Pforzheim and Huchenfeld
Every year, the people of Pforzheim remember two events.
They remember the destruction of their city on 23rd February 1945, just 10 days after the bombing of Dresden. 18,000 citizens died, a proportionately much higher figure than at Dresden.
They also remember an incident a few days later, in the village of Huchenfeld on the outskirts of Pforzheim, when five British airmen who had bailed out of their aircraft were murdered by young Nazis.
Murder at the Huchenfeld and its amazing consequences
Of all the German Cross of Nails Centres, Huchenfeld’s story, a village just outside the City of Pforzheim, is the most remarkable example of murder most foul, turning to reconciliation most profound.
An East German Lutheran pastor with a brave record of resistance to many injustices retired to West Germany, to the village of Huchenfeld where his son lived. There he unearthed a story that the villagers did not want known. Soon after an air raid on Pforzheim, as devastating as Dresden’s, a British reconnaissance plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire. Its wing ablaze, the captain of the aircraft ordered his crew to bail out. His own parachute had jammed. He flew on, expecting to die but, surprisingly, the fire went out and he landed safely behind allied lines.
The five man crew came down in the village of Huchenfeld. Anger at British bombing was running high. A Nazi officer rounded them up and locked them in the cellar of the village’s town hall. The next morning he put pistols into the hands of young members of the Hitler Youth, probably 15 or 16 years old, drove the airmen through a jeering crowd into the church yard and ordered the boys to kill them. Four died, but in the confusion two of them escaped into the forest and were taken prisoner-of-war as the law demands.
Pastor Heinemann-Grüder was determined not to let things rest until there had been a public acknowledgment of this lynching and a memorial placed to the victims. He faced a great deal of hostility but he persevered. Knowing of Coventry’s work for reconciliation with Germany, he invited me to the village to discuss this with the mayor and with others. The village council was not willing to erect a memorial. It would be too upsetting. Those boys might still be around. But the church council was willing. A memorial plaque on the church wall would be solemnly unveiled, just feet from where the men were killed. This would follow a Eucharist in the Church at which I was invited to preach.
Once this was agreed, the mayor was shamed into officially associating the whole village with this act of repentance. The Independent and The Mirror cooperated in finding the widow of one of the men killed. She was deeply moved and readily agreed to come to the ceremony. Other relatives were not found. The British Embassy sent a senior diplomat from Bonn. The bodies of the murdered airmen had been buried after the war by the British War Graves Commission not far away. The Nazi officer responsible for the murders had been tried by a war crimes tribunal and executed. The boys who had obeyed his illegal order were not held to account.
At the Eucharist one man who came to receive communion was crying bitterly. I quietly tried to comfort him. His were not the only tears. But through his tears he managed to say to me: “I’m so ashamed, I was one of the boys who killed them.” He had come for forgiveness, some fifty years later.
After the service I shared this with the widow of one of the victims. Her immediate response: “Find him. I’d so much like to put my arms around d him and forgive him.” We did not find him, nor did anyone know him. He had gone quickly and probably come from afar.
All this was published in several British papers. On a sheep farm in Wales, the surviving captain of the aircraft read the story. Until then he had never been told the fate of his crew. He was moved beyond measure, wrote to the mayor, asking what he could do to express his gratitude to the village. A new kindergarten was being planned. He agreed to come to its opening and brought as his gift a Welsh rocking-horse. The children queued to ride it. It was a wonderful village festival. That led to annual exchanges between Huchenfeld and a Welsh village. In an RAF veterans publication the two who had escaped read the story. They too then became an active part of this reconciliation story, part of a new network of friendships.
No other Cross of Nails Centre expresses as dramatically as Huchenfeld what reconciliation can mean in practice. Remarkably, an almost exact parallel story can be told of the City of Rüsselsheim, home of Opel cars. There, American airmen were lynched and there also two escaped. One of them returned when a memorial was erected to his comrades by the City. He was a devout Baptist, a simple working class man from the deep South. I interpreted for him as, in tears, he embraced a university professor, the son of one of the murderers who had been executed. Deep wounds can be healed.
Paul Oestreicher [written in June 2010]