In politics nothing is contemptible.
Disraeli

Chapter 3

Dig, Dig, Hurrah

My boss Max Buchner was pissed off, because my apprenticeship contract was to have ended on October 15. He said he had hoped to finally make some profit off my work. That was preposterous since I had made profits for him during the previous two years. He paid me peanuts, less than 5 Reichsmark a week, and claimed he didn’t make a profit. The mark up on ophthalmic merchandise was 300 percent.

Buchner was well off anyway. The old fart wouldn’t even let me enjoy my last hours of freedom. However, since I had my final diploma, I could leave. I wasn’t going to work until the day before going off to war, so I packed my tools and walked out.

Most of my friends had also received their induction orders. I called some of them up and suggested we should have a party before going off to our different units.

Since the start of the war against Russia, all public dancing and parties were prohibited. We had to either party at home, or ask permission to use the clubhouse of the rowing club. Permission was granted, and we had some damn good parties there. I had the right connections, and still could get liquor for these bashes.

The official reports were saying that the German troops had repelled all Russian counterattacks, and that the Russian Bear was as good as dead, but I couldn’t believe that. The radio announcements we heard sounded like an overly optimistic view of the real situation. Hitler had announced demobilization of 70 army divisions. This was either a hoax, or it meant that Germany had lost that many divisions already. I could only talk this over with my parents, I had learned to speak politically correctly, to keep my ass out of a jail or a concentration camp. My father had fought against Russia in World War I, and knew the Russians better than anybody else, but he was away, working in Berlin.

Seventeen years old, and I felt that nothing but black clouds were coming my way. Father came home for a weekend and told me that at the start of World War I, he had volunteered to join the Army, and had been wounded five times. He advised me to NEVER, absolutely NEVER, to volunteer for anything in the service. He said that volunteers were usually destined to be send on suicide missions.

Off to the R.A.D. (Reichs-Arbeits-Dienst)

My girlfriend Gisela often came to the house in the evening, and we danced, drank, and talked a lot. I didn’t know that her father was an SS officer. Fortunately I never told her about my political views.

On October 15, 1941 my mother and Gisela accompanied me to the station where I boarded the train to go to the camp of the R.A.D. Unit K 10/84, in Bomst just west of the old Polish border.

When I arrived at the railroad station in Bomst, a whole bunch of young man left the train. About 100 draftees walked towards the camp with me, and make sarcastic remarks about the Reichs-Arbeits-Dienst (RAD) to which we all had to report. The peacetime function of that Nazi organization was to teach young people discipline and hard work, mostly on worthwhile public projects such as draining of swamps, road building, reforestation etc. In a way the RAD could be compared to the American CCC camps, however the RAD was much more militarized.

In war time RAD units were engaged in paramilitary training, building fortifications, roads and runways, sometimes right behind the front lines. Some units worked in the defense industry to fill manpower bottlenecks. In other words, the government used the RAD as defense contractors. At a pay rate of 25 Pfennig, about ten cents per day per draftee, it wasn’t surprising they wanted us.

The fenced-in camp we were ushered into consisted of wooden army type barracks and utility buildings. A large open field was to the west, bordered by a big barn by the road into town. Just as in every military camp, there was basic boot camp training. We received our uniforms, fatigues, underwear, socks and boots, gas masks, canteens, and all the other junk that was considered essential for making a trained dog out of a human being. The worst problem was the supply chief who issued all that stuff. He not only looked like an early Neanderthal humanoid, he was only capable of barking one word, “Passt”, meaning it fits. He had obviously missed several steps of the human evolution.

We were issued a spade, as well as a Dutch infantry carbine of impressive length. All this equipment was designed to keep us busy and “out of mischief” for months to come. We would be washing, shining, cleaning, polishing, shooting and exercising the equipment. The “Arbeitsmann” (official title of the “trainees”) had to be kept on the run with the aforementioned paraphernalia. May be that’s what Hitler meant when he said his party had generated jobs.

I learned a few useful things during boot camp. How to properly handle basic hand tools, how to lift heavy loads without busting my back, how to split wood properly, how to drive a nail without hitting the thumb (hold hammer with both hands), and how to load and push a wheelbarrow. I also learned the names of 59 different soil transportation implements, so my time wasn’t totally wasted.

The trained dog routine

The worst part was the drills, a brutal suppression of our personalities. Our training was to instill “cadaver obedience”, obedience at any cost.

Boot camp wasn’t too traumatic for me, because there had been so many changes in my life already. For some of the young men, it was the worst thing that had ever happened to them, because they had never been away from home. I tried to make the best of things and kept a low profile, because it was only for six months. I had already been accepted by the Luftwaffe for training in a technical field, so I wasn’t worried about what would come after this misery.

To die for Führer and Fatherland?

It took a while before this heap of civilians settled into a coherent RAD group, and even longer before we could be called a paramilitary unit. After two weeks of sorting the recruits out, and the recruits trying to make sense of all the orders, we were deemed worthy of being sworn in. The RAD oath was identical to the military one. We were supposed to be obedient to Führer and Fatherland, even if it would cost our lives. I mumbled the words as inaudibly as possible. Up to that ceremony we had legally been civilians, even though we had been in the camp for two weeks. After the oath we were under military law, with all the dire consequences should we disobey orders, or leave the unit without authorization.

A nightly escape

I had an immediate problem with the latter. Gisela had arrived in Bomst to say good-bye. Her father had been transferred to Prague and she and her mother were very apprehensive about the move. I could not officially leave the camp to meet her. After a bit of information gathering, I decided to leave the camp during the night, and meet with Gisela in the large barn at the end of our exercise field.

The camp had a guard posted at the gate, and I had to find out whether guards were walking through the camp at set hours. This wasn’t too difficult, because the guards were also new recruits who didn’t know what the hell they were doing. Furthermore, they were constantly harassed to test their alertness by various superiors. The barrack that I was in was at the opposite end from the entrance, farthest away from the guards. Right behind my barrack was a barbed wire fence and beyond it the open field with bushes along one side.

With the gear I had received was a set of sports clothing, boxer shorts, a T-shirt and a warm-up suit, as well as some running shoes. Since the warm-up suit was navy colored and the running shoes were black, I considered that the best camouflage for my night excursion. We had to be in bed by 22:00 hours. I waited till 23:00 hours and got out of bed very quietly. I put on my sports clothes, opened the window, climbed out, closed the window, and listened for a guard walking around. I went through the fence and cautiously walked along the row of bushes toward the big barn. Fortunately it was a moonless night. When I reached the road, I quickly moved over to the barn. Gisela was already at the barn, we hugged and kissed and whispered to each other. The barn was empty, except for some bales of hay in a corner. There was also a partition, and behind it, loose hay on the floor. It was just what we needed, and we laid down and had a long talk.

To my horror she told me that her father was a high SS officer and had been transferred. She didn’t want to go to Prague, but had to stay with her parents. We kissed and did some heavy petting, but hearing about her father turned off my love making thoughts. I could imagine what would happen if I made her pregnant. Her father would certainly come after me, and I would most likely have to join the SS as well. Maybe Gisela had hoped I would make her pregnant so that she could stay with my mother, and wouldn’t have to move. We should have talked about that before she visited me. Our last get-together lasted until the wee hours of the morning.

I hurried back, just as dawn was approaching. At the fence, I heard a guard walking across a concrete apron, and ducked back into the bushes outside the fence. I hoped he would not check the window of my room and find it unlocked. The guard was not very attentive so I finally made it back through the window and into my bed. I was so pooped that I immediately fell asleep, without even taking my clothes off. The next morning the few men who knew about my escapade wanted to know how it went, but I kept my mouth shut.

A pissing contest

With 16 men of various backgrounds thrown together in close quarters, it was just a matter of time before problems surfaced. We had a man named Jurchen, he was a kid from the farm. He was grossly overweight, which during war time with tight food rations was unusual, and he obviously wasn’t quite up mentally. In those days, one had to be very cautious and observant to separate the men who were mentally retarded from the ones who played that role, in order to get out of military service. Jurchen’s name was easily converted into Julchen, which in German is an old-fashioned girl’s name.

During exercise it became obvious that Julchen didn’t know where right and left were, and he became the center of endless teasing. He had been placed in an upper bunk bed, and in the middle of the night he peed right in his bed. His urine rained down on the man in the lower bunk, who jumped up with a loud curse when he realized what was happening. The man in the lower bunk was quite muscular, and in his rage about the involuntary shower, he took his belt with the heavy buckle and thrashed Jurchen. Jurchen’s screams woke up everybody, and when they switched the lights on to see what was going on, they either laughed out loud, or cursed Jurchen, depending on temperament. It became such a ruckus that a superior appeared on the scene and analyzed the situation correctly, which was “amazing”.

He ordered Jurchen to clean up the mess, which was impossible since we slept on straw filled mattresses. When they were soaked, there was no way to dry them out in a hurry. Jurchen had to mop up the floor and take his and the lower bunk’s mattress outside to get them dried out. The lower man had to sleep in an empty bed in another room and Jurchen was ordered to report to the dispensary. Of course our sleep was gone and we all cursed Jurchen.

He came back a couple of days later, but was now assigned a lower bunk. He peed in his sleep several nights in a row, until the men finally called on the camp commandant to remove this pissy character from our room. He was taken to an outside hospital for psychological observation, and never came back to the unit. We wondered if he really was a bed-wetter, or had faked it so well that he got out.

The worst winter in decades, 1941/1942

We slid into one of the most severe winter weather Europe had experienced in decades. We had to exercise outside when it was 10 and 20 degrees below zero. I froze my heels right in the leather boots, because the back of the heels pressed firmly against the frozen leather. All this to “toughen us up” for the war ahead, we were told. Finally we had so many cases of frozen noses and ears, that the camp doctor limited us to no more that 20 minutes outside, and we had to closely watch each other. The moment the ears or the tip of the nose turned white, we had to stop what we were doing, and vigorously rub the frozen body parts with snow to restart the circulation. This was an exceedingly painful procedure. My frozen heels gave me severe pains for years, because we didn’t have the proper footwear for these low temperatures. When anybody complained, we were told to imagine how the soldiers at the Eastern Front felt, having to fight in snow and cold down to 40 below zero.

I thought, “And where are the SOB’s who sent them there?” As far as I was concerned, they should have sent the politicians and generals naked to Russia to fight their goddamn war. The German losses from the winter weather must have been appalling, but the numbers were not in the official bulletins.

Joseph Goebbels was finally forced to beg the German population to donate every piece of winter clothing they could spare to help save the soldiers at the Eastern Front. Another case of the typical arrogance in the upper echelons of political and military leadership, who thought the war would be over by November 1941. As far as the Russians were concerned, the war was just beginning. They had experienced huge losses in the initial battles, but they were now holding the lines everywhere.

A dreadful Christmas, 1941

It was now the middle of December, 1941, and my 18th birthday fell flat because we didn’t have anything to celebrate with. I was miserable. Then we started to prepare for our first Christmas away from home. We had only the skimpiest amount of coal or wood to heat our barracks, but we got at least a decent Christmas meal, and the parcels from home helped over the worst depressions. We shared what we had with each other and so it turned out as well as could be expected under the circumstances.

Despite the cold we were not allowed to sleep with our clothes on. When we woke up in the morning the single pane windows were obscured by thick layers of ice on the inside! Every night some asshole of a group leader would come around and lift our blankets to see if we had any clothes on. I got so angry that I stayed awake until midnight, and then put all my underwear and the warm-up suit on.
The latrines were in an adjacent building, and if I had to go out at night I had to dress completely before venturing into the subzero temperature. If it was necessary to sit on the 10 holer, I had to check the toilet seat first to make sure there wasn’t any ice on it, otherwise the skin would freeze to it, and peel off.

After Christmas we were told that we would be released early, since the allotment of heating material had been completely exhausted, and there was no chance that we would get more. Shortly after that. however, we were told that we would be shipped out for action.

Finally, near the end of January 1942, we were ordered to get ready with all our gear. We traveled by train at night in a northerly and northwesterly direction, but we were delayed because of an air raid on Berlin. The next morning the train rolled into Angermünde, which is about 60 miles northeast of Berlin, where we disembarked.

The town of Angermünde, in the Province of Brandenburg, was known for excellent bakery goods and famous jams, so some of the guys remarked we might be needed to stir the cake dough in these factories, and we all laughed. Our leaders herded us on board a narrow gauge train to Pinnow. None of us knew what the hell was going on in Pinnow that could require our presence. I had only heard the name used by a stand-up comedian, who joked that it was the ultimate ass of the world. I thought this “Pinnow an der Knatter”, as the comedian called it, was a product of his imagination, and that it didn’t really exist. But here we were, right in Pinnow at an Army ammunition factory. Why we were needed there became clear the next morning. We were briefed by an army ammunition expert, who gave lectures on the strict safety rules, and the confidentiality of the work.

The plant was situated in a densely wooded area that offered very good camouflage. There were numerous small, one story buildings, in which various kinds of artillery shells and other ammunition was manufactured. The buildings were widely scattered and were of a special construction. Walls were of cement blocks with the roof trusses sitting on the walls without being tied to them. The buildings had many windows that were left open most of the time.

The reason for all these measures was the ever present possibility of an explosion on the assembly lines. The gases of an explosion would lift the roof, and/or blow through the open windows without doing much damage to persons or building, so the theory went.

My unit was assigned to an assembly line for 75 mm (3 inch) artillery shells. A fireworker, the official name for the army ammunition expert, was in charge of the line, and was going to train and supervise us. He asked everybody what kind of training or profession we had, and assigned certain tasks accordingly. Students were, as always in the armed forces, categorized as unskilled workers. Since I had worked with sophisticated measuring devices, I was assigned the final inspection station where the position of the shell’s primer, (which triggered the main explosive) was measured and its location altered when it fell outside an established tolerance. I had to make the necessary corrections to bring the primer within acceptable dimensional tolerances to the fuse.

The corrective action was to remove the highly explosive primer and put washers underneath to raise it, reinsert the primer, and re-measure the corrected dimension. Sometimes several corrections were necessary. We were warned not to drop these primers, because they could explode and blow somebody’s leg off. The cement floor of the building was covered with soft, rubber like foot mats to cushion a drop. I was issued a rounded wooden stick, with which to GENTLY, PLEASE, tap the primer into the hole of the shell’s explosive core. Wooden sticks were used because any spark in surroundings like that could mean instant death. Well, how would you like to do a job like that for a “salery” of ten cents per day?

Death manufactured everywhere

The job bothered me a lot because what I made with my hands could literally kill somebody or cause terrible injuries. However, the other side was doing the same idiotic deeds. I recalled a story by Mark Twain called “The War Prayer”. It fit this situation exactly. The stupidity of men and especially politicians was beyond comprehension!

Like everything in life, one gets used to even the most dangerous jobs and becomes callous and even careless at times. Unexpected inspections were the rule there. Once a superintendent almost fainted when he saw me tapping the primer rather hard with the wooden stick. He stopped the line instantly with his shout, and proceeded to give all of us another safety lecture. At the end he asked everybody to look out the window, and he grabbed one of the nitro-penta primers and threw it out the window. It landed on a concrete pad about 50 feet away, exploding with a loud bang. For the rest of the day the line slowed down considerably. The fireworker had told us that our output was about 30% greater than that of civilian workers, so he gave us permission to take it easy.

The whole ammunition complex was subdivided by barbed wire fences, and in adjacent working areas different ordinances were manufactured. The work crews were different too. Some were German civilian workers, men and women. Other compounds were manned by women of Russian and other nationalities. Our RAD men were forbidden to have contact with these groups. In one group the women all had red hair. The fireworker told us that it was caused by the type of chemicals that went into some of the explosives.

Outside of our work there wasn’t much to do. The barracks we lived in were some distance from the factory and reasonably comfortable compared to the boot camp. At least we had enough coal to heat them properly. On Sundays we could catch a ride on the narrow gauge train into Angermünde. The town was very old and quaint, and had been made famous by the jam and marzipan that was manufactured there. My mother sometimes mailed me ration tickets, and I would go into town, sit in a nice café and have coffee ersatz and some pastry.

Sex through the fence prohibited

Adjacent to our living quarters were other camps, all separated by high wire fences. One adjacent camp had “Arbeitsmaidens”, the female members of the Arbeitsdienst, the same organization we were part of. Even though we couldn’t visit each other, we occasionally talked through the fence when no superior was in the vicinity. We were not supposed to do that, but there wasn’t any way to prevent it. Some men even had the nerve to have sex right through the fence at night. The girls would back up to the fence and the men would put their penis into them throught the fence. It must not have been very comfortable, but some of the women were determined to get pregnant so they would be discharged from the Arbeitsdienst. This caused one hell of an outcry from the male and female leaders on both sides of the fence, and the participants were put in solitary confinement.

The ammunition we worked on was earmarked for the spring offensive at the eastern front. At the beginning of March 1942, when we had caught up with the orders, we were on the train back to Bomst. Berlin was under air attack again. When we arrived at the base camp, we were told that we would be released within the next few days.

The hero catchers

During the last week in Bomst the recruiters from the services of the Wehrmacht and the SS came to the camp to look us over. These recruiters were referred to as “Heldenklaus” hero-catchers. The SS was looking for tall men, so I was approached. Fortunately I could tell them that I had signed on with the Luftwaffe already. The SS officer made a belittling remark about that. Around March 25, I was on my way home to Landsberg and hoped for a few weeks of peace and quiet before being called up by the Luftwaffe.

Oh, did it feel good to be home again. To be able to sleep in a decent bed, not to be awakened rudely in the morning, to wear comfortable clothes, and to linger at breakfast as long as I wanted. What luxuries and I really appreciate that and told my mother so.

Of course I had to pay a visit to the rowing club and I even took the skiff out for a short row up the river. The weather was still cold, and being all by myself out there wasn’t really that enjoyable. I missed my friends. They were in the armed forces, scattered all over Europe by now and one was under the sea in a submarine. I wondered how many of them would return home. I found my old girl friend Friedl, and we spent a few hours shooting the breeze.

New induction papers

Several days later I got my induction orders to the Luftwaffe. On April 15, 1942 I was to report to the 15th Wireless Company of the Chief Commander of the Air Force. This assignment was unusual because it was one of the top staff units of the Luftwaffe, directly under Hermann Göring.

On my last weekend at home my father came from Berlin. We had long talks, and I was glad to be able to confide many things I couldn’t talk about with other people. Father said that the location where I was to report was a top notch facility. Compared to what he had experienced in World War I it was a “luxury resort” he said, with his sarcastic sense of humor, I wasn’t sure what to make of that remark. My father wouldn’t give me any further information and just said, “You will find out.” Well, I thought, it couldn’t be much worse than the RAD camp in Bomst. I was going back to the city where I was born and was going to be stuffed into another uniform.