Русский корабль - иди нахуй

[Armybrat 41,314]

1 hour ago, 956 Worldwide said:

It’s important not to go too far with this. There’s some good evidence that Russian and Chinese assertiveness and aggression is not helping them.  The chart below is in German (I can’t find English) but the question is— which countries are trustworthy partners for Germany. The data is from late last year and is compared with 2019. 
 

Of course, the big jump for the U.S. involves the replacement of Donald Trump and we can expect some degree of disillusionment to set in. But the slumps for China and Russia are not linked to Joe Biden.

 

I was referring to prioritizing, not trusting. But it looks like the Germans have more faith in the US government than our own citizens do. (/jk)

[Brisketexan 106,614]

23 minutes ago, Shady Ray said:

Yeah, it is really weird. And it is unavoidable but they still try. It takes a looong time to get them to talk about it, and unless you have essentially "gone native", they won't talk about it to non-Germans. But it is always in the air.

 

Somewhat related...of all the spots in this town to get Chinese food, my wife's favorite place is way out in Dachau not far from where her Oma lived. Dachau is not just the camp, but also a very pleasant little town outside of Munich. So about twice a year she says, come on...let's go out to Dachau and get crispy duck. So off we go, 25 minutes out there, take a left at the gates to the Camp, one block down...pick up the takeout order, and back home for dinner.

 

Fucking bizarre.

It's also fascinating to realize how ordinary it is to discuss a particular city or town, and note that "all of this is new construction since the war, as 80% of the town was destroyed."  It's like that all over.  Having had your shit wrecked completely is just a foundational fact of life.

[Onboard 2.0 9,083]

24 minutes ago, Shady Ray said:

Yeah, it is really weird. And it is unavoidable but they still try. It takes a looong time to get them to talk about it, and unless you have essentially "gone native", they won't talk about it to non-Germans. But it is always in the air.

 

Somewhat related...of all the spots in this town to get Chinese food, my wife's favorite place is way out in Dachau not far from where her Oma lived. Dachau is not just the camp, but also a very pleasant little town outside of Munich. So about twice a year she says, come on...let's go out to Dachau and get crispy duck. So off we go, 25 minutes out there, take a left at the gates to the Camp, one block down...pick up the takeout order, and back home for dinner.

 

Fucking bizarre.

There's gotta be a really bad joke in there about crispy duck, and Dachau, but not in front of the Deutsche folks, that's for damned sure...

[TexasEd 8,248]

1 hour ago, Armybrat said:

It is easy to understand why the Germans prioritize Russia over the US.... because geography.

But they apparently don’t have much of a problem with dictatorships (like we don’t) because of economic ties.

And half the country depended on Russia not too long ago.  It's almost like the reunification of Germany was a trojan horse.

[Armybrat 41,314]

RE: Shady Ray’s inlaws’ uncle....

After his limited participation in the Bulge in Decembe-January, 1945, my dad was sent to a Paris hospital to recover from a severe bout of the malaria for a couple of weeks. While a patient there, he joined a Poker group of combat veterans to pass the time. 
During one long game, another officer excused himself to go to the latrine. After a prolonged absence someone went to check on him, only to find that he had quietly hung himself. Beforehand, there was no indication of any kind of mental trauma or instability. Suffice to say, most of the patients there just shrugged it off as if unexpected death was to be found anywhere at any time.

[Shady Ray 1,633]

40 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

It's also fascinating to realize how ordinary it is to discuss a particular city or town, and note that "all of this is new construction since the war, as 80% of the town was destroyed."  It's like that all over.  Having had your shit wrecked completely is just a foundational fact of life.

Yeah, and the length of time that it was completely fubar'd in the following years was long enough to completely scar the next generation. Both of my inlaws were born in the immediate post-war years. Father-in-law in Munich to a single mother, mother-in-law in a displaced persons camp which I will leave out so as not to get too specific to Sudetendeutsch refugees. Both grew up here.

 

I asked them one night over dinner, "So, did you remember the post-war rubble and destruction in Munich?" They said, "of course". So I then asked, "So when would you say the rubble was completely gone?" And in perfect unision..."1964". I don't know if it was some commemorative event or something, but it was as factual as can be. 19 years of absorption of the sins of your parents, visible every day of your life. Heavy shit.

Edited January 20, 2022 by Shady Ray

[SimonBolivar 11,026]

1 hour ago, TexasEd said:

And half the country depended on Russia not too long ago.  It's almost like the reunification of Germany was a trojan horse.

East Germany only had 22% of the German population in 1989 and even those that were communists were not fond of the Soviet Union. Foreign oppressors are unpopular when they haul all your equipment to the Soviet Union for reparations while the other side is getting the Marshall Plan and having relative freedom to tell the USA no from time to time. 

Edited January 20, 2022 by SimonBolivar

[SimonBolivar 11,026]

1 hour ago, Shady Ray said:

 mother-in-law in a displaced persons camp which I will leave out so as not to get too specific to Sudetendeutsch refugees.

Interesting, I'm guessing (based purely on the happenstance of their geography) that the wife's maternal grandparents were pretty happy with the SdP and then the NSDAP? (sorry to pry, but that's an interesting plight)

 

 

[956 Worldwide 35,516]

57 minutes ago, Bravo said:

what's more amazing is RUS is ahead of China. Didn't Russia occupy half the country and do horrific things to the Germans for +40 yrs? What did China ever do? lul

The Chinese suffer from being completely foreign, from (let’s admit it) racism and zero cultural affinity. You might make some money with them, is the European point of view, but there’s no way to be “partners.” The flip side is that it’s hard to spark any real concern about their behavior, or strong feelings of any sort— again, with the exception of the Brits who still see themselves as a maritime nation.

 

[956 Worldwide 35,516]

The scars of Sudetenland run deep. The current progressive foreign minister in the Czech Republic sparked a firestorm recently for a pre-ministerial suggestion he had that maybe a Sudeten Days cultural festival could take place in the Czech Republic and be a venue for some mutual soul searching and hatchet burial. This was an absolute nonstarter and he was accused of potentially trying to return property to Nazis. 

[Shady Ray 1,633]

12 minutes ago, SimonBolivar said:

Interesting, I'm guessing (based purely on the happenstance of their geography) that the wife's maternal grandparents were pretty happy with the SdP and then the NSDAP? (sorry to pry, but that's an interesting plight)

 

No problem. To be honest, even after 15 years as a member of a very tight-knit German family (I see my in-laws almost every day and I would put my father-in-law as one of my closest friends), it still wouldn't be seen as appropriate for me to ask about the family's position on National Socialism during the Third Reich. And I was told very early on by my wife that it is not proper form to pry, so it took me years to even start getting access to bits and pieces of the history from my mother in law. She doesn't speak English very well, so it wasn't until I had built up my German to fluency where we could develop enough equity to talk freely about this stuff...within limits of course. But over time, with the drip of info, there are enough signs there to ascertain if you are halfway informed. So, yeah, mother-in-law's maternal side was down for the cause, as were most Sudetendeutsch. Plus, I have a ton of the family records, including the Ariernachweisen ("Aryan Records"), which are still valid forms of ID here, which is a bit bizarre to have sitting in your basement, but you can put things together pretty quickly once govt docs start coming into play. Certain types of documents were mandatory...certain things were voluntarily obtained. 

[pantone159 727]

3 hours ago, The Royal We said:

Damn.  You are right, the vast majority of Americans cannot even fathom this level of emotional/mental scarring.  Even those American families who have lost loved ones fighting overseas were not all consumed by it like the Germans were.  It was overseas, not here surrounding all facets of their being for years and years.

This is also relevant for understanding the thinking of Russia. Although the Soviet Union eventually won the war, the effects were overwhelming and catastrophic to the nation. Somewhere around 20-30 million died, something like 100x the number of US people who died in the war. And though the war ended in Germany, it was primarily fought in the USSR, with no shortage of horrible acts by the German occupiers, and the nation was in ruins afterward. These memories lived (and still live) and affect decisions and thoughts still, and are not always appreciated in this country.

E.g. During the Cold War the Russian army was built for offense, with emphasis on armored vehicles to take the fight elsewhere. From the USA, it may have seemed like the Russians were looking to attack and were a threat, but from the Russian point of view, it was mainly that, given the memories of the leaders at the time, the Russians were EXTREMELY determined that, if there were another war, it would NOT be fought in Russia, and was not based in a threatening attitude. Russian concerns about NATO moving into Ukraine hit the same nerves.

[SimonBolivar 11,026]

11 minutes ago, Shady Ray said:

No problem. To be honest, even after 15 years as a member of a very tight-knit German family (I see my in-laws almost every day and I would put my father-in-law as one of my closest friends), it still wouldn't be seen as appropriate for me to ask about the family's position on National Socialism during the Third Reich. And I was told very early on by my wife that it is not proper form to pry, so it took me years to even start getting access to bits and pieces of the history from my mother in law. She doesn't speak English very well, so it wasn't until I had built up my German to fluency where we could develop enough equity to talk freely about this stuff...within limits of course. But over time, with the drip of info, there are enough signs there to ascertain if you are halfway informed. So, yeah, mother-in-law's maternal side was down for the cause, as were most Sudetendeutsch. Plus, I have a ton of the family records, including the Ariernachweisen ("Aryan Records"), which are still valid forms of ID here, which is a bit bizarre to have sitting in your basement, but you can put things together pretty quickly once govt docs start coming into play. Certain types of documents were mandatory...certain things were voluntarily obtained. 

Great stuff, and when you said that they were ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland then I pretty much knew that was going to be the case for that generation with the SdP being so popular by Germans. It's interesting to see how Germans are so humbled by this past in general. My in-laws are illiterate campesinos from Northern Mexico and they have seen/done some shit in the revolution and post revolution periods that would make you think that they'd be a bit....demure, but nope they'll tell you anything you want to know.

 

By the way have you seen Final Account on Netflix? It's nothing earth shattering for someone that lives in Germany, but for the rest of us you could tell how difficult it was for most of them to talk about the war. A few were in denial, but I'm sure their kids were embarrassed watching it akin to segregationists here in the South.

[Shady Ray 1,633]

12 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

The scars of Sudetenland run deep. The current progressive foreign minister in the Czech Republic sparked a firestorm recently for a pre-ministerial suggestion he had that maybe a Sudeten Days cultural festival could take place in the Czech Republic and be a venue for some mutual soul searching and hatchet burial. This was an absolute nonstarter and he was accused of potentially trying to return property to Nazis. 

I hadn't heard that. Really interesting. I honestly didn't realize that the Czech's still had concerns that that land would even possibly revert.

 

And yeah, it runs really deep. I knew the maternal grandmother before she died and the significance and trauma of the expulsion was regularly a topic of the old lady's rants. Particularly during the Eurovision Song Contest when the Czech's came on...every year she would curse the Czechs, flip the channel until their song was over, and then flip it back and enjoy the rest of the show. Laughed my ass off every time given how serious bidness this apparently was to a 95 year old woman. But yeah, it was always as though it had happened yesterday, which I guess is understandable given how it set off 4 years of displaced hell. They knew they would never get the land back that they left, but they damn sure felt it was still theirs...but them's the breaks when you end up on the wrong side of that particular war. 

 

[Hefeweizen 5,416]

3 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

It's also fascinating to realize how ordinary it is to discuss a particular city or town, and note that "all of this is new construction since the war, as 80% of the town was destroyed."  It's like that all over.  Having had your shit wrecked completely is just a foundational fact of life.

My mother grew up in Germany during the war, so when I was little in the seventies and we’d go to visit there were still occupying French soldiers, still scars from combat in some places , and definitely still lots of old people who had seen some shit. The old man who lived next to my aunt was a real nazi.  A tank commander on the East front and decorated.  He was lucky in that he lived in the west or after the war he would have been dead if the Russians found him.

[956 Worldwide 35,516]

The U.S. Navy has decided to tell everyone who might be interested that there’s a guided missile submarine in the eastern Mediterranean that can rain Tomahawks on targets 1,000 miles away.

[TexasEd 8,248]

40 minutes ago, Shady Ray said:

I hadn't heard that. Really interesting. I honestly didn't realize that the Czech's still had concerns that that land would even possibly revert.

 

And yeah, it runs really deep. I knew the maternal grandmother before she died and the significance and trauma of the expulsion was regularly a topic of the old lady's rants. Particularly during the Eurovision Song Contest when the Czech's came on...every year she would curse the Czechs, flip the channel until their song was over, and then flip it back and enjoy the rest of the show. Laughed my ass off every time given how serious bidness this apparently was to a 95 year old woman. But yeah, it was always as though it had happened yesterday, which I guess is understandable given how it set off 4 years of displaced hell. They knew they would never get the land back that they left, but they damn sure felt it was still theirs...but them's the breaks when you end up on the wrong side of that particular war. 

 

Reminds me of the Greek grandma in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" always rambling about the Turks.

 

[Armybrat 41,314]

Reminds me of of the family story when one of my cousins newly recruited to the US Army was getting ready to deploy to France after the US had finally entered WW 1.

He asked his German-born mom, “Ma, what should I do if I meet up with Onkel Otto (in the Deutsches Heer) on the battlefield?” 
She supposedly replied, “Vell, I tink you should just choot the sonofabitch!”. Lol

[Onboard 2.0 9,083]

1 hour ago, pantone159 said:

This is also relevant for understanding the thinking of Russia. Although the Soviet Union eventually won the war, the effects were overwhelming and catastrophic to the nation. Somewhere around 20-30 million died, something like 100x the number of US people who died in the war. And though the war ended in Germany, it was primarily fought in the USSR, with no shortage of horrible acts by the German occupiers, and the nation was in ruins afterward. These memories lived (and still live) and affect decisions and thoughts still, and are not always appreciated in this country.

E.g. During the Cold War the Russian army was built for offense, with emphasis on armored vehicles to take the fight elsewhere. From the USA, it may have seemed like the Russians were looking to attack and were a threat, but from the Russian point of view, it was mainly that, given the memories of the leaders at the time, the Russians were EXTREMELY determined that, if there were another war, it would NOT be fought in Russia, and was not based in a threatening attitude. Russian concerns about NATO moving into Ukraine hit the same nerves.

The history of the average Russian citizen has been one long, horrible, emotional, and physical scarring. There never was a middle class, they never had a say in their lives or their choice of leaders.

They dealt with  invasion from east, and west, and the consistent famines in Russia were the best way to lose weight, but that would be bad cause then your skinny ass would freeze to death.

Their most progressive ruler ever was Catherine, and that was back in the 18th c. 

Those poor fuckers had to pay a beard tax !!!  A fucking beard tax for sportin' a beard !!

[956 Worldwide 35,516]

1 hour ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

The history of the average Russian citizen has been one long, horrible, emotional, and physical scarring. There never was a middle class, they never had a say in their lives or their choice of leaders.

They dealt with  invasion from east, and west, and the consistent famines in Russia were the best way to lose weight, but that would be bad cause then your skinny ass would freeze to death.

Their most progressive ruler ever was Catherine, and that was back in the 18th c. 

Those poor fuckers had to pay a beard tax !!!  A fucking beard tax for sportin' a beard !!

Lol, the beard tax was progressive.  Peter the Great got sick of seeing all these bearded boyars and kulaks that looked embarrassing when his Dutch and German friends came to visit. And in typical Russian manner, he decided to enforce progress from the top down by taxing beards.

Believe it or not, things got pretty fucking Woke under Lenin for a time. Early Bolsheviks were all about crushing the patriarchy, free love, smashing the bourgeoisie family structure, nude beaches on the Moskva River, and the equality of races. Oh yeah, and mass “decarceration.”  The party said “fuck all that” in the mid-1920s and the Revolution then switched to downright prudishness and a lot of gay hate. 
 

Alexander II was probably the chillest tsar, with liberating the peasants, a sort of jury trial, and other reforms. 

[Onboard 2.0 9,083]

4 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Lol, the beard tax was progressive.  Peter the Great got sick of seeing all these bearded boyars and kulaks that looked embarrassing when his Dutch and German friends came to visit. And in typical Russian manner, he decided to enforce progress from the top down by taxing beards.

Believe it or not, things got pretty fucking Woke under Lenin for a time. Early Bolsheviks were all about crushing the patriarchy, free love, smashing the bourgeoisie family structure, nude beaches on the Moskva River, and the equality of races. Oh yeah, and mass “decarceration.”  The party said “fuck all that” in the mid-1920s and the Revolution then switched to downright prudishness and a lot of gay hate. 
 

Alexander II was probably the chillest tsar, with liberating the peasants, a sort of jury trial, and other reforms. 

The beard tax was to fund his navy I think, and the clergy hated his ass for it.  Yeah there was a really brief capitalist vibe for a couple years there, you good buy all kinds of western, capitalist, consumer goods, then it got clamped shut.

[JerrysJheriCurl 977]

10 minutes ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

The beard tax was to fund his navy I think, and the clergy hated his ass for it.  Yeah there was a really brief capitalist vibe for a couple years there, you good buy all kinds of western, capitalist, consumer goods, then it got clamped shut.

I could be wrong, my Muscovite, but I thought it was an attempt by Pedro I to “westernize” Russia. 
 

Edited January 20, 2022 by JerrysJheriCurl

[Ghost of LL 15,664]

6 hours ago, Armybrat said:

RE: Shady Ray’s inlaws’ uncle....

After his limited participation in the Bulge in Decembe-January, 1945, my dad was sent to a Paris hospital to recover from a severe bout of the malaria for a couple of weeks. While a patient there, he joined a Poker group of combat veterans to pass the time. 
During one long game, another officer excused himself to go to the latrine. After a prolonged absence someone went to check on him, only to find that he had quietly hung himself. Beforehand, there was no indication of any kind of mental trauma or instability. Suffice to say, most of the patients there just shrugged it off as if unexpected death was to be found anywhere at any time.

Maybe I'm missing the timeline here, but . . . how on earth did your father catch malaria in the Ardennes in the middle of winter?

[DDD Dad 14,570]

2 minutes ago, Ghost of LL said:

Maybe I'm missing the timeline here, but . . . how on earth did your father catch malaria in the Ardennes in the middle of winter?

[Onboard 2.0 9,083]

36 minutes ago, JerrysJheriCurl said:

I could be wrong, my Muscovite, but I thought it was an attempt by Pedro I to “westernize” Russia. 
 

Yeah that as well. It’s been a while since my history of Russia I, II, and III courses 

[Armybrat 41,314]

58 minutes ago, Ghost of LL said:

Maybe I'm missing the timeline here, but . . . how on earth did your father catch malaria in the Ardennes in the middle of winter?

Prior to Dec. 7, 1941 and soon afterwards, when US troops were building up in the Alaska Territory in anticipation of war breaking out with Japan, The War Department in all its infinite wisdom decided that to fool said “Yellow Peril” about such movements, to inoculate them with anti-malaria vaccines.
According to Dad, some of the vaccine stock was bad and made hundreds of the troops very sick, and a few even died. Unfortunately for Dad, he was one of those who got sick, and suffered a couple of recurring bouts of the disease. 
He had never been to the tropics, so we know he had not picked it up there. Luckily the Paris episode was the last recurrence he endured. 
Adding more insult to the GI Joes’ injury, the Army had issued them tropical uniforms & clothing...... to fool Tojo’s intelligence agents.

It didn’t take long for the commanders on the ground to rectify that dumbassery, but after the Battle of Attu in 1943, my dad picked up a decent pair of Japanese issue boots before they were buried in the trenches with the enemy dead. He was anticipating how warm those fur-lined boots would feel on his perpetually cold feet. However, he dropped the idea along with the boots when he discovered the previous owner’s feet inside them.

Dad on the right, somewhere in the Aleutians.

 

 

[HookEm 2,492]

20 hours ago, Shady Ray said:

I could write a book on how fucked up the situation with the post-war children was.

Maybe you should. You have a lot of insight and your posts on this topic have been fascinating.

[Armybrat 41,314]

Sorry about hijacking this Ukraine thread with Alaska stories.

[Homercles 10,206]

1 hour ago, HookEm said:

Maybe you should. You have a lot of insight and your posts on this topic have been fascinating.

Gotta love it…”where’d you learn so much about this stuff, Homer?”

”This anonymous guy called Shady Ray on a site called Surly Horns covered in dickbutt and jokes about a guys mom”

[Brisketexan 106,614]

50 minutes ago, Armybrat said:

Sorry about hijacking this Ukraine thread with Alaska stories.

Don't apologize.  You taught me that "I came down with malaria" was the line of bullshit GIs sold their wives back home instead of saying "I caught the clap from a hot Belgian chick."  Knowledge is power.

[Nice Guy Eddie 13,706]

What do we think about this being a ploy of Putin to take advantage of practically every major NATO country that are in disarray due to internal political strife?

Putin places resources on the border. NATO leaders don't want the headache and problems in dealing with this so NATO effectively agrees to leave Ukraine alone forcing Ukraine to move back towards Russian control. Putin doesn't have to send one uniformed soldier into Ukraine and gets what he wants.

[Shady Ray 1,633]

Well, I guess it is Friday, and apparently some of y'all find this stuff interesting, so I figured what the hell, I will just go straight to the best that I got. 

 

Wife's mother is not even close to the most interesting story.

 

Wife's mother's father is.

 

Spoilered for those who don't care, and it is a bit off topic.

 

TLDR: Between the years 1941-1948, wife’s maternal grandfather was a Red Army conscript, a German POW, a Wehrmacht soldier, a US POW, and a US Army employee. And he was the baddest motherfucker that I have ever met.

Spoiler

Let’s just call him Klaus. He was born in the late 1910s outside of Prokrovsk, Russia (Kosakenstadt in German), which is now known as Engels, in the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. He was the 3rd oldest of 9 children…the oldest male. Here is the location of the Volga German ASSR.
 

 

As a young man in his early 20s, he worked in Engels as a heavy machinery mechanic, but with war breaking out in Europe, and being the Soviet cannon fodder demographic that he was, he was called up to the Red Army in late 1940/early 1941. When Hitler invaded, he was thrown towards the front and was eventually taken POW by the Germans at the Battle of Smolensk in July of 1941. As he used to say, up until that point in his life, the day he was captured was the most unfortunate day of his life, and for the rest of his life, it was the luckiest.
 

Three weeks later, Stalin purged the Red Army of its Volga German elements (along with the Black Sea Germans) and sent them to Soviet work camps in Kazakhstan. During those same days, the Soviets came to the Volga German ASSR and forcibly deported the entirety of the Volga German population, including his family. They had less than 3 hours to prepare for the forced removals. His father was killed during this process, and his mother and sisters and his youngest brother were sent by open air train to Siberia in the most inhumane conditions imaginable, while his other brother, 3 years younger, was sent to the Soviet work camps in Kazakhstan. His mother didn’t survive the deportation and died in the cold en route to Siberia. They apparently threw her dead body off the train without stopping.

 

Of course, he didn’t learn any of this until much, much later in his life, which we will get to. 

 

They didn’t speak at all Russian growing up, as the Soviets allowed the German ASSR full independence to maintain their language, religion and culture. They didn't intermarry with the Russians and they were as German as anyone in the Reich. However, after Klaus had already left, Stalin decreed in the Fall of 1941 that German was banned and the use of Russian was made obligatory. Throughout his long life in Bavaria, he learned Russian because he maintained some type of far-fetched dream that he would some day meet his siblings again, even though those odds were essentially zero. Even when I first met him, he would regularly practice his Russian with others in the area, even going to a Russian Orthodox church from time-to-time down the street to keep sharp, and I always found it to be heartbreaking. My mother-in-law would always talk about what a waste of effort that was, particularly as he was never going to go to Russia, as until his last breath he feared that he would be forcibly detained if he ever visited, pursuant to Stalin’s almost rabid obsession to see all former Russian Germans returned from the west. Even when we talk about him now, years after his death, every single time my in-laws say, "Outside of Josef Stalin, nothing and no one ever scared him."
 

Anyway, by late 1941, his status as a German POW had changed, and he had been conscripted into a Wehrmacht division comprised primarily of captured Red Army/Red Army deserter ethnic Germans from the Volga region and other non-German volunteers (Hiwis) and, while fighting as part of the Wehrmacht as they moved through Eastern Europe, he took a bullet through the right side of his upper chest, and one across the front of his neck, leaving a bad scar and a really raspy voice. Fortunately for him, he sustained those injuries within a month from Stalingrad kicking off, a battle which - given his regiment - he would have been in. He slowly recovered from his wounds away from the lines back towards Central Europe, and was then put back to work through the later stages of the war fighting through the Balkans. 
 

When the war was clearly a lost cause, he said “fuck this” and found his way to Vienna, where he had a terrible time trying to connect with a distant relative whom he had never met, and then ultimately came on up to Bavaria. I never understood what caused this decision and I can’t figure out why he made this move. I hate that I don’t know. I have almost all of the records required to verified this entire deal, but why he chose Bavaria was one of the few things I never got the chance to clarify. All I know is that he hated the Austrians for how they treated him in Vienna during the latest stages of the war, and I imagine that perhaps moving on to Germany was a better choice for a volksdeutscher (Volksdeutsche being Germans from outside the Reich, Reichsdeutsche being Germans from within it).

 

Anyway, at Stunde Null ("Zero Hour"), which is what the Germans still call midnight of May 8th, 1945 - the moment the war was over - he was in a new city, he had no home city to return, no way to know what happened to his family, and he now occupied the lowest of the German post-war caste… refugee Volksdeutsche. Stalin had revoked the citizenship of Russian Germans in the West, and the Reich hadn't ever bestowed it to them, so he was a stateless (until 1948), family-less man - in a country where there wasn’t enough food and housing situation was all blown to hell (German residents were forced by the transitional authorities/caretaker Allies to house and board other Germans, which was a socially tedious situation at the beginning, and it was even worse for those ethnic germans streaming in from Czechoslovakia, Poland or Russia, as no one wanted them).

 

Klaus surrendered to the US Army in Landsberg, Bavaria in 1945, where he was held as a POW along with thousands of other ex-Wehrmacht. He was eventually transferred and spent 6 months in the displaced persons camp there before being hired by the US Army to do support tasks in the newly established heavy machinery shops in Bavaria. He had the mechanical skills and, due to his status as a Volga German, was deemed to be at very low risk of needing de-Nazification in the time before the de-Nazification process petered out, as to be honest, the Volga Germans didn’t really have a connection to the Reich the way the Sudeten did. They were just kinda fucking around over there just bein’ Germans in damn-near Kazakstan growing watermelons, as they had been doing since Catherine the Great.

 

He worked for the US Army for three years, striking up close transactional relationships with some black GIs stationed there, where he basically thrived off of some type of side-hustle where he traded cigarettes that were rationed to him by the US Army (he didn’t smoke) for extra food, as calories were in terribly short supply for German men at the time. He said it was some kind of three way deal where gas/cigarettes and food were shuffled around on a barter economy between the black GIs and the local employees…I never quite got the full scope of that, as my German wasn’t completely proficient when we discussed this, but I do know that he really liked the black dudes that he met from the US and always spoke fondly of them. He said they were the first black guys he had ever met and they were apparently real characters.
 

He appreciated the Americans more than we can even imagine...they saved his life, as he said, and with his US Govt paycheck and food rations, he went from the lowest of the low in German society, to a big swinging dick around the Displaced Persons scene in Landsberg, where he met his wife - my wife’s grandmother - who as mentioned had been displaced from the Sudetenland with her sisters and mother. He was a really funny guy who swore that the food the black dudes gave him was the key to get any woman in the camp. 
 

Klaus was a born hustler and found his way to a BMW when it re-opened after the war and after his work for the Americans ended. He started there in 1948 when they started building motorcycles. He got a job on the shop floor, where he worked until he retired in 1980, rising to floor management and he counted his greatest achievements as working on the rollout of the BMW 502, which he said gave him the first real sense of pride he ever felt. He talked about the 502 as though it was the child that he himself birthed.

 

Here is the 502. Fucking sharp looking ride. 

 

 

On the home-front, Klaus was the only man who wasn’t completely mind-fucked in his entire familial orbit after the war. He took care of a shitton of random little Sudetendeutschers that passed through his house for long extended stays from his wife’s side, as their dads were either dead or mindfucked. He worked like a sharecropper during the day, only to then come home and fix neighborhood cars for extra cash. The garage at his place, which is down the street from my own house, has a maintenance pit dug underneath with a ladder so he could pull neighborhood cars in and change their oil and do some limited maintenance, just like at the auto shop. Dude was relentless.
 

When I met him he was in his 80s and strong as an ox, as he was until the day he died. He had no hesitancy talking about the war and, in fact, almost every story over dinner started with, “In 1940-something, we were in blah blah blah.” It was awesome and it drove my wife and in-laws crazy, but I could only imagine how jam packed with experiences those 4 years must have been, so I encouraged it and we would talk for a couple of hours after every meal, which usually occurred a couple of times per week. Every time, after his last bite, he wold put down his silver, wash it all down with a big gulp of weißbier, sigh, and say, “phhhhhh...In 194X, I was in...” and off he would go with a story that would lead to God knows where. Wife and mother-in-law would pull the “sigh…papaaa/opaaa, bitte nicht” and he would just calmly and lovingly respond “be quiet, mädchen", which they obediently did...because he was Motherfuckin' Klaus and he had a story to fuckin' tell. I loved it.

 

In his mind, his "people" had nothing to do with all of the shit that went on, so he was just a participant in it and felt no guilt. He was completely resilient and spoke about the war as though it was just something one experienced. He would tell you a story about getting free ice cream at some spot along the Eastern Front in the same exact tone as he would tell you a story about burying a captain who had hung himself overnight. But he took me through his maps and his records and all of his awards and commemorative items and I loved every minute of it. 

 

But I will close this out with the part of the story that I got to witness, which was one of the wildest things I have ever experienced.

 

On his 90th birthday, three years before he died, we had a huge lunch for him at his house. All of the family came from all over Germany…all those little Sudetendeutschers who came in and out of his house in the 50s and 60s who had now become grandparents in their own rights and all their kids…it was a great experience. Klaus was so happy and was in his element…holding court in one corner of the house, only to then move to another corner and hold court a little more with the relatives from another place, only to go to his garage and show the men some vintage BMW hub caps that he took from the factory. Whatever he did, it was fun and it was interesting. There were probably 35, 40 people there. What Klaus didn’t know was that the Red Cross had contacted my mother-in-law two months before this party with the information that his younger sister, one of the ones who had been sent off to Siberia, had survived the whole fuckin’ Cold War in the Russian East and had migrated back to Germany as part of the German government’s initiative to allow them to come to Germany after the USSR collapsed. She had contacted the Red Cross to help her find him, which they did.

 

After the party ended (it was a daytime ordeal), the immediate family along with a couple of the closer-knit “Münchener” branch went to a very nice local bierhall for dinner. We had a private room and when we walked in, my mother-in-law had set it up that his sister, along with her only child, a son, would be in there waiting for him. He walked in, saw her, wondered who the fuck the old lady was crashing his birthday party room, and then was told who it was. Klaus seemed to be happy every minute of his life…but that minute that he saw his sister who had been separated from him for 65 years was the happiest I had ever seen him. They laughed and cried and talked and talked forever… in Russian, thus vindicating his efforts to learn the language over all those years, as the Volga Germans were prohibited from speaking German and most of them lost the ability to do so. For the next three years until his death they spoke almost every day by phone, in Russian, meeting up multiple times per year. He learned what happened to his family, and he even was able to speak regularly by phone to his younger brother who had been shipped off to the Kazak labor camps, who the sister had previously found. The brother had remained in Kazakhstan after being released from the work camps and settled there, like many of the Volga German men who were sent to the camps did. He even got a picture of him in the mail and it was framed on his bedside the day Klaus died. I am lucky enough to have photos of the entire deal and it was one of the most noteworthy things that I ever experienced.
 

But what I will remember most about that day was the drive home from the bierhall. We had taken two cars and I was driving my wife and mother in law. On the way home, everyone was tired after that long day and it was quiet on the ride. When we got closer to the house, I asked my mother-in-law if Klaus' sister and her son would be staying with my in-laws/Klaus at their place, as they have plenty of space for guests. 
 

And in her little voice coming from the back seat, “Of course not. They’re Russians…they’ll steal our shit.”

 

Edited January 21, 2022 by Shady Ray

[Caver60 443]

Awesome. Thanks for sharing. My own grandfathers were both badasses from that generation, at least to me. Loved hearing any and every story they would tell, though there weren't many. Late in his life, dad's dad had an experience related to the War that I told briefly on here some time back. We got to experience that with him and it was one of the best and most noteworthy experiences of my life.

Historical truism: you'd never want to get in a fight with your grandfather in his prime.

[40acredropout 2,908]

32 minutes ago, Shady Ray said:

Well, I guess it is Friday, and apparently some of y'all find this stuff interesting, so I figured what the hell, I will just go straight to the best that I got. 

 

Wife's mother is not even close to the most interesting story.

 

Wife's mother's father is.

 

Spoilered for those who don't care, and it is a bit off topic.

 

TLDR: Between the years 1941-1948, wife’s maternal grandfather was a Red Army conscript, a German POW, a Wehrmacht soldier, a US POW, and a US Army employee. And he was the baddest motherfucker that I have ever met.

  Hide contents

Let’s just call him Klaus. He was born in the late 1910s outside of Prokrovsk, Russia (Kosakenstadt in German), which is now known as Engels, in the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. He was the 3rd oldest of 9 children…the oldest male. Here is the location of the Volga German ASSR.
 

 

As a young man in his early 20s, he worked in Engels as a heavy machinery mechanic, but with war breaking out in Europe, and being the Soviet cannon fodder demographic that he was, he was called up to the Red Army in late 1940/early 1941. When Hitler invaded, he was thrown towards the front and was eventually taken POW by the Germans at the Battle of Smolensk in July of 1941. As he used to say, up until that point in his life, the day he was captured was the most unfortunate day of his life, and for the rest of his life, it was the luckiest.
 

Three weeks later, Stalin purged the Red Army of its Volga German elements (along with the Black Sea Germans) and sent them to Soviet work camps in Kazakhstan. During those same days, the Soviets came to the Volga German ASSR and forcibly deported the entirety of the Volga German population, including his family. They had less than 3 hours to prepare for the forced removals. His father was killed during this process, and his mother and sisters and his youngest brother were sent by open air train to Siberia in the most inhumane conditions imaginable, while his other brother, 3 years younger, was sent to the Soviet work camps in Kazakhstan. His mother didn’t survive the deportation and died in the cold en route to Siberia. They apparently threw her dead body off the train without stopping.

 

Of course, he didn’t learn any of this until much, much later in his life, which we will get to. 

 

They didn’t speak at all Russian growing up, as the Soviets allowed the German ASSR full independence to maintain their language, religion and culture. They didn't intermarry with the Russians and they were as German as anyone in the Reich. However, after Klaus had already left, Stalin decreed in the Fall of 1941 that German was banned and the use of Russian was made obligatory. Throughout his long life in Bavaria, he learned Russian because he maintained some type of far-fetched dream that he would some day meet his siblings again, even though those odds were essentially zero. Even when I first met him, he would regularly practice his Russian with others in the area, even going to a Russian Orthodox church from time-to-time down the street to keep sharp, and I always found it to be heartbreaking. My mother-in-law would always talk about what a waste of effort that was, particularly as he was never going to go to Russia, as until his last breath he feared that he would be forcibly detained if he ever visited, pursuant to Stalin’s almost rabid obsession to see all former Russian Germans returned from the west. Even when we talk about him now, years after his death, every single time my in-laws say, "Outside of Josef Stalin, nothing and no one ever scared him."
 

Anyway, by late 1941, his status as a German POW had changed, and he had been conscripted into a Wehrmacht division comprised primarily of captured Red Army/Red Army deserter ethnic Germans from the Volga region and other non-German volunteers (Hiwis) and, while fighting as part of the Wehrmacht as they moved through Eastern Europe, he took a bullet through the right side of his upper chest, and one across the front of his neck, leaving a bad scar and a really raspy voice. Fortunately for him, he sustained those injuries within a month from Stalingrad kicking off, a battle which - given his regiment - he would have been in. He slowly recovered from his wounds away from the lines back towards Central Europe, and was then put back to work through the later stages of the war fighting through the Balkans. 
 

When the war was clearly a lost cause, he said “fuck this” and found his way to Vienna, where he had a terrible time trying to connect with a distant relative whom he had never met, and then ultimately came on up to Bavaria. I never understood what caused this decision and I can’t figure out why he made this move. I hate that I don’t know. I have almost all of the records required to verified this entire deal, but why he chose Bavaria was one of the few things I never got the chance to clarify. All I know is that he hated the Austrians for how they treated him in Vienna during the latest stages of the war, and I imagine that perhaps moving on to Germany was a better choice for a volksdeutscher (Volksdeutsche being Germans from outside the Reich, Reichsdeutsche being Germans from within it).

 

Anyway, at Stunde Null ("Zero Hour"), which is what the Germans still call midnight of May 8th, 1945 - the moment the war was over - he was in a new city, he had no home city to return, no way to know what happened to his family, and he now occupied the lowest of the German post-war caste… refugee Volksdeutsche. Stalin had revoked the citizenship of Russian Germans in the West, and the Reich hadn't ever bestowed it to them, so he was a stateless (until 1948), family-less man - in a country where there wasn’t enough food and housing situation was all blown to hell (German residents were forced by the transitional authorities/caretaker Allies to house and board other Germans, which was a socially tedious situation at the beginning, and it was even worse for those ethnic germans streaming in from Czechoslovakia, Poland or Russia, as no one wanted them).

 

Klaus surrendered to the US Army in Landsberg, Bavaria in 1945, where he was held as a POW along with thousands of other ex-Wehrmacht. He was eventually transferred and spent 6 months in the displaced persons camp there before being hired by the US Army to do support tasks in the newly established heavy machinery shops in Bavaria. He had the mechanical skills and, due to his status as a Volga German, was deemed to be at very low risk of needing de-Nazification in the time before the de-Nazification process petered out, as to be honest, the Volga Germans didn’t really have a connection to the Reich the way the Sudeten did. They were just kinda fucking around over there just bein’ Germans in damn-near Kazakstan growing watermelons, as they had been doing since Catherine the Great.

 

He worked for the US Army for three years, striking up close transactional relationships with some black GIs stationed there, where he basically thrived off of some type of side-hustle where he traded cigarettes that were rationed to him by the US Army (he didn’t smoke) for extra food, as calories were in terribly short supply for German men at the time. He said it was some kind of three way deal where gas/cigarettes and food were shuffled around on a barter economy between the black GIs and the local employees…I never quite got the full scope of that, as my German wasn’t completely proficient when we discussed this, but I do know that he really liked the black dudes that he met from the US and always spoke fondly of them. He said they were the first black guys he had ever met and they were apparently real characters.
 

He appreciated the Americans more than we can even imagine...they saved his life, as he said, and with his US Govt paycheck and food rations, he went from the lowest of the low in German society, to a big swinging dick around the Displaced Persons scene in Landsberg, where he met his wife - my wife’s grandmother - who as mentioned had been displaced from the Sudetenland with her sisters and mother. He was a really funny guy who swore that the food the black dudes gave him was the key to get any woman in the camp. 
 

Klaus was a born hustler and found his way to a BMW when it re-opened after the war and after his work for the Americans ended. He started there in 1948 when they started building motorcycles. He got a job on the shop floor, where he worked until he retired in 1980, rising to floor management and he counted his greatest achievements as working on the rollout of the BMW 502, which he said gave him the first real sense of pride he ever felt. He talked about the 502 as though it was the child that he himself birthed.

 

Here is the 502. Fucking sharp looking ride. 

 

 

On the home-front, Klaus was the only man who wasn’t completely mind-fucked in his entire familial orbit after the war. He took care of a shitton of random little Sudetendeutschers that passed through his house for long extended stays from his wife’s side, as their dads were either dead or mindfucked. He worked like a sharecropper during the day, only to then come home and fix neighborhood cars for extra cash. The garage at his place, which is down the street from my own house, has a maintenance pit dug underneath with a ladder so he could pull neighborhood cars in and change their oil and do some limited maintenance, just like at the auto shop. Dude was relentless.
 

When I met him he was in his 80s and strong as an ox, as he was until the day he died. He had no hesitancy talking about the war and, in fact, almost every story over dinner started with, “In 1940-something, we were in blah blah blah.” It was awesome and it drove my wife and in-laws crazy, but I could only imagine how jam packed with experiences those 4 years must have been, so I encouraged it and we would talk for a couple of hours after every meal, which usually occurred a couple of times per week. Every time, after his last bite, he wold put down his silver, wash it all down with a big gulp of weißbier, sigh, and say, “phhhhhh...In 194X, I was in...” and off he would go with a story that would lead to God knows where. Wife and mother-in-law would pull the “sigh…papaaa/opaaa, bitte nicht” and he would just calmly and lovingly respond “be quiet, mädchen", which they obediently did...because he was Motherfuckin' Klaus and he had a story to fuckin' tell. I loved it.

 

In his mind, his "people" had nothing to do with all of the shit that went on, so he was just a participant in it and felt no guilt. He was completely resilient and spoke about the war as though it was just something one experienced. He would tell you a story about getting free ice cream at some spot along the Eastern Front in the same exact tone as he would tell you a story about burying a captain who had hung himself overnight. But he took me through his maps and his records and all of his awards and commemorative items and I loved every minute of it. 

 

But I will close this out with the part of the story that I got to witness, which was one of the wildest things I have ever experienced.

 

On his 90th birthday, three years before he died, we had a huge lunch for him at his house. All of the family came from all over Germany…all those little Sudetendeutschers who came in and out of his house in the 50s and 60s who had now become grandparents in their own rights and all their kids…it was a great experience. Klaus was so happy and was in his element…holding court in one corner of the house, only to then move to another corner and hold court a little more with the relatives from another place, only to go to his garage and show the men some vintage BMW hub caps that he took from the factory. Whatever he did, it was fun and it was interesting. There were probably 35, 40 people there. What Klaus didn’t know was that the Red Cross had contacted my mother-in-law two months before this party with the information that his younger sister, one of the ones who had been sent off to Siberia, had survived the whole fuckin’ Cold War in the Russian East and had migrated back to Germany as part of the German government’s initiative to allow them to come to Germany after the USSR collapsed. She had contacted the Red Cross to help her find him, which they did.

 

After the party ended (it was a daytime ordeal), the immediate family along with a couple of the closer-knit “Münchener” branch went to a very nice local bierhall for dinner. We had a private room and when we walked in, my mother-in-law had set it up that his sister, along with her only child, a son, would be in there waiting for him. He walked in, saw her, wondered who the fuck the old lady was crashing his birthday party room, and then was told who it was. Klaus seemed to be happy every minute of his life…but that minute that he saw his sister who had been separated from him for 65 years was the happiest I had ever seen him. They laughed and cried and talked and talked forever… in Russian, thus vindicating his efforts to learn the language over all those years, as the Volga Germans were prohibited from speaking German and most of them lost the ability to do so. For the next three years until his death they spoke almost every day by phone, in Russian, meeting up multiple times per year. He learned what happened to his family, and he even was able to speak regularly by phone to his younger brother who had been shipped off to the Kazak labor camps, who the sister had previously found. The brother had remained in Kazakhstan after being released from the work camps and settled there, like many of the Volga German men who were sent to the camps did. He even got a picture of him in the mail and it was framed on his bedside the day Klaus died. I am lucky enough to have photos of the entire deal and it was one of the most noteworthy things that I ever experienced.
 

But what I will remember most about that day was the drive home from the bierhall. We had taken two cars and I was driving my wife and mother in law. On the way home, everyone was tired after that long day and it was quiet on the ride. When we got closer to the house, I asked my mother-in-law if Klaus' sister and her son would be staying with my in-laws/Klaus at their place, as they have plenty of space for guests. 
 

And in her little voice coming from the back seat, “Of course not. They’re Russians…they’ll steal our shit.”

 

Great post-  thank you for sharing.  Klaus sounds like he was an absolute badass.

[Armybrat 41,314]

That was the most fascinating human interest story I have ever read in this forum. 
Thanks for taking the time to post it.

Makes me wonder what my German cousins went through during & after the war, and also Mrs. Brat’s Czech relatives.

[NorthLoop 14,420]

Man that was a great story. Thanks for sharing. 

[XYZ 2,154]

So are we gonna get nuked? Asking for a friend…

[SimonBolivar 11,026]

51 minutes ago, Armybrat said:

Makes me wonder what my German cousins went through during & after the war

[Parliament 14,556]

God damn that was a good read.

[SimonBolivar 11,026]

1 minute ago, Parliament said:

God damn that was a good read.

I can't imagine that number of Volga German men his age that survived the Cold War was very high. He's a new age Candid!

[Parliament 14,556]

Quite a few Volga Germans (often called Germans from Russia) settled in North Dakota.  Hardy people, they.  Every generation of them saw some wild shit.

 

In ND they refused to send their kids to public school.  I guess the Russian Czar's would go to the schools and taked their kids.  When they immigrated here they said "Won't be fooled again."

[SimonBolivar 11,026]

Here's what the public knew about the Volga Germans at the time for anyone interested. This is plug #234543 for a NYTimes Machine subscription for anyone with even a 1% interest in history.

 

 

[TexasEd 8,248]

2 hours ago, Shady Ray said:

Well, I guess it is Friday, and apparently some of y'all find this stuff interesting, so I figured what the hell, I will just go straight to the best that I got. 

 

Wife's mother is not even close to the most interesting story.

 

Wife's mother's father is.

 

Spoilered for those who don't care, and it is a bit off topic.

 

TLDR: Between the years 1941-1948, wife’s maternal grandfather was a Red Army conscript, a German POW, a Wehrmacht soldier, a US POW, and a US Army employee. And he was the baddest motherfucker that I have ever met.

  Hide contents

Let’s just call him Klaus. He was born in the late 1910s outside of Prokrovsk, Russia (Kosakenstadt in German), which is now known as Engels, in the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. He was the 3rd oldest of 9 children…the oldest male. Here is the location of the Volga German ASSR.
 

 

As a young man in his early 20s, he worked in Engels as a heavy machinery mechanic, but with war breaking out in Europe, and being the Soviet cannon fodder demographic that he was, he was called up to the Red Army in late 1940/early 1941. When Hitler invaded, he was thrown towards the front and was eventually taken POW by the Germans at the Battle of Smolensk in July of 1941. As he used to say, up until that point in his life, the day he was captured was the most unfortunate day of his life, and for the rest of his life, it was the luckiest.
 

Three weeks later, Stalin purged the Red Army of its Volga German elements (along with the Black Sea Germans) and sent them to Soviet work camps in Kazakhstan. During those same days, the Soviets came to the Volga German ASSR and forcibly deported the entirety of the Volga German population, including his family. They had less than 3 hours to prepare for the forced removals. His father was killed during this process, and his mother and sisters and his youngest brother were sent by open air train to Siberia in the most inhumane conditions imaginable, while his other brother, 3 years younger, was sent to the Soviet work camps in Kazakhstan. His mother didn’t survive the deportation and died in the cold en route to Siberia. They apparently threw her dead body off the train without stopping.

 

Of course, he didn’t learn any of this until much, much later in his life, which we will get to. 

 

They didn’t speak at all Russian growing up, as the Soviets allowed the German ASSR full independence to maintain their language, religion and culture. They didn't intermarry with the Russians and they were as German as anyone in the Reich. However, after Klaus had already left, Stalin decreed in the Fall of 1941 that German was banned and the use of Russian was made obligatory. Throughout his long life in Bavaria, he learned Russian because he maintained some type of far-fetched dream that he would some day meet his siblings again, even though those odds were essentially zero. Even when I first met him, he would regularly practice his Russian with others in the area, even going to a Russian Orthodox church from time-to-time down the street to keep sharp, and I always found it to be heartbreaking. My mother-in-law would always talk about what a waste of effort that was, particularly as he was never going to go to Russia, as until his last breath he feared that he would be forcibly detained if he ever visited, pursuant to Stalin’s almost rabid obsession to see all former Russian Germans returned from the west. Even when we talk about him now, years after his death, every single time my in-laws say, "Outside of Josef Stalin, nothing and no one ever scared him."
 

Anyway, by late 1941, his status as a German POW had changed, and he had been conscripted into a Wehrmacht division comprised primarily of captured Red Army/Red Army deserter ethnic Germans from the Volga region and other non-German volunteers (Hiwis) and, while fighting as part of the Wehrmacht as they moved through Eastern Europe, he took a bullet through the right side of his upper chest, and one across the front of his neck, leaving a bad scar and a really raspy voice. Fortunately for him, he sustained those injuries within a month from Stalingrad kicking off, a battle which - given his regiment - he would have been in. He slowly recovered from his wounds away from the lines back towards Central Europe, and was then put back to work through the later stages of the war fighting through the Balkans. 
 

When the war was clearly a lost cause, he said “fuck this” and found his way to Vienna, where he had a terrible time trying to connect with a distant relative whom he had never met, and then ultimately came on up to Bavaria. I never understood what caused this decision and I can’t figure out why he made this move. I hate that I don’t know. I have almost all of the records required to verified this entire deal, but why he chose Bavaria was one of the few things I never got the chance to clarify. All I know is that he hated the Austrians for how they treated him in Vienna during the latest stages of the war, and I imagine that perhaps moving on to Germany was a better choice for a volksdeutscher (Volksdeutsche being Germans from outside the Reich, Reichsdeutsche being Germans from within it).

 

Anyway, at Stunde Null ("Zero Hour"), which is what the Germans still call midnight of May 8th, 1945 - the moment the war was over - he was in a new city, he had no home city to return, no way to know what happened to his family, and he now occupied the lowest of the German post-war caste… refugee Volksdeutsche. Stalin had revoked the citizenship of Russian Germans in the West, and the Reich hadn't ever bestowed it to them, so he was a stateless (until 1948), family-less man - in a country where there wasn’t enough food and housing situation was all blown to hell (German residents were forced by the transitional authorities/caretaker Allies to house and board other Germans, which was a socially tedious situation at the beginning, and it was even worse for those ethnic germans streaming in from Czechoslovakia, Poland or Russia, as no one wanted them).

 

Klaus surrendered to the US Army in Landsberg, Bavaria in 1945, where he was held as a POW along with thousands of other ex-Wehrmacht. He was eventually transferred and spent 6 months in the displaced persons camp there before being hired by the US Army to do support tasks in the newly established heavy machinery shops in Bavaria. He had the mechanical skills and, due to his status as a Volga German, was deemed to be at very low risk of needing de-Nazification in the time before the de-Nazification process petered out, as to be honest, the Volga Germans didn’t really have a connection to the Reich the way the Sudeten did. They were just kinda fucking around over there just bein’ Germans in damn-near Kazakstan growing watermelons, as they had been doing since Catherine the Great.

 

He worked for the US Army for three years, striking up close transactional relationships with some black GIs stationed there, where he basically thrived off of some type of side-hustle where he traded cigarettes that were rationed to him by the US Army (he didn’t smoke) for extra food, as calories were in terribly short supply for German men at the time. He said it was some kind of three way deal where gas/cigarettes and food were shuffled around on a barter economy between the black GIs and the local employees…I never quite got the full scope of that, as my German wasn’t completely proficient when we discussed this, but I do know that he really liked the black dudes that he met from the US and always spoke fondly of them. He said they were the first black guys he had ever met and they were apparently real characters.
 

He appreciated the Americans more than we can even imagine...they saved his life, as he said, and with his US Govt paycheck and food rations, he went from the lowest of the low in German society, to a big swinging dick around the Displaced Persons scene in Landsberg, where he met his wife - my wife’s grandmother - who as mentioned had been displaced from the Sudetenland with her sisters and mother. He was a really funny guy who swore that the food the black dudes gave him was the key to get any woman in the camp. 
 

Klaus was a born hustler and found his way to a BMW when it re-opened after the war and after his work for the Americans ended. He started there in 1948 when they started building motorcycles. He got a job on the shop floor, where he worked until he retired in 1980, rising to floor management and he counted his greatest achievements as working on the rollout of the BMW 502, which he said gave him the first real sense of pride he ever felt. He talked about the 502 as though it was the child that he himself birthed.

 

Here is the 502. Fucking sharp looking ride. 

 

 

On the home-front, Klaus was the only man who wasn’t completely mind-fucked in his entire familial orbit after the war. He took care of a shitton of random little Sudetendeutschers that passed through his house for long extended stays from his wife’s side, as their dads were either dead or mindfucked. He worked like a sharecropper during the day, only to then come home and fix neighborhood cars for extra cash. The garage at his place, which is down the street from my own house, has a maintenance pit dug underneath with a ladder so he could pull neighborhood cars in and change their oil and do some limited maintenance, just like at the auto shop. Dude was relentless.
 

When I met him he was in his 80s and strong as an ox, as he was until the day he died. He had no hesitancy talking about the war and, in fact, almost every story over dinner started with, “In 1940-something, we were in blah blah blah.” It was awesome and it drove my wife and in-laws crazy, but I could only imagine how jam packed with experiences those 4 years must have been, so I encouraged it and we would talk for a couple of hours after every meal, which usually occurred a couple of times per week. Every time, after his last bite, he wold put down his silver, wash it all down with a big gulp of weißbier, sigh, and say, “phhhhhh...In 194X, I was in...” and off he would go with a story that would lead to God knows where. Wife and mother-in-law would pull the “sigh…papaaa/opaaa, bitte nicht” and he would just calmly and lovingly respond “be quiet, mädchen", which they obediently did...because he was Motherfuckin' Klaus and he had a story to fuckin' tell. I loved it.

 

In his mind, his "people" had nothing to do with all of the shit that went on, so he was just a participant in it and felt no guilt. He was completely resilient and spoke about the war as though it was just something one experienced. He would tell you a story about getting free ice cream at some spot along the Eastern Front in the same exact tone as he would tell you a story about burying a captain who had hung himself overnight. But he took me through his maps and his records and all of his awards and commemorative items and I loved every minute of it. 

 

But I will close this out with the part of the story that I got to witness, which was one of the wildest things I have ever experienced.

 

On his 90th birthday, three years before he died, we had a huge lunch for him at his house. All of the family came from all over Germany…all those little Sudetendeutschers who came in and out of his house in the 50s and 60s who had now become grandparents in their own rights and all their kids…it was a great experience. Klaus was so happy and was in his element…holding court in one corner of the house, only to then move to another corner and hold court a little more with the relatives from another place, only to go to his garage and show the men some vintage BMW hub caps that he took from the factory. Whatever he did, it was fun and it was interesting. There were probably 35, 40 people there. What Klaus didn’t know was that the Red Cross had contacted my mother-in-law two months before this party with the information that his younger sister, one of the ones who had been sent off to Siberia, had survived the whole fuckin’ Cold War in the Russian East and had migrated back to Germany as part of the German government’s initiative to allow them to come to Germany after the USSR collapsed. She had contacted the Red Cross to help her find him, which they did.

 

After the party ended (it was a daytime ordeal), the immediate family along with a couple of the closer-knit “Münchener” branch went to a very nice local bierhall for dinner. We had a private room and when we walked in, my mother-in-law had set it up that his sister, along with her only child, a son, would be in there waiting for him. He walked in, saw her, wondered who the fuck the old lady was crashing his birthday party room, and then was told who it was. Klaus seemed to be happy every minute of his life…but that minute that he saw his sister who had been separated from him for 65 years was the happiest I had ever seen him. They laughed and cried and talked and talked forever… in Russian, thus vindicating his efforts to learn the language over all those years, as the Volga Germans were prohibited from speaking German and most of them lost the ability to do so. For the next three years until his death they spoke almost every day by phone, in Russian, meeting up multiple times per year. He learned what happened to his family, and he even was able to speak regularly by phone to his younger brother who had been shipped off to the Kazak labor camps, who the sister had previously found. The brother had remained in Kazakhstan after being released from the work camps and settled there, like many of the Volga German men who were sent to the camps did. He even got a picture of him in the mail and it was framed on his bedside the day Klaus died. I am lucky enough to have photos of the entire deal and it was one of the most noteworthy things that I ever experienced.
 

But what I will remember most about that day was the drive home from the bierhall. We had taken two cars and I was driving my wife and mother in law. On the way home, everyone was tired after that long day and it was quiet on the ride. When we got closer to the house, I asked my mother-in-law if Klaus' sister and her son would be staying with my in-laws/Klaus at their place, as they have plenty of space for guests. 
 

And in her little voice coming from the back seat, “Of course not. They’re Russians…they’ll steal our shit.”

 

Must read story.  People, please don't pass this up.

Also if you have done any genealogy, especially in Ancestry.com or other sites you need to include this story on the relevant family member entries.

[The Royal We 3,090]

Fucking amazing story.  Thank you for taking the time and effort to get all that into this form so we could share it with you. 

Also, here's an amateur sketch of Klaus, probably:

[Nice Guy Eddie 13,706]

Cool story. I like to read history but had no idea there was a large german population in Russia at that time. It made me wonder how they ended up there in the first place. Wikipedia to the rescue.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Germans_in_Russia,_Ukraine_and_the_Soviet_Union

[Caponata 151]

Off-topic but this guy has a travel channel where he goes to Russia and former Soviet Republic rural towns, reviewing the history and chatting with locals. These forgotten towns are filled with graveyards and elderly pensioners who lost most of their families in the war. @13:00 

 

[Caponata 151]

 

 

[Shady Ray 1,633]

30 minutes ago, SimonBolivar said:

Here's what the public knew about the Volga Germans at the time for anyone interested. This is plug #234543 for a NYTimes Machine subscription for anyone with even a 1% interest in history.

 

 

You know what...I have done ungodly hours of research on this shit, reading the German articles and getting help with the Russian archives that aren't translated, and I have never once even thought about looking at how this was covered in the US media at the time. 

Thanks a lot for this.

[Shady Ray 1,633]

17 minutes ago, TexasEd said:

Must read story.  People, please don't pass this up.

Also if you have done any genealogy, especially in Ancestry.com or other sites you need to include this story on the relevant family member entries.

The funny thing is that those ancestry sites are ground zero for problems here. I was told from the get-go, "don't you even think about logging any family shit - anonymous or not - on one of those Ancestry sites."

 

Germans are reallllllll opposed to that type of open-source, public record keeping for relatives from that era. Way too many skeletons in everyone's closets...

[TexasEd 8,248]

2 minutes ago, Shady Ray said:

The funny thing is that those ancestry sites are ground zero for problems here. I was told from the get-go, "don't you even think about logging any family shit - anonymous or not - on one of those Ancestry sites."

 

Germans are reallllllll opposed to that type of open-source, public record keeping for relatives from that era. Way too many skeletons in everyone's closets...

Understandable.