CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Moschendorf Transit and Release Camp, Occupied Germany on the Bavaria, August 1954

The Amur-Yakutia Mainline moved at the rate of glacial erosion across the vast and frozen expanses of Siberia. Antoine and his men at least had seats and some freedom to move about in the passenger cars to stretch their legs. The guards frankly did not care if any of their prisoners escaped; there was no place to go; and the only alternative to the train was death in the snow from freezing or starvation. They crossed the Baikal-Amur Mainline after a week of tedious travel, traversed the Gilyuy River twice, and chugged their way over the Aldan Highlands and the Stanovoy Mountain pass. The distances were vast. It took the train six days to plow through the snow-covered tracks the 684 miles from Tayshet—where they obtained water for the steam engines—to Severobaikalsk on Lake Baikal.

There were two stops before reaching Lake Baikal to take on fuel and food. At Neryungri—about seventeen miles from the cutoff to the Baikal-Amur Mainline, they were allowed off the train to stretch their legs. For three days rations were doubled, and the quality of the food improved. Up to that point, the meal and meat rations were infested with insects and their eggs and larvae because the corrupt Soviet commissars and food depot managers sold off all of the good quality rations on the black market and left the rotting food for the prisoners. All of the men were in improved condition when they reached Severobaikalsk on the northern bank of the great lake. At Goudzhegit, the prisoners were ordered off the train cars and onto the beach. There they were ordered to strip naked and throw their putrid ragged clothing into a pile which was then set afire. Red army trucks from Severobaikalsk hauled in a truckload of used Soviet uniforms, including boots, and laid them out on tarpaulins according to size.

The master sergeant now in charge of the transportation detail herded the shivering men into the hot springs and then into a natural 40–50 degree natural spring to refresh. None of the men had been truly clean for months, and the experience was reviving. The army brought huge cauldrons of rich thick stew made of reindeer meet and canned vegetables. There was even beer. The army issued blankets for sleeping on the rest of the railroad journey to Moscow. The POWs felt like they had died and gone to heaven—a destination none of them expected ever to reach. For the rest of the railway journey, the men enjoyed the relative comfort of blankets, full bellies, and decently fitting clothing—albeit well-worn hand-me-downs.

When the train arrived in Moscow’s Kazanskiy Central train station after a 3,000-mile journey to the west, the prisoners were not allowed out of the passenger cars even to stretch their legs. News of their impending arrival brought out thousands of Muscovites who clogged the streets and entrances to the train station. Many of them carried hoes, shovels, rakes, pruning hooks, and a wide assortment of other improvised clubs. They were bent on wreaking their pent-up fury in an orgy of revenge on the German soldiers who had raped their country. Peasants and ex-soldiers made their way from as far away as Stalingrad to have their day of vengeance.

Between midsummer 1942 and midwinter 1943, the daunting German Wehrmacht pitted its might against the hapless city in the Siege of Stalingrad. The conflict was the single bloodiest battle in the history of warfare and probably the turning point in World War II. In the aftermath, the body count included over 1.1 million total casualties, which left tens of millions of Russians with a bloodlust against Germans. On their part, the Germans and their allies in the battle lost 400,000 Germans, 200,000 Romanians, 130,000 Italians, and 120,000 Hungarians killed, wounded, or captured. The bodies of the dead Axis soldiers were left to rot outside the walls of Stalingrad. When a German Red Cross group was allowed to visit the city after the war, they complained to the city’s officials and to the Soviet government that it violated all rules of war and civilized conduct to leave the corpses and skeletons in plain view.

The response from the victims of the German atrocities was: “The skeletons stay. This is what defeat looks like.”

KGB and Red Army divisions were mustered around the train station to protect it, the trains, and the hated returning POWs. Tensions were so electric and the dangers of a riot with thousands of civilian casualties so high that the government forced the train to move on to occupied Germany. The final destination of the transcontinental journey was the Moschendorf Transit and Release Camp, a miserable and inadequate holding pen for thousands of German POWs and translocated German civilians destined for Allied forced labor camps in the west.

The Moschendorf facility was constructed as a concentration camp located in the northeastern part of Bavaria near the Saale River close to the eastern border of Germany. For convenience of receiving the hordes of displaced persons, slave laborers, and POWs, the camp was located immediately along the railway yard between Regensburg and Moschendorf. Early on it served as a transit camp for displaced persons—including civilian prisoners, persons expelled by either or both the Nazis and the Allies, and returnees, and had accommodations for five thousand people. Soon, however, the numbers swelled out of all proportions and ability of the camp to provide food, water, shelter, and even rudimentary medical assistance. A novel solution was agreed upon by the Allied commanders.

Antoine and his four French companions who had fought for the SS—the “Gebirgsjägers”—arrived hungry and weary but in reasonably good condition considering what they had been through. The camp was overcrowded, none too clean, and the ration portions were between 1200 and 1500 calories a day. It was better than many of the places where they had “lived” since 1945, and the best thing was that there were barracks which could protect them from the omnipresent miseries of the elements. The five men presumed that they would soon be released, and that things could only get better. They were wrong on both counts.

They, like the vast majority of the rest of the internees in the Moschendorf so-called “Transit and Release Camp,” had no idea about the decisions arrived at by the Allies regarding disposition and treatment of Germans and other displaced peoples in the postwar period.

During the Allied commanders’ Tehran conference in 1943, Soviet premier Joseph Stalin laid the groundwork for the disposition of peoples. He demanded four million Germans be turned over to the Soviet Union as forced labor. In 1944, the Morgenthau plan included forced labor for not only the Soviet Union, but also for the rest of the Allied powers. Slavery was accepted and included in the final protocol of the Yalta conference signed in January 1945. The signatories included UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The result was the prolonged internment of and exploited labor from many thousands of former POWs and displaced civilians—some for many years. The ultimate fate of 1,300,000 German POW’s in Allied custody remains unknown; they are officially listed as missing. The German Red Cross—in charge of dealing with tracing the captives—estimated German POW casualties from the east and west, and in war and peacetime, to range from 600,000 to 1,000,000.

The August 16^th evening meal was the best the men had in the Allied camps up to then, or would ever have during their incarceration. Most of the food was obtained from the German civilian populace and was more often than not forcibly taken from the people who had barely enough nutrition to do their work, including from small family stores like the Tante Emma Laden chain. Rationing in Germany was introduced in 1939 immediately upon the outbreak of hostilities. The meat ration at the war’s beginning, for example, was 500g per week per person. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, however, this changed to 400g per week. The meat ration dropped by up to eighty percent during the five months of fighting in Russia. After May 1942, civilian rations in Germany were dropped to 8000 grams of bread—about a half loaf a day—1200 grams of meat—less than .1 lb. per day—600 grams of general foods, and 130 grams of sugar. By war’s end, any adult was lucky to be a third of that ration, and then only if the commodity was available on the day the German did his or her shopping.

Margarine replaced butter; the margarine was colored with a purple dye to salve the complaints of the farmers about losing their dairy business. Rationing or not, meat became scarce; so; the Germans raised rabbits. By the early 1950s, there were hardly any rabbits left. Flour for bread was stretched using ground horse chestnuts, pea meal, potato meal, and barley. The populace learned to make do with powdered eggs. Wild plants—edible tubers, mushrooms, plants, and seed—were foraged from the countryside to replace fresh vegetables. Other items were not rationed, but simply became unavailable as they had to be imported from overseas: coffee in particular, which throughout was replaced by substitutes made from roasted grains. The Reich Food Estate collapsed altogether late in the war.

The Gebirgsjägers’ grand meal consisted of intentionally overcooked rice mashed into patties and cooked in mutton fat to become small patties of ersatz meat. Rice patties mixed with onions and oil reserved from tinned fish became ersatz fish—which did not prove to be the Gebirgsjägers’ favorite—and mock goose. Cooked nettles and goat’s rue or pestilenzkraut [plague herb] also known as French lilac, the mucilaginous leaf juice of which tastes bitter and astringent. The bad smell emitted by bruised leaves of the herb is responsible for its most widely known common name. Before the war the plant was used as cattle feed. The nettles and goat’s rue were served mixed as a substitute for spinach.

Any illusions the Gebirgsjägers harbored after that fine repast were shattered on August 17. On that day, hundreds of men and women were lined up under Allied military guard and placed on trains, planes, buses, and troop trucks for translocation to other camps with no mention of even eventual freedom.

German Civilian (for POWs) Recipe

MockGoose—Serves 2–4 Average Adults

Ingredients

-1 cp dried split lentils, 2 slices wholemeal bread breadcrumbs, 1 onion, 1 chopped sage, a little butter, some chicken stock (or if that is not available, can make vegetable stock, salt, pepper, garlic, and lemon to taste.

Preparation

-Place 1 cp rinsed dried lentils and 3 cps hot water into a saucepan and cook for 15 mins., drain and squeeze some lemon juice and sprinkle salt and mix together.

-Chop onion and place in a pan with a little butter and saute lightly, add a little chicken or vegetable stock (~ oz) and continue to cook and reduce a little. Mix in breadcrumbs, salt, pepper, chopped sage, and mix thoroughly.

-Spread half of lentils in a shallow dish and press down.

-Spread the breadcrumbs/sage mixture over the lentils and again press down a little.

-Cover with the remaining lentils.

-Cook at about 200 C for ~30 min. until the top is lightly browned.

Tastes very faintly like goose. Children do not usually enjoy the dish.