World War II: How people remember the end of the war in 1945

Berlin. Albrecht Weinberg was always on the verge of being liberated. In January 1945, after two years of forced labor for IG Farben in the Buna-Monowitz subcamp of Auschwitz, and in April 1945, after death marches in Neuengamme and Mittelbau-Dora. But each time, before the British, Soviets, or Americans reached the concentration camps, the SS deported Weinberg and his fellow sufferers again.

The 20-year-old Jew ended up in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Celle between April 11 and 14, 1945, "more dead than alive," Weinberg recalls from his apartment in Leer (East Frisia). "I weighed 29 kilograms at the time, they told me, I was a skeleton covered in skin." He was never taken to a barracks. "They simply left me lying on the roll call square, surrounded by countless dead and half-dead people like me."

When British troops took over the concentration camp on April 15, 1945, the soldiers were looking into hell. They were able to free 53,000 prisoners, including Albrecht Weinberg. But for thousands, rescue came too late. By June 1945 alone, approximately 14,000 people had died as a result of their imprisonment. When the military entered the camp, Weinberg, a Jew, came to terms with his own life. "I thought they were finally going to shoot us. I couldn't tell that they weren't wearing German uniforms."

After the liberation of the survivors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, former SS members had to bury the dead in mass graves.

Source: imago images/Everett Collection

Was he happy at that moment? "Happy?" he asks. "At that point, I assumed I was the only one of us who had survived. And I asked myself, why the hell?" Only weeks later did Albrecht Weinberg learn that his older siblings Dieter and Friedel were also alive. Their parents had been murdered in Auschwitz.

Holocaust survivor Albrecht Weinberg (born 1925) today and in 1943 (l.) with his siblings Friedel and Dieter.

Source: Montage: Donati/RND, Photos: Thoralf Cleven, Private

When 14-year-old Gustav-Adolf Schur looked up in Heyrothsberge, 140 kilometers southeast of Bergen-Belsen, he saw the blue sky filled with airplanes. "There were definitely more than a hundred," he recalls, "a truly impressive and beautiful sight." Then, suddenly, a roar began. "Someone shouted: 'Those are bombs,' then we felt the first impacts. We ran for our lives, hiding in self-built shelters and bunkers. If a bomb had fallen on that, we wouldn't be here anymore. I was just as scared as the German soldier lying next to me."

Many Germans of his generation can relate to what the future East German cycling legend Täve (short for Gustav) Schur experienced in his hometown near Magdeburg during the last year of the war, 1945. The 94-year-old, who now lives in his birthplace again, says the events of 1945 have made him a different person. But more on that later.

World War II had returned to where it had begun. In the fall and winter of 1944, after the Wehrmacht's final, bloody stand against the British and Americans, the Western Front crumbled and finally collapsed. The US Army crossed the Rhine at the end of March 1945.

In the east, the Red Army launched the so-called Vistula-Oder Operation in January. The German-Soviet front between The Baltic Sea and the Carpathian Mountains were 1,200 kilometers wide. On January 19, 1945, the first Soviet troops crossed the borders of the German Reich and liberated the survivors of the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps on January 27, 1945. Four days later, the first Soviet troops reached the Oder River.

On April 16, 1945, the costly Battle of the Seelow Heights began. This marked the Soviet Army's launch of its attack on Berlin. On April 25, US and Soviet troops met in Torgau on the Elbe River. The British liberated the northwest and northeast of the German Reich up to the Hanseatic city of Wismar. US troops occupied southern Germany, the French the southwest. The division of Germany began.

When Wehrmacht Colonel General Alfred Jodl declared the unconditional surrender of the remaining German units on May 8, 1945, an estimated 600,000 German civilians had died since the beginning of the war on September 1, 1939. The Germans had systematically murdered more than six million Jewish people. In total, the Second World War claimed 70 million lives. The Soviet Union alone suffered 24 million deaths. "Never before," wrote historian Joachim Fest, "have so many human lives been extinguished, so many cities destroyed, and entire regions devastated in the collapse of an empire."

Täve Schur didn't see the end of the war as a liberation. "For me, it was a defeat." His father was in the SA and worked as a gas station attendant at a nearby military airfield. He raised his five children "strictly National Socialist," says the man who served in the GDR's People's Chamber for the SED from 1958 to 1990 and in the Bundestag for the PDS from 1998 to 2002. "I was a kid, a little fascist. I was raised as a victor, as unbeatable, as a 'member of the noblest race in the world.'"

GDR sports legend Täve Schur (born 1931) today and in 1937.

Source: Montage: Donati/RND, Photos: Thoralf Cleven, Private

In front of the Schurs' house on Fuchsberg, tank tracks constantly rattled over the granite pavement. The tanks were coming from or going to the Army Ordnance Office in neighboring Königsborn, where they were being equipped. "As boys, we enjoyed helping load ammunition; victory over the Russians and Americans was a given for us." The constant alerts about air raids on nearby Magdeburg or the railway junction were more of a necessary evil, according to the former athlete.

Suddenly, the war was over. Nearby Magdeburg had been captured by US troops. "Then in May, the Russians arrived in their panje wagons, with not a tank in sight, and occupied Heyrothsberge. I simply couldn't comprehend it: These were the people who had beaten our Wehrmacht? As a 14-year-old, it was very difficult for me to wrap my head around all that."

A former classmate still lives in Täve's neighborhood in Heyrothsberge. Susi Spiegel, now 92, worked for the German Reichsbahn (German Railway) in the GDR until 1990 and is a legend in senior sports. She began playing badminton, then known as shuttlecock, in 1965. She played her last tournament in 2017, winning over 70 championship titles in the GDR and in reunified Germany, winning four world championships, and claiming titles at the 2009 World Masters Games in Sydney. She says: "The end of the war was a relief for me."

The Red Army soldiers had suddenly appeared. "The Russians didn't harm us children, and my mother, 51 at the time, had made herself look older by wearing a headscarf." The family, Susi Spiegel recalls, was now completely destitute and starving. "We had nothing left, but we could sleep peacefully again. I felt that way even as a child."

Susi Spiegel (born 1932) today and in 1939 at the age of seven.

Source: Montage: Donati/RND, Photos: Thoralf Cleven, Private

Spiegel says she and her five siblings grew up in a caring environment. Her father worked as a railway signalman. "My parents weren't Nazis; they raised us to be critical—but cautious." The then twelve-year-old learned what war meant when, in February or March 1945, she was dawdling on her way home from school and was caught in a low-flying attack. "You could see the pilots in the cockpit. They were shooting at children, too." The girl was lucky, able to hide under trees. "When I came home, I got a beating from my mother, who was still shaking with fear for me."

As a child, Spiegel says, she was always afraid – of tanks, airplanes, soldiers. "Susi was always afraid," she says of herself. But the end of the war wasn't just a relief for her. Her sister, then 25 years old, died of diphtheria on May 15, 1945. She left behind two children, Spiegel says. The Soviet soldiers and officers quartered in their yard didn't help. "Perhaps they didn't understand us or didn't want to, I can't say. In any case, my father dug the grave alone."

One hundred kilometers south of Heyrothsberge, Christa Stutte, now 89, from Leipzig, experienced the end of the war in Lindenau, west of the city of Leipzig. When she thinks back to those days in April and May 1945, she remembers the boy standing in uniform on the small bridge over the Luppe River. "He was armed and was supposedly supposed to stop the Americans who were expected to come from the direction of Plagwitz. The adults, including my father, persuaded him to leave it alone and go home. The war was lost anyway. He actually changed into civilian clothes in my father's nearby carpentry shop and went home. For him, the war was over."

Christa Stutte from Leipzig (born 1936) today and as a five-year-old.

Source: Montage: Donati/RND, Photos: Thoralf Cleven, Private

But the then nine-year-old also remembers the dead American soldier at the Lindenau market, lying next to a destroyed vehicle. "Word quickly spread, and people curiously went to see it. The sight was horrific." Stutte and her two younger sisters were cared for by a 15-year-old nanny in the postwar days. "She always took us for walks right where American soldiers were standing. We were supposed to call her 'Mommy.' That led to her getting a lot of chocolate and sweets, because the soldiers apparently felt sorry for this young mother. We got our share and enjoyed playing along..."

German actor and entertainer Dieter Hallervorden cannot personally remember the exact day in April 1945 when US Army soldiers marched into Quedlinburg. It was April 19. Hallervorden, born in 1935, spent part of his childhood in the town on the edge of the Harz Mountains because of the air raids on his hometown of Dessau.

The actor Dieter Hallervorden (born 1935) today and in 1941 at his first day of school.

Source: Montage: Donati/RND, Photos: Thoralf Cleven, Private

He recounts that as a nine-year-old boy, "after years of successful brainwashing by the Hitler Youth and teachers," he greeted the advancing American tanks "as I had been taught." Hallervorden says: "I put on an army coat I found in the basement, with a swastika armband, that reached down to my ankles. Thus outfitted, I stood on the street in front of our barracks, raised my right arm in the Hitler salute, and shouted 'Sieg Heil!' to the American soldiers on their tanks."

Even today, he shudders when he thinks back to that situation. "A spookily disguised little kid wants to show a world power what's what. It wouldn't have been surprising if a GI, who had perhaps just lost his best friend to German snipers, had lost control in frustration and extinguished my life. It was my father who got me off the streets and brought me to safety. I survived!"

In his garden in Fichtenwalde, just outside Berlin, Klaus Abraham gazes into the trees as he recalls the day he saw his first Russian. "My mother, my brother, who was a year older than me, and I had holed up in a family bunker near our apartment in Berlin-Kreuzberg," the 88-year-old recalls. "Then they opened the bunker from the outside: two Red Army officers and several Germans. They ordered the people, mostly women with children or elderly people, to register and hand over their valuables. My mother said we had nothing. Which was true, because we had previously buried some things in the Hasenheide."

Former fire department diver Klaus Abraham (born 1937) today and as a three-year-old.

Source: Montage: Donati/RND, Photos: Thoralf Cleven, Private

The then eight-year-old was amazed at "how exhausted" the first soldiers were as they marched through the streets toward Berlin-Mitte. "They were basically knocked out," Abraham said. "They didn't hurt anyone; the second wave of soldiers was different. I didn't see it, but violence was taking hold. Everyone felt it; women were on their guard. Once, when drunken Russians followed us into the apartment, my mother was able to escape with us through the servants' staircase. We children felt an atmosphere fueled by fear and a thirst for adventure." Everyone, according to the retired firefighter, breathed a sigh of relief when the Americans took over Kreuzberg. "That's when freedom began."

Täve Schur says the time during and after the war made him hard on himself. He believes this hardness also contributed to his becoming amateur world champion (1958 and 1959) and multiple Peace Race winner, as well as winning Olympic medals in Melbourne (1956) and Rome (1960). "I became a different person, not least because of the reports about how Germans had wreaked havoc everywhere during the war. The little fascist became an anti-fascist."

The sportsman still suffers from remorse over his relentless asphalt battles with the Soviet racing driver Pavel Vostryakov, who was almost a year older than him. "Only later did I learn that Vostryakov had lost his entire family in World War II, that he was an orphan. That touched me deeply. With that knowledge in mind, I would never have tried to beat the man in a race."

Susi Spiegel settled in the GDR and had three children with her husband, who died in 2009. She remained skeptical of the state. "In the GDR, old Nazi phrases were replaced by new communist slogans. I rejected membership in the SED and have always stayed out of all politics to this day. And I will never pick up a weapon as long as I live."

Klaus Abraham pursued a career in the Berlin Fire Department and, through many rescue missions in the border region, gained painful experience of the city's division since the construction of the Wall in 1961. However, he was also able to help shape the unification of the rescuers in Berlin. Abraham retired in 1998. He says: "The war in Ukraine brought back so many memories of World War II for me. The bombs, the rubble, the fear in people's eyes—sometimes when I watch the TV images, it feels like I'm reliving it all over again."

After the war, Dieter Hallervorden graduated from high school in Dessau and later studied Romance languages ​​and literature at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He left the GDR in 1958 and began his career in 1960 as the lead cabaret artist of the "Wühlmäuse" (Wolves) in West Berlin and as an actor with a minor role in "The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse." Today, he is one of Germany's most successful actors in film and television, as well as on the theater stage.

Looking back, Hallervorden's war experiences as a child and his indoctrination, first by the Nazis and after 1945 by the Communists in East Germany, have had a lasting impact on him, as he emphasizes in light of recent debates about some of his performances. "The experiences of brainwashing and patronizing behavior have turned me into a politically engaged person with a penchant for forming my own opinions."

Observers accuse Hallervorden, who campaigned for the FDP and the CDU until recently, of possibly losing his political compass. The discussion centered on a controversial appearance on ARD and a video message at an event largely hosted by so-called lateral thinkers and right-wing extremists. Hallervorden denies any affinity with right-wing extremist ideas. He has spoken about peace, which is hardly surprising given his war experiences. "I have made ample use of this freedom for years," the actor said, "without regard for personal or professional disadvantages."

Albrecht Weinberg sits in his armchair in Leer and rolls up his left shirt sleeve when I ask him about his feelings when he looks back 80 years. The tattooed Auschwitz number is clearly visible on his forearm: 116927. "Hate," he replies. "Even when I wash my face in the morning, when I dip my hands in the water. 116927. Just think about how many camps the Nazis operated and how many people died in them! We were ordinary Germans and, from one day to the next, we were outcasts for most of our neighbors. I can't forget that, I'm sorry."

Nevertheless, Weinberg returned – even though he and his sister Friedel, two years older than him, had vowed upon their emigration to the USA in February 1947 never to set foot on German soil again. Although they enjoyed success in New York, Albrecht ran a thriving butcher shop on Broadway with another survivor. A severe stroke suffered by Friedel, who felt committed to protecting her little brother for life, and offers of help from friends changed his mind in 2012. After her death that same year, Albrecht Weinberg began telling his family story.

Since then, a street in Leer has been named after the siblings, and the high school bears the name "Albrecht Weinberg." At least once a week, he speaks to schoolchildren from the surrounding area at the former Jewish school in Leer. Weinberg says: "I'll be everywhere where I can explain to people what happened to us Jews here during the Nazi era. And children are the politicians of tomorrow." Incidentally, they would have understood well why he returned his Federal Cross of Merit in January after the CDU/CSU and AfD voted jointly in the Bundestag on migration policy.

The centenarian is now the only Jew in Leer, East Frisia, where there once was a fairly large synagogue. However, he says he lost his religion more than 80 years ago. "I don't believe there's a Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish God up there anywhere. Auschwitz speaks against that."