Jos. Strotz

War Experiences 1942-1945

I, Joseph Strotz of Bigonville, born on November 23, 1922, was drafted into the German Labor Service on the 6th of October, 1942, and was stationed on the Peenemunde Peninsula on the Baltic Sea. We had to dig ditches, install cables, remove grass and place it on top of the underground factory where, at that time, the V1 Miracle Weapon was being built and tested. We saw the first rockets rise into the sky and then disappear.

The rations in the R.A.D. were skimpy, although packages from home prevented us from being hungry.

On the 27th of December, 1942, having been released from the R.A.D., I was drafted into the Wehrmacht in Ansbach on January 17, 1943. The resistance of my will was broken and replaced by the thoughts of the German rulers. I was trained as a gunner for heavy automatic weapons (S.M.G. machine-gunner), as an Armored Infantryman and as a mortarman. Our unit consisted at the time of about 1/3 Luxembourgers, as well as about 1/3 Alsatians, and the rest were German soldiers.

After completion of the training, and after a short leave, I arrived at the Russian front in April of 1943 to join the defensive force which was being attacked around Stalingrad. In cattle cars we traveled to the Crimean peninsula, went by ship through the Strait of Kersch, and marched at 60 kilometers per day through the Caucasus Mountains to the vicinity of Armavir, where we took up positions.

The first experience at the front, and the first contact with the dead and the wounded, was frightful. After three months of front-line combat, I was wounded by a tank shell on the 26th of July, 1943. I received a shell fragment in the left side of the forehead, and a mortar fragment in the mouth which tore out nine teeth and split my tongue. I lost consciousness and then came to in an earthen bunker behind the front. From my mouth dark, half-coagulated blood was flowing, and on my head I was still wearing my steel helmet with the mortar fragment embedded in it. When I showed the first signs of life, I immediately underwent surgery. With no anesthetic my shattered teeth were extracted and my split tongue was sewed up. It is no wonder that I lost consciousness again as a result. On the same day I was transported by plane (a Storch) from the airport at Novorossisk to Sevastopol in the Crimea. In the field hospital they did surgery on my head wounds and a small gold plate was embedded in the left side of my forehead to prevent pressure on the brain. For three long weeks I could not speak or eat, and I was fed through injections. After four weeks, when I was capable of being moved, I was taken to the railroad station for shipment home. At the Sevastopol station I met my brother Nick who pushed me away from him when I tried to embrace him. He did not recognize me because my head was all bandaged up and my jaw was held together with immobilizing equipment. Only because of my wristwatch, which he recognized as his own, and through the nurse, who gave him my name, did everything become clear, and we fell into each others arms.

Then together we made the journey home through the Ukraine. In a hospital in Breslau we were nursed back to health, and that took seven months. The recovery leave in our home town of Bigonville required that we disappear into the underground. Our parents and siblings, because of our desertion, were to be resettled, and escaped the resettlement only by going underground also. We were hidden by friends and neighbors in the town, and were liberated on the 10th of September, 1944. when all six of us came out into the open again, healthy and happy.

During our absence, thanks to the Germans, a family of Croatians were quartered in our house, but shortly before the liberation they took off.

Jos. Strotz