Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
Hamburg after Allied bombing
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(photo credit 14.1)
As the end drew nigh, no Nazi youth organization was left out. The Labor Service (RAD) camps became tough basic training operations where sixteen-year-olds were taught “how to storm make-believe enemy trenches with drawn bayonets and how to fire bazookas at haystacks.”
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One month after arriving for labor duty in 1944, William Kern, sixteen, and his unit were given a few rifles and sent off in a French cattle car to a village in Lorraine twenty miles behind the front lines. There they were lodged on straw mattresses in an old French barracks. Their job, along with other units “working on this fortification as far as the eye could see,” was to dig, by hand, enormous antitank trenches for the Westwall defenses. Before they started on the trenches, the boys were ordered to dig foxholes for themselves. They would need them: Allied planes regularly strafed the vast construction site as the terrified boys lay facedown in the often water-filled foxholes. Labor duty had none of the glamorous aura of the Army and was generally detested. Kern, the only university-bound student in his unit, was hazed relentlessly by his squad leader; his only available revenge was to use the leader’s toothbrush to clean the toilets when he was assigned to punitive latrine duty.
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Farther along the line, the Westwall workers were even younger. Proud Hitler Youth member Alfons Heck, swept away by the exhilaration of Nuremberg five years before and still an enthusiast, found himself, at fifteen, armed with a pistol and in command of an HJ unit of more than 100 boys. This group not only dug trenches, but also manned an antiaircraft gun. Heck’s naive enthusiasm was dampened only slightly by the presence of a disillusioned veteran of the Eastern Front, assigned to coordinate Westwall construction operations after he had lost an arm in battle.
The HJ unit was housed in a requisitioned convent and its neighboring school. Meals were prepared by a large contingent of BDM and RAD girls. There was plenty of flirtation, and relations with the townspeople, after a rocky start, were not bad, as the presence of the HJ guaranteed a good food supply. The teenagers relaxed in the evenings by singing their hypnotic songs. Within a few months, Heck had been put in command of 2,800 boys and 80 girls. His dedication to his work was only increased by meeting Speer and Hitler during a visit they made to the Westwall project just before the Battle of the Bulge. There were few attacks in Heck’s area, and before the Allies reached the Westwall his unit was withdrawn and he returned to his family’s farm in the Rhineland, just inside the Luxembourg border. The reality of war would not come to him until Christmas Eve 1944, when the farm was bombed by Allied planes. His family was unharmed, but the buildings and animals were blown to bits. The physical damage left him cold, but when his grandmother, weeping in the ruins of her life’s work, cursed him for his mindless loyalty to Hitler, he was moved. Still, his only tears came for the death of his dog, and the whole experience fueled a fierce desire for revenge. Heck resumed his HJ duties, and, along with many of his comrades, reported with enthusiasm for induction into the Luftwaffe, as ordered, on his seventeenth birthday.
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Germany’s own did not suffice to construct the by now hopeless defenses against the Allied armies on both its eastern and western frontiers. In the summer and fall of 1944 in Poland and the eastern Reich, all men up to the age of sixty-five who were not in military service were required by the Nazi Party leadership to report for three- or four-week stints of trench digging. In November, some 50,000 men and boys were rounded up in Rotterdam and taken to work sites by barge and train, or on foot. Seventy thousand more would follow by December and be maintained in the usual miserable conditions.
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By this time huge numbers of the young forced laborers already in the Reich had also been moved into war production and to the vast construction sites on the borders. For this group there were no barracks, good
food, or songfests. At one site near Nordhaven, on the Dutch border, Polish boys, among them Julian Nowak and his compatriots originally sent to the jute factory in Bremen, were housed in a barbed-wire enclosure guarded by uniformed SS. Reveille was at 4:30 a.m. From their unheated barracks they marched for half an hour to a train of cattle cars for a one-and-a-half-hour ride to a station near the project that was reached by another hour-long walk. Here, working alongside Dutch concentration camp inmates, the boys were set to work digging antitank trenches. In the Northern European winter the work was wet and heavy. Those at the bottom of the pit stood knee-deep in freezing water. Many Dutch prisoners were shot by the SS for perceived disobedience. The Polish boys, being “workers” and not “prisoners,” escaped this extreme fate, though they were beaten with gun butts if, for example, their shovels were not full enough. One had to request permission to use the field latrines. A specific amount of time, from one to five minutes, was stipulated; if a boy lingered too long, the SS set their dogs on him:
The SS man shouted the time twice, then he let the dog loose. The Pole tried to run away, but the dog caught up with him, attacked him and knocked him down. The SS man came over himself and calmly looked to see how the boy on the ground had been bitten. Only then did he call the dog off before giving the worker a few kicks with the comment that next time he would not call the dog back.
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Work went on until dark, when the whole three-hour march-trainmarch process was reversed. Back at their barracks, after a minimal meal, the boys, some by now in their fifth year of captivity, fell into their bunks still wearing their frozen, wet clothes, which never dried. But now, at least, there was a little hope. They too saw the planes:
English planes flew low over our column. They were so low that we could see the faces of the pilots in the cockpits. We jumped up onto the earthworks we had just built and waved to them. They didn’t shoot. Our guards had, according to regulations, thrown themselves on the ground. We knew that the liberation was close.
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They were too optimistic. In the remaining months of the war, their lives were ever more expendable. The arms factories, with their huge complements of forced labor, were prime targets for Allied bombing attacks. The young conscripted workers were not allowed into the underground bomb shelters provided for Germans, but had to find their own
refuges in the surrounding ruins. Soon the raids were so frequent that work was virtually impossible. Julian and his friends were now assigned to digging rubble out of the Atlas factory on the outskirts of Bremen, one of the most heavily bombed cities in Germany. In the dark and smoke of the attacks, the boys clung to one another and, if they survived, only with difficulty found their way back to their filthy barracks. But despite all, they were called out to work day after day to the very end of the war, a phenomenon that occurred all across the Reich and allowed the Nazis to maintain production at an amazing level despite the total devastation raining upon them.
By the time of Goebbels’s speech, the war was indeed “total”: there were few people on earth, including small children, who were unaffected by the conflicts generated by Hitler and his Axis. Thousands of British and Dutch children were interned in squalid Far Eastern camps by the Japanese.
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Even for children in America, who would never experience the hunger or the grim dangers of a war zone, the war was all-pervasive. Most fathers were away in the armed forces, no one knew exactly where, for months and years on end. When and if they came home, it was only for a day or so, looking strange in uniforms from which might issue the subtle aroma of the fuels that propelled submarines and bombers. Mothers left the house in overalls or were, mysteriously, picked up by police cars at night to be taken to their jobs at air-raid warning centers. Windows were covered with big black shades. Small children brought dimes to school to buy American flag stamps, which they messily glued into little squares in a special booklet that when full earned them a war bond. Christmas trees, bereft of tinsel, were decorated with American flags instead. Small boys who saw flashes off the Florida coast were told that ships were being blown up by torpedoes. No one could go for a drive because gas was rationed, and at least one little girl would not understand until much later why her grandmother had told her to name the yellow calico dachshund brought by Santa “Hitler—because it is a yellow dog.”
Life was harsher in America for those of Axis origins. Not surprisingly, thousands of nationals and illegal aliens from these nations had been detained at the outbreak of hostilities in 1941. And, as is well known, some 78,000 Japanese-Americans, despite being citizens, were interned in dreary, wind-blown camps in Montana, Texas, California, and elsewhere. Less well known is the fact that many of these camps also contained whole families of German and Italian permanent residents of the United States
who had not bothered to become citizens. Nearly 600,000 foreign-born Italians, required to register under the Alien Registration Act of 1940, were ordered to move away from the coasts, restricted in employment, and subjected to curfews that caused many who worked in the fishing and restaurant industries to lose their jobs. The panicky precautions did not create goodwill: travel restrictions prevented Joe DiMaggio’s father from visiting his famous son, and a woman named Rosina Trovato was forcibly moved out of her house in Monterey on the day she was notified that her son, serving in the U.S. Navy, had died at Pearl Harbor.
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The Italian program was soon discontinued as unworkable and impolitic, but the Japanese families remained incarcerated until the end of the war, even though many of their menfolk fought heroically in the U.S. armed forces.
Those of German origin, whether citizens or not, were, due to sheer numbers, a more complicated problem.
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The anti-German passions of World War I had not been forgotten, and Nazi intentions were more and more suspect. During the 1930s Hitler’s minions had not been the only ones making lists noting the inclinations of German-Americans: the FBI, under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, was just as interested and had secretly created a Custodial Detention Index, which listed possible subversives and classified them according to potential degree of threat.
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As had been the case in Britain, refugees from Nazism were included. Roundups of people on these lists began within days of Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war. There was little observance of their rights. Suspects were arrested at dawn, their houses were ransacked, and they were taken off to detention with no time to pack or make financial arrangements. A few were bona fide spies and serious Nazi activists, but most, though they may have been admirers of the Führer, were not. As had been the case with the Italians, the idea of restricting the activities of millions of German-Americans along the coasts was soon dropped, and by war’s end, of the hundreds of thousands detained and investigated, just over 10,000 Germans, all noncitizens, were actually interned, and of these only a handful could be considered serious threats. For children, the experiences of arrest and confinement, even if temporary, were traumatic. Teenagers were humiliated while traveling to jails and camps by being handcuffed to police escorts who would accompany them even to the bathroom. One eleven-year-old girl was mortified when two large armed guards were assigned to take her to the doctor in San Antonio, causing quite a sensation on the streets.
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When families were split up, some youngsters were sent to state-run children’s homes for a time. Others did not even get this sort of attention:
ten-year-old Alfred Plaschke and his little brother, both born in America and therefore citizens, were left alone when both their father and mother were arrested. Not knowing what else to do, they simply went to the local jail where their parents were being held and lived there with them for some months. The Plaschke brothers played “all spring in the fenced-in yard between the jail and the fire station” until the whole family was sent to an internment camp in the Seagoville prison, near Dallas.
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After a time, more than 6,000 German, Japanese, and Italian internees rounded up by South and Central American nations were sent to the forty-plus U.S. camps, among them eighty-one German Jewish families who had to be rescued by help organizations.
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Though armed guards were always visible and there were frequent roll calls, life in the camps was not too bad for young children: food was plentiful, and there were schools and entertainment. For their parents, whose careers were ended and houses lost, the incarceration could be devastating. Repatriation was possible: to the dismay of their children, many of whom eventually returned to America, nearly 4,500 of the German internees, far fewer than Hitler and Göring had hoped, asked for repatriation to the Reich during the war and were sent back on Swedish vessels in exchange for Allied and neutral nationals.
By 1944, another sort of internment camp had been set up in the United States. This was Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York, a small town on Lake Ontario, north of Syracuse. To this remote spot some 950 refugees, 90 percent of them Jews, had been brought from Europe in August of that year.
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With the exception of the few hundred children who had come to the United States earlier, in fits and starts, the families at Oswego were the only tangible human result of all the commissions, lobbying, and hearings that had tried to find a way for the U.S. government to offer refuge to those uprooted by the Nazis. While refusal to change immigration laws for people who were merely threatened with expulsion from their homelands was marginally understandable, refusal to save people threatened with brutal death was not. But, despite the evidence of the exterminations communicated to the Allies by multiple sources, rescue continued to founder on the eternal problem of where to resettle those who might escape.