Three Germans landed in North Haven on Sept. 18 to talk about their lives as German soldiers in World War II and then as prisoners of war held in Houlton, Maine.
The former POWs, Rudi Richter, Dr. Hans Augustine and Gerhard Kleindt, spent day at the North Haven Community School (NHCS) talking with students and faculty.
Their visit came just before the departure of the high school students on their annual experiential learning week. One of the highlights of the week would be a visit to Seboomook near the West Branch of the Penobscot River, site of another World War II POW camp.
Talking to different groups of the K-12 students at NHCS, the Germans described their lives in Germany before and during the war.
High school students listened raptly as the three men talked about their conscription into the army in 1943 and 1944 when they were just 16 years old.
“We had no choice but to join the army;” said Richter, “not to join meant being shot.”
From the time they were children, they had been told of Germany’s importance and invincibility. All three were stationed in Normandy in the spring of 1944 and fought on D-Day.
Gerhard Kleindt said that the German propaganda had convinced them that Germany, stronger than the Allies, was winning the war. But at dawn, alone on sentry duty above Gold Beach, he saw the air and sea full of Allied planes and ships. “I knew then that we had been lied to.”
Captured by the Canadians, the three men ended up at the Houlton Camp from 1944 to 1946. Richter said that the shades on the windows were lowered as the trains carrying them pulled into Houlton. It was to keep the residents from seeing them, not to keep them from looking out.
Richter said that their visit was the first time any of them had seen Houlton’s main street. It was also the first time the three Germans had met each other.
POWs were sent to work in the Aroostook County fields and in the woods to alleviate labor shortages. Both agriculture and lumbering needed strong young men. Seboomook’s 1,000 POWs cut lumber. Camp Houlton’s 3,000 POWs worked in the potato fields.
Richter and the others reminisced about how young they were. Their guards carried no guns at the camp. Catherine Bell, curator of the Aroostook Historical and Art Museum, said, “They looked like the neighbor’s kids.”
As POWs, the caloric value of their food rations was guaranteed by Geneva Convention regulations on treatment of POWs. But when the war with Germany ended in 1945, they were no longer POWs, and the calories were reduced dramatically.
Whether from self-interest or from concern for these young men, or both, the county farmers protested the drop in food allowances to the officials.
“This was our first experience with American democracy,” said Richter. “Even though the government said our calories should be now 800 a day, the farmers said, ‘No, this isn’t fair.’ And we got more food!”
In 1946 they were sent back to Germany. Richter and Augustine returned to their homes in Harmstorf and Hovenburg, now in the western part of newly divided Germany.
But Kleindt’s home was in Dresden, now part of eastern Germany. He would not travel outside East Germany until 1989.
John Sommo, the school’s guidance counselor, read about the Germans’ visit to Houlton. He called the Germans as they made their way down the coast of Maine, and they accepted his invitation to visit the school the next day.
Waiting in the brisk air for the North Haven ferry the next morning, they all spoke of how moved they were by their welcome in Houlton and North Haven. Sixty-seven years after leaving the Houlton POW camp they had been invited back to the dedication of a monument commemorating the camp, they had been honored at a community dinner with Maine Rep. Michael Michaud and Germany’s deputy Consul Gen. Guentar Wehrman in attendance, and they had been welcomed by North Haven’s schoolchildren.
How long would it take, they mused, for current enemies of the West to become welcome? They hoped it would be sooner than 67 years.