THE WAR

I am certain that Horst would never would have wanted his war-time experiences to alter the perception of his art. In fact, he would've preferred no one ever knew about any of it. So by telling the story here, I am betraying his confidence to a certain extent. But you cannot understand any artist without knowing how his life experiences transformed him. In Horst's case, his childhood and youth were essentially stolen from him in a long series of traumatic expeiences. He spent a good deal of time trying to recover a childhood, healing himself through is art and putting the war as far behind as possible.

Not surprisingly, Horst was guarded when recalling his war experiences, knowing no one would ever really understand. He recounted them as if they were unique, like he had gone through them alone. He didn't acknowledge that millions of young Germans shared similar experiences. He never read about the war and resisted getting into discussions about it. I think he wanted to forget the whole thing; the one thing he had no desire to learn more about.

By the time the war ended, Horst had just turned 17, yet he had already served in military youth groups, military schools or the army for 9 years, more than half his life. His life didn’t reacquire a semblance of normalcy for many years. Collectively, his experiences were so traumatic that he struggled with the anxieties, nightmares and depression of PTSD his whole adult life. Sometimes we forget the Nazis didn't just victimize their adversaries, but of everyone they incountered, even their own children.

Indeed, Horst always spoke of the “The Nazis” as a kind of foreign criminal element, not really Germans. He never forgave them for their crimes against Jews and Gentiles alike. And even though they were punished for war crimes, they have never been held to account for the astonishing abuse of their own children. Horst’s entire generation was betrayed to a degree impossible for us to comprehend. Although completely innocent, they are still lumped in with the Nazis, presumed guilty of war crimes simply by association. Most Horst’s generation never recovered from any of this, and continue to live out their lives quietly and anonymously. Horst took a different path, came to America and found a kind of redmption unknown to his peers.

In the rest of this section, I recount what I remember, what we've discovered in his papers and journals. When heis recollections were incomplete, I have added historical details to fill out the context.

Dormitory

Horst’s father, Adolf, was an engineer, and the family was well off until the Weimar hyperinflation of 1923. During that period, everyone had to share his job with a coworker. To make ends meet, Horst’s family moved into and managed a student dormitory. Later, as fate would have it, this became a dormitory for young Nazi activists. Horst’s family had a natural sympathy for their young tenants, and like many good Germans, Horst's father was sucked in by the false promises of the Nazis. A mistake that ultimately cost him his life.

Hitler Youth

In December 1936, when Horst was only eight, membership in the Hitler Youth became mandatory for boys, and the League of German Girls for girls. By 1938 these two organizations had a membership of nearly 9 million children.

Poland

In 1940 the British began bombing German cities, including Hannover. This prompted an evacuation program for over 3 million children age 10-14 called Kinderlandverschickung or KLV. The KLV established 1000’s of rural education camps, mostly in Poland. Because the camps were run by the Nazi party, the “education” consisted mostly of pre-military training and Nazi indoctrination. These camps were designed to toughen the boys up. Extreme competition was encouraged and sports were often chaotic and violent affairs. Physical and sexual assaults and emotional sadism were common both from students and faculty. These camps were often real life Lord of the Flies experiences.

This information was mostly lost to history until the historian Jost Hermand, wrote a comprehensive memoire about his time in a Polish camp. The book A Hitler Youth in Poland, The Nazi's Program for Evacuating Children during World War II, sheds light on a nearly forgotten but deeply destructive period in the lives of German youth.

Although, Horst was evacuated to Poland, he apparently avoided the worst of this. He fondly recalled living and working with a Polish family on their farm. I don't recall him ever mentioning a camp; however, he recalled being embarrassed by his quasi-military status which required Polish men to defer by stepping off the sidewalk as he passed. It seems likely that Horst went to Poland at 12 and returned 2 years later at 14 to start Gymnasium (high school) in Germany.

Gymnasium

Sometime in 1942 Horst began attending what he refered to as an “SS School”. He never specified its name or location, but at the time there were twelve Adolf Hitler Schools and 23 National Political Training Institutes, or Napolas that fit his description. These were attended by the brightest Hitler Youth and children of Nazi party members. These schools were modeled on Prussian military academies and were not part of the traditional edcuation system. They emphasized a non-academic, militaristic curriculum designed to identify the next generation of elite Nazi leaders. As the war went on, they came under ever tighter control of the SS, which meant graduates went into the Waffen-SS, the elite ground forces of the SS, instead of University.

Horst described the environment at the school as brutal, designed to weed out sensitive boys too moral or ethical for the SS. He recalled being traumatized by beatings, rapes and other abuses and insisted on leaving the school after just one semester. These were popular schools with long waiting lists, so Horst was able to leave without stigma. Much to his credit, Horst was not cut out for the SS.

Flak Crew

In 1943, 15 year old boys were assigned to Luftwaffenhelfer, or anti-aircraft gun crews, and so Horst was assigned to a crew in Munich. Over 200,000 boys eventually served as Flakhelfer, and are now referred to as the Flak Crew Generation. At 16 German boys could be drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst (Labor Force) and from there into the Waffen-SS. Oddly, foreign boys were more likely to be drafted, which is what happened to Gunter Grass who was from Poland. Because his birthday was January 7, he missed this draft by a few days, and so was allowed to remain with his flak crew through the end of the war.

One of his favorite stories was about how his Gymnasium teachers went to each gun emplacement to give Latin lessons. Sometimes the lesson would be interrupted by an air raid with the boys jumping into action and the instructor taking cover. Horst's anti-aircraft gun, the infamous 88, had a sophisticated targeting computer. Horst recalled with some pride and chagrin that they figured out it was more effective to look through barrel until you saw a plane, then load and fire as fast as possible.

Return To Hannover

At the end of the war Munich was in the American zone, so Horst was interned in an American detention camp. Although it's controversial, many American detention camps were nothing more than huge fenced fields with no shelter, sanitation, medical facilities and little or no food. Photographs of these camps confirm this. Additionally, American guards reported that thousands of prisoners died from starvation, exposure, disease, suicide and random executions.

Horst never talked about the conditions at his camp, but they must have been bad enough for him to risk his life to escape. He then had to walk the 400 miles home to Hannover. Because being recaptured meant being reinterred or perhaps executed, this was an extremely dangerous journey. It was also not common for brutalized American soldiers to take revenge on any Germans they came across. This happened to Horst, when an American soldier forced him to play Russian Roulette, a memory that haunted him for life.

It is important to note that Horst’s good friend, Hans Becker, had a completely different experience in an American POW camp. He recalled his time fondly, describing his captors as very friendly and accommodating. Since, Hans would eventually be responsible for Horst coming to America, Hans’ favorable experiences were critical to Horst’s future.

Horst made it back to Hannover, and reunited with his mother and sister, but his father was still missing. Horst’s father had been detained in a Russian POW camp for two additional years after the war ended. He barely survived and returned to Hannover in 1947 a broken and chronically-ill man. In 1949, when Horst was only 21, his father succumbed to illnesses acquired in the camp.