We could already hear the rumble of distant artillery fire when I received orders to report to the provincial headquarters of the Hitler Youth, back in Germany. I hoped the Luftwaffe had finally insisted on my services. A day before I left the village, Dr. Robert Ley, Reich leader of the German Labor Front, inspected our nearly completed project and pinned the War Service Cross on several chests, including mine. Dr. Ley was visibly under the influence of alcohol at the time: members of his entourage had to help him climb out of the anti-tank ditch. I never quite understood why the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal sentence him to death but handed Albert Speer, who directed four and a half million slave laborers, 20 years in prison. Unlike Speer, Ley did not assume personal guilt for the crimes of the regime, nor did he plead guilty to any charge.
Back in Germany, I found the Luftwaffe would have to wait. I was ordered to assume command “temporarily” of the Hitler Youth district in which my home town was situated. I would never have reached the rank of Bannführer at 16 under ordinary circumstances, but we were desperately short of leaders. My predecessor had been promoted to deputy Reich leader and posted to Berlin. I didn’t know it then, but I was the last district leader before the Gotterdammerung engulfed us.
On December 16, 1944, Hitler loosed the last major offensive on the Western Front. Under cover of the miserable winter weather, the initial thrust by 180 divisions — there was no reserve left — took the Americans by near-total surprise. As soon as the cloud cover lifted, though, the crushing Allied air superiority made itself felt. On Christmas Eve, 1944, a clear, cold Sunday, a formation of B-17 Flying Fortresses leveled much of my home town, like nearly all German towns within 30 miles of the front. My grandmother, my two aunts, and their two small children made it to a bomb shelter and survived. Our farm was totally destroyed, including the 17 head of cattle and three horses. About 180 townspeople died, but I grieved most for my dog Prinz, a German shepherd. I had long since become inured to the loss of human life. That was just another sacrifice so the Fatherland might live.
At last, a few days after New Year’s, I received urgent orders to report to a small air base near Kassel. I found myself in the company of perhaps 60 other men, most of them Luftwaffe officers. We had one skill in common: all of us were top glider and sailplane pilots. To our disgust, we were ordered to practice pinpoint landings in DSF-230 gliders, which were nothing but plywood boxes with wings, capable of transporting 12 to 16 fully armed soldiers. These unwieldy craft were towed to a height of about 1500 feet and then released. I had often flown on thermal updrafts for three to four hours in graceful sailplanes, but DSF-230s just headed for the ground like wounded ducks. Rather euphemistically, they were called assault gliders, since each was equipped with a machine gun pointing through the windshield. Our task was to get our load of men down to the ground as quickly as possible through the enemy fire, even if it meant shearing the wings off between two trees. Our machines were expendable. We, the pilots, didn’t stand to fare much better. If we survived the landing alive and well — only a 50 percent possibility — we were supposed to become commandos. The only way back home was through enemy lines.
I suppose I should be grateful to General George Patton and his Third Army. On January 18, the day we were operations-ready, our armies were in disorderly retreat. It had become pointless to use glider-borne assaults, where no solid front existed. To my utter consternation, the Luftwaffe acceded to a request by the Hitler Youth and put me in charge of organizing a Volksturm unit in a small town near the Belgian border.
By Hitler’s orders, as of November of 1944, all Hitler Youth members 15 or older, as well as any man up to the age of 65 who could still walk, were summarily drafted. This, then, was the Volksturm the last ditch warriors of Germany. According to our diabolically efficient Minister of Propaganda and Volk Enlightenment Joseph Goebbels, who was second only to Hitler as a spellbinding orator, the “people’s storm” had the task of defending each meter of sacred German soil. In reality, most of the Old Bones, as we called the senior members, sensibly disappeared in the general chaos or surrendered without firing a shot. Not so the Hitler Youth. During the last month of the war alone, tens of thousands of boys were killed, especially in the savage fighting against the Russians. Fittingly enough, they were among the very last defenders of Hitler’s bunker.