December 5, 1943. We had no idea of the masses of people who were rolling around from the city, with nothing left but the bare lives they had saved. In the morning we visited the remains of the house that had been destroyed by the aerial mine. I simply did not understand how only a pile of stones about a meter high could remain of such a large building. You had to see some furniture or at least a scrap of wallpaper somewhere. But only a tangle of iron bars protruded from the pile of rubble. And under it lay our dear old house doctor with his whole family. He was a doctor like no other today. He would come to the house on foot with his little suitcase in the middle of the night when a child had a fever and was perhaps just coming down with measles.
Now there were hundreds of pieces of shrapnel lying around, but I was no longer interested in them1. I packed every available box with things that I absolutely wanted to take with me to Sonneberg.
Around midday our father appeared out of nowhere. He had climbed out of his compartment outside the completely destroyed main station and walked through burning Leipzig to Probstheida2. He had seen indescribable misery and was driven by only one thought: were we still alive, or were we also lying under the rubble of our house? No one could give him any information on the way, and so he only breathed a sigh of relief when he stood in front of our undamaged front door. Now he no longer needed to remind us of Sonneberg, we just threw our arms around him and hoped that he would take us there as quickly as possible.
We left that same evening. We quickly said goodbye to our friends. A family sat completely depressed in their pretty villa. Their business premises in the city were completely destroyed, and it was only days later that they found out that most of their relatives had perished. How they all envied us for our safe place to stay in Thuringia.
I was still worried about my school. I was sure I would be severely punished for not showing up for class that morning. It was only much later that I found out that the classrooms at the Richard Wagner School3 had been completely burned out and that it took weeks before they could find temporary accommodation for the students. But two girls never returned to their seats; they were buried under the rubble of their houses.
After a kilometer-long march with our heavy luggage, we finally found a small suburban station from which trains still seemed to be leaving4. But there, too, terrible scenes were taking place. Hundreds of bombed-out Leipzig residents were loaded into cattle wagons with an unknown destination. Some of them only had a coat over their nightwear; Red Cross nurses tended to their wounds and brought hot tea. With a bad conscience, we smuggled ourselves in among the poor people and pretended that we no longer had a roof over our heads, because otherwise we wouldn’t have been allowed to throw stones at the wagons.
Shortly before the train departed, the large sliding door was opened once again and two women were pushed in. On this cold winter night they were wearing nothing but their half-burnt dirty nightgowns and their hair was singed by the fire. One of them was determined to load a completely sooty basket pram, but after a long struggle the nurses wrestled the vehicle from her. The poor mother no longer had her child with her; it had been burned. Now she was talking incoherently and thrashing around wildly. We put our wool blankets around her shoulders, but she took no notice. Then we squatted down on the dirty straw in a corner of the carriage and our mother hugged us tightly. Today, after having raised children myself, I understand what must have been going through her mind at that moment.
At some point, it seemed as if an eternity had passed, the train stopped in Altenburg. The refugees continued on into the unknown and began the difficult journey of the evacuees, who were often only assigned to a room with strangers’ families for years. It was not uncommon for there to be a complete lack of understanding for them, even though they were among the first unfortunate victims of war who had experienced terrible things and lost everything they had.
We crawled down from the carriage at this first station and spent many hours in an ice-cold, dreary waiting room until we were finally able to continue on to Sonneberg.
Our father had already had to leave us in Leipzig. He had just managed to lift us into the cattle truck before he had to make sure he got back to Silesia as quickly as possible. He had left his office without permission when he heard the news report: “A terrorist attack on Leipzig in the early hours of the morning.” But now he knew that we were on our way to Sonneberg and that nothing much could happen to us.
We arrived in Sonneberg that evening, dead tired. The usual banners “Räder müssen rollen für den Sieg!”5 greeted us at the station, but we didn’t even spare a glance for the familiar Sonneberg rider. A call to Aunt Fanny was enough and the good woman appeared with a ladder cart to pick us up. We had never walked up Bahnhofstrasse so exhausted. But then even Aunt Anna greeted us with a friendly face, a fire was burning in the kitchen stove, and we walked through the rooms with Grandma’s old furniture and slept under the thick, heavy feather beds for the first time in months without being woken by the wail of sirens, but in our wild dreams we were thinking about what we had just experienced, which I have never been able to forget to this day.
- Renate had collected metal, including shrapnel, as part of her involvement with the Hitler Youth
↩︎ - Probstheida is a district located in the southeast of Leipzig, Germany, approximately five kilometers from the city center. Historically, it originated as a street village known as “Heida” in the late 12th century. The name “Probstheida” was established in 1438 after the area was handed over to the Augustinian Canons of Leipzig by Margrave Dietrich of Meissen in 1213
↩︎ - In 1944, the Richard Wagner School (Richard-Wagner-Schule) in Leipzig, Germany, was located in the city centre. The school, named after the famous composer Richard Wagner, was situated at Richard-Wagner-Straße 7, close to the city’s prominent areas. During World War II, Leipzig suffered extensive damage from Allied bombing raids, which also affected many buildings, including schools. The Richard Wagner School would have been part of this urban landscape, likely impacted by the war’s events.
The Richard Wagner School in Leipzig was indeed affected by the bombings during World War II. Leipzig was heavily bombed by Allied forces, particularly in 1943 and 1944, as part of the broader strategic bombing campaign against Nazi Germany. These bombings targeted industrial areas, infrastructure, and urban centres, causing significant damage to the city, including its schools and other public buildings.
While specific records about the Richard Wagner School itself being directly hit by bombs are scarce, it is highly likely that it sustained damage due to its central location in Leipzig, where many buildings were either damaged or destroyed during the raids. The city centre, where the school was located, was one of the areas most affected by the bombing campaigns.
↩︎ - It is not clear which trains station they left from, below is a list of station and their approximate distance from the Richard Wagner School (Richard-Wagner-Schule) at Richard-Wagner-Straße 7, as they were in 1944:
Leipzig Hauptbahnhof (Leipzig Main Station):
Distance: Approximately 1.5 km northeast of the school.
Walking Time: About 20 minutes.
Leipzig Bayerischer Bahnhof:
Distance: Approximately 2.5 km southeast of the school.
Walking Time: About 30 minutes.
Leipzig Eilenburger Bahnhof:
Distance: Approximately 3 km east of the school.
Walking Time: About 35-40 minutes.
Leipzig Plagwitz:
Distance: Approximately 3.5 km west of the school.
Walking Time: About 40-45 minutes.
Leipzig-Leutzsch:
Distance: Approximately 5 km northwest of the school.
Walking Time: About 1 hour, 15 minutes.
By Train/Tram: About 20 minutes.
Leipzig-Connewitz:
Distance: Approximately 5 km south of the school.
Walking Time: About 1 hour, 15 minutes.
By Train/Tram: About 20 minutes.
Leipzig-Schönefeld:
Distance: Approximately 4 km northeast of the school.
Walking Time: About 50 minutes.
By Train/Tram: About 20 minutes.
Leipzig-Thüringer Bahnhof:
Distance: Approximately 3 km south of the school.
Walking Time: About 35-40 minutes.
Leipzig Wahren:
Distance: Approximately 7 km northwest of the school.
Walking Time: About 1 hour, 30 minutes.
By Train/Tram: About 25 minutes.
Leipzig Messebahnhof:
Distance: Approximately 7 km northeast of the school.
Walking Time: About 1 hour, 30 minutes.
By Train/Tram: About 25 minutes.
↩︎ - “Räder müssen rollen für den Sieg!” (translated as “Wheels must roll for victory!”) was the slogan of a propaganda campaign by the Deutsche Reichsbahn (German National Railway) in 1942. The campaign aimed to encourage the German population to refrain from unnecessary train travel to free up rail capacity for military transport during World War II.
“Räder müssen rollen für den Sieg!” exemplifies how the Nazi regime used propaganda to mobilize civilian resources for the war effort, reflecting both the logistical challenges faced by Germany and the pervasive influence of propaganda in maintaining public support for the war. ↩︎