Hermann Boschet
NAME- Hermann Boschet
NATION- Germany
DATE (S) OF INTERVIEW (S)- Conducted by post and telephone on various dates; letters and supple- mental data.
PLACE OF INTERVIEW (S)- Telephonic: both from Glasgow, Scotland (1999) and Wilmington, North Carolina (2000).
LANGUAGE (S) CONDUCTED- English/German
SIGNIFICANCE OF SUBJECT- -Waffen SS lance-corporal, anti-partisan commando in Yugoslavia, 1944 45.
OTHERS IN ATTENDANCE- None
FORMAT- Q & A standard.
ADDITIONAL- Currently in preparatory stage in writing full book length biography.
Q- When and where were you born, and what was your family like?
A- I was born on 25 August 1927 in Aub, near Wuerzburg.
Q- How did you join the Waffen SS?
A- All young men had to join the Reichsarbeitsdienst (Reich Labour Service) until they joined the military, where we took time from work to train. I went to several camps in the Hitler Youth. Around June 1943 I went to the Wehrertuechigungslager (pre-military camp) which was the first camp you went to before entering the military, whether it was the infantry, the air force, or whatever. We read compasses, maps, and all kinds of things. We also learned how to shoot. It was held in Rhoen, which is in Northern Germany. One day we participated in a propaganda film. We were dressed in army uniforms and I was riding on a tank. We jumped down from the tank and attacked a bunker. Some men in Russian uniforms came out of the bunker and surrendered to us. I never did see this film. We stayed in that camp in Rhoen for about four weeks. At one point my boss would not give me any more vacation time. I then went to the Hitler Youth headquarters in Wuerzburg, which was about thirty kilometres away. I told them that my boss would not give me any vacation time and I wanted to know what I could do about it. They then sent me to another camp again. They sent me to a Reichs-ausbildungslager, which was a Hitler Youth/Waffen SS military training school. It was like the Adolf Hitler School. I went to Sondhofen on a night train, and it was the end of 1943 and the train was overcrowded. There were people who wanted to go this way or that, and those who were bombed out and looking for a place to stay. I went into a train car and there were two military policemen wearing their golden gorgets around their necks. They were standing almost in front of this one particular door. The door opened up and it was Field Marshal [Gerd] von Rundstedt. The field marshal was wearing his big coat and he called to me and the other boy who was with me, as we were both wearing our Hitler Youth uniforms with our backpacks. We were given hot chocolate and I was in there with Rundstedt for an hour as we traveled from Wuerzburg to Munich. In Munich we had to change trains Rundstedt said ‘goodbye’.
Q- Was that your first encounter with such a famous person?
A- I think the field marshal was only telling us where he was going. That was the first time I ever saw high-class his way to Berchtesgaden, but he didn’t take military police. I then changed trains to go to Sondhofen.
Q- How long were you there, and what was it like?
A- I spent one week at the Ordensburg Adolf Hitler School in Sondhofen. We took off our Hitler Youth uniforms while we trained there and wore SS uniforms. Theoretically, I was bad militarily and that’s why I was washed out of the school in a week. I was OK practically when we did our war stuff with tanks, infantry, or shooting. We practiced tactics with models in a big sandbox. When it came to theory with mathematics and that kind of stuff I wasn’t good at it. We had to know everything and that’s why I failed.
Q- What happened afterwards?
A- After a week I went to Birksau, which had another Reichsausbildungslager. This was the second class of the Adolf Hitler School and I was there four weeks. It was a mountaineering school in the Alps and this was my first experience with this. Everything was done in the mountains, as was the first school. We learned how to shoot and to climb mountains with bad terrain in the snow while wearing heavy gear.
Q- How tough was the training?
A- They pushed us almost to the limit by the time we got home. The whole outfit felt this way. They would make us go into mountain streams in our underwear. It was goddamn cold! They would make us swim back and forth a couple of times while laughing. They also found reasons to punish us. They might say that your fork or spoon wasn’t clean, even if it was. We weren’t happy about that. Then the four weeks went by; actually I was there for five weeks because I spent one week at Sondhofen and then four weeks at the school in Birksau. By the time I came home I could almost say I was a professional soldier.
Q- How did you get into the SS?
A- Before I entered the Reich Labour Service I went to the police chief in early 1943 and told him I wanted to join the Waffen SS. You had to go through your town’s police chief when you joined the SS; he had the request forms to join. Your record had to be completely clean. You couldn’t have any record of going to jail or doing anything wrong in your life. A robber, a thief, or a rapist could not get into the Waffen SS. He then gave me an authorisation letter, which stated that my parents couldn’t interfere with my enlistment, and I signed it. Once you signed this paper you would probably enter the Waffen SS, but it was not one hundred percent sure. Around March 1944 I got my paper assigning me to the Reich Labour Service, and I had to stay there for six months. They sent me by train near the Polish border to Frankfurt on the Oder.
Q- What was the Labour Service like?
A- Discipline always came first in the Labour Service and they put us where we were needed. Before the war they built the autobahns. We were paid twenty-five pfennigs an hour when I was there.
Q- What kind of work did you do?
A- For the first few weeks I worked on Christmas toys for kids. I made them wooden aeroplane models. I worked indoors for medical reasons as I had cysts on my neck, which they treated. I then worked outside. We learned to dig ant-tank ditches with shovels; these were big holes that tanks could fall into, and we also dug foxholes. It was sandy there so we had to put three poles into the ground to keep the sand from caving in. There was not much action in the Labour Service; we dug holes and stuff like that for the future defence of Germany. We also participated in parades and sports activities and played soccer against the nearest town to our camp.
Q- It was not just work, was it?
A- The Labour Service also had a full military training centre. We would shoot at a rifle range. You had your rifle and your spade. The front was still far away when I was there.
Q- So the defence of Germany was being prepared even in 1944, when the Propaganda Ministry was broadcasting victories and keeping hopes up?
A- Yes. Later the Labour Service was right behind the front-line just in case they were needed. They were the rear guard and they dug foxholes and bunkers to help the soldiers. We called the rear guard emplacements ‘aufangstellung’. This way the infantry would have some defensive positions when they moved back instead of just open ground.
Q- How did your selection for the SS go?
A- I soon got examined again by some Wehrmacht officers. It was in a big
room and there were some Waffen SS men there. I put my authorisation paper on the table and then I had to sit on a stool so they could check me out. I had to have blue eyes as that was very important. There were some Wehrmacht people there and they wanted me too, but I told them I joined the Waffen SS a long time ago. Then I entered the 6th Waffen SS Gebirgs (Mountain) Division ‘Nord’. This was because I had mountaineering experience and I was placed in the division’s training centre in Hallein, Austria, which is near Salzburg. It was also used as an assembly point for the division. The division’s head-quarters weren’t here though, as the 6th SS Division was all over Europe: Germany, the Russian Front, and the Balkans, all over the place.
Q- What was this place like?
A- At this training centre in the Alps we learned how to ski, climb, and shoot in the mountains. You learned to ski from the beginning with heavy equipment. Fifty pounds was the weight limit you could put on your back and we also learned how to use ski jumps. Skiing was very important in case you were needed in an area where you had to ski. You had to be a good skier. It wasn’t so pleasant doing this in the winter, especially later in Yugoslavia. There were lots of mountains there but they weren’t too high. It was a miserable winter. We also learned how to survive in the snow. They put us in the snow for three days with no food or water; we ate snow. We shoveled out a cave in a big snow bank and you laid on your skis. We stayed in that hole for three days. A skier would walk out there with some hot soup, but we didn’t get any. It was to teach us survival.
Q- This was fairly dangerous training.
A- Yes, near Berchtesgaden they would purposely break loose avalanches on top of us. An avalanche with wet snow could crush you to death. It is very heavy and it rips out trees and everything. An avalanche with powdered snow could suffocate you when you tried to breathe in it. I was buried under both types of snow, and that’s how we learned to survive. They would find us with dogs and dig us out.
Q- How would they start these avalanches?
A- They would shoot the overhanging snow banks loose with a machine gun. We would be waiting halfway down, then wet snow would take us down the slope about a hundred meters. Between five and fifteen of us would be five or more feet under the snow.
Q- How were you prepared for cold weather?
A- We had all kinds of important equipment in our backpacks. We had dry socks, shirts, heavy sweaters, and a little telescope that was like an auto-mobile antenna. It was at least five or six meters long. We had a suction device and we pushed the telescope out so we could breathe through it. You might have to breathe through it for an hour until they found you, but they knew exactly where we were buried. They dug us out very quickly, but you could be under there for a couple of hours. None of us were killed during this training. This high mountain training lasted a month or two, and we were really outside in the cold all the time. We went home soaking wet and would take our boots off and put them around an oven. The next day your boots got smaller because of the shrinking. Every month we got a new pair of boots because of the shrinking.
Q- What happened on the way to your first duty station?
A- The Allied air force attacked us when we took a train from Berchtesgaden down to Yugoslavia. A military train like we were on had everything on it. There were wagons and trucks on it. There was even a unit that could fix trucks very quickly. The train had machine guns and flak guns for defence, but they weren’t enough. Our train went into a tunnel and the aeroplanes came and fired rockets into the front and rear of the tunnel and they blew the front out of the tunnel where the train was. We were trapped in there for a couple of hours and we almost got smoked out. At first the men panicked in there from all the smoke and steam. There was also a lot of dirt in the air, so we had to put our gas masks on. As soon as they had the tunnel open again everything was fine, then we prayed to God that the aeroplanes wouldn’t come back. That was the first and last time I used it [the gas mask]. We never thought we would be attacked by gas warfare on any front-line, so we threw the gas masks away. I threw mine away the first day I arrived in Yugoslavia. We filled our gas mask containers with ammunition, food, sugar, or whatever. It was against military regulations to throw your mask away as it was part of your equipment.
Q- You were never worried about possibly being gassed?
A- They never used gas during World War II. Do you know why it was never used? Because Hitler was injured by it in World War I. He knew how horrible it was.
Q- When did you arrive in Yugoslavia?
A- I arrived in Yugoslavia in October 1944 and I was there for almost eight months. At first I signed up for an Unterfuehrer (non-commissioned officer’s) school in Ljubliana and I was there for four weeks. The school’s training NCOs were wounded veterans, and some of them were missing a limb. They were very experienced soldiers, and most of them had the Iron Cross First Class. The school was dissolved after it was bombed out by Allied bombers. The day this happened we were out doing field training, reading maps and learning how to operate in the woods against snipers or whatever. We were trained how to fight in those conditions. We were about a kilometre from our barracks when we heard some aeroplanes. I believe they were Thunderbolts; they shot our barracks to pieces with their machine guns and they dropped some bombs. I later talked to some American pilots who were in the neighbourhood. When we came back to the barracks there was nothing left of them. The front walls had collapsed and the windows were shot out, so we couldn’t use them anymore. The kitchen was completely wiped out. They then took us away from the school and I was transferred to the front-line.
Q- How were the people towards the German soldiers?
A- In Slovenia they were good people and very loyal to the Germans. They helped us and their army fought on our side. Their soldiers were drafted.
Q- What was the supply situation like?
A- Our supplies first came by train then by truck, then they went from the trucks to the food carriers. The food carrier would then bring our soup or whatever to our foxholes. We didn’t get enough food.
Q- What did you do?
A- We would have to go to a farmhouse and grab a couple of chickens or a rabbit, something. We always had a guy who knew how to cook the stuff. I couldn’t take a rabbit apart and there was always a butcher who did our butchering; he would know how to take the fur off a rabbit. One day we found a sack of potatoes in a farm town. We also found sauerkraut in some big barrels that looked like wine barrels. The top three or four inches of it was bad but the rest of it was good, then we cooked up the potatoes and ate them with the sauerkraut. We didn’t have any meat or anything. Sometimes someone might give us a chicken or something. We also didn’t have much to drink because the village wells were poisoned. We were drinking rainwater; when it rained we collected it in pots. This was how we washed ourselves. We received plenty of ammunition. I had a [Mauser] 98K mountain rifle which was a short carbine, and we had more ammunition than anything else. I carried ammunition in my gas mask canister. I had 250 rounds of ammunition for my rifle, which would last about ten days. That was plenty. I might use thirty rounds per battle.
Q- Where was your first action?
A- I first fought in Slovenia and later Bosnia, since they put us where they needed us, and in Slovenia I was involved in three reconnaissance patrols while I was there. Whenever we were needed some place they would drive us there by trucks at night, sometimes going a hundred miles. During the day this was not possible because of Allied air attacks. Before we went out on the patrols we had to have our feet inspected by our group commander. We had to have good feet to go out on a patrol and you could not have any blisters. If you had blisters you were not allowed on patrol. A reconnaissance patrol usually went ten kilometres one way then ten kilometres back again in the same day. Our commander did that and it was a good idea.
Q- Describe a typical patrol.
A- We avoided making noise on these patrols. We didn’t talk too much and we wrapped rags around our mountain boots. We talked very softly so you could hardly hear us. We made sure not to break any branches when we walked off the roads. We would search for the partisans with a reconnaissance group of about ten men, which included an obersturmfuehrer (first lieutenant). One of us would carry a MG 42 machine gun. The rest of us had Schmeisser submachine pistols when we were on recon missions, and we only had these machine pistols when we were on recon missions. We had to look for partisans and they would look for us too, but we really had to search for them. We had maps but they were completely wrong. There was no such thing as an accurate map. We would walk around in Yugoslavia like lost dogs. That was what it was like in the mountains. Only by walking our reconnaissance missions did we find out where they were. We either found a way out or we learned where the enemy was. We always had a wagon with special weapons and equipment on it, and we usually used our rifles, while some outfits had only submachine guns. The patrols would spot where the partisans were and then we would attack them with a larger reserve group of about a hundred men. Our second in command, Untersturmfuehrer (second lieutenant) Meyer would always stay in the rear with the reserve force. If you were not fighting you were put on relief, and we would clean our weapons, uniforms, and our boots. We would do those kinds of things. This was not really a controlled war. The bandits [irregulars] knew what they were doing and they knew exactly where we were. The British supplied them with aerial photographs; they had P-38s [Lightnings] spotting us and we didn’t even know where we were.
Q- So you were also engaged on the ground by aircraft?
A- Yes. My company shot down a P-38 fighter with our infantry weapons. There were a whole bunch of B-17s in a bomber formation which were being protected by the fighters. They weren’t flying very high, about 3,000 feet. Our rifles and machine guns could shoot that far. About a hundred of us shot at that one aeroplane and we shot it down.
Q- Did you use any aircraft for your own operations?
A- We had air patrols with Fiesler ‘Storch’ reconnaissance planes. They would radio back to our headquarters and tell us what they saw. They might tell us that there was a partisan camp ten miles away or even right in front of us. The partisans sometimes had open fires and the pilots could see the smoke.
Q- What was the tactical situation like?
A- We were outnumbered in Yugoslavia, sometimes by ten to one. The partisans weren’t as well equipped with weapons as we were, but they knew their neighbourhoods and the terrain. We didn’t know it. Sometimes we went into villages that had been fighting religious clashes or whatever since 1936, before the war.
Q- What was counterinsurgency combat like?
A- There were always casualties. Fighting in the woods was different; they usually had sharpshooters on top of big trees. Battles with the partisans usually lasted about thirty to sixty minutes. In the mountains we had artillery with mortars, but no tanks. They usually started the battled with their mortars. Once when I was in the middle of Yugoslavia I was wounded by a mortar shell that hit me under my arm. The partisans blew up our bridges and food supplies and laid mines on the roads. Yugoslavia didn’t have any big roads in the mountains; they were small little deer trails. They had major roads but not in the mountains. The partisans communicated with birdcalls. One time I heard a cuckoo sing and someone told me later on that the mountain areas of Yugoslavia had no cuckoos because the altitude was too high for them. We were told not to panic if we heard a cuckoo because it was the partisans communicating with each other. We also learned how to use birdcalls.
Q- Describe your first encounter with partisans.
A- The first time I saw some partisans there were two of them carrying some homemade mines along a road. We heard them coming so we hid behind some trees. We wanted to take them alive so we shouted at them to halt once they were near us. They had Enfield rifles and started to shoot at us. I was nervous so my first and only shot hit one of their rifles. The loading mechanism then fell out of my rifle and I couldn’t shoot anymore. The partisans wanted to get away but the guy beside me shot them both down. The first large group we encountered was during another recon patrol early in the morning. They were like Gypsies, they had their wives, kids, everything with them. It wasn’t really a fighting unit. They would fight a German unit and then go back to their camps again. We could always hear these partisans from far away. They had ten to fifteen covered wagons like you would see in an old Western movie and they had guards who were mainly sitting on their horses. There were ten to fifteen of us and we positioned ourselves in a half-moon circle towards the partisan camp. There were woods in back of us and open ground in front of us where the camp was. We then made some bad things happen. One of the guards was asleep on his horse and one of our guys stabbed him with a bayonet. I think we shot the other guards when they started shooting. We shot their wagons and the whole camp to pieces. Their wagons started burning, and one of our guys exploded a whole bunch of grenades from fifty meters away with a string. The partisans probably thought that we had hundred guys, but it was a trick to fool them. They didn’t know what hit them.
Q- What was the end result?
A- Some of the partisans escaped because a bunch of them ran away. We didn’t know how many of them there were in the camp when we attacked it, but there were about 200 of them! They had women partisans there too and they were also shooting at us also. We escaped from there but we lost two men during the battle, and we returned with eight men. The partisans were howling at us with little bullhorns; ‘Come back and pick up your comrades! We didn’t do anything to them! Come back and get them!’ We knew that if we went back for them we would all be dead. We would walk into a trap, so we had to leave those two guys. Later on we heard two shots when the partisans killed them. Maybe they also tortured them. Who knows?
Q- What happened afterwards?
A- After that battle we had peace for a whole week. Can you believe that? There wasn’t a partisan around for a hundred miles. We got to rest a little bit. We were also able clean ourselves. We didn’t have any showers so we washed ourselves by a little river. We were filthy.
Q- What was your perception of the partisans?
Q- The partisans were very cruel soldiers; I call them bandits. They didn’t take any prisoners. They might take some alive but they would shoot or torture them. The Tomobranzen who fought with us were instantly killed when they were captured, and they did the same thing to the partisans they took alive.
Q- How were the partisans supplied?
A- They were supplied by the British and the Russians. The British dropped food and weapons from the air. The partisans all wore that red Communist star, and they were completely outfitted with Russian and British uniforms and they had Enfield rifles. They usually wore British coats too.
Q- What was your unit organisation like?
A- We had two companies from the ‘Nord’ Division and we worked with the 4th Waffen SS Division ‘Polizei’ (Police). We were assigned to them. The police had the most casualties; they sometimes lost thirty or forty men in a couple hours!
Q- Describe one of the joint operations.
A- On one occasion we were attacked by the 1st Tito Brigade, which was like an SS unit; they were the best men Tito had. They were tough and very well trained. We were on a hillside position about thirty kilometres from Ljubliana, which was called Laibach by us. We had about 200 men not including the SS Police unit. About 1,000 partisans came at us in waves; five or six lines behind each other. The partisans knew where our soft spot was; they hit the police unit and broke through. The SS police had about 400 men and they took heavy casualties. We were behind the police on that occasion; my outfit was positioned on a tree line and the partisans had to attack us uphill over an open field. We had a better position than our attackers. For the first time we had to put our bayonets on our rifles because they came very close to us. I never had to use my bayonet, but they got to within twenty or thirty metres from our position! Our machine guns were a little higher up the hill from me and they took care of them. Our heavy machine guns could accurately shoot about 500 yards, while the infantry would shoot when they were about one or two hundred yards away. The partisans broke into our lines but we beat them. We never had hand to hand fighting that day but the police probably did. They never overran us, and the fighting lasted about two hours. On another occasion, around April [1945] early one Sunday morning a couple of Russian T-34 tanks approached our position in the mountains. We didn’t have many guys where we were. We could hear the tanks approaching from miles away, but they didn’t have any infantry with them. Tito didn’t have many tanks, but he got some from the Russians.
Q- What was your role during this period?
A- During that particular week I was the bazooka man since I was trained in how to fight tanks. You could run next to an enemy tank and put a magnetic mine on it, but I had a panzerfaust, which was accurate for about 100 meters. You could only use a panzerfaust once; you could not load another explosive into it-you had to get a completely new unit. One of the tanks advanced too far and reached the outpost I was in. These tanks had barbed wire wrapped around them to keep our men from putting mines on them. We had only one bazooka and I shot the left track off of a T-34 from a distance of about sixty to seventy metres. You had to aim a panzerfaust a little bit over the target in order to hit it.
Q- Did you get credit for the tank destruction?
A- I didn’t dismantle the tank completely, but it couldn’t move after that. Its cannon was also stuck between two trees so they couldn’t shoot it. One of our guys threw a hand grenade at it and told the four guys inside the tank to come out. All four of them came out, but two of them started shooting at us with their pistols. The two who had the pistols were shot, but we took the other two prisoner. The other tank escaped. We would have needed another panzerfaust to destroy the tank I hit. I got the Iron Cross Second Class for shooting that tank, but not a Tank Destruction Badge, even though I disabled the tank. That was the only time I ever saw any enemy tanks.
Q- Were there any other missions or engagements that stand out in your mind?
A- Yes. Once we were in a village with a motorised unit and that night the partisans attacked us. They rarely attacked during the day anyway. They first shot mortars into the little town; we knew they were coming when we heard the first explosions. Then we heard them yelling ‘Urah!’ and we could see a couple hundred of them coming at us towards the village. I think their advisors were from Russia because ‘urah’ means ‘forward’ in Russian. We had to get out of that village very quickly. I jumped onto one of our tanks that were very fast. I think that it was a Mk. IV. It still had enough gasoline to go another fifty to 100 kilometres. Some of the men didn’t make it out and were left behind. About fifty or sixty of us assembled again outside the town and we counted everyone who made it out. There were about ten to fifteen guys who were missing, but we didn’t go back to look for them. There was no way! We would have run into an ambush and gotten wiped out.
Q- What did your unit look like as the war came to an end?
A- We were not a full fighting unit anymore by April 1945, and there might have been fifty or sixty guys left. Every couple of days there would be one or two guys missing. Our numbers shrank down. My friend George from East Germany said that our company was down to thirty-five men; we had one 120 men during the Unterfuehrer School until it was dissolved. We weren’t engaged in much fighting everyday, maybe once or twice a week, and you would lose some people.
Q- You were aware of some POWs captured who survived, yes?
A- A cousin of mine was in the Wehrmacht and he survived after being taken by Tito’s men. He was alone when they captured him. He said they never tortured him or anything. They put him in the town jail and then gave him to a farmer, and he worked on the farm until he came home. As a matter of fact, he married the farmer’s daughter. He made it home and I talked to him after the war. He didn’t see any other German prisoners while he was there. He developed some kind of sickness so he died about ten years after the war.
Q- How did you escape Yugoslavia?
A- Our group was still together and we were east of Ljubliana when we got the orders to retreat out of Yugoslavia. The previous couple of weeks we had fought in this area, and later we fought near the Austrian border. Most of the time we didn’t know the date or what day of the week it was, especially during the last weeks of the war. We were always on the move and didn’t stay for three or four days anymore. We had lice in our clothing and we were completely filthy at that time. We did anything necessary to reach the Austrian order.
A- You got into a little trouble once, didn’t you?
Q- One morning during the retreat I was away from my unit and I stole
an Italian submachine gun and two ammunition magazines which
were sticking out of a horse wagon. There was a Tomobranzen
soldier sitting in the driver’s seat of the wagon. I didn’t know he was
an officer from the ‘Handschar’ Division. The men in that division
wore the funny looking fez hat with the tassel hanging down. Later
that morning I wanted to try the gun out. The roads were filled with
broken weapons and stuff like so I found a gas mask and put it on
some hay. I took my shirt and helmet off and walked fifty metres
away to try the gun out. That Italian weapon worked beautifully. I had
a bad rifle that shot to the left, having to adjust my sight to the left to
hit anything. Then the German military police got me. They wanted to
know why I was shooting on the side of the road. They thought that
there might be some partisans attacking. The military police could
blow you away without mercy if they got a crack at you. We called
them kettenhund, or ‘chained dogs’. The military policemen were called
this because they wore a chained gorget around their necks. They
grabbed me and the weapon and took me to a general. I found out
he was General Schimmelpfenig, serving under General von Weichs,
who commanded all of the southern armies as Supreme Commander –Balkans. I was standing there with no uniform on except for my pants, belt and mountain boots. General Schimmelpfenig asked me what unit I belonged to and how old I was. He told the military police ‘this boy is ok. We can need every man and every submachine gum we can get.’ The general told me to go put on my jacket and report back to him immediately. I did this and he then told me to find my unit. Unfortunately, I was never able to find my unit during the retreat and I was on my own until I reached Austria.
Q- Was that the last of your problems?
A- Hardly. Three days later I was marching on the road when I got stopped by that same Tomobranzen officer with his fez hat. His men surrounded me. They were Mongolians and they tied their hair around a wire. They had haircuts that were similar to Mohawks. The sides of their heads were shaved on both sides and they had a strip of hair that was sticking straight out on the top. The Mongolians were also wearing opium pipes; I could smell the opium on them. The officer said; ‘Listen. You have my submachine gun!’ He then told me the serial number of the gun. Those guys could have really messed me up! Believe me. They were SS too, but I was a real German SS man. The officer said, ‘ok, go find yourself a weapon. Walk down the street and you might find one. If you don’t have a weapon you might be mistaken for a partisan. They won’t take you prisoner.’ I walked about a hundred yards down the street and found some German soldiers from the Wehrmacht. They were drinking water that was coming down from the mountains. One of them left his rifle nearby so I grabbed it and took off. Ljubliana was about sixty percent deserted when I went through it. There were still people around and some of them were shooting at us when we retreated through the city. Even people in civilian clothes were shooting at us there. They were helping the partisans. I was in Ljubliana for about two days. Some German artillery was shooting from a big castle fortress in Ljubliana, then the artillery retreated. There were outfits from the ‘Prinz Eugen’ Division there. They were almost wiped out; there weren’t many of them left. They really took a beating in Montenegro and I retreated with them.
Q- How was the retreat?
A- It could have been better. As we retreated out of Yugoslavia the partisans came after us everywhere. They really didn’t push us out; we left on our own. Who wanted to be in Yugoslavia when the war was lost? We left on foot or by wagon, only rarely did we get a ride on a truck. There were thousands of us retreating. We went by vehicle if we got one that still had fuel. You could see dead horses lying in the street or the side of the road by the hundreds, all blown up. About twenty or thirty kilometres from Klagenfurt we saw about three Tiger tanks overlooking us on a hill. One of them started to lower its main gun because they could not tell if we were Germans or partisans. One of us fired a coloured flare to let the tanks know we were Germans so they didn’t fire on us.
Q- You were not alone during this exodus, were you?
A- No. Many times we didn’t see the Slovenian population anymore. Most of the villages were deserted because they left, becoming refugees fleeing into Austria. They were almost all women, children and old people because the men were fighting. Hundreds of them were on the road when the German troops were pushed out of Yugoslavia.
Q- Were relations still good between the Germans and the civilians?
A- Yes. The Slovenians gave us a lot during our retreat the last couple of weeks. They gave us food and everything because there was nothing around anymore; no cats or anything. They gave to us out of their own free will. I think some were even crying when the German troops left. They knew life would not be better for them under Tito. It was tiring too.
Q- What other difficulties did you encounter?
A- Everything came together at that time on this one big mountain road
towards Austria. That was the only major road. We were so exhausted
sometimes that we didn’t care if we lived or died. We would put our arms
across each other’s shoulders as we walked just so we could keep going. The
partisans got some of our guys when they were in this state of mind.
Q- What was Austria like at this time?
A- We had to go over the mountains and through the Laubel Pass, which was a big tunnel over a mile long to get to Austria. When we reached the tunnel about fifty to a hundred partisans tried to cut us off there. We attacked them because we had to get through. After the fight we sent some men inside to see if it was safe. None of the partisans survived the battle and the tunnel was full of water, which was about two feet deep. There were many bodies in the water and I stepped on some of them as I walked through. As I retreated with thousands of German soldiers I became aware of their resentment towards me because I was in the Waffen SS. I didn’t see many other SS troops around and I felt very uncomfortable. The soldiers didn’t say anything, but they looked at me in an angry way. I then rubbed dirt on my uniform so they couldn’t see my SS insignia. I wasn’t sure if I was safe around them. It took me about a week to get to Austria. After we crossed the Alps there was fighting going on, but it stopped a day or two before we became prisoners. The ones who were further east in Yugoslavia probably had to fight their way out. The partisans got rid of whomever they found in Yugoslavia; cut off German units and things like that. I think there were mass killings. The Russians were near us. They came down from the Drau River. We also saw some Russians going through Klagenfurt and driving in jeeps. One of them had a half-naked woman bound on the hood; they did horrible things to the women they captured. We saw the British there too.
Q- Did you ever find your unit?
A- I found my unit the day before I was captured in Klagenfurt, which is eighty-three kilometres from Ljubliana. There were just thirty-five of us left. My friend George knows more about it. At this time the British crossed a bridge near Klagenfurt, and they knew the whole southern army from Yugoslavia had to cross the bridge there; it was the only one that wasn’t blown up. We didn’t want to swim across the Drau River, which was about a hundred yards wide. If you weren’t a good swimmer you couldn’t make it, especially with a uniform on and everything. There were also dead people floating around all over the place.
Q- How were the British towards you?
A- They had three tanks and they waited for us. They let the Yugoslav refugees through and they took us prisoner. There were lines several miles long of German troops coming to surrender to the British. There were so many of us! We had to throw everything away and then walk about half a mile with our hands up. It was 13 May 1945 and it was the luckiest day of my life, when I was placed in a British POW camp. I held the rank of sturmann (private first class or lance corporal), and I was just short of my eighteenth birthday.
Q- What happened when you surrendered?
A- First they searched us. We had to take everything out of our pockets. They were looking for little pistols or anything we might have on us. The first thing they took from us was our first aid kits. The British were very poorly supplied with them and they took mine right off my jacket. The British were supplied worse than we were when we got captured. Can you believe that? If you had a watch the British took that away. Your commander usually had a military watch for his unit and they took that. Then they went through your belong-ings and your wallet where you might have pictures of your mother or your father. Most of the time they kept the wallets. They didn’t take mine. If they did I wouldn’t have that picture of myself in the SS uniform; that picture in my soldbuch (identification/pay book). Then the British rounded up about 10,000 of us in a big soccer field surrounded by barbed wire, and there were a bunch of men in there already. There were probably other camps nearby, I don’t know. My friend George was the only one I found after I was captured. The others were scattered all over the place. Maybe they arrived in the prison camp an hour or so later.
Q- How long were you held here?
A- We stayed there for a couple of days. The British brought us water and a little something to eat. They had white bread and corned beef, which wasn’t much, just enough to keep us alive. Then you got interrupted everyday for interro-gation. Then one morning British guards surrounded us. Some British officers and some of Tito’s officers were sitting along a table and we had to walk by them. They looked into our eyes and we looked into theirs. The British officer who interrogated me looked at me and then the Yugoslav did. Earlier I had rubbed dirt on my SS collar patch so you couldn’t see it. Only the British officer knew who I was, my age, everything else. He told me to go towards some trucks that had British troops from India. The prisoners the British kept went towards the trucks and the others were given to Tito’s soldiers.
Q- What happened to those given to the Communists?
A- By the hundreds Tito’s men pushed their prisoners into empty boxcars on a train they had near the soccer field. They put about fifty prisoners into each boxcar. About two years ago [1997] someone gave me a report in a German newspaper article which told what happened to those prisoners. They were annihilated in Gottschee, which is a little mountain village that I passed through weeks earlier. They shot 10,000 prisoners during the three days; neck shot, or they tied hand grenades to four or five of them and pushed them down a mine shaft. They fell in there and then, boom! They were dead. This is a true story.
Q- Who were these soldiers taken by Tito’s men?
A- They were mostly Slovenians, the Tomobranzen soldiers. The Slovenians had different emblems on their uniforms than ours. Hundreds of them were from the ‘Handschar’ Division. Tito’s men sorted them out and they also took some of the SS. If they knew that I was in the SS or the Unterfuehrer School I would have been sent with them, but the British officer saved me. He knew all of our outfits, and probably thought ‘forget about it, we won’t give them to Tito.’ I think he had this feeling. The British kept the majority of us. I met only one Slovenian soldier when I was in a different prison camp in Italy, Tito got the rest. Tito’s men even came up and began cutting off the refugees from British control and took many of them.
Q- How were things then?
A- Well, remember the three Tiger tanks we passed earlier? They had received the political news; the Americans were in Frankfurt, and there had been fighting near my hometown. That’s when I knew the war was over, not before that time. The British transported us from one camp to the next at first. The first couple of weeks were not so good but we managed it. They moved us into Italy; it’s very hot like it is in California. We would go one or two hundred miles to a new camp periodically. We first went to Udine for two days. We went from there to Mestre where we spent a few days. We then went to Naples for another few days to unload some ships. We were then put on board a Liberty ship that took us to Taranto, where I spent a year. I was in a camp with 50,000 German prisoners on a big airport. We were put in pens of a thousand men each, and in our pen there were only SS soldiers, para-troopers, and frogmen. There were Polish guards in the towers and we lived in two-man tents for the first six months, and then ten-man tents the last six months.
Q- How was this camp?
A- We worked in the camp. I was a barber so I cut the prisoners’ hair everyday. I also played soccer in the camp. My commander, who was a British captain, was also the trainer for our outfit’s soccer team. I was then commissioned to cut the British officers’ hair every two weeks; there were ten of them. That was the beginning of my good life as a prisoner. I was able to get food from three different sources; regular meals as a prisoner, which had a certain amount of calories per day, and I also got food for playing soccer and for my work. I was able to get cheese, sausage, butter, white bread, and whatever! I got my mess tin filled three times for each of the three meals. They gave us tickets for our meals. I ate twice at every meal and then gave my extra ticket to the other guy in my tent. So every other guy got my extra food. When we got counted everyday you could tell who ate more than the others. You could almost see the ribs on the others, but it wasn’t as bad as they show on television. I was well fed.
Q- So the conditions were quite good?
A- Yes. I can’t say that I was treated badly. Nobody kicked or slapped me or anything. They didn’t treat me any differently because I was in the Waffen SS. We got counted two times a day, in the morning at 0700 and in the evening at 1600. We were always at attention when the British counted us. It was very military; we didn’t look like shit. That was a good thing about it. We had to follow their rules because we were prisoners of war. Sometimes not everyone was there because they escaped. They also had to count the sick in the dispensary.
Q- What kind of questions did they ask you during the interrogations?
A- The usual things; name, rank, unit, age, where we were from, that kind of thing. There was a meeting in the prison camp before you were released. They would ask you which sector of Germany you came from. My sector was near Frankfurt and Wuerzburg on the Main River. This area was occupied by the Americans, who took my hometown and the whole area. You got selected and received a piece of paper which said you were going to the American or British sector. We were separated into groups, which would go to the different occupation zones, and they would get a train ready. I was separated from George because he was going to Leipzig in the Russian occupied zone. We were put in a big boxcar. We got through Italy by truck but we went through Austria by train, and were on the train for a couple of days.
Q- What did you think of Italy?
A- Italy was a very poor nation. It was also very Communist at that time. They were as poor as Germany was. We were on a prison train and we saw half-naked kids running beside the train trying to get food from us. Sometimes we gave them something to eat. We would throw them food when the train was moving very slowly into a train station. There was always a food wagon for us at the stations.
Q- How was the new camp?
A- We came to an American prison camp in Rosenheim, Bavaria. I went
into the camp and I had my paper assigning me to the American occupation
zone, and I was there for about two weeks. The Americans gave a lot of the
German soldiers to the French so they could work in the mines; they didn’t
let them go home. I wasn’t treated badly there either. We made little bread
knives with wooden handles from metal canisters. We used them to cut bread
or whatever, they weren’t for killing people. There was a German blacksmith there who made them and he did a magnificent job. They were so sharp you could almost shave with them. One of the guards spotted a knife and he wanted them, so he brought a big box to put them in. Outside it was all muddy and we took our knives out of our pockets and dropped them into mud. We then pushed them into the mud with our boots. One of us said, ‘we don’t need the knives anymore. If you want them you will have to dig them out of there.’ The American was so shocked he didn’t even tell his com- mander what we did. I wish I had my knife today, it would have been a nice souvenir.
Q- How was your release?
A- The day before I left I got interrogated by an American tank commander of Jewish descent. His parents were from Wuerzburg and they had immigrated to the United States. I still have my release papers and his name is in there. He had a big Colt pistol on the table and spoke to me in German. He called me by my first name and he said, ‘Aub is very badly damaged. I hope your parents are still alive.’ He told me this before I was released. He was very open and he told me everything. While I was being interrogated there was a big coloured man with a big whip next to the Jewish tank commander. Some of us got whipped by that black guy because I could hear them crying while they were being beaten. In his office there was a big German Swastika flag on the floor, and we all had muddy boots because of the rain. It rains a lot in Germany in April. I saw the flag and I walked straight over it. A prisoner would get whipped if he jumped over the flag. It was the end of April 1946 and I packed my things that night. The next morning they drove me in a truck to the Rossheim train station. One of the guys said, ‘You have your train ticket so now you are a free man.’ He wished me good luck and then I boarded the train. I then went to Munich and from there to Aub. At 0600 in the morning I boarded the train for my hometown.
Q- How was it coming home?
A- When I got there I saw the first people I knew. The word spread quickly
through Aub that I had returned. Then I walked over to our town square and
my little pet dachshund came running to me. My father was standing nearby
under a door. My parents were very happy to see me. They hadn’t heard
anything from me in about a year and a half and thought I was dead. The
postcard that I sent them from the British prison camp arrived a week after I
did, and I still have it.
Q- Did you ever doubt victory for Germany?
A- No, but I was young. Even when we were on the run we always thought that there would be some new weapons that would win the war. I was almost convinced that we could win the war. Can you believe that? They always said that the ‘wonder weapons’ were coming. That is what they said. We thought there would be a new aircraft, or something new that would change things.