Opa's Tales: An Odyssey from War Torn East Prussia to the American Midwest

By Fred S. Losch

Growing up in war-torn Germany, spending over two years in a Russian prison camp can ruin a life or make it stronger. Fred Losch chose to become a stronger person and to make the most of his life. Fred left his homeland, became an American citizen, traveled the world, learned new things daily, and loved his family. He wrote the words of his life so that others might see the misery of war and strive toward understanding and cooperation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 29, 2002
• ISBN: 9781462099801

Fred S. Losch

Fred Losch was born in East Prussia, Germany in 1927. He immigrated to a new life in America in 1951 after surviving the World War 2 and 2 1/2 years in a Russian labor camp. His life in America included 27 years serving the US Air Force. His wife, Ute and children, Ellen, Karen and Ralph helped to make his life complete.

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PART I

1

The Years of my Youth

I was born in Lotzen, Eastprussia, Germany, on August 28, 1927. It was a Sunday and mother frequently made me aware that because of that fact, luck was with me. As the oldest I was probably spoiled, at least until the arrival of my sister Siglinde. I don’t remember much about the early years. I do remember, though, going to kindergarten at an annex to the church-sponsored hospital (Mutterhaus Bethanien). Siglinde and I walked daily to the other side of town to join the children of parents who had the same religious persuasion as our parents. We were also baptized in the chapel of this hospital. There we often attended church services with our parents. Sunday school, however, we visited in the Free Lutheran Church. Sunday school was mandatory for us, but our lay teachers were very friendly and made it interesting. We enjoyed it. I recall one lady, Miss Blask, who was especially nice to us children.

Before we knew it, we were in school. My school education began in April 1934 in the almost-new Luther School. My teacher was Mr. Gehlhar throughout the four-year elementary school. (The last time I saw him was in the Berlin-Bernau Kaserne toward the end of the war. He must have perished in the battle of Berlin.) He was very strict and consistently demanded high educational standards. At the end of the first school year we wrote sentences using the Sutterlin writing style.

In the third year the government directed all schools to change to cursive writing. At the end of the fourth year we were expected to properly spell most German words. At that level we were also able to use the four basic math operations in problems having up to four dig

its. Our curriculum also included Heimatkunde, i.e. local geography and legend.

Religion was for most of us a required subject. The two predominant religions, Lutheran and Catholic, were taught in school respectively in the Catholic Church nearby, because there were only a few of them. The children of non-believers were, on parental request, excused during that time.

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We had to memorize much of the material. Failure to do the assigned work brought us one or more strokes with a thin bamboo stick across the inside of the hand. Would you believe that was a motivator to learning? It was. Fear made me learn and helped me to prepare for the entrance exam to the higher schools, i.e. Middleschool and Oberschule. I was one of about 25 (of 90) students chosen to attend the Oberschule.

The German school system then, a system which has not changed very much over the years, offered three options to all students at the end of four years elementary school: eight additional years of high school in preparation for the university; six more years in the middle school without university preparation; or four more years for manual occupations in the elementary school in preparation for a trade. The latter group also attended trade schools after completion of the eighth years of elementary schooling. The teachers were the judges who selected the candidates for each school career.

In the high school we learned foreign languages, as well as physics, biology, geography, history and even history of religion. The preparation was thorough. From the 25 students there were eight with a doctorate in various disciplines. The level of our education was far above what one would find in a typical US junior/senior high school. There

were no multiple-choice tests. All evaluations were based on what we wrote down or solved. The teachers knew if we were faking.

Was school always fun? Obviously not. We spent afternoons and evenings doing homework. But it seems to me that I have retained much more material I learned then than from what I learned later in the American system.

As studying became serious, other duties became routine also. My parents gave me a bike when I was 10 years old. The good thing was, I became mobile. On the other hand, I had to collect outstanding debts from our customers. For this I received 1% of the collected money. But that was not the only reward I got. Dad often took me along into the beautiful forests of Masuren. There I could observe him buying lumber and firewood for our coal yard. Sometimes, during the holidays, I was asked to accompany the local ship owner who pulled the big barges to Lotzen with the wood father had bought. Sometimes I was even allowed to steer the tugboat; oh, what a feeling it was for the young kid. I quickly learned the geographical features. My favored places were those that offered culinary rewards, such as Nikolaiken where we ate the freshly smoked maranen, (like white fish) or at the Kurhaus Rud-zanny, which was famous for the schnitzel.

Other memories of the area stemmed from a trip I took with a group of friends in a 10-man canoe during a Pentecost weekend in 1938. We crossed the Mauersee and slept somewhere along the coast in tents (close to where Hitler’s headquarters was located during the war). Grasshoppers joined us as we ate our marmalade bread. I didn’t like the taste of these critters.

In the meantime I had joined the Hitler youth (the same as the boy scouts in the USA). We could join the Jungvolk at age 10. Before I found my niche in the flying track of the organization, I went on several hikes.

I remember the first hike, which began on a Saturday afternoon. We had to walk about 10 miles with our neatly wrapped backpack, called affe (monkey) because it had a hairy back cover. That was very demanding. Before the day was over, I had lost all the food I had eaten that day. It was nothing serious though, just a little stress, a word we didn’t know yet. (I think it was not invented until the 1960’s.) The next day I felt fine again. When the ranking leader visited us on that day, he lauded our effort and gave us permission to wear the scout knife and the shoulder belt—the status symbols of the Jungvolk.

My last trip with the Jungvolk was a bike trip organized to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Tannenberg Monument. That monument commemorated the battle of the Masurian Lakes when General von Hindenburg threw out the Russian Army in 1914 and again in 1915. The people of Eastprussia built it in gratitude to the Fieldmarschall and one-time President of Germany. When he died in 1934, his remains were put in a vault in the monument. We were on the road to Tannenberg for three days.

On August 27, 1939, we got the word to return immediately. The roads were more and more crowded with military vehicles and it became clear that something was up. We got home.

A few days later, on September 1, 1939, the war began.

2

The War has begun

There was not much excitement going on in town; nor was there any enemy action. The war was entirely fought in Poland, at least 50 miles or more from where we lived. (In fact, our town was not affected by any enemy action until much later, in December 1944, when Russian airplanes dropped about 50 bombs on Lotzen without much damage. On January 22, 1945, the Russians overran the town. Later it was taken over by the Poles as war booty.)

We probably would not have been so calm had we known about the outcome of this big war, which in the end made us, who lived in Lotzen, homeless. So many people were killed. Eastprussia was divided between Russia, which took the northern half, and Poland wound up with the southern part of our province.

School continued until January 1944. Then we were told that the entire class was to report to Pillau, a naval base on the Baltic, now called Baltisk by the Russians. In preparation for enemy attacks, we were attached to a firefighting unit in the German Navy. Our favored teacher Mr. Lorenz took us there. We received navy uniforms, gray and blue with a swastika armband and were called Marine Helfer (Navy Helpers). The typical workday consisted of attending school in the morning and drilling in the afternoon.

There were infrequent air raids during the night. Only once was a team from our unit called out to extinguish fires in Königsberg after a big air raid in August 1944. In September, I was discharged from the helpers.

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In November, I had to report to the Arbeitsdienst (labor service) in Poland. The trip was by train and I arrived there at night. I still see myself shivering at the Litzmanstadt (Mlawa) railroad station on that miserable cold evening. They took us to the camp about 15 miles out of town.

There we would be treated like concentration camp inmates. The instructors were sadists. In fact, one of them bragged to have come from an extermination camp.

The day began with us running outside, usually in freezing weather, without shirts to wash our faces in ice-cold water. Then we had to run back to the unheated room, get dressed and eat our meager rations that we had received the night before. Next we had to fall out for duty. They gave us Russian WW1 rifles that fired when put down hard. It was a wonder no one got killed, although in our room two rounds went off. The guilty person had to fill the hole in the ceiling with toothpaste so he would not get into trouble.

The day’s drill consisted of marching, running, digging foxholes, political indoctrination and firing practice. Toward the evening one of us had to get some coal to heat the room. However, it was never enough to keep the room warm until 9PM when we had to extinguish the fire. Every once in a while we had to pull guard duty.

Another task was the daily routine to clean the above-mentioned rifles. Our squad leader slept in our room and he too had a streak of

sadism within him. As if we did not have enough chicanery outside, he liked to continue it in the barracks. This creep made me do 100 knee-bends with my rifle in my outstretched arms. I almost collapsed. The reason: he supposedly found some dirt on that rifle. I was very upset about the affair. When I showed him the rifle the second time he said, Why didn’t you do it right the first time? I didn’t have the heart to tell this character that I hadn’t done anything to that rifle. It was clean to start out with. Since he was from Saxonia, I feel that he got his comeuppance from the Russian occupiers during the post-war period.

While I served in Poland, my mother and siblings were evacuated to a small village in Saxonia. Mother and two brothers remained there until they fled to west Germany in 1946.

A few days before my discharge from the RAD (Reichsarbeitsdienst) on January 7, 1945, my father called the commander and told him that since he had to report to the Waffen SS, and asked if it would be possible for me to meet with him in Lotzen before his departure. Since I also had my draft orders for the German Air Force, the commander let me go early.

Was I glad to leave that place! That darn rifle of mine! I scratched myself on the palm of my left hand while cleaning it before turning it in. As a result I got a super infection that did not mature until later. In fact, that infection may have saved my life. Without the delay it had caused, I would have been in the battle around Stettin.

3

Leaving Home

The Air Force representative in Lotzen gave me 14 days advanced leave to spend in Lotzen, as well as in Saxonia with my mother. Dad talked to me about the uncertainty of the current situation. In the discussion I discovered a small doubt in his feelings about the future of our nation. I clearly remember when he recommended having a good look just in case I would not be able to come back here.

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My hometown, Loetzen, East Prussia

On January 12, 1945, I departed from Lotzen for Dresden, Saxonia, with a lot of baggage. Dad had bought a cow and a pig that he had made into sausage. Some of those delicacies I took now to Mom in her

exile. I also took along a radio belonging to our neighbor. She too was in exile where Mom was and thanked me for bringing her radio along.

Mom was very unhappy that I didn’t bring our big radio with me. There were no radios available then, and she lived in a valley two miles away from the village Hartmansdorf and felt lost without any information from the outside.

As I was about to leave Lotzen with the regular scheduled train, Dad noted that my infection had not yet ended. He, a somewhat trained medic, decided to wrap the hand for the trip, in hopes that the infection would be gone by the time I got to Dresden. Instead, my hand began to swell under the bandage. When I arrived at Mom’s I was sick. I had to go to a doctor. The natives suggested we go to Frauenstein. A friendly farmer, Mr. Berger, drove me there with his horse-drawn cart. The doctor sliced the palm of my hand open and released at least two ounces of puss at a rather ripe stage. He also gave me a tetanus shot and sulfonamides (prontosil) a predecessor of penicillin. Within 10 days my hand went back to normal and I was able to walk to the physician on my own.

The doctor gave me a certificate that I had been too ill to travel to report on January 20th to Stolpmunde, Pommerania, as ordered by the Air Force. But at that time the Russians had already occupied Stolp-munde.

Since I took my duty to my country seriously, I hopped on a train to Berlin, where I reported to the Air Ministry. The secretary was surprised to see me, since East Prussia had been, at that time, largely occupied by the Russians. I explained my problems. The secretary then gave me new orders to report to the 1st Officers Candidate Battalion of the Luftwaffe in Oschatz, Saxonia.

While in Berlin, I stayed with my aunt Erna who decided to leave the town at that time, so she packed essential clothing for herself and her two children, Anita and Eckehart, and we four left for Dresden and then on to Hartmannsdorf. They would stay there until the beginning of 1946, when they got permission to return to Berlin.

After depositing them, I left again by train through Dresden (a few days before the infamous bombardment of that beautiful city), and reported to Oschatz Fliegerhorst (airbase).

It was the same senseless drilling again, except this time we didn’t have enough to eat, and at a time when we needed it most, at the age of seventeen. At night the big air raids robbed us of our sleep. In spite of the high altitude of the bomber formations, we had to carry heavy machine guns and enormous amounts of ammo with us.

Finally, at the end of March, this misery came to an end. We were sent to Berlin to be used as cannon fodder to save our Führer. The morale among us young people was excellent. We were ready to fight and die for him. Besides, we were leaving Oschatz!

After a lot of research, the American writer Mr. Ryan described in his book The Last Battle, the situation in Hitler’s bunker. He had been a reporter in Germany before the war and probably knew more about Berlin than most of his contemporaries. Pertaining to my story, he reported on a decisive meeting in the bunker. Hitler was trying to marshal military forces to the defense of Berlin. Records indicate that Admiral Dönitz told Hitler that he would send 10,000 cadets and personnel not used on ships to the defense of Berlin. Fieldmarshall Göring,