Armin Scheiderbauer - Adventures in My Youth

Then there was a Hauptmann der Reserve Stölzner. He came, I believe, from Upper or Central Franconia. He was about 40 years old, and told of an elder brother who during the First World War had been taken prisoner by the Russians and had been sent to Siberia. From there he had fled to China and had attached himself as a military adviser to Marshal Chiang-Kai-Shek. His brother had married a Chinese woman, a fact that led in the wagon to a debate over the virtues of the women of another race. With the most earnest face Stolzner told of a peculiarity of Chinese women. His assertion caused among some men a short astounded amazement, until the laughter of the other men told them that Stolzner had been leading them ‘up the garden path’.

As one of the naive and, moreover, still visibly fearful comrades, I recall Staff Paymaster Uhland. He was a descendant of the poet of the Schwäbische Kunde , but evidently was not so fearless as his ancestor was supposed to have been. While the war was still going on, rumours had been circulating that the poor quality soap there was at that time had partly been produced from human bones. That was something that seemed completely incredible. But then after the war had ended, assertions concerning the atrocities practised in German concentration camps were doing the rounds. It is true that our fear of being shot had in the meantime abated. But the future was completely unknown and it seemed quite probable that we would be consigned to years of forced labour under inhuman conditions. It was therefore black humour when, in order to worry Herr Uhland, a man in the wagon asserted that the German officers who had been taken prisoner were going to be taken and turned into soap, and that well nourished paymasters, such as Uhland, would be made into toilet soap!

During the time we were kept in the transports there were some deaths. The causes of death could not be established. Since there were no lists in existence, the only responsibility of the guards was to replenish the number of prisoners being transported. That was achieved by the guards swarming out and grabbing male German civilians, of whom there were still a few, there in Masuria. During the first period of our captivity in the East there were no lists and the prisoners were not recorded by name. The many who died of epidemics and hunger were never recorded. In my opinion the real reasons that many years later, long after 1955, when the last prisoners were released, that people believed in the existence of so-called Schweigelager . Meanwhile, it is a fact that one in three soldiers who had come into the custody of the USSR did not survive his captivity, and never returned. From my personal experience I attribute that to the reasons I have mentioned above and to the wholly insufficient medical care which they received initially.

Before the summer of 1945 I had not been acquainted with East Prussia. If there had not been the sadness that we experienced at the loss of a land through which we slowly travelled, it would have been a pleasure to see this friendly and cultivated land. From the train, as it travelled past the settlements and even the town of Allenstein much seemed to have remained intact. But everywhere was depopulated. Only the summer sunshine stopped the landscape from giving a ghostly impression. Wistfulness seized the sensitive ones among us, as we travelled through the station at Tharau, because many knew the song Ännchen von Tharau .

I must mention one more stop in Deutsch-Eylau, where several thousand prisoners of war were encamped in a meadow. It was there, and not in Graudenz, that the final allocation and assembly of the transports for the East took place. In that meadow, as elsewhere, the officers were separated. It was there, completely surprised, that I met some gentlemen from our Division. They were Major Östreich, the Divisional Adjutant, and Hauptmann Franssen, the commander of the signals battalion.

From the latter I learnt that the Division, before the surrender, had got to Bornholm by ship in a fairly good condition. They had thought themselves to be safe, when two Russian torpedo boats appeared. The Danish island was occupied by the Russians, and all the Germans were taken prisoner. Östreich did indeed know that Regiment 7 under Oberstleutnant von Garn on the destroyer Karl Galster had not made for Bornholm, but had set course for the Danish mainland. But it was not known whether the destroyer, and with it the remnants of the regiment, had got through. Östreich, Franssen, and the other Bornholmers had until then been able to keep all of their baggage. They had evidently until then not been searched and not been plundered. A not so pleasant memory is that none of them offered me even a cigarette. Compared with them I had nothing. I enjoyed smoking again, ever since the senior registrar Johanssen in Danzig gave me a cigarette. He had said, with a smile, that I could forget my fear of not being able to smoke after the injury to my lung. But I could once again have that pleasure.

In Deutsch-Eylau I also saw again the medic who had shamelessly bitten into the full block of chocolate in front of all the hungry men in our room. I refrained from speaking to him. Elsewhere on the meadow a soldiers’ choir was singing a song which at that time belonged to the firm repertoire of German Gesangvereine : Wenn ich den Wanderer frage, wo gehst du hin? Nach Hause, nach Hause, spricht er mit frohem Sinn . (‘If I ask the wanderer, where are you going? I’m going home, home, he says cheerfully’). Here at least the German spirit, which had evidently remained intact, was still alive and kicking.

We stayed a week in the area of the border that had just been drawn in Potsdam between Russia and Poland. There would not be a journey into the unknown lasting for weeks, as many men had feared. In Insterburg we had already reached our destination. I recall marching past the huge undamaged Martin Luther Church. Then the column moved along the road over a valley bottom lined with poplars that stretched for a few kilometres. Our destination was the Georgenburg camp, an old estate. In previous decades it had been home to a stud farm. Georgenburg was the home of the Barrings and was known to the educated German middle-class from the novel of the same name. It was only after I returned home that I read Die Barrings and its sequel Der Enkel by William von Simpson. But even in 1945, without knowing the novel, I could imagine clearly enough how things had been before, and the defeat that had taken place. We marched along the drive and through a gate on which there was the date 1268 in old figures.

There in Georgenburg was Main Camp 445. Later it was called 7.445. It was the headquarters of the prisoner of war camps in the Russian-occupied part of East Prussia. From there, camps were established in Königsberg, in Tilsit, and in other locations in East Prussia. At that time there was still the infectious diseases hospital in Insterburg that was later closed down. I cannot recall many facts from our short first stay there in Georgenburg in the summer of 1945. The main thing I recall is the soup made out of turnip scraps. They constituted the main part of our food. The turnip scraps had been used as fodder for horses on the stud farm, and I cannot believe that this was unknown to the Russians.

Then I recall that many officers, particularly staff officers, were there. Amongst them, was an Oberst Remer, the elder brother of Major Remer. After 20 July 1944 Remer, on Goebbels’s orders, had occupied the Bendlerstrasse with the Berlin guard battalion. He had crushed the rebellion, and for that had been personally promoted by Hitler to Generalmajor . By contrast to that Remer, who was said to have been something of a simple unit officer, our Remer was a real man of the world with the best address and international experience. He had himself been military attaché in Spain or had been attached to the military attaché . He could speak several languages. As once many Russian noblemen and Tsarist officers had done, after the First World War, he had hoped to be able to see out the rest of his life as a hotel porter. I also recall the appearance of a quartet of men who sank the famous French hit song Parlez-moi d’amour to great applause. ‘Tell me of happiness’ was the first line of the song in German. That much I understood.