Armin Scheiderbauer - Adventures in My Youth

Franzl Manhart had already been allocated to an earlier transport and we had therefore been separated. Another comrade whom I had found in Thorn I had lost again. He was Dr Walter Rath, a Viennese whose home address was Hütteldorferstrasse 333. Rath had studied Latin and Greek, was an educated Mittelschule teacher, but in the bad times before 1938 had been unemployed. He had therefore become a leader in the Labour Service. At first he was in the Austrian Labour Service and afterwards in the Reich Labour Service. Towards the end of the war he had been transferred to the Wehrmacht as a Feldmeister and had thus become a Leutnant . In the hospital barracks in Thorn he had been in the next bed.

In about 1960 I met him again in the Salzburg officers’ mess. He had transferred into the Austrian Bundesheer and then, as a major, he was commandant of the Telegraph Battalion. He regretted that he had not met me years earlier. He had had trouble in proving his officer’s rank, something to which I could have attested, at least for our time in Thorn, when we were still wearing badges of rank.

The highest-ranking officer and therefore the right-hand wing man in the first unit was Oberstleutnant der Reserve Dr Josef Deckwitz. He was a lawyer from Münster in Westphalia. From then on until I was released, with some interruptions, I was always together with Deckwitz. I shall speak of him many more times. Although by age, he was born in 1896, and could have been my father, we had a close comradely relationship with each other. I owe him much for expanding my horizons. Deckwitz had been a flak officer. He had a huge ribcage and possessed a loud voice. He had, he said, been much in demand as a defence counsel in criminal cases and his legal pleas were something worth hearing.

Once, he said, in a trial before a jury, knowing that from midnight of the next day an amnesty would come into force, he had pleaded for many hours to benefit his client. The court, he said, had patiently tolerated his constant repetitions. Before 1933 Deckwitz had been a Social Democrat. His wife was the niece of an SPD, if not a Communist, member of the Reichstag who had emigrated to the Soviet Union. (After graduating to my doctorate in 1952, I visited him in Münster and was delighted to see him again. His wife was interesting and clever. The great misfortune of the two of them was that their son, their only child, had ‘completely ruined himself’ with drink.)

Although many healthy men capable of marching were in the column, it was still an unparalleled trail of misery. The armed sentries walked on all four sides of the column, but took careful notice of the many weak and feeble men. The distance of 55 kilometres, which healthy troops could have covered in one day’s march, was tackled in three stages. Half was done on the first day, something that made demands on many men, leading to exhaustion. The other half was tackled in two days’ marches each of 12 kilometres. Obviously the weakest men did not have the strength to walk further. I had recovered to such an extent, and had in the meantime learned again to stretch my left leg, that I managed all right. The worry of every man was always not to drop out of the column or be left behind, in order not to be shot by the guards, as had often happened. We spent the nights in barns on farms. If the sentries had not just dug out some women and the women were not screaming out for help, you could get a bit of rest and sleep well in the straw.

On the first day’s march we passed through the little town of Kulmsee. It had obviously been taken without any fighting. We were stared at by the Polish civilian population without visible hostility. I saw it as a particular irony of fate that on the last day of the march we moved along the very that five months before had been one of the roads along which we had been retreating. That was before we had crossed the Vistula over the ice bridge to the south-west of Graudenz. It was a particular sign of our having been beaten. In Graudenz, so word had gone round in the meantime, the transports were being assembled that would take us by railway into the interior of Russia. In Graudenz we were gaped at by the civilian population. They were evidently more hostile than the population of Kulmsee, but there were no incidents. Our destination in Graudenz was a barracks complex. We were placed in groups of many men, in completely empty rooms. But they were dry and everyone had enough room to be able to stretch out. We remained in the barracks for two or three days and nights. Then it was time for us to march to the railway station to be loaded on to the trains.

Today I can no longer remember whether the railway in the area occupied by the Russians had at that time already been converted to the Russian gauge or whether this was not yet the case. But I do know that 20 men were stuffed into one goods wagon. Half way between the floor and the roof a shelf had been placed on both sides of the wagon doors. There we lay on the bare wood. There was no kind of comfort, neither straw nor hay, to relieve the hardness of the floor. The only necessary luxury was the availability of a hole in the floor of the wagon, some 20mm in diameter, that served for the purposes of defecation. It was a simple solution, but an unpleasant one for those who, like me, were lying near to the hole. Fortunately it was not necessary for urinating. That was done through the open wagon door.

The transport train left Graudenz about 20 June. Nobody knew what its destination was. The rumour was that we were heading for Murmansk. It was one of the many topics of conversation in our officers’ wagon. Nobody had been on the Murmansk front. But many of us knew what had happened there in the First World War. 70,000 of the German prisoners of war and 20,000 of the Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war set to work on building the Murmansk railway had died. But as things turned out everything was quite different than the Parolen , that is the rumour, would have it.

After a relatively short journey, via Deutsch-Eylau and Allenstein, the transport came to a halt. It was the time before and during the ‘Potsdam Conference’. That was to be the last summit conference of the ‘Big Three’ of the anti-Hitler coalition of the Second World War. It was held in the Schloss Cäcilienhof , in Potsdam, from 17 July to 2 August 1945 and was between Truman, Stalin and Churchill or Attlee. The result of that conference was the ‘Potsdam Agreement’. In that agreement, subject to a final settlement of the territorial questions in a peace treaty, the town of Königsberg and the adjacent district of East Prussia were placed under the administration of the USSR. The border had hitherto existed between the USSR and Poland and ran approximately along a line between the towns of Braunsberg and Goldap. The area to the north was allocated to the USSR. For our transport and us it resulted in our destination being the part of East Prussia occupied by the USSR. We were not sent further on into the interior of the Soviet Union.

The train was on the tracks for five weeks. I recall the summer of 1945 as being very hot. During those five weeks it did not rain on one single day. For a fortnight no one was allowed to leave the wagon. Only after that, during the remaining three weeks, did the guards allow us during the day to camp in a meadow alongside the train beside the tracks. Being allowed to do this made our stay more bearable than the first fortnight had been. The constricted conditions and the heat had thoroughly irritated us prisoners. Many of them worked themselves up into a proper fury. In our wagon, too, hostile words were exchanged. For instance, men who were on the lower bunks were disturbed by the feet of those lying above them. One man complained that, when eating it was so dark that ‘you couldn’t even find the way to your mouth’. He who said it was a Leutnant Dr Hess from Frankfurt am Main. He worked as a translator at IG Farben, spoke fluent English, French and Spanish and had some interesting things to tell about his job. Hess was my neighbour and we were both lying directly beside the notorious hole.