarily out of order, he lent me his own and forced me to stand up and keep moving my feet, one in front of the other until we have reached a little railway shelter shed at the edge of the next village. It seemed that, with the sounds of war getting ever closer, no-one in that village slept that night and we were told that the soldiers who came through during the night didn't stop there but continued on their way to the larger town only about two kilometres down the road. I said 'thank-you!' to my rescuer and assured him that after a short sleep I shall be able to continue on my way by myself. One of the villagers took me to his house, gave me something hot (and fatty) to eat and I dropped off to sleep. When they shook me awake, we saw through a lace curtain a group of about ten Cossacks on horseback riding past the house. It seemed that this time it was really the end. I took out my Service Record and Pay-book also a few photos of myself in uniform and shoved them into the kitchen stove. They burned in no-time. My rifle and the snipers telescopic sight I stuck in the bread-baking oven. The master of the house was going to start a fire in it as soon as possible. But then - the Cossacks were passing by the windows again and I realised that they were only a reconnaissance patrol. I estimated how long it would take them to ride back to where we rode into a trap during the night and then how long for the main body to arrive and I decided that I still had enough time to get out of there. I pulled the rifle and 'scope from the oven and hurried, as fast as I could, to catch up with my unit. There I learned that during the night Einheit Frencken lost fifteen men and I thought to myself: 'It could have been worse, the number could have been sixteen'.

As I read back to myself this account of my first day back at the front, I realise that I can not write in such detail about the almost three months which have followed. So let me say only that even though I have managed to avoid volunteering for any exceptional 'heroics', at the end, on the 18th of April, when I was captured, I had in my (replacement) Service Record entered 5 days of Attacks against fortified positions (ger.:Sturmtage) and 16 days of Close combat (ger.:Nahkampftage). For Close combat (in WWII) qualified days during which side arms and hand grenades were used, including street- and house-to-house battles and also days spent cut-off behind enemy lines before re-joining own troops. And now it remains only to end this chapter with a kind of 'final score': Out of those 1000 newly trained sergeants who have departed from Dresden at the end of January '45 were only about sixty left still fighting in the morning of the 18th of April and at 3pm of the same day only seventeen.

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