I Remember Hövelhof

While Gary Moore remembers Paris in '49, Red Baron remembers Hövelhof, a community in the region of Senne in eastern Westphalia between Bielefeld and Paderborn, in '44.

Under Napoleon, Hövelhof became part of the Kingdom of Westphalia, with Kassel as its capital.

  

Der Code Napoléon pour le Royaume de Westphalie

The French emperor appointed his youngest brother, Jérôme Bonaparte, as king of Westphalia (1807-1813), who signed a decree on Christmas Eve 1807 in which Hövelhof gained its independence as a municipality.

I lived in Hövelhof from July 1944 to the fall of 1945 and went to elementary school there.

Before that, our family was in the Sudetenland, but as the Russian front drew closer in the east, my father thought it would be better if we lived further west.

He knew someone in Westphalia, Karl Epping, the uncrowned king of Hövelhof. Epping owned a meat processing plant and a sausage factory in the village. In 1944, he started with the help of Russian prisoners of war, building accommodations for evacuees and bombed-out people far outside the village center. Today, the settlement that still exists is called Eppinghof.

Did my father buy the Westfälisches Volksblatt? (Click to enlarge)

In 1944, on July 21, our family stood on a platform at Paderborn station, waiting for the train to Hövelhof to depart. My father went to buy a newspaper and returned with the news, "On July 20, an assassination attempt was made on Hitler."

We lived on the upper floor of the second house from the right.
My mother, wearing a white apron, looks out the kitchen/living room window.

In those houses of the settlement, there were two "apartments," each consisting of a kitchen/living room and a bedroom, with unit one on the first floor and a second on the second floor. Both apartments shared one toilet, which was located halfway up the stairs.

My father soon had to say goodbye. As a specialized engineer, he had to return to the distant Sudetenland to ensure the functionality of the X-ray facilities, which were frequently damaged by war.

Little Manfred, my mother, and my brother are standing at the entrance door.

The settlement was still under construction when we moved into one of the houses in our first-floor apartment. Every morning, Russian prisoners of war were driven in from the nearby POW camp "Stalag 326" Stuckenbrock-Senne. The men built the outer walls of the houses from large prefabricated bricks by filling the joints with mortar.

A row of finished Behelfsheime (temporary accommodations)

They were a funny crowd, especially when they took my two-year-old brother to their hearts. They greeted him with terms of endearment like Адреяашка парашка, whatever that meant. These Russian POWs were quite happy. They were not in the fire on the Eastern Front; they got their food and had work. A single older soldier, a constable with an old shotgun, was enough to guard them.

The secret of reconciliation is called memory.

During my current visit to Hövelhof, I read that from 1941 to 1945, prisoner-of-war transports arrived in freight cars at the train station. The POWs dragged themselves from there on the "Russenweg" six kilometers to the notorious "Stalag 326". Tens of thousands are said to have met their deaths there. Looking for the origin of the inscription, I found the following brochure:

Forced laborers and prisoners of war in the Third Reich (©Körber Stiftung)

A Russian Proverb states, "If you forget the war, then a new war arises." How true.

My reception as a nine-year-old on the grounds of the village school was one of curiosity and reluctance. Although I had the right prayer book, my classmates made me feel that, as a settlement resident, I did not belong to the village establishment. Today, this would be referred to as mobbing.

The first lesson of the morning was always devoted to religious education, as Hövelhof belongs to the Archdiocese of Paderborn. In German, the comparative and superlative forms of the adjective "black" are jokingly referred to as Münster and Paderborn, where the color black stands for Catholicism.

It was taken for granted that pupils attended the Holy Mass at 7 AM before classes started at 8 AM. My walk from the settlement to the village school and the church next to it was over half an hour, so my mother had dispensed me from attending early mass.

The type of classroom I remember well (©Schulmuseum Riege near Hövelhof)

Looking at the photo from the school museum: No, we were no longer taught Sütterlin, but the heavy wooden desks with their inkwells and the satchels (Ranzen) we pupils carried are from yesteryear.

In the village school, we were educated in strictly segregated classes by sex. This practice was still in effect according to the Prussian School Regulations of 1872. Corporal punishment with cane strokes on hands or buttocks was common.

A female teacher looked after the male classes simultaneously, one to three, and an older male teacher cared for the boys from the 4th grade onwards. This "simultaneous teaching" worked out because some grades were "immobilized" with written work while the teachers at the front presented the program for another age group.

The teaching program of my year was so simple that I was more interested in the lessons for the older years. In religious education, I was the best anyway because I owned a children's Bible and had read it at least three times in the absence of other books, which I had to leave behind in the Sudetenland.

In the fall of 1944, I transferred to the "upper" section of the village school.

My blond-haired brother is in the foreground.

After morning school, we "settlement children" played in the sand in the afternoon. The whole surrounding area, the Senne, consists of sand. People cited: Gott schuf in seinem Zorn den Sennesand bei Paderborn (In his anger, God created the sand of the Senne near Paderborn.)

And then they came. Silver air fleets of the Americans flew over Hövelhof at a great height. The planes hummed, glittered in the sun, and dropped strips of metal foil to interfere with German Radar. These strips we children collected as Lametta for future Christmas tree decorations.  

Once, we children experienced a high-up dogfight. Suddenly, plane parts fell from the sky. We took refuge in a nearby copse, held our breaths, and prayed many "Our Father."

The Western front was approaching, noticeable by the increased appearance of low-flying fighter planes. One day, we children were shot at by a board gun but were not hit because we were playing in the shade of a house. I still remember looking downstream at how the sand was stirred up by the impact of the shells.

The house that protected us.
Red Baron is sitting on the right, directing the crowd.

At the beginning of May 1945, I witnessed the invasion of the American troops approaching Hövelhof on the road from Gütersloh. The Wehrmacht started building a tank barrage to prevent the village's capture, but soon gave up, so the people of Hövelhof and their houses stayed unharmed.

Without schooling during the first weeks of the occupation, we settlement children spent part of our time in the village among the GIs. Here, I had my first contact with the English language.

Soon, the British took command in Westphalia. Suddenly, as a nearly ten-year-old, I was accused of stealing cigarettes from the English officers' mess. I was in tears. My mother intervened, and the village chaplain took me to the task. Of course, there was nothing; a classmate had falsely accused me.

The war was over, my father had eventually made his way from Sudetenland to Hövelhof, and we, in our best clothes, had a photo taken on the edge of the forest in the summer of 1945. Although living in poor conditions, our family was overjoyed to have survived the war unharmed.

Here are the brothers with a friend and a better view of the houses of the Eppinghof

At the end of the summer of 1944, preparatory classes for my first Holy Communion began in the parish church. This meant walking from the settlement to Hövelhof again in the afternoon. Our chaplain thus supplemented the daily religious lessons at school with instructions on communion in the church. I remember his stout and soft hands that stood out from the calloused hands of my schoolmates who had to help their parents on the Hövelhof farms. The chaplain stroked my hair sometimes, but that was all.

The atmosphere between the villagers and the settlement's inhabitants deteriorated. I recall vividly that one Sunday, this same chaplain announced from the pulpit, "Those of you who put your feet under our tables," creating a tense atmosphere. Nothing happened because the settlement was too remote, far from the village.

In the fall of 1945, my father took me to Hamburg, where I attended secondary school while my mother and brother remained in Hövelhof. I slept in my father's office until he found appropriate housing for the whole family. But that is a different story.

I am incredibly grateful to my parents for caring well for us children during those precarious times.

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