This article is published with the authorization of the official account "Nibelungen Factory"
Kurt Steingel poses with his father and sister as a child.
Kurt Steininger (born 1930). On April 1, 1945, the Third Reich was on the verge of collapse, the Nazi authorities were still frantically scavenging manpower to fill the defensive line, and even the 14-year-old Steinger was recruited into the army and became a Wehrmacht soldier...
On April 1, 1945, when my life was completely disrupted, I received a notice that I needed to go to military training, which meant that at the age of 14, I was about to become a soldier, to be precise, a child soldier. After learning to use bazookas and rifles, I was assigned to the "Vehicle Nightmare" anti-tank team, and my nightmares followed.
Today Kurt Steingel.
At the end of April, my troops were transferred to Stralsund for a defensive mission, marching on foot and spending the night in an anti-aircraft artillery barracks after nightfall. The next morning, a total of 35 soldiers were sent to the sentry position in the village of Rambin, including me and two of my compatriots. We were lucky that those who remained in the barracks went elsewhere and seemed to have all died.
The 6 men of the anti-tank team rushed towards the village with a "chariot nightmare" bazooka, and I rode a bicycle with two "iron fists" hanging from the bicycle. Once in the village, we dug trenches and stayed inside waiting for the Soviets to appear.
Anti-tank unit of the People's Stormtroopers in the later stages of the war.
A group of young soldiers at the end of the war, at that time, both Germany and the Soviet Union, were on the verge of exhaustion of human resources.
Some veterans came running towards us, shouting as they ran, you run! If you don't run, you're dead! The old man is coming! “
I replied, "I don't run, I want to witness the final victory!" ”
By this time, Greifswald had renounced his resistance, everyone there was fleeing for their lives, and the refugees who had previously fled from Pomerania had to continue to flee, and the streets were full of people carrying large bags and small bags. We withdrew our positions and took a short rest in front of a school, when the Soviets had arrived, and they saw that there were obstacles set up by the Germans on the road, so they pushed them over the field.
I went back to my bike and tried to distance myself from the Soviets, whose tanks had reached the entrance to the village. They threatened the defenders of the village to lay down their weapons, and if they dared to shoot, then none of them would want to live... Surrender all, fuck.
I rode forward for a while, then pushed my bike and bazooka into the ditch, and then I ran. Another comrade-in-arms also threw off his bicycle and ran after me. I ran in the direction of the woods, he ran toward the main road, the Soviets opened fire on us, at which point I stumbled and fell, but luckily dodged the bullets, and then got up and ran into the woods. My compatriots thought I had been killed, and later they told my mother that I had hung up.
The People's Stormtroopers, who rode their bicycles to the front, were modified to install two sets of fixtures on the faucets to carry the "Iron Fist" anti-tank bazooka.
I hid in the woods all day, and in the evening I met some comrades-in-arms, and everyone regrouped. On 1 May, we were again ordered to travel to Rügen, on the way to an endless canola field, where the canola flowers were in full bloom and glowed in the sunlight.
We are brave soldiers, none of us are afraid, we can block bullets for the Fuehrer, even if we die, it does not matter - we have received this kind of education since childhood, since the time we went to school, we have begun to receive queues and military training. On our first birthday on April 20, our training camp also held a military parade, and the comrades were about the same age as me, not even old enough to join the youth league. This is the last reserve of the Empire, and it is up to us to win the victory!
The German Junior League consists of male teenagers of German or German descent aged 10-14.
Such a person is completely unable to count on...
After arriving in Rügen, we were again pulled by car to Sassnitz, where the 10,000-ton freighter Friedrich was moored and waiting for us to board the ship. There were already more than 5,000 people on board, no lifeboats, no life jackets, nothing. The ship sailed from the high seas to Copenhagen, Denmark, and was not allowed to disembark after arriving at port.
On 8 May, we were finally allowed to leave the ship, but were loaded onto another freighter and transported back to Laboe, Germany. The boat was in worse condition, there were no beds, blankets and pillows, everyone had to sleep on the deck, and there was a row of rivets just below me, which was very uncomfortable.
After 14 days on the boat, the sun was flustered during the day, the night was frozen, the food was only the soup provided by the field kitchen, the meal was very irregular, and the first time I went out was such a virtue, too terrible. On 18 May, the freighter was towed to shore by a tugboat and captured by the British. The British had blown up the ship's engines, and it seemed that they did not want to pull us back to the mainland, where there were already too many Germans.
The British escorted us to a cattle shed on a farm 35 kilometres away, further east was the Soviet occupation zone, my hometown of Schönfeld was also in that direction, and the British did not release any of the prisoners of war who lived in the east to go home, and those who lived in the west were released, and I had to think of a way.
I mixed into the line in front of the POW office, and I asked the kid in front of me, his name was Alfons: "Where is your hometown?" “
"Cloppenburg".
"Do you still have uncles or uncles in your hometown?"
I remembered his uncle's name and insisted that I was from Cloppenburg! The British gave us food for 4 days, along with severance pay, and then a pickup truck pulled us to Oldenburg. After getting out of the car, I walked with Alphonse in the direction of Cloppenburg.
After the food ran out, we caught snails along the way to fill their hunger, caught snails and threw them into canned boxes and boiled them with water. In a restaurant, I also used my severance money to buy a bottle of cider – in fact, our severance pay was the salary that the Germans did not have time to pay us, about 5 Imperial Marks a day, and the salary was paid as usual during the detention, so I had a total of 70 marks in my hand. In the dining room, I also met a few people I had known on the ship, and Paul, the mill apprentice, was also going back to Kloppenburg, so we went with him. After arriving at the mill where Paul had worked, Paul stood at the door and chanted a few words, and then the mill owner came out, and he saw us and shouted at the back room: "Mom, mom, our family is coming!" ”
Proof of release of prisoners of war and proof of payment of salaries from Steingol.
The table was soon full of delicious food, almost crushing the table, we were so hungry, we ate so much food, ate too much, and I vomited all night... Alphonse's dad was a farmer here, he had four children and the house was crowded, but he didn't care about one more. So I stayed behind to help the Alphonse family with the farm work, and when he was 16 and I was 15, we became very good friends.
Our neighbor also took in a veteran who was going to stay until October and he was going to come home, and I said, You're got bird in your head, are you going to go back and be with the old maozi? "However, later, because of my homesickness, I changed my mind, and at the banquet where everyone was sending him off, I offered to go back with him.
We took the train to Göttingen, where we first stayed at the veteran's relative's house for a few days and then to his parents' house. After saying goodbye to the veterans' families, I sneaked into the train station in Heiligenstadt in the dark and hid in a mobilization room in one of the carriages. Near the end of Neubrandenburg, I saw a large prisoner-of-war camp, and I was glad that I had escaped, but I didn't know that a bigger pit was waiting for me to fall into my hometown.
A freight car of the German Imperial Railway with a mobilization room, in the early use of the railway, the train would be woven with such a carriage every few sections, and the mobilization was based on the signal sent by the driver, and the manual braking operation was carried out. Their working conditions are very harsh, the brake chamber is cold in winter and hot in summer, and tragedies of freezing to death occur repeatedly. After the popularization of pneumatic brakes in the 1920s, the braking capacity of trains has been greatly improved, the brakes of the whole train can be controlled by the driver in the cab of the locomotive, and the mobilization system is canceled, and the mobilization room is useless, but sometimes, the escort and staff accompanying the car will still stay in the mobilization room.
After returning to my hometown, I helped my father with farm work and drove a carriage to the fields every day. At this time, the land reform had been carried out in my hometown, my family had also been allocated a piece of land, the original rich peasants had fled, and those who remained had taken their land and farmsteads for themselves. One day, I had an argument with the son of an activist, who said, "These farms will all be mine!" I scolded him back: "You boy or honestly let the pigs with me." “
Then I was straightened out — 80% of this kid sued me! Some people insisted that I was a "Werwolf" (trained saboteur) sent by the remnants of the Nazis and returned to the village to do destruction. One day, when I got home, my mother hurriedly drove me out: "Kurt, what evil have you done outside, the old maozi has come to arrest you, you run!" I said, "Let the old man kiss my belly!" As a result, the old man was waiting for me in the back room, "Let's go with us?" ”
"I don't go, I don't do anything!!!"
In the April 1945 issue of the German newspaper Front and Rear, the headline on the front page was "Here comes the werewolf!" ”。
To no avail, the old man tucked me into a jeep and dragged me to Bennien's NKVD branch, without trial or explanation, and threw me straight into the prisoner-of-war camp in Fünfeichen. On the way, a prisoner jumped out of the car and ran, and the Soviets went to chase, but did not catch up, so they drove forward for almost a kilometer. They saw that there were exactly two people walking on the road ahead, so they stopped, grabbed one of them, threw it into the truck, and made up the number of prisoners, pretending that no one was fleeing on the road.
The Five Oaks POW Camp held more than 12,000 people, including more than 500 female prisoners in solitary confinement, all dazed and overwhelmed, all like me, not knowing why they came, and only potato cabbage soup to drink every day.
A corner of five oaks pow camp, formerly the IIA POW camp in Germany, later became the 9th ad hoc POW camp of the NKVD to house Nazi sympathizers and various "factors of social instability".
The reason is simple – the labor camps in Siberia need to replenish the workforce. The guards selected the passing prisoners, who were thin and feverish at the time, and I was one of them who walked step by step, and the doctor in charge of the examination only looked at me and then waved me away. I was counted as a prisoner of war of the second category, and I was somewhat luckier than the first, who were transported to Vorkuta, 7,000 kilometers east of Moscow, to mine.
It was still a meal of potato cabbage soup, and as soon as the meal began, everyone sat on the tree stump and devoured it while it was hot, and when they finished eating, they lay on the sand. The camp was tightly fenced with barbed wire, and if the Soviets found anyone crossing the border, they would certainly shoot them. Once, a prisoner of war woke up and swung to the barbed wire, put his hand out of the barbed wire, and tried to pull out the lettuce outside to eat, his behavior was discovered by the guards on the watchtower, and it was a shot.
I became a camp firefighter, able to move around, somewhat freer than others, and everyone else was only able to move within the prescribed area. If a fire is found, the camp fire brigade will have to rush over as soon as possible to extinguish the fire, and if the fire spreads, then everyone will have to finish playing.
The beds in the camp were three-tiered wooden beds, with no mats, and it was terriblely cold in winter. There was also no firewood in the camp, and some people would steal other people's bed boards to burn as firewood. The house was full of bed bugs and fleas, almost to swallow life alive, until before the release, I tried to get a quilt cover, drilled in at night, sealed the opening, the bugs could not come in, which slept a few good nights.
Soviet prisoners of war before the Five Oaks POW Camp painted the interior of the barracks and the scenes at the time of the soup.
In a prisoner-of-war camp, you can't do anything but starve. Later, a cement wall was built in the camp, which was divided into two, and the north camp held criminals, and the Soviets did not allow them to work, and the conditions were very poor. Prisoners of war in the South Camp were treated slightly better and could work under Soviet surveillance, and we worked in the camps of the Soviet tank troops.
Before the Soviets took us to work, they always asked, "Who worked as an electrician?" As a result, almost all the people in the camp said that they were electricians, and the later work became more and more difficult, and the "electricians" gradually disappeared, but I still went every time. In any case, there is no harm in going outside, and if you can find an opportunity, you may be able to ask someone to carry a letter to the house.
Once I went into the camp infirmary, and when I went there, I was just waiting for "self-healing", nothing, and in the end it was lucky not to go into the mass grave.
Prisoners were most concerned about food, and every morning they were given 200 grams of bread and eaten in an instant. By noon, everyone gets about a liter of soup and cooks whatever they want, but the most common ones are cabbage soup and potato cabbage soup. As for dinner, it doesn't exist.
When I got out of the Five Oaks POW Camp, I was so hungry that I couldn't walk, and I was wearing the same clothes I had when I was arrested, except that I had an extra hat on my head, which I had sewn myself out of needles and threads and stolen rags, and the prisoners' heads were always shaved, and there was no way. Guards did not allow prisoners to exchange things privately, and in the winter they did not have even a coat.
I was locked up in five oaks prisoner of war camp for 4 years, completely disconnected from my family, as if I were dead. My parents thought I had been sent to the Soviet Union, but I could neither speak nor write letters. In this respect, the prisoners of war in Siberia were better than us, and they could at least send letters home.
I was imprisoned with many of my peers, we were not very old, but when we re-entered society, one by one, we acted as if we had traveled to the modern age. We would move around a lot, and some of us still made friends in it, but I was very friends with them. In five oaks POW Camp, I also met the former mayor of Userin, who had a crush on me as his son-in-law and asked me to go home with him and inherit his family's farm.
We made some cards and chess to pass the time with stuff like waste paper, and almost a half of the people in the camp didn't make it through, and the former mayor died later, and they were all thrown into mass graves, sprinkled with lime and buried. Therefore, I did not become his son-in-law. Later, when I was a construction worker, I also paid a lot for the mayor... And her husband's house pasted the wall.
In 1993, the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany erected a memorial to the victims at the site of the Five Oaks Prisoner of War Camp.
At the center of the camp is a sink, just like the trough where cattle are fed, where everyone washes, no soap, and it's easier to shave their heads.
After I was released from prison, my release certificate said that I was released from the Five Oaks tree and did not dare to ask for me anywhere. My wife accompanied me to the shipyard to find a job, and the people in the shipyard looked at the documents and said, "Ah, the five oak trees are out, we don't dare to ask you, you still have to find another high." Fortunately, my wife is a party member, and she has a lot of methods. Later, we moved together to Stralsund, where I worked first as a municipal worker and then as an apprentice builder, and a year later I passed my exams and became a full-fledged builder.
Kurt Steingel later became a teacher and is still alive in 2021.