"The front is coming!" War Ends for Refugees, April 1945

The Molotschna/Gnadenfeld trek leader Jacob A. Neufeld was distraught at the thought of an imminent German defeat: “Thus far the German leaders have accomplished remarkable things. … Should they fail in the end after so many years of desperate economic and military struggle? Oh no, no, surely that cannot be!” (note 1).

In the early months of 1945, western regions of the Reich were obligated to take in ethnic German refugees; the quota was determined based on the ratio of occupants to the available living space. Many of the Molotschna / Gnadenfeld refugees who had successfully escaped advancing Soviet troops in Warthegau (annexed Poland) were designated for the Municipality of Hermannsburg, District of Celle in Lower Saxony, about 300 kilometres west of Berlin.

Helene Bräul (my grandmother) and her two daughters were sent to a Hilmer family in the village of Bonstorf; population: 280 (1939). This region had been deeply shaped by the 19th century Pietist revivalism and strict moralism of the Lutheran pastor and mission-pioneer Louis Harms (note 2). None of the refugees in the Hilmer home, for example, were to work on Sundays and all shared in family devotions. Helene found it curious that she was not even allowed to darn socks after midnight on Saturday.Bonstorf also sheltered families bombed from their homes in Hamburg in 1943 and Hannover in 1944, as well as 30 Dutch women and children whose men had joined the Nazi effort. However the larger influx of refugees in 1945 stretched all resources. The farmhouses were not designed for multiple family units—each with “only one kitchen and relatively few bedrooms” (note 4).

The numbers of children in the village school more than doubled pre-war enrollments, from 62 in 1939 to 143 in 1945 (note 3). Käthe Bräul (my mother) recalls that each pupil had use of a slate tablet and chalk pencil; but there were not enough desks, and many children had to sit on the floor.

Polish and French POWs were also part of the mix as agricultural labourers (note 5).

During this time everyone listened eagerly to radio reports to learn how the war was going and to get advance warning of “enemy” air squadrons. Sixty-six villagers had been conscripted, and one-third would never return (note 6).

As it became clear that Germany would soon be defeated, the Führer delivered a chilling eleventh-hour appeal over wireless radio calling “for all Germans, including young teenagers, to offer every possible form of guerrilla resistance to the enemy in occupied parts of Germany (note 7).

“Very young” Hungarian axis (child-) soldiers with no battle experience had been evacuated to the Bonstorf and region for military training. “All day long we could hear the explosion of hand-grenades and bazookas, as well the infantry's machine-gun fire from drilling grounds,” locals recalled (note 8).

On Sunday morning, April 15, 1945—two weeks after Easter—the young Hungarian soldiers marched through the village singing confidently yet unaware that allied tanks were fast approaching. In the afternoon Käthe and other children were playing on the street around the Memorial for Fallen Soldiers when one girl heard what sounded like deep thunder—though it was a sunny day. Suddenly sister Sara came running from the house shouting to the children, “The front is approaching!,” and that everyone should run home. Allied tanks shot in the direction of the young Hungarian soldiers ordered to defend the village on its southern edge, and then into the village where they detected resistance as the young Hungarians fled.

American troops soon entered the small village of Bonstorf and went house to house, setting several homes in fire. The Hilmer barn, located on their yard (Hof) across from their house, was being used by the German military as a depot for food supplies and was guarded by two soldiers. American intelligence knew this and set the barn on fire, flushing out the two soldiers. As the soldiers fled the barn, they were shot at from the house across the street and very badly wounded. Hans Hilmer ran out and pulled the two soldiers into his house. Käthe, only seven years old, witnessed everything from the window. Hilmer then instructed everyone into the potato cellar through the trap door in the kitchen for safety. Villagers were required to have enough air raid shelter space for all, and residents had practiced their use, including gas masks and first aid for years (note 9). They were all huddled in close quarters; it was very traumatic for Käthe to see the soldiers groaning and wrenching in pain, and everyone very afraid of what would happen next.The American soldiers entered and upon finding the root cellar door they opened it and ordered everyone out by gunpoint. They took the German soldiers and then proceeded to search the entire house. Everyone was very frightened. The Hilmer and Bräul families were then ordered back into the cellar—but only after they told the Americans where the family’s food supplies were. While huddled in the basement, the soldiers helped themselves to food and cooked a large meal in the kitchen and spent the night.

Bonstorf was now under Allied occupation and would become part of the British occupation zone for years to come.

On this same weekend Allied troops overran and took control of the entire region around Bonstorf. The village was only twenty kilometres from the notorious S.S.-run Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, where, only one month before the camp’s liberation the well-known fifteen-year-old Jewish diarist Anne Frank died of typhus (note 10). The accounts of what Allied soldiers found when they liberated the camp on April 15, 1945, are horrific.

Käthe remembers overhearing shocking descriptions given by the Hilmer girls, who were forced by the British to clean some of the buses in which enslaved and horribly abused Jews and other eastern Europeans had been transferred.

In this way—exactly two weeks after Easter—the war ended for this group of Gnadenfeld refugees.

---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: Jacob A. Neufeld, Tiefenwege: Erfahrungen und Erlebnisse von Russland-Mennoniten in zwei Jahrzehnten bis 1949 (Virgil, ON: Niagara, 1958), 212f.

Note 2: Cf. Theodore Harms, Life Work of Pastor Louis Harms, translated by Mary E. Ireland (Philadelphia: Lutheran Publication Society, 1900), 51, https://archive.org/details/lifeworkpastorl00harmgoog. On Harms’ impact on the village, cf. Giesela Meyer, “Bonstorf: Unser Dorf im Krieg und in der Nachkriegszeit,” December 15, 1952, 1b. In Folder 295, no. 1, Archiv Landkreis Celle, Germany.

Note 3: Meyer, “Bonstorf: Unser Dorf im Krieg,” 4b.

Note 4: Meyer, “Bonstorf: Unser Dorf im Krieg,” 4.

Note 5: Meyer, “Bonstorf: Unser Dorf im Krieg,” 1b.

Note 6: Meyer, “Bonstorf: Unser Dorf im Krieg,” 2a, 2b.

Note 7: Waldemar Janzen, Growing up in Turbulent Times (Winnipeg, MB: CMU Press, 2007), 84.

Note 8: Meyer, “Bonstorf: Unser Dorf im Krieg,” 4b.

Note 9: Cf. Meyer, “Bonstorf: Unser Dorf im Krieg,” 3, 5.

Note 10: Anne Frank was taken from her attic hideout in Amsterdam by the Nazis in August 1944, and became known around the world when her diaries were published after the war.

To cite this page: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, “‘The front is coming!' War ends for refugees, April 1945,” History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), May 10, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-front-is-coming-war-ends-for.html.

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