The Last Days of World War II: Seen Through the Eyes of a Young German Boy

By Wolfgang Nitsch

Wolfgang Nitsch was a boy of 15 years old, living in Germany, as the Third Reich crumbled around him. In the years following the war, he immigrated to America, and would eventually join the United States Army to serve his adopted country.

The last wartime Christmas in 1944 (our sixth) came under a spell of uncertainty and ill forebodings. My mother, sister and I were on the eastern border in Silesia, now Poland. We had been evacuated from our hometown of Berlin due to the ever-increasing devastation caused by the Allied bombing raids. My father was in the service and we saw very little of him during the more than five years of war.

The deadly quiet atmosphere of a land blanketed in snow added to the feelings of anxiety and gloom in our minds. The war was not over, yet there still was hope. It is incredible how people in a state of despair cling to the faintest rays of hope against all odds. The Nazi propaganda machine had come up with the promise of “Wunderwaffen,” or miracle weapons, which could turn the tide. Wunderwaffen was the word of the day, everyone expected the arrival of the victorious miracle weapons.

Actually, some had already arrived with astonishing effects: the V-2 rockets, the world’s first stratospheric missiles, were shelling London with horrible results, ultimately killing over 8,000 inhabitants. Faster than the speed of sound, they came down without any warning. Then the world’s first jet plane, the Messerschmidt 262 fighter-bomber, had been put into action. It was invincible and left the Allied pilots gasping for breath. Even the small anti-tank hand-held rocket, the Panzerfaust, was such a Wunderwaffe. It was fired by youngsters in the Hitler Youth, by grandfathers and housewives, if they had the guts to let a tank come within 40 feet. A direct hit meant the end for any T-34 Russian or any Sherman tank. So why not expect other miracle weapons of this kind to bring on the final victory? People’s fixation on such hopes helped to cloud their sense of reality. This became apparent after the turn of the year in 1945.

The Soviets had no time to spare. On January 12th their powerful winter assault broke loose from the Baranov staging areas near Warsaw. Marshals Koniev and Zhukov attacked with their armies of hundreds of thousands of troops along a 450-mile front. They commanded a crushing superiority: artillery 20:1, armor 7:1, infantry 11:1. The German defenses could not stand up against this might and soon collapsed. In less than two weeks the Red Army had reached the German borders. Most of East Prussia was overrun. The vengeance with which these troops appeared on German soil cannot be described. They left a trail of blood, murder and rape. Revenge always hits the innocent. It hit women, children and men too old to fight. Survivors panicked and loaded suitcases and crates on horse-drawn farm wagons and hit the roads fleeing en masse towards the west. The convoys, or trecks as they were called, had tens of thousands of people on the icy roads, in sub-zero weather. They were often overrun, rolled flat by tanks, thrown into the ditches, by friend and foe alike who needed the roads cleared for military movement.

Another route of escape frantically followed by refugees was across the Baltic Sea. The German Navy had set up a large scale evacuation system, employing everything afloat to ship out hundreds of thousands of civilians and wounded soldiers. Here, on January 30, 1945 occurred one of the most horrible sea disasters of all time. The Wilhelm Gustloff, a German ocean liner of 25,000 tons and loaded beyond capacity, was torpedoed by a Russian submarine. Of more than 6,000 aboard, less than 900 were saved. All others went under, disappearing into an icy ocean.

At the same time, the Battle of the Bulge came to its end. After a few initial gains, the German advance soon was halted due to gross misjudgment of the American resistance, the Allied air superiority, and the lack of fuel to drive the Tiger tanks. The crews had to abandon them in the field.