Page 13 - C.A.L.L. #33 - Winter 2010/2011

KALEIDOSCOPE

At 18, Siegfried was drafted, and headed off for battle with the Fuhrer’s call for a new “German
kingdom of honor and power” ringing in his ears. The echoes faded quickly. By December 1942, he
found himself on the eastern front, marching toward Stalingrad behind a horse-drawn artillery wagon
in knee-deep snow, biting winds, and subzero temperatures.
Ruined villages - abandoned farms - frostbite and fear of death - the stomach-churning discovery of
a gully full of dead young Russians - all this gnawed at the young soldier. "What
had these men done to me?" he asked himself. "Why did they have to die? For
what? For whom?"
Sometime later his company captured an enemy platoon. Meeting the prisoners
face to face he realized, to his horror, that they were not subhuman
monsters, as he had been indoctrinated to believe, but "human beings just like
us, sighing with relief that their lives had been spared."
Imprisoned first in one POW camp, and then another, and then held in France
for three years of forced labor (until 1948), Siegfried had no shortage of
lonely hours during which to consider the nightmare of the previous years, and Siegfried Ellwanger
to solidify his deepening conviction that war was a senseless, unnecessary evil.
It wasn't only the wreckage around him - the bombed-out towns, empty-eyed mothers, and endless
heaps of rubble - but a sickening realization that the glamorous propaganda of the Third Reich had
masked the most devilish regime imaginable:

Now I heard the terrible reality: that millions of Jews had been murdered - killed in
concentration camps, tortured and tormented, along with countless other so-called inferior
peoples. Germans, too, had lost their lives, after having recognized Hitler and the Nazis (for
what they were), and resisting them. What did it mean now, that my life had been saved?

In contemplating the past, Siegfried refused to take shelter in the thought (common enough among
soldiers of his generation) that he had simply "done his duty" or been swept helplessly along by the
tides of history, or fate. On the contrary, he felt personally responsible for his past - and so strongly
that he saw his stint of forced labor as an act of contrition:

These years, which brought me into close contact with people I had previously fought, meant a
great deal to me, despite the long separation from my loved ones. Indeed, I could accept this
time as a kind of penance for my involvement in the war.

There seems to be some kind of virus going around, infecting newsletters with items about
WWII, the Holocaust and Israel. Could that perhaps be a belated result of the activities of all
kinds of voluntary associations all over the world that have patiently spread information
about the fate of the Jews in Germany during the Nazi regime and the fate of a few righteous
ones who tried to resist - and paid dearly for it? Actually, nowadays almost everybody is
ready to believe almost everything about the human beast, contrarily to that period when
some escaped Auschwitz inmate arrived at the synagogue in a little Polish shtetl and warned
the inhabitants of what was happening and what was in store for them – but they took him
for a madman and dispatched him to the nearest asylum.

"An Embassy Besieged" tells us the story of the Rhoen Bruderhof people, who tried for a
short period to stand up to Hitler's henchmen, of course without success. After many years
the Bruderhofers, who emigrated to England and later to South and North America, have
made several attempts to re-establish themselves in Germany, but have encountered many
obstacles due to what appears to the local inhabitants as outlandish customs and goals. We
appreciate their courage and perseverance all the more because of it.

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