I was born in 1934 and grew up in Würzburg. Beginning in the winter of 1944, there were air raid alarms almost every day. During the day, formations of bombers often flew over the city, usually on their way to Schweinfurt, where we repeatedly saw fires. At night we frequently spent several hours in the air-raid shelter beneath our house. Air mines came down with a terrifying howling sound, accompanied by anti-aircraft fire, and struck the city. On many occasions I had to turn back on my way to school because of a preliminary air-raid warning, or, once at school, go down into the cellar.
Shortly before the destruction of Würzburg on March 16, 1945, the Gauleiter apparently ordered that children should, if possible, leave the city and stay with acquaintances in the countryside. I was therefore sent to the forester's lodge of a family friend, an isolated house in a nearby forest. Although I had just begun attending the Gymnasium in Würzburg, I instead walked each day to an elementary school in a small village about four kilometers away. Even there, low-flying fighter-bombers occasionally appeared. I would seek shelter in the nearby woods and often found leaflets they had dropped announcing Germany's impending defeat.
On the evening Würzburg was largely destroyed by incendiary bombs, my father and sister rode their bicycles into the city, but because everything was burning, they could not get in. A few days later, using a large handcart that my father, one of my sisters, and I had to pull ourselves, we managed to bring many pieces of furniture and books— which had previously been stored in the cellar —to the forester's lodge. We could no longer enter our apartment. Two weeks later, the entire house had collapsed, and we could no longer even reach the cellar.
During March and April 1945, German jet aircraft flew over us almost daily toward the Western Front. Time and again we heard isolated gunshots nearby. As we only learned later, SS units were executing German soldiers who had deserted.
Many years later, in Madrid, I became acquainted with an extraordinarily friendly German gentleman married to a Spanish woman. He invited me to dinner several times and explained that he too had studied in Würzburg. As he spoke, tears came to his eyes. A short time later I read in the Würzburg newspaper that this man, now living in Madrid, had been the commander of the SS unit operating near Würzburg. One of my most disturbing memories remains: personally very kind, yet a criminal.
In April 1945, German troops passed by our lodge, for the most part wretched, starving, and on foot. Toward the end of April, the first American troops arrived, traveling in tanks, jeeps, and trucks—none of them on foot—along what is now the federal highway passing the forester's lodge.
For safety, we moved into two small wooden huts in a nearby stone quarry in the forest. But American soldiers reached that place as well. One morning they were positioned on the ridge above us with machine guns trained in our direction. Nothing happened, however, as they saw that we were almost entirely women and children.
The American soldiers then occupied the forester's lodge for several days. When we returned, we found many cupboards broken open and feather pillows slashed apart, with feathers scattered everywhere. We later learned that the soldiers had discovered several crates of hunting rifles in the attic. Not recognizing them as hunting weapons, they assumed additional heavy weapons must also be hidden there and searched accordingly. A firearms manufacturer from Würzburg had stored the rifles in the lodge to save them from destruction.
After that, peace finally came for us. We did not learn of Germany's surrender and the end of the war until several days later, as there was no radio.
For a long time afterward, however, many jeeps and trucks full of American soldiers passed by every day. The Black soldiers—who were referred to at the time by a term that is now recognized as offensive—were extraordinarily kind to us children. They tossed chocolate and other sweets from their vehicles or handed them to us whenever they stopped.
The soldiers often spent the night in the woods or on nearby meadows and left behind large quantities of food and drinks: soda cans (Coca-Cola), chocolate, coffee and cocoa powder, and once even almost an entire wheel of Swiss cheese weighing about seventy pounds. The next morning we would collect these supplies—technically stealing them, though long since beyond any statute of limitations.
The farmers in the nearby villages were happy to sell us food, since there was hardly any transportation into the city. We ourselves had to walk more than four kilometers almost every day to fetch what we bought. The forester also regularly hunted game. In the large garden we kept chickens, geese, and ducks, though they were repeatedly taken by foxes or buzzards. Around the lodge stood many fruit and walnut trees, whose harvest we could gather.
As a result, we had enough to eat and were even able to share food with refugees from the East, from Poland, and from what was then Bohemia and Moravia, many of whom passed by our house.
By coincidence, on my birthday in the summer, my sister unexpectedly arrived from Berlin. We had heard nothing from her for many weeks and had no idea she was coming. She had spent about a week traveling—partly on foot, sometimes by truck, and occasionally by train. She was starving; in Berlin she too had suffered severe hunger. When she found us sitting in the garden drinking coffee and cocoa and eating several cherry cakes with whipped cream, she was utterly astonished.
Since the schools in Würzburg had been destroyed, I continued for almost another year to make the daily walk to the nearby elementary school, which naturally did my health a great deal of good.
When the first schools in Würzburg reopened in early 1946, I traveled into the city each morning on an open milk delivery wagon. Because we were receiving less milk by then, I drank from a small cup the milk that sloshed out of the large milk cans during the journey.
At school we were taught German by a teacher who had previously been our physical education instructor during the Nazi era. Before every lesson back then, we had been required to shout a sharp, military-style "Sieg Heil." If it was not sufficiently crisp, we had to repeat it several times. Now, before every lesson, he prayed with us.
Only in the evening could I return to the forester's lodge on a truck. My parents did not think it was a good idea for me to spend so many hours alone in the still largely ruined city. Because they had longstanding connections in Heidelberg—probably the only major German city that had escaped destruction—they found a boarding school there, which admitted me in September 1946. There, too, somehow, there was usually enough to eat.
From there I attended the Kurfürst-Friedrich-Gymnasium until graduating with my Abitur. For many years, the school provided meals financed by American aid.
In summary, our family came through the Second World War comparatively well, apart from the destruction of much of our property and possessions. We suffered no deaths or injuries within our immediate family. During the First World War, however, my mother had lost both of her brothers, while my father lost his brother and his brother-in-law.