Born in 1920 and raised in a Catholic family in Krefeld, Adam Grolsch became a radio operator in the German army on the Russian front. In his interview he describes in detail how he personally observed the mass murder of thousands of Jews in Pinsk in October 1942 and heard about the gassing of Jews from the BBC while he was on the Russian front.
I didn’t listen to the BBC before the war. But later, during the war, I listened to it very often. While I was a soldier in Russia, I worked as a radio operator, and then we listened all the time to the BBC in the evening. Otherwise, prior to this when I was in Germany before the war, I am not aware that many people listened to the BBC.
You in fact listened to the BBC in Russia as a soldier?
Yes.
Did you have to do that as part of your duties?
No. Some people had to do that as part of their duties, but that was something we were allowed to do. We would sit there at night by the radio and we’d always listen to the BBC or also to some other [stations], but I don’t remember their names.
Why did you listen to the BBC?
Because I was already very skeptical back then as to whether the Wehrmacht reports were correct. Again and again we noticed from what we heard from the other side that all of that could not have been correct, so we then often listened to the BBC. But, in so doing, we also noticed that the BBC also exaggerated sometimes.
And then there was another variant of the BBC, the name escapes me at the moment, which was this famous soldiers station. Anyway, we called it the soldiers station. They were always telling dirty jokes, so that the soldiers would stay tuned in. Thus they didn’t only broadcast the news; they always mixed in some of the dirtiest jokes you could ever imagine.
The broadcasts came from England. The [announcers] were Germans who were working in England. Probably they were German Jews. We would always be alerted by the BBC’s call sign, those four tones: pom, pom, pom, pom. Then we’d always tune in to the BBC.
There were two or three of these soldiers stations. I believe one of them was called the Soldiers Station West [Soldatensender West], and there was one for Russia. Anyway, all of them were introduced by those tones. We listened mostly because of the news, but also because of the absolutely wonderful jokes that they told, which were sometimes political. But they were always rather mild. After we had heard them, we would then go right away and recite them to others.
Did you explain to those others that you had heard the jokes from the BBC?
For heaven’s sake, no! It depended on whom you were talking to. If you knew they were people you could trust, then we told them. But not, for heaven’s sake, to others, as that was not allowed and you could get the death penalty.
What kind of radio set did you need to receive these broadcasts?
You could practically get them with every type of normal radio set. We had all kinds. But the regular soldier didn’t have any set whatsoever. Where was he supposed to get one?
The radio set was equipped for radio telephone. The programs were intentionally aimed at the frequencies we listened to, so that means that they also popped up on the frequencies that were reserved for official use. They would just pop up and say, “Hello, Lindley Fraser is back again. Today, I have just slipped in next to you in this sector, and I hope you can understand me well.” And then he’d start in. He was actually one of the moderate ones; indeed he was somewhat moderate.
Did you have to try intentionally to receive the BBC, or did you just getit anyway?
I’d switch around here and there. It wasn’t all that simple. We had to search the waves anyway. That was what the radio operator did anyway. As a radio operator, you always had to switch around back and forth through certain wave frequencies to see whether there were any emergency notices.
So, was it possible to get the BBC with a common Volksempfänger [people’s radio set]?
You could, but I heard about others who had been arrested by the Gestapo for that, people who listened to London with a Volksempfänger. There was this friend of some of my fellow soldiers in Leimke, back in Germany. They told us when they came back from Germany that he had been arrested for doing that.
Did you also get to go on furlough during the war?
Absolutely not, not one single time. But I was given leave once to get married. At the time, I was a new recruit. I was drafted for the Russian campaign right after I finished my studies. I was never in France; I was always only in Russia. I was among the first ones to go over the Russian border, which was the Lithuanian border at the time. I was there from day one. And I was outside of Moscow in the winter campaign. I took part in the retreat from Moscow, and then, because I was no longer fit for combat, I was suddenly assigned to be a communications engineer. I received a special rank and was attached to the high command of the Wehrmacht as a specialist for radio equipment. I then went through Russia to the Ukraine, and there I had to oversee all of the radio posts [in my sector].
So I was in Russia from 1941 until 1945. After being forced to retreat in the Ukraine, we were disbanded and became regular soldiers once again and were sent up to the front. There I was a radio operator for an artillery battery. This was a post that was directly next to the artillery, a forward position, that passed on orders to shoot and so on. It wasn’t at all pleasant.
May I pose another question regarding the BBC? Did many soldiers in Russia listen to the BBC?
There were only a few who listened to it as radio operators, as I did. I was then a special officer, an engineer. This meant that nobody could give me an order except the specialists from the high command of the army. We were deployed as engineers. We were to look after the technical posts and could listen to everything we wanted. That’s how it worked.
Did you hear reports about Stalingrad and the like?
Yes. I took them quite seriously at the time; they appeared to be quite credible.
Did you believe the BBC reporting more than the German?
No, I can’t say that. Well, the German reporting was very clever. But, if you could read between the lines, you could sometimes recognize the truth as well. For example, the expression “German retreat” was a contradiction in terms. One could see what was happening. However, I must say again, that when I wasn’t working as an engineer, I had to work the radios and I would also receive the official news from the higher authorities to those below them, and the truth was there about what was happening. Thus sometimes what came on the radio was the truth about how these or those guys were surrounded, had no more weapons, and so on. Of course, one heard that.
The BBC must have built up an absolutely amazing information network. Above all, names were named in full. We were always thinking, “How did they find out that kind of information?” They reported information from occupied Russia, and I could reassess it, since I was in a position to do so behind the front. I had permission to travel all over the place. But how could those guys know that in this place in Russia that this and that man, and this and that woman had done this and that? That’s never been cleared up for me.
Perhaps you could tell us a bit about your childhood? You were born in 1920, right?
I was thirteen when Hitler came to power, and I have to say that as a thirteen-year-old, I knew little about politics. My father died in 1933. He was unemployed at the time and was actually for Hitler. That’s nothing new to you, though. Everybody will confirm it for you. Hitler had gotten the unemployed off the streets. He understood that first and foremost. My father didn’t get to experience this. But that is what his expectation was. “None of the others is doing anything. Hitler will take care of it. He will give the unemployed something to do.” Today I understand this, but I didn’t understand it back then as a thirteen-year-old, that this was only possible to do by creating jobs that could eventually only exist by going to war.
My mother was a woman for whom Hitler was a god. For her, Hitler was the Lord God. Everything he said was right. The führer could do everything. And she wasn’t alone. Everybody else in the neighborhood, especially many, many women [agreed with her]. What the führer said was both just and the real truth and it had to be that way. I lived at the time in a suburb of Krefeld, in Borkum, but I heard basically the same things from many of the people I knew. So when you hear as you often do today how they had all been against him, that is absolutely not true. I can’t at all remember that the masses were against Hitler. But I come from a home and a neighborhood where we were all mostly for Hitler, especially because of the jobs he created, the autobahns that were built. That is all nothing new is it, that the masses were in fact for him?
But what I did not like personally was that the free youth movement, which I had joined when I was still a youth, was banned. I had been a member of the Kittelbach Pirates and then after that the Nerother and the Path Finders. After 1933, everything was banned little by little, but that’s another story. But, back then, I still went on a lot of trips with these youth groups that were strictly forbidden. But then, at the same time, I also had to join the Hitler Youth.
I think I was first in the Young People, then in the Hitler Youth. You automatically became a member. At school those who were not in it were looked at funny. More than anybody, the teachers immediately did an about-face [and embraced Nazism]. It is rather amazing from today’s point of view that Hitler was so strongly supported by the teachers and the German middle class. This was not the case, however, when he was still struggling, not before ’33. They were all against him then. But after ’33, [they discovered that] he was actually just what the country needed.
What was the political climate like back then? Did you live in a lot of fear?
If you weren’t trying to make waves, like in politics or something like that, you didn’t feel threatened. To the contrary, I have to say. What I often heard was, “Finally, you can go out once again in the evening on the Gladbacher Strasse.” Previously that had been the red section of town. At one time, there had been five or six sections of Krefeld where no upstanding citizen, above all no woman, would have dared to go in the evening. [That was because of] the criminals and also because of the way it was in general in these places. You’d be abused there. And everything was red there, blazing red. Red, of course, means the German Communist Party. And if anyone they recognized as a noncommunist went through there, he would be beaten up. It was that bad in those days. But when Hitler came to power, it suddenly got quiet. As we now know, of course, he did this by sending them all off to concentration camps. But, at that time, people thought, “Mensch, you can finally go out here again.”
But what about the Gestapo; didn’t you know about them?
I only found out about them once I was with the troops. But before this, one did know about the SS. That is to say, the SS was involved with the Jews. But there were rumors that they [the Gestapo] were up to something, that they hauled people off to cellars.
I would have never joined the Nazi Party, but not because I was a hero. I didn’t want to join the party, because they had outlawed the literature I loved and they had made it illegal to travel abroad and the like. That’s why I was privately against the party back then. But my mom thought that the [Nazis] were super, that everything they did was wonderful and fantastic and she couldn’t understand it when I was sometimes critical of them.
Nevertheless, I went on trips with some remaining members of the free youth movement to places like Oberwesel on the Rhine, and we ended up getting into fights with the Hitler Youth leaders. We beat the daylights out of them, and, if we had been caught, it would have been the end for us. To that extent, we knew that the Gestapo existed. Back then, one had to restrain oneself and not make too many negative remarks. To that extent, I certainly knew that it was dangerous. But, strangely enough, I had little fear, I would have to say.
What did you know about the mass murder of the Jews?
That affected me enormously. It was in fact a key lifetime experience. After I had taken part in the winter campaign against Moscow and was no longer fully fit to fight at the front, I was then frequently deployed as an engineer and had my base in Pinsk, which is today in Belarus. And then one morning, after I hadn’t been there for more than five or six days, there was a huge racket going on outside and I said to myself, “Man, what’s going on here?” Otherwise it had been very quiet there where I had been living in the town in an old church where we had our quarters. And Pinsk had a ghetto, a Jewish ghetto with around 25,000 inhabitants.
Back then, the Ukrainians and the White Russians didn’t like the Jews either. They hounded them and hated them just as much as the Nazis did, just not in this way. In short, I then set out with a friend, and with my own eyes saw how the people there were slaughtered; in two days, 25,000 men, women, and children, and in the most beastly way. I saw how they had to undress in front of the tank traps and many other things. And the absolute worst thing I saw was how this man took a screaming baby and beat it headfirst against a wall until it was dead.
Of course, the Germans were the ones who ordered this, but the ones who carried out the orders were mostly Russians: Cossacks and Lithuanians and Latvians. The auxiliary troops provided the force, but that doesn’t relieve the Germans of responsibility. One called them Hilfswillige [voluntary helpers], or Hiwis for short. They were mostly Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians, and they carried out the worst jobs for us, the dirty work. They did everything they were ordered to do. And that was something I experienced.
And then while I was standing at the edge of the pit, suddenly they saw me, just as it is shown in the film Holocaust. That was no exaggeration, as it had been just like that. And then they saw me standing there with another [guy who was with me]—both of us were wearing uniforms—and then a number of them suddenly came up and grabbed us and took us under arrest. And then standing just near to us was the local commandant, who was an officer and the local commandant for the city of Pinsk. He suddenly saw us there as well, and, in short, if he hadn’t been there, we also would have ended up in the pit because that was all top secret. Nobody was supposed to know what was being done there.
They had dug it all out and there were all of these corpses. Then they [the Jews] had to undress. Mothers were still carrying their children, usually in one arm. And then they would have to go up there, and they shot them. I saw everything, everything.
Afterward I went into the buildings [where the Jews had been kept], and it was horrifying. There were still people who were standing down there in the toilets, in the sewer trenches where the feces were. They were hiding, and they had only stuck out their heads and peered out and they thought they had gotten away. But then the Poles came along and stole everything they could. This was not like the Germans would do. And then they said, “There’s another one in there. There’s another one down there.” And then they shot them all. It was horrifying. What an experience that was! I just thought to myself, “something like this just can’t happen.”
That was in 1942, in October 1942. I can only say that after this experience I sat down and wrote a letter to my wife. That is to say that after I had seen all of that, I then wrote, “If there is any God at all, then Germany should never be allowed to win this war.”
Weren’t you afraid to write such a letter?
Oh, yes, but I was so shocked. I’m telling you this because that was such a [terrible] experience for me. “Something like this just can’t happen,” I thought. “How can one do something like that?” This undressing, this standing there stark naked, and those ditches, and then when you saw those guys, who were mostly Cossacks, standing there behind them and shooting them all down with their submachine guns! And then they would hand back their submachine guns and get new ones fully loaded. I have always said that if there were ten or fifteen guys standing up there, let us say twenty, then each one must have shot more than a thousand people in this short period. It was utter insanity!
Afterward we got to know them back at the radio post. They were always drunk. There was no other way to do it. They were running around drunk all of the time, those guys. And their boss was an officer from Düsseldorf. Unfortunately, I have forgotten his name.
Their boss who had organized all of this, was he in the Wehrmacht or the SS?
He was in the Wehrmacht. Wait a moment, no, stop, that was the SD. That was new for me at the time. Yes, they had done that. This man from Düsseldorf belonged to the SD. But among those people who did all that, this Holocaust there, only the bosses were Germans. The others were Hiwis. They did the dirty work. But they did this gladly, apparently. I am not certain about this exactly. But that was a real experience.
How did you manage to see all of that?
There was a loud noise. I was living right next door to the ghetto. I’d been there for six days and I remained there after that. That was my base of operations, where I was living and where I continued to live for quite a while after that. And then one morning there was a loud noise, and I thought to myself, “What is going on here?”
So you heard this loud noise and the submachine guns?
No, not just yet actually. Well, yes, there was also some shooting, but mostly a lot of noise. You suddenly heard this horrible racket and screaming and crying. When I think about it, it’s horrible.
And now it is just coming back to me that there was already snow on the ground, a light powdering of snow. And then there was an endlessly long and wide procession of people and there were guards escorting them with carbine rifles and submachine guns. Oh, man! Let’s say there were five hundred people on the road. They were sent out in batches, not all at once. There were perhaps ten guards for these five hundred people. We said to ourselves, “Good heavens! If they had all run at once, those ten men would have been able to shoot only fifty or sixty at best. The others would have made it into the forest. It wasn’t that far away. They would have been in the woods. And the Germans wouldn’t go into the woods. That’s where the partisans were. They didn’t go there. It was too dangerous for them.”
But the people went submissively to their fate and trotted along, and they knew exactly what lay before them.
How far outside of town were the ditches?
They were about two or three kilometers away. Later, when it was all over, we went there once again. We often had to drive out there because there were disruptions, problems with the lines. They had already fixed everything up; it had all been neatly graded. One couldn’t see anything anymore. Everything was flat, done with extra care so that you wouldn’t notice.
Were the Jews dressed when they were marched to the ditches?
They were still dressed, but people were constantly walking past them, looking to see whether they still had a watch on, or were wearing jewelry or something else, things that were always being snatched. But they were dressed when they arrived at the ditches.
It was always a long line, but they came up in batches. I estimate that there could have been a thousand in each batch. I don’t know anymore. But I have never understood why, as there were also men along with them, that not a single one of them had the mettle to run away.
So, [going back to the beginning of all of this,] you heard a racket outside and then you went into the ghetto?
Yes, and then we saw what was going on there and how another group of people was being assembled. It was all cordoned off, but we got in despite that. We showed our IDs, our special IDs, [and then we said,] “We have to enter. We have to check something.” In fact we were lying. And then they said to us, “Good, okay.” So we had then made our way in and then we saw that this procession of people was heading out and we became curious: “What is going on here? What are they doing with them?” So we then followed along after them, right along with one of these batches of people. And the Ukrainians and the Russians, the guards, didn’t do anything. They had simply thought, “Well, okay, let them follow along with them.” When we arrived, we saw the huge ditches. They must have been made in advance. There couldn’t have been any other way.
When the shooting started, could you hear it all?
You could even see it, see it and hear it. We were standing right below the ditches. They were [mounded up] somewhat higher. They [the Jews] were led up to this mound of dirt, and there were those guys standing there with the submachine guns at the top. And then they were shot down and they simply fell right in.
What did the remaining people do?
Absolutely nothing. One row of them were crying, especially the children being held in their arms. The little children being held in their arms, they were crying. And then something happened. One of those guys went over to them and snatched a child from [its mother’s] arms and threw it against a wall. Such [awful] things were happening there that one should simply not be allowed to think about them anymore. There were some who were crying, perhaps a hundred, but not very loudly. They were simply resigned to their fate, especially since they had been forced to go up there stark naked and they knew that now it was the end.
Mensch, but if a hundred of them had somehow attacked, even though there were those guys with the submachine guns, they could somehow have gotten away. But I don’t know if I would have had the courage to do this in such a case. I just don’t know.
What did the soldiers think about this? Did you discuss this with your friends?
They simply didn’t believe it. That was a so-called top secret that nobody was supposed to know about. And then the local commander—who was a Wehrmacht officer responsible for the entire Wehrmacht post in the area, but who didn’t have anything to do with combat troops as that was, of course, a rear area and there weren’t any combat troops there—was there, by coincidence, and he noticed us there as well and didn’t think that this was such a bad thing presumably. I can’t really say. Anyway, he then came between us [and those guys who were holding us] and said, “Halt! You are not supposed to be here. These people are under my command and so on.” He saved our lives. Later, he had us report to him and he ordered us to remain absolutely silent about this. For, if we talked about it, he couldn’t do anything more for us.
So you didn’t really pass on what you had experienced to the other soldiers?
Not a lot, I believe. But I don’t know anymore. Yes, here and there, sure, if I knew that it was someone I could trust. The others who had been present there had all been aware of this as well, every soldier who was there in Pinsk, and that was more than a few. Still, they hadn’t quite seen it like the both of us. [But] they all were aware of it. It was something that everyone would notice. But hold on a second. They had worked that all out very cleverly. Now it is coming back to me. Yes, everyone saw that the entire Jewish ghetto was empty after a few days. Suddenly the barriers were gone and it was open. And then all of those Poles were constantly running around and searching and searching to see whether they could find anything they could use. The ghetto was empty. And then there was this official communication that they [the Jews] had all been sent back to work in Germany and all over the place. And we, for heaven’s sake were not allowed to speak with anyone about what had really taken place.
It was just like that in other places as well. That didn’t only happen in Pinsk. [For example,] I was with the armored spearhead that went over the Memel River at 4:00 A.M. [on June 22, 1941]. And when we entered that first Lithuanian town—I’ve forgotten the name, but it’s directly behind the border—I thought to myself, “What the heck is going on here?” This was because when we looked around we saw bodies all over the place hanging from the trees, people who had been hanged. And then one guy came up to us who spoke good German and said, “We’ve already taken care of things here. All of the Jews from this town have already been strung up.” Before the Germans got there, the Lithuanians had already strung up all of the Jews.
Of course, we found out later that they had done this in order to get hold of their things. They had robbed them all. They had exploited the situation: “Hitler is against the Jews anyway. We’ll kill them and then we’ll take all of their stuff.”
We had crossed the border early in the morning and entered that town around noon. There were perhaps twenty [dead Jews]. It was a small town. However, I have since heard that it was like that everywhere. And the Lithuanians, Estonians, and Latvians—those who were the ones who had later been mostly involved in all of the shooting of the Jews—had done that with great enthusiasm.
Finally, one last question about the BBC. When you were on the front, did you hear BBC reports about mass murder and gassing?
Yes, I heard that as well. I can still remember this because I later saw those [gas] vans. But I heard about it too. I had by chance seen those vans. They were parked in Rowno [Rivne] and nobody knew what they were. They were those large and long mobile trailers attached to trucks. That is to say, they were mobile gas chambers for smaller operations. My attention was drawn to it by the BBC.
Where I saw it was in Rowno. Rowno was in the middle of the Ukraine. But previously we had heard about such things from the BBC, like about mass shootings of Russians. That was what I knew about the best. They had also explained how they had also done that with small groups [of people] and with such vehicles as well. That was such a thing to hear that you wanted to see for yourself if that was really the case. And then I ended up seeing two or three of those things in Rowno, parked near the harbor. I often had to go to Rowno to get replacement parts for the radio post. That could have been in 1943.
Born in 1915 and raised in an upper-middle-class family in Cologne, Hans Ruprecht was a Wehrmacht officer during the war in the Crimea. In 1942 he had to organize a squad of troops to cordon off the local population from a mass shooting of Jews.
My father was a self-employed entrepreneur and stemmed from the so-called middle class. I was born in Wuppertal, and we moved to Cologne in 1918.
We thought that Hitler was an outsider. For those of us in middle-class society, he wasn’t a German. He was an Austrian. How could an Austrian in Germany pull off such a development? That remains incomprehensible for me to this today.
Hindenburg said, “What does that corporal want?” But Hindenburg was too old. He was as old as I am today, and he couldn’t control the situation any longer. Furthermore, the population in Germany at this time was basically impoverished. The unemployment was alarming. For us, as self-employed entrepreneurs, the situation was also very difficult. But, when you promise someone that he will get economic growth, a reduction in unemployment, and things like that, he is easily inclined to give in to these temptations. That there would be such grave political and military consequences, and that the National Socialists would strive to dominate Europe after they had achieved dominance in Germany, were dangers that the people did not recognize at the time because they couldn’t assess them.
Hitler was a masterful politician and diplomat. What he achieved is what is so fascinating about this man, things that nobody in Europe had been able to achieve at the time. He battled against unemployment. He strengthened German unity. He brought the Germans to a certain level of dominance.
I left home at eighteen in 1933–1934 and completed my education. Then I worked at an engineering works, and at a paper factory, and so on. So I didn’t know much about what was going on back at home.
You were a Wehrmacht officer during the war and had a special experience in the Crimea. Could you elaborate on that a bit?
Yes, but that was a coincidence. At the time, I was deployed in the Crimea, at the harbor of Yevpatoria. And then a number of individuals and small groups of older men, who were evidently Jews, kept coming to us and they would try to feed themselves by trying to gather up the table scraps and other leftovers from our mess hall. [I didn’t know] where these people came from, whether they were Tartars, or if they were people from the bottom levels of society, or if they were people who were uprooted by the war for whatever reason, who had more or less come to this area by chance.
In any case, I became acquainted with a group of perhaps forty to sixty of them, although I didn’t know any of them personally. I only saw these people coming and going, over and over again, and I thought to myself that they were just poor devils going from place to place in order to survive and that we could offer them what we had left over.
I belonged to a unit that was not so tightly organized as those larger units. It was composed of three [artillery] batteries spread out along the coast by Yevpatoria, which was actually a medium-size vacation town with an industrial zone. Because of the physical distances involved, we could not always get together [very often]. The highest-ranking officer there was a captain or a major, who commanded or led or administered or in any event supervised these three batteries. We concentrated primarily on the Russians’ night attacks, and thus we often had to sleep during the day.
Anyway, these people really stuck out as a group of poor, badly nourished people, and they were always talking in a language that I couldn’t understand. They could neither speak English, nor any other Western, civilized language, but we understood enough to know that they were being forcefully persecuted.
One day a call came in from an SS officer. I don’t know what his rank was. In any event, he said, “We have to carry out some ‘cleansing measures’ here. You will not be affected by this as we can carry them out ourselves in a remote area to the north of the city. However, we do need to isolate the population from these measures.” And then I said, “What is this all about?” To which he replied, “You must know, of course, that we are eliminating ‘inferior creatures,’ and also people who don’t fit within our framework.”
So that was my experience. Nevertheless, I said, “I can’t force anyone from my unit to take part in this.” “Ah, go ahead and ask them,” he said. “There will certainly be some people who will be willing to do this on a voluntary basis.” I then thought this over and proposed it to my commander.
They had already dug out the pits or had them dug out by these people in the meantime. I heard about this again and again from people who understood something of the babble of languages and they had heard about it from those who had been forced to do the digging. So it had already become clear to me what was going on with this whole affair. But I had also spoken about it with my commander.
The preparations dragged out over several days, and eventually these people began to suspect that they were going to be shot. How they reacted to this surprised me, however, inasmuch as these people were rather resigned to their fate, or should I say, indifferent. They were so bad off anyway. Mostly these were older people, in a state of health that they were not fresh and flexible and mobile or ready to run away. Rather they simply gave up and waited for what was going to happen. Still, I cannot really judge to what extent that was comprehensible and understandable for them.
Anyway, I asked around among those in my battery and noted the people who would be willing to take part in such a cordoning commando and they were then posted in such a way that they wouldn’t actually have to be directly next to the unpleasant business. The SS men did that themselves. Instead, the streets that led to the residential area of the city center and the industrial district were cordoned off. That’s where they were posted by the SS men.
And then one day, the shooting commenced. The incident lasted about half an hour or an hour until it was over. With that, the whole thing was over and done with. There were no written records or written instructions or regulations or anything that had to be followed. It was completely carried out without any written [orders].
How did you get your instructions for this?
They simply just called me or my commander.
Were you called or your commander?
He was called.
And then he informed you that you had to do this, correct?
Yes, and I had to do it too. I had to [have] these men [get ready] at a specified time. They then were picked up with motor vehicles and taken to where they were to be dropped off. They then had to stay there until a detachment came to pick them up.
But your cordoning commando had been voluntary, correct?
It was voluntary, yes. But the men who went to do the cordoning basically knew what it was all about. As a consequence, they were well informed about those kinds of situations that became taboo here for a long time after the war, and that people didn’t want to admit having been witness to. They didn’t divulge it either. Basically, they had taken part in this because of the monotony one experienced there. In the place where we were, sometimes nothing would happen for weeks. And, of course, that was an event in which they said, “Oh well, before you die of boredom here, why don’t you go? Maybe you’ll experience something or other.” You know, at all executions, of royal families or whatever, it has always been the [ordinary] people who are the big onlookers and they often applauded what took place. You see it at traffic accidents as well. If there’s a traffic accident, then there are people there who you just can’t believe have the time to spend there. They only do this because of their curiosity or the thrill of participating, seeing, or comprehending something unusual.
Were there men who refused to go?
Yes. A whole bunch refused, but I think about twenty people from my unit went.
How many refused? Can you give an estimate?
There were about sixty men [in our unit]. So perhaps a third took part.
How was it for the forty people who didn’t take part? Was it a problem for them? Were they considered cowardly by the others?
Those were people who were convinced that an injustice was taking place. There were also those who didn’t need this thrill of knowing more than was absolutely necessary about a thing such as this. That was too much for them.
Can you explain further how it happened?
We always had an assembly in the morning, a kind of gathering. Then it was announced that a cordoning detachment had been requested by the SS, but they would not have to be involved directly in the affair. They would simply take up a position so as to isolate the whole thing from the public. Many immediately said, “No, that’s not for me.” It was said from the start as well that all of this was voluntary. Some people expressed curiosity. Some were bored and said, “Oh, well, maybe you can see something.” Normally you couldn’t leave your garrison.
On the day this happened, had you heard about anything like this before?
No, it was new for me too. This was the first direct, unmistakable experience [I had] with something like this. We already had suspicions, but we basically never had any details. Yes, we had already suspected [something like this]. But that was the only time I was personally involved in this way.
Were there any Gestapo men or anyone who said, “You must not talk about this?” Or did you simply know that yourself? How was that?
There was no Gestapo with us. Nevertheless, the whole matter only came up once. The request came from the SS, and they made it very clear that we couldn’t dodge this request. It wasn’t my decision either, rather that of my commanding officer. He then spoke to us officers and said, “We don’t have any other choice. I’ve also contacted the superior commands. As the Wehrmacht, we have to accept that we will have to provide a cordon for this project and find sufficient volunteers who are prepared to make this possible.”
Many of those [who took part] didn’t see anything at all. They did indeed hear shooting, and possibly also screams or something. But, you know, at a distance of five hundred meters, even a scream dissolves and becomes imperceptible. The shooting wasn’t supposed to be heard, right! But if someone wanted to find out where the shooting was coming from and went in that direction, he would be prevented from getting there by this cordon. And they also brought those people who were going to be the last ones to be shot and had them throw dirt on top of those who had already been shot before in the end they were shot themselves. Then the last commando came, and that was all filled in by a motor vehicle.
Does this mean that you saw all of this only from a distance of five hundred meters?
Not even that close, much farther away. The city lay flat on the coast, and beyond the city began an elevation of mountainous terrain. It was in this area that the shooting took place, and I only know of one shooting.
You can describe all that happened very well. Was this operation discussed afterward among the troops?
No. Well, you know, I was the only officer in this group of seventy. I also had my own room. I lived in my own room. As an officer, you have to keep a certain distance from the troops. Consequently I didn’t participate in the conversations with the troops and also not with those who took part in it. So I didn’t take part in what might have been said between those who had gone there and those who had not gone there.
But then how do you know that they threw dirt on top of the victims and later drove over the pit with a bulldozer?
You know, that was in 1942, and now it’s 1994. What I want to say is that this incident touched me very deeply. But it was basically clear to me that with the power the Nazi regime had over everything, only the combat soldiers of the Wehrmacht could stay free of this.
Can you estimate how many of the men who knew something about this incident had the possibility of taking leave during the war and going home for a while?
Yes, they all had the possibility.
And could you provide an estimate of how many talked about it with their wives, children, relatives, cousins, and friends?
I can’t estimate that.
What was said about such events in general?
I have to say something here. When you get into such a situation and cannot get out of it, a process of suppression sets in. And you shut it out [of your mind]. But you can never forget it. Even if you didn’t experience the event as such, you could make a picture of it for yourself about what had taken place from the illustrated photographs of shootings you would see in the newspapers after the war. Therefore, one has to assume from the start that this incident was com- parable to the other incidents that were published later. And that is why those people who had even volunteered [to take part in such events] have possibly said, “I don’t know anything at all,” in order to provide a protective covering for themselves.
Were you afraid to talk about it when you went home on leave?
No. When I was on leave, I never talked about it.
Born in 1907 in Wolgast, Albert Emmerich grew up in Stettin (today, Szczecin, Poland) and became a typesetter. He was a policeman in Nazi Germany in the small city of Eberswalde, and also, for a while, a concentration camp guard at Dachau. In 1943, he was sent to the Ukraine, where he observed many atrocities carried out against both Jews and the local Ukrainian population.
I was not drafted into the military. Right after the war started, I was drafted into the police as an auxiliary policeman, and I experienced all kinds of things. I was drafted like a soldier, but into the police instead of the military. As an auxiliary policeman, I had to carry out police duties, patrol the streets, and make sure that the blackout was observed during air raid warnings.
I was born in 1907 and was a typesetter by trade. In 1939, I was thirty-two years old. In 1939—it must have been in the autumn—I was transferred to Hohenstadt in the Sudetenland, where a police regiment was being set up. That was Police Regiment 1. [The men] were all young people, between eighteen and twenty-six, who had volunteered for the police—or was that a bit later? I don’t know anymore. In any event, the regiment went to the front, and I was able to go back home.
I was in Eberswalde near Berlin, where I was employed in a printing house. We had a [police] instructor there, who said to me, “Man, you could go on active duty.” I responded, “Stop it! Active? With your low wages and with my wages? Your salary? No, I’m not going to do that.” But he kept pestering me. Then he said, “Listen, you don’t really believe that you will stay here forever? You’ll also end up on the front. Your wife will continue to receive your salary, and you’ll get your soldier’s pay as well.” So, in 1941, I went on active duty with the police, took the training course at the police school in Berlin-Schöneberg for three months, and left with a promotion.
Then I went to the Ukraine. I won’t forget the place. It was called Liuboml’. It was close to Kovel’. An active-duty comrade, an older fellow, had been there, and they shot him. It was partisan territory, a wooded area, and they shot him. And now I was to go to Liuboml’ as his replacement. That must have been in 1943. The older comrades who had been there from the start familiarized me with the work. They were from Silesia.
Then one day, a younger fellow, around twenty-six to twenty-seven, said to me, “Come here, I want to show you something.” It was a gravel pit. He took me there. Gravel pits always sit deep in the ground. Then he said, “Look at that. There are three mass graves. Those are Jews. There are three hundred Jews lying in each grave.” “I was there as well,” he said. “We had to shoot the people. They were forced to undress, no matter whether they were old or young, or whether they were babies or women with babies in their arms. They all got a shot in the back of the neck. None of us received a submachine gun. They got a shot at the nape of the neck with simple revolvers and were forced to undress beforehand. Then the next three hundred were ready. They had to dig their own mass grave again and then their turn came later. A few days later, they had to stand on the edge of their grave, and then they were shot. It was awful.” Well, I thought, “Those Nazi bastards!”
They [the policemen] were supervised [during the shooting] by the Gestapo. Those were the SS men from the Secret State Police. They assigned them the task. Then I arrived. . . . The Gestapo had ordered the police to shoot those people. And anybody who didn’t do so could be shot himself.
How did it happen that the man from Silesia told you this?
We were in our lodgings and we were drunk. In the morning when we got up, we immediately received schnapps. So we were all drunk.
I also recall another incident, when I was still in Hohenstadt in the Sudetenland, when I got sick. The doctor of our unit was a dentist and he didn’t know what to do with me. So he sent me to Munich, to Dachau, to a police hospital. And that was also where the concentration camp at Dachau was. I was there for four weeks for observation and treatment and I didn’t have anything to do all day. And then they said to me, “Since you don’t have anything to do, you can reenforce the guards.” The concentration camp inmates [I watched] were in a camp where there was also an agricultural enterprise and they had to do gardening.
Once an inmate came along who was about to drop dead—he was weaving and couldn’t walk right—and I said to the one SS man who was there, “What’s wrong with that guy?” “Oh,” he said, “During the lunch break, we simply strung him up by the legs for two hours.” [The reason for this was that] in the mornings the prisoners had to sing while standing in place and this guy hadn’t sung. You can imagine what was up with him.
And then there was also something else [that I remember]. It was on a really hot day and the sun was burning down. The prisoners were forced to stand for hours with their faces looking at a wall that was three and a half meters high, whitewashed, and about seven to eight meters wide. They were all dressed in dark clothes, really dark, either dark blue or black and they fell over like flies in the heat. Then they got a bucket of water over the head and a kick in the backside and were forced to stand up again. Such were the methods the SS used. . . .
And then came the war, and I was, as I said, in Liuboml’. And then I was deployed to the front in the spring of 1944. We had to carry out an attack on a village in the Ukraine, and that’s where I was wounded. I was shot in the arm and the lung. I went first to a military hospital in Warsaw and then to a military hospital in Silesia. After I was there for three months, I was sent to a hospital back home in Eberswalde, where I also spent another three months. When I was released from the hospital, I had to return to the police and report to Captain Ehmke. By this time I knew what was up in Russia and the Ukraine. The Russians were coming closer and closer.
I need to mention here that I did not belong to the Nazi Party and that this captain had faith in me. One day he closed the door and said to me, “You were just in Russia. What is really going on there?” Then I said to him, “If the Russians keep coming closer, then I can only advise you to get out of here and go as far west as you can with your family, because what the Nazis have done there will have bitter consequences.” And he did just that.
Sometime after that I was transferred to Potsdam as a military instructor, and I received a group of recruits. The Russians kept coming closer and closer. And then I told my family that they had to head to the west. We couldn’t get a peaceful night’s sleep anymore. It was always alarm, alarm! And then, when we got over to the west, along the Elbe, I told them, “Listen, I’m now going over to the Yanks. I’m not going to do this any more. I can’t sleep any more.” And then we were taken into captivity in an American prison camp in Ludwigslust.
[After the war,] in June 1946, I began serving in the police again. First I was a traffic cop and then I went to Schleswig-Holstein to head up a village police post. In March 1949, I began working as typesetter again. On July 1, 1954, I came here to Cologne, where I became a department head, a chief typesetter. That’s where I was until 1972, up until my sixty-fifth year, when I retired.
Let us return to the Nazi period. You said that what the Nazis did in the Ukraine and Russia would have bitter consequences. What did you experience there yourself?
In effect, nothing. In effect, little.
But then how did you come to this conclusion that what the Nazis did there would have bitter consequences?
With the shooting of the Jews, and then in Dachau and how they treated the people there. As a result of that, we said, “this is going to have bitter consequences.” After Hitler occupied the Sudetenland and Austria, he then started the war in 1939 and it lasted until 1945. And what they did during that time in the occupied territories, for example, in the Ukraine! Hitler had promised the Ukrainians a free state, and the Ukrainians were happy. They invited us to breakfast as police officials. But then something else came along and he didn’t do what he had said. Then the battle with the partisans started and the Germans were forced to shoot them.
One thing that I recall was a real partisan-controlled village. When the Germans drove through it in small trucks, the partisans shot at them and only a few of them managed to return back on foot to Liuboml’. So what were the consequences? Well, the German artillery was called up. The village lay in a valley. The Germans went in first and took all of the animals, everything, cows and sheep and pigs. They brought out everything. Then they shelled the village. Nobody came out of there alive, [including] the women and children. There weren’t any young men there. They were with the partisans. There were only old people, women, and children, shot to pieces. And because of things like that I said, “Man, that’s going to have consequences.”
Did you actually see the shelling of that village?
I was there when it happened.
Did you have a function?
Me? No, no. I was just a policeman doing patrol duty. There was a curfew, and we went to the village at night to patrol it. Otherwise, we didn’t do anything.
Referring to your description of the shooting of the Jews at the gravel pit, was the Wehrmacht also involved there?
Oh, no. Those were policemen, they were all just policemen. And the Gestapo, as I already said, had ordered them [to carry out the shooting]. Of course, not every shot was lethal. And then the man explained [to me] that “they were all lying there in blood and we had to go down there and wade in the blood up to our ankles and give them the mercy shots.”
What was your work routine in Liuboml’?
It would begin at 8:00 A.M. in the morning after we were woken up at 7:00 A.M. Then we would go out on patrol and so on. We would drive through the surrounding villages, usually with four men, in an all-terrain vehicle. There was one guy there who wasn’t a 100 percent Nazi, but a 300 percent Nazi. And there were certain areas where you weren’t supposed to go. But one time we drove through one of those areas anyway and a young man in his early twenties was running, and the [300 percent Nazi] yelled out at him, “Stand still! Stand still!” But he didn’t stand still and he kept on running. Then the [300 percent Nazi] raised his rifle and shot him. He let go a volley and just blew him away. And we were not allowed to say anything about what had happened.
Why couldn’t you say anything about it?
Because then it would have been our turn. You weren’t allowed to say anything.
Would it have been tolerated, if you had shot as well?
Yes, of course. And then I remember how [the locals] were forced to collect livestock and potatoes for the soldiers, for the Wehrmacht. At the time we were accompanying them and had to ride along as protection. When they arrived in this one village, there was an old man sitting on a bench in front of a house. The Gestapo noted exactly who had delivered potatoes and grain and so on and who hadn’t. There were these three men from the Gestapo with us, and they went up to [the old man] and spoke to him. What was said, I don’t know. In any event, they spoke to him, and he shook his head, and then one turned his gun around and struck him dead with the butt. It was because of those kinds of things that I said, “That’s going to have bitter consequences.”
Were you ever forced to do such things yourself?
No. Never. Thank God, no. But I would have had to do it, if they had ordered me to.
Why do you think that man from Silesia showed you those gravel pits and told you about them?
I don’t know. In any event, he said, “Come along. I’m going to show you something.” “Okay, fine,” [I said]. Then he went with me to the gravel pits. They were fifty meters long. In every one of them lay three hundred Jews.
Was he an officer?
No, he was a normal policeman, just like us. He had been there since 1941, but we didn’t get there until 1943.
Was your friend from Silesia allowed to talk about it? Wasn’t it supposed to be kept secret?
The way it happened was that we were taking a walk and then he said, “I’m going to show you something.” Nobody there, none of the comrades, knew anything about it. There were about fifteen or twenty of us there.
Did you ever swap stories about such experiences with your colleagues?
No, no. You know, one guy didn’t trust the other. It was a complete rarity for him to show me that place near Liuboml’, those mass graves. The Jews had to undress before they had to stand on the edge of the pits and they had to leave all of their things behind. After the shooting was over, the Ukrainians who had been standing up above on the side of the pits came down and took their things. It was no love affair between the Jews and the Ukrainians. Most of the Jews had capital, money, and the Ukrainians were poor devils.
Born in 1920 and raised as the son of a civil servant in Krefeld-Ürdingen, Walter Sanders was a communications officer on the Russian front during the war and unexpectedly had a conversation with Hitler. He describes the horrors and atrocities he witnessed and shared with family and friends when he was on leave during the war.
When I started at the Gymnasium in 1930, I became a member of Neudeutschland, a Catholic youth group for Gymnasium students, but it was dissolved in 1933. Then I joined the Hitler Youth in 1934–1935. I had to do this; it was obligatory. When I was eighteen, I joined the NSKK (the National Socialist Motor Vehicle Corps). That was a fantastic association inasmuch as it had little to do with National Socialism. We met twice a month in a bar and had something to drink. I didn’t even have a uniform.
I wasn’t in the party, although, as a civil servant candidate, I was supposed to be. I asked them if they could wait until I completed my military service and they accepted that. Then the war came, and I was able to get around joining the party. This was almost impossible for me as a civil servant, but I was able to do it. Through my parents, I had a different view of things politically, certainly not a National Socialist one.
In 1939, I was drafted. After the Polish campaign, I was stationed with the occupational forces. Then, in 1941, it heated up again and I was in Russia from the first day of the invasion. . . .
[After a time,] the Russians broke through our division, and in a few days it didn’t exist anymore. Those of us who survived were put on a train to eastern Prussia for re-outfitting. I got enormously lucky when I landed in a communications regiment. That meant a farewell to combat. I went back to Russia, but to an army command group that was far away from the war, about five hundred kilometers from the front. That was the highest [field] command, directly under the high command of the Wehrmacht. The army group had around a million and a half soldiers.
I held a special position there. There were around ten work places next to each other where all the staff officers were connected. The field marshal was there, the head of the General Staff, and all of those guys with those red pants, the General Staff officers. I had those as well. I had been administered a special oath and had to listen in on the conversations that were held.
At the time we were stationed in the Caucasus, and the Sixth Army [in Stalingrad] also belonged to us. From the Caucasus to Berlin or to eastern Prussia where Hitler sat, amplifiers were built into the communications network everywhere. Otherwise, it all wouldn’t have worked. But if one broke down, the entire line would go down. When there was a conversation with the führer, when Hitler called the field marshal, I had two lines. I can still remember that the code name for that was Anna. We were called Fortuna, and Office Anna was the führer headquarters in Rastenburg. And Office Zeppelin was Berlin, the Wehrmacht command.
When Hitler would call us, I would be on the line and I would first hear from a first lieutenant who was my counterpart where Hitler sat. Immediately everything else on the line would then be interrupted, I would call for the marshal, and then he would have everybody who had those red pants on gather around me.
I’d like to tell you something about Hitler. That guy was unbelievable. You have to imagine it: The army group covered an enormous expanse of territory, a front sector of at least five hundred kilometers. You just can’t imagine the way in which he would juggle with those divisions and those regiments. Our own field marshal couldn’t keep up with him. He needed four men to do this. Hitler had the maps in his head. It was amazing. It was amazing, I tell you. I don’t like the guy, but what’s true must remain true.
[And then one day] the line went down, and suddenly I had Hitler on the telephone. He was still trying to get through and yelling, “Hello! Hello!” “Please excuse me, my führer, the lines went down,” [I answered]. “That can happen, my comrade,” he said. He had such a deep voice. And then this happened again three or four more times during our conversation. “We’re slowly getting to know each other already,” he said.
Just between us, the communications officer was standing just behind me and he was almost wetting his pants. “Calm down,” I said. “He’s not all that angry. He could have reacted very differently.”
Hitler understood that I couldn’t do anything about this, and that nobody else could. This happened to me a couple of times. Those were my conversations with the führer. I think he showed more humor with the lower ranks than with the high-ranking officers. He had a different attitude toward them. I don’t know this, but I assume it was the case.
One thing that I have never understood is how such people, who had to have been high-ranking officers in World War I, could have behaved like such school children vis-à-vis Hitler. You can’t imagine such obedience. Except for Field Marshal List, who once contradicted him [in my presence]. But that was the first and only exception I experienced. Guderian is supposed to have done so as well. I read all the books about it later. You can’t imagine this slavish obedience, the fear they had of him.
Could you now tell us about your experiences back at home before the war?
My best friend here in Ürdingen was a Jew. [His family] had a horse dealership right behind our house on the Luisenstrasse. We were at his place one evening in 1934 and the next morning they said that his father had hanged himself in a stall. Prior to this he had told my father, “It’s over for us Jews. There’s no point anymore.” Then he went and hanged himself.
In 1938, after my friend received his diploma from the Moltke Gymnasium, he fled to France and then England. Today he is a citizen of France. His sister went to England and their brother went to Belgium. But he was caught and killed during the occupation of Belgium.
Their mother was a really fine woman. She had a brother in Elberfeld who had lost both eyes in World War I. For this he received the wounded medal in gold, which was a very high decoration. He had a cigarette shop, but the Nazis left him in peace and he was able to go on running his shop. Their mother would go there and take care of him. They even received ration coupons just like—I now have to utter that word—Aryans. So I thought they would make it. But, at the end of 1944, the brother died, and, the day after the funeral, they nabbed the woman and sent her to Theresienstadt. We never heard from her again. It’s tragic.
There were a lot of Jews in Ürdingen, but they were all working in the trades. One case involved some friends of my parents. The husband was a plumber and he had a small shop here on the Niederstrasse. During the Kristallnacht, they smashed in his windows. So what did he do? He put on his black suit and his World War I medal and swept the broken glass away from the street. And then his neighbors came and helped him while some SA men who were there made an about-face. Apparently they were ashamed. That was the feeling he had, he told me afterward. But that didn’t help him any in the long run. . . .”
What happened on the thirtieth of January 1933, I can still remember perfectly. My parents had been at the movies. They went to the cinema at 8:00 P.M. and came back at 10:00, and I said to them, “Hitler has just become the Reich Chancellor. It was just on the radio.” “For heaven’s sake,” was their first reaction. My father had to howl with the wolves. He was a civil servant. He was an inspector, later a senior inspector. Whether he wanted to or not, he had to. He had fought in Africa, was in the Herero uprising in Southwest Africa in 1902–1904. He was a kind of “protected species” during the Nazi period. He came to an accommodation [with the new order]. What was there left for him to do? It may sound strange today, but what was he supposed to do then?
We were a mixed family. My mother was Catholic, my father was Protestant, and I was Catholic. I was an altar boy, and my father made sure that I got to church on time. And heaven help me if I wasn’t there. Then there was hell to pay. He went to his Protestant church, and my mother went with me to the Catholic church at 10:00 A.M. This never gave us any difficulties whatsoever.
I don’t believe [that my father stood behind the new political order]. Not my father, and certainly not my mother. My mother was always skeptical. I don’t want to say that she loved the Weimar Republic. She didn’t. Those were insane times, four or five governments per year. It was madness. And how those communists, or red front warriors, or whatever they were called, carried on here blowing their little trombones (Schalmeien)! And then there was the SA—they were also here before 1933—and both sides would beat each other up. Those were the circumstances, and they were dreadful. I’m convinced that a whole bunch of normal, well-behaved citizens put a cross [next to the Nazis in the Reichstag election] and said, “Thank God order will finally prevail.” That’s the way it was at the beginning. And, above all else, one can hardly imagine how, presto, Hitler got rid of the unemployment of 7 million people in just a few years.
When I consider the time between 1933 and 1939 before I had to leave, one could live pretty well here in Ürdingen. There had not been many infringements, save for the situation with the Jews. I had some colleagues, whom I worked with later at the city treasury, who were Center Party people and they were not harassed. When I was in the Hitler Youth, they didn’t have to ask us for a long time whether we wanted to join the SA, SS, NSKK, and so on. We could choose whether we wanted to or not. So I chose the NSKK because you are in good hands with your drinking buddies. I knew them all; one of them was a doctor. So what we then had was a kind of small motorcycle club and we were allowed to travel around, and that was something.
But weren’t people in Ürdingen afraid of the Gestapo, the police, or the Nazis?
Not that I knew. Now things like that were not broadcast widely, except for when they applied to Jews. That’s a chapter in itself. Even though it was done on the quiet, when the Gestapo came in the night and took the Jews away, one would know about this on the next day: “My God, they picked up the poor devils after all.” But people were rather cautious in discussing such matters. Nevertheless, among the people I knew, there were not only people who supported this, there were also people who were against it. But, nevertheless, I didn’t know of a single case in which one had people taken away by the Gestapo. Things must have been worse in Krefeld; it was larger. But here, things like that would have gotten around in Ürdingen. They did indeed grab a few communists though. They were sent to concentration camps, but they eventually came back. After about a half a year or so, they would come back, chastened.
What did people think happened to the Jews who were taken away?
The worst. You can’t imagine what the agitation against the Jews was like. There was a newspaper called Der Stürmer. It was something you just can’t imagine, and it was spewed out week after week. And then there were the [anti-Semitic] films, such as Jud Süss, which I saw myself. We had to go to see it because of school. We had to go there as a group. That was indeed a kind of agitation. So when the Jews were deported, we knew that something was going to happen to them.
How was it at your Gymnasium? Were racial theory and anti-Semitism actually taught there?
The Gymnasium principal had a party badge, but he was anything but a party comrade. There wasn’t a single Nazi teacher at our school [with the exception of a teacher who came there later]. Of course, they had to teach what was prescribed and racial theory was also taught, but in a subdued manner, not à la Der Stürmer or the like. They had to do this, but they did this in a really subdued way. As teachers, they had to be in the party. But there was not one of them about whom I could say, “That was a Nazi.” There were people from every level of society here in Ürdingen, and the teachers knew exactly where one came from and what one’s father said and so on. But not a word was said about any of that in class. To that extent, my school years at the Ürdingen Gymnasium were not overshadowed by National Socialism.
What was it like with the Jewish shops while you were in Ürdingen?
All their shops were still open, but there would be a sign out front, “Don’t buy from Jews.” But we did so anyway. Nobody went broke—until they were closed later. They went on selling their goods. We had a horse butcher, a large department store, a garden shop. There were all kinds of things here. There were a lot of Jews who had something here. They went on selling until ’38. Only then did it happen.
Wasn’t anybody afraid of the SA? In Cologne, they took pictures of people shopping at Jewish stores.
They did that sometimes, but it was known when they would be there. Then nobody would shop at Jewish stores. I tell you, it was liberal here. It could even happen that an SA man would call and say, “Don’t let yourself get caught there tomorrow.” Not all of those who were involved in the party were enthusiastic Nazis. The shops were open, but of course business got much worse. That’s clear. A large part of the population wouldn’t go there anymore out of fear, but the [Nazis] couldn’t watch the stores from morning to evening. You noticed that there were ever fewer Jewish shops as the Jews still had the opportunity to leave the country. And there were many who did this, above all the younger ones. Eventually they were all gone. The older ones stayed, and the younger ones left, so that in ’38, not so many of them were rounded up. The bulk of them had left already. Many of them were well off, and they had relatives everywhere. The Jahn family had relatives in Belgium, England, and France. It wasn’t any problem for them to get out. And, at the beginning, the [Nazis] would let them go, and often they could get out of Germany. To the contrary, that was even encouraged.
Were people sad that the Jewish community was getting smaller?
There were some scoundrels among them, just like among us Christians. There were some I couldn’t stand, but there were those among us as well. There were the same kind of louts among them as among us. But, for the most part, it was very much regretted. Most of Ürdingen’s Jews were middle-class people and businessmen. They were in the veterans association and what all. The people in Ürdingen and the Jews would all say Du to one another. We didn’t even know that a Jew was something different from us. [When a Jew was picked up by the Nazis, it was said,] “My God, he was picked up. He’s gone. He didn’t do anything.” Or, “She was such a good woman.” And then it all would be talked about. The Nazis did all that very secretly and silently and nobody had seen them doing it. Usually they came for the Jews in the night or during the early morning hours.
How do you know that? Did people observe this from their windows?
People living in the same building had noticed this happening. Not only Jews but also Christians, of course, were living in the apartment buildings. Those who took the Jews away were not people from Ürdingen. The Gestapo was in Krefeld, and they always came in civilian clothes, not in SS uniform. They did this very clandestinely. And then, when this would take place during the day, it would be thought they were just being summoned for questioning. That’s what we kept hearing. There were no public beatings [of Jews] that took place here. But I can only report on what happened before the beginning of 1938. I don’t know what took place after this, as I was no longer here.
But I did experience the pogroms in Russia. They were something horrible. I said there and then to myself, “If there is a God, then this is going to come back to haunt us.” For example, when we were advancing into Russia, we passed by an abandoned mine and there were SS men walking along next to the Jews and throwing them into the shaft while they were still alive.
Were they then killed immediately?
I assume. By SS men, but not by [SS men who were] Germans. The Poles, by the way, were beating them themselves. The Jews must have been greatly hated and also in Latvia and Estonia. The Waffen-SS had recruited them there and they were the worst. And I often saw those columns of Jews. [But there was also some opposition to this.] One time I was in a small town and the Jews, one thousand of them or something like that, were being marched on foot to some camp and were being guarded by the SS. And whoever was not able to go on any longer was beaten to death and there were corpses lying all over the place. But then the [Wehrmacht] colonel [who was in charge] went over and said, “If you show up here again, then we are going to shoot you.” After that, the SS men made a detour around the town. There were German officers who couldn’t abide this. But what could they do against it?
I then said to my comrades, “If there is a Lord God, may he have mercy on us.” Those were human beings. And my comrades agreed with me. I wouldn’t know of any of my comrades who would have said, “Serves them right.” But what are you to do?
The way the eastern Jews were treated was the worst, much worse than here, which was exemplary in comparison. There were huge numbers, millions, of Jews over there. They were basically still the real Jews running around with those caftans and their little locks of hair. It was not a pleasant sight; let us say, it was a sight that was foreign to us. We had never seen Jews like this. We hadn’t known Jews like that. We didn’t have that kind running around here. I don’t know of a single Jew who ran around like that in Krefeld. And those Jews over there were driven like livestock, and whoever was unable to go on was beaten with truncheons and was shot. Later, a couple of wagons would come by and pick them up and take them away. It was terrible. That was in the second half of ’41. After that I was with the army group and there was nothing like that there.
What was the relationship like between the SS and Wehrmacht?
That was no friendship. During one terrible winter I was transferred to the SS Division Das Reich. They were almost surrounded, but we had to go there. I was with them for two months. When we arrived, we were greeted by an SS captain, and then he said to us that the only good Russian is a dead Russian. He only spoke of Jews as vermin. So we then knew what was up. I was happy to get back out of that heap of shit, to use proper German. There wasn’t any friendship between us and the SS. They were a kind of people unto themselves. They were brutal. I don’t know about any atrocities committed by members of the Wehrmacht against the civilian population. I never experienced that, neither in Poland, nor in Russia. Perhaps that happened somewhere, but not on a large scale, I would say.
But in the SS, later the SS Police Division, [it was different]. They were deployed behind the front. They only carried out manhunts. They were only there to catch the Jews. That was beyond our comprehension. How often did we say to ourselves that they [the Jews] were in better hands here at the front than they would be if they were back there? There was a sense of injustice among us, but you had to be very careful [with what you said]. You didn’t know what your buddy was thinking. There was one guy with me who had been in the civilian SS and later joined our unit. He always acted as if [he belonged], but we never trusted him. He was just a few years older than me. He would boast that he had been a concentration camp guard sometime after 1933 or 1937 or something like that. And he told us all kinds of things about the Jews and the communists.
What did he tell you exactly?
How things had gone there and how they had beaten up the inmates and so on. He would brag about it. But they wouldn’t beat them to death, and, after a certain time, they would get out, except for a few. Most of them were communists as the Jews were not there yet. It was mainly communists that they had there. They [the Jews] were [still] there in Poland.
Have you ever heard of the Warsaw Ghetto? That was a city that was as large as Krefeld. I went through there when I went to Warsaw. The Polish campaign was in ’39. I had still been in Schwerin at the time, and then I went to Poland in early ’40 to the Warsaw garrison barracks. During the time I was in Poland [from around March or April] 1940, the ghetto wasn’t closed. It was still in the beginning phases. What it was like later, I don’t know. When I went into town, we drove through this ghetto. It took perhaps twenty minutes to drive through. What you saw there was enough. The streetcar windows were open, so you could see outside. I don’t know what it was like later on, but what one saw back then was bad enough. You saw these ragged, emaciated figures, just skin and bones wasting away. It was clear that they hardly had water to wash their beards with and so on.
The worst thing for us was to see the children, such tiny children, such poor little creatures, and how they would sit there holding out those tin cans. Their heads consisted only of eyes. But what eyes and what tiny faces. That was what was most distressing. You could have cried when you saw those children. It was dreadful. But what could you do? Because of this, you could have doubts about religion. How can a God allow something like that? But that wouldn’t have done anything for them.
Did you ever see any possibility back then to do something against it all?
No. Then you would have been sent away yourself. Nothing, nothing. We already had enough difficulties in Russia. How often had we given those Russians [who were living in such pitiful conditions] some of our bread? Although that was strictly forbidden, the head of our company looked the other way and didn’t say anything. And we also had given some chocolate to the children. That was also strictly forbidden. That was fraternization. But we did it anyway.
But you couldn’t get close to the Jews. The streetcar didn’t stop and you couldn’t get off it. It rushed through. And you couldn’t throw anything out from the windows. They were closed. You couldn’t help them there. If you had been hiding something to throw out to them, it would have been your turn next. This was because the SS who were guarding them were swarming around everywhere. And there was also an SS guard on the tram to make sure that nobody jumped on or off the tram or whatever. There was nothing you could do. You saw only misery. More than anything, I remember those children. Those big eyes looked at you and you didn’t understand the world any longer. Poor little creatures of three, four, or five years of age. Those children were the most appalling thing I saw.
Did you ever write to your parents or tell them about what you experienced?
You were not allowed to write. Tell them? I not only told my parents about that, I also told others when I was on leave—like good friends and relatives here. But you didn’t come home all that often. I was here three times on leave. Of course I talked about it. But I knew with whom I was talking.
And what kind of reaction did they have?
For the sake of those who say today that they didn’t know anything about it— a large part of the population did know about it. Perhaps [they didn’t know] that it was quite as brutal as it was in reality. But they knew that there were concentration camps. They knew that Jews were kept there. And later, word got around that they were gassed. It wasn’t for nothing that it was said in those years, “Take care, otherwise you’ll go up the chimney.” That was a familiar figure of speech. It circulated everywhere in Germany. [An expression like] “otherwise, you’ll go through the chimney” doesn’t come about by chance.