Inge Maier-Werner never let go of the pictures from April 30 and May 1, 1945. As a child, she watched the death march in Bad Tölz.
Bad Tölz - Dr. Inge Maier-Werner is 84 years old today and lives in Lenggries. To date, she has never said anything publicly. In April 2020, however, she wants and has something to tell. At the age of nine, she followed the death march of the Dachau concentration camp prisoners from the window on the first floor of the pharmacy. Children watch closely and don't forget easily. Inge Maier-Werner never let go of the pictures from April 30 and May 1, 1945.
Inge Maier-Werner is the daughter of the former district secretary Gerda Werner and lived, which is important to her, a "wonderful childhood in Bad Tölz". She and her friends would not have noticed much of the war. One was constantly on the move, mostly barefoot or with a scooter. “There were three cars in Tölz. Doctors Wulzinger and Hirzinger and taxi driver Holzmayer. Everything was safe there. "-" Funny, "muses the old lady over seven decades later," funny that I see this time so sunny. "
"You don't put that on," said the mother
Because the clouds in the children's sky have long been increasing. Inge Maier-Werner remembers that as an only child she would have loved to join the Bund Deutscher Mädel. "As an only child, I loved the community." And she still knows exactly how one day she admired the uniforms of HJ and BDM displayed in the Richter department store (later Sparkasse) and wished for one. "You don't wear that," the mother said to her shortly, but definitely. The mother was a cosmopolitan from Hamburg and, her daughter believes today, may have understood a little earlier what was going on in the Third Reich.
Inge Werner as a seven-year-old Tölzer girl.
On April 30 and May 1, 1945, the so-called death march of the concentration camp prisoners from Dachau and its satellite camps came through Tölz from the west. It was the final phase of the Third Reich. Shortly before Waakirchen, the train was to break up with thousands of prisoners. However, the last few days, as numerous testimonies prove, still caused many victims among the death march participants.
"She saw the wobbling figures and handed you the bread"
The contemporary witness can describe exactly how she stood at the window on the first floor of the pharmacy with her mother and watched the "tired, tired train of the prisoners". Again and again, some had been dropped, beaten and driven on. “And then there came a woman with bread in her hand from the Aschenbrenner bakery on the corner of Kirchgasse. She saw the wobbling figures and handed you the bread. Everyone else pounced on it. They were brutally beaten up. A horrible sight. "
Dr. Inge Maier-Werner lives in Lenggries today.
Inge Maier-Werner, who later studied medicine and worked in Würzburg before settling in Lenggries with her husband, also knows exactly what happened in the coming days and confirms the chronicler reports. The fact that the Americans allowed the concentration camp prisoners who returned to Tölz to be looted. Almost astonished, she says, she can still paint the patterns and colors of the bales of fabric that the looters threw down from the first floor of the Richter department store. The 84-year-old notes the bales of fabric that shouldn't have existed in April 1945 with a slight irony.
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And it expressly confirms the observation made by the later district administrator Anton Wiedemann and Monsignor Eugen Fässler that locals mingled with the looters. Some respectable Tölz citizens later walked around in the material, the pattern of which Maier-Werner could still paint today. "That's how people are," she says quietly and wisely with the experience of a long life.
"The sudden onset of winter saved Tölz"
There are more memories of the end of the war. At the demolition of the Isar Bridge, which broke the windowpanes of half the market street. And to the warning of the Americans that if the SS would fire on the advancing US units, Tölz would be bombed "like Aschaffenburg". Maier-Werner can still remember the onomatopoeic effect of the word Aschaffenburg on a nine-year-old girl. It was told by the mother, who knew the news situation as district secretary.
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The SS could not be stopped and shot towards the bathing area. On the evening of May 1, the residents of the house would have heard the humming of the approaching US bombers in the distance and sought protection in the basement of the pharmacy. "It was very scary and horrific. The pharmacist prayed. Then the noise was suddenly gone. ”The explanation: snow had fallen, an unexpected amount of snow even. Inge Maier-Werner is certain: “The sudden onset of winter saved Tölz. Otherwise the city would have been bombed. ”This memory is also confirmed by other Tölz chroniclers.
The mother was the first dancer to connect with the Americans
It was her mother Gerda Werner who was the first person in Tölz to connect with the Americans. It was about extinguishing a German truck that had caught fire. Gerda Werner spoke English and asked the GIs to delete them. District Administrator Wiedemann also describes this first contact with the occupiers in his chronicle "eventful years".
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After an intensive conversation with the newspaper editor, the 84-year-old witness still looks amazingly lively and lively. It was important to her to “bring this incisive time to mind again”. She was happy to tell. "Of course I hope," she concludes, "that something like this never happens again." Although she was not at all sure about it. "If you look around the world like this ..."