The War Years

Abstract

With the annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938, swiftly followed by German occupation of all the Czech lands in 1939, Herwig’s childhood idyll came to a brutal end. The unstable peace that had prevailed since the largely German-speaking borderlands had been assigned to the newly established Czechoslovakia at the end of the First World War had started to crumble, with the rise of German nationalism translating into electoral success in 1935. The young Herwig had been sheltered from these developments, but by the time he began his final year at the Landskron Gymnasium, an air of anxiety was spreading across Europe. Herwig had little doubt what lay in store for him following his graduation. It was therefore with some trepidation that he packed his bags in March 1942 and left for a small village near Breslau.

With the annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938, swiftly followed by German occupation of all the Czech lands in 1939, Herwig’s childhood idyll came to a brutal end. The unstable peace that had prevailed since the largely German-speaking borderlands had been assigned to the newly established Czechoslovakia at the end of the First World War had started to crumble, with the rise of German nationalism translating into electoral success in 1935. The young Herwig had been sheltered from these developments, but by the time he began his final year at the Landskron Gymnasium, an air of anxiety was spreading across Europe. Herwig had little doubt what lay in store for him following his graduation. It was therefore with some trepidation that he packed his bags in March 1942 and left for a small village near Breslau.

Herwig was on his way to join the RAD, or Reichsarbeitsdienst to give it its full name, a labour service established by the Nazi Party in 1935, nominally to combat youth unemployment, but in reality as a means of indoctrination and a precursor to military training. “In the camp, we got a kind of training that was more military than anything else,” he recalled. “Instead of training with a rifle, we had to use a spade.” The work was physically exacting, but the real challenge was psychological: “They immediately started to try to break our will so we would learn to be obedient to orders, that was the hardest thing.”

In the early days of the RAD, Germany maintained a pretence that it was a voluntary organisation, but by 1942, the days of pretence were over. The RAD became obligatory for every young German man. Besides providing a cheap labour force, the RAD became established as a pre-military training organisation. After they’d been at the camp for a few weeks, the young conscripts had a visit from the Waffen SS, the military wing of the notorious Nazi organisation. “We were told that it’s the greatest honour for a young German guy to be called to this Waffen SS and defend the country,” said Herwig. “If you said ‘no,’ you were sent to the front in a battle where your life expectancy was just a few weeks. Luckily for me, my health was not good enough to be recruited thanks to my spectacles: so I thank my short-sightedness for my narrow escape!.”

After the SS visit, Herwig was transferred to Thuringia and put to work in a disused salt mine that had been converted into a munitions factory and storage depot. Some of these mines were used to store Nazi gold and stolen works of art [1], but not this one: it was a munitions repository for Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Herwig’s job there involved descending to around 700 m below ground and filling steel grenade cases with explosives for eight hours per day. On top of that, it took an hour to march to the mine and another hour to return, and in the evening there was work to be done to maintain the camp. “That was very hard, boring and tiring work, but I survived.”

Basic Military Training

By August, his time with the RAD was over and Herwig had a few days at home in Landskron before being conscripted to the military. “Fortunately,” he recalled, “they asked me what part of the army I wanted to join, and since I wanted to stay in touch as much as I could with science and physics, I thought the air force would be the place with the highest intellectual level.” He was assigned to the Nachrichtendienst, the signals corps of the air force, and in September 1942, he was put on a train to the small town of Auxonne on the banks of the river Saône in Burgundy. It was to be the calm before the storm.

Fig. 2.1

Conscripted. Herwig and his schoolfriend Kurt Hayek leave Landskron. Herwig was on his way to Auxonne in occupied France for military training (Herwig Schopper’s personal collection. ©Herwig Schopper, All rights reserved)

On arrival in Burgundy, Herwig discovered the unmistakable contours of a Vauban-fortified town, and moved into its Napoleonic barracks, which seemed to have changed little over the intervening years. “We were installed in slee** halls, about fifty people to a hall, and the sanitary conditions were still the same as in 1788 when the place was built, so it was not paradise, and of course we went through the normal drill, this time not with a spade but with a rifle.” Life for a member of the signals corps involved a lot of physical exercise and training, but there was also an academic component. Lectures brought the new recruits up to speed with the latest information technologies, telephony and Morse code, and as such technology was built on science, there were courses in physics too. “That was very amusing because the teacher was a young Sergeant who had no idea about physics,” said Herwig.

Fig. 2.2

In 2021, Herwig returned to Auxonne to visit the barracks he was sent to for military training in 1942. The area is known as the Quartier Bonaparte, since it is there in 1788 that a young future Emperor of France learned his military craft. Today, the barracks are home to the 511th Transport regiment of the French army (Herwig Schopper’s personal collection. ©Herwig Schopper, All rights reserved)

Herwig’s fellow recruits were not only young men with their Maturity diplomas freshly awarded, but also some engineers who had worked for Siemens before the war. It all added up to a student body more knowledgeable than the teacher, with sometimes amusing, if sobering, consequences. “One day we discussed the direction of electric current, and he told us it goes from plus to minus, so we said,’ but you told us that the electrons are charged negatively, so they should go from minus to plus,’ he was completely confused,” Herwig remembered. The students may have had fun teasing their teacher, but at the end of the day, it was always clear where the power lay, and what the future held in store for the young conscripts. “It doesn’t matter what direction the electric current flows,” said the Sergeant. “The only thing that matters is that if a General comes to inspect our company, the answers you give must be uniform, so I order that the current goes from plus to minus!.”

After several weeks confined to the barracks of Auxonne, the conscripts were eventually allowed out at weekends. For Herwig, this had the double advantage of providing some real rifle practice—food was in short supply, and they hunted wild boar in the local woods—and allowing him to become re-acquainted with his love of music. Among Auxonne’s architectural treasures is a gothic church, which was equipped with a fine organ. On Sunday afternoons, Herwig and a fellow conscript, a talented musician, would go to the church, and Herwig would be treated to concerts just for him. “That was the best part of my experience as a conscript,” he remembered.

As his basic training neared its conclusion, Herwig had to decide whether to be a regular soldier, or to volunteer for training as a reserve officer. “Since I was afraid that as a simple soldier I would be somewhere at the front for years, completely out of touch with intellectual life, I opted for officer training” he explained. That decision set the rhythm for Herwig’s entire war: he had six months of training interspersed with periods of duty at the front to look forward to. Much later, Herwig had the opportunity to revisit Auxonne, and he found things much as he remembered them: “When I visited Auxonne as a tourist in 2021, I saw that the barracks had been modernised somewhat. The town was still the same typical provincial French town, but a harbour for boat trips had been created on the Saône where I used to go for long walks along the banks of the beautiful river.”

After six months in Auxonne, just before he was due to start active duty, a chain of events began to unfold that could have changed Herwig’s war, and indeed his life, beyond recognition. As well as setting him on course for a career in physics, Herwig’s pre-war holidays with his grandparents on the Adriatic coast had another dimension. “I had fallen in love with Nedda Ferri,” he recalled, “we were very close, and even considered marriage.”

With the emergence of war all such plans were put on hold, but when Nedda’s father learned that Herwig had been conscripted, he tried to get him assigned to Italy to serve as a link person between the Italian and German armies. It almost worked, but the transfer request came too late. “It arrived two days after I’d left for the Russian front,” explains Herwig. “If it had arrived on time, my life would probably have been completely different.”

The Eastern Front

It was in March 1943 that Herwig found himself at the front for the first time. He had received the order to travel to Russia to join a unit responsible for telephone services, and was stationed between Minsk and Vitebsk in a tiny village called Ust Dolissi. “Our job was to ensure that the telephone lines connecting two division headquarters behind the front remained operational all the times and we had to make tests continuously.” The region was heavily forested, and provided ideal terrain for resistance partisans to ply their trade. So although the signals corps was not a fighting company, Herwig regularly found himself in the firing line. “The partisans came during the night and cut the lines and even the telephone masts,” he recalled. “They knew that within a few minutes we would be there to repair them, and they were waiting with their machine guns. The moment we climbed up the masts to fix the lines, they shot at us. I must admit, this was one of the most dangerous and most unpleasant experiences I had during the war.” Herwig learned how to turn trees in to telegraph poles and to scale them with iron crampons attached to his feet to string the telephone wires, all the while with a rifle on his back in case of attacks by the partisans. To make things more unreal, Herwig’s unit was billeted in a local village and the young German soldiers had to interact with the villagers. “It was probably the same people we were dealing with during daytime to buy food that were shooting at us at night.”

Despite the shock of finding himself in a war zone for the first time, Herwig nevertheless found ways to advance his knowledge of physics. Before leaving home, he’d signed up for courses at the Technical University of Prague, and despite the war, the university honoured the commitment it had made to its new students. “They had a group there that was taking care of soldiers by sending them exercises in physics, which we had to solve, and send back to Prague. They corrected them and sent the work back. So I was sitting there in the dark blockhouses infested by all kinds of insects, solving physics problems, while watching the telephone line of course, day and night. We constantly had to test whether the line was working, so in between calling the next post every quarter of an hour, I was doing physics exercises. I was very grateful to the tutors at Prague who I never met.”

The telephone line itself also proved to be a source of physics learning. “There I learned a lot about telephone technology. For instance, if you look at telephone lines even today, you will notice that if there are two telephone wires, they don’t just go in parallel, but they rotate about each other. This is a way to reduce the induction between the telephone line and the earth, and to improve the quality of the communication.”

After six months, Herwig’s first stint of active duty came to an end, and he was ordered to attend the Luftwaffe’s Military Academy in Halle. It was now the late summer of 1943, the war had passed its mid-point, and the ascendancy of Germany and the Axis powers was waning. In the Pacific arena, the Allied victory at the battle of Midway in 1942 had marked a turning point, and by the time Herwig arrived in Halle, Allied victories were mounting up. American troops had arrived in Britain. The stalemate in North Africa had resolved in the allies’ favour. In Russia, the German army discovered the harsh realities of the Soviet winter as they were defeated at Stalingrad, and with the defeat of Italy, Germany lost an ally. By the end of the year, the allies would be planning their return to continental Europe.

Against this backdrop, Herwig’s time in Halle took a surreal turn. “In the middle of the war you would have thought that everything would be concentrated on military training,” said Herwig. “What is hard to believe looking back is that they thought that future reserve officers should not only learn military matters but should also get general social education, and they thought a future officer should learn how to dance! It’s hard to believe, but in the middle of the war we had dancing courses in the evening with girls of Halle. Completely crazy!”

It wasn’t all foxtrots and quicksteps, though, there was also training in the more serious business of the signals corps. “In Halle we got a really good training in signals technologies. I had to learn Morse code to send coded messages. The Morse equipment was a key and headphones, and I had to learn to send and pick up two hundred letters a minute, which was not easy. It was hard training and I’ve never forgotten it. Even today I can communicate in Morse code, although only at much reduced speed.”

Later in life, Herwig had the opportunity to reflect on his time in Halle. In 1967, he was appointed a member of the Leopoldina [2], Germany’s oldest continuously existing learned academy, which was established in 1652 as the Academia Naturae Curiosorum, and took the name of Emperor Leopold I in 1687. After having several homes, the Leopoldina finally settled in Halle in 1878. In 2008, it became Germany’s National Academy of Sciences, but at the time Herwig became a member, it was still behind the iron curtain.

After the war, Halle found itself in the German Democratic Republic, East Germany, and under normal circumstances, it was impossible for West Germans to go there. As a member of the Leopoldina, however, Herwig could go and this gave him the rare opportunity to foster contacts between the physicists of East and West Germany. As an active member of the academy, he frequently had business there, and on one of his visits after German unification, he decided to find out what had happened to the old Luftwaffe barracks, just across the river Saale from the town. “I was very surprised to find the old buildings still there,” he recalled. “They had not been destroyed, they had been transformed into a university campus, and in the building where I had spent time as a soldier, there was the University’s physics institute. A much better use of the space.”

After his six months in Halle, he was sent back to the Russian front, although this time having passed through the academy and emerged with the rank of Fahnenjunker Unteroffizier, which translates as Officer Cadet Corporal. By now, it was 1944, the year in which Allied troops would return to France through the beaches of Normandy.

This time, Herwig was again posted to the northern part of the Eastern Front, where he joined a company that had the job of providing regular weather reports every half hour, and guiding Luftwaffe planes supporting the battle on the ground from the air. The company was composed of several small groups of about a dozen people each, stationed a few kilometres behind the lines and controlled from company headquarters at Riga Strand, today known as Jūrmala, a seaside town on the Bay of Riga.

It was first to the HQ that Herwig was sent, and it was there that his increasingly surreal war became even more strange. He found himself as a member of the officers’ club in a beautiful Baltic coast resort, and he was expected to wine and dine with his fellow officers every night, while a Soviet offensive was raging just a few hundred kilometres to the east. “I was not only entitled, but I was obliged to participate in the officers’ daily life,” he recalled. “Among other duties, I had to eat in the officers’ special restaurant, a kind of club. The officer in charge of the company, a Major, was a righteous man, as I learned later in a serious situation, but my first impression was that he liked to drink.”

Every evening, Herwig was invited to join the officers at the club for drinks. They were an ageing group, and glad of some younger company. “I have nothing against drinking within limits,” said Herwig, “but I have never got drunk in my life. When I drink too much I get tired and don’t feel well, I do not get cheerful and happy.” So after a few evenings of drinking, Herwig asked the Major whether he could leave and go to bed, a serious breach of protocol, as it turned out, but the Major replied, “Yes, you can go to bed.”

The following day, Herwig got the order to join one of the groups at the front, just two kilometres behind the lines, and his war was jolted back into stark reality. “I was again billeted in a little village, but this time I found myself responsible for a group of twelve people, some of them forty or fifty years old, married with children,” he explained. As a young man of barely twenty years of age, Herwig found himself in charge of a group of men mostly his senior. “This was a typical experience for my generation, having to take responsibility at a very young age, and with very little experience, for the lives of other people, even concerning life and death. Such a commitment would be impossible nowadays, and the responsibility was not trivial.”

As a member of the signals corps, Herwig’s was not a combat role. His unit provided weather reports to Riga Strand using Morse code every half hour. The messages sent by wireless consisting of short and long strikes had to be rigorously standardised, because the enemy was listening, and was on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary that might suggest movement on the German side. Herwig’s unit did not have the famous Enigma machines at their disposal: they had to code by hand using a manual system known as the Doppelkastenschlüssel, or Two-Box Cipher, which was easier to crack. But regardless of whether the enemy could crack the code or not, if any individual had a particular style of transmitting, enemy listeners could glean valuable information from the transmissions. For example, if an individual coder gave a signal that was just too long or too short, it would serve as a kind of signature, and the enemy could use that to identify whether he had moved along the front.

The penalty imposed by the German military for any departure from the rigorous code was prison, and there came a time when Herwig had to impose a sentence on one of his men. Despite the threat of sanctions, the temptation to use slight distortions of the code, a sort of code within a code, to convey messages to friends and comrades down the line was sometimes just too great. “Of course we liked very much to give secret personal information about how we were to comrades in other groups, and we’d agreed to just delaying a point or strike in the Morse code in a specific letter a little bit,” explained Herwig. One day, when one of the people under Herwig’s command did just that, Riga Strand noticed, and sentenced the perpetrator to three days of prison. For Herwig, this presented a dilemma, as there was no prison two kilometres behind the lines. His solution was to confine the man to one of the vehicles that contained the transmission equipment, and he sentenced him to three straight days of weather reporting.

Herwig’s own brush with military justice came later, and carried potentially more serious consequences. Although not a combat unit, all the men had been trained to fight, and if the situation at the front became tense, it was up to the superior officer to decide whether to fight or retreat, thereby protecting the valuable coding and transmitting equipment. The general brief was ambiguous: “you are responsible for several millions worth of equipment, which is partly secret and must not fall into the hands of the Russians, but do not retreat without serious reason.” The day came in June 1944 when Herwig had to make a judgement call. “The Russians attacked and they got closer and closer,” he remembered. “I established contact with the infantry, which were close to us, and I asked their advice about whether we should join them or not. The answer I got was: ‘you do what you want, it’s your decision.’” Herwig decided to pull back ten kilometres to protect the equipment. At the end of the day, it proved to be the right decision: the infantry saw off the attack, and the valuable equipment was safe. “Of course I had tried to get a decision from HQ but the wireless communication was not good and I had to take a decision without having received an order,” he explained. “But that’s not how the military authorities saw things: I was accused of retreating without order.”

While this was happening on the Russian front, Allied forces were landing on the beaches of Normandy and making advances into France. Herwig’s Morse code equipment kept him and his men abreast of developments, as the Luftwaffe’s High Commander, Herman Göring exhorted his men to dig deep and fight to the victorious end, despite the setbacks being suffered by Germany on all fronts.

The need for redoubled effort did not stop the German military from putting Herwig on trial. The procedure was a complicated one, with all negotiations done by wireless. Herwig would spend hours decoding the messages coming in from company HQ—and sometimes the propaganda from Göring would even provide relief—but eventually a decision was taken. He was acquitted. The heavy-drinking Major in Riga Strand stood up for Herwig, telling the court that there had been no time for an order to be issued, and that the young Fahnenjunker Unteroffizier had made the right decision under pressure.

This episode was testing for Herwig in another way too. “At that time, I really saw what war is,” he said. “We were so close to the infantry that was defending our position that when we came out in the morning we saw all the dead bodies that had been killed during the night lying in the streets, it was horrifying.”

The End of the War

Freshly acquitted, Herwig was sent back to Germany in September 1944 for another stint of training, this time in Berlin at an Officers’ Academy in the suburb of Kladow. This was very different from the training in Halle. Although it involved tough, physical, military training, this time it also had a strong intellectual component. Training was marked by two, very different, trainers: one a tank-busting and highly decorated officer in the Luftwaffe signals corps, the other a highly educated intellectual. He was a member of the General Staff, a Generalstabsoffizier, and as such a member of the intellectual elite of the German army, recognisable by a red stripe on his trousers harking back to the uniforms of the previous century. The General Staff had been responsible for the Prussian, and then the German, military’s strategic planning since its foundation in the early nineteenth century, although under Hitler their power had waned, because Hitler considered himself a superior strategist. Members of the General Staff were frequently intellectuals, and often dissenters. Herwig suspected that this might be the case for his new teacher.

Opposition to Hitler, in the military and among civilians, pre-dated the war, and came to a head in 1944 with the failed 20 July plot by Claus von Stauffenberg and his supporters to assassinate the Führer at the Wolf’s Lair complex in East Prussia. Whether Herwig’s teacher had been involved with that plot, he would never know, but it was clear to anyone looking for the signs that this Generalstabsoffizier was no Nazi. “He was a very educated man, and he not only had to teach us tactics but also history. We realised immediately that he was an anti-Nazi, but of course he couldn’t give any public indication of that because he would have lost his life immediately. In a very sophisticated intelligent way he explained to us all the mistakes of Nazi propaganda and errors of Nazi ideology, and he did that by comparing implicitly the Nazi mentality to communist mentality pretending the two were opposite. But of course, we were clever enough to compare the two and understand that all the negative things he told us about communist ideology applied also to the Nazi mentality. So in that very intelligent, clever and sophisticated way he opened our eyes or strengthened already existing tendencies.” Not that Herwig would ever have discussed his political feelings with his fellow trainee officers. With the atmosphere of oppression and distrust that reigned, you just never knew who believed what. “It was impossible to discuss politics because, even if you tell your best friends that you doubt the final victory—Endsieg it was called—you were considered a defeatist. You got a war trial and you were accused of the crime of destroying the morale of the army and could be sentenced to death.”

So Herwig kept his opinions about what was really going on in the Generalstabsoffizier’s head to himself, and dutifully followed his training. The other notable instructor could not have been more different. “Our Lieutenant had fought Russian tanks with so-called hollow charges, which had been developed to break the armour of tanks. To use them, a soldier had to run up to the tank and stick the hollow charge equipped with magnets on to it. It would then fire through the blinding and destroy the tank. When somebody managed to do that he got a special medal for anti-tank fighting, and this Lieutenant had several of these medals. When we complained about the hard training he said: ‘look, it’s not just to make life hard for you, it’s in your own interest, because at war you have to follow orders otherwise your chances to survive are very small. We have to educate you in such a way that you follow orders without discussion.’ Such a strategy was psychologically not easy to accept. But it was war and there was no alternative.” Despite the news coming in from all fronts, the general feeling among the soldiers was that if Germany surrendered to the allies, the German military would soon be fighting alongside them, against the Russians. So Herwig took his Lieutenant’s words very seriously.

While in Berlin, Herwig was also assigned to one of the most advanced telecommunications groups in Germany, or indeed anywhere. In the nineteenth century, Heinrich Hertz had shown that metallic objects could reflect radio waves. Although he did not identify any practical use for this observation, it was later deployed in the 1904 invention by Christian Hülsmeyer of a device called the Telemobiloskop, which helped to prevent collisions between ships at sea. In the Second World War, it was developed further into what we now know as radar, short for radio detection and ranging: a precision tool for pinpointing metallic objects in the sky.

The German implementation of this took the form of the Würzburg Riesen, large 7.5 m diameter radar mirrors that were deployed in the defence of towns when the Allied bombardment began. “The defence units had two such radar facilities available to them. In the beginning, when the bombardment of Germany by British bombers started, attacks were carried out by individual bombers, or small groups of two or three planes. So one of these radars could locate the enemy bomber while the other picked up a German night fighter. The German fighter was guided to be placed behind the British bomber,” explained Herwig. “This was achieved with the help of a glass table with two projectors from below, projecting a blue point which was the German fighter and a red point which was the enemy. An officer talking to the German pilot could guide the German fighter behind the bombing plane, and at just the right moment the German pilot would get the order ‘pauke-pauke’ to start his machine gun and shoot at the bomber without even seeing it. This was the most advanced technology at that time and it’s how I learned about radar.”

The success of the Würzburg Riesen was to be short lived: as the Luftwaffe lost its domination of the German air space, huge squadrons of bombers would appear in the skies over Berlin every night at 10.00 p.m. “It was so punctual you could set your watch accordingly,” recalled Herwig. Individual fighters could do little to resist, and the ground-based defences fared little better. Every morning, Berlin would wake to more devastation from the overnight raid. “They were not drop** so many incendiary bombs, but bombs that created explosions by air pressure, with the consequence that the buildings were not damaged by fire, but by pressure. Most of the windows were broken, and sometimes the ceilings fell down, but the furniture was still intact.” Here, Herwig’s military training was radically transformed, as the officer students were detailed to salvage what they could. “In the morning, we were transported to the centre of Berlin and we helped to clean up the damaged apartments and take out the furniture that was still intact. At the time, I learned to hate pianos because I had to transport a lot of pianos from the third floor down to the ground. It was very sad, because when we entered Berlin every morning—one morning the Opera was destroyed, the next morning we saw a museum was in ruins. Next morning a church was in ruins—a very depressing experience. I lived there through the bombing expecting that one night our barracks would also be bombed, but the military camp was never attacked only the town of Berlin itself.”

By the end of 1944, Herwig graduated from the Military Academy as Fahnenjunker Leutnant, a candidate Lieutenant who after a short period of service would automatically become a Lieutenant. He was dispatched to the Western Front, with no possibility to visit his family on the way. As 1944 turned to 1945, things were becoming increasingly desperate for Germany as the war entered its final phase in Europe.

Herwig joined a Divisional HQ tasked with guiding German fighter planes in the battles now raging across northern France, but by this time, the Luftwaffe was a spent force. “The German fighters were useless because there was no fuel anymore. They were fixed to the ground and there wasn’t much we could do. As a last attempt an offensive in the Ardennes mountains was started by the German troops and we were sent there to help the infantry. But after a few days we were recalled to the Rhine, to defend the bridge of Remagen.”

The Rhine was a very important psychological landmark for Germany. If the allies crossed it, they would be on German soil, and Germany threw everything it could at preventing a crossing. Herwig was assigned the particularly grizzly task of recruiting pilots for kamikaze raids to destroy the bridge before the advancing allies could use it to establish a bridgehead on the eastern side. “One of my tasks was to make the connection with the pilots, to find pilots who would volunteer to do that. Quite a number were prepared to, but there was not enough fuel anymore and the bridge was taken by the Allies. We were asked to join the infantry to defend it with our rifles, a ridiculous enterprise! But before we could even start, the Allied forces had crossed the bridge and formed a bridgehead.” A hugely symbolic victory had been achieved. “Many Germans, including myself, were led to the belief that the Western Allies would join with Germany in the conflict with Russia.”

With the Rhine breached, the emphasis was given by Hitler to defend Berlin from the approaching Russian troops. Herwig was ordered to the capital with a few men under his command. “I was charged with a little group including three trucks and a few people to find our way from the Rhine to Berlin and report to a headquarters there, but Germany was in chaos. How could we get from the Rhine to Berlin? Somehow, we managed using somewhat unusual tactics. For example, a member of my group managed to rustle up a sack of green coffee, which was a much-appreciated currency at that time. We loaded it onto one of the trucks and started on our way to Berlin. I was in command, and I had my own jeep with a driver and we headed this little convoy, a jeep and three trucks. Of course, the allied air forces controlled the airspace above Germany completely, day and night. To move during daylight was very dangerous. At night, it was not much better and it was also harder for us to find our way through unknown regions, so most of the time we tried to advance in daylight. To get food we usually used the coffee to buy on the black market.”

One day, Herwig and his small convoy were driving through North Rhine Westphalia in broad daylight, and they were spotted by a squadron of Spitfires. “We left the trucks on the road and spread out into nearby fields, the Spitfires came down firing at us. They came so close I could almost look the pilots in the eyes. But, we were lucky. None of us was killed or wounded. They destroyed one of our trucks but my jeep and the other trucks were still intact and we continued to Berlin.”

They arrived in March 1945 to find total chaos, and discover that Hitler’s strategy had changed again. Nazi Germany was down to its last two strongholds, and the high command was determined to fight to the last. “One stronghold was in the Alps, where the commander was Göring, and another stronghold was supposed to be created in the north of Germany, in Schleswig–Holstein near the Danish border. There Admiral Dönitz was put in command. So after a day in Berlin we suddenly got the order to join the stronghold in Schleswig–Holstein.”

By this time, it was clear that the war was effectively over. His marching order for Schleswig–Holstein was a very welcome document because Herwig had already reached the conclusion that it would be better to be captured by the western allies than by Russia. Being sent west not only allowed him to avoid summary execution by the German army as a deserter if he’d gone it alone, it also allowed him to move across the Elbe, where everyone expected the line of control between Russia and the western allies to be drawn. Nobody wanted to be a Russian prisoner of war.

After a quick visit to Frederik the Great’s testimony to another, more enlightened period of German history, the palace at Sanssouci, Herwig and his driver set off for the Elbe, and onwards to Schleswig–Holstein (see this chapter, In his own words: a visit to Sanssouci). By the time they arrived at the end of April 1945, the war was all over bar the shouting. Hitler was dead, although that was not widely known, and Germany was on the point of unconditional surrender, signed by Alfred Jodl, Chief of the Operations Staff of the German Armed Forces High Command, in Reims on 7 May, with a cease fire to begin at midnight. Jodl had one final attempt to persuade the allies to join Germany in fighting the Russians, but Eisenhower had none of it. As if to underline the finality of the German defeat, a second act of surrender was signed two days later by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the supreme commander of all German forces. To this day, 8 May is marked as VE day in Western Europe, while Russia celebrates victory day on the 9th.

For Herwig, the Allied victory came as a relief. “Somehow, I have forgotten exactly how, I got a paper that said that I was dismissed from the German army, and I was not defecting. We threw the pistols that we were still carrying in the nearest lake, and moved on to Schleswig–Holstein, where we were caught by the British troops. I’d never seen a British person before in my life,” Herwig recalled, “and it was a pleasure to discover that they treated us very reasonably. The problem was that they faced so many prisoners that they didn’t know what to do with us. We were put in a camp, not a real camp, just an open field, and we were left to sit there on the grass for two weeks under a rainy sky. We were given a dozen biscuits every day, that was all we got for food, and some water to drink. Finally, the British were able to put us in a camp for prisoners, which was established in a former farm in Schleswig–Holstein. The only possession I had was my rucksack, nothing else, everything else was lost. After some time, the British military administration worked out a procedure to release prisoners to provide the labour desperately needed to start the reconstruction.”

Prisoner release was a complex affair because the British were looking for SS soldiers, and perpetrators of the atrocities that had been laid bare as the allies advanced and liberated the concentration camps. Everyone had to be rigorously interviewed before release in an attempt to weed out the fugitives from the ordinary soldiers. The language barrier didn’t help. “One day I learned that the British were looking for interpreters, so I told myself to be courageous and try,” he recalled. “It was then that I had cause to be thankful to my English teacher at school, who taught us to converse, and not just to read Shakespeare. Among young Germans of my generation, that was a rare skill to possess, and it proved valuable to the British.” Herwig plucked up the courage to apply, and he was accepted. Had he not spoken English, he would probably have ended up down a coal mine, rather than nurturing a dream to study physics at university.

The British were looking for prisoners of war with no real profession since they seemed to be most useful for work in the coal mines of northern Germany. “As a young person with a Maturity examination, but no real profession, I was an excellent candidate for coal mines but I didn’t feel like joining that profession,” said Herwig. Once all the prisoners of war had been sorted and released or sent for trial, Herwig found himself in the employ of the British Army, working as an interpreter for a young reserve officer, a captain a little bit older than himself, and they soon became friends. In the chaos following the war, Herwig had lost touch with his family, who had been expelled from Czechoslovakia to where he did not know, and it would be some years before he found out. For the time being, he was alone in an unfamiliar and devastated land, so when the British officer asked him what he wanted to do with his life, Herwig told him that all he wanted to do was get to a university town and study physics. The British military administration had set up a local headquarters in Hamburg, and Herwig’s officer frequently had cause to visit. “I often have business at the military government in Hamburg,” he said to Herwig one day, “why don’t you come with me?.”

At this point in Herwig’s life, chance played an important part in determining his destiny. Had he not been given marching orders to Schleswig–Holstein, he could well have been a Russian prisoner of war. Had he not learned to speak English at school he may well have been down a coal mine. And had he not struck up a friendship with a fellow inmate while a British prisoner of war, he would have had no address to turn to in Hamburg. As it was, one of Herwig’s fellow prisoners of war had served in Hamburg during the war. “I met a family in Hamburg by chance when I was a soldier,” he said to Herwig, “and they told me that if I ever found myself in trouble they would take me in.” When Herwig set off for Hamburg, he set off with their address in his pocket. “The British captain dropped me somewhere near the S-Bahn, and I went to this address at Farmsen, Hasenböge, which was half an hour outside Hamburg by subway and half an hour’s walk from the end of the line. When I got there, I rang the bell, and a very nice lady called Frau Palm opened the door.” Herwig explained that he wanted to study at the University of Hamburg, and that he needed somewhere to stay for a night while he looked for work and made an approach to the university. “After some hesitation, she said yes, I could stay for the night,” recalled Herwig. “In the end this one night became almost four years.”

In His Own Words: A Visit to Sanssouci

“I remember my last night in Berlin before leaving for Schleswig-Holstein as if it were yesterday. I’d been in Berlin for half a year, but I’d never found time to visit Sanssouci at Potsdam, and it’s a place I really wanted to see. Berlin at the time felt like the end of the world, and I had no idea whether I’d ever get a chance to go back, so I said to my driver, ‘take me to Potsdam before we leave, I want to see Sanssouci.’ It was late in the evening, and my driver gave me a quizzical look, but we went there anyway, and we arrived just before 10 p.m., when the nightly bombing raids began. It may seem strange to say this, but there was a kind of beauty in the devastation, mixed with the poignancy of seeing this palace of enlightened thinking against the backdrop of Berlin in ruins. The bombing always started in the same way, at ten o’clock sharp, the bombers would drop what we called Christmas trees because of their shape—flares that would light up the skies allowing the bombers to find their targets. They produced a very dramatic illumination of the town, which was all the more strange since they were in the form of Christmas trees, symbols more usually associated with peace on Earth. The illusion was soon broken as the bombs followed the flares, but for just a few minutes by the light of these Christmas trees, I visited the historic castle of Frederick the Great where he had played the flute and discussed philosophical problems with Voltaire and other great minds of the time. I was convinced that I would never come back in my life. Little did I know that my life’s journey would lead me to Geneva, where I could visit Voltaire’s home Les Délices, and his Chateau just across the border in the French town that bears his name, Ferney-Voltaire. And I’ve had the pleasure of going back to Sanssouci on many occasions.”