Towards noon on 8 May 1945, it is true that the camp loudspeaker quite unexpectedly announced to us that the war was over. Germany, it said, had ‘unconditionally surrendered’. Sometime afterwards the sentries appeared also to have heard the news. They celebrated the event in their own way, by firing their ammunition off into the air. For us, this was not without its dangers, because ricochets were buzzing through the air and bullets came through the wooden walls of the barracks. We, the conquered, meanwhile, lay on the floor of the barracks or on the sandy ground of the camp, scrabbling for safety on the ground. Hopefully it was for the last time.
The camp complex included a sports ground, at the edge of which the convalescent officers lay in Finnish tents. I often visited them to get a change and to exchange ideas. They were waiting to be transported away. No-one dared to think that some would be released and sent home. Perhaps one small Hauptmann would be lucky. Both his lower legs had been amputated below the knee, and he had thus become even smaller than he had otherwise been at his scant 5 foot 2 inches. He moved around on his hands and knees and made tiny leaps just like a sick frog.
Among the closed circle of the officers there was still the accustomed politeness. You addressed each other with Herr, whereas elsewhere it was soon the fact that you were addressed as du by a ‘class-conscious proletarian’. In the company of those officers was a girl of 20, pretty as a picture, dazzlingly blonde, with bright blue eyes. She was the daughter of General Lasch, the commandant of Festung Königsberg, who had surrendered there. I wondered where and how such a girl could have survived the first assault.
The Thorn camp was so gigantic that, with my limited sphere of movement, I was not able to get an idea of the extent of it. It was said that 30,000 men lay within its barbed wire fences. Every few day transports of ambulant prisoners left. They had been gathered into groups of a few hundred men and had left the camp. In Thorn, incidentally, I had met another man from Stockerau by the name of Franz Heinz. We had exchanged addresses and I had given him a slip of paper for my relatives, as I suspected that he, because he was only a private soldier, would be released earlier than I would, because I was an officer. It actual fact he was released as early as 1945 and my parents received the news I was alive only on Christmas Eve, 24 December.
As it turned out, the next destination of the marching column was Graudenz, some 55 kilometres away. But the march had to be made on foot. There could have been 500 to 1,000 men who set off, after the fashion of the Red army, each section consisting of five men. At the head there marched some 30 officers from Oberstleutnant to Leutnant with quite varying amounts of baggage. The gentlemen who had surrendered and had been taken prisoner uninjured had generally a lot of baggage. I and others only possessed the little we had been able to salvage from the military hospital in Danzig and had been able to supplement during the course of the following weeks. I had only the underclothes I was wearing, my uniform tunic and trousers, a haversack and canteen and an overcoat. Added to those, I believe, were a toothbrush, my pay-book, my identification disc and a couple of photos in my old plastic wallet.
Franzl Manhart had already been allocated to an earlier transport and we had therefore been separated. Another comrade whom I had found in Thorn I had lost again. He was Dr Walter Rath, a Viennese whose home address was Hütteldorferstrasse 333. Rath had studied Latin and Greek, was an educated Mittelschule teacher, but in the bad times before 1938 had been unemployed. He had therefore become a leader in the Labour Service. At first he was in the Austrian Labour Service and afterwards in the Reich Labour Service. Towards the end of the war he had been transferred to the Wehrmacht as a Feldmeister and had thus become a Leutnant. In the hospital barracks in Thorn he had been in the next bed.
In about 1960 I met him again in the Salzburg officers’ mess. He had transferred into the Austrian Bundesheer and then, as a major, he was commandant of the Telegraph Battalion. He regretted that he had not met me years earlier. He had had trouble in proving his officer’s rank, something to which I could have attested, at least for our time in Thorn, when we were still wearing badges of rank.
The highest-ranking officer and therefore the right-hand wing man in the first unit was Oberstleutnant der Reserve Dr Josef Deckwitz. He was a lawyer from Münster in Westphalia. From then on until I was released, with some interruptions, I was always together with Deckwitz. I shall speak of him many more times. Although by age, he was born in 1896, and could have been my father, we had a close comradely relationship with each other. I owe him much for expanding my horizons. Deckwitz had been a flak officer. He had a huge ribcage and possessed a loud voice. He had, he said, been much in demand as a defence counsel in criminal cases and his legal pleas were something worth hearing.
Once, he said, in a trial before a jury, knowing that from midnight of the next day an amnesty would come into force, he had pleaded for many hours to benefit his client. The court, he said, had patiently tolerated his constant repetitions. Before 1933 Deckwitz had been a Social Democrat. His wife was the niece of an SPD, if not a Communist, member of the Reichstag who had emigrated to the Soviet Union. (After graduating to my doctorate in 1952, I visited him in Münster and was delighted to see him again. His wife was interesting and clever. The great misfortune of the two of them was that their son, their only child, had ‘completely ruined himself’ with drink.)
Although many healthy men capable of marching were in the column, it was still an unparalleled trail of misery. The armed sentries walked on all four sides of the column, but took careful notice of the many weak and feeble men. The distance of 55 kilometres, which healthy troops could have covered in one day’s march, was tackled in three stages. Half was done on the first day, something that made demands on many men, leading to exhaustion. The other half was tackled in two days’ marches each of 12 kilometres. Obviously the weakest men did not have the strength to walk further. I had recovered to such an extent, and had in the meantime learned again to stretch my left leg, that I managed all right. The worry of every man was always not to drop out of the column or be left behind, in order not to be shot by the guards, as had often happened. We spent the nights in barns on farms. If the sentries had not just dug out some women and the women were not screaming out for help, you could get a bit of rest and sleep well in the straw.
On the first day’s march we passed through the little town of Kulmsee. It had obviously been taken without any fighting. We were stared at by the Polish civilian population without visible hostility. I saw it as a particular irony of fate that on the last day of the march we moved along the very that five months before had been one of the roads along which we had been retreating. That was before we had crossed the Vistula over the ice bridge to the south-west of Graudenz. It was a particular sign of our having been beaten. In Graudenz, so word had gone round in the meantime, the transports were being assembled that would take us by railway into the interior of Russia. In Graudenz we were gaped at by the civilian population. They were evidently more hostile than the population of Kulmsee, but there were no incidents. Our destination in Graudenz was a barracks complex. We were placed in groups of many men, in completely empty rooms. But they were dry and everyone had enough room to be able to stretch out. We remained in the barracks for two or three days and nights. Then it was time for us to march to the railway station to be loaded on to the trains.