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The FReeper Foxhole Revisits
WWII in Europe - Memoirs
Early War Memoirs
Margrit Fischer,
young woman living in the Third Reich
From earliest infancy I was aware of Germany’s hatred toward the Treaty of Versailles. The inflation that occurred after the war, which I remember even though I was five, strengthened those feelings. Every night there was fighting, and we often heard gunfire. There was a great sense of uneasiness everywhere. So when this odd Hitler came along with his slogans that captured the essence of what was in the hearts of the German nationalists, then it became clear that things would change very soon. He promised us that unemployment would end, and that Germany would once again take its place in the world as a state worthy of respect. So this man wasn’t only admired but welcomed, longed for. When the change of power happened, and the streets were suddenly peaceful and clean, and there was no more fighting--then all of us, who hadn’t really been for Hitler necessarily, were initially greatly relieved. I must have been about 14 the first time I saw him. The picture that was constantly shown in the newsreels and newspapers was very impressive. I still remember January 30, 1933 very clearly. Now, suddenly, there were brown-shirted troops who marched around and made a very orderly and cheerful impression. The sidewalks were lined with people, there were nice marching bands, and there was a festival-like atmosphere everywhere. There wasn’t any jubilation yet, but there was expectation.
The jubilation came one or two years later, after unemployment had really been fought and the streets were clean. At that time there was still no mention of war, and no mention of persecuting Jews either, at least not publicly. It all happened so quickly in those first few years. The previous private associations--the scouts, the religious groups--were gradually subsumed into the Hitler Youth. I was hiking, and I met up with a group of Bund deutscher Mädel [League of German Girls] on the way up to where Hitler had his residence. When the door opened and the führer walked up to us and shook our hands and talked with us--not really like a father, but more like a comrade. He had a very deep understanding of young people, and had an ability to speak with youths. His entire personality touched a place in the heart that is quite seldom reached. That was an experience we would never forget as long as we lived. We had no television then, only radio and newsreels, and of course everything we saw and heard was terribly slanted. Whenever Hitler’s voice came on the air, you felt a kind of inner attentiveness. His way of speaking was difficult for the ears to take for any length of time, but we got used to it, and somehow it was always something special to hear him speak. We were never allowed to see anything that would tarnish Hitler or the image of his leadership. Of course we didn’t see everything as positive. But we couldn’t publicly rebel against the state. Basically people were satisfied. The fact that we had to keep our mouths shut, that we weren’t entirely free, that was the price that we paid for this positive feeling.
Peter Pechel,
Wehrmacht Panzer officer during the invasion of Poland
Just before the invasion of Poland, Hitler sent the 3rd armored division through Berlin, and he was very disappointed by people’s reactions. He thought that they would be jubilant, as apparently the Germans had been in 1914 when World War I started. But the Berliners lined the streets and let the tanks go by, remaining totally silent. There was no movement, no reaction, nothing. I think this illustrates the general feeling among the people at that time, especially the young men in uniform like myself who would have to use their weapons sooner or later. Not long after that, my company marched into Czechoslovakia and camped on the Polish border. We were very scared because we didn’t know what war was. We had only been told by our fathers that war was a horrible thing. And so we hoped and prayed that we would be spared. As a matter of fact, when Mussolini intervened with Hitler shortly before the war started, we were happy, thinking war might never come.
And then the order came to move into battle position. We were to march across the border at 4:45 am on the first of September, 1939. For a young man, war means hearing the first shots, and suddenly having strange smells in your nose: burning houses, burning cows, burning dogs, burning corpses. It means seeing the first people killed; in Poland it was civilians. And then seeing young men like yourself in foreign uniforms being killed or wounded. I was in an armored tank division, and of course we rode on and on and just kept on rolling. We were the spearhead of the German army. The Poles were very tough to fight. They fought bitterly and desperately.
Julian Kulski,
son of the mayor of Warsaw,
member of the Polish underground and
participant in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising
In the summer of 1939, my father, who was the mayor of Warsaw, rented a house out in the Polish countryside because he knew the war was coming soon. One day I was playing in the woods with my friend; we were picking mushrooms and we heard this tremendous sound of motors, and watched the trees start bending. Huge planes with sinister-looking black crosses on them were flying over us, pretty much at the level of the treetops. They were headed north, toward Warsaw, and they must have been one of the first squadrons in the Luftwaffe. This was when I realized that war had begun, and it was a terrifying experience.
The little medieval town near us was bombed a few days later. And since it was not defended, the Wehrmacht took it over immediately. I was near the market when I first saw them coming, and while I expected something like cavalry on horses, they came on motorcycles and trucks. They wore greatcoats covered with dust, goggles, and very scary grey helmets. Somehow I expected that the invader would come in looking very well dressed, but they looked pretty beaten up and bedraggled. The Polish army had given them a hard resistance on the border, so they had been fighting every day. They put up a field gun in the middle of the square near the cathedral. And they put up loudspeakers and announced that the town had been liberated, and that we wouldn’t have to worry about anything because we were now going to be part of the great German Reich.
They brought in a large military band and started playing “Deutschland über Alles” and other German marching songs. At the same time, they started a fire in the synagogue and tied up the rabbi, letting the elders run into the temple to try to save him. I didn’t know anything about “Dante’s Inferno” at the time, but my first impression was this was complete unreality. And absolute horror. With the music and the German flags--which were very beautiful red flags with swastikas--they turned the square into a theater. And they reassured us that nobody had to worry about anything. It was just absolute horror. I didn’t stay in that town very long, but before we left, I remember that a 9 year old boy came over and touched the handle of a German motorcycle. And a soldier, who was inside the café, came out and shot him dead, right in front of my eyes. It was lucky that wasn’t me; I certainly felt like doing it. But after that I stayed away from the Germans, period.
A Polish Underground courier,
visiting Poznan at the end of 1939:
Poznan was a city I had known rather well in pre-war days. It is one of the oldest cities in Poland and regarded by many as the cradle of the Polish nation, especially when, many centuries ago, Poland was emerging as one of the most powerful monarchies in Europe. The population of the entire province is as purely Polish as any other district in Poland. I thought about this as I walked through the streets of Poznan. The city with the finest historical tradition in all Poland was now, to all appearances, a typical German community. Every sign, on stores and banks and institutions, was in German. The street names were in German. German newspapers were being hawked on the corners. All I could hear spoken was German; German with an accent or German spoken grudgingly and sometimes with a deliberate twist and inflection through which the Polish character of the speaker could be discerned, but I do not remember hearing a single word spoken publicly in any other language.
All the intelligentsia and every Pole who owned property had been expelled from the city. The same operation took place in every part of the district that the Germans had incorporated into the Reich. The only Poles who had been allowed to remain were those whom the Germans allowed to survive as outcasts. A Pole who refused to register as a German had to doff his hat before anyone whose uniform or insignia indicated that he was a German. If a German passed by, a Pole had to step off the sidewalk. A Pole could not travel by automobile or trolley and was even forbidden to own a bicycle. He had been placed completely outside the protection of the law and all his property, movable or immovable, was at the disposal of the German authorities.
Susan Bluman,
Polish Jew in Warsaw
September 1, 1939 was my birthday, and it certainly wasn’t a very beautiful birthday present to have the war begin. On that day, my life changed completely, just took a turn of 180 degrees. In Warsaw, the war lasted several weeks. But finally we gave up and the city was conquered by the Germans. By the time the German army walked in I felt relieved. I was a young girl, and all it meant to me that we wouldn’t have the bombing anymore. In fact, I had been praying for the Germans to come in because it was just terrible to be bombed constantly from all sides--with the airplanes, the blitzkrieg, and so on, we hadn’t slept in 4 weeks. The population was quite starved by that time, and the whole of Warsaw was on fire. When I walked down the street my hair would catch fire, because everything was burning.
Paule Rogalin,
daughter of a french soldier captured at Dunkirk
Just before the war began I was living in Dunkirk with my mother. My father had been drafted and was stationed nearby. Since so many of the french ships were coming through Dunkirk we saw soldiers all the time, and we just knew something bad was going to happen soon. It was like living on dynamite. All of us children went to school each day with a gas mask on our back. We were all given gas masks because they were expecting the Germans to use gas, as they had in the first war. I was given a real old fashioned mask with a long tube and a canister, and it petrified me to put this thing on. One night my mother and I went to see some friends who lived in a barge anchored in the port of Dunkirk. We started to hear these loud explosions, but the air raid signal had not been sounded, so we didn’t know what it was. And suddenly we were surrounded by fire. The big ships in the harbor were on fire, and men were jumping off them--some men were on fire as well. We were so shocked, but we ran off the barge, and jumped into a ditch shelter nearby. The bombs kept falling and soon the shelter started collapsing. I was almost up to my nose in dirt. I was getting buried alive, and my mother was trying to get me out, but she couldn’t move her arms. And these 3 young men, they got my hands and they pulled me out of the dirt. We ran toward Dunkirk, but bombs were just falling all over. It was terrible. It’s something I cannot forget. Houses were collapsing, and we could hear people down in the basement who were screaming because they were drowning in the water from pipes that had burst. And we just kept on running. It seemed like we ran almost all night.
In the morning the bombing stopped for a while, so we started walking back to our house. It was still standing up, but as we got nearer, we could see the drapes flying out of the windows, and we could see that a bomb had exploded inside the house. We stayed there for a few days, because there was nowhere else to go; the whole city of Dunkirk was just gone, all gone except for 1 statue, which still stands there today. We kept hearing that the German soldiers were marching toward our town, and the terrifying stories heard were left over from World War I--that they would come in and rape the women, cut off children’s arms, and all of that. Though I can’t remember the first German I saw, I do remember the sounds of their boots and their voices speaking that very guttural-sounding language. That’s what scared me the most. They came into our house, which was half gone, and they kept saying to my mother, “Where is the man of the house?” They thought we were hiding something. And she kept telling them he was in the french army. I’m not a hateful person, but I felt hatred toward the Germans. I hated them with a passion. I felt like we were not french anymore. We were invaded by these people, who had done so much damage, and so much killing, and I’m sure a lot of them got killed too, but at that point I didn’t care.
After a few days we left the house, bringing with us a few things that we carried on our backs. When we got onto the main road we saw that many others were doing the same thing. We looked for our friends but we couldn’t find them. As we walked along we saw a lot of dead people, old men with half their heads blown off, children who were badly maimed; I remember seeing one man who had burned up inside his truck, and he was still at the wheel. Then the enemy started shooting at us from their airplanes, even though we were mostly just women, children and old people they would swoop down low and shoot at us. We had to scramble down the hill into the canal in order to avoid getting hit. We saw french soldiers in trenches who had no idea what to do. They were lost just like we were, running in all directions with no General to tell them what to do, trying to get away from the Germans.
Since I was just a little girl I was hoping that my father would be the hero and save us from all these bad people. But when my father managed to find us he was just like those men. He had left the army because they had no guns, nothing to fight with. He was almost crying when he found us, saying “We can’t fight. We don’t have anything.” We stayed on a barge in the canal for a few days with my father, trying to figure out what we should do, and we decided that my father should try to get to England. So he went back to the beach of Dunkirk, and we had no way of knowing what happened to him. And then we heard that many soldiers had been killed there on the beach, so my mother wanted to go see for herself if my father had made it. And since she never went anywhere without me, she brought me with her to the beach of Dunkirk. It was utter confusion; there were bombs going off everywhere and soldiers scrambling to get on ships. Some were drowning in the sea because the water was so rough and the waves were so high. We took advantage of the breaks between bombings to look for my father among the dead men on the beach. It was a horrible sight, all these men lying there, and when I would see a dead man with his eyes open I’d say to my mother “He’s awake! He’s not dead! Maybe we can help him.” My mother realized how awful it was for me, and luckily she didn’t see my father there, so we left the beach. And I remember thinking “When is it going to end, mother? Maybe tomorrow?” And my mother would say “Yes, maybe tomorrow.”
Sheila Black,
actress turned London factory worker
First, the men were called to join the military. Then there was the building of the air raid shelters. In our gardens we got “Anderson” shelters, which were tin huts buried under the earth. And in our homes we got what were called “Morrison” shelters, which were wrought-iron tables. We were to hide under these tables if there was a bomb. We also had to line all of our curtains with black fabric, to make sure our homes were absolutely light-tight. There was a group of men called the Home Guard who kept watch for bombs or other signs of invasion, and we were rather led to believe that at any moment a German might parachute himself into our midst. We were all issued gas masks, which were horrid things with eye-pieces. They were horrible things, and I think they made me feel more like we were in a war than almost anything else.
What else is there to say about the blitz? Yes, there was bombing, yes, we lived with it, yes we woke up and some areas were devastated, but we got used to it. One day I was walking and I passed through some trees. There had been some bombing there, the bodies hadn’t yet been cleared, and there was one woman hanging in the fork of a tree. She was mutilated, but you could see her head, sort of hanging down, and she was blond with a dark parting. Two women were standing there looking and one of them said “My goodness, her roots needed doing, didn’t they?” Now that’s probably going to sound terrible, but that’s how much we were taking bombing for granted. Some people died, some didn’t. You lived for the day. And then at night, you would get under your Morrison shelter, into which you put your mattress. Others packed up their mattresses and blankets and went down to the tube stations [subways]. And when you came up in the morning, you saw dead people. You would have been terribly squeamish about it, but we got used to it.
A German Gebirgsjäger,
or elite mountain troop,
remembers his grueling march across the barren wasteland of Crete during the spring of 1941
I have never in my life been so depressed. In Crete the mountains were forbidding and dreadful. Never had I seen such a hostile terrain. There were no paths, not even animal tracks along which we could have moved. There was nothing. As part of the machine gun group I had to carry the tripod of the gun. Even without it, my knees were trembling with the strain of the climb within only a few hours and, when we rested at midday, I was almost unconscious. My comrades were all the same. I slept immediately for more than half an hour and woke up with my face burning. I tried to find shadow to keep my face out of the sun...not one little shadow. There were no wells from which we could top off our water bottles--we had not drunk more than a couple mouthfuls of tepid water from our bottles since dawn. The afternoon march was much worse. The tent half was appreciated when we stopped for the night, but we cursed it by day for its weight. I cannot tell you how much we longed to throw everything away and to march unencumbered by rucksack, ammunition cases and all the heavy, bulky and bruising equipment. Many of us fell out with a sort of heat stroke or exhaustion and lay there almost paralyzed. For myself, I had a terrible headache, my vision began to go and I stumbled repeatedly. I cursed everything and everybody.
We were lucky that the English were not mountain men, for just to cross the White Mountains was terrible enough. To have had to fight across them would have been impossible. A handful of determined English and a few machine guns could have held us off for days. As it was, we saw nobody and nothing except for a few birds. When we did meet the Tommies, they fought very hard to hold us and several times attacked us with rifle and bayonets. I think they were desperate men, knowing that if we won it was a prisoner of war camp for them. Their attacks cost them a lot of men and I remember Crete as the place of black corpses. The bodies on Crete, left lying for days in the hot sun had all turned black and had swollen. Most of them were covered with greenbottles and the stink of decay was everywhere. Night was bitterly cold and we lay shivering in our tents which were weighted down with stones. We could not bang the tent pegs into the almost solid rocky ground. We had no hot food. Everything had to be done quickly for once the sun went down it was soon totally dark and no lights were allowed. I didn’t feel hungry and I certainly did not want to eat the dry ration bread as it would have been too hard to swallow. We were up at dawn and marched immediately. There was no breakfast and no spare water. I hated Crete...the memory of that three day march has never left me.
Henry Metelmann,
German panzer driver on the eastern front
When the war broke out I was too young to join the Wehrmacht. I was very disappointed because I was sure the war would be over before I could become a soldier and fight for my country. But soon I was 18 and drafted and heading for Russia in the winter of 1941. We traveled in troop trains that took us slowly through Poland. And as we came further east, we could see that the living standards were much lower. The villages looked very old, full of decrepit thatched cottages. We realized we were moving into a poorer part of the world, and that gave our arrogance a boost. We thought “God, look at this here. They live like bloody pigs.” In Germany, everything was better organized and tidier. In Poland we stopped in a railway station, and saw another train with closed cattle cars. We could see people looking out through the windows and there was barbed wire around all the openings to prevent the people from putting their hands out. A woman looked at us and said “Bread, bread,” in German. We didn’t want to be nasty. When an SS guard came along, we asked, “Would it be all right to give her some bread?” And he said, “No! They’re bloody Jews and they were fed only a couple of days ago.” We felt bad about it. To fight on a battlefield was great, to kill soldiers was great. But this had nothing to do with a battlefield, this was just a person.
As we moved into Russia, the poverty got worse, and now it was winter. It was cold, and the further east we got, the colder it became. Then one day we passed through a place where there were tanks lying all over the place, and they were rusting away. Some were turned over, and you could see that they were burned out, and I remember looking out of the window and seeing an overturned German tank, exactly like mine, completely burned out. For the first time, it occurred to me: My God, how did the driver get out of there? Fear overcame me. When it comes down to it, you’re young and you don’t want to die. When we got to the Crimea, we went into a very poor village of one-room cottages with earthen floors. We went into one of these cottages, and there was a young mother with three small children, living in very poor conditions. Our sergeant said to the woman, “Out!” She said “This is our home--where can we go?” And the children started to cry. I thought to myself, here we had come a thousand miles, and now we are going to rob these people of what little they had. And the woman rolled up everything she had and dressed the children, and they went out. I stood in the house--it was nice and warm, they had a fire on--and looked out the window. And I saw them standing in the snow: the mother and the three small children, their bundles on their head. I thought, well if that is war, I don’t know.
It was very cold that first winter--the coldest temperature I remember is minus 54 degrees. It was so cold that you couldn’t even touch metal with your bare skin because the skin would stick to the metal. When it’s that cold, you reach a point where you don’t care anymore whether you live or you die. And a lot of German soldiers did freeze to death. Sometimes a man would fall down into the snow and we’d kick him and wake him up again, because if you lie for half an hour in minus 54 degree weather, you’re finished.
Very gradually during my time in Russia my attitude began to change. When I was billeted in a house in another Crimean village, there was a girl called Anna, and somehow I fell in love with her. One day she said “Why did you have to come into our country like this? I love my country, and you have come here as an invader.” Anna was supposed to be a second-rate human being because she was Russian. But to me, Anna was not only beautiful, she was valuable human being. What was going on? I was the superior being, I had come to rob her of her home. We were to destroy everything so that we could be their masters. I didn’t understand it anymore. Unconsciously, that added to the growing realization that I was involved in something horrible. But there were human feelings, sometimes.
I remember one of my first battle experiences attacking the Russians. I was driving a panzer and there was a river in front of us and a narrow bridge. And through my periscope I could see Russian tanks and soldiers everywhere. We had to get over that bridge because it was one of the basics of being a tank soldier: in battle you must never stop. But there were three Russian soldiers on that bridge, two of them carrying a wounded one. And when they saw me coming, the two of them dropped the injured man. He was lying there, so I stopped. My commandant shouted “Don’t stop! Go on!” And I said, “He’s lying there! I can’t go!” He said, “I give you the order to go on.” So I went on, and I saw him looking at me, as if he couldn’t believe it. And that is still with me now. Very heavily it lies on me, that I have done something like that. I know that if you lie down, an elephant doesn’t tread on you. But yet I did that.
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