The Life Of A German Soldier

Surrender

July 18th, 1947

"They pulled us out of those trucks and lined us all up, we kept our hands raised while they looked through our pockets."

"Continue." the news reporter said in English with a German translator standing next to him.

"We stood there for a while, about fifteen minutes or so. Some of us were shot, I was one of the lucky few. This was the time I had lost my closest military friends, Ernst Schwarz from the Wehrmact and Wilhelm Müller from an SS Panzer Division. I thought I would be next, but a year later I guess I'm still here in one piece."

Cameras flashed around the room and people took notes in their notebooks, listening to every word the translator spoke from German to English. Albert's hands shook and he tapped his foot on the floor for awhile, having no idea what questions the man would throw back at him.

"Where did you go after that, Schroeder?"

"We walked for miles, the rest of the evening and into the night. We made it all the way to Romania. A couple of soldiers tried to escape from our group but they were never close to making it out. I stayed quiet the whole way until we stopped at another prison camp, I've already been to two before this one. This last one I really suffered at, I had no food for days. The Russians gave us old or left over scraps of food. Some of it was rotten but I had to eat it anyways."

Albert paused and took a deep breath. He put his head down and rubbed his hands down his face, not wanting to speak of this again to anyone.

"Please continue, Schroeder."

"Um, I stayed there for a couple of weeks until they would move us to different camps. They stuck us behind barbed wire fences with almost no place to walk around. We did nothing, sometimes labor or they would force us to watch our comrades get tortured or even killed. If we did not do what we were told, we were shot on sight. I never did anything but follow the orders of the Soviet Officers, I wanted to keep my life to have a beautiful wife and children which I have now."

"So Schroeder, why did you want to come to The United States after the war?"

"To escape from Germany, I never wanted to go back. The way that country was controlled changed my life. At the end of the war, I was freed from the camp and was sent back to Berlin hoping to find my family, that was gone and perhaps dead. That's when I broke down on the streets in front of my home that was partly blown. People that walked around the streets stared at me, no one came over to comfort me, still knowing I was apart of an army that changed the world."

"Anything else, Schroeder?"

"No. I never want to think or speak about that time again."