The Colors Never Change

It was a beautiful fall day with a slight haze or fog over the Spree river and the trees showed their best fall colors on the other side of the river in the Plänterwald. It was time for me to set out on my own. I emotionally said good-by to Orje, who had done so much for me. Without his fatherly advice I would have never made it back to Berlin that quickly. It didn’t occur to me to exchange addresses to be able to stay in touch with each other, but we didn’t have anything to write with. I hugged Orje for a long moment and stammered a tearful thanks for all he had done for me. Then we all shook hands and hugged again with tears just running down our cheeks and wished each other good luck for our uncertain future.
My mind was still in the survival mode. I had survived 1475 days as a soldier, 175 days from Courland back to Berlin, including 16 days in jail, and 98 days in a POW camp and I couldn’t quite comprehend that it was all over.
Then, crossing many tracks, I made off to the nearest street along the yard, waved back to my fellow ex-POWs and walked westerly along Köpenicker Chaussee towards railroad station Ostkreuz, which I could see in the distance. I figured that it would get me to the Stralauer Bridge and across the Spree river into the suburb of Treptow, where my maternal grandmother had lived. It was a reassuring feeling to still know my way around the big city, even though I had been away for almost ten years.
The Stralauer bridge, even though it had been blasted, was usable and I ended up in the Treptow Park area. I was appalled at the huge Soviet War Memorial that was being built in the park. It was monstrously overdone in the usual bombastic Stalinistic style, and lacked taste and dignity. It reminded me of similar Nazi abominations. Finally I walked along Neue Krugallee where both grandmothers, my parents and I had lived, until we moved to Landsberg in 1936. Damage in this area was minimal, and when I finally turned the last corner, I could see that the apartment block where grandma lived was still the way I knew it.
I did not know that returning POWs were still an uncommon sight. It was October 31, 1945, and everywhere I walked people stared at me, and asked questions. Where did I come from and what happened to all the other soldiers etc. This was understandable, since every family had men in the war. There were still no German radio stations with factual information. The postal service wasn’t working, I had seen no newspapers, so people were almost totally in the dark about what was going on in Germany. What they heard were rumors interlaced with Russian propaganda.
To the people I came in contact with, I must have been the manifestation of Germany’s total defeat. I was certainly a sorry sight. Limping, walking with a cane, in a dirty, ragged old army uniform with a “woyna pleny” arm patch (POW in Russian), disintegrating wooden shoes on my feet, long unkempt hair, unshaven and with an empty tin can hanging from a rope around my waist. I wished somebody could have taken a picture of me for posterity, but who still had a camera in Berlin in those days? They had all been stolen by Russian soldiers.
When I walked up to Grandma’s apartment door, the neighbors had already spotted me and came out to see who I was. When I told them that I was Hans Thielemann, they were shocked. They said that my Grandma was presently queuing at a grocery store over on Köpenicker Landstrasse for available food. They said that my mother was living with her. Wow, I just couldn’t believe my luck. My mother was working at a construction site at the corner Köpenicker Landstrasse and Baumschulen Strasse. I was puzzled, what was my mother doing at a construction site? Since I was familiar with all these locations from my childhood, I set out to surprise them both.
As a kid I did grocery shopping for my mother at the store I was heading for now. Things had not changed much. This area was loosely crisscrossed by large apartment complexes, most of which had been built in the late 1920s and early 1930s by labor union credit institutions. The buildings were modern for the times, with large areas of greenery between each complex and garden plots for the ground floor units. They were four stories tall and each apartment had a balcony.
When I arrived at the grocery store, I recognized Grandma right away. She had never been my favorite grandmother, because she had always played the “grand dame.” She had supported Hitler and for that reason had been at odds with most of the family. She was overweight as far back as I could remember, but was considerably thinner now, and she looked good. She was surprised that I was back from the war already. As always she bitched about the living conditions, her health, and about that idiot Hitler, whom she had idolized just a few years ago. She had not changed one iota. I exchanged a few pleasantries with the other people standing in line and then walked off to find my mother.
My mother cleaning bricks?
The building at the corner lot the neighbors had directed me to was heavily damaged, and was in the process of being torn down. As in every other bombed out place in Germany, the bricks of these buildings were either crushed, and converted to new building blocks, or they were recycled. At the site, I asked a foreman about my mother. When he heard who I was, he immediately went to get her. She was cleaning bricks in the inner yard of the building. She was appalled about my condition, but surprised and relieved to see me back from the war in one piece. Her supervisor gave her the rest of the day off.
As we walked home she told me that she had not been able to save anything in Landsberg. She hadn’t been home when the Russians came and when she finally returned home, all valuable things had been stolen. The Russian soldiers had chopped up the bedroom furniture for firewood and camped in the house. She had been taken in by Hildegard who lived upstairs. Hildegard was shacking up with a Russian engineer, and he protected both of them. Mother was deported by the Polish administration, and had been given 20 minutes to leave. After seeing my attire she was particularly distressed that she hadn’t been able to save any of my clothes.
When we arrived at Grandma’s place I was astonished to find it the way I remembered it. Nothing seemed to be missing and it sure felt good, but unreal, to be back in civilization again. Grandma’s first question was, “Do you have lice.” After my affirmative answer, she said “Go out on the balcony and take all your clothes off and leave them there.” She had a little coal and wood stove for cooking out on her balcony, because neither city gas, nor electricity had been restored. She filled the biggest pot she had with water, and brought it to a boil and then put all of my underwear into it. I washed myself from top to toe with the miserable wartime soap that was still common, but it felt good to be reasonably clean again. There was even an old razor and I was able to chop off my long whiskers. When I felt halfway civilized again, and it was time to sit down for a long talk.
They had a difficult time dealing with the miserable living conditions in Berlin. No gas, no heat, only part-time electricity and for months hardly any food. Shelter, food and utilities were the biggest problem everywhere in Germany. However Granny and my Mom, unlike most Berliners, still had a roof over their heads.
I finally conked out and had the first decent sleep in months. The next morning we had “breakfast”, consisting of one slice of bread and fake coffee. Mother, who had to go back to cleaning bricks, urged me to go to the district’s administration office immediately, to get food ration tickets. She said, as a returning POW, I was entitled to ten days worth of food tickets, but after that, I would have to work to get food tickets.
Wherever I showed up, I was bombarded with questions. The hunger for information was every bit as large as the hunger for food. After I had taken care of the tickets, I went back to visit my mother at the construction site and let her know that I had something to eat, at least on paper.
Checking up on the relatives
When Mother came home from work, she told me that my cousin Wolfgang had come home even earlier than I did, and that surprised me. He had been with the Waffen SS, but had apparently left his unit near Magdeburg and walked home to Berlin. He had a badly wounded leg and knee, from stepping on a mine earlier in the war, and he walked with a cane, limping badly. Mother told me, that through an incredible stroke of luck, Wolfgang’s family had not lost any of their possessions, except the things that they had evacuated to Landsberg. They were still living in the same apartment in the Berlin city center near Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse.
A pile of rubble called Berlin
I was anxious to talk with Wolfgang, and took the streetcar to the S-Bahn station Treptow Park. The S-Bahn, ran only for a distance of two stations, then I had to leave the train, and walk across to the other side of the platform. From where another train would proceed two more stations and I had to again transfer to the other side and continue. The reason for this system became clear, when I looked at the railroad tracks. The second set of tracks had been removed by the Russians for reparations, and in order to maintain any kind of traffic this clever flip flop system had been devised. From the train, which ran elevated through the center of Berlin, I could look down into Georgenstrasse to see the building I was born and grew up in. Only the street side facade was still standing, the rest of the building had been destroyed.
When I arrived at Aunt Kläre’s apartment, I was amazed at what I saw. During the house to house fighting in the center of Berlin an artillery shell had exploded on the second floor of the apartment building, and the whole staircase and much of the upper floors had collapsed. The debris completely concealed their ground level apartment entrance and windows, so that no plundering Russians were able to clean out their belongings. My Aunt Kläre, Wolfgang’s mother, had been in the air raid shelter underneath the house when it was hit by artillery, and she was trapped there for a few days. When she finally dug herself out, the fighting was over, and she hid in the ruins without being detected.
Since Wolfgang was about my size, he gave me some of his clothing. Wolfgang was wheeling and dealing in the Berlin black market already and not just in small quantities. Wolfgang and I limped through the old parts of Berlin around Kupfergraben and Lustgarten and down Unter den Linden where we had roamed as kids. The beautiful city I was born in had been leveled by bombs and artillery. I visited my great-uncle Leopold whom I had never met. Leopold had been an employee of Lufthansa at the Tempelhof airport, and had just started working for the Americans there. Leopold gave me some clothing that GIs had discarded. I gradually returned to a semi-civilized looking human being again. It would be a long time before I would recover from the humiliation of having to go around and beg for clothes and food.
Seeing all the dirty, unkempt Russian soldiers pushing everybody around at will, reminded me too much of the early Nazi era’s brown shirted Sturm Abteilungen (SA), when they rounded up Jewish people. It was the same goddamn brutality. Even the colors of the uniforms matched, and they also marched behind a red flag! What difference did it make if there was a swastika or a hammer and sickle in it? The same attitude and mental deficiency, “If you don’t want to be my brother, I’ll bash your head in” prevailed. I was to leave that behind me and make a new start someplace else.
Just before my arrival in Berlin the Allied Control Commission had been established and declared itself being the Government of Germany. People in the streets said, “This is democracy? We don’t have anything to say again?” Well, I was not going to be dragged into any political discussions here, because like in Nazi days, the communists now listened in on conversations, and reported people with the “wrong” attitude to the Russians. I had learned my lesson when I was jailed by the NKVD.
My mother understood my feelings, and also thought it would be better for me to leave. She had decided to stay with her mother, where she had a habitable home, which hundreds of thousands of Berliners didn’t have anymore. Mother told me that Shell Oil Company, shortly before the Russian troops closed in on Berlin, had decided to evacuate to Hamburg, where their main refinery was. In the middle of the night they had packed up their documents, crammed all the employees who wanted to leave, including my father, into a few remaining vehicles, and convoyed out of Berlin. Father was in the British occupation zone, and there wasn’t a way to find out whether he was still alive. What Mother didn’t tell me was that she and my father had separated. I found that out only 50 years later, but I could never find out why they separated.
On November 1, 1945, the intra-zonal postal service was opened. A few days later we got letters from my father and from my uncle Gerd Rausch in Reichenbach. Uncle Gerd wrote that after I return from Russia, I should come down to stay with them and he would help me to get re-established. That was incredibly good news. As if I had foreseen this, I had given uncle Gerd’s address as my residency on the Russian release paper. Now I could legitimately claim that I lived in the US occupation zone.
Mother received a letter from a former business acquaintance of father by the name of Otto Friese. Otto had channeled many business contacts towards father. Otto and his wife Johanna were heavy drinkers, had four children and mother claimed, each child was from a different father. I was stunned when mother told me that Otto had been a Nazi-SD man and a Gestapo informant.
As a young man Otto had learned the blacksmith trade and later he started in the automobile business. He wrote that he and his whole family had re-established themselves in a small village near the town of Brandenburg and if mother needed any food to come out and visit them. My mother was really angry that Otto, despite his past, had already fallen back on his feet again. I guessed she was envious and who could blame her. My parents had worked hard for 25 years and had nothing to show for it, while Otto was established and probably an informer again, this time for the Russians .
Since mother had to work, she didn’t have the time and maybe not the guts, to use the unreliable train connections to pick up badly needed produce at Otto Friese’s place. She asked me if I would go to get potatoes for her. I was reluctant to do so, because I was sick and tired of traveling on trains, and didn’t want to jeopardize my newly won freedom. But I felt guilty for having stayed at Grandma’s place and using their scarce supplies and I agreed to give it a try.
I put on my old faded and dirty POW uniform and set out to Lehrter Railroad Station to catch a train that would carry me in the direction of Brandenburg. Lehrter Station used to be the biggest dead end railway stations in Berlin. When I got there, not much of the station building was left standing. Only a bombed out, burned out shell without roof remained, but the railroad tracks were intact and a few trains would pull into, or out of the station.
The fight to board a train
There were hundreds of people waiting for the trains, and it required a robust physique and sharp elbows to get into the train. As a released POW I didn’t have to pay for the train ticket, I only showed my sprawka. Through a simple trick I was able to get into the first train to Brandenburg that came in. When the train overloaded with people pulled into the station, I quickly jumped across the car’s bumpers to the other side of the car away from the station platform, and casually went into the car while the people in the car were trying to push their way out to the station platform. It was as hard for the passengers to get out of the train, as it was to get in.
Regular battles were fought. People were climbing through the car’s windows, climbing on the car’s roofs and standing on the runners and even the bumpers to go where they wanted to go. It was impossible for the railway personnel to discourage people from these dangerous practices. People had waited for countless hours just to get into the station, and they were not going to get off that train again. Finally, with two hours delay, the train started to roll.
When I finally reached my destination, I had to walk to Otto’s farmhouse, where they welcomed me with open arms. I had my first hearty meal in ages. As a matter of fact the sausage was so fat I almost couldn’t eat it. Otto had taken over the large farm of a former local Nazi who had been deported to Siberia. He wasn’t the least bit ashamed about it and told me that the Russians knew about his background, and after what my mother had told me I could guess what Otto meant. The farmers in the area had needed a blacksmith to shoe the horses, so Otto fit right in. Otto was pleased to hear that all of my family was OK. The next day Otto’s wife had a big breakfast on the table and we discussed what I wanted to take back to Berlin. She filled my rucksack with some potatoes and they gave me bread, bacon and eggs, and then filled another sack with about 100 pounds of the precious potatoes.
Otto found out that the next train would probably leave either late at night or early in the morning. Due to the curfew I had to arrive at the station just prior to the curfew hour and camp out in the station’s waiting room all night. Otto got a horse drawn cart and took me and a total of 140 lbs. of potatoes to the station. On the way to the station I kidded Otto saying that this vehicle wasn’t as fast as his Opel “Admiral,” and he laughed and said, just you wait, that will come again too.
The waiting room at the station was already packed with people and at the onset of the curfew two armed Russian soldiers took position outside the doors. The train was overdue and didn’t arrive until 7:00 am. Since I wasn’t strong enough to schlepp the big sack with potatoes with me, I had the audacity to check it in at the freight counter to be shipped to mother’s address. I carried the 40 pound rucksack with me.
The train was a freight train, with open lorries full of potatoes. We boarded it and sat on top of the potatoes. As we rolled through the countryside I enjoyed the beautiful autumn scenery. It was already the 6th of November and the weather was exceptionally nice for this time of the year. I expected that at the end of this train ride a big raid would be conducted and I wanted to avoid that.
When our train rolled into a Berlin S-Bahn station in the western suburbs and stopped right at the station platform to wait for another train in the opposite direction, I quickly got off the freight train and casually walked across the platform to wait for the next S-Bahn train. Some Russian soldiers glanced at me, but with my “woyna pleny” uniform and my cane I didn’t arouse any suspicion.
Mother couldn’t believe what all I had brought home. She was skeptical about the shipped potatoes and said they would never arrive. As it turned out they arrived two weeks after I had left.
The next morning mother passed the newspaper to me and I read that by getting off earlier, I had avoided the big raid that took place at the Lehrter station. The raids were conducted to prevent people from bringing stolen food items in from the surrounding farm areas. Apparently the hundreds of passengers on the potato train had also filled their luggage with the cargo of the train, which was illegal and many ended in jail.
When my ten days of “tolerated presence” in Berlin were over, I decided to get the hell out of Berlin, and go to the U.S. occupation zone. Wolfgang told me that there was an Allied transfer camp operating in Berlin-Staaken to channel all POWs returning from Russia and residing in the western occupation zones to release camps in these zones. I went out to Staaken, a suburb on the western fringes of Berlin. When I left the S-Bahn station there, streams of ragged looking former Russian POWs were all walking in one direction. At the camp entrance, which was under British administration, I showed my “Sprawka” and even though I was in civilian clothes now, was immediately admitted.
They asked a lot of questions about name, destination, from what POW camp, from what German unit etc. Then two husky English soldiers armed with enormously large wooden syringes (they were at least 4" in diameter and about 18" long) blew clouds of powdered DDT into every hole of everybody’s clothing. Into pants legs, pockets, shirt collars, sleeves, every piece of luggage, everything was dusted with DDT. The western Allies didn’t want to admit Russian pests into their territories.
The camp had a militaristic milieu, with a typical British arrogance and the proverbial stiff upper lip. When POWs did not move aside fast enough to make room for British officers, they just slapped them with their swagger sticks. On the positive side, the food was good, it consisted of American K-Rations. The cigarettes and chewing gum had been removed from the boxes, but the POWs sure liked what was left.
In this enormous heap of humanity I had a chance to talk to all sorts of people. I met another civilian who turned out to be a former Luftwaffen physician, Dr. Werner Hauser, who, after the collapse of German forces east of Berlin, had walked into an abandoned medical practice and set himself up to help the local people to deal with the many serious medical problems arising out of the occupation. Rape, venereal diseases and unwanted pregnancy were on top of the list. He had been able to help many and made a lot of money, but wasn’t able to continue for lack of the most basic medical supplies. We had a long talk and then boarded a freight train together.
Into the U.S. occupation zone
These freight trains, running between the western occupation zones and West-Berlin, ferried supplies to British, French and US troops. When going back, they carried returning POWs who needed to go to the western zones. The trips were scheduled to go west during the night, so there wouldn’t be much interference by the Russians. Armed US soldiers accompanied each train. After we had passed across the zonal border, the train stopped in Marburg, Lahn, and Dr. Hauser and I decided to bail out. We were both in civilian clothes so it was not too difficult. We saw that standard passenger trains were in service here already, so we walked across the tracks, went to the ticket booth and paid for tickets to Heidelberg, where Dr. Hauser had studied and had many friends. Our departure from the POW train may have saved us also unpleasant problems at the U.S. discharge camp the train was destined for. As it turned out the camp was notorious for transferring POWs to the French Army, who shipped them to France to work in the reparation work force.
I could not help but think that I now had finally escaped the Russian Bear as well as the Berlin Bear.
Back to civilization?
Like every place else, train traffic in the US zone was impaired by the damage and destruction of the German rail network. However it was possible to detour around the destruction. The double spur rail system, common on all railroad lines of Germany, was intact, no rails had been removed for reparation. Passenger trains were running pretty well according to schedule, but were overloaded with passengers.
We slept in Red Cross dorms and railroad stations and slowly worked our way south. Thanks to Dr. Hauser’s knowledge we made it to Heidelberg in about three days. The normal prewar travel time would have been a few hours. I enjoyed the trip, because I had never been to southern Germany before. The ride in an electric suburban trolley from Weinheim to a northern suburb of Heidelberg was very picturesque. From the end of that line, we had to walk the last few kilometers. I vividly remember walking down to the Neckar River and for the first time seeing the beautiful city of Heidelberg.
A fairy tale image?
I felt like I was walking into a fairy tale town. The town looked as if World War II had never happened. The Neckar river valley overwhelmed me emotionally and tears rolled down my cheeks. Dr. Hauser gave me a questioning look, but he understood how I felt after what I had been through. When we walked over the Neckar bridge, I stopped every once in a while and looked at the old monuments and my adoration for this town knew no limits. I would have liked to settle here.
Dr. Hauser found his friends in Heidelberg, and I was anxious to talk to them to find out how best to continue to Stuttgart and Reichenbach. We all had so much to talk about that there was not much time left to sleep. The next morning I thanked Dr. Hauser and his friends for their help and made off for the rail station.
Walking through Heidelberg was dreamlike. No bombed out houses along the beautiful Neckar river valley, trees ablaze with fall colors, vineyards climbing up the steep slopes, and above it all, the old Heidelberg Schloss. It was like a dream, a fantasy of what the real world should look like, but didn’t.
Later in the day I arrived in Pforzheim and was reminded that Heidelberg was an exception. I could not understand why the famous jewelry center was of such a strategic value that it had to be destroyed. I could not get a train connection and had to stay overnight at a Red Cross shelter. After seeing Heidelberg, it was a nightmare to walk through the rows and rows of destroyed buildings in Pforzheim and no human beings.
I got into Stuttgart around noon and found that rail connections here were better than any place else. The diligent Shwabians had many things functioning again, even though there was a tremendous amount of bomb damage here too.
Finally at my destination
I finally embarked on the last stretch to Reichenbach/Fils. When the train stopped I was surprised to see my Uncle Gerd and Aunt Wally waiting across the station platform. They were speechless when they saw me getting off the train and said that they were on their way to Stuttgart. There was a big hello, and we walked back to their place.