John Stieber - Against the Odds - Survival on the Russian Front 1944-1945 [2nd Edition]

First of all, being stranded in Germany as a teenager was not as hard to bear as others might think. I loved the life in my two boarding schools and I had a wonderful time during all my holidays. Relatives and friends went to great trouble to make me feel at home and provided me with all sorts of treats. Another factor must be that I had had plenty of practice in learning to settle down in a new environment, so I must have already been a fairly independent person.

I think the war made me very critical of waste and I will always remember my experience of living with rationing over many years. A further lasting memory has been of people exchanging essential food rations for cigarettes. This has left me with a resolve never to become prey to such dependence.

Fortunately, I did not get caught in a city during an air-raid, nor was my battery ever attacked directly during my service as a Luftwaffen-auxiliary, so it was not until I joined the army, and became more directly involved in the horrors of war, that I experienced acute personal danger and severe hardships.

When I was on the Front, I was extremely lucky to have suffered from nothing worse than acid burns and the conditions of extreme cold. It becomes more difficult when trying to assess whether I suffered so-called mental scars. I think there are two reasons why I did not suffer from severe post-war trauma, as happened to many ex-soldiers.

In the first case, I never found myself in a position where I had to cold-bloodedly take human life or cause personal injury. In the second case, and this is something which has always amazed me, soldiers never seemed to get killed or injured within my sight. I remember only one exception, and that was when our ammunition train got blown up and some of us were hit by shrapnel fragments.

This brings me to the only problem of a psychological nature that I had. It first hit me about a month after the war was over. One night I had been fast asleep in bed on the farm in Rotenburg when I awoke with a start and was struck by the unnerving conviction that I must have been killed on the Russian Front. My mind flew back, darting from event to event, when unbelievable luck saved me every time and I argued that to think I had survived was absurd. The only explanation that made sense to me just then was that when a person is dead, the mind continues to function and to throw up images as if one continued to live out one’s expected existence.

Over the course of time these doubts returned, but with an ever-decreasing frequency. I soon learned to apply self-control and to switch my thoughts to other matters so that I was no longer troubled after the first few weeks. When I began to write my narrative, I wondered whether this would cause my doubts to re-surface. In actual fact my memory has only been jogged about this experience of long ago and I have had no trouble setting down a dispassionate record of these recollections.

After my personal experience of tight discipline in the German army, revelations about the policy of extermination in concentration camps came as a great shock to me. That the excesses of a well-organized minority in power can inflict so much lasting damage on mankind must be a grim warning to us all and to future generations.

I have at no time felt any bitterness that I was unfortunate enough to get stuck in war-time Germany when I could have enjoyed an almost peace-time existence in Ireland. By the same token I have never thought of blaming my parents for sending me to Germany. Of course, a loss which can never be made good is the seven years during which I grew to adulthood without seeing them.

At the same time, my life has been enriched by the years spent in Germany and army service has given me a greater self-confidence than I would otherwise have had. I have often felt that if I could survive the Russian Front then I could survive anything. Though I lost much by my parents’ decision to send me to Germany, I also gained a lot in other areas and this included meeting the girl who later became my wife. In whatever way my life might have been different, this is how it turned out and I am well content.

In writing these memoirs I have fulfilled a long-time ambition of wanting to record my service on the Russian Front. While doing this I was constantly reminded of the terrible tragedy of the death of millions of young soldiers on all sides whom I would nowadays look on as being hardly more than boys. Next, it awoke memories of the horrendous fate suffered by German refugees from the eastern provinces. Another reminder was of the total destruction of old European cities with so much loss of life and of irreplaceable art treasures. What a terrible waste it had all been!

It was a great sadness for me to be reminded of the friends in the Lietz schools who had been killed on the Front, or were listed as missing and never heard from again. So many young gifted people, full of life and with high hopes for their future, were lost to their families.

I did not, of course, have the same ties with the men in my division whom I knew only fleetingly, but I was nevertheless deeply shocked to discover from military archives that so few had survived death, or capture by the Russians. In a tragic ending for the Hermann Göring Divisions, nearly all of the surviving units became encircled by the advancing Russian forces at some stage during the final days of the war. Soldiers of the last units to surrender became prisoners-of-war near the town of Geising one day after Germany surrendered and less than twenty-four hours after I had passed along that same road. Very few soldiers managed to break out of the ring and then still elude Czechoslovakian partisans before surrendering to American troops.

Although I was never enthusiastic about being a soldier, I cannot but feel deeply saddened by the fate of my army-corps. I had known it when it was at full strength, I had respected it for the exemplary discipline that was maintained whatever the situation and I had never known any units or individual soldiers to be guilty of dishonourable behaviour. That I was one of the very few to escape unscathed was just my good luck.

Both Heinelt twins survived the war and fulfilled their ambition to become doctors. Sadly, Günther developed multiple sclerosis in his early thirties and both he and Heinz died in their fifties. Willi Gerkens settled down in his home town of Rotenburg, but he also died in his fifties. I never discovered the fate of any other of my mates in the Division Göring.

Hertha’s brother, Adolf, returned to Döllnitz after Germany became reunited. Under the conditions of unification, no claim for repossession of the family farm was possible and re-purchase was also not permitted. Adolf rents part of the land and farms it organically. His brother, Georg went into publishing and lives in Stuttgart. Over the years Georg and I have spent many a time hiking in the southern German Alps.

My guardian, Uncle Oskar, survived the war and was soon reunited with his wife and baby. Aunt Hella was evicted from her house in Karlsbad, but she managed to build a new life in Munich. In her typically enterprising way she took up horse-riding and painting when in her sixties.

My sister, Erika, married an Irishman in 1954 and emigrated to Canada. They live near Toronto and have two children and five grandchildren.

My in-laws, the Goedeckes, were dispossessed of their farm in 1945 and first settled in West Germany. In 1953 I arranged for Mr. Goedecke to get a position as a farm manager near Carlow and he and his wife lived in Ireland until 1967. They loved Ireland, but returned to Germany because they were getting on in years and missed their many relatives.

Erika and I had no problem adjusting to life in Ireland. Although it did not strike me at the time, I think my parents must have found it very hard to suddenly have two adults in the family, when they last knew them as children. To have been deprived of witnessing seven years of one’s children’s lives must have been very sad and a great loss to them.