First published in Great Britain in 2016 by
Pen & Sword History
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S70 2AS
Copyright 2016
ISBN: 978 1 47385 820 6
PDF ISBN: 978 1 47385 823 7
EPUB ISBN: 978 1 47385 822 0
PRC ISBN: 978 1 47385 821 3
The right of Don A. Gregory and Wilhelm R. Gehlen to be identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.
Typeset in Ehrhardt by
Replika Press Pvt Ltd, India
Printed and bound in England
By CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Pen & Sword Books Ltd incorporates the Imprints of Pen & Sword Aviation, Pen & Sword Family History, Pen & Sword Maritime, Pen & Sword Military, Pen & Sword Discovery, Pen & Sword Politics, Pen & Sword Atlas, Pen & Sword Archaeology, Wharncliffe Local History, Wharncliffe True Crime, Wharncliffe Transport, Pen & Sword Select, Pen & Sword Military Classics, Leo Cooper, The Praetorian Press, Claymore Press, Remember When, Seaforth Publishing and Frontline Publishing.
For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact
PEN & SWORD BOOKS LIMITED
47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England
E-mail:
Website: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk
To the memory of our mothers
Contents
List of Plates
1. Will Gehlen, aged eight, in full Jungvolk uniform. (Wilhelm Gehlen)
2. A 1930s map of the Rhineland where Will grew up.
3. Will and other boys are allowed to inspect a quad 20mm flak gun. (Wilhelm Gehlen)
4. Wills troop with other Hitler Youth and Jungvolk in morale-building exercises in the Eifel. (Wilhelm Gehlen)
5. Group photo of Wills troop on an excursion to Bavaria. (Wilhelm Gehlen)
6. Obergefreiter Lorenz Gehlen, Wills father, in uniform. (Property of the Gehlen family)
7. Dad (right) on patrol near Cholm, Russia, in April 1942. (Wilhelm Gehlen)
8. Dad (far left) listening in while plans are being made; somewhere near Vilikye Luki, Russia, in 1942. (Wilhelm Gehlen)
9. Brother Len and his group of Hitler Youth on the march during training exercises in the Harz area, 1943. (Wilhelm Gehlen)
10. Len and five of his mates no doubt planning an attack on the invading Americans. (Wilhelm Gehlen)
11. A permit and receipt for having paid the tax for owning a dog. (Wilhelm Gehlen)
12. An official document granting a farmer permission to slaughter a pig. (Wilhelm Gehlen)
13. Ration card for children aged six to fourteen. (Wilhelm Gehlen)
14. Major General Reinhard Gehlen, Wills uncle. (US Army Signal Corps)
Overture
A twelve-year-old Hitler Youth single-handedly trying to save the Thousand-Year Reich from destruction in 1945 might seem a little far-fetched today, but it was not so far from the truth at the time. Millions of us had the same idea, but that is only a small part of what life was about during the last days of the war. As early as 1941, some food items were becoming scarce at home and in the final months of the war, most of Germanys soldiers and civilians were hungry. Trying to save themselves and their families became more important than continuing to fight for a lost cause. After the war, Germans began starving by the thousands. It was a struggle for many just to find enough food to survive from day to day. This book is my small contribution to history as seen through the eyes of a young boy growing up in a small rural community just outside Mnchen-Gladbach, or M-G as those who lived there called it. I was barely a teenager when the walls of the Reich Chancellery came crashing down but some events are as real today as they were then.
I never learned English in school and my first teachers for that foreign language were American GIs who spoke everything from New York Yankee to Mississippi Rebel. My native language is German or more correctly, a lower Rhine German slang. I dont have a high school education or a college degree in political science and I have never been politically active. I have never voted for any political party and do not support one now. I do listen to the politicians promises, but when the voting is over and done with, those promises all go out the window, whether we are talking about Washington, the German Bundestag, the Kremlin or some capital in deepest Africa. As I have said many times since I became an adult, the only honest politician I ever remember was Adolf Hitler. In his campaigning he said, Give me five years and you wont recognise Germany and he told the truth. The Germany of 1938 was nothing like the Germany of 1933 but then the Germany of 1945 was nothing like the Germany of 1940 either.
Times were bad, much worse than just eating horsemeat or using discarded cement bags for toilet paper. Folks can get by without a broom or new clothes every year but one has to eat. Americans shouldnt say that could never happen here, because in fact it did. The Great Depression of the early 1930s didnt just happen in the United States; it was far worse in Germany and it had already been going on for a decade. Adolf Hitler promised us that things would get better if we would just elect him Chancellor. Contrary to what you may have been taught, we did have elections and we elected Hitler, although maybe not quite fair and square by American standards of today, but by European standards of the time, it was not an unusual election. He got hold of the government in January 1933, the year I was born, and sure enough things got better almost overnight and kept getting better even after the war came. After the war was lost however, things were even worse than during the depression if you can believe it. Hitlers Thousand-Year Reich had only lasted twelve years, but for a young boy, twelve years is forever.
I want to describe in this book our daily life in the final years of the Second World War and shortly after. It was a time when the whole world went mad; when people in Germany lived on four ounces of rock-hard margarine and one egg per week and whatever else they could find that wouldnt kill them if they ate it. It was a time when a simple broom handle would cost you practically nothing but you had to have three or four permits with stamps and signatures to get one if it was available. Seventy-plus years is a long time to remember some of these things but theyre a part of my childhood and I do have some notes I made, and most importantly, I have my mothers cookbook where she wrote down recipes that she tried and then tested on us. Several of those recipes are included at the end of this book.
There is an old German dialect proverb that translates as, What a farmer cant grow himself, he wont eat. Well, today, when food is plentiful, it is easy to pick and choose what you eat, but in the times described here, you ate what was available or you starved. Life was as simple as that and food was always on your mind. We ate without questioning what it was or where it came from. This however is not a gardening guide or a cookbook. It is the survival guide we created at the time to get us through another day. Skinny cooks cant be trusted is one of my favourite sayings today, but when I was a boy, you would have had a difficult time finding a cook who wasnt skinny. There were new proverbs created toward the end of the war that reflected the times.
