Later I sat outside a small guard house by the train station. A soldier had given me half a cup of cold coffee and I drank it with slow, very slow sips. I sat on the ground, in the shade, leaning my back against the wall of the building. The other comrades were all camped out beside the Bzura river that ran past near our meadow, they washed up, bathed and rested. I heard Udo Roth speak. I could see him, he stood on the railway embankment, a little higher than the rest, where everyone could see him. He spoke calmly and strongly of Germany, of the Führer and the new order. Just shortly before, he had been the one to report to a German officer that the Poles had diverted some 600 to 800 comrades farther eastward. "Then I will send some armored cars after them right away!" the German officer had cried – and was gone. Thus it was Udo Roth who had seen to it that the group headed to Bromberg was also liberated that very same day. – Now he stood there on the embankment and spoke to us of the Führer.

But then my gaze was drawn elsewhere. Something was moving, up ahead of me, it was approaching over a swell in the ground and I couldn't quite make out what it was. But now – it was a man – he was closer, he had climbed the small height. And kept coming closer.

God is my witness, I am not lying: a man was coming on his knees. He dragged one knee before the other to move forward. And on his shoulders he carried a comrade. There were only twenty meters now between him and me and the station house. I stared dumbfounded at the approaching man and I was incapable of getting up to help him.

There came my comrade Walter Milbradt from Altreden, who no longer had the strength to walk on his feet, he came on his knees, carrying a man who had lost his life to a Polish machine gun in the very moment of our liberation. He dragged himself right up to where I sat, and gently let the dead man slip to the ground. The German soldier in his steel helmet still stood beside me, neither of us could move as we stared at the scene before us. Walter Milbradt looked at us, his eyes reflecting the dawn of freedom, and collapsed into the grass beside the body of his dead comrade. His strength was exhausted. He fainted.

For more than a kilometer he had carried the dead man, on his knees. He let the others run ahead to the German soldiers, let them rush past him, and carried his burden, did not leave it behind, even though his heart drew him no less fervently than all the others to where they rejoiced and sang the songs of Germany. Any doctor, any athlete, any know-it-all will tell you that such a deed is not possible because it goes beyond human strength. And yet it happened, on September 9, 1939 just outside Lowicz in Poland.

Walter Milbradt was unconscious, his strength had left him, he lay beside his dead comrade. But he would awaken, and then he would be free. –

And that, my comrades, is how we marched into the Reich, on our long journey through Poland. And like Walter Milbradt, we all come bringing our dead with us on our backs. If anyone should ever undertake to put up a memorial to the Germans in Poland, let it depict a man dragging himself up a hill on his knees and, with a dead man on his shoulders, seeing Freedom.

Our homeland, Posen, bled like no other German border land. Now the Vistula and the Warthe, the Netze and Drewenz and the lakes and cities and towns, the forests and hills and fields of our homeland are German again. The blood of the murdered, the tears of the widows and orphans, the faith of the living have made our land part of the heart of the Reich.

Some are already beginning to disparage what we lived through! And yet – the seeds sown in these weeks of sacrifice will begin to grow. It is enough that we know, and that our children know, what we endured for the sake of Germany.

This book is based on accounts which were made available to me partly in writing, partly orally in person. My thanks goes to Paul Jendrike from Bromberg, von Rosenstiel from Lipie, Walter Milbradt from Altreden, Peter Schrey from Raschleben, Viktor Ortwig from Kruschwitz, Walter Lemke from Luisenfelde, Julius Mutschler from Ostwehr, Wilhelm Meister, Bruno Schneider, and my brother Reinhold Wittek from Hohensalza. I have also drawn on reports published in the Deutsche Rundschau of Bromberg and in the Posener Tageblatt. And thanks to Hans Ulrich Hempel I was able, together with my brother and Walter Lemke, to drive by car along the route of this death march and to inspect first-hand the various stations mentioned in these pages.

Long Night's Journey Into Day.
The Death March of Lowicz.
Erhard Wittek