After the meal I realised that Fritz Seyerl, a staff vet and Sudeten German, had not eaten with us. No one could explain why he was already full, but he was occasionally taken out of the camp by the Russians as a vet. So we thought he must have already eaten. On closer questioning he replied, after the meal, clenching both hands into fists, Solche Kavernen. He meant the state of the lungs of the horse he had been treating, and at the slaughtering and inspection of which he had been present.
My first trip out beyond the camp fence may have been in January or February. In the camp a comrade had died who had to be buried outside the camp. Herr Kahl, the camp leader, took me with him a few steps outside the camp. There the grave had already been dug. It was by a hedge. The body was laid in the flat grave. Oberleutnant Kahl said an ‘Our Father’, then the grave was filled in. Then we went back to the camp. We were the few prisoners who were capable only of working inside.
My last recollection of Holstein dates from March or April 1946. At that time we had received orders to erect round the camp a fence that was to some extent permanent. The Russians provided posts of over two metres high and many rolls of barbed wire. The posts were dug in or even concreted in, and then the wire was stretched over them. Stretching the wire with a tool designed for the purpose, I was able to get to work again for the first time. Slowly I felt my strength returning, even if I was still only capable of working inside. I even felt a certain satisfaction when I saw how tightly I had stretched the wire after the staples had been hammered in. But by the next day the tension had slackened because the material was already over-stretched.
The man directing the work was a Russian captain by the name of Mironov. He was the friendliest Russian that I met in captivity, not yet 30 years old, good-natured and kind. Blue-eyed and black-haired, he was smaller than me. He spoke a little German and was polite, almost comradely. But the notorious Skogo damoi, i.e. ‘home soon’, was no more convincing from his mouth than it was from other Russians. Doubtless it was decently and sincerely meant.
Meanwhile, we certainly were not going home soon. Although one day in April, we officers, with what little baggage we had, were loaded up on to lorries. But I was to encounter one more grotesque episode in the Holstein camp. For years I had carried in my right hand top pocket a marching compass. It was the compass that had, in February 1945, prevented me from going in the wrong direction with my men. But then I thought that the possession of it might lead people to think that I was planning to escape. It was too risky to keep it, even if my physical condition ruled out any thought of escaping. On one occasion as I went into the unused building in the camp where there were various types of optical equipment, I simply hid it. I decided I would certainly not need it any more. In the event that it was found on me during a frisking, it would lay me open to extreme unpleasantness.
But I was plain astonished when, a few weeks later, that very compass of mine was offered to me ‘for sale’. A Landser had been rooting about in the building and had found my compass. He decided that it was very likely that an officer might be interested in acquiring it as such an instrument would be necessary in any escape plan. Thanking him, I declined, without batting an eyelid.
Soon afterwards our miserable time in Königsberg came to an end. We officers were transferred back to the Georgenburg camp. Of course, once more we were completely unsure as to what was going to happen to us. Indeed, right up to the last day of our captivity, there was complete uncertainty, and unending anxiety. By then, the spring of 1946, the general situation had to a certain extent stabilised, if not improved.
Our return to the ‘main camp’ of Georgenburg, which was probably better organised than the Holstein camp, seemed at any rate to be advantageous to us. In fact the organisation and accommodation in the many barracks did indeed seem to be better. That was evident even as we arrived. We were subjected to a thorough ‘frisking’. My pay book and my New Testament were taken away from me. Losing my pay book felt to me just like losing my identity. From then I no longer had any document that could show who I was. I had nothing to show my name and rank, my date of birth, nor any other important dates. The seizure of my New Testament also hit me hard. It was the small pocket edition with the psalter I had received as a present from Father. It had his dedication, ‘A thousand shall fall beside thee, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee’. From then I had to summon up from my memory the consolation I had often felt in reading it. But I had to continue to trust in my Father’s dedication. The Russian guards evidently had orders to confiscate all written and printed material. Even my request for them to leave me with my New Testament ‘for cigarette papers’ met with no success.
We new arrivals were also given an immediate medical examination. The examination was not even ‘purely clinical’, but really consisted in viewing the naked prisoners and pinching their backsides in order to determine the degree of dystrophy. Since I was extremely emaciated, I could not be put down as capable of working. I was quite happy about that. But I considered myself to be even more fortunate not to be placed in the tuberculosis barracks. The ‘pointed’ noses of the men who were in the process of slowly dying there, beyond recovery, were frightening enough.
In the spacious barracks where we Holsteiners joined the other officers in the camp, there was at last enough room for an individual to lead an existence that was halfway human. We slept on single beds placed in the room either individually, against a wall, or in twos next to each other. Every bed was provided with a straw mattress and a blanket. Among the inmates of the barracks I was reunited with a whole series of acquaintances. Above all was Oberstleutnant Joseph ‘Job’ Deckwitz, whose Obermann in the bunk I was to be for a long time.
Another sign of the organisation in force was the fact that we were recorded on a register. That involved, at least for all officers, filling out questionnaires of several pages. Everyone had to answer 42 questions concerning his personal dates and, above all, the activities in which he had been engaged in the military. Our answers, in conjunction with denunciations by informers, provided the material that served as documentary evidence in the many war crimes trials that resulted in their cursory sentences of 25 years’ hard labour. From the start I had provided true information. For instance I had not concealed my rank as an officer, as many had done.
Even in the camp at Thorn, when informally that was still possible, officers who had ‘lost’ themselves in the ranks had acknowledged their rank. The constant fear of discovery, by comrades or fellow-countrymen, in which those men lived, would have prevented me from taking such a step. That was quite apart too from the fact that it would not have been in line with my natural honesty. As long as I had been with my unit nothing had happened that could not be militarily justified or that could have qualified as a war crime. So I was confident that no undeserved fate would overtake me. In actual fact I had had nothing to fear.
Even during our first stay in Georgenburg in the summer of 1945, the heads of men and other ranks had been shaven. What we took to be a measure intended to humiliate us, had obviously been necessary due to the completely unsatisfactory hygienic conditions. Many others suffered under such degradation. However, I resigned myself to the measure as a fateful means of enforcing conformity. I can still remember how many of us looked at each other in surprise. The disappearance of their hair had significantly altered the appearance of many men. The shape of the skull became a particular distinguishing feature. But we did not have to be subjected to that procedure a second time.