In East Prussian Insterburg, September 1944: If she fled, he would report her, threatened father Karl-Heinz, a convinced SA man, his wife. "Do you believe in the Fiihrer," she replied drily - and leaves. Before the approaching Red Army Käthe Therese Klodt rescued with her five children, including Rolf Klodt (born 1941), from East Prussia via Pomerania to northern Germany. The family's odyssey ended in Schleswig-Holstein. Just like those of many thousands of people from the eastern regions: in 1946, the country recorded a population increase of 67 percent. No one was prepared for the crowds - which was painfully felt by Rolf Klodt, as he tells here.
No farmer in Nindorf wants to voluntarily accept these starving, shabbily dressed and lousy "pollackers", as they call us. Out of respect for the official authority of the village gendarme, chambers, floors and stables are cleared, albeit grudgingly.
We heard many bad words on the run. Now comes another one: "You Refugee", pronounced with so much hateful contempt that it burns into our childlike souls and prevents a friendly coexistence for years. Whenever you want to say something derogatory, something hurtful, you are called "you refugee".
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Alexandra Frank / THE MIRROR
One day we get a new home and move to the village school. From collected stones builds my older brother Manfred in the school yard a small cooking place, attentively observed by inquisitive locals. I can not forget their mischievous laughter as the saucepan slips off the slippery stones in the rain and the laboriously procured food flows into the muck. Another day without a hot meal.
Finding accommodation for a mother and five children is difficult. We are sent to a makeshift home on the edge of a pasture. Each family has two rooms and a floor. The walls are made of stone only. In summer it gets unbearably hot inside, ice cold in winter.
On the dirt road a cannon, in the pasture a tank
A faucet is located ten meters away on a dirt road. All families use a single toilet house with a heart in the door on a small yard. After all, each apartment has a small garden, which is a great wealth.
Our immediate neighbors are called Hoffmann and also come from East Prussia, from Osterode. A coarse family with bad manners whose members cuss extensively in Polish. Later we realize that they have loosened stones of the partition to our soil clean. Anything within reach of their arms stole it.
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As a refugee child in northern Germany: insulted and beatenThere are weapons and ammunition everywhere. In the last days of the war, many soldiers have left their units and discarded their equipment. On a dirt road is a cannon, on the pasture next door a tank. We children sit in a circle, break the tips out of the rifle cartridges, pour the powder into a heap and enjoy it when it hisses loudly with a gust of flame.
Hand grenades as a toy
Klaus, our neighbor ignites a hand grenade, but he can not throw far enough. When he gets up, because he knows nothing about the delay time, he is mortally wounded by some splinters. He is bleeding heavily and screaming terribly. Older boys, trained in first aid at the Hitler Youth, save their lives. Klaus stays in the hospital in Rendsburg for a long time and can not get it right until one year later.
But the shock only briefly stops, the temptation is just too big. Soon we will be back in our old hiding places. But at some point weapons and ammunition are gone. We swear eternal revenge on the traitor.
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Meanwhile, hunger is becoming an ever greater problem. The farmers are not ready to open their filled pantries. Since we do not own anything valuable that we could trade for food, we have to beg and steal. If you have moral reservations, you will not get anything to eat.
Hunger becomes the greatest scourge of the lost war. He makes people dangerous and forces them to prostitute themselves.
"They even eat dog food"
At night we hear suppressed squeaks of pigs. Farmers slaughter "black" without special permission from the British occupying power. The certainty that the farmers will soon get over sausages and ham makes us bitter and angry.
We East Prussia communicate with each other and know where to slaughter. Horrified, the farmers watch as we dig up the hastily burrowed rumen of the secretly slaughtered cows. Only after a while do they realize that we are making the "Königsberg spot", an East Prussian national dish.
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Germany after '45: rubble women, black market, refugees - a journey through time"They even eat dog food," say the farmers, shaking their heads. But even so they can still make money. Soon we can not look forward to free food.
Battles with the farm boys
The farm boys feel strong enough to chase refugee children through the village and beat them up. From time to time, however, we succeed in luring them into the trap and pushing them together. I throw a stone to a fat farm boy. Roaring, he rushes toward me, holding his bleeding skull. My brother Helmut catches him, I barely escaped a rubdown. After the peasant boys have brought some bloody nose, they finally leave us alone.
At home, we breed rabbits and urgently need food. Since the meadows are closely guarded, we can only risk collecting succulent clover in the dark. Hastily stuff the older siblings a backpack full, while Helmut and I "dope". We are always afraid, because the farmers do not shy away from giving even a small child a big blow with a club. "Damn fugitive, you," they curse.
Then comes winter 1946/1947 with Siberian temperatures. We are freezing because the bedroom can not be heated. Mother puts hot, paper-wrapped bricks in the beds and we all move closer together. Coats and stockings are retained.
Petroleum against the lice
Thank God Helmut took the chamber pot in his escape bag. Unthinkable if we had to go outside to the toilet at night. Every morning thick ice flowers bloom on our windows.
Helmut and I (nine years old and I barely six years old) walk in the woods in the evening, equipped with the undercarriage of an old pram. Fearfully, we load thick branches on our vehicle, while we believe we can see and hear everything possible in the dark.
Helmut pulls the car, I push from behind, then it goes out with beating hearts from the forest, in a wild ride about three kilometers home. How happy we are every time we arrive there!
We have been rid of our lice for a long time. Mother has shaved all her hair short and rubbed the scalp with petroleum daily. We smell pathetic, and it bites terribly, but one day the critters are defeated. Since we can wash regularly, the scabies are soon gone.
The father - a stranger on crutches
I learn to read at school with a primer that dates back to the Third Reich. Piece by piece, the images glued with flour paste and paper dissolve, on which swastika flags swinging children can be seen. Of course we help. Our teacher begins each day of school with the canon: "Infantry, Artillery, Red Hussars, Rifle Company". Then we sing an old soldier's song from the First World War: "Wild geese roar through the night".
In 1949, my father is released from captivity. From the Friedland camp, where all the Russian returnees are deloused and registered, he comes to us in Nindorf, in a dark, Russian cotton suit. A stranger on crutches who brought me a red toy car from Schuco.
I get a beating from my father when I intervene in a relatives visit unasked. Always the whining about the lost home, the loss of beautiful furniture and the many dead. I'm almost ten years old and blame the plaintiffs. The indignation is great. My father, former Oberscharfuhrer of the SA, accepts no guilt. Instead of answers, I often get beatings, so mutual rejection arises.
When my father, now an alcoholic, dies at the age of 51 in January 1959, I feel - nothing.
Election posters - Refugees as a plaything of politics
Advertising campaign: The German-speaking parties in the post-war period vigorously wooed the displaced - as on this CDU poster on the occasion of the local elections in North Rhine-Westphalia in 1948. For the CDU aid to refugees apparently meant the same for the CDU.
Familiar tones: "Together we can do it", printed the CDU on this poster from 1949. That the Christian Democrats campaigned among the displaced, was only logical. After all, they represented a voters potential of about ten million dar. The greatest desire of the uprooted ...
Signature in the Federal Archives: Plak 005-004-018
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... but could not fulfill a federal government (poster from 1947): the return to the old homeland. All former German territories beyond the Oder-Neisse line were under Polish or Soviet administration after the Second World War. As Poland was moved westward in favor of the Soviet Union, millions of Poles also had to leave their homes and settle in the former German eastern territories. Nevertheless, many politicians were afraid to expose the displaced persons to this truth. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer advised "patience".
Signature in the Federal Archives: Plak 004-008-027
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Disappointment: At the beginning of the sixties, his later successor Willy Brandt even issued the slogan "renounce betrayal". All the more was the indignation among the expellees when Brandt in 1970 accepted the political reality in the Warsaw Treaty by recognizing the Polish western border. As a result, many turned disappointed CDU and CSU, which had previously been regarded as parties of the veteran. (Poster from 1949)
Signature in the Federal Archives: Plak 005-011-013
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Change of sides: Prominent expellee functionaries even resigned from the SPD. The FDP, which supported the new Ostpolitik in the social-liberal coalition under Chancellor Brandt, also lost a Bundestag member. Born in Silesia Erich Mende joined the CDU / CSU parliamentary group. The poster was launched in October 1947.
Signature in the Federal Archives: Plak 004-010-015
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Reality: When Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1990 again emphasized the finality of the German-Polish border at an expellee event, he was disturbed by whistles and boos. Twenty-five years later, the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft deleted the item "recovery of the homeland" from its statute. Instead, cross-border cooperation with the Czechs is now sought. (Poster from the late 1940s)
Signature in the Federal Archives: Plak 004-009-017
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Loss of meaning: Parties from the national-conservative edge of the political spectrum campaigned for the displaced as well as the German Party (DP) with this poster from 1949. 1961 parts of the DP merged with the repeatedly renamed block of the expellees and disenfranchised (BHE) to the All-German Party. Three years later, the displaced party BHE, which was founded in 1950, made it into the Bundestag with some members of parliament, but failed at the next election at the five-percent hurdle. The party had success only in regions with a high percentage of displaced persons. With the integration of many displaced persons, however, the party lost large parts of their clientele. Poster from 1949
Signature in the Federal Archives: Plak 005-022-008
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Beschönigung: Four million refugees and displaced persons had fled to the GDR. Only they were not allowed to call themselves that. They were called "resettlers" officially. In the later GDR, the displaced were similarly unwelcome as in the Federal Republic. The communist and Saxon Minister of the Interior Kurt Fischer described them as "swarms of locusts" in 1945. On their posters, like this one in 1946, the SED wooed the homeless.
Signature in the Federal Archives: Plak 100-015-022
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Resettlement: Unlike the FRG, the GDR recognized the Oder-Neisse line in 1950 as a "peace border". In the working-class and peasant state, displaced persons were to assimilate as quickly as possible and forget their old homeland. The establishment of associations and organizations for home care were prohibited, corresponding songs and costumes politically undesirable. It was only after the fall of the wall that displaced people could officially commemorate the lost homeland. (Poster from about 1946)
Signature in the Federal Archives: Plak 100-014-018
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