Armin Scheiderbauer - Adventures in My Youth

In later years, after my studies, I met him in Munich, where, with a PhD, he was working as an occupational psychologist. Paul Eberhart was the same age as I was, but he looked a lot younger. He had a somewhat round face with blue eyes, and for a grammar school boy he was very well educated. In fact he had already studied philosophy for one semester. He spoke about the art historian Worringer in Munich and about other professors. He was acquainted with publishing houses and had an eye for valuable books. It was he who brought back to the camp many books while on work details in Jüditten and Metgethen.

One day Paul had been in the library of a Königsberg lawyer, Egon Fridell. He turned up with a three-volume cultural history of modern times from the C.H. Beck Verlag. It was a large first edition in greenish yellow. He worked his way through those volumes during the winter. He always underlined important parts as he did so, somewhat as my father and his father too had done. He also let me work on Fridell. I can still remember how we both agreed that we had found studying the introductory chapter particularly difficult. Of the books that Paul brought back with him, and which I then read for the first time, Rudolf Georg Binding’s Erlebtes Leben, and Hans Carossa’s Führung und Geleit, were the best known.

Other comrades in our room were Herr Straub, a lawyer from Düren near Aachen, and Herr Korte, who was a singer, a bass or baritone. I can remember that Korte would toast his bred on the stove in small strips and slices, and carefully distribute his sugar ration over them. A particular personality was Herr Böhm, a Reserve Hauptmann who had taken part in the First World War. Böhm called himself a lyricist, but I can no longer remember the quality of his poems. He was a gentleman of refined appearance with excellent manners and a cultured way of expressing himself. His Hochdeutsch had that certain East Prussian ring to it. I had the feeling that the downfall of his home city was a dreadful blow to him. I can still hear his voice when, in his East Prussian fashion, he would say to me Härr Schejderbauerchen . I had the impression that he was a prosperous man and a bachelor. One time he gave us a laugh when he sang a popular song, full of black humour, from the period after the First World War. Wenn der weisse Flieder wieder blüht (‘When the white lilacs bloom once more’). Remarkably, I can still remember the title of one of his lyrical poems. It would have marked him out as an East Prussian dialect poet. I do not know whether that was really the case, but the poem was called Schalche Flack , in Hochdeutsch, Ein Schälchen Fleck , or ‘a little bowl of Fleck ’. It referred to the sour Kuttelfleck , a favourite East Prussian dish.

When my 22nd birthday came round, on 13 January 1946, I had recovered sufficiently to feel able to walk. It was a Sunday. I can remember it clearly because for the first and only time there was meat in the soup for lunch. Because it was my birthday, like all birthday boys, I received an extra helping by order of the camp leader. I devoured it with the greatest enjoyment and without the slightest prick of conscience towards my comrades!

After the meal I realised that Fritz Seyerl, a staff vet and Sudeten German, had not eaten with us. No one could explain why he was already full, but he was occasionally taken out of the camp by the Russians as a vet. So we thought he must have already eaten. On closer questioning he replied, after the meal, clenching both hands into fists, Solche Kavernen. He meant the state of the lungs of the horse he had been treating, and at the slaughtering and inspection of which he had been present.

My first trip out beyond the camp fence may have been in January or February. In the camp a comrade had died who had to be buried outside the camp. Herr Kahl, the camp leader, took me with him a few steps outside the camp. There the grave had already been dug. It was by a hedge. The body was laid in the flat grave. Oberleutnant Kahl said an ‘Our Father’, then the grave was filled in. Then we went back to the camp. We were the few prisoners who were capable only of working inside.

My last recollection of Holstein dates from March or April 1946. At that time we had received orders to erect round the camp a fence that was to some extent permanent. The Russians provided posts of over two metres high and many rolls of barbed wire. The posts were dug in or even concreted in, and then the wire was stretched over them. Stretching the wire with a tool designed for the purpose, I was able to get to work again for the first time. Slowly I felt my strength returning, even if I was still only capable of working inside. I even felt a certain satisfaction when I saw how tightly I had stretched the wire after the staples had been hammered in. But by the next day the tension had slackened because the material was already over-stretched.

The man directing the work was a Russian captain by the name of Mironov. He was the friendliest Russian that I met in captivity, not yet 30 years old, good-natured and kind. Blue-eyed and black-haired, he was smaller than me. He spoke a little German and was polite, almost comradely. But the notorious Skogo damoi , i.e. ‘home soon’, was no more convincing from his mouth than it was from other Russians. Doubtless it was decently and sincerely meant.

Meanwhile, we certainly were not going home soon. Although one day in April, we officers, with what little baggage we had, were loaded up on to lorries. But I was to encounter one more grotesque episode in the Holstein camp. For years I had carried in my right hand top pocket a marching compass. It was the compass that had, in February 1945, prevented me from going in the wrong direction with my men. But then I thought that the possession of it might lead people to think that I was planning to escape. It was too risky to keep it, even if my physical condition ruled out any thought of escaping. On one occasion as I went into the unused building in the camp where there were various types of optical equipment, I simply hid it. I decided I would certainly not need it any more. In the event that it was found on me during a frisking, it would lay me open to extreme unpleasantness.

But I was plain astonished when, a few weeks later, that very compass of mine was offered to me ‘for sale’. A Landser had been rooting about in the building and had found my compass. He decided that it was very likely that an officer might be interested in acquiring it as such an instrument would be necessary in any escape plan. Thanking him, I declined, without batting an eyelid.

Soon afterwards our miserable time in Königsberg came to an end. We officers were transferred back to the Georgenburg camp. Of course, once more we were completely unsure as to what was going to happen to us. Indeed, right up to the last day of our captivity, there was complete uncertainty, and unending anxiety. By then, the spring of 1946, the general situation had to a certain extent stabilised, if not improved.

Our return to the ‘main camp’ of Georgenburg, which was probably better organised than the Holstein camp, seemed at any rate to be advantageous to us. In fact the organisation and accommodation in the many barracks did indeed seem to be better. That was evident even as we arrived. We were subjected to a thorough ‘frisking’. My pay book and my New Testament were taken away from me. Losing my pay book felt to me just like losing my identity. From then I no longer had any document that could show who I was. I had nothing to show my name and rank, my date of birth, nor any other important dates. The seizure of my New Testament also hit me hard. It was the small pocket edition with the psalter I had received as a present from Father. It had his dedication, ‘A thousand shall fall beside thee, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee’. From then I had to summon up from my memory the consolation I had often felt in reading it. But I had to continue to trust in my Father’s dedication. The Russian guards evidently had orders to confiscate all written and printed material. Even my request for them to leave me with my New Testament ‘for cigarette papers’ met with no success.