RUDOLPH RUETER

Interviewer: You mentioned that your friend Deisner was involved with a Guernsey woman. Was this a common occurrence  amongst local women and soldiers stationed there?

Rudolph: Well, I think they were a different type of women, really, but I am not sure. Most of the time it was just friendly contact or, in the case of Manfred and his Jane it was a real love story. Other than that, they hardly got involved with Germans. I mean, Manfred and Jane had been seeing each other for a long time and then they met again. I think theirs was a true love. The others it was all just, you know, fleeting encounters.

My other comrades, Koehler, who had a girlfriend in town, his encounter lasted a lot longer but it was over when the war was. No, most of these encounters were short lived and probably based on “mutual benefits“. Both parties got something out of it. I don’t know. I don’t know of any case where there was serious jealousy involved. It was all just temporary  and not all that serious.

Interviewer: Moving on, we understand that you were involved in a life-threatening incident involving a shipwreck during your time on the island. Please can you tell us the story of what happened?

Rudolph: I had not had any leave for over a year when I was granted fourteen days in January 1943.  It was four of us from our unit, who were to go on holiday. We were driven to the harbour to board the ship ”The Scotland“ or something like that. There was another ship in the harbour, too called France or Normandy, a small steam ship. It was a passenger ship. Ours was a freighter. I got on board and looked round for a place to stay the night. I looked down one loading hatch and saw timber loaded down there on the cement floor and a ladder leading down. I thought to myself, ”better not go down there, if something happens you’ll never make it back up again“. I checked out another loading hatch and there, the same scenario, a timber load and on top of it comrades sitting chatting, playing harmonica, looking forward to going home. But I thought to myself better not go down there either. So I looked on deck for somewhere to stay the night. I decided to take shelter from the wind  behind some planks.

We started moving but were still waiting for the convoy from Guernsey to take us to St Malo. Whilst we were waiting for the convoy, I suddenly noticed these light signals, the ship turned and it became unpleasant up on the deck. So, I decided to go down the iron spiral staircase, down to the first level.  I went into the machine room, the steam room. It was nice and cosy there. I sat on my suitcase resting my back against the isolated  wall of the hot boiler and everything felt great.

We had been going for ten minutes or so, when the ship came suddenly to an abrupt halt. The lights went out and on again. Then, we started moving again. I think, that was the biggest mistake. If the ship would not have moved again but kept sitting on the reef it may not have sank. So, any way, there I am in the machine room and feeling all cosy. Suddenly there was a bang, the light goes out. I get up. The light comes back on again and for a moment everything seemed okay. A moment later however I saw the water gushing forth from underneath the floor. There was such a high pressure, it must have been a meter high or so. And it moved from here to there, because the ship swayed. So, I call this sailor over, he was busy further inside the machine room. He comes, sees the water and tells me to get out of there. He gets a crate and starts to take out the embers, to avoid an explosion because if water gets near the boiler it all explodes. I left him to it. 

Upstairs they were busy firing flares. It was all chaos. I tried to find myself a place in a life boat, I’m not a good swimmer. There was one seat left in one of the boats. But the boat was still tied to the ship by the ropes and none of the sailors were in sight to undo them. They had all disappeared, the sailors. There were only two life boats, anyway. In the second boat, it was already in the water, I saw a female passenger and a few people from the Organisation Todt, old people, you know. I remember thinking, these must be French people, maybe they were being exchanged. Anyway, I had a knife on me and I was about to cut the ropes of the boat when I suddenly realised that by the time I would have untied the boat on both ends somebody else would have taken my place in it. It didn’t make sense to me, so I didn’t do it. The boat later sank together with the ship.

I found myself one of metal-framed inflatable life-rafts. I struggled to pull it from underneath this iron bar. By now the water had risen to knee level. You could hardly see the railing anymore. It looked like the ship would sink any minute now. Some people jumped into the water holding onto their suitcases some undressed before they jumped in. I thought, ”you better keep your clothes on or you’ll freeze“. I had my pistol on me and a sausage. And suddenly there was water everywhere, just gushing forth. The timber was floating past me and I drifted away from the ship. Rescue people started to fish out people at the other end of the ship. I called out for them. One of them heard me, turned the spotlight in my direction and told me that I would have to wait as there were far more people waiting to be saved on the other side of the ship, and that they would come back for me later. Well, I clang on to the railing with one hand and the inflatable life-raft with the other. The raft also contained a net, but the net was broken. Finally, I managed to climb inside the raft. It was old and rusty and leaked, and my legs didn’t fit in. All the while I kept drifting because of the strong current. It was something like eight miles per hour. I kept drifting and drifting because of the strong current. The rescue people had forgotten all about me. I was all by myself.

Some time later I saw a light coming from the land. I tried to reflect it with my aluminium water bottle, so they would see me. But they didn’t. I thought if I get to a bay by myself, there will be mines and I will explode up into the air. All the outer bays were full of mines, weren’t they. So I kept drifting round the Island all night long.

In the morning, drifting past one bay after the other I said to myself “you have to get on land at some point.” I had made myself a paddle from the timber that was floating round everywhere. It looked like a timber road in the sea. So, I took my makeshift paddle and tried to get on land. But I kept drifting because of the strong current. I remember thinking if you don’t reach this bay over there, right now, you’ll drift into the open sea. In the end I took my pistol and fired a few shots in the hope, someone on land would hear me. And then I saw a flare being fired on land and thought, “thank God, somebody saw me”. Two hours later a tug boat came towards me and I thought, “God, I hope, they saw me”, when suddenly the boat turns back. It had come across a mine field and had to turn. But they had seen me. They threw me a rope and got me on board. There was a British pilot on board. He was amazed to learn I had survived. They had not expect any more survivors after all these hours.

I remember asking them to help me get undressed. I also remember the smell of porridge and asking them for a portion. They gave me one and then I fell asleep. That’s all I remember. I had saved one bullet for myself in case I didn’t make it or got rescued because I was scared of drowning. I kept the pistol as a memory. Later, back home my father bedded the pistol into the mortar of the kitchen stove because he didn’t want to hand it over to the Allies.

Interviewer: What happened to the other three soldiers you were with from your unit?

Rudolph: They all drowned. I was fished out at the northern side of the island. The ship sank on the southern end. I always used to think, it was one hundred and seventy people who had drowned. Some statistics say it was one hundred and thirty.

Interviewer: Did such a high number of casualties come as a shock to the troops in the island?

Rudolph: It was nothing unusual. For example, I was reported missing around lunch and found the next day in the afternoon. I had already been pronounced dead.

Interviewer: So death was not something unusual for you to deal with?

Rudolph: No, nothing unusual about that. We had the news coming in from Russia. People were dying every single day, a lot more people. The guys on the ship had just been unlucky. The guys from my unit who’d been on the ship with me had all been excellent swimmers. Only one of them survived.

End of interview.

Read Part 1 of this interview. The boating accident described above is of great interest to the Occupation Archive. If anyone has more information on what this disaster might have been such as boat name and more accurate facts, we would be very interested in hearing about them.

Interview copyright 2001 High Tide Productions Ltd, can be reproduced with permission

RUDOLPH RUETER

Rudolph: My name is Rudolph Reuter. I was born on the same day as Hitler, April 20th. (laughs)

I am a baker by trade but in my spare time always mucked around with radio equipment.
So, when I was drafted they had me repair all the radio gear.

Interviewer: Did you enjoy being in the signals division?

Rudolph: It was great, brought me a lot of advantages. You see, everytime something unpleasant was coming up, like exercises, I invented an excuse, said something needed repairing. The things I got away with, you wouldn’t believe it.

It got even better when I was put in charge of  the whole radio system and the shift rota, too.

I give you an example: when it was announced in the morning we had to exercise, there would suddenly be a short-circuit in the telephone system, and of course,  I had to repair it immediately! Which would take most of the morning, well until they finished exercising anyway. (laughs)

You see, I was my own boss. I could do what I wanted.

Interviewer: Being in the signals meant you had access to all radio broadcasts. Did you ever listen in to the Allied news broadcasts as the war went on?

Rudolph: Yes, I regularily listened to the news and told my comrades what was going on.

Interviewer:  This must have put you in an interesting position. Did you know when your commanders were, for instance, hiding things from you late on in the war?

Rudolph: Well, when I went to this company meeting one Saturday where we’d normally get the latest report from the commander, our commander announced that the wonder weapon, the V2 rocket, was going to win us the war. Would you believe it?

Well, actually most of the soldiers did! The commander gave us such an inflammatory speech, they bought it straight.

I’d gone in there thinking, “that’s it, a few more days and the war is over”. But when I saw my comrades, I realised that they believed the whole story about that mysterious wonder weapon. So, I though I better keep my mouth shut or they’ll say ‘but he (points at himself) told us we’d lost the war already’.

Interviewer: How would you explain this belief from your colleagues? Desperation? Brain-washing?

Rudolph: Well, I guess, you could call it mass hypnosis, the way the commander talked to us that morning. People genuinely believed the war was almost over before they went into the meeting. When they came out they said ‘Wow, at last in ‘45, we got the Wonder Weapon. Now we’ll win the war!’

Interview. During your time in the island, did you have much contact with the locals?

Rudolph: You weren’t really allowed to, but somehow we all tried to make contact with the locals.

Actually, one of my superiors, he was shot because of it, six weeks before the end of the war. He had English girlfriends, one after the other. He wasn’t a very good soldier, though. He had a poor reputation, as a soldier, I mean. They had arrested him and put him in the nick.

Interviewer: Why was he shot?

Rudolph: It was a succession of unfortunate circumstances which let to him being shot, very unfortunate. To start of with, his wife was expecting a baby. The Allies had already marched into Germany, we were starving and we were putting up these fish traps down by the beach. The guy in charge of this was a real hard line Nazi.

So, my superior, Deisner was his name, he is there, too, at the beach, and looks at the fishing boats and says ‘We should try and get away from here in one of these’. What he meant to say was that he ought to try and get home to his wife who was expecting his baby. But this Nazi, he got it all wrong. He reported to his superior that Deisner wanted to flee the Island. Our chief commander had to act on the report  because Deisner was already  known because of his poor record as a soldier and the trouble he always got himself into with girls.

Because of the poor record Deisner had as a soldier and, if you want because our chief commander was a party line Nazi, too, he passed the report on to his superior. And then, Deisner got arrested.

No, hang on, there was something else. He came to us one afternoon and asked us to help him. He had been caught with this Guernsey woman and wanted to intimidate this local guy into not reporting him.

So he asked us to be false witnesses and tell this local guy that we had witnessed him stealing food from the parcel this woman had received from the Red Cross. Deisner only wanted to intimidate the guy, that’s all. But this guy, an English guy, he complained to the chief commander that he had been threatened with a gun, which wasn’t true. Deisner was a harmless soul, he would never have hurt anyone. But now there was this complaint so they had to arrest him.

During trial we were called as witnesses. We acted as if we didn’t know. We said that all we could remember is that Red Cross parcel on the table, all this food in there, so much food! Food we had forgotten existed and so on. The court got annoyed: ‘had we not noticed the civilian being threatened with a gun?’ “No,” we said, “all we saw was the food ( stretches out his arms) so much food, we couldn’t take our eyes off”. In the end, the court dismissed us as useless witnesses.

When they shot him, it was very disturbing for us…

Interviewer: Was there anything you tried to do to help him out?

Rudolph: During the trial me and a friend tried to bail him out. Admittedly, it was a stupid thing to have done, to threaten a civilian with a gun but Deisner didn’t mean any harm. He would never have done anything serious. But now he was in front of a court and on top of it, now the boat story, him wanting to flee by boat, came out too! And that was that. He was sentenced to death. He was returned to prison to await his execution.

I went to visit him there, brought him a clean shirt. Know what he said to me? He said ‘They can’t do much. The war will be over within the next few weeks. I filed a plea for clemency. By the time they’ll have it processed the war will be over.

Well, two days later, I was on duty when I received an urgent  message. This telegram had to be picked up immediately. A motorcyclist was dispatched to pick it up. That’s how I got to know about the execution the next morning.

Manfred Zimmer, he was among the command. They drove Deisner to the forest, in an ambulance. They weren’t really allowed to use an ambulance but did it anyway. They drove him to a gorge, well, a valley,  a beautiful valley, come to think of it. There they tied him to a tree. Read out the sentence and then they shot him. The war was almost over…

If our chief commander wouldn’t have given him such a bad assessment in court, I am sure, things  would not have turned out the way they did and he would not have been shot.

End of part 1

Part 2 of this interview including the final part of the story about Diesner and Rudolph’s dramatic escape from a shipwreck which killed a number of soldiers will be published shortly.

Interview copyright 2001 High Tide Productions Ltd, can be reproduced with permission

BERNHARD WEISS

Bernhard: I am from originally from the area of Schlesigen which became Poland after the war. Before the war I worked on a farm just like my father did. I worked there until I was drafted in 1943.

Interviewer: Thanks Bernhard- please tell us how you ended up in the Channel Islands.

Bernhard: Well, the reason , I ended up in Guernsey is this. After we had completed our training in France we were told that our year (1925) would not be sent to the front line because of the immense losses among the soldiers from the years before us. That’s how I came to be stationed at Guernsey. The older soldiers we replaced at Guernsey were probably sent to the Eastern front.

I didn’t see it, of course. The movement of a battalion within the army was always a matter of secrecy as it could have been read as a sign of weakness by the enemy.  The older soldiers had already left before we arrived there. Well, that was the explanation we were given.

Interviewer: What was the general mood at the time?

Bernhard: I remember everyone being in good spirits. We had arrived there, a whole bunch of us. All young men. The others were old compared to us. Most of them were in their late thirties or early forties. They could have been our fathers. So, it was much more difficult for as young ones to make contact with them.

Interviewer: So you never really mingled with the older soldiers?

Bernhard: That’s exactly how it was. The old ones kept themselves to themselves and so did we. Well, we came in contact with them on the job during the day but our accommodations were separate. As a young person you tend to bond with your peers and most of us already knew each other from training camp, anyway.

We mostly stayed in our quarters in our spare time. I suppose, we could have gone out more but most of the time we preferred to stay inside. It was safer and a lot less hassle. You always had to go through several controls, show your pass etc.

Occasionally we would go into town, to the cinema or down the beach but I wouldn’t say I fully explored the island.

Interviewer:  What kind of crowd was there at the cinema? Did you get to mix with the locals?

Bernhard: No, only Germans were allowed by this point. The best thing about the cinema was the concert organ. It would play before the actual film accompanied by lights and water. This was often much better than the film itself that was to follow. Mainly because of the newsreels they always showed before every film. These newsreels were Nazi party propaganda, as you well know.

Interviewer: You worked in signals during your time on the island. Did you ever hear any of the radio broadcasts being put out by the Allies?

Bernhard: You had access as a radio operator. All you had to do was switch the channels. Which is, what I did and nearly got caught.

Interviewer: What happened?

Bernhard:  I made a mistake. I forgot to switch back the channel. So, this Lieutenant comes in, switches on the radio and hears it.  I tried to convince him that I hadn’t touched it and that it must have happened by accident but the Lieutenant wasn’t convinced.

In the end it took my commander Lieutenant Wolters to bail me out. He did it because, he himself listened in now and then. It was punishable by the death penalty.

I would also like to mention that it was only in the last 6 months of the war that things like this happened. Before that, nobody would have dared to do such things.

Interviewer: Were there many soldiers who did this?

Bernhard: It’s difficult to say. If people did it they would certainly not have talked about it or let somebody else know. It was far too dangerous.

Interviewer: You said your Lieutenant used to listen in too?

Bernhard: Yes, towards the end. In the last six months or so, he would listen in, too.  That’s mainly why we got on so well.

Interviewer: So there were others prepared ot take the chance of being caught?

Bernhard: Well, not in my unit as far as I was aware. I really only knew the first lieutenant and the major. I don’t know whether the major was a loyal follower or not. All I know is that towards the end he was drinking heavily. Drowning his sorrows, I suppose

Interviewer: Do you remember D-Day?

Bernhard: I remember the night of the invasion very clearly. It was a Monday, the 5th of June. We were in session at the command post when I nipped outside to relieve myself. When I looked up I saw the sky was full of airplanes. I went back inside and said jokingly to my commander ‘Looks like tonight will be the night’ but he didn’t reply. We finished at around 11pm that night and by 12am I was back on duty. At 5.30am I received the message that they had landed.  I forgot to mention that I did receive a message before that one. It said ‘Artillery fire and lighting signals are strictly forbidden for all battalions’.

Interviewer: So you were on high alert at this point?

Bernhard: Yes we were. We were on alert the minute they landed. But as I said we couldn’t leave the command post. I went back down to the bunker to try and pick up information via the radio. There was a lot of air traffic going on,  people tried to get information from the main land. Later on we fell under the command of the Navy, and to operate the marine radio was even more difficult.

Interviewer: What was the islanders’ reaction to the invasion?

Bernhard: They kept pretty quiet as they always did.

Interviewer: But you did have contact with the local populace?

Bernhard: Yes, partly. We talked to them.  They rather liked Germans. I never heard a bad word from them.  We organised ourselves a lady who would do our laundry so we men didn’t have to do it. I would take the laundry round her house once a week. I knew they were short of food and we had plenty, so I would take bread with me one week and butter the next.

Interviewer: Did you ever socialise with them in the evening?

Bernhard: Not in pubs. We were not allowed in there, if I remember rightly.  Well, I never went to a pub there. They were friendly. Would greet you and you would greet them back. Some soldiers had girlfriends.  One of them settled down in Sark after the war. He is German, a former member of the occupying force  at Guernsey.

Today, he is an important dignitary of Sark. He was  received by the queen when she came to visit the island a few years ago.

Interviewer: So going back to the D-Day invasion, what happened after the day of the landings?

Bernhard: We were on alert for the next 6 weeks but nothing really happened. So we gradually slipped back into our old routine. Things went back to the way they were until hunger broke out like an illness among us.

At this point we only slept for a few hours at a time. We were on duty for 3 hours in the morning and another two hours in the afternoon. In-between we had strict resting order.  The food would be mainly porridge by now mixed with lots of water, one hundred grams of it, no more than a thick slice and meshed potatoes mixed with water. That’s when we started to steal.

Interviewer: What sort of things did you steal?

Bernhard: The first thing I stole was a Sunday roast for christmas dinner in 1944.  I caught us a cat.

Interviewer: A cat?

Bernhard:Yes, we called the cats “roof rabbits” *laughs*.

End of part 1.

Part 2 of Bernhard’s story can be found here

Interview copyright 2001 High Tide Productions Ltd, can be reproduced with permission