HM

Firstly, I was, as was typical for young people during fascism, a sort of Hitler Youth leader in my village, which now belongs to Poland. However, this was not like the stereotypical Nazi organization with the ideology and so on — for us, the war had already arrived in our village by 1940, as it was located between Stettin in the north of modern Poland and a large hydrogenation plant where petroleum was manufactured. My apprenticeship began in 1942 when I was 14. The grown-ups in our village had all been conscripted into the war effort, and so our group was essentially left alone.

Bombs were falling on our village, corpses in the ruins, incendiary bombs. We put out fires in Stettin. I did an apprenticeship for over two years there, and for over six months I was a member of the fire brigade. There was always somehow a connection to the war. It was never the Soviets but the air forces of the Western Allies who came and rained bombs down on us as the young fire brigadiers cleared the dead in our village.

This gave me the feeling that I had already experienced the war before I was conscripted into the Volkssturm. I completed my apprentice exams in December 1944, and from January 1945 I was a member of the Volkssturm, but I never had to experience direct combat. Then I became a prisoner of war in May 1945.

This is a phase of history that is presented very differently in the West and in the East. If you had been in a POW camp in the old FRG, then it was seen as “well, it wasn’t great, but it was alright.” However, if you were in a Soviet POW camp, then everything must have been awful and absolutely nothing can have been okay.

I had a very different experience. I became a POW near Stralsund, and with around a thousand others we marched to Stettin, and there was always someone who had been awarded the Ritterkreuz (Iron Cross) at the front. The Soviets allowed this because they took the view, as I found out later, that if we were following our war heroes they wouldn’t have to watch out as much. This is perhaps more than these soldiers of the Red Army would have liked to tolerate, but it was a sort of honor with which these defeated soldiers could march into captivity.

I was then in Hinterpommern until December 1945, and things began to change. I was seventeen years old, and the corporals wanted to continue ordering the young lads around. I realized that there was no way of winning honor back with the Ritterkreuz bearer and that these others wanted me to continue to be under his spell. Then a Red Army soldier says to me, “you’re a trained metalworker, come and work for us.” So I was faced with this choice between those who didn’t respect me and just wanted to continue ordering me around, and these others who needed me and would give me an extra piece of bread so that I could do my work properly. And that was how I made it through POW captivity.

In February 1946 I was in a camp near Moscow, not far from Borodino where Napoleon lost the famous battle, where the fascists had again brought fierce fighting, and I attended the Central Antifa School. Our teachers came from the Committee for a Free Germany [set up by émigré German communists, who sought to encourage defections from the Wehrmacht and undo the fascist indoctrination among POWs].

The head of this school was a Professor Naumann, a German antifascist émigré who later returned to the GDR to become an economics professor at Humboldt University and a member of the Central Committee. These were the sort of people who introduced us to Marxism. And so by 1949 I was a young educated Marxist-Leninist. I passed the course and then became assistant to a teacher, who had been a staff doctor in the Wehrmacht and defected at the front in Romania.

And so when I came back and worked as a metalworker for nine months, I was known as “the Red” because I was a defender of the Russians and the western Berliners didn’t have any antifascism in the manner in which it is talked about today. It was only after this that the phase began in which the then–minister president of the GDR Grotewohl said, roughly summarized, the German youth had not yet freed itself from fascism and not yet accepted the new future in which they found themselves. This was the directive from Grotewohl, who was more of a social democrat, to communicate antifascism to the youth, and in the early ’50s as a youth functionary I was able to participate in the upsurge in antifascism.

I had experienced the Soviet Union, and on my travels back to Germany I’d seen the devastation the war had left behind. And you have to say that my generation internalized the message, “no more war, no more fascism!” and it wasn’t just a doctrine. However, we must also say that this side of pedagogy was somewhat neglected in the 1980s in the GDR. A visit to Buchenwald was not enough to communicate antifascism to the youth. The passing down between generations and telling of personal stories was not given as much room as perhaps would have been necessary. It led to some people simply repeating things that they had learned but not internalized and incorporated into their conscious behavior.

This is still the problem today. As an ex-member of the Bundestag, I was at an event recently about relations between Russia and the FRG, and I said quite clearly: you are all talking about Gauland’s relativization of the Nazis as merely a bird-shit in a thousand years of German history, but none of you are talking about what President von Weizsäcker said in 1985: “We were freed from the yoke of fascism through the victory over Hitler fascism” [causing a stir in the West-German right by implying that the 1945 defeat was a “liberation”]. Our culture of remembrance excludes some things that we need today. We are giving space to the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) because we are excluding this aspect of history. I’ve recently been discussing a commemoration in May 2020 for the Battle of Berlin. The D-Day landings in Normandy are widely commemorated, but the Battle of Berlin which actually forced the fascists to surrender is not. We shouldn’t omit anything, we shouldn’t disparage D-Day, but nor should we forget Berlin.