Only the clothes and the weapons were ferried across the river. The men had to swim as it would have taken too long, making it very risky. Nine of them never made it.
We pushed on toward the American zone. Four times we ran into Soviet patrols or Czech militia. We had to kill them in order to survive. The enemy troops were getting thicker every day, but the closer we came to Bavaria the more resolved we became to arrive there. We no longer cared to bypass the roadblocks or the enemy camps but attacked them, pouring lead as if we had an inexhaustible supply of ammunition. We were only forty-two men when we finally reached Bavaria at Wunsiedel. Three hundred and seventeen of our comrades had fallen so that we might arrive home.
Three miles from the border we encountered our first American patroclass="underline" a jeepload of young men led by a lieutenant. Clean, neatly dressed, and obviously well fed, they were sitting around the jeep with a mounted MG having dinner. Dinner with a record player in the grass blaring the “Stuka Lied,” the lively march of the German dive bombers.
We had the Americans like sitting ducks, but I saw no reason for killing them the way we had killed every Russian who blocked our way. I decided to pay them a visit, alone and unarmed.
Leaving Eisner, Schulze, and an NCO to watch the development, I left the shrubbery and walked up to the group. The soldiers stared at me with astonishment and reached for their guns. The lieutenant turned off the record player. He was a handsome young man of about thirty, tall and blond, just like some of us Teutons. He wore sunglasses which he removed to have a better look at me.
“I see you are having quite a picnic here, Lieutenant,” I spoke to him nonchalantly, gesturing toward their rifles that almost poked me in the belly. “You don’t want to shoot me, do you? The war is over.”
“Who the hell are you?” he blurted out glancing at his men, then back toward me. “What are you doing here?” I thought God bless my mother who had always insisted that I should learn English.
“What could a German do in his own country?” I asked him in return. “I am on my way home.”
“Who are you?”
“Only a German officer. Coming home from far away.”
“How come you speak English so well?”
“We are quite civilized people, Lieutenant. As you see, some of us can even speak English.”
I noticed that they were completely taken aback by my sudden appearance and for some time the officer seemed at loss as to what to say or do.
“Are you carrying any weapon?” he asked finally.
“Only a pocketknife.”
“Hand it over!” he ordered me briskly. I knew he said that only to say something. I handed him my knife and he motioned his men to frisk me. The result set him at ease. He offered me a cigarette, lighted one for himself, then taking a notebook from the jeep he began to rattle off a number of questions.
“Your name, rank, and unit?”
“Hans Josef Wagemueller,” I obliged. “Obersturmführer, twenty-first special partisanjaeger commando.”
“What’s that?” a freckled, lanky soldier interposed.
“Guerrilla hunter,” the lieutenant explained and I bowed slightly. “That’s right.”
“Your last combat station?”
“Liberec, Czechoslovakia.”
“Have you killed any Americans?” a squat little corporal cut in.
I smiled. “If there were any American troops serving in the Red army, then I sure as hell did.”
The lieutenant made a quick, impatient gesture. “He said he was in Czechoslovakia,” he said to the corporal.
“Wehrmacht or the SS?” he now demanded to know. I could barely conceal my amusement. Only the SS had Obersturmführers. The Wehrmacht had lieutenants. I shrugged.
“Wehrmacht, SS, Luftwaffe—what’s the difference?”
“There’s a helluva difference, buddy,” he snapped. “The Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe go home but we hang them SS cutthroats good and high.”
He extended his hand. “Show me your pay book.”
“I haven’t got any.”
“How come?”
“Well, I just figured that our paymaster’s office might be closed for a while, so I threw my pay book away.”
He frowned. “You like jokes, don’t you?” he remarked curtly and turned to the squat little corporal who wore a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. “Joe, you had better call headquarters.”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Lieutenant,” I suggested mildly and lifted a protesting hand toward their guns, which were coming up once more. “Please do not threaten me. At this very moment there are at least a dozen rifles pointing at you. My men are expert marksmen and they are a bit nervous. I don’t want to see you killed—unless in self-defense.”
The soldiers paled visibly. The lieutenant ran his tongue over his lips but his confusion did not last long. My troops began to emerge from the woods with their guns providing the necessary dramatic undertone. Their chins dropped, then their weapons. The lieutenant began to unbuckle his holster but I stopped him.
“Oh, never mind your gun, Lieutenant. We don’t want to shoot at each other. The war is over.”
We took them, jeep, guns, and record player back into the woods. “Nicht schiessen, Kamerad,” squat little Joe muttered in broken German. “Don’t shoot.”
Somewhat bitterly I acknowledged that even the SS cutthroats could quickly turn into comrades when the business end of the submachine gun had turned the other way. The face of the lieutenant revealed sheer agony. He must have thought that we were going to kill them right then and there. I motioned the Americans to sit down on a fallen log and told them briefly about the surrender of Colonel Steinmetz and our odyssey across Czechoslovakia. They seemed impressed.
“Are you telling me that the Russians just gunned them down under a flag of truce?” the lieutenant asked. “It is a helluva way of treating prisoners of war.”
“Indeed, Lieutenant?” I queried him sharply. “Do you consider hanging more sophisticated?”
“We aren’t going to hang anyone without a fair trial,” he protested.
“Can you call a trial of the vanquished by his victors a fair trial, Lieutenant? I presume you will be holding your fair trials in some neutral country to ensure their fairness… in Geneva, for instance. We had been listening to your broadcasts and know your intentions about the so-called war criminals. A new class of the doomed; everyone who served in the SS now belongs… If you speak of the Jew-haters or those who preferred to guard concentration camps instead of fighting the Red army, you might make a point. But do you know that on Hitler’s order every German soldier serving in the rear was free to choose front-line duty. And if a man demanded to be sent forward, his commanding officer had no right to turn him down. Do you think we front-line soldiers did not sneer at the swine who wanted to survive the war by flaying Jews a thousand miles from the trenches? I was an officer of the SS, Lieutenant, and I was fighting terrorists whose mere shadows would have sent you screaming into the nearest mental institution. They were not concentration camp inmates but armed insurgents who spat on all the game rules. Now just tell me, you immaculate American lieutenant, what will you do to guerrillas captured in your rear, wearing civilian clothes, guerrillas who blow up bridges, derail trains, stab your buddies in the back, or toss hand grenades into your officer’s mess? Won’t you hang them, Lieutenant?”
“But the SS… during the Ardennes offensive…”
“I’ve heard of them, Lieutenant,” I cut him short. “Some bastards murdered a group of American prisoners at Malmedy. If it is true, then hunt them down. Hang them for all I care. But then go and hang some of your fellow Americans who gunned down German prisoners with their hands in the air. Just look around a bit and you will find them too. You shouldn’t play the holy man here. You had your Chicago and AI Capone long before the SS was born. In the meantime, you had better remember that among us were thousands of enlisted men, ordinary people who had been drafted and put into SS uniforms. Or do you think they should have protested against their uniforms? How about the SS tank drivers, the signal men, the artillerists? Would you consider them war criminals? Would you hang them all, American lieutenant?”