During the first week of April we celebrated our graduation in a pub in Spandau. We were nineteen students in our class who made it. Two had flunked. Of the whole class of nineteen only four survived the war. During March 1938 Hitler's armies marched into Austria. The "Anschluss," the union of the two countries became a "fait accompli." It was welcomed by the Germans and the majority of the Austrians. The "Arbeitsdienst" which Hitler had created in 1936 was now the only prior obstacle to my entering the university in the fall of 1938. After turning seventeen every German male and female had to register to join this work force. New military planes started crowding the sky. The military draft was ordered by Hitler in 1937. Dark political clouds were already rising in the German skies. But Hitler could count numerous previous accomplishments prior to this without any interference from the victors of World War I. The occupation of the western border of the Rhine River was the first step. The conditions of the Treaty of Versailles had stipulated the demilitarization of the left bank of the Rhine. The creation of the Luftwaffe was Hitler's next step. Until now Germany was only permitted to use gliders and sail planes. No military planes were allowed. The Allies restricted the German army to 100.000 men. The sudden rearmament happened without any serious protest from the surrounding countries. The Saarland, which was created as a buffer zone, had returned to Germany in 1935. All these steps were welcomed by at least 90% of the German population. Unemployment had disappeared. But the union of Germany and Austria began to ring bells of alarm in France, Poland and England. England and France started to arm. Even some Germans could not hide their misgivings that Hitler was heading straight for a war. One dared not utter these thoughts publicly, but the older generation, like my parents, could see the handwriting on the wall. My mother had listened to one of Hitler's speeches during a meeting in 1932. She came back spellbound by the dynamics and enthusiasm of the crowd and the convincing political program Hitler presented with great eloquence. I was only twelve years old when I heard the discussion between my parents at the dinner table. She thought one should give Hitler a chance, but she could not convince my father.

A few weeks after the Abitur I had to enter the Arbeitsdienst, Hitler's labor service. There was no way out. I would have to dig ditches for six months if I wanted to study medicine. The pay was 25 pfennigs per day. Within a couple of days I found myself in a camp in Pomerania close to the Polish border. The camp was located next to a small village of not more than a hundred inhabitants, all of them farmers. We received ill-fitting black boots with long shafts and worn bulky work clothes. The wearing of socks was not allowed. They issued us "Fusslappen," a two-by-two foot piece of cotton with which we had to wrap our feet before we could put the long-shafted boots on. As a consequence, every second man walked around with large blisters. I wrote my father to send me moleskin and tape, and every evening I went from bed to bed to treat the blistered feet. It was not long before the troop leader found out that I took care of my comrade's sore feet. I was ordered to appear before the commander and received two day's imprisonment for the unauthorized treatment of other personnel.

On the first day, while I was standing in line, the troop leader asked, "Who knows how to drive?" A driver's license could not be had before the age of eighteen. As a sixteen-years-old I had to go through a ten-hour psycho-technical examination before I was permitted to take the driver's test. When I heard the question "Who knows how to drive?" I thought that driving a car in these surroundings did not sound too bad, so I raised my hand. The troop leader acknowledged my raised hand, and shouted at me:

"Otto, you will be assigned to scrub the twelve-cylinder toilet seats for the next two weeks." Everybody around me started laughing when I expected to be assigned to a motor vehicle but ended up having to scrub the "twelve-cylinder" latrine. Here for the first time I was confronted with the attitude of the people in charge of our training. Their main purpose was to suppress individualism. This taught me never again to raise my hand and volunteer for anything. Whether rain or shine, we had to march five miles to our project, which consisted of building a road between two villages which had no connection to one other and no access to a main highway. The sergeant always kept us an extra 20 minutes at work, so we had to jog 30 minutes to be in time for supper. A half hour later we had to appear in our uniforms with our spades, which we had cleaned in the meantime to a shiny surface. The black-shafted boots had to be freshly polished for the strenuous exercise to follow. Exhausted, we hit the bed to rise again at 5:30 a.m. for another day.

After three months I was detailed to a tree-planting group ten miles from the camp. We had bicycles for the ride. The sergeant could not stand it if we did not keep the prescribed distance between each bike on the narrow, sandy, wooden footpath. He got mad and commanded, "Dismount your bikes! Carry your bikes on your shoulders and start running." Sometimes we dragged our bikes for 20 minutes in that manner. These chicaneries were practiced all through the six months and created a lot of hatred. But we figured, "The whole circus lasts only six months. We can take it."

After three weeks of planting trees, I was detailed again to road construction. I got the job of maintaining the lorries' tract. We had to fill 20 skip loaders standing on rails with sand and push them downhill one mile and in that way spread the sand onto the roadbed. One day I loosened a few bolts on the metal pieces which connected one track to the next. As the next trainload of sand rolled downhill, it jumped the track, throwing all the skip loaders on the side. One hundred men had a nice rest while I had to explain how the bolts happened to come loose.

In the fall Hitler again created a crisis by accusing Czechoslovakia of mistreating the Sudeten-Germans in their country. Daladier and Chamberlain, the French and English minister presidents, came to Munich to negotiate. They let Hitler occupy the Sudetenland under the condition that this was the last territorial demand he would make. Nobody had the courage to oppose him. He gave orders to start building the West Wall. This was to be a new defense line opposite the French Maginot line. Without delay he needed a large labor force on the western border of Germany. We had to leave our camp in Pomerania and were shipped to a small town near Saarbrücken on the French border. Here began the real hard work of building bunkers with thousands of tons of concrete. No large mechanical equipment was available. Every sack of cement we had to carry on our backs. The rain soaked the clay, and at the end of the day we looked as if we had rolled in mud. In the afternoon we had to clean up and shine our spades, blacken our boots and get ready for the exercises. There was not enough time to scrape off all the clay and shine our boots. We just put large gobs of shoe polish over the clay to make the boots black again. That was an expensive practice when one gets paid only 25 pfennigs a day. So, some of us broke into the commissary and stole all the black shoe polish we could find. The camp commander was furious. For two days we had to work without food, but nobody turned in the guilty parties.

© Irmgard & Jürgen Otto 1993 All rights reserved