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Theo Sommer in 2015
Photo: Daniel Reimann / dpa
The most important question that summer of 1945 was: What will become of us?
I had been a student of Adolf Hitler at the Ordensburg Sonthofen until the end of the war.
There we had been drilled to die for the Führer and the Reich.
At that time I was ready for partisan warfare.
If I had been 17, I probably would have also enlisted in the Greater Germany SS Division, we felt we owed that to ourselves and to our beloved leader.
But we had survived and we hadn't been put against the wall either.
We went on Christmas vacation in 1944 with the assumption that the Ardennes offensive would result in a great victory.
When it failed and was called off in January, we gradually realized that the war was probably unwinnable.
In January and February we worked in the Graf Hagenburg company in the mornings, where we riveted control parts for the Führer's miracle weapon, the V2 rocket.
In March, we 14 and 15-year-olds were drafted into the Volkssturm.
The Sonthofen mountain infantry trained us on the carbine 98, the machine gun and the bazooka.
They really took us down.
With the twelve-kilo machine gun on our backs, we had to crawl through the terrain on skis with the muzzle covers open – alas, snow got in, then there was a scare.
At the end of April we should still be defending Ulm.
However, we arrived too late.
We then separated the Volkssturm stripe from the left sleeve and settled down in an alpine hut as a kind of children's deportation camp.
There we heard the last Goebbels lie on the radio: that the Führer had fallen on the steps of the Reich Chancellery in the fight against the Bolsheviks.
We then held a small funeral service.
On May 8th, the day of the capitulation, I climbed the Rotspitze with two comrades.
It was a wonderfully warm sunny day.
When we came back in the evening, the alpine hut was empty.
The others had been picked up by the French.
They were marched in the direction of Lake Constance and came to the mines in Lorraine.
I then made my way to Sonthofen.
For a few weeks I worked again with Count Hagenburg.
The company now built irrigation systems for garden centers.
After six weeks I got a permit from the French local command.
I wanted to go to Schwäbisch Gmünd with my family.
My permit read: "À pied, avec sa bicyclette", on foot, with his bicycle.
Germans were forbidden to cycle in the entire French zone.
So I had to push my bike to Kempten, where the American occupation zone began.
I was finally allowed to climb there.
There I saw the first huge picture boards on the side of the road, photos of corpses from a concentration camp, probably from Dachau.
I was convinced that it was enemy propaganda.
However, my attitude changed when the Nuremberg Trials began in November 1945. What I had taken for enemy propaganda turned out to be a depressing reality.
In 1947 I got my hands on Eugen Kogon's book Der SS-staat, which for me was probably the most important milestone on my way to clarity and truth.
Too young to be a perpetrator
That summer I lived in a quandary: I was too young to be a perpetrator.
I was not personally to blame, so I was not at odds with myself.
But despite this, I was soon overcome by a deep sense of shame for the terrible crimes that Germans had committed.
Sometimes I woke up at night bathed in sweat, woke up from a dream that the "Third Reich" had won the war after all.
Everyday life contradicted the dream.
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Hauke Goos, Alexander Smoltczyk
»A summer like no other since«
A SPIEGEL book: How peace began in Germany in 1945 – contemporary witnesses report
Publisher: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt
Number of pages: 240
A SPIEGEL book: How peace began in Germany in 1945 – contemporary witnesses report
Publisher: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt
Number of pages: 240
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On my way home I passed through the totally destroyed city of Ulm.
At Hohenstaufen there was a camp for Russian forced laborers.
Shortly before that, a boy of my age, who apparently looked like me, had been killed there.
My mother found out about it.
For days she was out looking for me with my brother, who was five years younger than me.
She returned home convinced that I was no longer alive.
When I arrived in Gmünd a little later, my little sister was playing on the lawn.
When I pushed open the garden door, she looked at me in shock, turned around and called into the house: "Mum, Theo isn't dead at all!"
Sometime that summer my father also came home.
He was a prisoner of war on the Rhine meadows, where hundreds of thousands of German soldiers were dying in the mud or starving.
He had served as an officer in Rommel's Afrika Korps and, while retreating near Tunis, had been caught in an air raid: shot in the stomach.
He had come to the hospital in Altötting via Italy on the last hospital ship.
Nobody believed in 1945 that they would see the end of the year.
He made it 24 more years, but I can't remember a day when he wasn't in pain.
Father was 36 when he came home.
Everyone was glad he was back.
Above all: that he had not been taken prisoner by the Russians, since he had been on the Eastern Front for a few months before the Africa mission.
Did I ever talk to him about the war, about what he had experienced?
I never asked him about it.
You don't ask questions of someone writhing in pain.
Would I have asked more if he hadn't been hurt?
I'm not sure.
Back then, you had to deal with everyday life above all.
Coming to terms with the past began much later.
To eat and heat, to even get through the time halfway, that's what it was all about.
Father's uniforms were recolored;
Mother used them to make jackets and coats.
I drove into the woods with her and my brother; each family was allowed to cut a certain amount of wood;
so we could heat.
At the farmers we went hamsters.
One had two eggs, the other a net full of potatoes.
We walked a lot of the way, only some by bike, you had to take care of the inner tubes and tires.
I even found a job - and lost the tip of my index finger
I even found a job that first summer after the war.
Schwäbisch Gmünd is a gold and silver town.
The Rettenmaier company did not produce jewelry, but insignia, such as the Americans wear on their lapels or collar tabs as a sign of their units;
these
badges
were made of aluminum or tombac, an alloy of copper and zinc.
I sat at a press, punching, stamping and punching, it was a fairly monotonous activity: insert the workpiece, step on the foot switch, the stamp rushes down onto the punch, take out the workpiece, then do it all over again, eight hours a day.
A pretty girl was standing next to me at a similar machine.
I once glanced over at her and accidentally hit the footswitch - I lost part of the tip of my index finger.
Another time I was sent to Pforzheim in an American jeep to fetch new material.
Pforzheim had 80,000 inhabitants, 20,000 had died in the bombing.
About 89 percent of the city area lay in rubble and ash.
It was the first time I've seen masses of ruins.
Only then did I understand what total war was.
However, the reconstruction of the country began almost immediately.
Former party members had to do extra clean-up hours.
They were also expected to give two more pieces than the others at the fall clothing collection, including a coat.
Denazification soon hung over many like a sword of Damocles.
They asked themselves: Do I have a future?
Can I ever work again?
It is noteworthy that there was almost no grief over Hitler's death.
Almost overnight there were no more Nazis.
It was as if someone had turned off the electricity on an electric stove.
Nevertheless, the end of the war was not perceived as a liberation, everyday life was too difficult for that.
One was glad that it was over.
In categories of perpetrators or victims was not thought.
We only slowly realized that we were perpetrators before we became victims.
This determined me to study history.
I wanted to know: How could our people fall for this seducer?
Soon I spoke better English than our teacher
At that time we lived in Schwäbisch Gmünd just one street away from the US quarters.
The soldiers took their shirts to my mother to be ironed.
Sometimes there was a can of pineapple.
Sometimes they also brought large pots to wash, in which there was still enough food for one meal.
I also collected the GIs' read paperbacks, which they threw away after reading them.
They had a special format and fit in trouser or jacket pockets.
I learned English by looking up hundreds of unfamiliar words.
Soon we boys spoke better English than our English teachers, albeit with heavy American accents.
In addition to the
pocket books
, I also saw used condoms for the first time, with which the GIs copiously plastered the sidewalks.
This is how the soldiers protected themselves from sexually transmitted diseases,
venereal disease
in English, abbreviated VD.
In the vernacular, it soon became »Veronika Thank You«.
There was also an America House in Schwäbisch Gmünd.
The Americans had set up a small library in a requisitioned manufacturer's villa, three or four thousand volumes.
That's when I discovered all the American authors I didn't even know existed before: Hemingway, Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dos Passos.
Reading it opened a window to a world that had previously been closed to me.
To this day I associate the summer of 1945 with a certain smell: the early morning smell of freshly brewed American coffee.
And the sweet smell of Chesterfield cigarettes—American smells that I later found in Greyhound bus stations in the United States.
The sound of summer?
The roar of the jeeps, AFN, jazz
From time to time there were also smells of hunger.
You don't smell very good when you're hungry.
Kind of putrid, like bad breath.
And sometimes people must have smelled unwashed.
At that time it was customary for men to wear a shirt for a week.
Many shirts had collars that could be buttoned up, so a fresh collar was tied on every two days.
There was neither deodorant nor washing powder, and hardly anyone had a washing machine or dryer.
Brassieres and panties and shirts hung on lines to dry in the sun.
And the sound of this summer?
The roar of the jeeps.
And AFN, American Forces Network, the American military radio station.
AFN was a very formative medium.
The station introduced us to Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, Glenn Miller's "Chattanooga Choo Choo" and Tommy Dorsey's "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."
Absolutely jazz.
In a way, that first post-war summer lasted until 1989/90.
Currency reform, the founding of the Federal Republic and the GDR, and the Cold War determined the new reality.
After the Berlin blockade in 1948/49 and the beginning of the Korean conflict, the Germans slowly moved into the cohort of guest winners.
From pariahs they became partners, in East and West.
But for four decades the borders in Germany and Europe remained as they had been in the summer of 1945.
Seen in this way, the summer of 1945 did not end until 1990.
Recorded by Hauke Goos