During the next few hours, our rooms were entered again and again by other Russians who behaved very differently. Many threatened us with their weapons. But, in many, you could see something like pity. Young members of the Komsomol, perhaps 16 years old, were the worst. One waved his machine-pistol slowly from bed to bed and then stopped in front of Franz Manhardt, aiming at his head. I can still see Franz’s profile with the questioning expression on his face, especially the detail of the eyelid of his left eye opening and closing while the young Russian – it seemed to last minutes, but it could only have been seconds – had him in his sights. I can still see too how another held a pistol, a German 08, at Oberleutnant Nabert’s temple. I can see Nabert turning his eyes upwards in order, in the last second of his life, to look his murderer in the face. But on both occasions the Russians did not pull the trigger. From that I concluded that they obviously did not have a general order to kill wounded men, nor particularly officers.
Almost amusing, when compared with the situations mentioned above, in which you were hovering between life and death, was how our watches were taken away. They were collected up, in a procedure to which the main interest of the individual members of the Red Army seemed to be directed, as they said, Uhr ist? Because I had left my service watch behind at my unit when I was wounded, I no longer had a watch, and had to try to express this with gestures of helplessness. That seemed to be incomprehensible to one of the busy plunderers, because, with his index finger on my forehead, he pushed my head back on to the straw filled pillow. Officers also came into our room. I can clearly remember a tall, blond young major who spoke German and was an artilleryman. When he asked how I had been wounded, I replied, to please him, ‘by artillery’, which in fact did please him.
In conversation one of us said that the war was over for us, to which the major replied that it was only just beginning. In actual fact, at that time many Russians were convinced that with the downfall of Hitler’s Germany the capitalist Western powers would then turn against Russia. I found it to be more than a friendly gesture when a captain, before the officers moved on, brought out a bottle of plundered schnapps from his overcoat and reached it over to me in bed. Of course none of us exhausted wounded men would have been capable even of taking one gulp from it. So I hid the bottle in my bunk under the straw mattress.
After some hours of continually being visited by Russians we were pleased that the last assault had passed off so lightly for us helpless men. The fact that we had not yet received any food that day was unimportant. Indeed none of us felt hungry or thirsty. After all we had escaped with our lives. We also did not see anything of the medics who had stayed behind. We understood that none of them risked coming up to us on the second storey. Similarly, little was to be seen of the two doctors. I still know their names and can remember what they looked like. One of them was the Munich surgeon Dr Stadel-Eichel. He was compact in appearance and gave the impression of being busy. The other was a senior doctor from the Greifenwald University Clinic by the name of Dr Wolf. He was tall, slim and with a relaxed manner.
Meanwhile, there was no question of a ‘normalisation of conditions’ so soon after the hospital was handed over. German shells were still exploding. However, a new development was that the unmistakable smell of burning was spreading through the building. The air in the house was thickening into fumes heavy with smoke. Nobody knew whether the building had been set on fire by German gunfire, or had been set alight by the Russians, or perhaps even by the Poles. It later turned out that it was arson. In fact it was said that, of the 800 seriously wounded men who had remained behind, 150 lost their lives in that fire.
The saviour of the men in our ward was Franz Manhart. It must have been after mid-day and the fumes were apparently preventing the Russians from moving about freely in the building. Franzl took advantage of the opportunity to seek out a way that we could save ourselves. He succeeded in discovering a staircase close to our ward. Although wide, the stairway itself was blocked with the furniture that had been in the rooms before the hospital was set up. Nevertheless, enough space had been left for one man to get through between the banister and the furniture. For us it was a matter of leaving our beds and struggling through that exit to freedom. For Eberhard Nabert and me – I can only remember the two of us – it was a risky undertaking. Neither of us had left his bed since we had been wounded. I was so enfeebled that I could scarcely stand. With little time, I did not know what I should take with me. I can still remember that I only had on my collarless soldier’s shirt, and that I put my field tunic on over it. I needed both arms to hold on to the wall and to the banister.
Under Franzl’s direction we managed to get out into the open and into a sort of yard. There were remarkable scenes that I can only recall happening in a blur. Wounded men who seemed to have just got out into the open were lying on the bare earth and only crawling or scrabbling about. Others were being taken by helpers, including Russian soldiers, to an undetermined destination. Russians seemed to be still plundering and arguing over plunder. One of them had several wristwatches on his arm. Smoke was still belching from the building. Flames could not yet be seen. The following night, according to an eyewitness account from the book mentioned above, the ‘TH’ went up in flames. It shared the fate of many buildings that were destroyed by fire only after they had been taken over by the occupation forces.
Free of smoke and fumes was a single storey building that had served as a physics laboratory, as could be seen from the wide windows reaching to the roof. That area had similarly been set up with basic bunks that were all occupied of course. Because of the fire it had been necessary to fill each bed with two or three wounded men. I had the good fortune to have to share such a bed with only one comrade. In the next three days and nights it was our refuge. My comrade must have been wounded in the head, because they had bandaged his skull in such a way that only one eye, his nose, and his mouth could still be seen. When he spoke, he spoke incoherently, but soon I could tell, at least by his accent, that he must be from Vienna. When during the night he was rambling in his coma, I began to recognise him more and more, and finally I was able to identify him as a comrade from my own regiment. He was Leutnant Robert Kelca, who had relieved me in the summer of 1944 as second orderly officer with Major von Garn. It was a sad, but unusual reunion.
It was dreadful that German women and girls had hidden themselves between and under the emergency beds. Of course, the Russians noticed. Again and again a Russian would come past, track down a woman and wave or drag her out. According to their temperament, the women would be led out of the room by their violators either resisting or resigned. The next day or the day after that the Russians were looking for men who had not been wounded who might have been able to go to ground among us. One Russian went from bed to bed and ordered, Aufstehen, which for most of us was not possible, whereupon he shouted, Schlaffen, after which we were allowed to stretch out again. I have to say that no healthy man was among the wounded. That was on Easter Sunday.
Women continued to hide in the room, and when their torturers had let them go, returned to us again. A certain Friedl obviously felt particularly attached to me. On Easter Sunday, after something dreadful had apparently happened to her, she came back into the room, visibly overflowing with emotion. Without a word she dashed over to me.