May 8, 1945: As I remember ...

By Willy Wenger
May 5, 2013

I was in the final battle for Berlin - from the Seelow Heights up to the last bitter street fighting in the vicinity of the bunker of Adolf Hitler. All Berliners participated in this, the bloodiest battle on German soil. The city had already included for some days troops of the Red Army.

Knowledge of the possiblity of being liberated by the Twelfth  Army under the command of young General Walther Wenck must have been what gave us the hope and the courage to endure. But General Wenck came up only as far as Potsdam.

"Then was the terminus." Those were his words as I heard them from him in Geneva in 1966, a time that I was able to talk to him about it.

At right, Willy Wenger right before his 87 birthday.

The war ended on 8 May 1945. Immediate peace should have followed, but it was different. Families waited for husband or father, but so many were languishing in prison camps under inhuman treatment. (The Rhine meadows camps, most people still don’t know about today.) Women, longingly expecting their husbands to return, were often enough raped by occupying troops - especially in the East.

I myself personally know some soldiers who were delivered by the Americans and Russians to spend many years in Russian camps, leading a most terrible life. Erich Hartmann, the most successful fighter pilot in the world; Fritz Schröter, who was Poldi's* group commander; or Wilhelm Rauch from Bad Gleichenberg,  now a spa director, was held ten years in Siberia.

Albin Laggner, my wife's brother, was heavily wounded on the day of capitulation in Czech territory and was beaten almost to death. Then, with other wounded, he was made to lay down on the road to be run over by tanks. A Czech woman, feeling pity for the 17-year old, pulled him out of the road at the last second, while others were being crushed by tank tracks.

These may be anecdotal, but there are thousands of similar stories. And these victims remained silent, as they did not want to be reminded of the horrors they experienced and one has to respect that. Even so, they were usually innocent victims.

A monument should be built to the German women. It was they, in German cities night after night with their children, often having to remain in the freezing cold of the shelter when Allied aircraft of up to a thousand machines carried out their carpet bombing on the defenseless civilian population down below. Instead, the British commander responsible for this area bombing gets a monument located in the English capital.

I want to avoid arousing hatred, but justice should prevail in the world and reporting should correspond to the facts. The war that really no one wanted was brought to the German people, and not vice versa.

*Poldi is Willy's older brother, Oberleutnant Leopold Wenger, who died after being shot down over Vienna in April 1945.