“We hear that you are going to deliver us to the Russians.”
The war ended and nothing returned to normal. The river of human events is so very easily diverted by even the smallest interruption. When something as cataclysmic as World War II happens, the river can veer very far from its original course. Every aspect of human life changes. As the song says, you can never go back to before.
While the fighting was still going on, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met at Yalta to discuss what the new world would look like. They decided that they would divide Germany into four separate zones of occupation. The Americans, the British, the French and the Russians would each control one of them. It’s worth noting that at the same time, the Germans were making their own plans for how they would control the Allied territories when they won. Global politics would be very different today had that occurred. They lost, though, and the once mighty Third Reich, plans and all, was taken apart. To this day, there are still 35,000 American troops permanently stationed in Germany.
The Battle of the Bulge was over by the end of January of 1945. The war, however, wasn’t. My father and his division continued to push the Germans back towards Berlin. As they took over more and more territory, they started to see what life behind the front had been like.
“As we went deeper into Germany, we got more and more glimpses of what had been going on behind the German lines. One day the infantry liberated a camp full of Russian prisoners of war. We were driving our jeep slowly in a column of infantry walking on each side of the road. The infantry had captured a German prisoner and they asked us to take him off their hands. We sat him on the flat hood of the jeep, where we could cover him from his back.
When the infantry opened the gates of the prison camp, a horde of Russian prisoners rushed out toward us. The captain told us to protect the prisoner. The Russians threatened him but did not attack. We communicated with the Russian prisoners in the few words of German we had in common. They indicated that they did not get enough food, “funzing gramme Brot,” (fifty grams of bread - about two ounces). They were thin, but in much better shape than the concentration camp prisoners, whose pictures we saw later. Many of the Russians were Asian, probably Buriats.
Once, when we were deep inside Germany, we found billets in an abandoned German army barracks. Slogans in big white letters had been painted on the outside of the building. One said, “Seig oder Siberien” (Victory or Siberia). Another said “Nie wieder ein 1918” (Never again a 1918). Unfortunately for the Germans, many of them did end up in Siberia. When peace came, I am sure they would have preferred to have had the one they got in 1918.”
After the war, a second Allied conference was held in Potsdam. It was already clear that Stalin wasn’t going to uphold his part of the agreement at Yalta. Roosevelt had died and had been succeeded by Harry Truman. Churchill’s government had been defeated in an election, so the new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, represented Britain. Stalin attended, but now the other two countries were wary of him.
They agreed to divide Germany and Berlin, and Austria and Vienna into the occupied zones that had been outlined at Yalta. All other areas that the Nazis had taken over would be returned to their pre-war borders. They conceded recognition of the puppet government that Stalin had set up in Poland. Stalin agreed that Russia would invade Japan on behalf of the Allies on August 15th.
The whole idea of the Soviet invasion turned out to be moot after we dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima on August 6th and Nagasaki on August 9th. Truman did not want Stalin involved in their post-war dealings with the Japanese, so the timing of the drops was probably not coincidental. It is also likely that Truman wanted to use the show of nuclear bombings to warn Stalin. Stalin certainly heard the warning loud and clear and that marked the end of either side cooperating with the other. This was the beginning of the Cold War between us that lasted for decades.
After all they had perpetrated against others, Germany, itself, now started suffering. Fifteen million Germans were forced to leave the territory that had been given back to Poland. Death from the bitter cold as well as starvation claimed many of them. Both the Polish and Czechoslovakian governments incarcerated many others in forced labor camps. One horror was simply traded for another.
As part of the post-war agreement, the three powers also agreed to prosecute Nazi war criminals.
In 2001, Michael performed in the play, Judgement at Nuremberg on Broadway. Since we were already following my father around Europe, it made perfect sense for us to visit Nuremberg, too. We were able to go inside Room 600 where the trials were held. We watched the film footage that the prosecution used as evidence. I thought that I was used to seeing pictures of the camps. I was wrong.
When Buchenwald was liberated, the people living in Weimar at the foot of the hill claimed that they knew nothing of the atrocities committed there. I don’t see how that would be possible. Even now, it is visible from many miles away. By the end, the smoke belching from the crematoriums never stopped. Day and night, the stacked corpses which were little more than skin-covered skeletons, were efficiently and relentlessly reduced to ash. One survivor said that there was a constant flame that was at least a meter high coming out of the top of the chimney. The smell must have been unbearable.
The American soldiers rounded up more than a thousand German villagers and brought them into the camp to see the extent of the horror they had ignored up close. At Buchenwald, as in other liberated camps, these civilians were then forced to bury the hundreds of remaining bodies.
After the surrender, the infantry was dispersed to become occupation troops in different places. My father’s battery was sent to a beautiful little city in Germany called Saalfield.
“We lived at the edge of the town and some of the roads were almost rural. We walked around too. We and the Germans would greet each other, but the no-fraternization rule kept us from doing much more. Nevertheless, some of the GIs managed some illegal fraternization, chiefly off the path going up to the top of the hill in the park.
Two of our sergeants had better opportunities than most. They were assigned to drive around our area after dark to make sure that the curfew imposed on the Germans was not being violated. They linked up with two young German women who were schoolteachers. After we learned that we were going to pull out and go back to the US to allow the Russians to take over the area, the news leaked to the Germans. It almost seemed that, as in the States, the civilians always learned our coming movements before we did. When the girls asked the sergeants about this, they replied that it was not true and that we were going to remain there until after the defeat of the Japanese. When we did leave one of the girls was pregnant and the sergeant left his future offspring to be brought up behind the Iron Curtain. I don’t think it bothered him. He was just glad to escape.
Every day three young boys, maybe ten years old, used to play near our house. They often played soldier and had dug a fox hole big enough for all three of them to get into. One of them unnecessarily pointed out to me that it was a festung (fort). They had made toy German hand grenades out of short lengths of a tree limb about six or eight inches long. They had sawn the ends neatly and made a cut in the bark around the limb about an inch from one end and stripped the bark from the rest of the piece. It bore a good resemblance to a German hand grenade and its wooden handle. When they weren’t playing soldiers, they played music together. They had three different little instruments, pipes, and such. Smith pointed out that they were playing the music in parts.
One night Smith had been on guard for the last watch at the mess tent and when he came back to the house he brought a little hedgehog, which he slipped into my sleeping bag before I had gotten out of it. It was a little prickly but was cute and could be easily handled. Smith said there were a lot of them in the field near the mess tent and it had not been too difficult to catch one. I had heard of them from childrens’ books, but never seen one.”
While he was in Saalfeld, my dad was awarded the Bronze Star. He always claimed that everyone got one which was simply not true. Many officers who could, put themselves in for it but fewer were awarded to those in the rank and file. My father and his friend Smith were both awarded the medal for performing their duties with valor under fire.
“Medals can’t be taken too seriously. The person had to be seen to do something and someone had to write up the citation properly for the award to go through. Many people got them who did not deserve them and many who did deserve them never did. I was satisfied that I had deserved the medal and it did a lot for my self-esteem. For the rest of my life, I never felt I had to impress anybody about anything I did.”
My father was not a proud man so to hear him own that well-deserved pride for what he’d done is very meaningful.
“I was scheduled to begin a week’s leave on the Riviera early in May. One night I went back to the 912th to begin my trip the next day. It must have been the day before VE Day, May 8. I watched as an enormous vehicle convoy of surrendered Germans came through our line. The convoy had every conceivable kind of vehicle, including jeeps and other US vehicles that had been repainted in the standard Wehrmacht color, a sort of tan. The vehicles were all piled up with German soldiers. I knew then that the war was truly over.”
My father was flown to Nice and put up in a beautiful room at the Riviera Palace. It was his first time on a plane. It was in one of the Army’s C-47s with minimal comforts, but he was hooked anyway. He was thrilled to find out that Nice was on the Mediterranean Sea. He had assumed that the “Riviera” referred to a river. Later in the 1950s, he took my mother there on a holiday and was tickled to find that the little airport next to the sea that they landed in was still being used.
“The hotel offered to help us shop for souvenirs. I signed up and an attractive woman, probably twice our age took four or five of us downtown. Not much was available, the French were having a hard time of it after the German occupation and the fighting during the liberation. I think I bought something for my mother, perhaps a little handkerchief. When we finished our tour, it was late afternoon and our guide suggested we buy her a drink, so this sophisticated woman led all of us clods in our GI boots into a bar.
She said that she was braver than all of us because before the war she had worked in an act for a lion tamer and put her head into the lion’s mouth. When the war started, they had to kill the lion because of the shortage of meat for it. She said that in those days, rooms in hotels such as ours went for $20 per night. This was at a time when you could get a good hotel room in the States for under $5.
Our shopping guide told us that if the Germans caught a French person out after curfew, they would take them to police headquarters. Women would be made to do such things as wash floors or shine officers’ shoes. Otherwise, they were unharmed and released the next day. She also pointed out a woman sitting at a table on the promenade and reading a book. She said she was Jewish and had to hide out during the war. She was enjoying her regained freedom. Another woman I talked to said that her husband was a deporte in Germany, one of the many French men either pressured into volunteering or forcibly removed to Germany to work in factories or on farms during the war.
The Red Cross organized dances with French girls. They all seemed to speak some English. I remember one of them asking me what Germany was like I told her about the cities, some of which were bombed flat with nothing standing more than about a yard high. She asked where the Germans lived, and I told her that they lived in the cellars. She laughed at that.”
That night in downtown Nice, there was a big Victory in Europe celebration. VE Day marked the end of the war in Europe, but it was still raging in the Pacific. Until the bombs dropped, as far as my father knew then, that was where he was heading.
Those few weeks before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the last time that our planet lived without the ever-present threat of nuclear war. It was also the last time that evidence of the barbaric cruelty that we human beings are capable of inflicting upon each other could be ignored. We lost that ignorant bliss for good.
We lost so much more. Our current strained relationship with Russia dates back long before any of these current players were even born, to this exact moment in time. We watch the war in Ukraine unfold today and pray that Putin does not resort to using nuclear weaponry because now we all know what that means. Nothing is the same, but then nothing ever is. The woman who looked at my father while he was standing in line to see a movie in Saalfeld and said, “We hear that you are going to deliver us to the Russians,” saw her life and the lives of her family profoundly altered. She may have seen something coming, but I can’t imagine that she truly had any idea of what life behind the Iron Curtain would be. That’s what it means to lose a war.
I’m sitting here writing this because, despite everything he went through, my father fell in love with Europe during World War II. After he started working back in the US, he leaped at the opportunity to work in London so he could go back over there to live. It’s where he met and fell in love with my Indian-born, South African-raised, but basically, British mother and the rest, as they say…
… is history.
I just love your father’s story and how you present it♥️