My mother’s brother Peter Bräul was seventeen years-old on the 1,100-kilometre refugee trek out of Ukraine, 1943-44.
After two months in German-annexed Poland (Warthegau)
and as a newly naturalized German citizen, Peter now eighteen eighteen-years-old,
volunteered as a Black Sea ethnic German for the Waffen-SS.
Peter Dueck of Margenau, Molotschna was the
same age as Peter Bräul and recalled this “remarkable incident” at boot camp in
Warthegau.
“A German officer questioned the young
recruits: ‘And who of you would not serve the Third Reich voluntarily?’ I think
it was a shock for all of us. Out of 500 only 3 men lifted their hand. They
were asked to come to the front. Officer: ‘And what reason do you have not to
serve the Third Reich voluntarily? Their answer was: ‘We as Mennonites, we
believe in nonresistance.’ Officer: ‘We have no use for such people. We all
defend our Reich.’ They were led out to the back door and to this day I would
still like to know what was their verdict.” (Note 1)
Their military preparations in the nearby city of Exin (Kcynia) included worldview training. The officer “tried to implant hatred of Jews in us. Most of would have preferred to sleep during the lecture. But doing 200 or 250 knee bends, holding the rifle in front at arm’s length, made us hate him more than the Jews,” as Peter Dueck recalled years later (note 2). After completion of military training mid-summer 1944 (note 3), the young men were deemed battle-ready and sent by train to join the 3rd Panzer Grenadier Regiment 19/ 9th Division. Shortly thereafter this tank division was given orders to put down the “Warsaw Uprising” in Fall 1944 and to push back the advancing Soviet Red Army. Within a few months the division was redeployed to assist German units in Hungary. Eduard Reimer recalled the arrival of some very young Molotschna boys to this division:
“Our casualties had been heavy and we were sent replacements. Among them were four boys from our Molotschna villages. They were not even eighteen years old and very unconcerned, certainly not realizing the mortal danger they were in. I was twenty-two years old but in comparison to them felt like a grandfather.” (Note 4)
When Budapest fell, Peter Bräul’s unit was pushed back to Hitler’s hometown of Linz, Austria. Here too the unit was soon boxed in and overpowered by combined Soviet and American forces. Three weeks later on May 9 German forces at Linz surrendered to the American 41st Tank Battalion, and survivors were handed over to the Soviets. Peter Dueck was wounded in the waning weeks days of the war.
Peter Bräul was missing in action. Over the next twelve
years my grandmother, with the help of my mother, wrote many letters to the
German Red Cross hoping to locate Peter.
They were not alone in their search; some 2 million German soldiers
vanished without a trace, and families hoped against hope that the Red Cross
would send information about their location and fate.
Thirteen years later (1958), the papers in Peter’s knapsack were
identified and sent to my grandmother in Canada by the Austrian Red Cross.
His
identification papers have two bullet holes.
The Red Cross could confirm that on April 17 Peter was heavily wounded
in battle and brought to a military hospital (Reserve Lazarett) in Linz where
he died, age 19, after less than one
year in uniform (note 5). The day before German troops in Berlin had surrendered
unconditionally.
In Peter's backpack was an address book that included the addresses of other Mennonite Waffen-SS soldiers (Jakob Dorksen, Peter Friesen and Heinrich Peters, and his brothers Heinrich and Franz), a few cousins, and a number of girls whom he writing.
Barely given the time to grow up, and tragically with no experience of any period of life that could be called normal—under Stalin, his father was taken from the home and shot when Peter was eleven—Peter became entangled in a senseless offering to the gods of war and nationalism.
---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast
---Notes---
Note 1: Robert Martens, “The Journeys of
Peter Dueck,” Roots and Branches 26, no. 1 (February 2020), 14f., https://www.mhsbc.com/news/pdf/RB26-1_2020_Feb.pdf.
Note 2: Martens, “Journeys of Peter Dueck,”
15.
Note 3: The details of training are based
on an account by Albert Enns, who was also conscripted in the same period of
1944; in Dorothy Siebert, Whatever it takes, 2nd ed. (Winnipeg, MB: Kindred,
2004), 4-6.
Note 4: Eduard Allert [pseud., Abram Reimer],
“The Lost Generation,” in The Lost Generation and other Stories, edited by
Gerhard Lohrenz (Steinbach, MB:
Self-published, 1982), 75.
Note 5: This is confirmed by a letter to
the author from the Berlin office of the Deutsche Dienststelle für die
Benachrichtigung der nächsten Angehörigen von Gefallenen der ehemaligen
deutschen Wehrmacht, regarding an inquiry about Peter Bräul, dated December 21,
2007.
---
To cite this page: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, “Peter Bräul: Teenage Soldier in Budapest,” History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), May 13, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/05/peter-braul-teenage-soldier-in-budapest.html.
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