Homecoming

Across West Germany, newspapers and radio stations broke the news with one simple phrase: "Sie kommen!" (They are coming!). All Germans knew what it meant. Eight years after war's end, the U.S.S.R. was sending home "the last" of the Germans still held in Russia as prisoners of war.

Great crowds set off for Herleshausen, a border village where the Russians would deliver the prisoners. It was an odd, silent pilgrimage--government officials, clerics, rich Germans from the cities, farmers in their Sunday best. All wore the strained expression of desperate hope.

"Have You Seen This Man?" At the border, Communist trucks unloaded their passengers. The crowd broke into cheers. The worn, too-old-looking men shuffled across the border in cheap new suits given to them by their captors. Among them were a few women caught up in the Red army sweeps of 1943 and 1944. Behind several of them walked children born in prison camps.

From the waiting crowd, women dashed out waving faded photographs of lost sons or husbands, and spoke in whispers. "Have you seen this man?" "Do you know this man?" Most of the P.W.s just walked mechanically on, past the crowd and into waiting buses, to be taken to the refugee processing center near Goettingen.

Eleven Generals. Of the 3,000,000 Germans said by the West Germans to have been swallowed up by Russia, 800,000 were sent back in repatriation shipments between 1945 and 1950. Hundreds of thousands of others listed by the Germans as missing have never been accounted for by the Russians, but "a few,"--perhaps 13,000, said Moscow--were kept, tried as war criminals and sentenced to punishment in Soviet jails and labor camps. Those who came home through Herleshausen last week in batches of 400 to 500 a day were the "war criminals." In one shipment, the Russians sent back eleven generals,* but most of the returning P.W.s were soldiers of Wehrmacht and SS battalions which fought in Russia.

Corporal Fritz Keuntje, a onetime auto mechanic of 33, with the face and stooped back of an old man, had been captured in Czechoslovakia and shipped to a Soviet camp. In 1949, a Russian officer and woman interpreter came to question him: "They asked me whether I had ever passed through a certain village and whether I had been ordered to burn or loot. I said no. They put me into a cell with . . . just room to stand and said, 'If you don't confess, we will leave you here until your legs fall off.' "

Keuntje and 16 other Germans were tried in a five-hour session before a Soviet tribunal (others told of trials lasting only three or four minutes), then were sentenced to hard labor. His guard asked him how many years he had got. "I told him 25," said Keuntje. "He looked at his list and said I must be mistaken; his list said only five. Later he rechecked and told me with a smile: 'You were right. It is 25.' "

In tones more weary than bitter, all told stories that differed in detail but agreed in substance with Keuntje's. "If we died, they carted off the bodies. If we lived, we lived," said Keuntje.

* Who reported that Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, the loser at Stalingrad, is now serving 25 years at hard labor in a Soviet prison camp.

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