Crossing the Bridge

By Christopher Masterman

Two days before the final Nazi surrender, US Army translator, Captain Paul Stoebel, watches his comrades pick their way across a destroyed bridge and enter the Austrian town of Braunau; Hitler's birthplace.

The twisted metal, lying partially submerged in the River Inn, seems to mirror the ending of the Nazi forced 'Anschluss' between Germany and Austria, orchestrated just seven years earlier and meant to last a thousand years. About to set off across the bridge, Stoebel receives new orders. He is not to enter Braunau but report immediately to a place called Dachau.

Thrust into the midst of a legal team tasked with war crime investigations, he suffers mental trauma that affects him severely and stunts his ability to function normally in society. Only after many years and with the support of a strong woman in a loving relationship does he reach a level of contentment and peace, but the political rise of a one-time Nazi officer resurrects Paul's Dachau demons. 

It seems they can only be completely excised, through a final crossing of the Bridge at Braunau-am-Inn.

Previously Published as The Bridge at Braunau-am-Inn (ISBN 978-0-9943521-0-1

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Book Reality Experience
• Release date: Sep 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9780648407515

Book preview

Dedication

To Elizabeth Horne

My lovely wife who gave me so much encouragement and invaluable comment in the writing of this book, and who trudged round the Nazi haunts of Munich and the gloomy confines of Mauthausen with me.

Acknowledgments

Thanks also to Dietmar Raudzuz for all the useful suggestions he made after reading the first draft of the original book, and whose family history so eerily echoed part of the story, and to Greg Wilson for supplying the photos for the frontispiece  and front cover.

Also by Christopher Masterman

Non-Fiction

‘An Average Pilot’

An affectionate history of Cedric Masterman OBE DFC

Fiction

Secrets From Norway

Travelling to Tincup

Deathly Confessions

The Bridge at Braunau-am-Inn*

*The Bridge at Braunau-am-Inn was originally published by ‘Zeus Publications in 2015. It has since been subject to revision and republished as this novel; ‘Crossing the Bridge’

Introduction

I have endeavoured to ensure that this novel is set in a carefully researched and historically accurate environment. History is continually being revised and rewritten, and such amendments often reveal the opinions, sometimes biased, of their originators. In what I have written I have tried to reflect what is the now generally accepted version of the rise, actions, fall and consequences of Nazism. Context, however, is always important; thus opinions and comments made by my narrator are, I believe, valid for the times within which his story is set – up to, but not beyond, 1989. And my narrator, of course, has his own biases, most of which arise from his experience of Nazism and form the heart of this book.

I have deliberately included hyphens in place names such a ‘Braunau-am-Inn’ whereas German text would not include them. This is an Anglicisation which I believe sits better in an English text.

Preface

There is a bridge over the River Inn that joins Austrian Braunau to German Simbach. But the construction that you can see now is not the one that is seared into my mind. What you would see is a benevolent, unremarkable structure of stone supported by three piers seated stolidly into the river bed; its roadway is flanked by footpaths on either side, edged by low and understated hand railings. Apart from some thin vertical lamp standards these railings are the highest part of the structure – there are no towers or arches framing it.

My bridge at Braunau-am-Inn is a vastly different construction. Made of iron, its imposing metal arches were destroyed on the first day of May 1945. It is fitting that the bridge was of iron because that hard, cold substance is what tanks and guns are made of – and those weapons are what whirl through my mind as I see my bridge. The machinery of war alongside another image, a journalist’s snapshot of Adolf Hitler crossing the bridge on 12 March 1938, and the citizens of Braunau greeting him in triumph as he enters his birth town and visits Nazism on Austria. And it is fitting that the bridge was destroyed seven years later – the day after Hitler had destroyed himself, his dog, and left his mistress with no choice but to kill herself.

But of course, he did not bring Nazism to Braunau or to Austria as a whole on that March day in 1938. It was there already, introduced insidiously to begin with then with increasing pressure – and violence – until the resistance of the Austrian Government was exhausted and the Anschluss declared just the day after Hitler drove across that iron bridge.

The ‘Anschluss’, the joining of Germany and Austria into one nation under Nazism for a thousand years, was all over in just seven. Germany lay in ruins, occupied and divided, a single nation no more. Austria was once again under its own sovereignty – albeit subject to the control of the conquering Allies for another ten years. It had emerged relatively unscathed physically or by reputation from its immoral affair with Nazism. An affair that many, probably most, of the Austrian populace had welcomed with – literally – open arms that day on the bridge at Braunau-am-Inn. Just three months later, prisoners from the German forced labour camp at Dachau were sent to the town of Mauthausen to begin the construction of Austria’s first such place of torment and death.

The proof of the Braunau enthusiasm for the return of their own son is in the photos taken at the bridge that day; a Roman Emperor entering Rome through a triumphal arch, the arch of the iron framework of the bridge’s supporting towers bearing the double-headed golden eagle shield of Austria and the Hapsburgian empire, but now completely shrouded by the cruel swastika-adorned flag of Hitler and his Nazis, and of Germany, and now of Germany and Austria. Hitler, in an open car – Mercedes, of course – accompanied by a phalanx of men in uniform, stopped exactly under that flag, smiling benevolently, in uniform, in profile, the slant of the peak of his military hat exactly matching the tilt of his straight, thin, Aryan nose; bending over and shaking hands with a smiling, blonde woman. A man dressed in civilian working clothes with a flat cap giving an exemplary Nazi straight-arm salute; a man in uniform – Austrian police perhaps – beside him giving the same salute. More smiling women and men, and children – a girl, perhaps twelve years old with fair pigtailed hair, gazing radiantly at this man in his cap standing in the back of his big black car, and the market square of Braunau just visible in the corner of the photo.

And why were they there, these now Austro-Germans? Was it to taste again the glories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire so rudely dismantled at the end of the First World War just twenty years previously? The alliance of that empire with Prussian Germany had cost the Austrian people and their country dearly. Why on earth were they about to embark on another doomed adventure with the same ally? Regard the photo; the eagerness for this affair is evident on every Austrian face. And regard the aftermath. How did Austria essentially get away with this enormous immoral blunder with barely a stain on its reputation? ‘Poor little Austria’ was the spin, and the spin was believed by the Austrians and most of the outside world.

C:\Users\Chris\Desktop\The Bridge at Braunau\Text in work\Braunau3[1].jpg

The original, destroyed bridge across the River Inn between Simbach, Germany and Braunau, Austria – May 1945

The original, destroyed bridge across the River Inn between Simbach, Germany and Braunau, Austria – May 1945

Chapter 1

Munich East Railway station, April 1989, and I’m travelling by train through the Bavarian countryside to the German border with Austria – the River Inn. Two-thirds of the way there and I’ll have to change trains at Mühldorf for the final leg of my journey to Simbach where the River Salzach flows into the Inn. The route is almost exactly due east and as I settle down into my seat, facing towards the front of the train so that I can see where I’m going, I recall my first journey to Simbach almost exactly 44 years previously.

Then, I and two others were bouncing around in a jeep sheltering behind and beside American tanks, stopping and hiding as we took inaccurate and sporadic ground fire from small arms often operated by frightened and dishevelled Hitler Youth; they were all, it seemed, that was left of the German army in Bavaria as it attempted to regroup. Regroup, perhaps, in the forlorn hope of preventing the capture of Hitler in his Eagle’s Nest fortress near Berchtesgaden, which is less than 200 km from where I now sit. A simple map would indicate that the area surrounding Berchtesgaden ought to belong to Austria as its shape is that of an almost closed-off human appendix forming a German salient into Austrian territory. Topographical study might perhaps lead to a different conclusion because of the juxtaposition of the mountain ranges with the River Inn as it enters Germany from Innsbruck in Austria to join later with the Salzach River at Simbach. Regardless of the geography, Hitler wasn’t at his nest in those dying days of April 1945. He was far away in his Berlin bunker and about to die there on the last day of that month.

My route to Simbach all those years ago had been almost directly south from the Danube River at Plattenburg and despite the opposition encountered – diminishing by the hour – it took only three days to cover the hundred miles or so.

I was twenty-two years old on 2 May 1945, the day I first laid eyes on the iron bridge of Braunau-am-Inn, or what remained of it. At that time I was an intelligence officer in the United States military attached to the 13th Armoured Division of the US Third Army. A year before I had been undergoing officer training in America when, coincident with the Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944, someone in the Directing Staff finally noticed that I was a fluent German speaker. It seemed my European ancestry might be useful once, as was confidently assumed, the US Army defeated the Germans in Europe and had to deal with many thousands of non-English-speaking prisoners-of-war. I was given an immediate temporary rank of Captain, put on a plane to England along with a number of other US Army German speakers, and arrived in France just as the Allies were breaking out of Normandy.

By mid-August I was in France and exclusively performing preliminary interrogations of German soldiers captured by the various formations of General Patton’s Third Army. I followed our front-line troops as a member of the general’s headquarters staff and saw very little actual fighting either on the ground or in the air; the American and British air forces had virtually eliminated the German Luftwaffe as a fighting force outside the bounds of its own country. Most of the enemy soldiers that were brought to me were completely exhausted and covered in dirt; some were wounded. Many still had defiance in their eyes, others the sadness of betrayal through lack of resources or reason to continue fighting. Most were hardened men, good soldiers and honourable, and knew little of the German order of battle. I learned not to waste much time on them; they were generally well treated by our men, fed, cleaned up and transported away from the battle fields to the safety of internment. There they would be re-interrogated and some who had slipped through my fingers through my inexperience would prove to have knowledge of value and would sometimes reveal terrible secrets.

Others, officers always, came my way with arrogance in their expressions, still unable to believe that the mighty Third Reich was facing defeat from the soft soldiers of a decadent American culture. They were harder to deal with and in my inexperienced hands gave little away, but there were others on my side who did extract items of intelligence – not by torture or other physical abuse (I saw none of that bar an occasional slap across the face in response to a particularly insulting remark to an interrogator) – but most often through flattery.

Then there were the few for whom I could feel only contempt and against whom I twice drew my pistol. Perhaps I could have, would have shot, had it not been for the restraining hand of my older and wiser sergeant. These were the carbuncles of Nazism – the SS officers trying to escape disguised as common soldiers, and the Gestapo agents handed over, reluctantly, by French citizens sometimes after very rough treatment. I did my best to cope with these people but my efforts to interrogate them were clouded with emotional disgust and were largely ineffective. I knew firsthand what they had done to civilians in France, and the news of the death camps within Germany and Eastern Europe was becoming common knowledge within the Allied intelligence communities.

The Third Army advanced steadily through Northern France, gaining in confidence, basking in the welcome given it by liberated populaces and perhaps becoming complacent. We seemed to be moving swiftly to a final victory, but on 16 December 1944 all hell broke loose not five miles from my comfortable billet at the rear of the combat battalions. The Germans counter-attacked us through the allegedly impenetrable Ardennes and the so-called ‘Battle of the Bulge’ began; it was nearly lost by us, not least because of the appalling weather that all but grounded the overwhelmingly superior British and US Army air forces. But we hung on, counter-attacked and, aided by the disintegrating German logistics supply chain, defeated the enemy after about six weeks. We lost a lot of men dead and injured but we held. A great many German soldiers gave up at that time and I was continually interrogating them and passing them back to the holding camps to the rear of the ever-moving front lines.

We pushed on towards the German hinterland and reached the mighty River Rhine before the end of January 1945. On the Russian Front many more German soldiers were facing the wrath of the Red Army and were never going to experience anything other than total destruction. Even surrender wasn’t a guaranteed option over there. Any hope of a German victory, or even a government-saving armistice with the three Western allied powers, effectively died over Christmas 1944.

Too late to join the action in the Ardennes, the US 13th Armoured Division arrived in the French port of Le Havre in late January 1945 fresh from training in England. It got acclimatised to war for a few weeks through performing occupation duties to the rear of the remainder of the rapidly advancing Third Army. I was attached to its 46th Tank Battalion and frequently met up with members of its intelligence staff as I looked after the increasingly motley groups of German prisoners.

The 13th was well into the German heartland near the city of Kassel by the beginning of April, and fully integrated into the combat structure of the US Third Army. It was ready to join battle with the remnants of the German armies west of Berlin, and I was moving with it, very excited at what was happening all around me. We advanced rapidly despite meeting very stiff resistance on several occasions. The British were not far away to the north of us alongside the Canadians and we were all racing to prevent the whole of northern Germany from falling to the Russians. I shared information with the Brits and Canadians on managing the occupied territory with the huge number of refugees and escaped prisoners-of-war that weaved through our lines. One of the British officers told me that on 15 April his unit had liberated an appalling death camp called Belsen; he could hardly talk about what he had seen; he just repeated, ‘You can have no idea, no idea at all’. I pressed him about it, but that was all he would say. He was right. I had no idea at all.

We had thought that the 13th might be part of the Allied push to Berlin – we headed in that direction until mid-April – but then we were suddenly ordered to swing south to help pacify Bavaria along with our sister division, the 11th Armoured.

There had been some stories about the 11th and the Battle of the Bulge where, it was said, in retaliation to a proven massacre of captured US soldiers by the German SS, some of the 11th had paid back in kind at a place called Chenogne. But we in the 13th knew that the 11th had been fighting continuously and generally against harder foes for much longer than us. So we accepted that they did what they did, and made no judgement. They were sent to fight their way through to Linz in Austria, where Hitler had been brought up and where the last, fanatical opposition from the Axis forces in that part of Europe was expected; those forces were trapped between the US Army coming in from the west, the Red Army coming in from the east and the British advancing from the south out of northern Italy. While we, the 13th, were sent to fight our way into Hitler’s Austrian birthplace, Braunau, facing Simbach across the River Inn.

We set out towards Braunau on 27 April, the day we heard that Austria had declared the Anschluss with Germany null and void. I thought then, ‘That won’t help you – perhaps from us but not from the Reds.’ On 30 April, what was left of the German radio service announced the death of Hitler. The next day the news came through that Berlin had been surrendered to the Russian Army – God help them, I thought. We were ordered to race to Simbach to prevent the destruction of the Inn Bridge, but when we arrived on 2 May we found that it had already been blown up. Cautiously, because we had encountered some sporadic resistance as we had advanced those last few miles into Simbach, we got out of the vehicles and looked at the twisted metal wreckage, half-covered by the water but still linking the two countries. A small advance party of foot soldiers was formed up and cautiously picked its way across the wreckage. A few white flags – scraps of sheets perhaps – started to appear at the windows of houses set around where we had stopped at the river’s edge. I could see similar flags and some people on foot across the other side of the river; one man appeared to be photographing us.

The ranking officer, a major, came up to me. ‘It’s just about all over. Those guys going across are going to be extra careful though – we don’t want anyone falling to some suicidal Kraut; I’ve put out a ring of sentries on this side and called for engineers to put pontoons across the river; they should be here tomorrow. When we get the tanks across we’re going to set up a HQ for the 13th right in the building where Hitler was born. Seems quite appropriate. I’ve been told it’s just off the Braunau market square that’s facing us over there.’ He pointed across the river and I let my gaze follow his gesture.

‘The sergeant leading those men across now has been told to find a friendly Austrian to show us exactly where it is. He’s also been told to get hold of the Mayor so I can tell him how he and his buddies have got to behave from now on.’

‘I’ll come over with you to translate,’ I said.

‘Like to have you with us, but a message has just come through that you are to stay right here and await new orders. I’ve no idea when they’ll come; that wasn’t included in the transmission. So make yourself comfortable Captain and wait it out – and be careful.’

He turned away before I could make any effort of a salute, not that we bothered with much of that at the best of times. I glanced back across the river, with its twisted metal bridge partly submerged and slumped like a wounded dragon. The icy cold water fast flowing around its spars and arches.

I sat on the ground with my back against the side of a tank, pillowed by my kitbag, and waited. There were no shots. I watched the major pick his way across the ironwork of the bridge and join a group of his soldiers and a knot of civilians in the Braunau market square – the Mayor and burghers, I guessed. The group disappeared out of sight and I dozed a little.

When I woke my first thought was, ‘It’s over… ‘Really over – just a bit of mopping up here and there, I expect.’

I considered where I was, and what I was looking at across the river, and who I was. An American soldier who had made it through eight months of combat. And I was a German. My parents were both German, born in Germany, lived in Dresden and immigrated to America with me in 1930 when it became clear that Jews, even completely secular ones like they and their own parents, were not going to do well in a Nazi-dominated German Reich. But both sets of my grandparents, whom I had not seen since leaving Europe when I was just seven, had stayed – too old, they claimed, to start new lives. I wondered how they had fared. Perhaps when I returned to see my parents again in Portland – soon now, I hoped – they would have news. Germany was defeated and my side had won, but had my race lost? I put such questions out of my mind as two jeeps raced into the midst of our tanks.

The first jeep contained a driver, a sergeant and a private toting a carbine. The second jeep carried a driver and another soldier manning a machine gun mounted on a pintle.

The sergeant got out, looked around, and seeing that I was an officer approached me.

‘Captain Stoebel?’ he asked, saluting in a quite formal manner.

I saluted back from my sitting position. ‘That’s me, Sergeant –?’

‘Johnson,’ he said. Then, handing me a sealed brown envelope, ‘Here are your orders, sir. We have to get you to a place called Dachau.’

Chapter 2

It was too late to set out for Dachau that evening. The German forces in southern Germany had not yet followed Berlin into unconditional surrender thus a night trip of nearly 100 miles through darkest countryside in unarmoured jeeps would not have been permitted. I and my escort bedded down in the ground floor of a vacant house near to the bridge and prepared for an early start. None of the escort had been to Dachau before, but I had heard the name indirectly through intelligence channels. It was reportedly a concentration camp, something like Belsen that the Brits had told me about a few days earlier. If I’m honest though, I still had no real idea what that actually meant. I asked Sergeant Johnson what he’d heard.

‘All that I know,’ he said, ‘is that it’s some form of prison camp which our guys got to three days ago. Here, take a look at this map.’ He pulled out a folded map from a waterproof document case hanging from a strap around his neck.

On