Today’s story is the miraculous account of how the Norwegian’s saved their gold reserves from the Nazis and spirited them out of the country right under the enemy’s noses. If the Germans had obtained these reserves, they would have gained more wealth to supply their war machine.
Although Norway was neutral during WWII, Nicolai Rygg, the director of Norges Bank where the nation’s gold reserves resided, made preparations in case Norway should fall or a crisis develop. Early in 1940, Rygg brought in volunteers to pack bars of gold in white painted boxes and seal them with iron bands. Bags of gold coins were packed in smaller kegs. Of the 421 million Krone stored in the bank, 300 million was shipped to the United States. The rest was left in the vault because Norwegian law did not allow all the gold to be removed from the country at one time.
After Rygg learned that German warships were headed up the Oslo Fjord on April 9th, Rygg contacted General Laake, the Commander-in-Chief of military forces, who ordered Rygg to immediately evacuate the gold to the bank in Lillehammer. Moments later, Rygg learned that the Germans already occupied major cities but hadn’t reached Oslo (the sinking of the Blücher kept the Germans from seizing the capital for an extra eight hours).
Norges Bank at Oslo 1906-1986. Courtesy of Norges Bank.
Twenty-six trucks were chartered from local merchants, and the drivers were directed to the side entrance of the bank but were not informed about what they would be carrying. Bank guards were placed close to the bank to keep inquisitive eyes away, but the military was not used in order to avoid drawing attention to the operation. The bank employees loaded the gold.
Each truck, along with two armed bank guards, drove away immediately after loading so there was no convoy to draw the attention of the Luftwaffe. The first truck left at 8:15 AM and the last truck shortly before 1:30 PM. German soldiers marched down the main street of Oslo at exactly the same time, and the Norwegian commander of the Oslo garrison surrendered the city at 2:00 PM at the Akershus Fort, only a couple hundred yards from Norges Bank.
A Gold Bar from the Norges Bank. Courtesy of Norges Bank.
The gold shipment totaled 818 large crates, 685 smaller crates, and 39 kegs of gold coins. Lillehammer was 115 miles from Oslo, and the trucks traveled over snow-laden roads. Vehicles and pedestrians fleeing the capital slowed down the trucks, and people became angry because the trucks didn’t stop to help them. The last truck arrived at the bank in Lillehammer at 8:00 PM.
The bank employees in Lillehammer tucked the gold away in their vault; however, they could only unload the cargo when the Luftwaffe wasn’t flying over them. The media picked up on the activity and broadcast that trucks of gold were arriving in Lillehammer. A Trondheim newspaper also reported on the shipment, but the Germans did not pick up on the reports. The Royal Family, the Norwegian government, and the Norwegian gold had escaped for the time being!
The gold remained at Lillehammer for ten days while the Norwegians barricaded the roads and kept the Germans from advancing. Rygg checked on the gold twice and on the second trip, he asked the bank manager, Andreas Lund, to memorize the numbers to the vault lock. Frequent bombing raids forced the bank to close and wait to reopen until the planes disappeared.
Norges Bank at Lillehammer. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons – Public Domain
On April 14th, 15 German transport planes dropped about 180 lightly armed paratroopers in the Dombås area, northwest of Lillehammer. They were spread over a wide area, and the Norwegian troops successfully killed or captured them over a five-day period. This kept the railway lines to the north and the west coast open.
In the mean time, it became obvious that the Germans could overtake Lillehammer at any time. Oscar Torp, the Norwegian Minister of Finance, tasked Fredrik Haslund, Secretary of the Labour Party, with transporting the gold from Lillehammer to the port of Åndalsnes where the British Royal Navy could take it safely away. On April 17th, the British—determined to assist the Norwegians in ousting the Germans—had landed a large number of troops and equipment at three Norwegian ports—Harstad, Namsos, and Åndalsnes.
United States Military Academy Dept. of History – Courtesy of Wikipedia – Public Domain
At midnight on April 19th, orders came to open the bank vault door. Unfortunately due to fear and anxiety, Lund had a difficult time getting the lock to the brand new vault open—it had only been opened once before and Lund was operating by memory. He finally succeeded with the code a little past 1:00 AM.
Haslund had recruited the Lillehammer chief of police who assembled 30 volunteers who met at a secret location at 10:00 PM. They were armed with spades and shovels so they would appear to be preparing to dig trenches. Instead they were quietly transported to the bank and loaded the trucks which took the gold to the railway station, a short distance away. The gold was loaded onto the wooden railcars. A small group of soldiers was ordered to accompany the train, but the men weren’t told what they were guarding. They soon figured out the contents because of the Norges Bank initials displayed on the outside of each container.
Lillehammer Train Station. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons – Public Domain
The train left Lillehammer at 4:00 AM with its lights dimmed in case any Luftwaffe aircraft flew over. When dawn approached, the bullion train stopped at Otta and pulled onto a siding to wait for a safer time to proceed. Later, a train arrived at Otta Station from the north with three carriages full of British soldiers who had their thumbs in the air. The Norwegians were encouraged. Little did they know what dangers lay ahead.
The gold train sat undetected on a railroad siding in Otta. It didn’t run during the day because the German bombers loved to target anything moving. After a twenty-four-hour wait, the gold train left at 10:00 PM and arrived at the port town of Åndalsnes at 4:30 AM on April 20th.
View of the innermost part of the Romsdalsfjord with Åndalsnes up to the left in the picture. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
Åndalsnes is located at the head of a fjord – a long narrow inlet which connects to the Norwegian Sea. The British had landed troops and secured Åndalsnes two days before, and at 9:00 AM on the 20th, the Germans commenced bombing the port, the British ships, all transport routes, and the town of approximately 2000 people. In spite of their intelligence, the Germans were not aware of the presence of Norway’s gold, which remained at the station awaiting transportation out by British warship to the United Kingdom.
At 11:00 PM, Fredrik Haslund, the official tasked with conveying the gold out of Norway, sent the gold train to a siding at Romsdalhorn, a few kilometers away. Towering mountains guarded the tiny station, making it a perfect place to hide a train. Due to the constant daytime bombing, a crew of railwaymen worked in twelve-hour shifts to repair the area’s rail lines.
On the night of April 24th, Mr. Haslund ordered the gold train to be brought down to the dock in Andalsnes. Norwegian soldiers loaded 200 boxes of gold onto the HMS Galatea which had just unloaded British troops and equipment. The cruiser carried sixteen tons of the gold along with Norwegian officials to Scotland, and from there, the gold was transported to London and the Bank of England. Thirty-four tons of gold remained in Norway, awaiting transportation to the Allies. If the Nazis took possession, the precious metal would provide a tremendous boost to the enemy’s war chest.
A Modern View of Åndalsnes from the Romsdalsjjord Courtesy of Creative Commons via Wikimedia. Author Ludovic Peron.
The Norwegians expected German soldiers to come up the valley into Åndalsnes at any moment. Only hours remained to move the gold. An army captain obtained twenty-five trucks and drivers, and in two hours’ time, all the gold was removed from the train and loaded on the trucks. The convoy navigated over poorly paved roads that were covered with melting snow and mud. Unfortunately, the Luftwaffe returned to Åndalsnes and attacked the convoy. The soldiers and drivers ran for cover and no one was injured during the forty-five minutes of strafing. The convoy continued its journey, and when the next attack commenced, the drivers sped up. The Germans weren’t successful at hitting their targets. After reaching a ferry crossing, some trucks were hidden and some were camouflaged until dark.
A ferry arrived but could only carry two trucks across the water at a time. It took six hours to convey all the trucks to the other side. Because of deep ruts and potholes caused by the winter weather, the road ahead had to be repaired in places before the convoy could pass through. Trucks broke down and had to be replaced, and the crews became exhausted unloading and reloading the gold. Local farmers utilized their horses and equipment to drag one truck out of a ditch and back onto the road.
Eventually the convey arrived at the port of Molde where the Norwegian Government, King Haakon, and Crown Prince Olav were taking cover. They had arrived on April 23rd, and Molde had essentially become the new capital of Norway. The gold was unloaded into a large vault in the basement of the Confectionsfabriken building (clothing factory) in town.
Confectionsfabriken Building – Molde
The people of Molde were very helpful. They assisted with unloading the gold, providing security, and feeding the exhausted soldiers. But the Germans were intent on capturing or killing the King, Crown Prince, and Government. The Luftwaffe attacked Molde and it’s surroundings with bombs and incendiaries. The townsfolk set off the air-raid alarms as soon as they spotted aircraft, which allowed everyone time to escape to the woods.
On April 28th, the German Government announced that they were at war with Germany and that King Haakon was wanted ‘dead or alive.’ This was no surprise to the king or the Government. The relentless air strikes forced the British to send the cruiser HMS Glasgow to Molde and plans were made to evacuate.
The Germans bombed Molde for the first time at night. With debris littering the roads and fires raging, Norway’s gold was loaded on any available truck and transported to various locations at the harbor. Not all the trucks were immediately able to find a safe path through the destruction.
Before the HMS Glasgow could pull into port, a fire had to be extinguished on the dock. A portion of the gold was carried on board from this dock, and some was ferried by smaller ships from other points and loaded by crane onto the ship. The King, Crown Prince, members of the Norwegian Government, and the French, Danish, and British embassy members and staff joined British soldiers aboard the ship.
The Ruins of Molde – 1940. Courtesy of Flickr. No known copyright restrictions.
After the Germans unsuccessfully attacked the ship, the Glasgow left port and sailed down the fjord in reverse for at least an hour. It was too dangerous to turn around in the fjord at night. Not all of the gold had been loaded and not all of the gold had even made it to the dock before the Glasgow was forced to sail.
Along with the gold, the Glasgow carried King Haakon, Crown Prince Olav, members of the Norwegian Government, and diplomatic officials from Britain, France, and Denmark to the Tromso area in the far north of Norway. From here, the Norwegians hoped to form an offensive against the Germans and drive them out of the country.
Summer Night in Tromso (2012). Photo Credit: Mark Ledingham via Wikimedia Commons
After delivering its precious human cargo, the Glasgow turned south and safely landed the second installment of Norway’s gold in Scotland. Norwegian officials accompanied the shipment by train to London where it was stored in the vault of the Bank of England.
Back in Molde, Fredrik Haslund, the official in charge of rescuing the gold, searched for a way to remove the 18 tons which the Glasgow had been forced to leave behind due to the bombings. While Molde was burning, Haslund loaded eight tons of the gold on the steamer Driva, and the ship set off at 2:00 AM, only one hour after the Glasgow had pulled away.
The Luftwaffe dropped a stick of bombs in the water near the Driva, but she wasn’t damaged. During her trip north she was attacked by a German seaplane, and to avoid being sunk, the Driva’s first mate beached the craft on a flat shoreline. Bombs fell but landed in the sea. As the tide came in, another steamer pulled the Driva back out into the fjord.
Molde Under Attack in 1940 Painting by Rolf Groven
In the meantime, near Molde, Haslund decided the gold should be moved to fishing vessels because the Driva was too much of a target for the Germans. Word was sent to the Driva to rendezvous at the village of Gjemnes. The remaining ten tons of gold was transported by truck to Gjemnes and loaded onto fishing boats (puffers) there. Five hundred and forty-seven boxes of bullion were loaded in the dark, including the gold from the Driva. By this time, Norway’s fight against the Nazis was over in southern Norway but still continued in the far north of the country.
The puffers sailed through the fjords, laying over at coastguard stations and villages but not staying in any one place for long. Unfortunately, the captains of the puffers weren’t comfortable moving into unfamiliar waters farther north along the dangerous coast, and Haslund was forced to find other sources to move the gold to Tromso where the new capitol had been established.
Bodo at the time Haslund visited before it was bombed by the Germans on May 27, 1940. Courtesy of Hundholmen
The gold was again unloaded and reloaded on two different fishing boats. The boats split up but rendezvoused at a small port north of Bodo on May 7th. Hasland left the boat and traveled by car to Bodo where he located the local military commander and learned where the British had placed the minefields in a fjord they must pass through. After safe passage through the fjord, they obtained the services of the commanding officer of a Norwegian guard ship who boarded and piloted them safely to Tromso where they arrived on May 9th.
The gold was combined on one of the puffers, and that boat went out to sea with the other fishing boats each day. On May 21st, the gold was loaded on the HMSEnterprise, a Royal Navy cruiser. The Luftwaffe had previously attacked the Enterprise with 150 bombs, and she was in poor condition. She left on May 23rd on a zig-zag course for the UK. She was attacked again, but none of the bombs hit their target. The Enterprise traveled down the west coast of England without destroyer protection and docked at Plymouth in the south. The gold was transported by train to London and deposited in the Bank of England.
Expecting a German invasion of Britain at any moment, the Norwegians made plans to move its gold once again. The British had already removed all of its own gold reserves before the war started in September of 1939. The Norwegian precious metal was split into several shipments and sent across the Atlantic to the Federal Reserve Bank in New York and to the Bank of Canada in Ottawa. A small portion of the gold remained with the Norwegian Government-in-Exile established in England. This allowed them to function independently throughout the war.
Source: Gold Run by Robert Pearson. Casemate Publishers, 2015.
Early on the morning of April 9, 1940, Germany attacked Denmark. The invasion was executed so swiftly that the Danish military surrendered after only four hours. Many Danish citizens were furious that their government gave up without a fight. Because Hitler wanted to make a good impression on the many foreign correspondents in Denmark at the time, and he wanted the country to be “a model of Nazi occupation rule,” he allowed the people more freedom than in other occupied countries. The elected government continued functioning, but under Nazi supervision, and the Nazis didn’t persecute the Jews.
The boat of Gilbert Lassen, a fisherman from Gilleleje, Denmark, used to smuggle Jews to Sweden. Courtesy of Yadvashem.
The Danish Resistance slowly strengthened over the next three years, and in 1943, after the Allies had put the Germans on the defensive on several fronts, the Danish Resistance stepped up their activities and sabotaged the German war industry in Denmark. The German occupation troops were already concerned about an Allied invasion through Denmark, so Hitler placed the country under a dictatorship. He also ordered occupation commanders to arrest the 7,800 Danish Jews and send them to concentration camps.
Georg F. Duckwitz, a German diplomat serving in Denmark, privately warned the Danish government of Hitler’s orders. Duckwitz went to Germany and tried to get the orders reversed. When he didn’t succeed, he traveled to Sweden and asked the Swedish government if they would grant asylum to the 7,800 Danish Jews. Sweden agreed and Duckwitz returned to Denmark. Hitler was shocked when the Danish government leaders and citizens rose up together and refused to hand over their Jews.
The Danish government encouraged its citizens to hide the Jews from the Nazis. The Danish Resistance led the efforts and recruited captains and crews to take the Jews on boats across the waterways to nearby Sweden. Thousands of refugees made their way to the departure points. They rode on trains, in hospital ambulances, by automobile in a fake funeral procession, and in caravans with Danish police officers “looking the other way.” Even the universities shut down so students would be available to help in the rescue operations.
The leader of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark sent a letter to all the Lutheran Churches in the country and urged its church members to fight for the freedom of their Jewish brothers and sisters. The bishop challenged them with the New Testament scripture that states they should “obey God more than man.” On October 3, 1943, in the tiny fishing village of Gilleleje, about thirty-five miles north of Copenhagen (Denmark’s capital), Reverend Kjeldgaard Jensen read the letter to his congregation. He then led them in assisting the Jewish refugees arriving by the hundreds in their seaside village.
Jensen’s church members helped purchase fuel for the local fishermen to carry the refugees ten miles across the Oresund Strait to Sweden. They fed the Jews and hid those awaiting transportation. The fishing boats traveled late at night and at times were hindered by bad weather or German patrol boats. Some ships were swamped and sank, drowning their refugees. The church members worked with the Resistance, some of whom were arrested, imprisoned, sent to concentration camps, and shot to death for assisting the Jews.
Jewish refugees from Denmark upon arrival in Sweden. Courtesy of USHMM
Two days after Pastor Jensen read the aforementioned letter to his congregation, a train arrived from Copenhagen with hundreds of additional Jewish refugees. This brought the total number of Jews awaiting escape in their village to five hundred, and they were in imminent danger if the Gestapo arrived. Because of a storm that same night, a large schooner sheltered in the Gilleleje harbor, and the villagers raised fifty thousand Danish kroner to lease the schooner. Eager to leave, the refugees rushed to the dock, but during the slow boarding process, a fisherman yelled at those out of line, and the people up front thought the Gestapo had arrived. The schooner captain panicked and cast off with only half his passengers aboard.
The villagers immediately loaded all the refugees they could on local fishing boats and took them to Sweden, but they were forced to leave more than one hundred behind. These refugees sheltered in the church, but an informer alerted the Nazis, resulting in a late-night raid. The Gestapo and German soldiers surrounded the church and threatened to burn it down unless the Jews surrendered. The doors were opened, and the Nazis sent all of the men, women, and children to a concentration camp except for one young boy who hid in the belfry.
The Gestapo threatened Jensen and his church members but didn’t arrest them that night. Pastor Jensen collapsed after the raid. However, the villagers leased another large schooner available nearby and safely ferried the remaining Jews sheltering outside Gilleleje to Sweden. Over a three-week period, rescues took place up and down the coast of Denmark, and about 95% of Denmark’s Jews escaped safely. No other Nazi-occupied nation matched this percentage of Jewish survivors.
Danish-Jewish children living in a Swedish children’s home after their escape from Denmark. Courtesy of USHMM.
Resource: Gragg, Rod. My Brother’s Keeper. Center Street, 2016.
The tragedy of Kristallnacht, Night of the Broken Glass, took place in Germany, Austria, and the Nazi-occupied section of Czechoslovakia (Sudetenland) on November 9-10, 1938. The Nazis damaged or destroyed 1000 synagogues and 7500 Jewish businesses, sent 30,000 Jewish men to concentration camps, and beat ninety male Jews to death.
These events shocked the world. However, many countries, including the United States, only permitted a small percentage of Jews to immigrate, regardless of guarantees of financial support from relatives, friends, and acquaintances in those countries.
Shortly after the events of Kristallnacht, a delegation of prominent Jews in England met with Prime Minister Chamberlain and requested that he allow young German children and teenagers to temporarily enter Britain, retrain, and return to their home countries at a later time.
The Jewish representatives were most concerned about teenagers threatened with arrest and those already in concentration camps. Jewish and non-Jewish agencies assured the British Home Secretary that they would meet the financial needs of the refugee children, apart from government funds, and their stay would only be temporary.
As a result, the British government gave permission for unaccompanied refugee children under the age of seventeen years to enter Britain and didn’t announce a limit to the number of children who would be admitted.
The non-Jewish groups consolidated and formed the non-denominational Movement for the Care of Children from Germany (later called the Refugee Children’s Movement, RCM). Agents of the organization traveled to Germany and Austria and set up the selection, processing, and transportation plans.
A representative of the Jewish refugee agencies met with Jewish leaders in Berlin, and volunteers gathered the names of the most threatened children. These included teenagers in danger of arrest or already in concentration camps, children in Jewish orphanages, children whose parents were in concentration camps, children who could no longer be financially supported by their parents, and Polish children or teenagers at risk of deportation.
Through radio broadcasts, the BBC Home Service appealed to the British people to provide foster homes. Five hundred people answered the call. Jewish and non-Jewish volunteers visited the homes of these potential foster parents and reported on their suitability.
Several hundred immigrant applications from Germany arrived in London each week, demonstrating the urgency of the situation. British volunteers processed the applications, many of them working around the clock, grouping the children in lists and sending travel arrangements to the parents and guardians in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia.
The Nazi government only permitted the refugee children to take a small amount of money out of the Reich, but it wasn’t unusual for parents to place valuables in their children’s luggage. Some children were excited about the journey, but others were angry with their parents and felt rejected. Later on, guilt plagued these children for how they had responded.
The first Kindertransport left Berlin on December 1, 1938, and the first transport from Vienna left ten days later. The trains traveled across Germany and into the Netherlands and then Belgium. At the border crossings, German guards terrified the children by looting their baggage. After reaching the coast, they boarded ferries and sailed to either Harwich or Southampton, England. The German adults who had accompanied them returned to Germany as required by arrangements made between England and Germany. One of these adults was later imprisoned in Auschwitz and lost his own wife and child to the gas chambers.
For the first three months, most of the Kindertransports were from Germany, but later the number of transports leaving Austria increased. Nicholas Winton, a twenty-nine-year-old stockbroker from Britain, witnessed the plight of the refuge children in Czechoslovakia and organized Kindertransports from Prague. Many of these children had previously fled with their families from Germany, Austria, or the Sudetenland and were living in squalid refugee camps.
The transports continued after the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia in March of 1939, but they were halted when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Hundreds of children waiting to leave Nazi-occupied territory could no longer escape. Most of them did not survive the war.
Close to ten thousand lives (70% Jewish) were saved through the Kindertransports, but the majority of these children never saw their parents again. Some of the rescued teens eventually joined the Allied armed services and fought to free their homelands from the vicious grip of the Nazis. Many remained in Britain after the war, but others emigrated and settled in various countries around the world.
Source:
Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport by Mark Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer
For the past two months, I’ve posted individual stories about children who fled the Nazis and survived the Holocaust by taking the Kindertransport to England. An earlier post explains how the Kindertransport program was created. If you missed that post and would like to read it, here’s the link: The Kindertransports: Nearly 10,000 Children Rescued from Nazi Territory.
Lory Gruenberger lived a happy childhood with her brother and parents in Breslau, Germany, close to the Polish border. To her doting father, Lory could do no wrong. Mr. Gruenberger, a partially paralyzed WWI veteran, had a flourishing law practice and refused his government disability pension. After the Nazis took power in 1933, they didn’t harass Mr. Gruenberger due to his veteran status.
By 1937, Lory’s parents recognized the rising danger for Jews and searched for a way to leave Germany. They applied for quota numbers to the U.S., but the wait was long. In the meantime, Lory’s aunts in South America sent papers for the family to emigrate there. The Gruenbergers sold their house, bought passage for South America, and shipped all their belongings ahead. Two days before their scheduled departure, the Argentine consulate informed them that Hitler would no longer allow siblings to sponsor each other to emigrate from Germany. They were unable to find a way to leave.
Map Showing Location of Breslau, Germany, near Poland in 1938 Courtesy of Dr. John Heineman – Boston College
The Gruenbergers had money, but very few stores would sell to Jews. They lived in a hotel in Breslau and started over, purchasing what they could. Lory’s brother completed secondary school three years early, and the family sent him to a small university in Czechoslovakia to get him out of Germany. During the summer break, they sent her brother to stay with Lory’s uncle who taught at Cambridge and Oxford in England. He never returned to Germany.
One morning in November, 1938, Lory road the trolley car to school as usual. During the trip, she passed store after store with smashed windows. In the center of town merchandise littered the sidewalks. She realized all the damaged businesses belonged to Jews. After leaving the trolley car, she could only see the top of their synagogue, but she spotted flames shooting from the edifice. She was so frightened, she crossed the street and took the next trolley back home, refusing to look out the windows on the return trip.
Lory arrived home, and the family maid, with tears running down her face, grabbed onto Lory. German officials had just arrested Lory’s father and taken him away ten minutes earlier. Lory’s mother was also distraught. But three or four hours later Mr. Gruenberger returned home in a police car. The Iron Cross belonging to a WWI veteran still provided protection for some Jews.
German WWI Iron Cross (Wikipedia – Public Domain)
Lory applied and was accepted for the Kindertransport. Her father wanted her to go to England, but at the same time he didn’t want her to leave. On the prearranged day, the Gruenbergers boarded the Kindertransport train with Lory and put her suitcase up. Her father lowered her window all the way down so she could lean out of the train – the German passenger trains had very large windows. They hugged and kissed, and Lory’s parents disembarked. While waiting on the platform, her father’s face turned whiter and whiter, and her mother couldn’t hide her suffering.
As the train started to move, Lory’s father asked to hold her hands through the window. Before the train gained speed, Mr. Gruenberger pulled Lory out the window. She fell on the train platform, causing injury and bleeding. Her father was extremely happy to have his little girl back, but Lory was devastated. After arriving home, her father admitted he probably shouldn’t have pulled her off the train, but after losing his son, he didn’t want to live without her.
Mr. Gruenberger chose to believe that nothing would happen to their family and stated as much to Lory and her mother. Lory was no longer allowed to attend school or the movies, but Lory and another Jewish friend decided to defy part of this order. Neither girl looked Jewish, so they removed their yellow stars and went to see Shirley Temple movies. When Lory’s father discovered from the other girl’s parents where she was, he went to the theater with a light and pulled her out. He slapped her, which he had never done before.
Most stores posted signs informing Jews they weren’t allowed to shop in their establishments. When Lory and her mother entered stores where they were welcome, they were greeted with “Heil Hitler.” They responded with “Drei Liter,” which means three liters, and because it sounded so close, no one challenged them.
In 1940, the authorities called women up for forced labor. Lory was fifteen years old and was assigned to clean the streets in another part of Breslau. She wasn’t allowed to ride on the trolley car because she was Jewish, so she had to get up at 4:00 AM and walk by herself in the dark almost 45 minutes to the assembly place. Lory was next assigned to work in a uniform factory where she mended and cleaned dirty uniforms. She did this until close to the end of 1941.
Various judges and lawyers visited Lory’s father and warned him that he and his family would eventually be arrested. The SS came at 4:30 one morning and nearly broke the door down. The Gruenbergers were only allowed to take what they could put on and nothing else. Lory’s father had a very high fever, and he was taken out on a stretcher and loaded on a truck.
Lory and her mother were taken on another truck to the huge yard of a synagogue and, along with hundreds of others, waited outside in the March cold for about two days and nights. They were then taken by truck to the railroad station and loaded into cattle cars. Thirty-five to forty frightened people traveled in the cattle car, in complete darkness, with no food, for two days.
After two days of traveling in the dark cattle car with 35 to 40 people and no food, the guards opened the door and ordered the prisoners to quickly disembark. The daylight blinded their eyes. Lory’s father waited outside the train for Lory and her mother, and he appeared perfectly fine. The prisoners traveled by truck to their final destination—Theresienstadt, a Jewish ghetto in Czechoslovakia. Because of his WWI service, Mr. Gruenberger had been given the opportunity to pay the German government to send him and his family to Theresienstadt, rather than to another camp or ghetto.
Theresienstadt – Prisoners Wait for Food Rations Courtesy of YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York & the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Lory and her mother lived in a barrack with 300 other people. They slept on straw mattresses in bunk beds with three people per mattress. Lory’s father lived in a house with older, sickly prisoners.
Lory contracted spinal meningitis and stayed in the camp hospital for four months. The doctors were also prisoners, but they were able to get medicine for her through the Swiss Red Cross.
The Germans “beautified” the ghetto, dressed up the prisoners, and put on a good show for the representatives of the International Red Cross, visiting from Switzerland. Lory performed for them in a children’s choir. After the visit, more prisoners were crowded into Theresienstadt, and it became necessary to sleep in shifts, one group sleeping during the day and the other at night.
Theresienstadt Photo Taken During Red Cross Inspection Courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
One day Lory was ordered to report to the railroad station and meet with an SS officer. He informed her she wasn’t going on the transport and sent her back home. This happened four times, and each time she said goodbye to her parents. The fifth time she was called she told the SS officer that she wanted to go. He gave her the chance to back out, but she had made up her mind. He crossed her name off the list and loaded her on a cattle car. Her trip ended at Auschwitz.
Selection of Jews for the Gas Chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau Courtesy of Yad Vashem & the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The guards opened the door, and Dr. Josef Mengele stood outside the car with his stick, hollering and cursing at the prisoners. The officers chased the prisoners out of the train, and Lory’s glasses fell off and broke. Since having spinal meningitis, Lory wore glasses to take the pressure off her nerves. Her inner voice told her not to pick up the glasses, and she obeyed. Mengele divided the prisoners, sending those with defects to the left, including those wearing glasses. This group went directly to the gas chambers, but Mengele sent Lory to the right, and she lived.
After a six to eight-week stay at Auschwitz, the Nazis transferred Lori to several different camps—Buchenwald, Dachau, Kurzbach and Gross-Rosen. At the beginning of 1945, she arrived at Bergen-Belsen where people died by the hundreds.
Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
One month before Lory’s twentieth birthday, the prisoners hollered and many ran outside. The English Army had arrived to liberate Bergen-Belsen. Lori only weighed fifty-eight pounds and was so weak she could only crawl halfway out on her hands and knees. She lay on the ground and prayed to God. A soldier approached and asked if he could assist her. The liberators wanted to help the inmates and gave them chocolate and chicken soup, but more people died from consuming the rich food.
Survivors & British Soldiers outside Bergen-Belsen Courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum & Lev Sviridov
Attachments of soldiers from the French, Russian, and American Armies accompanied the British Army when they liberated Bergen-Belsen. They put together lists of the names and nationalities of the internees. Lory was fascinated when an American soldier from Germany spoke to her in German. The soldiers took her to a hospital for treatment, and she was surprised to see many people she knew, even folks from her hometown of Breslau.
One month after liberation, the British soldiers burned the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to the ground to prevent the spread of Typhus. The survivors were relocated to a former German Army camp nearby.
The British Burn Bergen-Belsen Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Lory traveled by bus to Hanover, a city nearby, to register as a survivor. There she found a man who had lived in the same building with her father at Theresienstadt. He recognized her but said she didn’t look too good. He shared that her father was still at Theresienstadt, but her mother had been transported to Auschwitz three months earlier and had gone to the gas chamber. He pointed out a bus driver whose route went to Theresienstadt once a week. Lory spoke with the driver, and he promised to ask about her father on his return trip. Lory wrote her name on a slip of paper so Mr. Gruenberger would see her handwriting and believe the bus driver.
Lory took the bus back to Hanover the day before the Theresienstadt bus was scheduled to return. She didn’t have a watch, so she waited on the street all night long to meet her father’s early morning bus. The bus arrived, but Lory’s father didn’t. The driver had checked on him and learned that he had left on a bus for Berlin two or three days earlier. Lori had no way to travel to Berlin and didn’t know how she would ever find her father.
Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons Camp Courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum & Herbert Steinhouse
Lory met two young men who’d been traveling around Germany on foot, looking for family. They had come across a little town in Bavaria that wasn’t damaged, and the officers at the American military installation in charge of the area told the young men they’d be happy to have Jewish people locate there. The fellows asked Lory and her girlfriend to join them, and they traveled for a couple of days, begging for food along the road and sleeping with animals, including pigs, to stay warm.
Lori and her group rode into the Bavarian town on an army truck and were sent to a very nice furnished house. Jewish American soldiers, originally from Germany, brought them food the next morning. One of the soldiers was Walter Cahn, and Lory recognized him as the soldier who had taken her information right after the Bergen-Belsen liberation. She was astounded to see him again.
Walter helped Lory locate her father through the Red Cross and Military Intelligence, but it took eight months. After four more months, her father traveled to see her. They had been apart for four years. Lory was thrilled to receive his hugs and kisses.One year later, in 1947, Lori immigrated to the United States and married Walter Cahn. Over the years she corresponded with her father, but they didn’t see each other again until Lory returned to Germany with her son in 1962. She and her family visited her father two or three more times before he died in 1972.
Lory often pondered what would have happened if her father hadn’t pulled her off the Kindertransport and if she hadn’t been able to help her parents through the tragedy they had faced. She didn’t want to hurt her father, so she never brought the topic up with him. But Lory realized she wouldn’t have a normal, happy life if she hated the Germans. She spent many years speaking at universities, schools, and organizations, encouraging others not to forget what the Germans had done, but not to hate them. Lori had a wonderful, happy marriage to Walter Cahn for sixty-one years. She passed away in 2008.
Lory often pondered what would have happened if her father hadn’t pulled her off the Kindertransport and if she hadn’t been able to help her parents through the tragedy they had faced. She didn’t want to hurt her father, so she never brought the topic up with him. But Lory realized she wouldn’t have a normal, happy life if she hated the Germans. She spent many years speaking at universities, schools, and organizations, encouraging others not to forget what the Germans had done, but not to hate them. Lori had a wonderful, happy marriage to Walter Cahn for sixty-one years. She passed away in 2008.
Source:
Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport by Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer. Warner Bros., 2000.
In 1938 and 1939, the British provided homes for nearly ten thousand children and teens from the Nazi occupied countries of Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, saving them from sure death in the ghettos, concentration camps, and gas chambers of WWII Europe. To read how this amazing endeavor began, click on the link to my earlier post: The Kindertransports: Nearly 10,000 Children Rescued from Nazi Territory.
Who were these rescued children and what are their stories?
Jack Hellman lived in the little village of Tann, Germany, population fifteen hundred and eight percent Jewish. His parents owned a general store where they sold feathers and down, piece goods, and ready-to-wear items. Jack’s family observed Jewish holidays, ate strictly kosher meals, and attended the local synagogue faithfully.
Anti-Semitism was evident in the late 1920’s, and it increased with the rise of unemployment in the district where Jack lived. Shortly before Hitler came to power, the SS entered Jack’s home and beat his father unconscious. The Nazis held torchlight parades in Jack’s village. He lay in bed haunted by the shadows flickering across the walls of his room and the marchers’ songs of violence against the Jews.
The local schoolmaster unmercifully beat the Jewish children with a cane, including Jack who managed to receive said discipline at least every other day. Most of Jack’s friends had been non-Jewish, but now they would no longer talk to him or his parents. When he was nine-years-old, a group of boys attacked him, throwing him through a plate-glass window, leaving him with severe cuts. In 1935, after Jack’s sister was also attacked, their parents sent her to live in a large Jewish community in Hamburg, and they sent Jack to live in a children’s home and attend the Philanthropin School in Frankfurt. Ironically, Jack’s Jewish headmaster was just as sadistic as the schoolmaster in Tann.
Boernestrasse Synagogue in Frankfurt on Kristallnacht Courtesy of USHMM
One November morning while riding his bicycle to school in Frankfurt, Jack observed two big synagogues on fire. Every Jewish business he passed had broken windows, had been looted, or merchandise had been deposited in the streets. School was cancelled and he was sent home. A message from Jack’s uncle awaited him—he was to tell his parents who were visiting him not to return home. Their store back in Tann was ruined, their car had been pushed down the hill, and their apartment had been looted and their furniture thrown in the street.
Jack quickly rode his bike to the train station and warned his parents, but they refused to stay in Frankfurt. After arriving home in Tann, Jack’s father was immediately arrested and sent to the Buchenwald Concentration Camp. He wasn’t released until early January.
That evening the Nazis broke the windows of the children’s home and took away the house father and everyone sixteen to sixty-five years of age. Jack was twelve years old and knew he and his family needed to leave Germany as soon as possible. His sister had already emigrated to the United States earlier that year (1938). The rest of the family had received quota numbers and had secured an American who guaranteed they wouldn’t become a burden to the U.S. government, but the number allowed into the country from Germany was so small that they had a five to six-year wait before they could leave.
The daughter of Jack’s house parents wrote to Baron James de Rothschild in England, requesting his assistance. Rothschild sent an emissary to Germany who arranged for the house parents, their children, and twenty-six of the boys in their care to move to England under Rothschild’s sponsorship. They left with the Kindertransport on March 16. Some parents refused to let their boys leave the country without them, but none of the boys who stayed behind survived.
Jack Hellman’s Teddy Bear He Carried on the Kindertransport Courtesy of USHMM
The boys and their house parents lived on the 6000-acre Rothschild estate at Waddesdon. The manor house reminded Jack of a castle he’d seen in pictures. His group lived comfortably in the eight-bedroom servant’s house called the Cedars. The boys played soccer on the lawn the first day they arrived, and the village boys came out to join them. When the villagers left for dinner, they told the newcomers they would see them the next day. Jack was so excited he ran in and told his house mother, ”’Somebody who’s not Jewish wants to see us tomorrow.’”
Jack commenced a campaign to convince his first cousin in London to get his parents out of Germany. The cousin agreed to get visas for Jack’s parents if Jack’s father had a work permit. Jack went to the manor house and personally asked to see Baron Rothschild. Rothschild asked if Jack’s father would be willing to work on the chicken farm, and Jack told him his father would do anything. The Baron went to the local notary, wrote out the work permit, and Jack’s parents soon received permission to enter England.
When they tried to leave Germany on August 30, 1939, only Jack’s mother was allowed across the border because his father didn’t have a “J” for Jew on his passport. Jack’s mother refused to leave without her husband, and together they went to a local bureaucrat. After Jack’s father emptied his pockets, the official corrected the passport. Jack’s parents arrived in Harwich, England, on September 1st, 1939, the day World War II began. Jack was one of the few children from the Kindertransports to ever see his parents again.
Jack found a place for his parents to live—a little six-foot by eight-foot flat with an open stairway. They were more happy and content living in that little flat than Jack remembers them being at any other time in their lives. Jack’s father also enjoyed his job at the chicken farm.
After two years in England, the Hellman’s emigrated to the United States where they were reunited with Jack’s sister and his mother’s brother. Their quota numbers came up much sooner because they moved from England to the U.S. rather than from Germany. Jack went on to become a building contractor in New York City.
Sources:
Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport by Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer.
In 1938 and 1939, the British people rescued nearly ten thousand children from the Nazi occupied countries of Germany, Austria, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The background information can be found in last month’s post – The Kindertransports: Nearly 10,000 Children Rescued from Nazi Territory.
Who were these young people and what are their stories?
Ursula Simon and her family lived in the small town of Quakenbruck in northwest Germany. Her mother sent extra rolls and sandwiches to school for other less fortunate children — those who were hungry because their families didn’t have enough food to feed them. Unfortunately, the recipients grew to resent these acts of charity and the Jews in the town who always had enough to eat.
After the Nazis took power in 1933, anti-Semitism flourished in Quakenbruck. The Simons’ old friends stopped visiting them, isolating the family from the community. Yearly birthday parties were normal in Germany, and Ursula’s mother prepared one for her when she turned eight. Not one child attended. Ursula now understood that she was different from the other children.
Ursula’s father, a loyal, patriotic German, had fought in WWI as a volunteer. He wouldn’t consider emigrating—not from the country he had fought for, not the country to which he belonged. He sincerely felt that the German people would remove the Nazis from power, that the problems were only temporary. But the persecution gradually increased and Mr. Simon had a nervous breakdown. He spent a long period of time in a psychiatric hospital.
Attending school became more and more difficult. Ursula was forced to sit alone in the back corner of the classroom, and the other children threw ink over her work. Her classmates terrorized her during playtime.
On the morning of November 9, 1938, soon after Ursula arrived at school, flames flickered in her classroom window. Fire engulfed a small, ordinary house across the street which served as the local synagogue. The students streamed outside to join the onlookers who clapped, jeered, and shouted. A family lived in one of the downstairs rooms of the synagogue, and their belongings had been thrown out a window into the street. Ursula made it home only to discover that her father had been arrested along with all the Jewish men in their town. They were sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Role Call for Buchenwald Prisoners, Mostly Jews Arrested on Kristallnacht Courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
At Buchenwald, the guards took away the men’s shoelaces and braces. When Ursula’s father objected to the treatment of the older people, the officials beat him to death in front of the other prisoners to stamp down further opposition. Ursula’s family learned the truth from men who were later released from Buchenwald.
After the events of November 9th (Kristallnacht), Jewish children were no longer allowed to attend German schools. At the end of November, Ursula’s mother sent her and her sister, Hella, to a Jewish orphanage in Hamburg, Germany. The girls were thirteen and fourteen years old. By the summer of 1939, Ursula and Hella were placed on the list for the Kindertransport. Their mother prepared their clothes and embroidered their names on each item.
The girls had mixed emotions—they wanted to go to England but didn’t want to leave their mother behind in Germany. Even if she could find a position and sponsor in England, their mother needed to stay and take care of the girls’ blind grandmother in Quackenbruck. Mrs. Simon travelled to Hamburg in July of 1939 to send her girls off on the Kindertransport. Normally very controlled, she couldn’t hide the hurt and agony welling up from deep within. Her face contorted with grief as she and the girls parted for the final time.
The Simon sisters and fellow Kindertransport passengers arrived at the Liverpool Street Station in London and were taken across the street to a gym to wait for their foster parents to arrive. Ursula, Hella, and three others did not find homes that day and felt that nobody wanted them. They were sent to a hostel near Kensington to spend the night, and the next morning they were directed to the Refugee Committee in Bloomsbury.
The girls traveled unaccompanied in a country where they couldn’t speak or understand the language. Nevertheless they found their way to the Refugee Committee, and Ursula and Hella were assigned to live with a widow in Sussex. They were given a ticket, but they had to find their way to Sussex on their own. Their luggage was lost and the Committee promised to forward it to them, which they did—three months later. In the meantime, the girls wore one set of clothes and washed their underwear and blouses once a week while wearing a bathing suit their mother had put in their rucksacks.
Kindertransport Children in England Courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The girls arrived at their new home only to discover that their host had expected little girls, and she only had a single bed for them to sleep in. Ursula and Hella were now fourteen and fifteen. The widow was very nice to them but didn’t understand that teenagers needed more food than she did (she had a very small appetite).
She told the girls that the Refugee Committee didn’t pay her enough for them, so they gave the widow the sixpence pocket money the Committee sent each week. Ursula wrote to her mother but wasn’t able to mail all her letters because she couldn’t afford pay the postage. One month later, WWII began, and she could no longer send or receive mail from Germany.
Ursula and Hella attended school in England and loved it. Ursula learned to speak English by devouring books from the school library, and she developed a love for English literature. But the girls desired to be independent. After Hella turned sixteen in November of 1939, she found work in a fever hospital (for those with infectious disease) and earned enough to provide for herself. Ursula attended school for nine months and then apprenticed with a very high-class dressmaking establishment. The Refugee Committee continued to support her, and Hella secretly contributed to Ursula’s rent. She also took evening classes to continue her education.
After the war, Ursula and Hella learned through the Red Cross that their mother had been deported to Minsk, Russia, where she was probably killed. The girls never obtained more information. On June 1, 1946, Ursula married Peter Rosenfeld, a fellow refugee from Germany. They raised four children and made England their permanent home. Ursula’s recorded testimony can be found on YouTube.
Kindertransport Memorial at Liverpool Station. Courtesy of Loco Steve from Bromley, UK in Wikipedia Commons
Resource:
Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport. Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer.
World War II is full of many miraculous acts of bravery and survival, but the encounter of Franz Stigler and Charlie Brown over the skies of Germany in 1943 is one of the most profound. This is their story.
Restored B-17 Bomber – Creative Commons via Wikipedia – Author Airwolfhound
The German Pilot:
Franz Stigler was born and raised in Bavaria, southern Germany. His father, a former WWI pilot, instilled a love of flying in his sons. At the age of twelve, Franz soloed in a home-built glider. Because he didn’t weigh enough, the plane crashed, and Franz sustained minor injuries. Several months later, with a sandbag tied around his waist, he successfully launched and landed the rebuilt glider. By the time Franz was seventeen, he knew he wanted to fly every day for the rest of his life. The German government provided his training, and Lufthansa, Europe’s largest airline, hired him when he was only eighteen years old.
In 1937, two years before WWII started, Franz received orders from the new German Air Force, the Luftwaffe, to train pilots how to fly long distances using instruments. One day Franz’s older brother surprised him by showing up for flight training. Franz did everything in his power to prepare his new student for war because it was obvious that Germany was preparing for one. Franz’s family was anti-Nazi, but German young men weren’t given the option to avoid the military, not unless they wanted to end up in a concentration camp.
Franz Stigler – Luftwaffe Fighter Pilot
In 1940, after Germany had occupied most of Europe, and the Luftwaffe was bombing English cities at night, Franz’s brother’s plane crashed at takeoff in France. Upon learning of his brother’s death, “Franz’s grief chilled into hate.” He had believed Hitler’s lies that Germany had invaded Poland in self-defense, and now Franz blamed the British for enlarging the conflict into a world war. Franz resigned as an instructor and volunteered to be a fighter pilot.
In 1942, Franz was sent to North Africa to backup General Erwin Rommel and the German Wehrmacht as they fought to capture the Suez Canal from the British. Franz flew a Messerschmitt Bf109 against the P-40s of the British Desert Air Force. The British pilots outnumbered the German’s five to one. Franz’s commanding officers taught him to fight with honor – not to shoot a defenseless enemy in his parachute, not to count “kills” but count victories, to shoot at a machine and not a man. A highly decorated young ace fighter pilot told Franz that once a person enjoyed killing, he would be a lost man.
Franz Stigler in North Africa
Franz’s squadron followed Rommel east into Egypt “far from their ports and supply lines while pushing the British closer to theirs.” The German pilots and their fighters were worn to the bone. The pilots slept in 6-foot holes they’d dug in the desert for protection from British air attacks. After being hit by ground fire while escorting German bombers, Franz was forced to belly land in the desert. A Bedouin rescued and escorted him back to base on a camel. In September of 1942 Franz was ordered home on leave. While in Germany, several ace pilots of his acquaintance were killed in Africa. The British launched a counter attack at El Alamein, Egypt, that Rommel couldn’t stop, and the Americans landed to the west in Casablanca. The Germans were trapped between them.
Messerschmitt Bf 109G-10 at the National Museum of the United States Air Force Public Domain. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
Franz’s unit withdrew from Africa, and in March 1943, they deployed to Trapani Airfield, Sicily, where he encountered the Four Motors, which the Americans called the “B-17 Flying Fortress.” The German mission – defend the island and the supply convoys to Africa; the Allies’ mission – cut off the supply line. In May of 1943, 275,000 troops of the Afrika Korp surrendered to the Allies. Only an Italian garrison stood in the way of an Allied invasion of Sicily. After the Italians sent a distress message for fighter support to pick up their downed pilots, Franz volunteered to go, even though he’d already flown a combat mission that day.
Forty-five minutes later Franz coaxed his severely damaged ME 109 toward the coast of Sicily. Three miles from shore, the fighter’s engine gave out, and Franz decided to ditch rather than bail out. He steered the 109 as if it were a glider landing on the ocean surface. The plane bounced on the waves and then dove under the sea. Franz forgot to jettison the canopy before hitting the water, and as the fighter sank into the sea, the water pressure kept the canopy from releasing. Franz opened a side window pane, allowing water to pour in and equalize the pressure so he was able to flip the canopy open. His life preserver pulled him to the surface where he inflated his life raft. He drifted to shore and convinced an old fisherman to take him back to his base. Two weeks later Franz was shot down by Spitfires, and he bailed out behind friendly lines. This was the fourth fighter he lost in the war.
After the Allied invasion of Sicily, Franz’s squadron was sent home to defend Germany. By mid-August 1943, they had settled into a routine. Every other day they battled the Four Motors (B-17’s) from England “to stop the bombs from dropping and killing the German people.”
The American Pilot:
During the summer of 1943, twenty-year-old pilot Charlie Brown and his co-pilot Spencer “Pinky” Luke flew their final mission of B-17 training school. They were required to stay in the air for seven hours but were allowed to plan their own route. Charlie aimed for his hometown of Weston, West Virginia. After circling the area, Charlie and Pinky buzzed the town, sending fishermen running from a bridge, the river water over its banks, and forcing dust to billow in the streets. His father, knowing only one young man from Weston piloted B-17’s, watched the disturbance from the sidewalk.
Later, Charlie and Pinky headed for Texas where they picked up the other eight members of their crew and trained together. They dropped practice bombs and shot at wooden targets on the base’s thirteen-thousand acre range. In late October, the crew left for England where they joined the 379th Bomb Group of the United States 8th Air Force. Charlie flew his first mission over Germany as co-pilot to a veteran pilot so he could acclimate to combat before heading out with his own crew. German fighters beat up the bombers behind Charlie’s formation, but after bombing the submarine pens in the German port city of Bremen, Charlie’s plane made it back to England without a scratch.
One week later, on December 20, 1943, Charlie piloted his own crew on a return bombing run to Bremen, but this mission would end differently. Return on October 1st to learn about the extraordinary outcome of that fateful day over the skies of Germany.
Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses of the 91st Bomb Group, 8th AF, enroute to Bremen, Germany, fly high above heavy cloud banks at 27,000 feet altitude. 20 Dec. 1943. Courtesy of American Air Museum in Britain.
On the morning of December 20, 1943, twenty-year-old Lieutenant Charlie Brown piloted his B-17 crew into combat for the first time. “Ye Olde Pub” flew in a twenty-one-plane battle formation and led most of the 8th Air Force’s bomb groups to Germany (475 B-17s and B24s). They were told to expect five hundred or more bandits (German fighters) to intercept them.
The Crew of “Ye Olde Pub.” Kneeling, L to R: Charlie, Pinky, Doc, and Andy. Standing, L to R: Frenchy, Russian, Pechout, Jennings, Ecky, and Blackie. Courtesy of the American Air Museum in Britain.
The bomber group flew twenty-seven thousand feet above the icy sea. Three and a half hours into their flight, the bandits attacked and flak from the ground soon followed. After four separate explosions just ahead of The Pub, Andy, the navigator, and Doc, the bombardier, reported a big hole in the Plexiglas nose of their plane. One of the engines on the left began to smoke and pinky, the co-pilot, shut it down. A shell passed through one of the wings, leaving a large hole. The Pub reached the target area and released twelve five-hundred-pound bombs on the Focke-Wulf aircraft plant five miles below and turned north to escape Germany as quickly as possible.
The bomber group didn’t know it yet, but their fighter cover had already departed for England because they feared running out of fuel. One of The Pub’s right engines began to run wild, and Pinky cut power and restarted the engine. The bomber fell back as the rest of the 8th Air Force passed overhead and left The Pub behind.
Five German 109s leaped from below, and eight German 190s trailed ahead, blocking the path to the North Sea. Two enemy fighters dove straight for the cockpit of The Pub, so Charlie, the pilot, climbed directly up and into their path. Frenchy opened up and hammered one of the 190s before it could break away, putting it out of the fight. The other fighter scored hits on The Pub, but Doc fired at its belly and scored another win.
The controls for The Pub’s third engine was shot out, and the engine froze at half power. Five 109s headed for the tail of The Pub, but Ecky’s guns in the tail jammed. Then Blackie’s guns in the ball turret froze. “Charlie threw the bomber into a bank,” and bullets from the 109s “ricocheted off the bomber’s frozen belly and clanged against Blackie’s turret, cracking its glass but not penetrating.” More guns froze, welded shut by ice. Only three of the bomber’s eleven guns were now operational. Charlie twisted and weaved while the 109s continued to attack, but the pilot’s maneuvers threw them off.
A 20mm cannon shell tore into The Pub and “blasted the bomber’s skin outward,” almost severing the right waist gunner’s leg. Other shells struck the tail, destroying the tail gun position and killing Ecky. Pechout, the radio operator, frantically calld for help, but several 20mm shells blew the radio into pieces but spared the operator. Meanwhile, Charlie banked the bomber into a near vertical turn of eighty degrees and aimed at any fighters he saw coming in. He flew in circles. Bullets tore through the cockpit’s ceiling, and one embedded itself against Charlie’s left shoulder blade. Bullets punctured the oxygen tanks behind the pilots’ seats, slowing the flow of oxygen into their masks.
The enemy shot off The Pub’s horizontal stabilizer and shortened the sixteen-foot rear wing to three feet. Charlie, needing a new evasion tactic, tilted the bomber until its left wing pointed to the sky, but without the stabilizer, the plane “flipped and entered a slow, upside-down, flat spin.” Oxygen stopped flowing to the pilots, and the last thing Charlie remembered was viewing the German farm fields five miles below as he and the co-pilot hung upside down in the cockpit. Then he passed out.
B-17 Bomber
When The Pub reached 10,000 feet, “its spiral broke into a nose dive.” The oxygen-rich air at this low altitude brought Charlie back to consciousness. He gripped the controls and hauled back. He toggled the bomber’s flaps, but
The Pub continued her dive. At 3000 feet, “her wings began to flutter,” something a B-17 in this kind of condition shouldn’t have been able to do. “Charlie dug his heels into the rudder pedals and pulled back on the yoke with his whole body.” “The wings began flying again,” but the bomber was now below two thousand feet and still dropping. Just in time, “her nose lifted to the horizon and she leveled out” over the suburbs of Oldenburg. Pinky, the co-pilot, regained consciousness, spotted the treetops below them, and asked if they were in England.
Charlie had Doc, the navigator, “figure out where they were and establish a course for home.” He sent others to assess the damage to the bomber and check on the status of the crew. Doc mapped out a plan to head thirty-five miles north to the sea, but his map showed flak batteries all along the coastline, known as “the Atlantic Wall.”
The German Pilot:
Meanwhile, German fighter pilot, Franz Stigler, had landed at an airfield to refuel and continue the fight. If he could nail a bomber, he would have enough points to receive the Knight’s Cross, a badge of honor, indicating “that he had done something good for his people.” While waiting at the airfield, the low drone of an approaching bomber caught his attention. A B-17 skirted the airfield, flying low and slow before disappearing behind the trees. Franz took off without waiting for clearance from the tower. He had a bomber to catch and a Knight’s Cross to earn.
Stigler approached the wounded B-17 but noted the missing stabilizer and the dead tail gunner leaning over his machine gun. Through the torn fuselage, he saw the airmen tending their wounded crew members. He thought of his commander’s words that if Stigler ever shot an airman floating down in his parachute, the commander would shoot Stigler himself. He remembered his dead brother and the grief these enemies’ families would face.
Kimbolton at Sunset – Airfield Where Charlie Brown & His B-17 Crew Were Stationed in England Courtesy of American Air Museum in Britain.
Franz’s superiors had taught him “to fight with fearlessness and restraint, to celebrate victories not death, and to know when it was time to answer a higher call.” Realizing the bomber held no threat to him, Stigler pulled up close to the co-pilot’s window and stared at Brown.
Charles “Charlie” Brown had sent his co-pilot, Pinky, to give the crewmen permission to bail out. They would be taken as POW’s, but they would live. He planned to attempt a return flight back to England with Russian who was unconscious. Charlie viewed the approaching coastline where Germany met the North Sea and knew the soldiers manning the coastal defenses would shoot them down. He looked out the co-pilot’s window to check on engine four and spied Stigler’s 109, flying three feet from The Pub‘s right wingtip, as if it owned the B-17. Charlie’s heart stopped for a moment. Franz nodded at Charlie, but Charlie thought he’d imagined it.
Pinky returned to the cockpit, announcing that none of the men wanted to jump. They planned to stay together and help fly The Pub home. Pinky turned to see what Charlie was staring at and claimed they were living in a nightmare. Charlie and Pinky expected Franz to destroy them. Franz noted the shock and fear on the pilots’ faces and pointed to the ground. Charlie and Pinky shook their heads. This angered Franz, but he felt that leaving the B-17 to face the coming flak alone would be the same as shooting it down. He moved his 109 a few feet away so the guys at the coastal defenses would recognize his silhouette and hold their fire.
John D. Shaw’s painting of Ye Olde Pub Being Escorted Out to Sea by Franz Stigler’s ME-109. Valor Studios. Used by Permission.
As Stigler and Brown approached, the battery commander recognized the Messerschmitt 109 and shouted for his men to hold their fire. The Germans used captured B-17’s for training, so it wasn’t out of the question for the two planes to be flying together. “Side by side the 109 and the B-17 soared over the soldiers defending the Atlantic Wall then over the beach obstacles and the crashing surf. The sight was a beautiful one, the little fighter protecting the big bomber.”
Charlie still thought the German pilot was a threat and that he’d escorted them out to sea to finish them off. Franz, however, waved at the pilots and pointed to the east, mouthing, “Sweden,” which was only thirty minutes away. Neither American pilot could figure out what Franz was trying to tell them. Given the damage to the B-17, Franz was certain they would not make it home alive. Charlie sent the turret gunner to swing his gun toward the 109, hoping to chase the German away. When Franz spotted the movement in the turret, he wasn’t surprised. He saluted Charlie, who responded with surprise, and then Franz flew over the B-17 and dove away.
With a hole in her nose, her skin frayed, and only two and a half engines operating, The Pub headed toward Kimbolton Airfield, three hundred miles away. She was steadily losing altitude when engine four began acting up again. Pinky initiated shut-down procedures and successfully restarted the engine, but the bomber’s altitude dropped further during the process. Charlie ordered his men to dump everything that wasn’t nailed down. The Pub dropped below 1000 feet of altitude and was only halfway home. Charlie told his men that all they could do was pray.
Three-fourths of the way home, The Pub dropped below five hundred feet. Charlie prayed and touched the Bible in his pocket. Shortly after, two fighters zoomed past his window, and the crewmen were afraid the enemy had come to finish them off. The fighters turned and passed in front of the bomber, revealing the emblem of the U.S. Army Air Corp. Then they returned to the B-17, and one parked beside the pilot’s window, just as Franz Stigler had done. The fighter pilot pointed to his headset, but Charlie shook his head. Then the fellow pointed down, and Charlie spotted a bit of land between the clouds. Soon the clouds parted, revealing an ever widening band of land. The Pub had reached England.
Charlie searched for a suitable field to land his bird, but they were dotted with stone fences. The Pub dropped below two hundred feet, and Charlie told his men to prepare for a crash landing. Up ahead, the two fighters were circling at one thousand feet, so Charlie turned the bomber in their direction. A military airfield appeared below them. He made the approach to land and attempted to lower the landing gear. Unfortunately, the hydraulics weren’t functioning. Frenchy, the flight engineer, went down and lowered the wheels by hand, but the flaps were frozen. Alerted by the fighter pilots above, emergency vehicles pulled up along the runway. Soldiers crowded around the tower and watched the wounded bomber come in.
Frenchy fired red flares from a ceiling window of the bomber, notifying the base that wounded airmen were aboard. Charlie kept The Pub’s nose up and brought her front wheels down. Once the tail wheels settled on the runway, Charlie and Pinky jammed on the brakes, and the undefeated bomber slowed and came to a stop. The pilots shut the plane down. “The crew and The Pub had completed their first mission together.”
Charlie and most of his original crew completed their twenty-eighth and final mission on April 11, 1944. Charlie returned stateside and became an instructor. He wondered for over forty years if the German pilot who’d spared them had survived the war. At the same time, Franz Stigler wondered for over forty years if the men of the B-17 he’d risked a court-martial for had ever made it home.
After returning to England, Charlie and most of his original crew continued bombing Germany. They completed their twenty-eighth and final mission on April 11, 1944. Charlie returned stateside and became an instructor for the remainder of the war. Later he graduated from college and joined the U.S. Air Force as an intelligence officer. He retired early in order to work for the State Department during the Vietnam War. After retiring again, Charlie and his family moved to Florida.
Franz Stigler continued to shoot down Allied planes on bombing runs over Germany. In late October 1944, a one-inch copper bullet from a B-17 pierced the windshield of Franz’s 109, hit him in the forehead and bounced off. Franz managed to make it back to base, sporting a black hole of dried blood and a nasty dent in his head. The copper bullet was secure in the palm of his hand.
Franz was sent away to recuperate but later convinced his commander to send him to jet school. Franz learned how to fly the jet-powered Me 262 and, in March of 1945, joined General Adolf Galland’s newly formed fighter unit, JV-44, dubbed “the Flying Sanatorium” or “the Squadron of Experts.” Franz and other ace pilots made their last stand from a base just outside of Munich. He surrendered to the Americans shortly before the war ended, having achieved 487 combat flights. In 1953, Franz immigrated to Vancouver, Canada.
Franz had a good life in Canada. After retiring, he flew a Me 108 in air shows, with Allied planes chasing him, which delighted the crowds. He came to the notice of the Boeing Company, and in 1985 they invited him to their 50th Anniversary party for the B-17 Flying Fortress. This led him to tell his German wife about “the one he had let get away.” Still curious whether the B-17 he’d risked a court-martial for had ever made it home, he attended the party and much to his amazement was embraced by the former American B-17 pilots and crewman he met. He asked if any of them knew of a bomber that had been escorted to safety by a German fighter, but no one did.
After debriefing on that fateful day in 1943, Charlie and his crew were ordered not to tell anyone about their escort out of Germany, and the records were classified. Charlie wondered for over forty years if the German fighter pilot who’d spared him and his crew had survived the war. Most of them had been wiped out. Now, many years later Charlie began to think about his war experiences and had nightmares that “always ended with The Pub spinning to earth in a death dive from which he could not recover.” He always woke up before he crashed.
Charlie decided he needed closure, so he joined the 379th Bomb Association and attended a reunion for pilots. He shared the story “of the German pilot who had spared him and his crew.” Nobody had heard the story until now, and Charlie’s fellow pilots encouraged him to look for the German. He searched the archives in the U.S. and England and located his crew’s after-action report but after four years was no closer to locating the pilot he sought.
Several years after WWII, the Allies allowed West Germany to re-establish its air force as a deterrent to the Soviet Union. Several of the ace fighters Franz Stigler had served with became leaders in the new organization. These were the pilots who’d served their country with dignity and hadn’t joined the Nazi Party. The Association of German Fighter Pilots published a newsletter called Jagerblatt. Charlie wrote the editor, asking that a short letter be published in the newsletter about the December 20 incident, but the editor was not interested in helping a former bomber pilot. Charlie wrote to Adolf Galland, Germany’s most famous pilot and former president of the Association. Galland ordered the editor to publish Charlie’s letter. Galland was Franz’s former commander in JV-44.
General Galland – Public Domain
A few months later, the Jagerblatt arrived in Franz Stiger’s mailbox. He was so excited when he read Charlie’s letter that he immediately wrote to him. Charlie was equally astounded when he received Franz’s letter. He obtained Franz’s phone number from directory assistance and called him. In the Jagerblatt letter, Charlie had left out information about The Pub’s exact damage and the fact that they had flown out of Germany over the North Sea. Charlie began asking Franz a series of questions. Franz shared details about The Pub’s damage that Charlie had not included in his Jaggerblatt letter, and when Franz said he thought they’d never make it across the sea after he let them go, Charlie couldn’t hold back the tears.
Charlie wrote a thank you letter to Franz, but he still didn’t know that the German was an ace or why Franz had allowed the B-17 to escape. The two met for the first time in Seattle in June of 1990. When they saw each other in the hotel lobby, they hugged and cried. The fact that they’d found each other was miraculous enough, but the fact that they were both living after forty-six years was incredible. The two spent a couple days together, sharing about their lives. Contrary to what Charlie had thought, Franz’s guns had been full of ammunition when he’d encountered Charlie’s plane. He learned that Franz had served in the “Squadron of Experts” and was one of Germany’s great aces. After that meeting, Charlie never suffered another nightmare.
Ten years prior, Franz’s former commander General Galland had visited Franz in Canada, and Franz took him hunting. They’d kept up with each other by phone ever since. After meeting with Charlie, he confessed to Galland about sparing the B-17. Galland’s response was “‘It would be you.'” The reunion soon made the headlines and hit the TV news stories. Later that year, Franz met Charlie at the 379th Bomb Group reunion in Massachusetts. Charlie introduced his old ball turret gunner, “Blackie” and his former radio operator Pechout to Franz, and they hugged and cried together. Blackie sobbed and thanked Franz for sparing his life because it had allowed “his children and grandchildren to experience life.”
Watch a short documentary about this story on You Tube here.
Source: A Higher Call by Adam Makos with Larry Alexander – Berkley Caliber, New York, 2012.
Germany and the Soviet Union defeated and divided Poland between them in September of 1939. The Soviets quickly arrested and deported University professors, police officers, border guards, lawyers, doctors, pastors, priests, physicians, engineers, journalists, pilots, teachers, landowners, writers, chaplains, civic leaders, and any other person deemed a threat to the establishment of a communist society. The Soviets arrested anyone wearing a uniform, even boy scouts!
A column of arrested Polish police officers, civilian public servants and other “enemies of the people,” being escorted by the Red Army in “liberated” Eastern Poland in September 1939. From the Soviet Cinema Newsreel.
The fascinating story of Mietek Rymaszewski begins in the small town of Malkowicze in Soviet-occupied Eastern Poland during the winter of 1940. Mietek belonged to a youth cadet organization but had been too young to fight at the outbreak of WWII. After a number of families from his town were deported to Siberia in February, word came of his own impending arrest due to his youth organization ties.
Mietek packed underwear, food, and a little money, bade farewell to his mother and younger brother and left during the night with two female school friends. He never returned to Malkowicze. The train ride toward the border was interrupted twice by NKVD (secret police) passenger checks. At the first check he was questioned about the contents of the suitcase he carried for one of his friends.
Mietek replied that he was taking the items to his sister at college, and the NKVD let him pass. The two girls said they were traveling to college, and they were allowed through. At the next passenger check, Mietek and his friends moved to a group that had already been processed, avoiding another search. The threesome arrived safely in the city of Łomża, near the border between Soviet occupied Poland and East Prussia (Germany).
Mietek and his companions went to a prearranged address where they waited for an opportunity to cross into German-controlled territory. The moon was full and the nights were too light to avoid detection in the open, flat country covered with deep snow. Growing impatient, Mietek left with a guide who took him to within three kilometers of the border. Before parting, Mietek questioned his guide thoroughly about nearby villages, landmarks, woodlands, and the best places to cross the border. Later when he was intercepted by a Russian soldier, he posed as a local citizen, accurately describing the area. The soldier let him pass, but Mietek returned to Łomża because of the impossibility of successfully crossing the border. The Russian patrols were too active at the time.
Łomża, Poland
Mietek’s two schoolmates sold some of their jewelry and returned home, but the jewelry dealer sold out the owner of the house and the other potential escapees. The NKVD surrounded the house, arrested everyone, and took them to the NKVD station in an old seminary. The officers plied the prisoners with questions. Who were they? Where were they from? And what they were doing in Lomza? The prisoners were put in separate cellars at the old seminary so they couldn’t talk with one another but not before Mietek let his companions know he had changed his name. He was determined to protect his mother.
Fifty men shared the cellar with Mietek, including smugglers from Warsaw who bragged about their exploits. They described their route in detail, and Mietek memorized everything he heard. Since the penalty for those coming into the Soviet occupied section of Poland was less severe than for those caught escaping, Mietek prepared his story. When he was questioned, he said he had come from Warsaw and was headed to Bialystok (about 80 km/50 miles away) to find his uncle. He described his journey, including a detour at the river Narew where the bridge had been blown up. He had crossed an improvised bridge and took another train.
When Mietek’s interrogators asked him how he had crossed the border (from German-occupied territory into Russian-occupied territory), he claimed he didn’t know he’d crossed the border. The NKVD believed him. An army officer came in to report the arrival of new captives, and the NKVD berated the officer for not having stopped Mietek at the crossing.
Mietek’s interrogation lasted for several weeks, and the NKVD officers used a variety of methods to coerce confessions from the prisoners for whatever they were accused of committing—usually spying. The prisoners were forced to sit on a small stool with sharp edges and corners, which cut into their spines. The NKVD used special handcuffs, tightening them until the prisoners’ hands turned blue, causing pain and then numbness. They stood the prisoners against a wall and pointed a gun to their heads. Another interrogator would enter and gently question the prisoners and then pretend that he was going to shoot them also. Prisoners were pulled in for questioning at two o’clock in the morning, submitted to a volley of rapid-fire questions, and suffered if their answers were inconsistent.
A well-known engineer in Mietek’s cellar was accused of spying, and the NKVD tortured him for hours at a time. He would come back covered in bruises, bleeding, and unable to walk.
Someone scratched a hole in the wall, allowing communication with the women prisoners in the next cell. The women collected a matchbox full of lice, and when an inspector visited, they complained about the conditions. The inspector said the lice problem was their own fault, so they threw their collection at him, and he raced out of the cellar.
Mietek was transferred to the Łomża Prison and later taken with hundreds of other prisoners to the railway station and loaded into cattle trucks. Destination – Siberia.
The next morning the train pulled out of the station headed east. The prisoners united to sing a patriotic Polish song, vowing to “defend the Polish spirit” from the Russians. The guards riding between and on top of the cattle cars unsuccessfully tried to quiet the prisoners.
After passing through five cities and into Byelorussia, the train stopped at Gomel near the Ukraine, and the prisoners were escorted in groups of fifty to the local prison. Mietek saw the largest rats he’d ever seen. They ran along the top of the wall and fed on corpses in the mortuary.
Fifty men shared the 4 by 5 meter cells (13 x 16 feet). They were only allowed to exercise in the yard for ten minutes each day. As they marched down the winding stairs, a number of prisoners committed suicide by jumping down head first, forcing the Russians to install netting on the bannisters to prevent these deaths. One prisoner hid in an outbuilding and escaped over the wall after dark. Dogs tracked him, and the Soviets beat him up, put him in a penal cell, and reduced his food allotment.
An epidemic of dysentery passed through the prison—those with the worst cases went to the hospital on the ground floor. They were stripped and given only a blanket so they wouldn’t climb out the bathroom window, jump onto the wall and attempt to escape.
In August of 1940, the NKVD (Soviet Secret Police) sentenced Mietek to serve three years in corrective camps of the Northern Railway in Kotlas, Northern Russia. He refused to sign the paper, so the NKVD officer signed the documents for him, using Mietek’s false name since the NKVD had never discovered his true identity. He was taken to a new cell, and one of the occupants jumped up calling out Mietek’s name. To everyone’s surprise, Mietek’s cousin Edward was also a prisoner. The two remained together for the rest of their captivity.
Again the Soviets separated the prisoners into groups of fifty, escorted them to the railway station, and loaded them in cattle trucks. They traveled through Minsk and then Smolensk where Mietek’s grandfather had been wounded during WWI.
Soviet Deportation Train
Between Leningrad and Kotlas, a Bielorussin cut a hole in the floor of a cattle truck with a piece of flint and dropped between the rails. Unfortunately the guards saw him, stopped the train, and beat the prisoner black and blue.
They arrived at Kotlas to find a camp holding a few huts, a high barbed wire fence with a tower in each corner, soldiers brandishing rifles and machine guns, and knee-deep mud. There were two ditches – one for drinking water and one for a latrine. After a short time at this camp, the prisoners were taken in groups of fifty about eight kilometers through the taiga to the Northern Dvina River. They sailed north on barges for a few days, stopping at night. They were given 300 grams (10.5 oz.) of bread and a small piece of boiled fish during the journey.
The new camp was a completely empty square piece of ground, so Mietek and his fellow prisoners used tools lent to them and cut down trees to build shelters and fires. Since Mietek had grown up in the forest, he built a safe shelter for himself and a small group of fellow prisoners; however, others built inadequate shelters which collapsed during the night, killing the occupants.
Mietek and the other prisoners decided to escape while they were out of camp collecting firewood, but on the planned day Mietek woke up with legs so swollen his flesh hung over his boot leggings. He had scurvy and the escape was called off. The prisoners later learned to boil pine and spruce needles and drink the brew to fight scurvy. They boiled willow bark and twigs to make a drink substituting for aspirin. They also boiled the twigs of bilberries to cure diarrhea. The water in the ditches overflowed and mixed with the drinking water, causing dysentery, so the prisoners learned to only drink water from melted snow.
After a few weeks the prisoners moved to a new camp where they found marquee type tents pulled over a wooden frame-work with a small metal stove and firewood inside. A group of Estonian sailors shared Mietek’s tent. These strong, healthy, intelligent, and good-looking young men needed lots of food, but they didn’t get it and were the first to die. The old and weak perished next. A group of Lithuanians in the tent also died – the last one with his head frozen to the tent. From November, 1940 to February, 1941, 300 of the 360 captives died.
The prisoners built a railway line from Kotlas to Vorkuta by digging soil from the hillside and taking it in wheelbarrows to the embankment. If they didn’t obtain the required cubic meters of soil each day, their food rations were reduced – 300 grams (10.5 oz.) of bread and some watery soup twice a day.
A Russian railway supervisor, also a prisoner, asked to buy Mietek’s jacket and boots – hunting boots with high leggings made of very good leather. Mietek agreed, although the items were worth much more than the supervisor paid for them. But he did reward Mietek with a new job – measuring and recording the soil in each man’s wheelbarrow. It was wise Mietek was meticulous in his measurements because a supervisor checked his work. Later he heard that six million cubic meters had been overlooked and two Russian engineers were shot for it.
One morning after a heavy snowfall in late December, Mietek strode to his worksite in the frigid temperatures and worked up a sweat. Finding a hole that had been chiseled in the ice of a nearby river, he drew a cup of water and drank from it. A nasty chill resulted, and by the end of the day, a 102°F fever gripped him. On December 31st, Mietek was taken to the hospital, a deep dugout located outside the prison camp. At first he was delirious, but soon he lost consciousness.
Sometime later, Mietek awakened but couldn’t lift his head. After drifting off, he woke again and asked how long he had been at the hospital. The doctor pointed to a calendar tacked to a post. The day was February 5th. He’d been unconscious for thirty-six days! Lena, a nurse and also a prisoner, brought bread, dipped it in tea, and fed Mietek by hand. She had kept him alive in the same way all the weeks he was unconscious.
Mietek gradually gained strength and helped the nurses by carrying food to the other patients. Later when the doctor examined him, the doctor told Mietek he was all right but just needed food. To help solve the problem, the doctor hired Mietek to keep a fire going in his dugout at night. When the doctor came in, he shared food brought from the kitchen with Mietek.
On May 11th Mietek was escorted back to camp and returned to work the next day – cutting firewood for locomotives. A nasty blizzard struck and left a case of frostbite on Mietek’s face. The male sickroom nurse provided him with a mixture of surgical spirit and glycerin, and his skin began to heal after a few weeks.
Mietek and his fellow prisoners moved on to build an embankment to support bridge timbers for a rail line spanning a deep river. Next, they relocated to a camp on the River Pechora where they pulled timber out of the river, cut it, and rolled it to a small sawmill to be cut for railway sleepers. Here Mietek saw eskimos and reindeer for the first time.
Many young Russians lived in this camp, and some of them stole whatever they wanted or took the items by force. One Russian demanded Mietek’s soup, so he quickly drank it and rammed the bowl in the Russian’s mouth, causing his mouth to bleed. The same fellow approached Mietek as he was lying down that night, so Mietek struck him a few times with a stick, and the Russian walked off holding his ribs. The fellow didn’t bother Mietek again.
After the ice on the Ust Usa River melted, the prisoners sailed up the river on barges and crossed the Arctic Circle. They passed an area where many human bones protruded from the melting snow. Some of the Russians thought these were the remains of eight hundred slaves who’d been trapped by an Arctic storm while they were marching on foot to Vorkuta (an area where prisoners slaved in the uranium mines).
It was thought that the whole convoy had frozen except for the escort commander who’d escaped with a pack of dogs. Since Mietek and his fellow prisoners were heading to the same place, he expected the Soviets to force them to work the mines until the radiation finished them off. Meanwhile, the men in his convoy continued to die from malnutrition.
But . . . another miracle transpired.
Before arriving in Vorkuta, an official boarded and pulled all the prisoners from Poland off the barges. Because Germany had invaded Russia, the Soviets were joining the Allies in their fight against the Germans and had agreed to release all Polish citizens held in the Soviet Union. They released Polish POW General Anders from prison to immediately gather and train a Polish Army in the east to aid the Allied fight.
The Soviets sent Mietek back to camp and tried to persuade him to join their army, but he carefully responded that he hadn’t been educated in Russian and wouldn’t feel right in the Russian Army. Instead, Mietek and a group of other former prisoners boarded a cattle truck and rode south to join the Polish Armed Forces in the East. They rode the same rail line they had previously built and relished the freedom of traveling unguarded in Russia for the first time.
Obtaining food became an immediate priority. Along the way, the former prisoners were occasionally given boiled fish and a piece of bread, and at some stations they obtained all the boiled water they wanted. At one stop Mietek exchanged his shirt for a small bantam hen and a few potatoes. He plucked and cleaned the hen, confiscated a large can by a well, gathered nettles, and made four gallons of soup. Since the train never stopped for long, Mietek built a fire at each stop, gradually cooking the broth until it was ready to eat.
Mietek traveled from Kotlas in northern Russia through Svierdlovsk and Kyubishov to Buzeluk on the southern Russian frontier, each time expecting to find a Polish recruiting station but only to discover the offices had moved. He and his companions traveled through the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan and entered Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, also under Soviet control.
While waiting at a stop further south, Mietek attempted to do some trading. He went to the closest hamlet and knocked on a door. He was invited in and discovered a poor Russian family of three sharing a meal of tiny potatoes. Observing their plight, Mietek only asked for water, but after the family learned that he had been recently released from the labor camps, they insisted he share their meal. With tears in her eyes, the Russian woman gave Mietek a half glass of milk from their meager stores.
Continuing south, Mietek and his companions arrived in Samarkand (outer Mongolia) and slept outside for a few nights until barges arrived and took them to Nukus near the Aral Sea. They walked behind an Uzbeki riding an oxen-driven cart to a collective farm 120 kilometers away and stayed with the Uzbeki families. They slept in a tent-like accommodation covered with homemade felt, ate sesame flat bread, rice and sesame meal noodles with some meat, and drank boiled water. Mietek’s host was the local school teacher who was embittered because the Red Army had killed his father, confiscated his father’s lands, and eaten his herds of livestock without compensation. He vowed to one day get it back.
After news arrived that the Polish recruiting office had reopened in Bukhara, Mietek and his fellow travelers spent a day and a night walking back to Nukus where they soaked their blistered feet in the river. They sailed on barges down the River Amudarya to Farab near Samarkand and were encouraged by the majestic flight of three white eagles above the river. Mietek also witnessed the reunion of a Polish husband and wife who’d been separated since 1939 and had survived the labor camps. In Farab, they stayed in rail trucks and were given a dead dog to eat. While Mietek was with an NKVD officer getting soup (boiled water with a few green tomatoes), some of his companions stole millet. After he returned, they were all arrested by the local militia and sent to the Samarkand Prison.
A number of Russians and Uzbekis shared Mietek’s cell. One Russian was imprisoned for being fifteen minutes late to work (his wife was sick). Mietek and his companions went to court where his charges were dropped, but three others were given the maximum sentence (death penalty). Then a man spoke, pleading that the men had been brought up in a capitalist country and didn’t know the difference between right and wrong, and they should be allowed to repay their crime by joining the army. The court released them with a warning to be out of Samarkand within twenty-four hours.
Mietek and a friend walked to Bukhara, surviving on weeds and desert tortoise eggs. When they arrived, the recruiting office was empty, but after two days a Polish 2nd lieutenant arrived and took them to the railway station. He shielded them from Soviet agents who were in the area conscripting the local men for the Russian Army. They traveled to Kermine where the Polish garrison was stationed, and Mietek gave his true name for the first time since he had been captured by the Soviets in Poland. Despite reaching the Polish Army, forty men died daily from the prolonged starvation they had endured. Even Mietek collapsed and spent two days in the hospital where he was put on a special diet.
As the Polish recruits gained strength, their military training increased. For a time, the Soviets refused to provide the Polish garrison at Kermine with transportation to Persia (Iran), where they planned to connect with the British Army. Instead the Soviets tried to persuade them to fight on the Eastern Front with the Russian Army. The Polish military leaders objected, and the troops prepared to march out. The Soviets didn’t have enough forces in the area to stop them, so they provided transportation to Krasnovodskon on the Caspian Sea.
The Polish troops and civilians at Krasnovodsk crossed the Caspian Sea on rusty, old ships, fighting dysentery and dehydration. One day while standing in line for his water ration, Mietek noticed a pair of bright, young eyes watching him through the gaps in the steps. Then he heard a young voice say, “Mum, it’s Mietek.” The girl’s mother appeared and greeted him. She was the daughter of the station master from his home town in Poland! She shared that they had been deported to Siberia with his mother, brother, and grandfather. She gave Mietek his mother’s address, and he was able to later make contact with her.
In Pahlavi, Iran, the troops showered, obtained haircuts, and were powdered with insecticide. They burned their uniforms and were issued new tropical uniforms. Mietek was posted to Iraq, where he defended a refinery and later an airport and served as a driving instructor. His unit transferred to Palestine and then North Africa. In Egypt, Mietek volunteered for the infantry and fought in Italy. He was wounded in a battle on the the Kenti River and was hospitalized in Taranto and in Scotland. He recuperated and returned to Italy, where he guarded German POW’s following the war.
After his time of service, Mietek settled in England and worked for the forestry commission. He married Stephanie Burnett, an English widow. The Soviets resettled Mietek’s mother in western Poland, but Mietek didn’t see her again until she visited him in England in 1963, twenty-four years after parting. They didn’t recognize each other after all that time, but she stayed for five months. When Mietek visited Poland in 1988 (after a 49-year absence), he was disturbed by the moral scars caused by the communist domination of the country.
What: In a surprise move on the seventeenth day of the German invasion of Poland, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. The Nazis and Soviets had secretly agreed the month before to divide the country. Because the Polish military leadership had ordered the Polish forces not to engage the Soviets, the Red Army advanced rapidly with little opposition.
Problem: Stalin and the NKVD (the secret police and forerunner of the KGB) planned to quickly transform the eastern portion of Poland into a communist society and incorporate it into the USSR, but the educated classes stood in the way.
Lvov, the third largest city in Poland, was under German attack when Soviet troops arrived on September 19, 1939. Polish General Langner rejected German demands to surrender and abdicated to the Soviets instead. The negotiated agreement called for the 30,000 Polish troops in the city to surrender at 15:00 hours on September 22. The agreement allowed the soldiers to return home and the officers to cross the border into Romania or Hungary.
The Polish officers assembled at the designated time and laid down their arms, but the Soviets marched them off and transported them around the country for four days without food or water.
At station stops the soldiers scrounged for roots in unharvested gardens, and strangers thrust food at them. They eventually landed in prison camps to the east.
Polish prisoners of war captured by the Red Army after the Soviet invasion of Poland – Wikipedia
Before the war, the Polish government had required every non-exempt university graduate to join the military reserves. University professors, physicians, lawyers, engineers, teachers, writers, journalists, pilots, and chaplains made up the pool of reservists mobilized when Germany invaded. Those that weren’t captured in the initial surrender were easily rounded up later and transferred into the custody of the NKVD. This included police officers, border guards, landowners, refugees, and a prince.
From October 1939 through February 1940, the soldiers endured lengthy interrogations and constant political agitation in concentration camps established on the former grounds of orthodox monasteries in the western USSR. If the captives resisted the Soviet government, they were condemned to die as enemies of the state.
In March of 1940, Stalin signed the death warrant for over 20,000 officers, soldiers, and civilians. They were secretly shot and buried in mass graves. One such grave site was in Katyn, Russia. Although the captives were executed and buried in various locations, Katyn Forest became the symbol of the atrocity. In all, the NKVD annihilated almost half of the Polish Officer Corp.
Professor Stanislaw Swianiewicz was condemned to die at Katyn, but a NKVD colonel pulled the professor out of line while he waited to board a bus to the execution site. Swianiewicz had studied in Moscow before the Russian Revolution, was an internationally recognized expert on forced labor in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, and had written books on the Soviet economy. He was sent to various prisons, interrogated, and eventually incarcerated in Siberia.
Another officer, General Wladyslaw Anders, had commanded a cavalry brigade which had engaged in heavy fighting with the Germans. While fleeing to the Hungarian border in late September of 1939, he and his troops fought the Soviets. He was injured, captured, and eventually sent to prison in Moscow, thus avoiding the same fate as his fellow officers.
The NKVD arrested, tortured and killed thousands of other Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, and Belorussians from 1940 to 1941. Estimates vary among historians, but it’s believed that 300,000 to 1.2 million Poles were deported to Northern Russia, Siberia, and Central Asia during this time period.
Many died in transit or in exile.
After the Germans overran Eastern Poland and attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, the Soviets formed an alliance with Great Britain and the Polish government-in-exile in London. As part of their agreement, Stalin released all surviving Polish prisoners with the understanding that they would assist in the fight against the Nazis.
General Anders was freed and given command of the Polish Army in the east. It was his responsibility to gather and train the recently released Polish prisoners to form the new army. When inquiries were made regarding the whereabouts of the thousands of missing Polish officers, Stalin claimed that he had lost track of them in Manchuria.
Germany uncovered and exposed the Katyn atrocity to the world in 1943. The Soviets denied responsibility, claiming the Germans had killed the soldiers found in the mass graves. The Polish government-in-exile objected, so Stalin broke off relations with them. Great Britain and the United States chose to accept the Soviet explanation of Germany’s guilt rather than rouse the ire of their ally.
General Anders led his freed Polish troops through Iran and Iraq to Palestine where he successfully organized and trained them to fight the Germans. The Anders Army went on to fight in the Italian Campaign, capturing Monte Cassino in 1944. He and his soldiers engaged in other major battles before the war ended. Anders died in London in 1970.
Professor Swianiewicz was released from Siberia, and left the Soviet Union in 1942. He worked with the Polish government-in-exile in London and informed them of the number of Polish officers that were held in the Soviet Union in the spring of 1940. Later he wrote about the Katyn Massacre and lectured at numerous universities around the world. He died near London in 1997 at the age of 97.
The Soviets also released thousands of previously deported Polish civilians, including many women and children who left the Soviet Union with the Anders Army.
It wasn’t until 1990 that Russia admitted responsibility for the massacre and expressed “profound regret” for its actions.
Sources:
Williamson, David G. Poland Betrayed. Stackpole Books, 2007.
Today is the 80th anniversary of WWII – the day Germany invaded Poland. Six months prior to the invasion, Hitler had encouraged an event which he later came to regret. An event which saved tens of thousands of lives and aided the Allies in their future victory.
What big mistake did Hitler make in 1939 that contributed to his eventual defeat?
The map below illustrates the boundaries of European countries in early 1938 before Hitler began his conquests. Notice that Poland is sandwiched between Germany to the west and the USSR to the east. It was bordered by Czechoslovakia and Rumania in the south.
Before the end of 1938, Germany seized Austria and the mountainous area of western Czechoslovakia (Sudetenland) without opposition. Hitler then devised a way to take possession of the rest of Czechoslovakia and her iron works, armament factories, and huge supplies of modern military equipment. First, he encouraged the Hungarian government to invade the eastern tail of Czechoslovakia and reclaim the territory of Carpathian-Ruthenia lost after World War I.
So, in March of 1939, the Hungarians acted upon Hitler’s suggestion and repossessed their former lands in the Carpathian Mountains. This distraction allowed the Germans to march into Prague and seize the whole western half of Czechoslovakia unopposed. The middle of the divided country became “Slovakia” and a protectorate of Germany. The rest of the world responded with outrage but didn’t move to stop these advances. As seen on the map below, Hungary gained a common border with Poland.
Courtesy of Professor John L Heineman, Boston College
And then almost 6 months later . . . on September 1st . . .
the Germans unleashed the German army, the Wehrmacht, on Poland, giving birth to the blitzkrieg, “lightning war.” In the days leading up to the invasion, the English and French had urged the Polish government not to mobilize its troops so they wouldn’t further enrage Hitler. The Poles had ignored the warnings and secretly mobilized half of their armed forces by August 31st. Unfortunately, the German air force, the Luftwaffe, bombed trains, train stations, and rail lines, preventing many of the remaining troops from reaching their battle stations. Refugees clogged the roads, making it even more difficult for defense forces to engage the enemy.
What the Polish soldiers lacked in numbers and equipment they made up for in bravery and sheer determination. They held the enemy back longer than Hitler had expected. However, armed with the most modern equipment (including the newly acquired arsenal from Czechoslovakia), the German troops attacked from multiple points, broke through weak spots where the Polish Armies were spread out, and encircled hundreds of thousands of troops. The Poles tenaciously fought an army almost twice their size and an air force five times greater.
By September 9th, Hitler was impatient to finish the Polish campaign. The Germans asked the Hungarian government for permission to transport soldiers to Poland on a rail line through Hungary. The Hungarians denied passage. Even though they had signed a trade agreement with Germany, the Hungarians considered Poland their friend. If German troops set foot in Hungary, the government would consider it an act of war.
Nevertheless, the Germans advanced across Poland, and on September 11th Polish Commander-in-Chief Marshal Rydz-Śmigły ordered his remaining troops to retreat to the Romanian border in southeast Poland. He expected new military equipment to arrive from France and England via Romania. He also planned to organize a counterattack from the east when France opened an offensive from the west as they had promised.
Then on September 17th, the unthinkable happened . . .
The Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east and captured Polish troops. Upon hearing the news, Rydz-Śmigły ordered all remaining Polish units to cross the border into Hungary or Romania by any means possible. Although many soldiers, airmen, and civilians escaped into Romania, the Soviets quickly sealed the Polish-Romanian border, leaving Hungary as the only other escape route in the south.
The Hungarians officially opened their border with Poland on September 18th, and tens of thousands of Polish soldiers and civilians entered Hungary safely despite a lack of passports and visas. This allowed many military units and future soldiers to escape to fight another day.
Polish Soldiers. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Both Romania and Hungary followed the Geneva Convention and established refugee camps for civilian refugees and internment camps for soldiers. Refugees who could fend for themselves passed through Hungary and Yugoslavia to Italy and France. Hungarian citizens housed civilians in their homes and transported them to the Yugoslavian border where they found transportation further west. The Hungarian government didn’t stop “refugees” dressed in civilian clothing from leaving the country. In fact, the Hungarians sent civilian clothing to the Polish Embassy in Budapest, and this enabled tens of thousands of soldiers to make their way to France and rejoin the Polish Army and Air Force.
Graves of Polish Soldiers (1939) By Сергей Семёнов User: Stauffenberg via Wikimedia Commons
The Polish Armed Forces joined the Allies and became the fourth largest Allied military force to serve in World War II, and they served with distinction. If the escape route through Hungary had not been available, how many more Poles would have been captured or killed? How much longer would the war in Europe have lasted? How many more civilian lives would have been lost?
Used by Permission from Budby via flikr
Sources:
No Greater Ally (Kenneth K. Koskodan) Poland Betrayed (David G. Wiliamson) Man of Steel and Honour: General Stanislaw Maczek (Evan McGilvray) Hungarian History
Last month, I shared how Hitler came to power and took dictatorial control of Germany in 1933, and I described the state of the Jews in Germany during the interwar period (WWI – WWII). Here’s the link to the post if you missed it: “How Did Evil Men Take Power in Germany?” Today we will examine how Hitler and the Nazis gradually subjugated their opponents and the Jewish people prior to WWII.
In April of 1933, the German government sponsored a two-day boycott of Jewish businesses. Political opponents of the Nazis and all Jews who hadn’t fought in WWI were dismissed from civil service. New laws pushed Jews out of other government jobs, including Jewish doctors who worked in government-financed healthcare programs.
In 1933 . . . 37,000 Jews emigrated from Germany.
In 1934 . . . another 23,000 Jews fled the country.
But during these early years of Nazi control, many Germans, including the Jews, thought that Hitler wouldn’t last long.
Not even everyone in his own movement agreed with his policies.
The three-million-men-strong, brown-shirted, street-fighting SA Stormtroopers, who’d been instrumental in bringing the Nazis to power, now threatened the party’s power and existence. Hitler’s close friend Ernst Röhm headed the SA. He and the other SA leaders were unhappy with Hitler’s slow implementation of the radical policies the Nazis had advocated from the beginning. Also, Röhm wanted Hitler to combine the Reichswehr, the German military, with the SA and replace the officer corps. The German military leaders fought back by threatening to topple the Nazi regime if the too-powerful SA wasn’t eliminated.
Between June 30 and July 2, 1934, and under Hitler’s direction . . . Heinrich Himmler and the SS arrested the SA leaders and shot them to death, including Hitler’s buddy, Ernst Röhm.
This operation became known as the “Night of the Long Knives.”
As a result, the German Army leadership formed an alliance with Hitler and supported him when he declared himself Führer on August 19, 1934, less than three weeks after the death of President Hindenburg. Most of these military leaders remained loyal to Hitler for many years to come.
In September of 1935, Hitler reduced the Jews to the status of second-class citizens and stripped them of their civil rights. Despite this, many thought the worst was over. Indeed, the Jews felt a sense of calm for two years, and . . .
10,000 Jewish emigrants returned to Germany from neighboring countries in 1935.
By 1938, Germany had rebounded from the economic instability created by WWI and the Great Depression. Firmly in control of the country, Hitler and his regime set their sights on territorial expansion, and Jewish policies took a radical turn.
The German Army occupied Austria in March, 1938.
There were 185,000 Jews (3% of the country’s population) living in Austria, and 170,000 of them lived in Vienna (10% of the city’s population). Sixty-two percent of all lawyers in Vienna were Jewish, and a similar percentage held positions in finance and commerce. Almost 50% of all Viennese doctors were Jewish, and Jews dominated trade and were quite visible in cultural enterprises.
Before the occupation, the Nazi Party was very active in Austria, promoting the unification of Germany and Austria and stirring up anti-Semitism. After the annexation, anti-Jewish laws were put in place and enforced immediately. The Jews quickly came under attack and were even assaulted in the streets. Jews lost their businesses and their apartments from the start.
In August of 1938, SS Lieutenant Adolph Eichmann set up an emigration office in Vienna to help speed the exit of Jews from the country, and . . .
150,000 Jews left during the following eighteen months.
The Nazis forced them to give up their property and their wealth before leaving Austria, but the Jews were thankful to be alive.
Violence against the Jews increased in Germany and Jewish businessmen were pressured to sell and leave. Jews who had previously immigrated from Poland were sent back; however, the Polish government didn’t allow them to return and left them to fend for themselves in the frontier zone. An angry young Jewish man in Paris whose Polish parents resided in the frontier zone retaliated by shooting Ernst vom Rath, a German officer stationed at the German Embassy in Paris. The Nazis used this incident to accelerate Jewish persecution in Germany and Austria.
On the nights of November 8-10, 1938, SS and SA men, dressed as ordinary citizens, “set fire to 1000 synagogues, smashed up 7500 Jewish-owned businesses, invaded and ransacked the homes where Jewish people lived, and fatally assaulted over 90 Jewish men. Police herded 30,000 male Jews into concentration camps until they could be ransomed out by their terrified families” (Cesarani).
This event became known as Kristallnacht, or “Night of Broken Glass.”
In addition, the Nazis charged the German Jewish community one billion Reichsmark (approximately 400 million U.S. dollars at that time) for the damage done on Kristallnacht. This spared the German insurance companies from paying.
What were the conditions in Germany which led to another world war only twenty years after the War to End All Wars? How did a “civilized” nation allow its leaders to annihilate so many of its own citizens? And how did such evil leaders gain power in the first place?
Post WWI Turmoil
The Treaty of Versailles – as one of the conditions of surrender, Germany was forced to pay huge reparation payments to the countries she fought during WWI. She also lost territory and was forced to surrender her colonies abroad, further limiting the income needed to pay debts and recover from the War. To help pay its obligations, the German government printed more money, which led to extreme inflation.
Enter ➥ numerous political parties vying to fix Germany’s troubles, parties that opposed the new government (Weimar Republic) and hated democracy. The German Army hired former WWI soldiers to infiltrate and spy on these groups. One of these soldiers, Adolph Hitler, became an undercover agent and joined the German Workers’ Party in 1920. He liked the party’s program, so he dumped his role as spy and soon became the leader, renaming the party the National Socialist German Workers Party, or Nazis.
Hitler’s Rise to Power
Hitler led the Nazi Party in a failed attempt to take over the Bavarian state government in 1923 and spent a year in prison. After his release, he built support for his party by recruiting from other discontented groups.
1928 elections – the Nazis had 800,000 votes (2.6%) for representatives in the Reichstag (German Parliament).
1929 Wall St. Crash – American banks called in German loans, causing German businesses and banks to fold and unemployment to spin out-of-control.
1930 elections – the Nazis had 6.4 million votes for representatives in the Reichstag. The centrist German government was unable to cure the economic problems and parliament was paralyzed by the two large opposing blocks of Nazis and Communists.
July, 1932 elections – the Nazis received 13.7 million votes (37.3% of the vote) and became the second largest party in the Reichstag. Hitler used his growing power to demand the position of chancellor, but President Hindenburg resisted.
September, 1932 elections – the Nazis received 11.7 million votes (fewer than the previous election), and President Hindenburg offered Hitler the post of chancellor, which he accepted on January 30, 1933. The Nazi celebrations included torchlight parades and the assaulting of their political opponents.
February, 1933 – an arsonist set fire to the Reichstag building, and Hitler convinced President Hindenburg to issue a decree (allowed by the Weimar Constitution), suspending most civil liberties in Germany. These rights (secrecy of the post and telephone; habeas corpus; freedom of the press, of expression, of free association, of public assembly) were not reinstated as long as the Nazis held power. Because the Reichstag arsonist was a communist, Hitler declared that the communists were plotting to take over the government. Many communists were arrested, including those serving in the parliament.
March, 1933 elections – the Nazis received 44% of the vote. By forming an alliance with another party which had received 8% of the vote, the Nazis now had a majority in the Reichstag (52%). In order to pass the Enabling Act, the Nazis either arrested or intimidated representatives of the Social Democratic Party who opposed them. The act passed, giving Hitler the right to rule by decree, and he effectively became the dictator of Germany.
The Nazis immediately embarked on a plan to exclude the Jewish population from German culture, politics, economics, and society.
The State of the Jews in Germany
After WWI, approximately 600,00 Jews lived in Germany (under 1% of the population). One third lived in Berlin (4% of the Berlin population). Seventy percent of Jews lived in large cities while 50% of the non-Jewish population lived in small towns and villages. In 1933, only one in five Jews lived in small towns.
During this period, 75% of all Jews were employed in trade, commerce, the financial sector, and the professions (three times the proportion among the general population). Jews owned 80% of the turnover of all German department stores, 25% of smaller retail outlets, and 30% of clothing stores. They handled 25% of all wholesale agricultural trade, and in some districts, largely controlled cattle dealing and grain marketing.
Only 11% of all doctors and 16% of all lawyers in Germany were Jewish, but they were concentrated in Berlin, giving the appearance of a much higher percentage. Several of the great publishing houses were owned by Jews, and they were highly represented among writers and journalists, in theater and the film industry. However, a significant number were rather poor.
In 1932, during the Great Depression, over 31.5% of Jewish employees in Berlin were out of work, and one in four received charity. Jews from Poland and Russia had immigrated to Germany during the 1880’s to the 1920’s, and by 1933, they made up 20% of all German Jewry. The Eastern Jews were predominately small merchants, itinerant traders, shopkeepers, tailors, artisans, and industrial workers. Many were Orthodox and religiously observant whereas the majority of German Jews belonged to the Reform or Liberal movement. Also, many German Jews were assimilating and marrying outside the faith.
Sources:
Introduction from Into the Arms of Strangers, Stories of the Kindertransport, by Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer. (Introduction by David Cesarani)
With the outbreak of WWII, submarine warfare took on new dimensions. Many heroic battles occurred “under the sea.” The adventures of one particular Polish submarine received international attention and provided inspiration to those at war.
Where? The Baltic Sea, the Gulf of Finland, and the North Sea
Poland’s submarines were commissioned to protect the 90 miles of Polish coastline on the Baltic Sea. The Orzel had only been at sea for about twenty months when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and World War II began. At first, the Polish submarine fleet carried on very low-key operations, observing and reporting German naval activity, but on the seventh day of the war, the fleet was ordered to return to the Central Baltic region.
Poland’s submarines weren’t prepared for battle—they’d missed their May maintenance because of the seriousness of the international situation and had been at sea for nearly twelve months without an overhaul.
At first, the Polish submarine fleet carried on very low-key operations, observing and reporting German naval activity, but on the seventh day of the war, the fleet was ordered to return to the Central Baltic region.
On September 14th, the commanding officer of the Polish submarine division ordered the sub commanders to carry out patrols and thwart enemy shipping for as long as possible. When they could no longer continue, they were to sail to the United Kingdom. If that wasn’t possible, they were to seek internment in Sweden.
When the Polish submarine Wilk attempted the long journey, the Germans attacked with depth charges and dropped thirty-eight bombs from the air. Despite the opposition, the Wilk made it safely to the rendezvous point at Rosyth, Scotland on September 20.
The Orzel’s adventure lasted much longer . . . After patrolling the Baltic Sea for nine days, the Orzel landed at Talinn, capital of Estonia. The captain needed medical treatment for stomach pains. Officially neutral, but sympathetic to Germany, the Estonians insisted upon following international law. They required the Orzel to leave port within twenty-four hours but not until a German freighter already in port departed first (also international law). The German vessel didn’t sail, so the Orzel missed her departure deadline.
The Estonian government then interned the Orzel and her crew. They removed the ship’s charts, the sailors’ small arms, the breach locks on the ship’s guns, and fifteen of twenty torpedoes. They stationed two Estonian guards on the ship to conduct surveillance. But, undetected, the Polish submariners partially cut through the thick ropes mooring the ship, leaving the sub attached to the jetty by a single strand.
On the night of September 17-18, two Polish sailors crawled ashore and cut the lines powering the jetty searchlights. The sailors severed the last rope tying the Orzel to the jetty and overpowered the two Estonian guards, taking them aboard the sub. At the mouth of the harbor, the ship hit a rock, but the crew trimmed the tanks, and the sub floated free.
While the Estonians fired on the sub with rifles and artillery from the small fortified islands outside the city, the Orzel submerged and fled. The sailors steered blindly with no chart for soundings. At dawn, they lay down at the bottom and waited as the hunters passed over them and depth charges burst around them.
At midnight, the Orzel cautiously rose, and the submariners discovered they were at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland. Nothing was in sight, so they remained surfaced and recharged the sub’s batteries.
Meanwhile, the Orzel’s escape from Estonia became an international incident, and Germany accused the Estonians of complicity with Poland. The Soviets, who had invaded Poland on September 17th , patrolled the Gulf of Finland with cruisers and six destroyers, looking for Polish subs. The Orzel’s crew dropped off the Estonian guards on the island of Gotland, Sweden, leaving them with money, cigarettes, and a bottle of whiskey. The Orzel then cruised the Baltic for two weeks, evading the Soviets.
The Orzel in English Port, 1940 – Public Domain Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
With their water supply running low and their cook suffering from an infected finger, the crew of the Orzel decided to proceed to Scotland. On the way, they sighted a flotilla of German destroyers, so they dove to a shallow bed and avoided detection. After dark, they surfaced to periscope depth, ran aground, floated free, and crept along until reaching deeper water, all while the German flotilla continued to patrol.
The Orzel traveled up the narrow waterway between Denmark and Sweden and arrived at the North Sea where she was vulnerable to German attack and “friendly fire” from British patrols. On October 14 at six o’clock in the morning, a British shore naval station picked up a faint transmission from the Orzel, and a few hours later a Royal Navy destroyer escorted the sub into Rosyth.
The arrival of the Orzel shocked the Royal Navy—the British had presumed the ship was lost at sea. The Orzel went on to serve the Allies, sinking the clandestine German troop transport, Rio de Janeiro, in southern Norway in April 1940. During the sub’s seventh patrol in May-June of 1940, the Orzel disappeared and was never heard from again. To this day, her fate remains a mystery, although the Polish government has made repeated attempts to locate her final resting place.
