Hitler's Last Witness (6 page)

The Outbreak of War: 1939

BY THE END OF
August 1939, I had been promoted to SS-Rottenführer
*
and now we were moved by train once more to an unknown destination. We passed through Silesia to the Polish border. To the very last moment all of us expected this to be an exercise. Thus the Polish campaign began for us without the least hint. My company was attached to a Wehrmacht unit.
[1]
I never experienced heavy fighting in all my service. The fighting in Poland was for the most part widely disposed in favour of ourselves – major encounters being handled by the Wehrmacht units.

Nothing led us to suspect that this Polish campaign would bring in its train something that had no similarity to ‘flowers, flowers everywhere'. We did not see in it the seeds of a world war, and considered the intervention as inconsequential – as had been the annexation of Austria or the invasion of Czechoslovakia. But we were wrong.

During the advance on Warsaw we came to a fruit farm. Boxer Adolf Kleinholdermann was No. 4 gunner, I was ammunition carrier and No. 3 gunner of a four-man machine-gun squad. Suddenly, we came under fire. The Poles were in the trees, and all at once let loose. Kleinholdermann and I were unharmed, but our comrade Kolditz, who came from Lake Constance, was shot in the head and fell to the ground. Everything happened so quickly that what occurred immediately after the exchange of fire has been erased from my memory. I have no idea if Kolditz died at once or not. It was like a car crash – everything up to the moment of impact is remembered precisely but what follows is a blur. In any case, I realised that it was not necessary for there to be a great battle for one to die in war. It can simply happen in the blink of an eye in a beautiful fruit farm. A little later, I escaped the same fate by a hair's breadth – no, by two centimetres.

Close to Warsaw, towards the end of the campaign, on 24 September 1939 with three of my colleagues I was selected by my company commander, Hauptsturmführer Mohnke,
[2]
to parley the surrender of the Modlin fortress.
[3]
My later destiny would be linked to Mohnke. Mohnke had assumed that as a Silesian I would be able to speak a few phrases of Polish. I told him that my knowledge extended to pidgin-Polish, which consisted of trying to make German words sound like Polish. Mohnke was not impressed, but I remained selected.

Together with my platoon leader Lindner, and two other men, I set off. Unarmed, and with a white flag unfurled, we made our way over infantry trenches towards the old fort and got to the bunker of the Polish position. No negotiations were possible, because the Poles said they had no negotiator, and their soldiers refused to be encumbered with making the decision to surrender. It seemed to us that this was a delaying tactic, and, after spending a few hours making a circuit, our platoon commander decided to return empty-handed.

On the way back we struggled through barriers and wire entanglements and were about eighty metres from the fort when the Poles opened fire on us. We were unarmed, and they opened fire with everything they had. I felt a dull hard blow in the back, which I can still feel today when I think about it. Hit by several rounds, I collapsed. The first round had gone through my back and tore through my body to within two centimetres of my heart. A straight shot went through one lung. Two centimetres from death. A second round lodged in my arm. My comrade was also wounded in the arm. I felt the blood rise to my mouth, pour out from my lips and run down my neck. I was gripped by mortal anguish. At some point I lost consciousness. My comrades carried me to the main dressing station. There and later in the hospital at Lodz, I received several blood transfusions. As all Waffen-SS men, I had my blood group tattooed under the upper arm. The second bullet had hit me there. They could still make out the type ‘B'. When I regained consciousness, I cannot remember what was running through my head.
**

After several weeks in the field hospital, I was transferred to a hospital at Bad Berka near Weimar, and after that I spent six weeks at a convalescent home in the Alps. One has to admit that the first people to be wounded in that war were really well looked after. There were not very many of us, and we received the full attention of the doctors and other staff.

Soon Gerda visited me. Both of us now felt that there was more between us than our ‘tomato relationship'. It was here in the hospital camp at Bayrischzell that we kissed for the first time.

It soon struck me that prisoners were working in the spa clinic. Opposite the clinic was a barrack camp guarded by soldiers. From our terrace we watched these prisoners fall in, morning and night, for roll call. One day, one of these men was cleaning the radiator in my room, and I asked him about the barracks. He told me that it was an outlying annexe of Dachau concentration camp with two hundred inmates. He was a ‘bible student', people known today as Jehovah's Witnesses. In reply to my question why he was in a concentration camp, he replied that he was being detained there until such time as he signed a document distancing himself from the community that shared his beliefs. If he signed he could go home, but he would not do so.
[4]
It was the first time that I knew anything about concentration camps which was not hearsay.

Back at Lichterfelde barracks, I was assigned to the Convalescent company. Apart from a few circuits of the terrain there was nothing to do. I re-met Mohnke among the convalescents, having last seen him during the skirmish at Modlin. He had also been wounded and enquired where I wanted to go next. I had no idea what he was getting at and merely shrugged my shoulders. Apparently, I was likely to be sent into supply, possibly as a kitchen hand in the rearward area of the front. Having little enthusiasm for a return to the fighting front, I did not like the sound of that much either. If Mohnke wanted to protect me from the fighting I cannot say. He knew I was an orphan, and he probably considered a task with a ‘family connection' to be the right thing for me.

Meanwhile, battalion commander ‘Teddy' Wisch was looking for somebody to help out on his brother's farm.
[5]
The brother had just been called up, and his wife, pregnant with their fourth child, needed land workers urgently. The farmstead was at Dithmarschen in Schleswig–Holstein, near the then Adolf-Hitler-Koog.
[6]
Therefore in the spring of 1940 I spent about four weeks on a farm working shoulder to shoulder with a Polish POW and a girl. There was much to be done, and I did my share everywhere; to a certain extent, I was a jack-of-all-trades. There really was nothing I did not put my hand to. One night I took the farmer's wife, who was in labour, to the hospital, and also dug trenches against low-level British fighter attacks.

It was here that I experienced the first British bombing raids. Cuxhaven opposite the Koog was an important naval base. One could see flames flickering in the distance while RAF fighters howled overhead. They fired on farms deliberately, leaving two of them burning at Wesselburen. So I stayed in my slit trench alongside a Pole! I wrote to my Aunt Sofia in Berlin: ‘Aunt, we are in the thick of it here. I came to convalesce, but now I'm back in the war!' National Socialist propaganda ensured that the German civilian population heard little about it. Nobody was to become alarmed.
[7]

1
The SS infantry regiment
SS-Leibstandarte
was attached to XIII Army Corps (commander Maximilian von Weichs), part of Eighth Army (Johannes Blaskowitz) making up Army Group South (Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt).

2
Wilhelm Mohnke (1911–2001) received the Iron Cross I and II Class for his service in the Polish campaign.

3
The Modlin fortress (about fifty kilometres northwest of Warsaw) was one of the most important Polish defensive positions before Warsaw. The ‘Modlin Army' was supposed to prevent the German attackers reaching the capital, but on 13 September a part of the army was trapped inside by an encirclement. Sixteen days later, on 29 September, the fortress surrendered after a Luftwaffe attack. Janus Piekalkiewicz:
Polenfeldzug
, Herrsching 1989 (first edn Bergisch Gladbach 1982), p. 224.

4
In 1936, the Gestapo formed a special squad to root out Jehovah's Witnesses (whose organisation in Germany had been disbanded in 1933) and enforce the prohibition of the spreading of their religious texts. Because Jehovah's Witnesses appeared ‘totally ideal' to the SS leadership (as Himmler expressed it in a letter in 1944 to the head of the RSHA, Kaltenbrunner), and they were, in pursuance of their convictions, ‘industrious, tolerant, honest and not burdensome', a major effort was being made to turn them away from their beliefs. Imprisoned Jehovah's Witnesses seldom attempted to escape, which was why they were often sent out to work in areas where it was difficult to guard prisoners effectively. The document mentioned by Misch may have been the so-called Verpflichtungsereklärung (Declaration of Obligation), in which believers recanted their religious belief and acknowledged loyalty to the state in order to avoid being placed in protective custody. Alternatively, it may have been the Wehrpass (service record book), which many believers refused to sign as conscientious objectors. Stanislav Zamecnik,
Das war Dachau
, Frankfurt/Main 2007 (first edn, Luxemburg 2002) pp. 227f.

5
Theodor ‘Teddy' Wisch (1907–1995) was a brigadier and led 1st Company,
SS-Leibstandarte
from October 1933. From December 1939 he took command of the new 4th (Watch) Battalion.

6
Koog was reclaimed from the North Sea in 1935 to become a model terrain within the framework of the National Socialist policy of ‘Blood and Soil'. Until 1945, it was settled only by SS officers. After the war Adolf-Hitler-Koog was renamed Dieksander-Koog. Theodor Wisch came from the area, being a native of nearby Wesselburenerkoog.

7
Early RAF attacks and individual bombing raids were intended primarily for military targets such as the shipyards of North Germany, shipping convoys in the English Channel and airfields on the North Sea islands, but some attacks did occur against Cuxhaven, Wilhelmshaven, the naval air base at Hörnum on Sylt island and the naval town of Kiel.

*
The rank of SS-Rottenführer carried the authority equivalent to a British lance-corporal but was not of NCO status. Misch was promoted to Unterscharführer (full corporal) in early May 1940. (TN)

**
Rochus Misch was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class (EKII) for an act of bravery near Modlin Fort on 24 September 1939. He was probably the first
SS-Leibstandarte
man to be decorated in the Second World War. Apparently modesty forbade that he mention the circumstances of the award. (TN)

Chapter Four

Hitler Needs a Courier

ABOUT TWO WEEKS AFTER
my return to the Berlin-Lichter-felde barrack, while I was still assigned to the Reserve company, a young man was being sought for the personal bodyguard of the Führer. This involved being a telephonist, courier and bodyguard for Hitler, personally. His chief adjutant, Wilhelm Brückner, had let battalion commander Teddy Wisch know that an absolutely reliable man was being sought – a person who would give no trouble.
[1]
It was urgent.

Wisch passed the requirement to company commander Mohnke, who had suggested me. I had returned seriously wounded from the front and was moreover the last surviving son of my family. It had been ordered by the Wehrmacht High Command that the last surviving son of a German family had to be spared for the future and not sent to the front. He, Mohnke, was to assess my devotion to duty.

Wisch recalled having heard only good things from his sister-in-law on the Schleswig–Holstein farmstead and so accepted Mohnke's recommendation. I had to present myself at once to Wisch, who then informed the Reich Chancellery that a suitable young man had been found. I was therefore appointed, and in less time than it takes to tell I was seated alongside Mohnke in his car heading for the Führer apartments at the Reich Chancellery, Wilhelm-Strasse 77. This was on 2 or 3 May 1940.
*

On arrival at the Reich Chancellery, Mohnke spoke briefly to a guard at the entrance and then left me to my destiny. The guard accompanied me to the upper floor, directly into Brückner's office. He had been Hitler's regimental commander in the First World War. My heart pounded – before me stood Hitler's chief adjutant. Brückner looked me up and down. He got straight to the point. It was his intention, he explained tersely, to employ me as a messenger, distributing despatches and newspapers in the adjutants' wing. Now I should return to my barracks to fetch my personal belongings.

An hour-and-a-half later, I stood once more in the Reich Chancellery hall, grasping my suitcase. A different guard from the first one indicated that I should follow him. He showed me into my service room on the upper floor of the adjutants' wing, then left me alone. Cautiously, as if I might damage something, I put down my suitcase and looked around. The room was simply furnished: two beds, a military locker, a hand basin.

Me, here? In the Reich Chancellery? In the Führer-apartments? Why me? I was not even a Party member! I could not think clearly, saw before my mental gaze the cheering crowds in the Olympic stadium and Hitler driving past me with his arm outstretched.

I went out into the corridor and met two middle-aged men of the Watch. Both showed me round. I was desperate to know the various offices, but it would be some time before I really knew my way around. The most important thing, the two elder colleagues advised, was to become familiar with the rules of behaviour to be observed here in the Reich Holy of Holies. The most important of all was: ‘If you run across the Führer, stand aside and do nothing! Either he will speak to you of his own accord, or equally he will not.' To my many questions, their response always was: ‘Stay close to your comrades! Watch closely what they do; it will become clear.'