A chance meeting with an old soldier

We went for a walk around Monschau last night and went up the hill to the ruins of an old castle. As has been typical for the last month in Germany it soon started pouring rain. We got talking to a nice German fellow who later informed us that he is 80 years old. We got chatting initially about what we were doing in Monschau and he was interested in my (Adam's) work because he is an engineer too. He then mentioned something about when he was in the war (WWII that is).

He told us that he had been initially put in to the army at the age of 16 and he and his school mates formed an anti aircraft artillery unit. Apparently they would be in class and then if the air raid siren went off, the teacher would put on his steel helmet and they all had to go outside and man their guns. He even said that at times they were happy for an air raid to come to get them out of class! Following this time, he eventually served in Denmark and then back to Germany where at the end of the war they surrendered to the Americans. For the next two years he was a prisoner of war in France and Belgium where it sounds like they spent a lot of their time cleaning up from the war.

He also mentioned one interesting point was that at one stage they were with an American unit which was comprised of all coloured soldiers with a couple of white officers. He said that this was a better time for them because the Officers seemed to like the Germans more than their own men because they were white. The soldiers seemed to like the Germans more because they felt like they were prisoners themselves to an extent as they weren't allowed to mix with white people. He also said that many of the Germans served as translators as not too many of the Americans could speak anything other than English. So they knew what was going on most of the time since they were the ones translating!

So after talking for about an hour, he had to go back to his little holiday shack. It was pouring rain like a tropical downpour so we didn't want to let him walk home in the rain. So we let him use one of our umbrellas and we walked back to his place. He invited us in to have a couple of glasses of red wine and we left with the invitation to come back another time for some more wine!