Henry Metalmann: Confessions of a soldier for Hitler. “Everything stupid inspired me.”

Henry Metalmann is a widower aged 80. He is a retired railway worker and lives in  Godalming, Surrey, where he acts as a voluntary gardener for Charterhouse School. He was born in Hamburg and served in Hitler’s Wehrmacht on the Russian front.

“I was born on Christmas Day 1922. My father was an unskilled worker but I had loving parents who did their very best for me. I was an only child. My father had low wages. His cultural life was nil.

“They both had a great potential for education, but they never had the opportunity. Reactionary forces were very strong in Germany at this time – the aristocracy, the Churches, the Germany establishment. When I went into the Army, all my officers were ‘von’. A bloke like me would have had no chance to be an officer.

“My father taught me a lot which I did not then accept. I was always arguing with him – he wanted a socialist world. He said to me – ‘Do you want our globe, our earth, to be owned by certain classes? The earth belongs to all of us and it must be administered justly.’ But I was a National Socialist ideologue! To me, the Fuehrer was the greatest thing.

“In our part of town [Altona], our fathers were too poor to buy us a football. We played with a tennis ball. But then the Nazis came along and started sports clubs. The Hitler Youth provided us with gymnasiums, swimming pols, and you could go to camps in the summer by the mountains and the rivers.

“I used to come home singing Nazi songs. I sang a song: ‘When Jewish blood springs from our knives’! My parents were aghast. Everything stupid inspired me. Everyone had a copy of Mein Kampf and I read it diligently. My father used to say – ‘You think you are pushing, but you are being pushed’. He died at the outbreak of the war. His words often come back to me.

“I was apprenticed to be a locksmith, and then I got my call-up papers, in 1940. I thought it was great! Die for your Fatherland! Germany would win the war – this was the most powerful country in the world. Hitler made many speeches: we were the most intelligent and efficient nation with a cultural level higher than all the others, etc., etc. I listened, thinking, ‘You’re right, you’re right,’ without understanding anything.

“I was full of myself as a German soldier in the Panzerjaeger [tank regiment]. I was chosen to be a driver. Most of us were between 18 and 19; almost all had been in the Hitler Youth. Most of my comrades were ordinary decent human beings who were put into a uniform and into a position where they had to conquer and kill, or be killed.

“I was transported into Russia. As we marched east, we saw the order and neatness of Germany decline into the under-development and carelessness of lands to the East. Yet I soon began to understand the reality of ‘fight for your Fatherland’. It was a hell of our creation. You had to keep going because the alternative was to die. The coldest I remember was minus 54 degrees Centigrade. If you touched metal, your skin stuck to it, and you had to tear it off. Some did it on purpose in order to get out of the situation. If they were suspected of doing that they were shot.

“I killed people. There was a wounded man – I had to drive over him. He was lying in a ditch, and I stopped the tank. It was the last thing I wanted, to drive over someone. My commander shouted, ‘Why are you stopping?’ and I said, ‘There’s someone here, he’s alive,’ and he ordered me to drive on. I had no choice, but even so, that’s no excuse. To save my life, I killed him.

“I also killed a friend of mine. We were marching through the snow, like Napoleon’s army. We were a battle group, not a regiment, just a few stragglers put together. Six of us got separated from the rest. We had no maps, no idea where we were going, but we walked one after the other through the snow towards the west. Two Russian planes turned up, as the winter sun was very low, and they fired through the snow at us. One of us was hit – Willi, a good friend of mine. He was torn open at the side. The evening before we had played chess together. None of us had any medicine. He was dying, but he was still moaning. We stood around him, frightened and confused, and the others – who were younger – pointed to me, and I realised that it was my duty. I went down on my knees and stroked his head and said, ‘Willi, it’s all right, Willi, it’s okay’, and with the other hand I shot the pistol into his heart. He died instantly. And then we shovelled snow over him and moved on. Had that been reported I could have been court-martialled and executed.

“Soldiers were always court-martialled for refusing an order – the death sentence to be carried out within 24 hours, no appeal. A friend of mine became a lieutenant, and when it was seen that he didn’t fight to the very end, in East Prussia, he was executed.

“When I got back to Germany, I went to see Willi’s parents, to comfort them. Of course I didn’t tell them the circumstances of his death? Why cause extra mental suffering?

“I began to see that the war was all too idiotic for words and to realise that there was a possibility that Germany might lose the war. And then I fell in love with a Russian girl. Nothing happened, but I saw her as a human being. The Russians were human beings, not Untermenschen. I wanted to be friendly with the Russians. I wanted to learn Russian. I talked to girls – they told me that their parents were proud that they were going to university so that people could learn, could build for the future, and they asked me, ‘Why do you come here to destroy all that?’

“I turned 180 degrees when I understood. I am now against most war. I took part in peace marches against the dreadful war in Iraq. I am still in touch with two or my old army comrades and we all think along the same lines.”

In 1945, Henry became a prisoner of the Americans, and was taken crop-picking in Arizona and Montana, and then routed back to England. He got back to Germany in 1948, though his mother was now dead.