Hitler's Last Witness (31 page)

A transport brought me one day from Tushino to Sverdlovsk in the Urals. The camp commandant was an army captain who had been a POW in Thuringia. He had all the former SS men separated out, which gave me a bad feeling. Then came the surprise: the SS men went into the food factory; the others had to break rocks. I also had to do this, but later. Often children would stand around, spitting at us and calling us ‘Hebrews'.

In the camp, there was a traitor who reported to the guards whenever anybody had helped himself during kitchen duty. One day Lieutenant Schmidt went up to this prisoner, whose name was Kruse: ‘We know now that you are the traitor. Today you do not go to work! If you do, I shall kill you!' Kruse really should have taken the threat seriously. He turned up for kitchen duty and was helping carry the pea soup on a plank with another prisoner when Schmidt came up on him from behind and hacked off Kruse's head from his shoulders. That earned him the nickname Hatchet Schmidt. Thank God I was spared seeing it; over the next few days it was the number one topic.

Finally, I got to Stalingrad. I did not know than that it would be the last place of my captivity. Only too often had I heard how transports of prisoners left the camp for an unknown destination and mostly went to the next camp, and the next and the next. This transport from Stalingrad at the end of 1953, however, really would bring me back to Germany.

1
The building at Moscow's Lubyanka Square No. 2 was until 1991 among other things the central prison of the Soviet secret service.

2
These names were written by Rochus Misch from memory. Stalin had ordered the NKVD to ascertain finally if and how Hitler had committed suicide. At the end of 1945, under code-name Operation Myth, People's Commissioner Sergei Kruglov was given the assignment by Interior Minister Beria of assembling officers fluent in German. Linge also remembered interrogators Colonel Wolf Stern and Professor Savielyev. Misch knew the latter as Savalyev; to other prisoners he also mentioned Dr Savelli. The prisoners themselves gave this most brutal and cynical of interrogators the nickname ‘Lamefoot' on account of his limp. Linge also mentioned interrogators Schweitzer and Klausser, although the latter also gave prisoners his name as Klaus or Krause. Seltenvahr and Gagaze known to Misch were not mentioned by other prisoners, though Linge remembered a Lieutenant Colonel Georgadze. This was the cover-name of Fyodor Karpovich Parparov, who worked out the interrogation protocols for Stalin at the end of the 1940s. Seltenvahr was probably the cover-name of twenty-three-year old Lieutenant Smirnov, who was in charge of questioning Rochus Misch.

3
The Nuremberg Trials against the principal Nazi war criminals were held between 20 November 1945 and 1 October 1946.

4
Bydgoszcz (formerly Bromberg) was Prussian from 1772 to 1807; from 1807 to 1815 part of the Duchy of Warsaw; and from 1815 to 1920 the Prussian province of Posen. After being annexed to Poland by the Treaty of Versailles following WWI; it remained a centre of German life in Poland.

5
‘Bromberg Bloody Sunday' was a bloodbath occurring on 3 September 1939, in which many Germans living in the town were massacred. Nazi propaganda used the incident as a retroactive justification for the attack on Poland and inflated the number of German victims. Gotthold Starke was taken away by the Poles in connection with ‘Bromberg Bloody Sunday' but later freed by Wehrmacht troops.

6
On 30 August 1918, an attempt was made to assassinate Lenin, but he escaped wounded. Fanya Kaplan was arrested as the perpetrator and executed by firing squad after being interrogated. Her exact involvement had not been conclusively determined, nor how the library-trolley inmate remembered by Misch might have been somehow involved with her.

7
Theodor Körner (1791–1813) was a German poet. Kurt Huber, member of the Weisse Rose resistance group quoted the first line of Körner's poem
Aufruf
(1813): ‘Let's go, my people! The flame signals are smoking!'

8
The Steppe-ITL (Special camp No. 4) existed between February 1948 and April 1956.

9
Between 1949 and 1950, POWs were condemned to death in Soviet mass trials to get round the obligation to release them under the agreements signed by the Allies with the German Federal Republic. See Wolfgang Schuller, ‘Opfer der sowjetischen Terrorjustiz',
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
, 5 November 1992.

10
Borovichi (Oblast Novgorod) is about 270 kilometres southeast of Leningrad. From May 1943 until it was closed in August 1953 it housed five thousand German prisoners, of whom four thousand died there.

11
The Blue Division was an infantry division of Spanish volunteers incorporated into the German Wehrmacht from 1941 to 1943 on the Russian Front. Captain de la Rocca fought with the remains of a company in the final battle for Berlin.

12
Many of these Republican Spanish fled only as far as France, where they were interned. Most of them then worked on building the U-boat bunkers along the Biscay coast, 1941–3. See Lars Hellwinkel,
Hitlers Tor zum Atlantik
, Christoph Links Verlag, Berlin 2012. Later many were sent to Mauthausen concentration camp.

13
Gustav Ludwig Hertz (1887–1975) received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1925. In April 1945, he was brought by a special unit of the Red Army to Sochumi on the Black Sea, where he led a project involving German specialists at the Physics-Mathematics Institute founded by the NKVD. At the end of 1946, Interior Minister and NKVD head Beria initiated the deportation into the Soviet Union of German technical specialists from all areas of research, technology, industry and armaments together with their families. At Tushino, specialists worked on rocket technologies.

Chapter Eighteen

My Homecoming and New Beginnings

SHORTLY AFTER CHRISTMAS 1953,
our train stopped in the Brandenburg POW reception camp at Fürstenwalde, which had been set up by the NKVD.
[1]
There we were relieved of our prison clothing and given normal civilian wear. Now we looked like real people again. Would they really let us go? We were supposed to get on another train for Friedland near Göttingen, but did not trust the Russians.
[2]
Near Fürstenwalde camp was a tram station from where a line ran into Berlin. Five fellow prisoners and I decided to defect at the next opportunity. We succeeded. All six of us got on a tram and then after nearly nine years I was back. Back in Berlin.

Spying through the misted windows of the compartment I was totally overcome. Suddenly, at the entrance to a tram station, I saw a sign that read ‘Neukölln'. I heard myself say: ‘This is the West – everybody out!' We stumbled through the guard's van, ran down the steps from the platform to the forecourt and found a taxi stand. A colleague who was heading in my direction got into one of the waiting taxis with me. I told the driver my address without mentioning that I had no money on me. Without a word he took us. We might not be wearing prison clothes any more, but as returners from captivity we were easy to recognise. The taxi driver did not want the fare. First he set down my friend at Britz, then carried on to Rudow. I read the street signs, some with the names of flowers, and then the street in which I lived – had lived – a long time ago. The taxi pulled up at the number I had given. I was home.

There stood my parents-in-law's small house, which I had last seen on 22 April 1945 – it looked exactly as I had remembered it. My wife had lived there since the end of the war. The first person I saw at the door was my mother-in-law. Shortly after that, Gerda joined her. It was 31 December 1953. Our wedding anniversary. The eleventh, but of those we had not lived together for nine.

And now I was to learn that life had not stood still in my homeland. I shared this fate with thousands of others who came back from the war late. Gerda had begun a relationship with somebody else, my father-in-law was dead and naturally for my daughter Gitta – by now almost ten years old – I was a total stranger. The homecoming I had longed for was a very different thing from my daydreams because the homeland I remembered no longer existed. It was too much for me. I was on the Havel bridge and jumped into the ice-cold water. I remember nothing of the details, but I was saved. Gerda decided we should take the chance of a new beginning. Thus, the year 1954 began for me in Berlin, and I had to find my new place in it.

First of all, I had to attend to correspondence. I rummaged through my things for the letters my fellow prisoners had pressed into my hands. At the first opportunity, I sent them to their families. Gerda took them to the post office. Later I got busy sending small parcels to the comrades I had left behind in Russia. I packed thick paint brushes from which I unscrewed the brush-head and put a little note into the shaft which I hollowed out. I hoped in this way to be able to smuggle in news from the homeland without the censors finding out. In captivity we had promised each other firmly that if you got post from a former prisoner now at liberty – give it the most thorough going over! I wanted them to know that the politicians in western Germany were doing everything they could for their early release.

The Social Ministry sent our small family on holiday for six weeks. We went to Reisbach in Lower Bavaria. Late homecomers were given support in this way to find their way back into their families. Gerda had got through the difficult period just after the war in masterly fashion. In 1945 she had re-entered the SPD (German Socialist Party), in 1946 the AWO (Workers' Welfare), and in 1950 the DGB (German Trade Unionist Federation). In 1946 Uncle Paul, through his contacts with the post-war Bürgermeister Ernst Reuter, had got her work in a US military office.
[3]
She spoke English, and nobody cared when neighbours denounced her to the authorities as the wife of an SS man. Soon after that Gerda took up teacher training. In 1951, she passed her second state examination, and since then had been teaching at a school in Neukölln. Later she was even appointed headmistress.

What was I to do for a living?

I took an apprenticeship to be a draughtsman. That seemed to me to be a little along the artistic lines I had once travelled pre-war and therefore suitable. Only a few weeks later, however, I gave it up. The instruction went totally over my head – I was incapable of assimilating it. After almost ten years in Gulag it was difficult to peel off the prison clothing. I had not yet arrived home mentally – the homeland was a place I still did not know.

I was offered employment as a porter in a hospital. I turned it down. Push beds here and there? That seemed to be too undemanding an activity. I spent more than a year looking for something suitable. I received several offers, but nothing in Berlin. Some came from south Germany through old colleagues. Someone I knew from Swabia suggested I could take over as his commercial representative for rubberwear of all kinds in southern Germany. The assortment ranged from rubber rings for glass jars to Paris fashions. I would like to have accepted, but Gerda was not prepared to leave Berlin.

I came across Erich Kempka, Hitler's former chauffeur and motor pool chief. He was now a test driver at Porsche. He invited me to work with him, and I called on him in Stuttgart. Kempka got in touch with Jakob Werlin, whom I had known in earlier times.
[4]
Werlin received me in his six-roomed apartment in Munich. I could also be a driver, no problem, he gave me to understand. The day I met Werlin he had to go to Italy, and he offered me his flat to spend the night. Here again I would have to work in south Germany, and Gerda was not prepared to leave Berlin.

Finally, I heard through acquaintances that a shop selling artists' requisites was up for sale – its owner now wanting to retire. ‘That would be just the thing for you,' my friend said. It certainly would, but I had no money to buy it.

In the end, I turned to a former general who helped late homecomers. He sent me to Gräfin von Isenburg.
[5]
She was the chairperson of an association helping former POWs to get back on their feet. Princess von Isenburg was especially impressed by my story and organised a meeting with politicians in Bonn. She accompanied me, for example, to a meeting with the CSU (Christian Socialist Union) deputy Kaspar Seibold,
[6]
and Seibold related my story to Finance Minister Fritz Schäffer.
[7]
Finally, I was invited to a talk with Schäffer, who wanted to know all the details of my time with Hitler. Thus, we spent half the day talking about that before we came to my present predicament. I assume that this conversation contributed to capital being made available a little later for a fund to support late returners.

I got a loan of 28,000 Deutsche Mark from the Grund-und-Kreditbank, and finally I was able to buy out the seventy-six-year-old owner of the artist and interior decoration shop at Kolonnen-Strasse 3 at Berlin-Schöneberg.

When my Aunt Sofia was looking for a flat, I asked my local postman if he could help. He asked around, and my aunt was very grateful to be able to occupy a new flat, also in Kolonnen-Strasse, before moving into the old peoples' home at Rudow, where she died aged eighty-seven. I liked us being close to each other and would regularly go there for lunch.

When I met my old colleague boxer Adolf Kleinholdermann around this time he made me an unusual offer: he had started up a small peanut-butter factory and would I like to buy him out. After the end of his active career as a sparring partner, he had emigrated to the United States. His wife could not stand the New World and told him: ‘Adolf, I am a Berliner, I want to go home.' With the peanut-butter recipe in his pocket, back they came. This favourite American spread was quite unknown to us, and Kleinholdermann's monopoly, which he had set up as soon as he arrived home, was now overwhelmed by demand from the Americans. The enterprise appealed to me, and so I became probably Germany's second supplier of peanut butter.