Contemporary Witness Statement Herbert Römer

As the Last Reserve in Kahla 1945 Herbert Römer Background We lived in Düsseldorf when the war broke out. The ominous prelude to disaster began already on November 9, 1938, with the infamous "Reichskristallnacht": beer-bellied SA men and fanatical youths rampaged like berserkers, destroying the furnishings and shops of Jewish fellow citizens. Piles of rubble lay in front of their houses. Two years later, the first bombs fell. The streets looked similar now. The frightened people whispered behind cupped hands: "This is the punishment for what they did to the Jews!" Darkness fell over the Reich. No light was allowed to shine outside at night. Car headlights wore caps with a slit and crept through the unlit streets. Later, luminous plaques were used so people wouldn’t bump into each other in the dark. It only became bright when bomber squadrons fired flares and the notorious "Christmas trees," and the pale fingers of the searchlights hunted the deadly birds. Often, even after that, the night was "lit as bright as day" and the day shrouded in smoke. We mostly spent the nights in the air-raid shelter and got used to an underground life. On June 11, 1943, it became especially bad. Another night in the expanded air-raid shelter of the school opposite. The crashing of explosive bombs and the barking of the nearby quadruple anti-aircraft guns was the orchestral accompaniment to the song of death. It did not stop. The air became stuffy in the gas-tight shelter. We children helped turn the hand cranks of the ventilators with the large gas filters. My consciousness narrowed to rigid waiting and vague hoping. (I experienced this state several more times later). Suddenly, there was such a crash that we ducked our heads, believing the ceiling would collapse on us, which, thank God, did not happen. At dawn came the relieving "all clear." I went up with others into the school building, which was strewn inside with shards. On the second floor, we discovered in a classroom a torn-open air shaft in which an explosive bomb was lodged, estimated to be a 100-kilogram bomb. A dud or a time fuse? Down and out quickly! Outside, a firestorm. The house where we had lived and the two neighboring houses: blazing furnaces. Nothing to save! My father, who as a disabled veteran of the First World War had not been drafted, went with us (my mother and younger brother) through the burning streets of downtown Düsseldorf to the apartment of my mother’s parents, who had traveled to Vacha in Thuringia for recuperation. Their apartment was not destroyed but temporarily uninhabitable. My father lodged us in an empty attic room in the undamaged office building of his workplace. On one of the otherwise bare walls hung three glass cases with a butterfly collection. The cases with the dead fragile beauties were strangely undamaged. The sight of intact delicacy amid chaos impressed me deeply and has not faded to this day. My father telegraphed our situation to my grandparents. They arranged accommodation for us at the inn "Goldener Engel," where my father took us. He himself had to return to Düsseldorf and stayed with his sister. At the end of October 1943, he visited us again in Vacha but had to cut his short leave short for official reasons. On November 13, we received a telegram that my father and my cousin had been killed by a bombing raid on November 3, and my aunt had been rescued alive from the buried cellar. She died a year later. In Thuringia Now a return to the life-threatening West was out of the question. My grandparents and the rest of the family stayed in Vacha. Life was peaceful again. The quaint small town with its beautiful town hall and the gentle hills of the Rhön Mountains all around were already a welcome change for city children. (That as a stranger one had to endure some fights, at least with an honorable defeat, to be accepted, belongs to our Stone Age heritage). My brother and I attended the local secondary school. Unlike our gymnasium in Düsseldorf, it was more ideologized and ritualized. In the stairwell hung a three-part board. The top part showed the (weekly) "slogan," the middle the "weekly song" from the relevant song repertoire, and the bottom the "core saying," which changed monthly. The class representative had to report attendance or absence militarily briefly to the teacher at the start of class and then have the slogan, weekly song, and core saying spoken or sung in turn. My family was fed up with the cruel war game. We sons did not join the Jungvolk but engaged in the church (Catholic diaspora). I was soon integrated into my class, was a good student, and was even elected class representative. After about a year, in spring 1944, the deputy headmaster (the director was at the front) called me out of class and shouted at me: "I heard you don’t go to service (Jungvolk), you are an antisocial element!" He called the responsible squad leader and ordered him: "Put this guy in your troop!" My mother complained to the headmaster, pointed out our sacrifices in the war, and threatened to complain to higher authorities. The brave headmaster became uneasy. He apologized servilely and meekly to me, but this did not change my situation. In May 1944, now 14 years old, I was taken into the Motor-HJ. (Refusal threatened punishment-HJ!). The school building became a hospital; classes took place in the old elementary school, which had been expanded by two barracks on the schoolyard, in shifts with the elementary school. The rituals remained but degenerated, e.g., by singing off-key, probably less for ideological reasons than to annoy the teacher and delay the start of lessons. War-Critical Assignments Mail Carrier In the summer holidays of 1944, I was assigned to the Reich Post as a rural mail carrier. Two students each took half a rural mail carrier’s route but otherwise with all the rights and duties of a postal employee: besides letters and parcels, also registered letters and even delivery of cash ("money letter carrier"). There was no pay. This task was interesting, responsible, and even pleasant, for example, when early in the morning the storks in the Werra meadows took off from the old watchtowers with food for their young. Loading WorkerIn the autumn of 1944, there was a series of daytime assignments in Merkers, but not to shovel potash salt, rather to handle more valuable items. In an empty potash salt hall, piles of brand-new fur coats for soldiers' winter clothing, felt boots, and paratrooper knives were stored. All of this was to be brought underground because attacks were expected in the area, which had so far been spared by Allied long-range bombers. The piles had to be dismantled and the material loaded onto carts. I was amazed by the amount of warm clothing while the soldiers on the Eastern Front were freezing. The paratrooper knives exerted an irresistible appeal on us. Theft, however, would have been considered sabotage with corresponding consequences. The knives were better off going into the mine. Later assignments had something to do with culture. In an extensive cellar of the potash mine, one million volumes (so it was said) of the Prussian State Library were stored, but not neatly on shelves, rather stacked to fill the room. The removal of this mass of paper and parchment was done almost like mining work. We waded through old folios, Bibles bound in parchment and leather. I loved beautiful old books. Their immediate fate pained me. But perhaps they escaped the great fires down there, the effects of which I had already experienced. Everything had to be hurriedly loaded onto carts and taken underground. Again and again, small stacks of books with the initial signature "XY" appeared off to the side of the "extraction area." I inspected these "separates" and soon found the explanation for the strange phenomenon: they were adventure novels or similarly appealing youth literature, by no means selected by the Reich Chamber of Culture. There was still room in school bags or bread bags. Towards the end In the following months, space became tight in the Reich. Endless columns of German soldiers passed by the Golden Angel. The nearby Werra bridge was a bottleneck. Once I saw a strange troop: soldiers who knelt down and bowed their heads to the ground, all facing one direction. That was not the command "Full air cover!" As a Karl May reader, it became clear to me: Muslims! Where did they come from? I thought the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hitler's friend, had sent them. (Probably, however, they were Muslims from the Balkans). One day, brand-new aircraft engines with accessories were lined up in the wider streets of Vacha and on the outskirts. We had no assignments with these. It would have been too heavy for 14-16-year-olds anyway. Last reserve At the end of February 1945, it became serious for us boys again. We were assigned for six weeks to armaments work in an underground aircraft factory near Kahla. Early in the morning, we set off by train. A queasy, strangely tense feeling in the stomach. Although I had already experienced some unusual things, I had never been separated from my family. When the train rounded a curve, one could observe the long trail of fire that the locomotive, heated with raw brown coal, left behind. In the background, the morning red. Memories of the fire nights in Düsseldorf came back. The scene had something eerie and caused again that state of rigid expectation and indefinite hope for survival. Arriving in Kahla, we took a longer march and reached a disturbed construction site in Großeutersdorf, flanked on both sides by two-story buildings still in shell construction. In front of us stood an ox cart with kitchen waste. It was surrounded by emaciated people dressed in shapeless clothing, rummaging through the waste for anything still edible. They wore earth-colored quilted jackets, no shoes or boots on their feet, but pieces of cement sacks wrapped with cord. A blue square with the inscription "Ost" (East) was sewn onto the jackets. Although I had already seen "foreign workers" in Vacha, the current sight shocked me. We mostly wore the HJ winter uniform. After the usual roll calls and instructions, we received our additional equipment: three gray blankets and a pair of felt boots, as far as the supply lasted. For me, it was no longer enough. I was left only with my lace-up shoes. In the long run, there were still plenty of cement sacks! We were actually put into the inhospitable dwellings where beds were still free. These were three-tiered roughly made frames with paper sacks of undefined contents as mattresses. There were windows with glass, but no doors, neither inside nor outside. I got my bunk in the top bed by the window. Bad luck again: the windows had no blackout. The brutal "room elder," who had his bunk by the (still) heated stove, ordered me to give up a blanket to darken the window. The "rooms" were designed for 19 men. On the first night, we newcomers were subjected to nasty pranks ("Holy Spirit"). There was nothing else to laugh about anyway.The next morning we went to the construction site. After a half-hour walk, we arrived at a mountain ridge that was strangely flattened at the top. At about halfway up, a relatively wide terrace had been created, partly by cutting away the mountain slope, but mostly by dumping spoil from inside the mountain. The valley-side slope was no longer vegetated but yellowish-white from the dumped material. The mountain looked wounded and battered. Large semicircular tunnel openings led into the mountain slope, and in other places, huge bunkers with thick steel doors leaned against it. I was assigned with some comrades to the construction of another bunker. This one had almost reached its finished height and was surrounded all around by rough wooden scaffolding, on which numerous workers were busy. It reminded me of pictures of pyramid building or the Tower of Babel. Our task was to feed a concrete mixer. However, I had never seen such a type before. The mixing drum, which ran continuously, was located at the top at the height of the uppermost scaffold boards on a shaft-like tower made up of several box-shaped sections. These were apparently stacked on top of each other depending on the construction progress. Inside the shaft ran two bucket excavators (scooping buckets on chains), similar to the gravel dredgers on the Rhine, which I knew as a Rhinelander. The excavator chains ended below in two large funnels embedded in the ground. We had to continuously shovel sand/gravel into one of the funnels. The shovels were provided to us. At the opposite funnel, forced laborers slit open cement bags and poured the contents into the funnel. The bucket excavators transported sand and cement from the funnels into the mixing drum above, to which a water pipe also led. The transport speed of the excavators was apparently set so that the correct concrete mixing ratio was maintained in the mixer. Above, workers pushed coarse two-wheeled iron carts, which had a semi-cylindrical shape and a handlebar, under the mixer’s outlet, filled the carts, and pushed them on the scaffold platform to the designated spot, where they dumped the contents into the formwork. This went on incessantly. If we had gone on strike or worked too slowly below, the whole system would have come to a halt. The work itself was not dangerous, but the conditions: No one wore a protective helmet; they were not even offered to us. We worked beneath a machine at great height with constant material handling and vehicle movements on a not exactly modern wooden scaffold! There were no safety nets. The forced laborers with their thick fur caps were somewhat better protected than we were with our HJ “ski caps.” Material supply was via the factory railway. A whole rail system had been laid. There was busy traffic. The air was filled with the chattering of the small black diesel locomotives and diesel smoke. Trains with tipper wagons were shunted. Once I saw a forced laborer have his leg crushed because he had not lifted it in time out of the area of the buffers when coupling a row of wagons to a train. Not a pleasant sight! (Grim Reaper was probably the occupational safety officer!). The deployment at this site lasted several days. We were repeatedly led through the tunnel system. The reason is still unclear to me. Did we shorten routes around the mountain this way, or was it propaganda towards the forced laborers toiling there with the motto: “Look here, we, the masters, do not even spare our children! What are you complaining about?” We were also forced laborers, and without a penny of pay. Officially it was “honor service,” from which no one escaped. The leader of the youth camp was a higher HJ rank with a “homeland shot.” He hobbled through the camp mostly shouting on two crutches and was called Künast. He had the nickname “The Four-Legged” and was feared. At night, double guards (unarmed) had to patrol the camp with two-hour shifts. Once I was assigned to this guard duty. “No special incidents!” Those who ran away and wanted to go home were caught again at the latest at the Kahla train station. The “deserters” were put in the punishment barracks at night and had to sleep on a straw heap. Compassionate comrades on the upper floor were said to have poured water through the cracks to send the prisoners a goodnight greeting. (When I read TRAVEN’s “Death Ship” after the war, where at the bottom of the hierarchy the wretched mistreated the even more wretched, I was reminded of this). My mother tried in vain to get me back, citing our personnel and material war damages. During the passages through the tunnel system, its logic became clearer to me. Deep inside the mountain, the tunnels were about the height and width of an average living room. Some were still being driven forward. Forced laborers drilled blast holes in the rock with heavy drilling machines. The tunnels were not supported, probably because the rock was self-supporting at those dimensions. In the finished tunnels, technical work was already underway. This narrower tunnel type led into higher and wider tunnels that were concreted. Larger components were worked on there. From these tunnels, one reached a kind of underground hall, which was of course also developed. Large aircraft parts were worked on there: wings, tail units, fuselages. In one such hall, engines were lined up side by side, slender devices wrapped in tubes. They looked completely different from the piston engines I had seen earlier in the streets of Vacha. For a short time, as a technically interested boy, I forgot the camp conditions and enjoyed being able to inspect and even touch these probably secret things. They were called “turbines.” The finished aircraft were called “turbine fighters,” named after the manufacturer Messerschmitt Me 262. The hall-like tunnels led into the already mentioned large bunkers, where the final assembly of the parts into the finished aircraft took place. It was said that eight such tunnel systems (today one would say: production lines) were planned. In fact, only one line was producing; others were still under construction. From a bare rock face outside, the mouths of a series of pipes protruded, apparently for ventilation or exhaust. (After the war, I read H.G. WELLS’ “Time Machine” with the underground production facilities and “subhumans,” “lemurs,” as workers, recognizable only by the exhaust shafts. I remembered Kahla). Only a few guards were visible. Outside and in the tunnels stood here and there “golden pheasants,” political leaders, in their long yellow-brown gold-braided coats like silent idols. OnlyOnce I saw a rough man in a cotton jacket striking a Lorenschieber with a knotted stick. Probably a Kapo who was earning extra money. During my work outside at the mixer, I had already seen an inclined lift. A normal railway track on wooden sleepers led straight and quite steeply from the terrace up to the mountain plateau. The actual lift consisted of the chassis of a two-axle Reichsbahn freight car, on which a horizontal platform compensating for the incline was mounted. The freight car, thus converted, could be pulled up to the mountain plateau with a winch. Finished airplanes were transported to the runway laid out above with it. After a few days, the time had come. We heard engine noise up on the mountain, which at first did not sound particularly impressive, more like a Sachs engine. But suddenly it roared and thundered in the air. When we looked up into the sky above us, some of us pointed to the horizon. There, with never-before-seen speed, the new bird, the "turbine fighter," raced. I was fascinated. I had read DOMINIK's "Fuel SR," atomic weight 500, and similar things and immediately thought of atomic propulsion. Soon we learned that the new "wonder weapon" consumed 2000 liters of fuel per hour. The scarcity of this ordinary fuel was no secret. This wonder weapon could probably no longer save the already doomed thousand-year Reich. The second takeoff we still experienced was probably a last gasp. Our inhospitable quarters were reality. After 3 days, the coal bunker was emptied down to the last crumb of raw brown coal. The cold, frosty night wind swept through the barracks. The crossboards from our bed frames were burned so much that only 3 or 4 boards saved us from falling through. Personal hygiene was out of the question. Two whole water taps in the muddy terrain served 600 or more people. The natural cold draft dampened strong concentration of human exhalations, to which one could probably get used over time. There were no toilets in the barracks. There was a "toilet" barrack. Above a pit was a wooden platform on which 12 normal chamber pots ("pit latrines") stood. The facility was therefore called the 12-cylinder. However, the cylinders were not as sparkling clean as those of the aircraft engines in the streets of Vacha. Increasingly frequent air raid alarms came at night. There were no air-raid shelters or at least bomb shelters. The safe tunnels were far away. We walked over a footbridge from our first floor directly into the forest rising behind the barracks. Fortunately, no bombs fell, but in the dark we became acquainted with the truly notorious "trip mines." The "12-cylinder" was apparently not enough and was too far away. (The hygienic conditions were typical for the early form of human sedentism. People lived near their excretions. The philosopher Peter SLOTERDIJK calls this prevailing sociological phenomenon in "Spheres II" "Merdocracy"!) The food was meager: per man per day 500g bread, 50g meat, 25g fat, and twice 0.5 liters of soup. The latter was not generally popular; usually, a few liters remained in the 10-liter can. The forced laborers were supposed to get 350g bread, 25g meat, and 15g fat and also the tasty soup. It was forbidden under a fine of 1000 RM to steal wood from the construction sites as firewood. One evening a forced laborer came to the barracks with a bundle of wood and asked for a bowl of soup. There was still soup left. The young master race men took the wood from the hungry man and chased him away. It was forbidden under penalty to do business with the "foreign workers"!? Cold, hunger, and working conditions increasingly dampened the joy in the "honor service." One heard more often: "Like in Buchenwald."The Allies were already in Krefeld in the west. Nevertheless, the deployment continued. After working on the concrete mixer, I was equipped with a hoe and assigned to a group to widen a path on the mountainside. Others were digging cable trenches. The electrification was commissioned to the Siemens company. For a short time, there was joy. The rumor went around that BDM girls were coming as reinforcements. They were supposed to be housed in the opposite barracks! The pinnacle was then the deployment on the runway at the top of the mountain. It was said to be 1.4 km long, just long enough to enable the takeoff of the jet fighters, but too short for a landing. Landing was possible, we heard, in Erfurt. We were to widen the runway. Brand new coke shovels were handed out to us as tools. Now, the concrete strip did not border loose soil, but solid forest ground that had to be cleared. The success of our efforts was accordingly limited. The grandeur of the honor service had now reached the height of absurdity. We had already been deployed for 2 of the 6 weeks. One morning we were ordered to a special roll call. It was said that we would be sent home early. This was good news. But the matter was not so simple and nice. The roll call took place on a meadow near our barracks camp. A thin layer of ice covered the old grass. We had to line up in threes as usual. It took some time in the cold until HJ prominence appeared. (The HJ district leader and the Gauleiter Sauckel were said to have been at the plant as well, but did not appear). The ritual began with flag raising and the flag song. "Do you see the dawn in the east..., maybe we will be dead tomorrow!" It was actually announced that we would be discharged home, but before that, the "voluntary" registration of the birth years from 1929 to the Waffen-SS was to take place. In addition, at least 50 were to "volunteer" to remain in the deployment. No one had prepared us for this action. Then came the command "Birth years 1929 and older step forward!" I belonged to the 1930 birth year. The group thus divided (about 300 each) had to reform. After the command "Attention," the command question was addressed to the 29-year-old block: "Whoever volunteers for the Waffen-SS, step forward three steps!" The block stepped forward three steps! Only two remained standing. They were called forward and asked for the reasons for their refusal. One said his parents did not agree. The other gave a smarter answer: He felt physically unfit for elite service in the Waffen-SS. (The two objectors were not beaten up, as reportedly happened elsewhere on similar occasions.) The leadership also managed to get the 50 to remain. No obligation of secrecy about the deployment was imposed. The real heroes of this ghostly scene were the two objectors and the 50, if they had not volunteered out of deluded devotion to leader, people, and fatherland. (Given the overwhelming number of forced laborers, even the dumbest could imagine what would happen if the system collapsed.) That was one of those points where one later asks oneself: "What would you have done if you had been faced with the decision?" (I had also already been noted once as an "asocial element"!). I knew of one from the 29-year-old group who and whose family were under pressure because their Aryan descent was doubted. He had also stepped forward three steps. Later, after the Americans conquered Thuringia, one saw the father as a "persecuted of the Nazi regime" in concentration camp clothing. While we worked for Hitler's wonder weapon Me 262, he was finally put into a concentration camp. (In doubt, against the accused!). The son was probably making a last attempt to convince the system. (Later Pharisees and scribes have it easy, after a refreshing shower in the tiled bathroom, a good breakfast with organic egg and fragrant coffee at their comfortable word processor, to frown and spout nonsense. After this good deed, one treats oneself to a walk in the park and reflects on their impressive appearance in the evening talk show!).The End In the following days, it was mid-March, we headed to our hometowns. The train heading west left a long trail of fire, and I was back in Vacha. Troop movements increased. Shortly before Easter, at the end of March, the war activity became audibly closer. Where to? In front of the cable factory were shelters, a tunnel system that went 16 meters deep. The remaining family (my mother, my grandmother, my brother, and I – my grandfather had died in 1944) went with some hand luggage from the Untertor to the cable factory. On the way there through Turmstraße, enemy low-flying aircraft appeared. We took shelter in the cellar of a smithy. This cellar did not seem bomb-proof to us. (We were right. During the artillery shelling in the following days, the smithy was hit, and the smiths were killed.) After the wave of low-flyer attacks subsided, we reached the shelter. The tunnels were narrow and supported like in a coal mine. Compared to that, the tunnels in Kahla were ballrooms. There was lighting but otherwise only cave life. We crouched on the floor and hoped to come out alive. Our greatest fear was that some 150-percent types would play heroes and the conquerors would smoke out the tunnels. The fear was not unfounded. HJ patrols combed the tunnels to recruit youths for reporting trips to the front. My mother hid my brother and me in a narrow ventilation tunnel, which the patrol fortunately overlooked. After two days, even the Führer-believers probably saw that the end was inevitable. They packed up. Party badges, medal bars, all decorations of this kind were buried in the tunnel floor. Thank God no death-defying heroes! On the third or fourth day underground – it was in the first days after Easter – Vacha was captured, and we could leave the shelter guarded by GIs. In front of the exit, an anti-tank gun fired towards Öchsenberg. In the town, American soldiers, tanks, and jeeps with heavy machine guns. Upon arriving at the "Golden Angel," we were received by GIs. I was searched for weapons by a terrifying guy with pitch-black hair and equally piercing eyes. Not practiced in "Hands up!" I lowered my arms again; he energetically pulled them back up. Now I knew who was in charge. So this is what being conquered felt like. You absolutely can’t do anything. Whether the new masters were liberators or just oppressors in different uniforms had yet to be proven. In any case, my conqueror also considered me capable of resistance; otherwise, he would not have searched me for weapons. The new masters were very afraid of "werewolves." I was already quite tall for my age and fit into this category of their enemy image. Another "antisocial element"? He found no weapon and let me go. "Phew!" The inn was requisitioned. We regular guests (a total of eight people) had to move to the former military training camp with many other evacuees. The conditions were luxurious compared to the barracks in Kahla. After a few days, we were allowed back to the Golden Angel, but not to our rooms, rather to the vaulted cellar with an air hole and an iron trapdoor. Again, cave existence. About 30 liberated former English prisoners of war were housed in the guest room. During the day, they were quite nice. We could communicate reasonably well with our school English, which showed us that we had not only learned for school. The liberated had meanwhile discovered alcoholic beverages. In the evening, I wanted to go upstairs to get something from our room. In front of the guest room door stood an Englishman who had already had too much to drink.had looked. He saw me, rushed at me, and wanted to grab my throat. I froze in terror. Just before he could seize me, the door to the guest room opened, a US soldier who was apparently posted as a guard saw the scene, grabbed the attacker by the collar, tapped on his pistol holster, and calmed me: "Be quiet, I have a pistol." If I had resisted and even overpowered the attacker, the soldier might have interpreted the scene differently and not used his pistol as a calming signal. Here, the ancient behavioral pattern of freezing in terror once again proved its worth. The burden that the Nazi system had imposed on us by recruiting youths also had an effect in this case: "Werewolves"! (In the neighboring town of Unterbreizbach, after raising the white flag, a shot was still fired. The occupiers burned down at least two-thirds of the town!). After a few days of the English being quartered, all the drains of the guest toilet were clogged. The access was next to the trapdoor to the cellar. The sludge sought a slope and immediately found its way into our dungeon. We down there experienced "merdocracy" in pure form! That too passed. The English withdrew to their homeland. We were allowed back into our rooms. The undelivered Reichspost was delivered, including confirmations of their reports to the Waffen-SS to the comrades of the 29th. A 16-year-old—probably from an earlier conscription—had fallen in the battles on the field of honor. The Nazi leaders were deposed and assigned to public works. A new mayor was appointed, a city inspector. The school resumed classes without the usual rituals. During the following weeks, jeeps with oddly uniformed men on board appeared repeatedly. They wore gold-braided shoulder boards as large as "breakfast boards," peaked caps, and olive-colored uniform fabric. That did not bode well. There was a rumor that the Russians were coming. One morning in July, we heard horses' hooves outside the Golden Angel. A look out the window was enough: the Russians were there. Panjewagen, simple foot soldiers with worn boot heels in coarse, unhemmed coats. The Americans had withdrawn. The Iron Curtain had fallen, still without a wall and barbed wire. It consisted of Red Army soldiers with clunky submachine guns. Their use was unmistakable. We could no longer go to the swimming pool in Philippsthal or climb around the red rocks in Ziegenhain. A stifling feeling. The "Golden Angel," only 200 meters from the Werra bridge or the "demarcation line," constantly received visits from Soviet military police, Asians searching for illegal border crossers and "on the side" for schnapps. But they did not banish us to the cellar like the conquerors. All inhabitants of Vacha aged 14 and over had to undergo examinations for venereal diseases by the only old doctor; whether out of actual fear of infection or to humiliate the defeated was unclear. Probably both applied. Red banners with communist congratulatory slogans were hung in the marketplace, and for those who could not or would not read, loudspeakers blared, though without hi-fi quality. One day, a decree from the mayor still appointed by the Americans was posted, stating that all German "newcomers" had to leave the city on short notice. Those affected were mainly "bomb refugees" from the West. There was a protest assembly in the marketplace. The city commander, a major, neat in a new uniform, probably made from captured cloth, entered the steps at the district court, smashed the glass of the display case with his fist, tore out the notice, and deposed the mayor. Then he asked the crowd: "Who wants to become mayor?" Next to me, there was whispering, and a worker named Schuh from a weaving company relocated from Wuppertal to Vacha (including parachute harnesses) volunteered. As the only candidate, he was immediately appointed mayor by the commander. After 14 days, he threw in the towel with the remark: "The devil should be mayor here!" The occupying power found a replacement.This was the first and last time I experienced an immediately effective plebiscite. Almost classic: the marketplace (forum) was the polling station. Sometimes curious GIs managed to get across the Werra bridge to see what their eastern comrades-in-arms were up to. There were fights in front of the Golden Angel. Throaty shouts and the clattering of plastic helmets knocked off the brave GIs on the cobblestones were the "battle noise." School continued, enriched by Russian lessons. Russian teachers were first a dismissed potash mine director who had served in the Tsarist army, and after he died of a heart attack, a dismissed magistrate who probably also came from the Baltics. Teaching material was a textbook by Alexeyev, 24th edition 1945 (!), printed at the Pierer Court Printing House in Altenburg/Thuringia. It contained no trace of communist example sentences. Important, possibly life-saving vocabulary or sentences not in the textbook were: "Stoi! Ruk' verh! Kuda idiosh?" "Ya idu v gorod." (Stop! Hands up! Where are you going? I am going to the city.) Even without knowledge of Russian, one quickly learned what Red Army soldiers meant by "Dawai, dawai!" namely: "Forward! Go, go!" (Literally translated: Give!). As reading material, the ex-magistrate offered us a small poem by Lermontov about a "Ptitschka," a little bird. The council system was also introduced in school. I was on the student council and took part in conferences in this capacity. After Grotewohl and Pieck shook hands and the SED was founded, there was also an SED school council. One day this councilor inspected the Vacha secondary school. First, a conference. I was there. The school councilor made clear at the outset what he thought of the school: a school for sons and daughters of potash mine directors, not for the children of workers! (The directors supposedly had to have a harem and offspring like oil sheikhs to fill a large school!). A math teacher had prepared statistics: there were still 30 percent worker children at the school. He would have been better off not saying that. The school councilor shouted: "You dare to contradict me? That is precisely the proof of my statement!" The math teacher kept quiet. — There I was again not properly programmed. I was only a skilled worker’s grandson, and only on my father’s side, but not a worker’s child. That we were now almost completely penniless because widow and orphan payments no longer came from the West to the Soviet zone and savings accounts were "frozen" would probably not have prevented classification as a "capitalist" in a serious case. Afterwards After two failed attempts, we only managed in June 1946, by the skin of our teeth, via Heiligenstadt, Friedland camp (with the well-known "Nissen huts" as quarters, bare ground to sleep on), to return to Düsseldorf. The journey took eight days in freight cars. In our hometown, we were homeless because my grandmother could no longer get into her apartment. It was occupied. Only the train station bunker remained. Democratic parties had been founded. We went to a meeting in a somewhat intact hall. The chairman of one of the new parties, the CDU, was announced as a speaker. An older gentleman named Konrad Adenauer took the podium. But he did not get us out of the bunker. Life underground thus experienced a new edition. After three months, with the help of the father of a classmate, I managed to get a daytime quarter for the family: forced quartering in the intact single-family house of a politically burdened businessman. Two unheated attic rooms. As flotsam of the lost war, we were not loved by the master race man, which was nothing new for us. This too once came to an end. A reunion The second half of the last century did not, thank God, drive us underground again. The division of Germany lasted a long time. The desire, even in dreams, to visit the places in Thuringia where I experienced history firsthand, always pressed on me. An unrealistic idea. Vacha lay in the 5-km security strip at the border, not to mention the restricted area in Großeutersdorf near Kahla. When we came there in the early 1990s: no bunkers, no flat hill, but a barred gate with a chain lock and a sign "Military restricted area! No entry!" In the bare rock face, one could still see the openings of the ventilation pipes from back then, which I immediately recognized. Behind a barred window of the guardhouse in the background, the lenses of a field binocular flashed bluishly. Aha, someone there! I formed my hands into a speaking tube. "This is Römer from Bonn. Is this the site where the Me 262 was built? I belonged to the last contingent in March 1945!" From the background, militarily curt: "Yes!" I: "Are the tunnels still there?" — "Yes!" — "Are the assembly bunkers still there?" — "Blown up!" — "Is the runway still up there?" — "Blown up!" The still mysterious place with the ghostly voice from the background had something eerie. Not even the flag of the Federal Republic of Germany over the guardhouse helped. I said goodbye to the ghost with binoculars in his style of speech: "Thank you, that’s it!" Pyramids and caves do not