Today I can no longer remember whether the railway in the area occupied by the Russians had at that time already been converted to the Russian gauge or whether this was not yet the case. But I do know that 20 men were stuffed into one goods wagon. Half way between the floor and the roof a shelf had been placed on both sides of the wagon doors. There we lay on the bare wood. There was no kind of comfort, neither straw nor hay, to relieve the hardness of the floor. The only necessary luxury was the availability of a hole in the floor of the wagon, some 20mm in diameter, that served for the purposes of defecation. It was a simple solution, but an unpleasant one for those who, like me, were lying near to the hole. Fortunately it was not necessary for urinating. That was done through the open wagon door.
The transport train left Graudenz about 20 June. Nobody knew what its destination was. The rumour was that we were heading for Murmansk. It was one of the many topics of conversation in our officers’ wagon. Nobody had been on the Murmansk front. But many of us knew what had happened there in the First World War. 70,000 of the German prisoners of war and 20,000 of the Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war set to work on building the Murmansk railway had died. But as things turned out everything was quite different than the Parolen, that is the rumour, would have it.
After a relatively short journey, via Deutsch-Eylau and Allenstein, the transport came to a halt. It was the time before and during the ‘Potsdam Conference’. That was to be the last summit conference of the ‘Big Three’ of the anti-Hitler coalition of the Second World War. It was held in the Schloss Cäcilienhof, in Potsdam, from 17 July to 2 August 1945 and was between Truman, Stalin and Churchill or Attlee. The result of that conference was the ‘Potsdam Agreement’. In that agreement, subject to a final settlement of the territorial questions in a peace treaty, the town of Königsberg and the adjacent district of East Prussia were placed under the administration of the USSR. The border had hitherto existed between the USSR and Poland and ran approximately along a line between the towns of Braunsberg and Goldap. The area to the north was allocated to the USSR. For our transport and us it resulted in our destination being the part of East Prussia occupied by the USSR. We were not sent further on into the interior of the Soviet Union.
The train was on the tracks for five weeks. I recall the summer of 1945 as being very hot. During those five weeks it did not rain on one single day. For a fortnight no one was allowed to leave the wagon. Only after that, during the remaining three weeks, did the guards allow us during the day to camp in a meadow alongside the train beside the tracks. Being allowed to do this made our stay more bearable than the first fortnight had been. The constricted conditions and the heat had thoroughly irritated us prisoners. Many of them worked themselves up into a proper fury. In our wagon, too, hostile words were exchanged. For instance, men who were on the lower bunks were disturbed by the feet of those lying above them. One man complained that, when eating it was so dark that ‘you couldn’t even find the way to your mouth’. He who said it was a Leutnant Dr Hess from Frankfurt am Main. He worked as a translator at IG Farben, spoke fluent English, French and Spanish and had some interesting things to tell about his job. Hess was my neighbour and we were both lying directly beside the notorious hole.
Then there was a Hauptmann der Reserve Stölzner. He came, I believe, from Upper or Central Franconia. He was about 40 years old, and told of an elder brother who during the First World War had been taken prisoner by the Russians and had been sent to Siberia. From there he had fled to China and had attached himself as a military adviser to Marshal Chiang-Kai-Shek. His brother had married a Chinese woman, a fact that led in the wagon to a debate over the virtues of the women of another race. With the most earnest face Stolzner told of a peculiarity of Chinese women. His assertion caused among some men a short astounded amazement, until the laughter of the other men told them that Stolzner had been leading them ‘up the garden path’.
As one of the naive and, moreover, still visibly fearful comrades, I recall Staff Paymaster Uhland. He was a descendant of the poet of the Schwäbische Kunde, but evidently was not so fearless as his ancestor was supposed to have been. While the war was still going on, rumours had been circulating that the poor quality soap there was at that time had partly been produced from human bones. That was something that seemed completely incredible. But then after the war had ended, assertions concerning the atrocities practised in German concentration camps were doing the rounds. It is true that our fear of being shot had in the meantime abated. But the future was completely unknown and it seemed quite probable that we would be consigned to years of forced labour under inhuman conditions. It was therefore black humour when, in order to worry Herr Uhland, a man in the wagon asserted that the German officers who had been taken prisoner were going to be taken and turned into soap, and that well nourished paymasters, such as Uhland, would be made into toilet soap!
During the time we were kept in the transports there were some deaths. The causes of death could not be established. Since there were no lists in existence, the only responsibility of the guards was to replenish the number of prisoners being transported. That was achieved by the guards swarming out and grabbing male German civilians, of whom there were still a few, there in Masuria. During the first period of our captivity in the East there were no lists and the prisoners were not recorded by name. The many who died of epidemics and hunger were never recorded. In my opinion the real reasons that many years later, long after 1955, when the last prisoners were released, that people believed in the existence of so-called Schweigelager. Meanwhile, it is a fact that one in three soldiers who had come into the custody of the USSR did not survive his captivity, and never returned. From my personal experience I attribute that to the reasons I have mentioned above and to the wholly insufficient medical care which they received initially.
Before the summer of 1945 I had not been acquainted with East Prussia. If there had not been the sadness that we experienced at the loss of a land through which we slowly travelled, it would have been a pleasure to see this friendly and cultivated land. From the train, as it travelled past the settlements and even the town of Allenstein much seemed to have remained intact. But everywhere was depopulated. Only the summer sunshine stopped the landscape from giving a ghostly impression. Wistfulness seized the sensitive ones among us, as we travelled through the station at Tharau, because many knew the song Ännchen von Tharau.
I must mention one more stop in Deutsch-Eylau, where several thousand prisoners of war were encamped in a meadow. It was there, and not in Graudenz, that the final allocation and assembly of the transports for the East took place. In that meadow, as elsewhere, the officers were separated. It was there, completely surprised, that I met some gentlemen from our Division. They were Major Östreich, the Divisional Adjutant, and Hauptmann Franssen, the commander of the signals battalion.
From the latter I learnt that the Division, before the surrender, had got to Bornholm by ship in a fairly good condition. They had thought themselves to be safe, when two Russian torpedo boats appeared. The Danish island was occupied by the Russians, and all the Germans were taken prisoner. Östreich did indeed know that Regiment 7 under Oberstleutnant von Garn on the destroyer Karl Galster had not made for Bornholm, but had set course for the Danish mainland. But it was not known whether the destroyer, and with it the remnants of the regiment, had got through. Östreich, Franssen, and the other Bornholmers had until then been able to keep all of their baggage. They had evidently until then not been searched and not been plundered. A not so pleasant memory is that none of them offered me even a cigarette. Compared with them I had nothing. I enjoyed smoking again, ever since the senior registrar Johanssen in Danzig gave me a cigarette. He had said, with a smile, that I could forget my fear of not being able to smoke after the injury to my lung. But I could once again have that pleasure.