At that time we did not yet know that our dear Rudi had been called to his heavenly home six months earlier. He had been killed in action on 10 April 1945 at Haubinda/Thuringia, between Sonnenberg and Coburg. Even though it is difficult not to have him with us any more, may you nevertheless be consoled by the words that we put on his obituary notice: ‘I have loved thee from everlasting to everlasting, therefore I have drawn thee to myself from pure goodness’. We cannot doubt that God, even if he has laid heavy suffering upon us, has shown Rudi the greatest blessing by calling him home out of this life into a better world. Be consoled with this, and pray that God may keep us all in true faith, so that one day we may meet our dear Rudi again and all be reunited in glory. We are glad to have news from you at last and long for you to come home. We have been here since 20 May 1946.
I received the third card on 16 February 1947. In it were more details about what had happened to the family. On 15 December 1946 it had been Father’s induction. In Braunau, the card said, there was no grammar school, only a high school. Liesl was in primary school and in addition she was doing a Latin course. Otherwise, it said, many things were better there than in Stockerau. They were not able to continue to live there because of the bomb damage. In Korneuburg both the vicarage and church were totally destroyed on 20 March 1945. Frau Spindler, Rudi and Christl were killed. ‘Father came home on 9 March 1945. The burial of Frau Spindler and her children was his first official duty. On 2 March 1945, after a day’s leave, Rudi left home for the last time. Your Father never saw him. Now he is resting so close to places we know so well. He is in Kreis Hildburgshausen, near to the Gleichberge. Fräulein Weidmann has visited his grave. It is being loyally taken care of by the teachers and pupils of a rural grammar school. May God protect you and send you home soon’.
I deeply regretted the loss of my brother, companion of my youth who was always so cheerful, with whom, particularly during the last years, I had had such an excellent understanding. Aunt Ilse too, deeply disturbed, had informed Mother that Jörg, the father of her three children, had been killed at the end of the war. So, after the death of Uncle Erich Scheiderbauer, in November 1942 at Lake Ilmen, three men from our closer family had been killed in the war. In the light of what had happened to them, at the same time I felt myself to have been unjustly treated. Because those three had not been so often and so continuously in mortal danger as I had, in all probability I felt it should have been me killed before them. Not they, but I had been held and protected by the invisible hand of God. I had felt it over me so often during the war and in my captivity.
Nevertheless, I knew that my good parents and my little sister were alive and had a roof over their heads. I knew also that they did not have to suffer hunger. All things being well, I knew that I would be able to return home to them. Compared with many other comrades who had not received any news from their dear ones for a long time, things were all right with me. It had been two years since I had heard anything from the family, and everything might have been a lot worse! The postal connection, which was functioning again, even if only very unreliably and incompletely, was a contributory factor in strengthening the new feeling of life that I felt within myself.
I believed that at any rate after my happy return home, a completely new and completely different part of my life would begin. Everything that I had gone through would drop away from me without leaving behind any noticeable traces. It is true that soon after I returned home I realised my mistake. But at that time I did not see it. The Antifa propaganda had raised in me the expectation that the future of Austria lay in a form of democracy under Socialist leadership. As a person interested in politics, I might play some part. The fascist dictatorship was dead and the restoration of earlier conditions, i.e. those which I had known in the Third Reich, were out of the question.
In the camp there was a modest ‘cultural life’, in the organisation of which Dr Deckwitz was involved. One day a competition took place. It resulted in an exhibition of artistic creations such as drawings and literary productions. Few took part, and interest in it was small. I can remember none of the works exhibited apart from my own productions. Those were two poems, one of which was a love poem. It spoke of longing for an unknown girl. I know that in it I was no longer thinking of Gisela, but of another girl, unknown to me, to whom I would give my love. The other poems had been entitled ‘On looking at the last photograph from the old times’. It said that everything that I felt when I looked at my uniform, like a dream, was lying behind me. Everything was past and gone like the glimmer of joy on my cheeks, and now everything was new. ‘Now everything is new’ was the last line of that simple poem. My poems caused no sensation. They only received one vote each, from Dr Deckwitz.
The main attraction of our ‘cultural life’ was the orchestra. During the course of time they had succeeded in getting hold of instruments and in forming an ensemble of about 20 men. The conductor was the trained conductor Kurt Forst. He looked quite pleasant, and had a gentle appearance. The musicians had the advantage of not having to go on work details. They also had special clothing, namely a kind of shirt that they wore, in Russian fashion, over their trousers. It was made of heavy material and replaced the uniform tunic. Apart from the musicians and the tenor, Benno Stapenbeck, only the leading camp officials, Gless and Schubert, had such shirts. The last two also wore newly tailored breeches to indicate their positions of importance within the camp.
The orchestra gave occasional concerts, some even outside the camp for the Russians. It was also involved in the so-called Bunte Abende. As had been the case in frontline entertainment, individual artists of different kinds, mainly nonprofessionals, did their bit. Such a non-professional was Gottfried Stadler from Timelkam near Vöcklabruck. As he had already shown in his unit, he was a gifted compere. The programmes for these Bunte Abende were very mixed. Of course they also appealed to the emotions, for instance when the tenor sang the Italian song of the Chianti wine. It was popular at that time, as were other songs that 20 years later would be called ‘schmaltzy’.
Gottfried Stadler had been assigned to a work detail involved in unloading duties at the Insterburg railway station. He and his comrades worked for months on end loading on to trains of Russian gauge for transport to Russia, vehicles that had been plundered or had been requisitioned by the Russians. Many a time, with anger or shock, he said that, from what he saw every day, the whole of eastern Germany under Russian occupation must be in the process of being plundered. Sewing machines and bicycles, crockery and other household goods, furniture and machines, pianos and such like from private households were all there. But the objects were mostly in a poor state, having stood for weeks or months on end out in the open. They seemed to have been randomly and aimlessly snatched together. One day he told us of the stock from the Weimar National Library. Unbelievably, he had held in his hand a folder with line drawings by Goethe. Other museum objects too, confiscated by the victors, were there in Insterburg, passing through German hands for the last time.