Don't You Know Me?

By Edgar B. Madsen

This is the account of a survivor of the post World War II Russian prison camps. He describes the descent from a happy childhood, including tutoring by a then 15-year old future Pope Benedict XVI in Latin and Greek, into a virtual hell on earth and his ensuing salvation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781312881822

Book preview

Don't You Know Me?

DON’T YOU KNOW ME?

A Soviet Prison Camp Survivor’s Account

By

RUDOLF M. ALTINGER

As told to

EDGAR B. MADSEN

Fifth Edition

Copyright© 2015 by Rudolf M. Altinger

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-312-69942-7

This book was self-published using Lulu (www.lulu.com).

Inquiries about the publishing of this book may be directed to:

Dan Brennan

63 Silverbrook Rd., Shrewsbury, NJ 07702

[e-mail]

The author may be reached at:

Edgar B. Madsen

47 McComb Road, Princeton, NJ 08540

Telephone: [phone]

Email: [e-mail]

Preface

Adolf Hitler was in no mood to listen on February 13, 1945. His General Chief of Staff was proposing evacuation of battered German Army units from the path of 180 Russian divisions advancing toward Poland. General Guderian later recounted Hitler's response:

His fists raised, his cheeks flushed with rage, his whole body trembling, the man stood there in front of me, beside himself with fury and having lost all self-control. After each outburst Hitler would stride up and down the carpet edge, then suddenly stop immediately before me and hurl his next accusation in my face. He was almost screaming, his eyes seemed to pop out of his head and the veins stood out on his temples.[1]

There would be no evacuation. This was the Fuehrer's order! Six days later, the consequence of Hitler's intransigence descended upon a teenage German infantryman when he was captured by the Russians in Poland. The war ended three months later. The young soldier remained a Prisoner of War for another three years.

Under Stalin, Russians treated POWs with contempt, claiming their forced labor as reparations. Prison labor was an exploitable resource. Conditions of captivity were cruel and inhumane.

In all, more than two million Germans were taken prisoner by the Russians during WWII. More than one million of them died in prison. In some prison camps, perhaps fewer than five out of one hundred survived.  This is the account of one survivor, the teenage infantryman. He describes the descent from a happy childhood into a virtual hell on earth and his ensuing salvation.

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[1] William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York:  Simon & Schuster, 1959) p. 1,103

PARADISE LOST

Precisely eight years after the end of the war to end all wars, I was born on Armistice Day, 1926. The youngest of six boys, I grew up in the little Bavarian town of Glonn, fifteen miles southeast of Munich in foothills of the Alps. Naturally, being the youngest, I was always trying to keep up with my older brothers whenever we played games, went fishing for trout in the clear mountain stream behind our house, or hiking in the mountains, which was nearly every Sunday afternoon.

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The Altinger Boys. Hans, Pep, Max, Hermann, Ernst, Rudy (from left to right)

It was a happy childhood, full of fun and good memories. My father owned the utility company, which produced electricity for our little town of about 900 people. Everybody knew him and the Altinger boys, as my lively brothers and I were known. But we were brought up with discipline. Each of us had chores to do like weeding the garden, which supplied a major portion of our food.

Every morning, after a light breakfast, we attended 7 a.m. Mass in our town’s picturesque Catholic Church where I served as an altar boy. Then we walked across the street to our school, where one of our teachers was a committed Nazi. He would frequently say that he longed for the day when our church across the street would be reduced to a pile of rubble.

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Rudy's hometown of Glonn

During the 1930s the Nazis came to power and tightened their grip on our daily lives. The people did not like it, but they could not do anything about it. First there were little inconveniences. For example, a decree was issued that nobody could fish for trout unless he was a member of the Nazi party. Later, it became grim. One morning in 1938, the school building was adorned with an effigy of the teacher with a communist emblem showing under an open brown Nazi shirt. Soon the Gestapo (Secret Police) came to interrogate every family in town about the effigy. They pinned the blame on a couple of guys and sent them to a concentration camp. We never heard anything more about those two again.

In those days, every teenager had to be in the Hitler Youth Movement. At first we resisted because, in the beginning, participation was voluntary. However, when the Gestapo came to town, they asked my parents why my brothers and I did not go to the Hitler Youth meetings. My father said we were too busy with chores and our studies. But the Gestapo said that if we did not join, we would not be allowed to continue our education. Finally, on March 25, 1939, executive orders related to the 1936 Hitler Youth Law made youth service compulsory.[2] So, along with all the other teenagers in town, we joined the Hitler Youth. That is where we received preliminary military training and learned map reading and how to shoot a rifle. Target practice was a regular weekly exercise.

After the war started, fear and suspicion became our companions in daily life. You had to watch out what you said because the Gestapo had an informer in the town. At first we did not know who the informer was, but later we learned it was our mailman. When my oldest brother was killed early in the war, my mother complained bitterly about the stupidity of war. Our mayor, who was a family friend, came over to our house one day and told her to shut up or he would have to report her to the authorities. After that she kept quiet but got sick and died a few months later.

At age 15, in 1942, I attended prep school in Traunstein, a Bavarian town where my 18-year-old brother, Hans, was starting his college education. That is where he was tutored in Latin and Greek by an exceptionally bright 15-year-old classmate we nicknamed Ratzi. Years later, Ratzi entered the priesthood, became a Cardinal and one of Pope John Paul II's closest advisors. When Hans traveled to Rome for a visit with his old classmate in November 2004, the Cardinal confided that he was looking forward to retirement. But now he is the Pope![3]

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[2] Richard Bessel, ed., Life in the Third Reich, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p.