Liberation | "That was wonderful!"

A premonition of Europe's finally approaching liberation from the stranglehold of the German-fascist beast grips Ernst Melis in Lyon in the early morning hours of June 6, 1944. The news reached his German and French comrades over the airwaves: "The sky over France is cloudless." Code for the long-awaited opening of the Second Front. The German communist, who emigrated to France via Holland in 1933, spent years writing leaflets to encourage Wehrmacht soldiers to desert, publishing an illegal newspaper, "The Soldier on the Mediterranean," and forging passports to help the persecuted. He arranged to meet his friends at Alfons's. On this happy day, the innkeeper treated them to Pinot Noir and Calvados, along with a specialty from the hotly contested city in Normandy: "Tripe à la mode de Caen," entrails with onions and carrots.

It would be weeks before France was liberated. On August 19, 1944, the uprising broke out in Paris. Hans Heisel, who had joined a troop of Yugoslav fighters, "daring men," was among them. Victory was achieved on August 25. "It was wonderful! People danced in the streets, laughed, and cried." Hans had found like-minded people in the staff of the German Navy in Paris, with whom he relayed fresh information to the French resistance via teleprinter. What's more: "The Resistance always had a great need for weapons." Hans and his companions helped themselves to weapons in the changing rooms of swimming pools frequented by the Wehrmacht and in theater dressing rooms. "Once we captured twenty weapons." With a pistol that Hans had unnoticed stolen in a café, SS Standartenführer Julius Ritter, satrap of Fritz Sauckel, Hitler's Plenipotentiary General for the Recruitment of Forced Labor, was shot dead.

One of Heisel's troops on the naval staff was Kurt Hälker, who also participated in the liberation of Paris. For him, as for Heisel, who continued on to Germany with the regiment of the legendary Colonel Fabien, the war was not yet over. On behalf of the Comité Allemagne libre pour l'Ouest, the Duisburg native attempted to persuade Wehrmacht soldiers near Mühlhausen in Alsace to defect. "Attention! Attention! Germans shout to Germans: Stop the senseless bloodshed! Save your lives!" Blind, furious machine gun fire was the response. On Christmas Day 1944 – only a narrow canal separated Kurt from his deluded compatriots – he thought they would have a better conversation face to face. He threw a pack of cigarettes tied to a stone. The gift was convincing.

Erhard Stenzel from Freiberg, Saxony, also celebrated the liberation of Paris on the Champs Élysées. At the beginning of January 1944, he deserted in Rouen, joined the Maquis, the partisans operating from the forests of France, blew up railway tracks and bridges, and once saved seven KPF officials from being transported to their place of execution. Now integrated into a regular French unit, he arrived in Oradour-sur-Glane on June 12, 1944. Corpses were everywhere: women, men, and children shot, beaten, and burned by the SS. "We arrived two days too late." Erhard was ashamed of being German.

Horst Behrendt celebrates Djen Pobydi, Victory Day, on May 9, 1945, in Krasnogorsk. The son of a Social Democratic family had seized the opportunity to desert in early March 1944 in a village near Vinnitsa in Ukraine. A kind-hearted farmer offered him refuge. After hours of uncertainty, the German was rescued by a young girl with a radiant smile: "Ours are here." The next day, Horst initiated a Soviet Army intelligence officer into his regiment's encryption codes. The 23-year-old became an employee of the National Committee for a Free Germany, agitating for prisoners of war. He found this unsatisfactory. "Give me a uniform and I'll march with you to Berlin," he begged. The answer: "Nyet. You have to re-educate your Germans so they become human again."

A similar fate befell Hans Herzberg, who had arrived in England on a Kindertransport. When the war broke out, he enlisted in the British Army, was accepted, and quickly underwent military training in Glasgow. He was to be shipped to India with a pioneer unit. Hans protested. "I don't want to fight the Japanese somewhere." He wanted to go to the second front, face to face with the Jew-murderers. He wouldn't set foot on a battlefield. Hans had to interpret during interrogations in prisoner-of-war camps. He celebrated Victory Day with the Labor Party in Abergavenny in South Wales.

Wearing a Red Army uniform, Hanna Bernstein experienced the liberation of Vienna on April 13, 1945. She had traveled to Austria with the 3rd Ukrainian Front from the Black Sea via Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. The daughter of a communist-Jewish family, she had wanted to study at the Foreign Languages ​​Institute in Moscow. The war intervened. "I became a subversive agent." That means wearing down the enemy and persuading them to surrender, for example, the Wehrmacht units encircled in Stalingrad. Hanna crossed minefields with her loudspeaker van. "We had no idea." Those who are clueless are not afraid. She also boldly flew a biplane over German positions to drop leaflets. After the Wehrmacht surrendered on May 8, 1945, in Berlin-Karlshorst, she worked for Sergei Tulpanov at the SMAD, the Soviet Military Administration. Hanna Podymachina, who soon married, didn't immediately get along with the Germans. When she offered her seat to a man on crutches on the Berlin subway, one of them snapped at the young woman in Red Army uniform: "First you shot him to pieces, now you think you can make up for it like that?!"

Moritz Mebel also worked for the SMAD, but in Halle-Merseburg. He learned of the unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945, in a town 50 kilometers east of Brno. He was a first lieutenant in the Red Army, having arrived in Slovakia with the 2nd Ukrainian Front. Here, the 6th German Army Group was still putting up fierce resistance three days after the end of the war sealed in Karlshorst. On June 22, 1941, Moritz was studying in the library of the Medical Institute in Moscow when the voice of Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov came through the open window via loudspeaker, announcing the insidious invasion of Hitler's hordes. Like his fellow students, there was no stopping Moritz. "It was a matter of life and death." With a workers' battalion, he marched straight from the parade on Red Square across Volokolamsk Highway to meet the invaders at the gates of the Soviet capital.

Werner Knapp couldn't celebrate on May 8, 1945, either. He had traveled to Paris with his mother and twin sister via Prague, shared in the Grande Nation's humiliating defeat at the Marne with the Czechoslovak Foreign Army in June 1940, was shipped to England with his unit, and actually wanted to join the Royal Air Force. He would have liked to fly a Spitfire, but was placed in a tank battalion. With the second wave of "Operation Overlord," he landed in Normandy in June 1944, piloting a Cromwell. "It was fast. But the optimal tank was the Soviet T 34." After costly fighting in the "bone mill" of Falaise, his regiment reached Dunkirk. Dunkirk had been declared a fortress. "There we experienced what fanaticism meant." The garrison didn't surrender until May 9.

At 17, Stefan Doernberg enlisted in the Red Army in Moscow. He returned to his hometown with the rank of lieutenant and Vasily Chuikov's staff. He drove through the rubble of Berlin and prophesied to the defenders of the Reich capital entrenched in the ruins: "Anyone who falls now will be making their sacrifice in vain." On May 1, Commander-in-Chief Helmuth Weidling refused to raise the white flag, but the following day he relented. Stefan interpreted. Six days later, he also witnessed the Wehrmacht's unconditional surrender in Berlin-Karlshorst. For him, May 2 remains a turning point: "Peace has dawned on this day."

All of them and many others shared their stories with the "nd." And that was a good thing, too. Because they are no longer with us.