Chapter Eighteen

My Homecoming and New Beginnings

SHORTLY AFTER CHRISTMAS 1953, our train stopped in the Brandenburg POW reception camp at Fürstenwalde, which had been set up by the NKVD.[1] There we were relieved of our prison clothing and given normal civilian wear. Now we looked like real people again. Would they really let us go? We were supposed to get on another train for Friedland near Göttingen, but did not trust the Russians.[2] Near Fürstenwalde camp was a tram station from where a line ran into Berlin. Five fellow prisoners and I decided to defect at the next opportunity. We succeeded. All six of us got on a tram and then after nearly nine years I was back. Back in Berlin.

Spying through the misted windows of the compartment I was totally overcome. Suddenly, at the entrance to a tram station, I saw a sign that read ‘Neukölln’. I heard myself say: ‘This is the West – everybody out!’ We stumbled through the guard’s van, ran down the steps from the platform to the forecourt and found a taxi stand. A colleague who was heading in my direction got into one of the waiting taxis with me. I told the driver my address without mentioning that I had no money on me. Without a word he took us. We might not be wearing prison clothes any more, but as returners from captivity we were easy to recognise. The taxi driver did not want the fare. First he set down my friend at Britz, then carried on to Rudow. I read the street signs, some with the names of flowers, and then the street in which I lived – had lived – a long time ago. The taxi pulled up at the number I had given. I was home.

There stood my parents-in-law’s small house, which I had last seen on 22 April 1945 – it looked exactly as I had remembered it. My wife had lived there since the end of the war. The first person I saw at the door was my mother-in-law. Shortly after that, Gerda joined her. It was 31 December 1953. Our wedding anniversary. The eleventh, but of those we had not lived together for nine.

And now I was to learn that life had not stood still in my homeland. I shared this fate with thousands of others who came back from the war late. Gerda had begun a relationship with somebody else, my father-in-law was dead and naturally for my daughter Gitta – by now almost ten years old – I was a total stranger. The homecoming I had longed for was a very different thing from my daydreams because the homeland I remembered no longer existed. It was too much for me. I was on the Havel bridge and jumped into the ice-cold water. I remember nothing of the details, but I was saved. Gerda decided we should take the chance of a new beginning. Thus, the year 1954 began for me in Berlin, and I had to find my new place in it.

First of all, I had to attend to correspondence. I rummaged through my things for the letters my fellow prisoners had pressed into my hands. At the first opportunity, I sent them to their families. Gerda took them to the post office. Later I got busy sending small parcels to the comrades I had left behind in Russia. I packed thick paint brushes from which I unscrewed the brush-head and put a little note into the shaft which I hollowed out. I hoped in this way to be able to smuggle in news from the homeland without the censors finding out. In captivity we had promised each other firmly that if you got post from a former prisoner now at liberty – give it the most thorough going over! I wanted them to know that the politicians in western Germany were doing everything they could for their early release.

The Social Ministry sent our small family on holiday for six weeks. We went to Reisbach in Lower Bavaria. Late homecomers were given support in this way to find their way back into their families. Gerda had got through the difficult period just after the war in masterly fashion. In 1945 she had re-entered the SPD (German Socialist Party), in 1946 the AWO (Workers’ Welfare), and in 1950 the DGB (German Trade Unionist Federation). In 1946 Uncle Paul, through his contacts with the post-war Bürgermeister Ernst Reuter, had got her work in a US military office.[3] She spoke English, and nobody cared when neighbours denounced her to the authorities as the wife of an SS man. Soon after that Gerda took up teacher training. In 1951, she passed her second state examination, and since then had been teaching at a school in Neukölln. Later she was even appointed headmistress.

What was I to do for a living?

I took an apprenticeship to be a draughtsman. That seemed to me to be a little along the artistic lines I had once travelled pre-war and therefore suitable. Only a few weeks later, however, I gave it up. The instruction went totally over my head – I was incapable of assimilating it. After almost ten years in Gulag it was difficult to peel off the prison clothing. I had not yet arrived home mentally – the homeland was a place I still did not know.

I was offered employment as a porter in a hospital. I turned it down. Push beds here and there? That seemed to be too undemanding an activity. I spent more than a year looking for something suitable. I received several offers, but nothing in Berlin. Some came from south Germany through old colleagues. Someone I knew from Swabia suggested I could take over as his commercial representative for rubberwear of all kinds in southern Germany. The assortment ranged from rubber rings for glass jars to Paris fashions. I would like to have accepted, but Gerda was not prepared to leave Berlin.

I came across Erich Kempka, Hitler’s former chauffeur and motor pool chief. He was now a test driver at Porsche. He invited me to work with him, and I called on him in Stuttgart. Kempka got in touch with Jakob Werlin, whom I had known in earlier times.[4] Werlin received me in his six-roomed apartment in Munich. I could also be a driver, no problem, he gave me to understand. The day I met Werlin he had to go to Italy, and he offered me his flat to spend the night. Here again I would have to work in south Germany, and Gerda was not prepared to leave Berlin.

Finally, I heard through acquaintances that a shop selling artists’ requisites was up for sale – its owner now wanting to retire. ‘That would be just the thing for you,’ my friend said. It certainly would, but I had no money to buy it.

In the end, I turned to a former general who helped late homecomers. He sent me to Gräfin von Isenburg.[5] She was the chairperson of an association helping former POWs to get back on their feet. Princess von Isenburg was especially impressed by my story and organised a meeting with politicians in Bonn. She accompanied me, for example, to a meeting with the CSU (Christian Socialist Union) deputy Kaspar Seibold,[6] and Seibold related my story to Finance Minister Fritz Schäffer.[7] Finally, I was invited to a talk with Schäffer, who wanted to know all the details of my time with Hitler. Thus, we spent half the day talking about that before we came to my present predicament. I assume that this conversation contributed to capital being made available a little later for a fund to support late returners.

I got a loan of 28,000 Deutsche Mark from the Grund-und-Kreditbank, and finally I was able to buy out the seventy-six-year-old owner of the artist and interior decoration shop at Kolonnen-Strasse 3 at Berlin-Schöneberg.

When my Aunt Sofia was looking for a flat, I asked my local postman if he could help. He asked around, and my aunt was very grateful to be able to occupy a new flat, also in Kolonnen-Strasse, before moving into the old peoples’ home at Rudow, where she died aged eighty-seven. I liked us being close to each other and would regularly go there for lunch.

When I met my old colleague boxer Adolf Kleinholdermann around this time he made me an unusual offer: he had started up a small peanut-butter factory and would I like to buy him out. After the end of his active career as a sparring partner, he had emigrated to the United States. His wife could not stand the New World and told him: ‘Adolf, I am a Berliner, I want to go home.’ With the peanut-butter recipe in his pocket, back they came. This favourite American spread was quite unknown to us, and Kleinholdermann’s monopoly, which he had set up as soon as he arrived home, was now overwhelmed by demand from the Americans. The enterprise appealed to me, and so I became probably Germany’s second supplier of peanut butter.

The recipe was top secret and very successful – the magic word being lecithin. The Americans stationed in Berlin could not get enough of it, and my production hardly met the demand. The only problem was German law. Under the food regulations ‘butter’ came from milk – an animal product. Peanut butter could therefore not be butter. There were difficulties with the ministries, and in the end the courts had to decide. The result was that I could continue turning out peanut butter providing I gave it another name. The business then began to get out of hand, taking up more and more of my time, competing with my shop. I had to choose between full automation, and having peanut ‘butter’ as my primary occupation, or giving it all up. At a trade fair I saw a modern bottling plant, which I would have to buy to meet the rising demand. It cost a fortune. I decided in favour of my shop, or rather Gerda persuaded me. I would really have liked to have gone on with the peanut-butter production. Shame about that.

John F. Kennedy

On 26 June 1963, I worked again as the bodyguard to a head of state. Well, almost. All the same it was remarkable. In connection with the J. F. Kennedy visit to Berlin I was approached by the CIA. It was explained that they wanted to put around the Schöneberg municipal government centre a ring of alert civilians who would be prepared to keep their eyes open and report anything suspicious. My shop in Kolonnen-Strasse was about two kilometres as the crow flies from the municipal centre. I was to pay particular attention to a certain road junction, and I was given a telephone number to call if I felt that I ought to report something I had seen. I have no idea why the CIA chose me, how they knew I would be reliable and that I had experience as a bodyguard. I did not enquire and simply watched more keenly than usual. Thus, not twenty years after the war’s end, I protected the highest representative of the former enemy. In the event, there was nothing to report and I made no use of the telephone number.

I followed Kennedy’s speech with its notorious sentence ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ (‘I am a doughnut’ – the correct term is ‘Ich bin Berliner’) from among the milling crowd. Another detail to cause a grin was the reward I received for my services: for a year the CIA paid me, Hitler’s former telephonist, my telephone bill.

Prince Philip

My wife continued her career in politics. She was a district councillor at Neukölln, and in 1975 was elected to the Berlin House of Deputies for the SPD.[8] More than once I begged her: ‘Gerda, why don’t you leave politics alone?’ But it was in her blood, and I had no chance of deterring her. I just had to have some understanding. It was often difficult for me, as it must have been for her when I was in Hitler’s service. It was not that I had problems with the aims and objectives that she represented; I simply did not like politics and politicians. And that has never changed. Reluctantly, I once again became an extra on the political stage. If there was an official event to which the marriage partner was invited to attend, obviously I would accompany my wife. I got to know the important names in the SPD, beginning with the Berlin senator Joachim Lipschitz,[9] with whom my wife had considerable contact during his time as district alderman of Neukölln; with the governing bürgermeisters Klaus Schütz[10] and Walter Momper;[11] even with Willy Brandt, who after being governing bürgermeister of West Berlin became federal chancellor, but I do not remember the date.

Nobody ever spoke to me about my past, but most knew. If I attended official functions there was a tacit agreement that I would never mention it. Thus, during the state visit of Queen Elizabeth in 1978, even Prince Philip was not aware with whom he was having such a lively conversation as he was led through the Charlottenburg exhibition. I might even suggest that the Duke of Edinburgh and I were in partnership that day: we were both the escort to our respective wives and made no secret of the fact that we had no enthusiasm for the collection of sculptures. Soon the small group surrounding the duke was agreed – we preferred the garden. The duke was grateful to be led out to be shown the parkland designed by Peter Joseph Lenné. He liked that much better.

Ghosts

For many years my past was buried. I had minimal contact with old colleagues. I met my former company commander Mohnke once on the occasion of a birthday reunion of Hitler’s pilot Hans Baur. After that, Mohnke invited me on a number of occasions to visit Hamburg, but because of my business I could never get away, even though he lived to be ninety-six. Occasionally I met Helmuth Beermann, a colleague from the bodyguard. He lived near my relatives, and I was often able to make a detour to see him.

I had an attack of the horrors one day on account of a totally unexpected meeting. I was with my wife in a restaurant. When the waiter arrived to take our order, I recognised him as Hatchet Schmidt, the co-prisoner from the camp at Sverdlovsk who had chopped off the head of the traitor Kruse. It was apparent that he recognised me at once. This was not a story for my wife, and I did not want to burden her with it, and so I acted as if the waiter were a stranger to me, and nothing in his tone made my wife think that Hatchet Schmidt was anything more than a waiter. However, I slipped him my address surreptitiously, and soon afterwards he visited my shop. Once he got back to the Federal Republic he had gone on trial for the business at the camp but had been acquitted.

Until the death of my wife in 1998, out of regard for her political involvement I kept in the shadows, gave very few interviews and never broached the subject of my past. For many years there was no special, or in any case no public, and certainly not a German, interest in my experiences. In the 1970s, I gave the American historian and journalist James O’Donnell a long interview. He wrote a book about the bunker experiences, although a lot of it did not seem to me to conform with how I had related it.[12]

The books and documentaries known to me about the last days in the Führerbunker are all contradictory and excessive in number. There were really very few of us down below. If one counts up today how many have since ‘inveigled’ themselves into the bunker, there must have been a military company present. All of these had something to say. Supposedly, a hundred or so people were still living down there just before the suicides of Hitler and Goebbels. The fact is that nobody, absolutely nobody, spent time in the bunker who had not been expressly told to report there. Certainly, officers came down for the situation conferences, but then went up again as soon as they finished. My own commander, Schädle, never went down there, nor did RSD chief Rattenhuber. I cannot recall ever having seen Hitler’s pilot Baur in the bunker. I cannot insist that he was never there, but I certainly never saw him for myself.

People had to make themselves greater or lesser in importance to justify their presence. Otto Günsche, one of the few who really had something worthwhile to say, finally had enough of it and gave out no more information. He even withdrew from me because I gave his telephone number to somebody I considered trustworthy who then became very oppressive and unpleasant. Otto did not want to talk. I also stepped back out of the limelight under the weight of enquiries. In 1982, I gave an Australian film crew my first television interview, and after that I got some peace at last.

I managed my shop for interior decorators’ requisites until my sixty-eighth year, when I sold it to a former co-worker. My wife had to be cared for by me in the last five years of her life. It was difficult for me to watch my clever Gerda fall victim to Alzheimer’s. The onset was harmless enough – she just started to slur the end syllables of longer words. Later she began to be anxious about public speaking. ‘Rochus, I stand at the dais, and suddenly there is nothing there. Just emptiness.’ At first I tried to play it down, but Gerda was too much of a realist not to notice that this was no normal ageing process she was undergoing. I cared for my wife at home until the last day of her life.

Rochus III

Now I live alone in the house of my parents-in-law. Over the years, unfortunately, I was never able to mend the relationship with my daughter. Those ten missing years could never be made good. The greater part of her childhood lay behind her when one day I returned, bringing into her life not only her father but Hitler too. The latter stood like a wall between us. Gitta became an architect, and one of her major assignments has been the restoration of synagogues. She is certain that she has Jewish forebears on her mother’s side. My daughter bore two sons relatively late in life – Rochus and Alexander.

Since the death of my wife, I have faced the questions of the press and public. Many young researchers write to me, often with a whole catalogue of questions. A surprising number of enquiries reach me from eastern Europe and Russia.

One of the questions I am asked most frequently is: when did I realise that the war was lost? I then write back – often only months later – and I never forget to point out that war is the worst thing men can do to each other. War is nothing but mass murder. It was the worst then, it is the worst today. Everything, absolutely everything, happening in the world today can be watched from an armchair in the living room. No dictator can fool the people any longer. Everybody can keep himself informed. Yet people still fail to understand what war is. Will we never have good sense?

As I have discovered, my ancestor Paul Misch was a soldier in Wallenstein’s army in the seventeenth century. My father and I were soldiers who served at the front in the world wars of the twentieth century: he died of his wounds; and I landed in Hitler’s bunker and the Moscow torture chambers. For my grandchildren, the young Rochus and his brother, and to their generation, I wish nothing more than that they recognise what an uncommonly valuable challenge they have in today’s democracy: to be able to go the way they choose. In my day I had no choice but to be a soldier.

1 At Fürstenwalde, the former barrack camp for POWs and ‘foreign workers’ had been converted in 1946 into a camp for displaced people. The reception of former POWs had been intended to occur here.

2 Where the demarcation lines of the British, American and Soviet zones of occupation intercepted, on 26 September 1946 the British had set up a collection centre at Friedland near Göttingen in which refugees of the immediate post-war period were accepted, fed and registered. In 1952, the German authorities took over the camp, which became the returners’ camp in the West for POWs released from the Soviet Union.

3 Ernst Reuter (1889–1953) was responsible for political affairs in West Berlin from 1946; in 1948 was Oberbürgermeister of the three Western sectors; and from 1951 until his death was the governing Bürgermeister of West Berlin.

4 Jakob Werlin, later chairman of Daimler-Benz AG, had a friendly relationship with Hitler. For getting him released from Landsberg on 20 December 1924, Werlin, as the Benz & Cie AG representative in Munich, placed a vehicle at his disposal. In the National Socialist period he became an SS-Oberführer and inspector-general for road traffic.

5 After the Second World War, Helene Elisabeth Princess von Isenburg (1900–1974) became the first president of the association Stille Hilfe für Kriegsgefangene und Internierte (Silent Help for Prisoners of War and Internees).

6 Kaspar Seibold (1914–1995), CSU deputy and member of the Parliamentary Council.

7 The CSU politician Fritz Schäffer (1888–1967) was in Konrad Adenauer’s cabinet as federal finance minister, from 1949 to 1957, then federal justice minister until 1961.

8 Gerda Misch was a member of the Berlin House of Deputies 1975–8.

9 Joachim Lipschitz (1918–1961) was a municipal councillor for the Berlin district of Neukölln, and from 1955 an interior senator, first in the Senate of the governing bürgermeister Otto Suhr and then under Willy Brandt. Lipschitz founded the action Unbesungene Helden (Unsung Heroes) which publicly honoured citizens who had provided refuge for people from Nazi persecution.

10 Klaus Schütz (b. 1926) was an SPD politician; 1967–77, governing bürgermeister of Berlin.

11 Walter Momper (b. 1945) was an SPD politician; 1989–91 governing bürgermeister of Berlin.

12 Uwe Bahnsen and James P. O’Donnell, Die Katakombe – Das Ende in der Reichskanzlei, Stuttgart 1975.