OBERKALBACH, HESSEN, GERMANY
Village of My Berthold and Ullrich Ancestors Includes Information about Surrounding Villages Attack on Oberkalbach 1945 Written by Richard Heinrich Jung, Pastor of the Lutheran Church in Oberkalbach from 1935 to 1948. It is posted on the Oberkalbach website http://oberkalbach.de/Dorfchronik/5_April.html. I translated and posted this account on my web site with permission of Daniel Foeller who lives in Oberkalbach and is on a committee to preserve the history of the village. He is the webmaster of the Oberkalbach website. The footnotes are my own creation added at the end of the Pastor's account. Following Pastor Jung's story you can read the memory of a 10-year old girl of the same event. |
The 5th of April 1945 in Oberkalbach
In spite of the ban on listening to foreign radio reports, it was known in every house and it was spoken of in the street – not without dismay: heavy armor was advancing from Hauswurz[1] towards Fulda![2] American artillery was shooting towards Schluechtern![3] With fear of the relentlessly advancing front mingled the hope for a quick end to the nightmare.
During Holy week, Heubach[4] and Uttrichshausen[5] had to take in the military weapon unit of the district air command of Wiesbaden. The high command-west vehicle staff with three colonels, two majors, several captains and a number of men had found refuge in Oberkalbach. As on Holy Saturday columns of captured Russians were pushed through our villages towards Wildflecken, reconnaissance troops suspected troop movement and a few minutes later planned to send out eighteen low-flying attack planes. When they realized the situation, they aborted the plan. The horror of the war now fell heavily on the quiet peaceful villages of the Rhoen[6]. The stark fear of the impending menace was present everywhere. For that reason, the confirmation ceremony of this Easter celebration with its words: “He who fears God has a secure fortress” (Proverbs 14:26) was understood by the congregation as armor for their hour of danger.
April 2nd brought a double surprise: We were cut off from electricity and a battery of infantry riflemen with 7.5 centimeter machine guns and machine pistols took up position opposite the Weinberg.[7] The Americans had also taken Schluechtern and Fulda. In spite of this, we still wanted to resist.
When on Tuesday reserves from Dalherda[8] and scattered units from Döllbach[9] and Hutten[10] formed the battle group Kurzreiter[11], our anxiety and at the same time our bitterness escalated. We feared that no good would come from this. As I rode my bicycle at 10 a.m. towards Uttrichshausen to a funeral that was scheduled for 11 a.m., civilians and SS men had blocked the road with tanks. A lunatic undertaking! Freshly-felled tree trunks piled on top of one another wouldn’t stop the American tanks.
Nothing new happened on Wednesday. But it was the calm before the storm. During the night before Thursday, it began. At the railroad overpass in Neuhof[12] the Kurzreiters tried to get things going. In vain! The quickly defeated attempt was simply a signal to start up the engines of the giant American tanks. By dawn, they rolled slowly from Oberzell[13] towards Heubach and Uttrichshausen. By 9 a.m., heavy smoke clouds swelled upwards in Oberkalbach. The stables and barn of farmer Johannes Jaeger burned down. Actually, I should have been at a funeral in Heubach. But I was detained in Oberkalbach as more infantrymen penetrated our village, blindly obeying their officers, who, openly urged by SS men, gave commands from the schoolyard. Our only weapons were rifles, bazookas and hand grenades. What should we do? A decision had to be made. Our own fate will end in misfortune. The decision was made: Oberkalbach will defend itself!
All my attempts to persuade them to give up this senseless decision failed. The women, old and young, began to be filled with dismay. The white flag! But they feared court martial. The young SS officer, who had lost an arm on the eastern front and also had a head wound, was unpredictable. About 11 a.m., my neighbor Rueffer grabbed me and forced me to leave the street and go into the parish office. “He’ll shoot you.” It was horrible - to recognize the coming catastrophe and not be able to do anything to stop it. Was it only fate or was it also guilt? I sat down in my office at the typewriter to make a record of the happenings. The view through the window continued to draw my gaze as I observed new soldiers hurrying from the direction of Eichenried[14] into the village. They were immediately gathered and placed under the SS officer.
When I saw three men hunched in my neighbor Schaefer’s food storage area with machine pistols, I couldn’t remain in the house any longer. I wanted to be in the street. The French prisoner of war[15] approached me and said, “House to house battle.” The order was given to go into the cellars with hand weapons. Now the women and children hurried into the cellars designed for safety during air raid attacks. The first American tanks were sighted on the Mittelkalbach-Oberkalbach road. Shortly after 12 o’clock the first shots were fired. They were reported by a lookout in the church tower. A few minutes later, the residence and stables of farmer Breitenbach were on fire. Immediately, attempts were made to extinguish the blaze. But it was impossible because of the street battle.
The confusion grew. Every house was searched. When the Americans had searched the parish office and had come back out through the garage, one of their comrades was hit by a shot from an ambush. “Water, water!” I hurried to bring him water. But the young man died immediately. A squad of Americans came. They wrapped him in a blanket that they demanded from my wife and carried him away. A short break ensued. But before a decision could be made, a signal was given. The American commander had given the command to stop the street fighting and at the same time gave the order: “The whole village must be emptied within ten minutes. It will be completely burned down.” Fire had already been thrown into neighbor Schaefer’s barn.
A panic broke out. Indescribable! Was there no escape? The SS men were still shooting. What could be done? Then I decided to seek out the American commander and ask him to withdraw his order. To identify myself, I used an amnesty declaration of the 1938 Kassel Special Court, in which was written about my opposition to a malicious law. But he only made the commitment to lengthen the evacuation order by forty minutes in order to spare the church and the parish office. To all other requests, he answered repeatedly, “Two men were killed. Two men were killed.”
Now the word was: “Save what can be saved”. The most necessary things were loaded onto carts and wagons. The cattle were driven out of the village. Where was it safe? Where was refuge? Flight in all directions! With a refugee family from the Dobrudscha[16], who had been living in the parish house since 1943, and with my wife and child, I stayed in the immediate area of the village at Gehampeter’s field behind the church. I had taken the church books to the old cemetery. Now it was necessary to trust:
“Nothing can happen to me that He has not foreseen and He will bless me. I will accept what is given, what is right for me. I trust His grace will keep me from all harm. If I live according to His Word, nothing will hurt me, but will benefit me forever!”
The order to evacuate the village had been given at 12:25 p.m. The announced attack didn’t begin until 1:40 p.m. The American tanks were driven up on the property behind Lamphanse[17] and on the opposite side at Hinterkirchweg[18] field and all guns fired phosphorus munitions. It was obvious that this was retaliation. The power to destroy reigned outrageously. One house after another broke out in flames. The farm buildings burned like tinder. A light rain caused a dense smoke to lie over the village like a pitch-black cloud. I negotiated two more times with the commander. His Jewish interpreter was sympathetic to my request. To him, I appeared credible as a member of the Bekennende Kirche.[19] When I accomplished the cessation of the retaliatory firing at 15:20 p.m., I had him to thank for it.
It is unbelievable how the village appeared. It was as if it had become extinct. Greater damage could still be prevented. The Scholze[20] house could still be saved. Also the Rueffer and Kraushaar houses. Now men and women must be found to put out the fires. Those who had fled were afraid to come back. I called and searched. We feverishly sprayed the fires with the air-raid protection hoses. Even the American soldiers helped out. And at last we were able to prevent the three buildings from burning down. Also the mayor’s office in Schmidt’s Garten could have been saved, but we didn’t have enough manpower. They were afraid to come back into the village. With fear in their hearts, they were trembling. The prospect of being left with nothing was as shocking as the realization that the legacy that had been left by the fathers had been spared was thrilling.
As evening came, it was not yet possible to assess what had actually happened. It was only talked about that a second American soldier was gravely wounded in Lamphanse’s yard and immediately died. The Frenchman at Koetze-Hannse’s house, Albert Vasseur of Channy[21], died in the vicinity of the Herbert house. The Americans had quartered themselves in several houses for the night. They had searched in the cellar and the pantry in the parish house, which was badly damaged. The pastor’s wife had to cook and fry for them. They also demanded alcohol. But they did without it when I explained that the wine was to celebrate the Holy Communion. When I also pointed out the terrible destruction they had perpetrated by their attack, they seemed to be ashamed. But they repeated the words of their commander: “Two men were killed.” Revenge was more important than forgiveness!
During the night of Thursday to Friday, the house of Konrad Jost burned down. He had built it himself with arduous labor. He was drafted on the first day of the war. He had served in the military in Norway and Russia. Now at home on convalescent leave, he was struck by a fragment from a phosphorus grenade on the last day of the war. After excruciating pain, he died in the Schluechtern hospital. And a second member of the congregation became a victim of the 5th of April: Johann Sauer, evacuated from Cologne (Koeln) to Oberkalbach. On Friday also a Hitler Jugend. Hans Zeh from Preungesheim[22] was found in the immediate vicinity of the village. So we mourned for the six human sacrifices following the great day of misfortune. Seventy people were homeless as a result of the destruction of seventeen residences. Thirty-three workshops were victims of the flames. Twenty cows, nine horses, four bulls, nine pigs, nine goats and eight sheep burned to death. Eleven additional buildings were ten to fifteen percent damaged.
On Saturday, when the fallen Frenchman was to be buried in the Oberkalbach cemetery, we discovered that not only the church tower had suffered severe damage but that the only remaining bell was shot through and silenced. Its swaying was only an indictment and complaint. Its swaying was an effective expression of the sorrow and the pain of its village, of the devastation of our people, of the sacrifice of people of the whole world. The new casting of the bell was done by bellcaster Rincker in Sinn. Now the numbers are displayed on it:– 1611 – May 4, 1945 – 1946: the story of its existence that beseeches every generation: Sow love, not Hate! Practice forgiveness, not revenge!
[1] Village 10 miles northwest of Oberkalbach.
[2] City 10 miles north of Oberkalbach.
[3] Town 7 miles southwest of Oberkalbach.
[4] Village 2.5 miles southeast of Oberkalbach.
[5] Village 2.5 miles east northeast of Oberkalbach.
[6] An area of low mountains in central Germany, located around the border area where the states of Hesse, Bavaria and Thuringia come together.
[7] A low hill on the north side of Oberkalbach.
[8] Village about 8 miles east of Oberkalbach.
[9] Village 3 miles northeast of Oberkalbach.
[10] Village 7 miles southwest of Oberkalbach.
[11] Name of last minute emergency soldiers similar to Minute Men in the U.S. during the Revolutionary War.
[12] Town 5 miles northwest of Oberkalbach.
[13] Village 6 miles south of Oberkalbach.
[14] Village 2 miles southwest of Oberkalbach.
[15] This French soldier had been captured by Germans and placed in Oberkalbach to live and work until the conclusion of the war.
[16] An area in southwestern Romania and northeastern Bulgaria between the Danube River and the Black Sea. where Ethnic Germans were ousted in the 1940’s.
[17] House name for the Mueller family residence.
[18] Street name “Path Behind the Church” that runs parallel to Am Fennbach which is the main road through Oberkalbach. Its name came from the fact that there was a church building in this area before the current church was built on Am Fennbach.
[19] The Confessing Church (also translated Confessional Church) was a Protestant schismatic church in Nazi Germany that arose in opposition to government-sponsored efforts to nazify the German Protestant church.
[20] House name for the residence in which Jost, Kirchner and Hornung families had lived.
[21] German spelling of Chagny - a town in eastern France.
[22] A city-part of Frankfurt am Main.
Memories of the Attack by 10-Year Old Margaretha Foeller Shields
The following are the memories of Margaretha Foeller who was a 10-year-old girl living in the village at the time of this event. She eventually married an American soldier and came to the U.S., settling in Wisconsin.
Margaretha vividly remembers the soldiers coming to Oberkalbach. They entered the village from the opposite end of town from where she lived. An evacuation order had been sent out, but it never reached her end of town. The family went into the basement. She remembers the rifle shells whizzing past the house. The mayor, who was supposed to wave the white flag to surrender the town, didn’t do it because there were German soldiers present. Then the German soldiers began firing at the U.S. soldiers from basement windows. When one of the Germans shot and killed a U.S. soldier, the Americans pulled out and parked their tanks on the hills overlooking Oberkalbach from the direction of Niederkalbach. From there, the tanks began firing at the buildings until ¾ of the town was on fire. Then the soldiers re-invaded, going from house to house.
When they got to the house where Margaretha’s family lived, they entered and everyone put their hands up to surrender. Her father, who couldn’t lift his arm because of an old wound from WWI, had put his arm in a sling so that he wouldn’t get shot for not putting his hands up. The front yard of the house was used as a kitchen to feed the soldiers. The entire family was locked into one room at night to be guarded. The soldiers used the rest of the house. Margaretha’s mother expressed anger, not so much because the soldiers took over the house, but because they slept in the beds with dirty boots on. Her mother was watched as she fried eggs for the soldiers to make sure she didn’t lace the eggs with poison.
After five or six days of occupation, the soldiers left to move on toward Berlin. Then the German government required the villagers to take in refugees from the eastern European countries. If there was an extra room in the house, it was mandatory that a refugee family be placed in the home. Margaretha’s family didn’t have to take in any refugees because their rooms were full. Her sister and her brother-in-law, who had just returned from the war having lost an arm in battle, were also living there. The brother-in-law had to break the curfew when he ran to get the midwife to deliver his wife of her first child in the middle of the night. The family held their breath until he returned home safely. When German soldiers were coming to collect “surplus” food, Margaretha’s father buried potatoes in the back yard to hide them for his family.
Margaretha says that it all seems so surreal now, to think that she went through that experience as a child.
In spite of the ban on listening to foreign radio reports, it was known in every house and it was spoken of in the street – not without dismay: heavy armor was advancing from Hauswurz[1] towards Fulda![2] American artillery was shooting towards Schluechtern![3] With fear of the relentlessly advancing front mingled the hope for a quick end to the nightmare.
During Holy week, Heubach[4] and Uttrichshausen[5] had to take in the military weapon unit of the district air command of Wiesbaden. The high command-west vehicle staff with three colonels, two majors, several captains and a number of men had found refuge in Oberkalbach. As on Holy Saturday columns of captured Russians were pushed through our villages towards Wildflecken, reconnaissance troops suspected troop movement and a few minutes later planned to send out eighteen low-flying attack planes. When they realized the situation, they aborted the plan. The horror of the war now fell heavily on the quiet peaceful villages of the Rhoen[6]. The stark fear of the impending menace was present everywhere. For that reason, the confirmation ceremony of this Easter celebration with its words: “He who fears God has a secure fortress” (Proverbs 14:26) was understood by the congregation as armor for their hour of danger.
April 2nd brought a double surprise: We were cut off from electricity and a battery of infantry riflemen with 7.5 centimeter machine guns and machine pistols took up position opposite the Weinberg.[7] The Americans had also taken Schluechtern and Fulda. In spite of this, we still wanted to resist.
When on Tuesday reserves from Dalherda[8] and scattered units from Döllbach[9] and Hutten[10] formed the battle group Kurzreiter[11], our anxiety and at the same time our bitterness escalated. We feared that no good would come from this. As I rode my bicycle at 10 a.m. towards Uttrichshausen to a funeral that was scheduled for 11 a.m., civilians and SS men had blocked the road with tanks. A lunatic undertaking! Freshly-felled tree trunks piled on top of one another wouldn’t stop the American tanks.
Nothing new happened on Wednesday. But it was the calm before the storm. During the night before Thursday, it began. At the railroad overpass in Neuhof[12] the Kurzreiters tried to get things going. In vain! The quickly defeated attempt was simply a signal to start up the engines of the giant American tanks. By dawn, they rolled slowly from Oberzell[13] towards Heubach and Uttrichshausen. By 9 a.m., heavy smoke clouds swelled upwards in Oberkalbach. The stables and barn of farmer Johannes Jaeger burned down. Actually, I should have been at a funeral in Heubach. But I was detained in Oberkalbach as more infantrymen penetrated our village, blindly obeying their officers, who, openly urged by SS men, gave commands from the schoolyard. Our only weapons were rifles, bazookas and hand grenades. What should we do? A decision had to be made. Our own fate will end in misfortune. The decision was made: Oberkalbach will defend itself!
All my attempts to persuade them to give up this senseless decision failed. The women, old and young, began to be filled with dismay. The white flag! But they feared court martial. The young SS officer, who had lost an arm on the eastern front and also had a head wound, was unpredictable. About 11 a.m., my neighbor Rueffer grabbed me and forced me to leave the street and go into the parish office. “He’ll shoot you.” It was horrible - to recognize the coming catastrophe and not be able to do anything to stop it. Was it only fate or was it also guilt? I sat down in my office at the typewriter to make a record of the happenings. The view through the window continued to draw my gaze as I observed new soldiers hurrying from the direction of Eichenried[14] into the village. They were immediately gathered and placed under the SS officer.
When I saw three men hunched in my neighbor Schaefer’s food storage area with machine pistols, I couldn’t remain in the house any longer. I wanted to be in the street. The French prisoner of war[15] approached me and said, “House to house battle.” The order was given to go into the cellars with hand weapons. Now the women and children hurried into the cellars designed for safety during air raid attacks. The first American tanks were sighted on the Mittelkalbach-Oberkalbach road. Shortly after 12 o’clock the first shots were fired. They were reported by a lookout in the church tower. A few minutes later, the residence and stables of farmer Breitenbach were on fire. Immediately, attempts were made to extinguish the blaze. But it was impossible because of the street battle.
The confusion grew. Every house was searched. When the Americans had searched the parish office and had come back out through the garage, one of their comrades was hit by a shot from an ambush. “Water, water!” I hurried to bring him water. But the young man died immediately. A squad of Americans came. They wrapped him in a blanket that they demanded from my wife and carried him away. A short break ensued. But before a decision could be made, a signal was given. The American commander had given the command to stop the street fighting and at the same time gave the order: “The whole village must be emptied within ten minutes. It will be completely burned down.” Fire had already been thrown into neighbor Schaefer’s barn.
A panic broke out. Indescribable! Was there no escape? The SS men were still shooting. What could be done? Then I decided to seek out the American commander and ask him to withdraw his order. To identify myself, I used an amnesty declaration of the 1938 Kassel Special Court, in which was written about my opposition to a malicious law. But he only made the commitment to lengthen the evacuation order by forty minutes in order to spare the church and the parish office. To all other requests, he answered repeatedly, “Two men were killed. Two men were killed.”
Now the word was: “Save what can be saved”. The most necessary things were loaded onto carts and wagons. The cattle were driven out of the village. Where was it safe? Where was refuge? Flight in all directions! With a refugee family from the Dobrudscha[16], who had been living in the parish house since 1943, and with my wife and child, I stayed in the immediate area of the village at Gehampeter’s field behind the church. I had taken the church books to the old cemetery. Now it was necessary to trust:
“Nothing can happen to me that He has not foreseen and He will bless me. I will accept what is given, what is right for me. I trust His grace will keep me from all harm. If I live according to His Word, nothing will hurt me, but will benefit me forever!”
The order to evacuate the village had been given at 12:25 p.m. The announced attack didn’t begin until 1:40 p.m. The American tanks were driven up on the property behind Lamphanse[17] and on the opposite side at Hinterkirchweg[18] field and all guns fired phosphorus munitions. It was obvious that this was retaliation. The power to destroy reigned outrageously. One house after another broke out in flames. The farm buildings burned like tinder. A light rain caused a dense smoke to lie over the village like a pitch-black cloud. I negotiated two more times with the commander. His Jewish interpreter was sympathetic to my request. To him, I appeared credible as a member of the Bekennende Kirche.[19] When I accomplished the cessation of the retaliatory firing at 15:20 p.m., I had him to thank for it.
It is unbelievable how the village appeared. It was as if it had become extinct. Greater damage could still be prevented. The Scholze[20] house could still be saved. Also the Rueffer and Kraushaar houses. Now men and women must be found to put out the fires. Those who had fled were afraid to come back. I called and searched. We feverishly sprayed the fires with the air-raid protection hoses. Even the American soldiers helped out. And at last we were able to prevent the three buildings from burning down. Also the mayor’s office in Schmidt’s Garten could have been saved, but we didn’t have enough manpower. They were afraid to come back into the village. With fear in their hearts, they were trembling. The prospect of being left with nothing was as shocking as the realization that the legacy that had been left by the fathers had been spared was thrilling.
As evening came, it was not yet possible to assess what had actually happened. It was only talked about that a second American soldier was gravely wounded in Lamphanse’s yard and immediately died. The Frenchman at Koetze-Hannse’s house, Albert Vasseur of Channy[21], died in the vicinity of the Herbert house. The Americans had quartered themselves in several houses for the night. They had searched in the cellar and the pantry in the parish house, which was badly damaged. The pastor’s wife had to cook and fry for them. They also demanded alcohol. But they did without it when I explained that the wine was to celebrate the Holy Communion. When I also pointed out the terrible destruction they had perpetrated by their attack, they seemed to be ashamed. But they repeated the words of their commander: “Two men were killed.” Revenge was more important than forgiveness!
During the night of Thursday to Friday, the house of Konrad Jost burned down. He had built it himself with arduous labor. He was drafted on the first day of the war. He had served in the military in Norway and Russia. Now at home on convalescent leave, he was struck by a fragment from a phosphorus grenade on the last day of the war. After excruciating pain, he died in the Schluechtern hospital. And a second member of the congregation became a victim of the 5th of April: Johann Sauer, evacuated from Cologne (Koeln) to Oberkalbach. On Friday also a Hitler Jugend. Hans Zeh from Preungesheim[22] was found in the immediate vicinity of the village. So we mourned for the six human sacrifices following the great day of misfortune. Seventy people were homeless as a result of the destruction of seventeen residences. Thirty-three workshops were victims of the flames. Twenty cows, nine horses, four bulls, nine pigs, nine goats and eight sheep burned to death. Eleven additional buildings were ten to fifteen percent damaged.
On Saturday, when the fallen Frenchman was to be buried in the Oberkalbach cemetery, we discovered that not only the church tower had suffered severe damage but that the only remaining bell was shot through and silenced. Its swaying was only an indictment and complaint. Its swaying was an effective expression of the sorrow and the pain of its village, of the devastation of our people, of the sacrifice of people of the whole world. The new casting of the bell was done by bellcaster Rincker in Sinn. Now the numbers are displayed on it:– 1611 – May 4, 1945 – 1946: the story of its existence that beseeches every generation: Sow love, not Hate! Practice forgiveness, not revenge!
[1] Village 10 miles northwest of Oberkalbach.
[2] City 10 miles north of Oberkalbach.
[3] Town 7 miles southwest of Oberkalbach.
[4] Village 2.5 miles southeast of Oberkalbach.
[5] Village 2.5 miles east northeast of Oberkalbach.
[6] An area of low mountains in central Germany, located around the border area where the states of Hesse, Bavaria and Thuringia come together.
[7] A low hill on the north side of Oberkalbach.
[8] Village about 8 miles east of Oberkalbach.
[9] Village 3 miles northeast of Oberkalbach.
[10] Village 7 miles southwest of Oberkalbach.
[11] Name of last minute emergency soldiers similar to Minute Men in the U.S. during the Revolutionary War.
[12] Town 5 miles northwest of Oberkalbach.
[13] Village 6 miles south of Oberkalbach.
[14] Village 2 miles southwest of Oberkalbach.
[15] This French soldier had been captured by Germans and placed in Oberkalbach to live and work until the conclusion of the war.
[16] An area in southwestern Romania and northeastern Bulgaria between the Danube River and the Black Sea. where Ethnic Germans were ousted in the 1940’s.
[17] House name for the Mueller family residence.
[18] Street name “Path Behind the Church” that runs parallel to Am Fennbach which is the main road through Oberkalbach. Its name came from the fact that there was a church building in this area before the current church was built on Am Fennbach.
[19] The Confessing Church (also translated Confessional Church) was a Protestant schismatic church in Nazi Germany that arose in opposition to government-sponsored efforts to nazify the German Protestant church.
[20] House name for the residence in which Jost, Kirchner and Hornung families had lived.
[21] German spelling of Chagny - a town in eastern France.
[22] A city-part of Frankfurt am Main.
Memories of the Attack by 10-Year Old Margaretha Foeller Shields
The following are the memories of Margaretha Foeller who was a 10-year-old girl living in the village at the time of this event. She eventually married an American soldier and came to the U.S., settling in Wisconsin.
Margaretha vividly remembers the soldiers coming to Oberkalbach. They entered the village from the opposite end of town from where she lived. An evacuation order had been sent out, but it never reached her end of town. The family went into the basement. She remembers the rifle shells whizzing past the house. The mayor, who was supposed to wave the white flag to surrender the town, didn’t do it because there were German soldiers present. Then the German soldiers began firing at the U.S. soldiers from basement windows. When one of the Germans shot and killed a U.S. soldier, the Americans pulled out and parked their tanks on the hills overlooking Oberkalbach from the direction of Niederkalbach. From there, the tanks began firing at the buildings until ¾ of the town was on fire. Then the soldiers re-invaded, going from house to house.
When they got to the house where Margaretha’s family lived, they entered and everyone put their hands up to surrender. Her father, who couldn’t lift his arm because of an old wound from WWI, had put his arm in a sling so that he wouldn’t get shot for not putting his hands up. The front yard of the house was used as a kitchen to feed the soldiers. The entire family was locked into one room at night to be guarded. The soldiers used the rest of the house. Margaretha’s mother expressed anger, not so much because the soldiers took over the house, but because they slept in the beds with dirty boots on. Her mother was watched as she fried eggs for the soldiers to make sure she didn’t lace the eggs with poison.
After five or six days of occupation, the soldiers left to move on toward Berlin. Then the German government required the villagers to take in refugees from the eastern European countries. If there was an extra room in the house, it was mandatory that a refugee family be placed in the home. Margaretha’s family didn’t have to take in any refugees because their rooms were full. Her sister and her brother-in-law, who had just returned from the war having lost an arm in battle, were also living there. The brother-in-law had to break the curfew when he ran to get the midwife to deliver his wife of her first child in the middle of the night. The family held their breath until he returned home safely. When German soldiers were coming to collect “surplus” food, Margaretha’s father buried potatoes in the back yard to hide them for his family.
Margaretha says that it all seems so surreal now, to think that she went through that experience as a child.
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Copyright 2000-2022 by Sue (Ursula Kaiser) Foster.
Please contact me for permission to copy and to let me know why you are interested in this information :-)
Copyright 2000-2022 by Sue (Ursula Kaiser) Foster.
Please contact me for permission to copy and to let me know why you are interested in this information :-)