Burkhard Hirsch in August 2018
Photo:Wolfgang Kumm / picture alliance / dpa
German soldiers who were supposed to offer resistance had taken up residence in individual squares. One saw more and more white flags and sheets on the houses, there were individual artillery impacts. I saw them carrying a classmate away on a stretcher. He was covered with a makeshift blanket, his left arm hanging limply. He was dead, a shrapnel had torn his chest. That was something different from the dead strangers that you occasionally saw lying around on the roadside after air raids, strangers and dead, so you didn't think about it for long. But the? I can still see him today. We didn't talk about him again afterwards, when school started again towards the end of 1945. In between was the end of the world.
Now the Americans came with Shermans and not a T34 that we had been practicing for. Anyway, we didn't have any charges or bazookas. They came in their jeeps, clean, disciplined, and the Volkssturm dissolved like snow in the sun. It was rumored that Count Luckner, the famous "sea devil" of the First World War, drove to meet the approaching Americans and assured them that Halle would not be defended. So he saved the city from an air raid. There were a couple of shootings at Reileck and Riebeckplatz. Then it was over.
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