Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.
Mark Twain

Chapter 11

The End is Here

Coming back from the announcement, my group of seven sat around a table and contemplated what to do. We were independent of the 12th Panzer Division which we were assigned to, so we could return to the company headquarters, or go home on our own, if we thought we could pull that off.

I listened to the Allied radio stations since there wasn’t anyone to stop me. To my surprise I could not raise “Soldaten Sender West” and was beginning to doubt that it was a British station. Why would a British station go off the air at the end of the war? Who was really behind Soldaten Sender West?

I had privately talked with Oberleutnant Sepp von Collins. We conversed in English, as to not arouse any anxiety in the rest of the group. I told him, "If the Russians want me for their Gulags, they will have to catch me first. I was going to try to “hike” home to Germany."

My completely independent decision

During the past month I had planned a route, collected maps of the areas to be traversed, had a good compass, dehydrated food, extra clothing, tobacco and cigarettes etc. and other paraphernalia I deemed necessary, including my small Mauser automatic. I also took my little Agfa camera along.

When I told the other men of my plan, I was surprised when they said they wanted to come along. I said that a group of seven people was too big, and that we would have to split into two independent groups to have any chance of success. We would have to travel through 600 miles of Russian occupied territory, without any certainty of food or support from the local population.

The group agreed to try my plan after much unrealistic discussion. They figured they would have a few more days to prepare, before the Russian side would come and take charge of the situation and tell them what to do. We sat down in the old farmhouse and drank whatever alcoholic beverages we could muster to drown our concerns.

On my suggestion we all fantasized where we wanted to be in 1950, 1955, 1960. Nineteen-sixty was as far as anybody was willing to think ahead. Sepp von Collins, who was from an old, aristocratic Austrian family, said he hoped that Austria would be independent again. He invited all of the guys to come and live in Austria. Hannes Rhode, a professional soldier with the rank of sergeant major, had been wounded five times, had fought with the Legion Condor in the Spanish Civil War and had been in all the major war theaters including the war against Russia from the beginning. He could not imagine what he was going to do. I said that by 1960 I would not be in Europe any more.

Professional soldiers never gave much thought to what would happen if the other side won the war. What did the victorious Allies plan on doing with Germany? We assumed that there would be occupation, but for how long? The idea that some of us would not have a town anymore to go home to, because certain areas of eastern Germany would be given to Poland and Russia, never entered our minds.

The next morning we packed everything into our communication van, and slowly rolled east towards the former front lines near Tukkums. We disabled the transmitter and threw the radio tubes out of the window. We were still laboring under the illusion that these items were classified as “secret” and should not fall into enemy hands. We stopped in a forest and burned our station documents, log books and took a big hammer to the “Enigma” encoding machine making sure it was totally unusable.

Preparation to escape

Next, we destroyed some of our personal belongings. I saved a few pictures. Then we removed all rank insignia and decorations from our uniforms. I told my buddies, if you get caught by the Russians tell them you were in a penal unit and had escaped. These units were not allowed to show any rank insignia.

We got into a traffic jam of military vehicles. Suddenly I saw a Russian Yak-2 fighter plane swooping down for an attack and shouted to get under cover. The Yak-2 came down and strafed the stalled military vehicles. I had dashed into a nearby house.

When I heard the plane circling for another attack, somebody outside opened fire on the Yak-2 with a quad-barreled light antiaircraft gun mounted on one of the vehicles. The gunner was apparently an experienced man and the Yak-2 went off trailing smoke. What a jerk, I thought, here the damn war has finally ended and this Russian clown starts his own, and probably got killed, because I didn’t see anyone bail out. What a shame. Everybody congratulated the gunner and we all hoped the other side had heard that the war was over.

Our group continued driving towards the east end of the former front line. That might sound strange, but I had reasoned that it would be easiest to cross the frontline there, because the Russians would think no German soldiers will escape in that direction.

In the late afternoon we drove into an encampment of an infantry unit and parked our vehicles. The unit was a Saxonian infantry regiment, probably from the 24th Infantry Division. The officers of the unit tried to persuade us not to go through with our plan, and offered us new army uniforms, and new identification papers, if we needed them. That was strange, but they might have thought that the seven of us were from a penal unit, who wanted to get our asses out of Courland.

They also offered some provisions, which we gladly accepted. When it was dark, we packed our rucksacks, thanked the friendly Saxonians, said good-bye to each other and exchanged some home addresses. Then we started our Odyssey back to Germany, which we named, “Our journey of no return.”