Armin Scheiderbauer - Adventures in My Youth

It must have been about 20 April that we were moved in cattle wagons by rail to Thorn. That was about 150 kilometres away up the Vistula. In Thorn there still remained from the war a large barracks camp, in which Allied prisoners of war had been held after the German victories. So the camp was filled with us, the final losers. As far as I could establish, as well as soldiers and officers who had been taken prisoner uninjured, the camp also came to house many wounded and sick men. Dysentery and typhus were rife. Those who had become sick with those diseases were isolated in their own barracks. From them, day after day, were brought out in the morning the bodies of those men who had died the previous night. Most of the camp inmates were dystrophic, recognisable by their oedemas due to hunger, by swollen legs and faces. On their arrival in the camp, both the healthy and the sick had to go into the sauna, the banja. No consideration was given to fever and the danger of pneumonia. I saw wounded men, running a temperature of 40 degrees, who had to go into the hot sauna and afterwards would lie for hours on end in the train on the way to the barracks.

The wounded not only died of dysentery and typhus, but also, it seemed to me, simply of debility due to their wounds and a lack of sufficient nourishment. In our sick barracks, in which I had ended up with Franzl Manhart, the thin soup handed out twice a day, by way of food, was distributed out of a pot. The pot, after it had been brought in, was set up in the barrack block, and then every man received his dollop from the ladle into his canteen. The many men who were confined to their beds were served their food by medics. One thing remains unforgettable to me. In that barrack block officers and men were not separated. One comrade was at the point of death. The medic, who had seen this, quickly put next to his pillow the canteen of the man who was lying at his last gasp. After the wounded man was dead, the medic hurriedly removed the canteen. In that way he got a second portion for himself. Even today I can see the scene. The medic lurked there watching the man, who was still alive. Then, after the man’s life was over, he tucked into the dead man’s soup ration.

After our arrival in the camp and before we were put into the barracks I had lain in one of the several Finnish tents which were provided for seriously wounded men. The Finnish tents were made of plywood and were taller than a man, so that the people lay in two layers over each other. I lay in the lower layer and I remember a Latvian SS Leutnant who lay diagonally above me. His arm had suffered paraplegia and dropped everything down. It was terrible, because his arm was not cleaned. Beside me there lay another Kriegsfreiwilliger Latvian officer. His Christian name was Antons. He had had one leg amputated and in the other had an extensive flesh wound. But he had still kept his leg. As well as his native language, Antons spoke fluent German and Russian. So I was able to have some good conversations with him. He was completely without illusions in contemplating his future. He was enormously collected and self-controlled. As a Soviet citizen who had opposed the Bolsheviks, he might expect their revenge and a completely uncertain future. The Russian medical officer, a major, who came on his rounds once a day, was called Raskolnikov. His hair was already grey and he had a moustache. We could tell how to a certain extent he ‘put up with’ the misery which surrounded him. But he clearly regretted that he was not able to give better help.

Time alone had been left to heal my wounds. There were neither medicines nor fresh dressings. I was urged by the German doctor to diligently practise stretching my left leg. A final test tap revealed that there was no more coming from the injury to my lungs. In Thorn, in the barracks, I was allowed to get out of bed and could move around the camp with a single crutch. As the doctor had threatened that he would sit on my crooked leg if I did not soon stretch it out again, I carried out the exercise diligently. Slowly the condition of my leg returned to normal.

In the camp at Thorn for the first time we came into contact with political propaganda. On large banners were written so-called ‘sayings’. They were mostly words of Lenin or Stalin, with which we were confronted. ‘The Hitlers come and go, but the German people, the German state, will remain’, went one Stalin quote. It had a surprisingly prophetic ring to it. As we received no kind of news or situation reports, we knew nothing of the progress of the war or even about the death of the Führer .

Towards noon on 8 May 1945, it is true that the camp loudspeaker quite unexpectedly announced to us that the war was over. Germany, it said, had ‘unconditionally surrendered’. Sometime afterwards the sentries appeared also to have heard the news. They celebrated the event in their own way, by firing their ammunition off into the air. For us, this was not without its dangers, because ricochets were buzzing through the air and bullets came through the wooden walls of the barracks. We, the conquered, meanwhile, lay on the floor of the barracks or on the sandy ground of the camp, scrabbling for safety on the ground. Hopefully it was for the last time.

The camp complex included a sports ground, at the edge of which the convalescent officers lay in Finnish tents. I often visited them to get a change and to exchange ideas. They were waiting to be transported away. No-one dared to think that some would be released and sent home. Perhaps one small Hauptmann would be lucky. Both his lower legs had been amputated below the knee, and he had thus become even smaller than he had otherwise been at his scant 5 foot 2 inches. He moved around on his hands and knees and made tiny leaps just like a sick frog.

Among the closed circle of the officers there was still the accustomed politeness. You addressed each other with Herr , whereas elsewhere it was soon the fact that you were addressed as du by a ‘class-conscious proletarian’. In the company of those officers was a girl of 20, pretty as a picture, dazzlingly blonde, with bright blue eyes. She was the daughter of General Lasch, the commandant of Festung Königsberg, who had surrendered there. I wondered where and how such a girl could have survived the first assault.

The Thorn camp was so gigantic that, with my limited sphere of movement, I was not able to get an idea of the extent of it. It was said that 30,000 men lay within its barbed wire fences. Every few day transports of ambulant prisoners left. They had been gathered into groups of a few hundred men and had left the camp. In Thorn, incidentally, I had met another man from Stockerau by the name of Franz Heinz. We had exchanged addresses and I had given him a slip of paper for my relatives, as I suspected that he, because he was only a private soldier, would be released earlier than I would, because I was an officer. It actual fact he was released as early as 1945 and my parents received the news I was alive only on Christmas Eve, 24 December.

As it turned out, the next destination of the marching column was Graudenz, some 55 kilometres away. But the march had to be made on foot. There could have been 500 to 1,000 men who set off, after the fashion of the Red army, each section consisting of five men. At the head there marched some 30 officers from Oberstleutnant to Leutnant with quite varying amounts of baggage. The gentlemen who had surrendered and had been taken prisoner uninjured had generally a lot of baggage. I and others only possessed the little we had been able to salvage from the military hospital in Danzig and had been able to supplement during the course of the following weeks. I had only the underclothes I was wearing, my uniform tunic and trousers, a haversack and canteen and an overcoat. Added to those, I believe, were a toothbrush, my pay-book, my identification disc and a couple of photos in my old plastic wallet.