Jeremy Robson concludes his story of his dad's time as a prisoner of war during the final part of the Second World War, and reflects on his debt of life to an honourable enemy ...
During his convalescence in Scarborough, my father received a letter from the Air Ministry.
This informed him of an approach by Herr Heinrich Gottman, who was claiming that he and his family had helped an injured British airman in the closing stages of the war.
Herr Gottman had also told the ministry that a relative, Fritz Nolte, was a prisoner of war at a camp in Scotland. Naturally they were looking forward to his return to Germany, and hopingthe help they had offered to my father might be taken into consideration in securing Fritz with an earlier than scheduled release.
My father replied, pointing out that the Gottman family and other villagers had been very kind to him, especially given the circumstances.
They had done their very best to help treat his wounds and make him comfortable. They had very little to treat him with but had done the best they could. As the war was now over, he said that if anything could be done to reunite Fritz Nolte with his family, then it would be very much with his blessing. Over the following decades he never heard any more about this, and wondered if his reply to the Air Ministry had produced the desired effect.
As a small child I was constantly amazed that my dear old Dad had experienced such a tumultuous time in his youth. I would endlessly demand that he told me more “war stories” and my favourite time for this was on a Friday night after my Dad had been to the pub for a couple of pints.
I suppose there were a lot of things that he wouldn’t talk about, He’d seen things that nobody should see and experienced a lot of bad things that he didn’t want his family to know about. Like other men who had undergone similar experiences, there were some things he would never discuss. Some secrets died with him.
What I’ve recalled is the most complete account of what I was told as a small child.
There may be some things missing but nothing that changes the starkness of those events of so long ago. I used to wonder if this peculiar meeting of “enemies” had made the same profound impact on the Gottman family, and their neighbours.
Very few civilians came into direct contact with the enemy during those years, and to some extent very few of the participants in battle in the air, on land or at sea would look directly into the eyes of “the enemy” as my Dad did with Heinrich Gottmann and his family, and as they did with him.
My father was generally a man of few words. But his preoccupation with the war, its political backdrop, origins, and events as well as aftermath, became his key interest for the rest of his life. He was a bookworm, devouring hundreds if not thousands of books devoted to the subject. He had turned away from the Air Force at the end of the war, yet was tied to the battle, insatiable in an appetite for detail that remained undiminished until his death in 1996.
This fascination with the events of decades earlier didn’t seem unusual to me as a child, and it was only as I grew up, that I realised the enormity of the largely unspoken impact that it all had.
The physical damage done to him was lifelong, as so was the psychological aspect. I adopted an almost vicarious fascination not so much with the war itself but the intensely personal situation that resulted from him baling out, and the very brief time in the hands of a German family.
It would have been so easy to run him through with a pitchfork as he lay helpless and bleeding in a foreign field. Nobody would have batted an eyelid. Such action would probably have been regarded as a patriotic heroic act, killing a flyer whose mission was to bomb them.
In the summer of 1985 the time had come to find out more about what had happened all those years ago. I set off in search of whatever it was that I needed to find out. I headed for Germany stopping off for a couple of days with some relations of a student friend of mine in Aachen, Germany, just across the Dutch border.
I set off across Germany for Kulte. I arrived in Arolsen, the town where my father was hospitalised, unable to locate Kulte on any of the maps I had. The name of the village had yet to appear on any signpost I’d encountered so far.
Peculiarly, I happened to come across a German army medic about to get into a jeep, when I was looking for someone to provide directions. He was interested to know why an Englishman was looking for Kulte, so I told him part of the tale. “You’d better follow me” he said. “You’ll never find it otherwise,” he said in very good English.
I followed him for several miles down country lanes until we arrived on the edge of a tiny village which looked like it probably hadn’t changed for centuries.
“Here is Kulte,” he said as he got out of his jeep. “Good luck. I hope you find what you came here for.” He got back into his vehicle and left me standing there, wondering what I should do next.
Kulte was much smaller than I had imagined or could have expected. It was little more than a collection of smallholdings, with a few farms and an assortment of houses.
Freshly washed clothes hanging on lines above the well-tended vegetable gardens, and not a soul was in sight. I wandered around the narrow winding streets in the hope that someone would appear.
Eventually a middle aged woman appeared at her door. I stopped and asked if she knew the Gottman family, not even sure if any of the family remained in Kulte. I explained to her in what could only be described as woeful German why I was there. At this point she became very excited and shouted something I took to mean “Wait there!” in German as she ran back into the house.
I waited patiently and could hear the sound of an animated phone conversation - or, at least, one side of it.
Within a few minutes she emerged from the house, even more excited than when she had gone in. She started trotting down the street, gesticulating to me to follow. “That’s Frtiz Nolte’s brother’s house,” she said, pointing to her left as we made our way down the street.
“Where are we going?” I asked for a second time, my first question passing her by in her haste to reach our as yet to be declared destination. “The Gottmans!” she responded, smiling broadly.
As we reached the end of the street she crossed and pointed to a younger woman in the garden of a house as we neared.
She started talking again, but I couldn’t understand a word she was saying. The younger woman appeared to be very enthusiastic about whatever the older woman was telling her. I was quickly bundled into the kitchen of her house where the younger woman told me that she was going to fetch her husband. She explained that Heinrich Gottman was her father-in-law.
At this point I was trying to determine how old Heinrich must have been based on the age of his daughter in law. By now I had been introduced to Frau Gottman, who I assumed must be Heinrich’s widow, as no mention had been made of Heinrich.
A well built, blond German in his thirties then appeared in the kitchen, shaking my hand warmly and offering me a drink.
He said he was going to bring in his Dad! Incredible! Heinrich was still alive and 40 years after the event, I was going to meet the man who had saved my father’s life. After what seemed like an eternity a dark haired man in his sixties wearing heavy framed spectacles appeared. I was amazed to find that Heinrich was exactly the same age as my Dad, even more surprised to find he had been a German soldier home on leave at the time my father arrived so spectacularly in the middle of a winter’s night.
Both my father and Heinrich were only 22 when these events had occurred.
Within a half hour of arriving in the kitchen the farm house was besieged by visitors, who had been in Kulte during the war or who had heard tales about the injured British flyer landing in a field.
I wondered more, after the event, about how easy it would have been for Heinrich to have simply put a bullet through my father’s head. I doubt very much whether his wartime experience had been something that he particularly relished. He was a country boy caught up in it all, just the same as my Dad.
I realised, though, from talking to Heinrich and spending several days with them as their guest that the killing of a wounded enemy was simply not conceivable for a man like him. His instinct was to help another human being who lay injured, frightened and in pain in an enemy land.
Maybe when Heinrich looked at my father he saw himself in other circumstances. I really don’t know.
The language barrier didn’t help of course, but what was unmistakable was the warmth of their welcome and the generous nature. I realised my Dad had been in safe hands all those years ago. This feeling was so overwhelming, that for many years afterwards I don’t think the very real danger he was in ever sunk in. It made me think that being found by a member of the German army maybe helped him in some way or other.
Heinrich said that over the previous 40 years, that he had often wondered what had happened to the wounded “flieger”, and that he hoped he had recovered well and resumed a normal life after the war.
Once my father had left the farmhouse on the back of a horse drawn cart, they heard no more about him. It had taken 40 years to find out. I also had the pleasure of meeting Fritz Nolte who said that he realised my Dad had done what he could to help him return home after the war. Fritz had been released earlier than expected. He told me he wished he could have expressed his gratitude, but had no way of contacting him of course.
Several months later I took my father to Kulte, and it was a wonderful occasion. That is the three of us in the 1986 photo: me, my father and Heinrich.
Neither he nor Heinrich were men to let emotions run wild, but for them to meet four decades on was something special to both. I’ve come to realise as I’ve grown older that I very much owe my existence to Heinrich.
My father passed away in 1996, and Heinrich just a few years ago. Heinrich’s grandchildren are now adults, and they send a card and letter to my mother, written in impeccable English every Christmas. In them he left behind a great legacy of which he was justifiably proud. I wonder if it ever crossed his mind, that he also left so much more.
It’s amazing what can happen when two young lads meet up in a farmer's field.
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