From his office at Rostock-Marienehe Dr. Heinkel watched his works pilots trying out their new machines. A field-glass is always handy, so that he can follow their trial flights.
Karl Born, Luftwaffe pilot. “The Russian air force was very bad. They hurled all sorts of stuff down, stones, bits of iron. It was all very primitive.”
Alfred Wagner, Luftwaffe fighter pilot. “I volunteered for the Luftwaffe when I was 17. To me, it was a marvellous adventure. If we were asked to volunteer to fly somewhere, I was always first in the queue!”
The famous Stuka dive bomber has become synonymous with the Wehrmacht of the Blitzkrieg era. The unique gull wing configuration made the sinister shape this dive bomber readily distinguishable. However the cumbersome non-retractable landing gear contributed to the very slow air speed rendered the Stuka highly vulnerable to Allied fighters. This glaring drawback was cruelly demonstrated in the Battle of Britain where the losses were so high that the aircraft had to be withdrawn from frontline service.
For most people alive at the time, the Second World War is a distant, if painful, memory. For very many more, it is just history, something that happened before they were born and made no impact on their lives or their recollections. However, for those who served and survived, the recollections are as vivid as they were at the time they occurred and nearly sixty years on, they remain vivid down to the last fine detail.
Until recently, the picture has been somewhat incomplete. The generals and politicians have written their memoirs, the regimental histories have found their way into print, some of the participants have set down their experiences, the films, the videos, the documentaries have been made. It is, however, the victors who write history, and the Second World War has been no exception. Now, a group German veterans who have kept silent for nearly sixty years have come forward with accounts of their own war.
In their youth, they served the Third Reich and their Führer for the six years the War lasted and came away with impressions and memories of the conflict from the sharpest of sharp ends - the early halcyon days of the blitzkrieg, the hazards and rigours of the Russian campaign, the discomforts of the U-boat war, the war in the air and the last days of Berlin in 1945 as the thousand-year Reich went down in the blood, flames and destruction of total ruin.
The Third Reich had many faces, and the German veterans who tell their stories in this book came to the Second World War from different and sometimes surprising perspectives. For instance, Detlef Radbruch, who fought with the Luftwaffe, had little time for Hitler and actually came from an anti-Nazi family, but as a soldier, he still believes, ‘you have to do your duty’. Hanno Rittau, who served in a Luftwaffe anti-aircraft unit, says much the same thing: ‘We had to defend out home and we had to defend our country, and that’s what we tried to do.’
Heinz Reiners joined the Kriegsmarine because his father had served in the German Navy during the First World War.
‘So his son had to do the same in the Second! But it wasn’t just that. We were young, we were enthusiastic. The propaganda we heard told us that only the Germans were worth anything, all the others were nothing. That’s the way we were brought up in our youth.’
For Karl Born, a volunteer who joined the Luftwaffe, his war service was a natural continuation of his training as a glider pilot, which began when he was only thirteen, in 1936.
‘At that time, the first flying groups had been set up in the Hitler Youth. We were supervised by the German Air Sport Association which had been founded after the First World War by former airmen. They had been forced to switch to gliders because Germany wasn’t allowed to build planes with engines any more. I took various glider pilot exams in this Hitler Youth Flying group and after that the air pilot license for gliders, which permitted me to fly gliders loaded with up to ten people’.
Karl Born found it all a great adventure, though his sense of adventure was afterwards tempered by his war experiences.
‘I volunteered when I was seventeen and when I was twenty, in 1941, I went on my first mission. Flying was enormous fun, and I was full of enthusiasm for it. If we were asked to flying somewhere, anywhere, I always volunteered straight away. Of course, it was a good feeling to survive aerial battles, but in retrospect, later, when you reviewed it all, you had to say that it was all madness. The war, every war, shooting at men you’d never seen before…I must say that today, I wouldn’t want to volunteer.’
Wolfgang Reinhardt was another volunteer for whom the War was just an extension of peace-time activity. Reinhardt belonged first to the Jungvolk, afterwards to the Hitler Youth, and that meant that between the ages of six and sixteen, when he volunteered, he was preparing for war and knew little else.
‘I was a recruit in the Army NCO school, Potsdam-Reiche, the élite school in Germany. Whoever went through its doors could be proud to have been there, you could walk 3 centimetres taller. All the training was geared to war. We were trained on mortars and machine guns; and made mock attacks on bunkers, although it wasn’t all that much of a pretence because live rounds and shells were used. The training was tough. We had to face all the dangers of real battle, and its discomforts, too.
‘I’ll give you an example. There was a river in eastern Prussia called the Liebe, a small river perhaps one metre deep. We were ordered to about turn, and march into the Liebe about turn and march out of the Liebe, about turn back into the Liebe again, holding rifles and machine guns up so that they didn’t get wet. We had to put up with the cold, too. Potsdam in winter was ice cold, lousy cold.
‘As a training exercise, we were ordered to attack a town. We had hardly started when the command came to stop. ‘Artillery, change of positions, you must dig yourselves in.’ And we sat there for hours in that cold in the snow before the word came that we could continue and the change of positions was over.
A squadron of He-111 bombers
‘It went to extremes. We had to run around the training areas with full pack and equipment, not walking, but running over three or four kilometres of the training areas, including the field packs we had. Later the field pack was replaced by a storm pack. We had to climb over walls, over barbed wire, through a pipe, over the wall again, and that went on for an hour or more’.
Eckhart Strasosky was a leader in the Hitler Youth before he joined the Wehrmacht on 1 December 1939 and later fought in Yugoslavia and Russia. At eighteen, Strasosky had already commanded a group of young fourteen- to eighteen- year olds and was predestined for the officer corps from the start.
‘I was an officer at twenty-two. At that time, once the war had begun, every boy of the right age volunteered to join the Wehrmacht. I was one of them. But I didn’t really understand anything about politics and there were many others like me. Before the war when we were ten or fourteen years old, we didn’t even realise that we were being prepared for war, through military fitness training or sporting achievements. We weren’t told what the end of it all was going to be.’
Hajo Hermann, later to become a famous Luftwaffe ace, approached the War from a predominantly political point of view. The Treaty of Versailles of 1919, which ended the First World War, had reorganised areas of Europe in such a way that German minorities found themselves severed from Germany and placed under the rule of two new countries: Czechoslovakia and Poland. In both countries, or so Adolf Hitler claimed, they were suffering discrimination.
Millions of resentful Germans, including Hajo Hermann, believed him. They were mollified when the problem of the German ‘exiles’ in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia was solved at Munich in 1938: the agreement made there by Britain, France, Germany and Italy transferred the Sudeten districts to the Third Reich. In 1939, however, the Germans in Poland had yet to be rescued. When Germany precipitated the Second World War by attacking Poland on 1 September 1939, Hajo Hermann was firmly convinced that it had been a great wrong to consign a predominantly German population to the Poles.
‘That had to be redressed. Hitler’s suggestion, to hold a referendum was refused by the Poles, who were unfortunately supported in their decision by the British and Americans. And that led to the conflict. At any rate, I participated in that war and I always said to myself that we did what we just had to do, what Germans had to do. If we had accepted the injustice, then we would have been the worst idiots ever.
‘I was a bit older than most, twenty-five or twenty-six when the War began in 1939, and I’d studied history, listened to my teachers talking about the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles and that shameful Paragraph 231 which blamed Germany for the war. So after Hitler took power, we could say ‘Thank God, now we have an army again, now we can put things right and get back the land that has been taken away from us’.
Others, though, saw the political imperative that fuelled the policies of Hitler and Nazi Germany from a different angle, as the workings of a dictatorship that punished dissension with death. Benedikt Sieb was one of them. He was a nineteen-year old apprentice in Hamburg when his life was changed by the Nazi diktat.
‘My apprenticeship ended in 1941, after two years, not because of anything I had done, but because in the factory where I worked, someone had been discovered listening to English radio programmes. He was sentenced to death. I became involved because the Gestapo wanted me to make a statement as an eyewitness. I refused to do it. The next thing I knew, the Gestapo demanded that I sign up for the Russian front or they’d send me to a concentration camp and my parents would be shot. So I signed up.’
Rudolf Oelkers was in an even more invidious position, as the son of a social democrat. Democrats, socialists, communists, trades unionists and other political opponents had been the first targets of the Nazis after Hitler came to power in 1933. Many were imprisoned in concentration camps, many were executed. Oelkers’ father was more fortunate: he was given a choice. Rudolf Oelkers still has the documents in which his father’s choices were spelled out.
‘My father was told: “Either you keep quiet or you’ll be put into a concentration camp’. He decided not to go to the concentration camp, but he also decided not to keep quiet. We lived in a country village, so everyone knew about my father. It was very uncomfortable - probably dangerous - because and there were members of the SS in the village. Everyone knew me as ‘the red’, the ‘communist’ son of a ‘communist’ father. I wasn’t the only one. There were many more, but for their own safety, maybe, they all joined up.
‘I wanted to do the same. Fortunately, my father stopped me from volunteering the Waffen-SS. I was only sixteen and had no idea what the SS, the Waffen-SS or the whole Nazi business was going to mean. Eventually, I was in Russia with the 18th Tank Division, the division commanded by Colonel Guderian himself. But afterwards, I was glad we lost the war. Can you imagine what would have happened if Hitler had won?’
Heinz Friederich, who was born in 1928, was in uniform for only the last three months of the War, but he remembers very well how he was forced to enlist.
‘We were suddenly told at school that we had to register voluntarily. We were put under duress, we weren’t allowed to leave the room until we had signed up. Two or three weren’t at all willing, but they were physically forced to sign by their relatives. Probably the relatives had been threatened with something bad. After it was all over, it was said that we had registered voluntarily, of our own free will. What a farce!’
There were subtler ways of binding recruits to the Nazi cause. Some might call it economic blackmail. However, before the War, Helmut Benzing, who trained for the Kriegsmarine, but ended up seeing the destruction and capture of Berlin in 1945, feels he had had good cause to be grateful for the generosity of the Nazi state and with that, good cause to serve it in war.
‘I knew the time when unemployment was rife, so when the Nazis came and suddenly, my father got work and everyone got work, I was convinced it was for the best. We didn’t know anything else, or rather what we did know wasn’t good - hunger, unemployment and so on.
‘We were very young, of course and we didn’t have any contact with the outside world. We could only see and believe in what was happening in front of us. There was no television and no one who could tell you about different ways of doing things. Whether or not those ways - the Nazi ways - were right or wrong, we couldn’t judge, that’s the truth. I say again that we were much too young and we didn’t hear any contrary opinions about what was going on with the Nazis.’
Leo Mattowitz, who served in Russia during the War, had also known some very hard times before Adolf Hitler came to power
‘In 1933, when Hitler took power, I was eleven years old. In the Ruhrgebiet where I lived, there was abject poverty, I went to school with a small piece of bread, my father was out of work, everyone was out of work, it was a time of great poverty. We had no shoes, only clogs and I had to walk four kilometres to school even in the winter through the snow. I got my first shoes from Adolf Hitler. All of a sudden, my father was given work, the neighbours got work and I was delighted to wear proper shoes for the first time. So of course we all supported Hitler. He had rescued us from a terrible situation.’
What Mattowitz did not realise, as yet, was the even more terrible situation he was going to find when he was serving in Russia. Neither did another Russian veteran, Edmund Bonhoff, though he soon came to learn that once he was in the army there was no turning back.
‘We grew up as Nazis. The Hitler Youth made us into Nazis. That was their whole aim. I was quite enthusiastic about the Hitler Youth. I was born in 1920, so I was thirteen when Hitler came to power - far too young to see all that Nazism really meant. Today, of course, I can see it differently, but then I know so much more. So much I wish I didn’t know.
‘Even so, I must say that we are all guilty, very guilty because of what the Nazis did. But the ordinary soldier as such, he just did his duty. All of us had to, because we’d have been punished otherwise. If any one of us had said ‘We don’t want to fight any more’ or something like that, we’d have been shot immediately. We all knew that. We all knew about others who been shot. They did that often enough.’
Whatever the personal path that led them to war - whether it was duty or enthusiasm, whether they were pressured into it or believe their cause was just - for everyone, the Second World War a time of excitement and boredom, frantic action and waiting for action, facing death or escaping it, watching comrades die while others survived, and celebrating triumph or swallowing defeat. These German veterans saw it all and tell a sometimes fascinating, sometimes moving, often horrific tale of the long-ago war they fought and lost, but a war they can recall as if it happened yesterday.
Original caption: Even a hit like this on a dive bomber cannot harm a German airplane.
This was the most common German fighter of the war, over 35,000 were produced making the Me-109 the largest production run of any fighter on any side in World War ll. Constantly upgraded between 1939 and 1945 the Me-109 remained operational until the very last days of the war. This excellent colour image shows of a pair of Me-109’s on combat patrol in North Africa during 1942. The effectiveness of the desert camouflage pattern is suitably demonstrated by how well the machines blend in with the desert terrain.