The better part of valor is discretion.
Shakespeare

Chapter 14

NKVD Commissar Krapnikov

In Vilnius I was taken to the headquarters of the NKVD for Lithuania. The guard who took me there broke out in a cold sweat when he telephoned from the outside of the building to gain entrance. We were checked in by an armed sentry at the entrance. I was frisked and even my boots were closely examined. My guard had to deposit his gun at the entrance, they sure had tight security here.

We were directed to what appeared to be an admission room, where there was a small crowd of people with gravely concerned faces. Some seemed to be close to a nervous breakdown. Two bureaucrats doing the booking were standing behind a counter. An additional armed guard was inside the door of the room.

When I sat down on an old decrepit sofa, in a rather casual manner, with one leg over the other, I immediately caught shit from the guard. He motioned me to get up, move to a chair, and sit in a proper subservient attitude. The sofa must have been for the upper echelons only, and the guard tolerated no deviation from the norm. None of the other people sat down. I realized now that I was at the “Russian Gestapo” headquarters for Lithuanian.

The bureaucrat checked me in and took almost everything from me, including my belt, suspenders and my glasses. Next they gave me a haircut, right down to the skin. The Russians did it with hand clippers, making their jokes as they cut once lengthwise and once crosswise over my head, then the rest. Next came my beard and then the joker asked me if I wanted to keep my mustache. I told him yes, and he obliged. Actually I should have been grateful for the haircut, because my last haircut had been three months back by a German army barber. However, after I saw myself in the mirror I was really outraged. Now I looked like a Russian criminal. The guy who clipped my hair made his joke and said I looked like a bulldog now.

I was marched off to a jail cell and again, there were at least 15 men in the cell already. The guard assigned me a bunk, and I was so tired that I had to lie down. I dozed off, and was awakened by a guard and led upstairs to a room with several desks and finally I could see what time it was, 11:45 pm. That gave me the creeps, because I had read of the Russian tactic to jerk prisoners out of their sleep and interrogate them at all hours of the night.

A Russian officer of appeared. I instantly knew that I was in for a tough interrogation. Since the Russians never introduced themselves or had name signs on their desks, I baptized him “Commissar Krapnikov.”

Krapnikov sat down at a desk and told me in good German to sit down. He made the usual inquiries about family name, age, etc. The next question was, “What party were you a member of?” It struck me as an incredibly stupid question, because just as in Russia, there had been only one party in Germany. I said that I didn’t understand.

The Commissar barked at me “Were you, or were you not, a member of the Nazi Party?” I said that I was not and Krapnikov wanted to know why. I told him that by German law, active members of the Armed Forces could not join the Nazi Party. That apparently puzzled Krapnikov. I also mentioned that the Nazi Party would not have accepted me if I had applied for membership. The commissar wanted to know why. I told him that I had Jewish relatives. That cracked the commissar up, especially when I told him that the relatives had left Germany for the United States of America.

Then the commissar looked into the diary I had kept. He said that he could not read what I had written. I asked him why not and he answered that he was not familiar with that kind of German writing style. I had written in the old Sütterlin alphabet, which was certainly different from the modern Latin alphabet. The commissar asked me to read from my diary and reminded me that by Russian law it was a punishable offense to lie. I thought to myself, “You’d better tell that to the editors of the “Pravda” newspaper, but kept my mouth shut. The commissar pointed to a page in my diary and asked, “What did you say here on this page?” I read it to him and he seemed satisfied. That made me suspicious. Maybe he was just testing me and had been capable of reading my handwriting and it was just another interrogation trick.

In the next few days I was interrogated several times. Krapnikov went through a variety of subjects, with a repetition of some of the earlier ones, to test my previous stories. This was boring, but I could not deviate from my previous testimony, or I would have been in deep shit. One day the subject was the pictures of my girl friends. He wanted to know who these girls were and where I had met them. All the pictures in my possession were German girls from Landsberg, my hometown. I had deliberately destroyed all others before I left Courland.

Commissar Krapnikov wanted to know if any Russian or Baltic women had fraternized and collaborated with me. I absolutely could not reveal that I had stayed at Sophie and Elsa Grizius’ place in Lithuania, or they would have been deported to Siberia immediately. The commissar was probing that point again and again, to find any contacts or help given to me by the local population. I told him that my unit didn’t like help from the Russians, because they spied on everything we were doing. Krapnikov got very angry after my statement and told me that Russians would never spy.

I concluded that the NKVD’s prime goal was to find and eliminate all the people who had helped Germans during our occupation of Lithuania.

One day Krapnikov was so upset about not getting any “correct” answers from me that he threatened to shoot me. To emphasized that point, he put his old six shooter on the desk with the muzzle pointing at me. I said that I never doubted that the “Herr” Commissar could shoot me, but added that millions of good people had been shot senselessly in this stupid war, and it wouldn’t matter if there was one more casualty. I was fed up with the commissar’s bullshit and really didn’t care at that moment if he pulled the trigger. Krapnikov ended the interrogation abruptly and I was taken back to my cell.

It was a good thing that I couldn’t communicate with the other cell mates. I was pissed off to the hilt, and would have given anybody a piece of my mind and my fist about this goddamn bloody Soviet communist system. An outburst like that could have been my death knell, since the NKVD had stool pigeons in every cell.

Signing my death sentence?

The next day I was called out for another interview. I was surprised that it was during daytime. Since all holding cells were below the ground, I couldn’t tell what time of the day it was. The same commissar Krapnikov talked to me some more, and then pushed a stack of papers across the desk and said, “Here, sign these at the bottom of the page.”

I looked at the papers, but everything was in Russian and I had no idea what it said. I looked at the Commissar and said, “I can’t read what is in these papers. How can I sign them? I could be signing my death sentence!” Krapnikov replied, “Never mind, just sign them!” I thought about it for a few seconds and since I really had no choice, I signed them, but above my signature I wrote, “Without knowledge of contents”, and then gave it back to him.* The commissar read my note and said, “Well, aren’t you a “Schlaukopf” (a clever guy)” So he obviously could read German after all ! See note at end of chapter.* That was the end of that session, and the question was what would happen next? I was very much on edge, because they could ship me to Siberia or shoot me.

The next morning a prison guard came in and motioned to me to follow him and to bring everything with me. That was the biggest joke, since there wasn’t much but a wooden spoon, a tin can with a piece of wire for a handle and an empty bag. The guard led me to the same room where they had booked me in and confiscated my paltry possessions. Another young man was in the room and he was also getting some of his belongings back. One of the guards motioned to me that I was allowed to talk to this man, which was unusual since communications between prisoners had always been discouraged.

He turned out to be another German ex-soldier who had some command of the Russian language. He was upset and argued with one of the employees over missing belongings. I was sure one of the Russians had stolen whatever it was that was missing. I didn’t get any of my papers back either, not even my military pass. Only some clothing and a belt and suspenders were returned. When I asked the other man where we would be taken, I was told to the nearest prisoner of war camp. I replied that I was skeptical about that and if true, I would feel like having won the lottery. The other guy gave me a disagreeing look and said that he wasn’t happy about that at all. I couldn’t fathom what he expected, a free train ticket back to Germany?

* Solzhenitsyn’s said in one of his books that the NKVD interrogators were promoted by how many “confessions” they extracted from their prisoners. Krapnikov must have gotten some brownie points for my signature, because I didn’t know what I was signing.

The NKVD prison is now a Lithuanian museum and when I read a story about it in US News and World Report, I saw that Menachem Begin, later the prime minister of Israel, had been in the same prison after the Russians occupied Lithuania in 1939. I wrote to the Curator of the museum to find out whether papers of my case were still in existence, but I never received an answer. The US Embassy in Vilnius wasn’t interested in helping me either.

The Lithuanian government was searching for two Jewish commissars that had shipped thousands of Lithuanians to Siberia. One is living in Israel now and the other one in Bonn, Germany. Extradition attempts were not successful.

Marching to where?

When everything was in order an armed guard took us out the front door and marched us through the old downtown area of Vilnius. It was a beautiful warm, sunny, summer day. As we walked, I talked to the other German soldier and found out that he was a deserter who had sneaked off into the Baltic forests two years before the end of the war. He said he had survived there all by himself. If true, a remarkable feat.

This day was July 9, 1945. I had been in custody for 16 days. Ten days in the horrible NKVD prison in downtown Vilnius.

Years later, after reading “The Gulag Archipelago” by Solzhenitsyn, I began to understand why Krapnikov hadn’t known how to deal with me. He had never faced anyone who had not been completely intimidated by the Soviet system already. I did not feel that I had been defeated or intimidated by their armed forces nor that I was responsible for the damn war, or any atrocities committed by the Germans. Even though Germany had been defeated, the Fortress Courland where I had been was literally undefeated. It sure made a difference in my attitude and morale.