Veteran's Story

[BedsnHerts]

This is the translated and edited version of an interview I did a couple of years ago with a chap called Ludwig Harms, who is my aunt's partner. It's not an action-packed war story but I think it's pretty good reading. Please bear in mind that he's pretty old and his memory may be a bit faulty on certain topics

I lived in a small town near Wilhelmshaven, which is a sea port on the north coast of Germany. I first became aware that trouble was coming on the day the day that England declared war on us. The propaganda films we’d been shown when our armies went into Poland and Saarland and Austria told us that those countries either belonged to us anyway or, like Austria, that they wanted to join the Reich. It was never referred to as war. When Britain and France declared war on us, all of that changed. Everyone was very sober and thoughtful. The older people, who had been through the First World War, were saying that this was a serious matter. I was only 11 and obviously far too young to enlist. When I was a bit older I was required to do Arbeitsdeinst – work service. Everyone who wasn’t in the military had to do some sort of work for their country, Hitler didn’t want anyone to be unemployed. I spent some months building sea defences with a lot of other people. We didn’t have any machinery, it was all done by hand.

Wilhelmshaven was a big submarine base and had been a target for enemy bombers all through the war. As the war progressed the bombing got more and more intense. I remember seeing what looked like thousands of bombers in formation flying overhead, each dropping their bomb load. They were being shot at by our FLAK guns. I had a few friends who were FLAK helpers, 14 and 15 year-olds. They told me the gunners had estimated the altitude that the bombers came in on and had pre-ranged their guns, so they managed to shoot down quite a few. Even so, Wilhelmshaven town was totally destroyed.

I turned 16 in 1944 and was finally old enough to enlist so I left school and went to the recruiting office. If you volunteered you could choose which of the forces you went into and you were likely to be attached to a more prestigious Regiment than if you waited to be conscripted. After filling in the forms and swearing allegiance they asked me what I would like to do. My Hitler Youth unit had been infantry and most of my friends were going into the Heer so that’s what I chose. On the way out, a Waffen SS officer looked each of us over and asked if we wanted to go into the Waffen SS instead. I think a few did but it didn’t appeal to me so I said no, thanks.

I had to report to the military centre in Oldenburg the next day but the train line had been bombed so I hitched a lift in a farmer’s truck. It was actually quite risky travelling in a truck because you were a good target for the American planes. As a kid I’d always thought of Americans as cowboys and their airmen certainly acted like cowboys. They would shoot at anything that moved, trains, civilian cars, bicycles, horse-carts, anything, but especially trucks. We got to Oldenburg without being attacked and then we all had three days of tests to see what kind of soldiering we were best suited for. For some reason it was decided that I would make a good machine-gunner and that’s what I was instructed on over the next few weeks in addition to the usual basic training.

I was enlisted as a Grenadier in the Oldenburgisches Grenadier Regiment, a very old and distinguished Regiment. Our officers were mostly senior officials from the Arbeitsdienst. We were told we were an elite infantry unit and we were certainly very well equipped considering how little there was of everything at that time. My regiment formed up in Muensterlager and we began our march towards the eastern front. On the way we encountered thousands of German refugees coming the other way, all trying to get as far from the Russians as they could. The road was crowded with civilians pushing prams and hand carts with all their possessions in them. We were on foot and could squeeze past them but when the Panzers came up there was no room at all. The Panzer commanders had been told to get to the front as quickly as possible and they just drove the civilians off the road. Lots of them were knocked down or killed accidentally and all the time the planes were flying overhead strafing us all with their cannon. One day I had my machine gun set up inside a 2 metre deep foxhole that we’d dug. There was myself and two ammunition carriers. I saw a plane flying straight towards me very low and so I fired my MG42 at it. A low flying plane is a huge target but they go so fast they are almost impossible to hit and when I saw the sparkle from his gun barrels I got my head down pretty quick and he passed overhead. That was the only time I ever fired my gun at the enemy, the rest of the time I was just carrying the damn thing.

Even though we were well equipped we didn’t have enough MGs to have one per Gruppe, so we marched in groups of about 40 with three machine guns between us. I would carry the gun and two others would carry two boxes of ammunition each. The idea was that in combat one of the ammunition carriers would crouch down facing me and I’d fire the gun off his shoulder. An MG42 is a very heavy gun and gets heavier the farther you carry it. I tried carrying it in the left hand, carrying it the right hand, even carrying it on my head and it was never comfortable. I even thought of strapping the thing to my back but was worried that I wouldn’t be able to deploy it fast enough if we were attacked.

We marched as far as Perleberg. That was as far as we got. We had orders to resist a Russian advance so we deployed defensively across an area with a good field of fire and waited. Tanks make a lot of noise and we heard these Russian tanks coming long before we saw them. Even the sound of them was terrifying and when they finally came into view it became clear that this was a large armoured division of T34s and we had no armour ourselves as they had all moved out the night before so we had no way to really engage them. Fortunately we were ordered to pull back and from that point on our orders must have changed because our role was simply to get to Berlin as fast as we could to defend it against the Red Army advance.

We were halted some way outside of Berlin, we weren’t even in the suburbs but the Russians had got there before us and circled the city. We were outside the circle and even though we were a large well equipped force the Russians didn’t seem bothered about us. Their orders were to take Berlin above all else and if we didn’t attack them they weren’t going to attack us. Then came a period when we were marched all over the place, seemingly at random but never engaging. We were in a town called Hagenow with the Russians about 2km away and preparing to rest up when suddenly over the brow of this hill came all these American tanks. We had no idea the Americans were so close and we were caught totally by surprise. I heard an officer suggest that we should engage the Americans, deliver a crushing defeat to them and then turn around and start on the Russians. I think he meant it as a joke but it didn’t go down too well. The tanks came and just drove right through us. I don’t know if they thought we had already surrendered but they didn’t fire on us and didn’t even get down from their tanks, just drove on in the direction of the Russians. This was really the last straw. Our officers told us that we were going to surrender en-masse and we had to destroy our weapons and all our documents. We’d been told to have no information on us at all when we went into enemy hands.

Eventually the Americans came back and accepted our surrender. We were put into a barbed wire enclosure next to the river Elbe. There were thousands of us there, maybe even tens of thousands and we were kept there for four weeks with no shelter, no water and to begin with no food. At night the GIs on the other side of the wire would get drunk and fire into our enclosure. Fortunately they didn’t hit much. After a few days the Americans supplied us with rations that consisted of a big hard biscuit, some other stuff in tiny quantities and a couple of cigarettes. These ration packs were supposed to be for one man but we were issued them at one for every 10 men so we all got very hungry. One poor fellow who had been detailed to deliver these rations came into the camp with a horse and cart and was immediately hijacked. We took the horse off the cart and killed it. We had to use rocks as all our equipment had been taken from us. I don’t know how they managed to butcher the carcass but we ate horsemeat that evening. The lack of water was a real problem. There was wire between us and the river so we couldn’t draw water from there. The Americans told us to use the irrigation ditch that ran alongside our camp but it was being used as a latrine by a few thousand soldiers and so the water was unfit to drink. Eventually a load of spades appeared and we dug holes in the ground and waited for them to fill with water and that was what we drank.

After four weeks we were told to separate ourselves into two groups: Those who were under 17 went into one group, over 17 in another. This didn’t sound too good and even though I was over 17 I stood in the group of youngsters. I was convinced that the older men would be taken by the Russians. As none of us had any papers there was no way to tell how old we all were and so they interviewed each of us and made us swear that we were telling the truth about our age. They gave us temporary ID papers based on what we had told them and were warned that if it transpired later on that we had lied we would be in a lot of trouble. I thought that I would be in more trouble by telling the truth and so lied pretty convincingly, swearing that my birth date was 2nd May. In the back of my mind I had decided that if they ever found out my real birth date I would say that it was the American clerk’s error, writing 5/2/28 instead of 2/5/28.

Two days later we were given our new ID papers, packed whatever we had and were driven to a new camp near Luneburg where we were handed over to the British. From then on things got much better. We were very impressed with how professional the British were compared to the Americans. They gave us a roof over our heads and above all they gave us decent food and water. I even think it was the same rations that their own troops were getting.

Six weeks later we were simply released and told to go home. I had to walk a fair way and all I really had was an eating tin and the clothes I stood up in. I had no money to buy food and so would hang around farmers’ fields. If I saw the farmer planting vegetables I would wait until he’d gone and dig the bulbs up to eat them. If you started a fire anywhere then within a few hours there would be a bunch of people who would congregate around it and you would all cook what you had stolen that day.

Eventually I made it back home. I had gone to war and come back safe to my family, but I needed a job and to get one I had to register myself to get permanent ID papers. The clerk at the town hall asked me what my profession was. I knew that saying “soldier” wasn’t going to get me very far so I thought; well, I’ve done a fair amount of digging over the past year so I’ll say I’m a farm labourer. The man handed me my new documents and there I was – a different birth date, a different profession and a different man.

[berlin1945]

thank you a real good story

[Franz repper]

Thanks for that interesting post

[Steiner]

Thanks, Martin.

[SSnez]

Thanks for sharing this story with us. Really nice to read, cheers

[Hauser]

Very interesting ...I enjoyed that !

[Alex]

wow.

[BedsnHerts]

A book about the US treatment of POWs after the war is OTHER LOSSES by James Baque. You can read the whole book online for free

http://www.archive.org/stream/Other_Los ... 0/mode/2up

Baque asserts that more German soldiers died in captivity at the hands of the Americans than were killed in combat by the US Armed Forces. He cites a figure of between 800,000 to 1,000,000 dying mostly of starvation and disease. Other historians put the figure at around 50,000, with inter-camp transfers and releases without charge (Volkssturm and civilians) making up the difference in numbers. Either way it's a shitload of dead men.

What isn't in doubt is the US policy of actively preventing POWs from receiving extra food via Red Cross parcels or private mail. All food that was donated or surplus was stockpiled by US Administration for use in the event of a post-war famine, which is somewhat ironic when the people you are keeping it from are dying of starvation.

Wikipedia article here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Losses