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Herbert Wagner (* 1948)

• Herbert Wagner was born in 1948 in Neustrelitz

• he went to primary and secondary school in Neustrelitz

• while graduating from high school, he completed an apprenticeship as heating engineer

• after school, he served in the army for 18 months, as was required per compulsory military service

• afterwards, he studied information electronics at the university in Dresden

• there, he met his future wife, whom he married. Together, they have three children

• after graduating from university, he worked as electrical engineer in the development of receiver technology for colour television until 1989

• during the peaceful revolution in the GDR, he joined the so called “Group of the 20”, a group of citizens that negotiated as representatives for the people with government officials to avoid a violent escalation

• in 1990, Dr. Wagner was elected mayor of Dresden and as such, oversaw the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche and of the New Synagogue

• he was in office until 2001

We spoke to Dr. Herbert Wagner, born in 1948 in Neustrelitz, in the Soviet occupation zone about his parents’ lives during the time of National Socialism and the post-war period.

His father, Edwin Wagner, was born in 1908 in Kleinpriesen in Bohemia when it was still part of Austria-Hungary. Like his father, he became a mason, married and in 1931, fathered a son called Heinrich. Shortly after, his wife passed away and his mother-in-law took in Heinrich. Edwin Wagner threw himself into his work and started his own building business. In the mid ‘30s, a mutual friend introduced him to Martha Jandausch, the daughter of a hop farmer in the nearby village of Drahobus. They fell in love, married and in 1937 had a son called Josef. With his building company, Edwin Wagner constructed a three-family house in Mosern near Aussig (Ústí and Labem), where the young couple moved in after the wedding.

As Mosern was situated in the so called “Sudetenland”, the Wagner family suddenly became German in 1938, when the Sudetenland was annexed. For them personally, the only notable change was the currency. The Czech korunas lost value and instead, the German Reichsmark was used. Edwin Wagner had been exempted from military service in the Czechoslovakian army due to health issues, but the Wehrmacht needed every man after their attack on Poland. So he was drafted in 1940. Because of his proficiency as builder and mason, he received a basic military training in Riesa as pioneer.

His first attack occurred on the western front, in France. There, he was supposed to cross the Rhine with his troop, to build a landing bridge, where the following Wehrmacht units could dock. However, the French attacked, and Edwin Wagner was wounded by shrapnel. He was sent to a military hospital to recover. Because of his injuries, he was rated “unfit for military action” and subsequently employed for construction works on the eastern front in Poland. He was sent to Kraków, where he was responsible for repairing and building military barracks, hospitals and prisoner-of-war camps.

In 1942, the Wehrmacht desperately needed more soldiers at the eastern front. Edwin Wagner was reassessed and then declared “fit for military action”. After a short refresher training in Zwickau, he was sent to Russia, somewhere between Smolensk and Moscow. There, the front was static, and the soldiers were fighting a trench warfare. In February of 1943, he was wounded in action – this time a bullet shot clean through him, entering his neck and exiting his shoulder. The following six months were spent again in military hospitals and in recovery. In September he returned to the front, war-weary and disillusioned. On Christmas, he told his comrades that he does not believe that Germany will win this war. The commanding lieutenant overheard this comment and threatened to report him for undermining the morale. Fortunately for him, his comrades came to his aid, claiming that Edwin Wagner had never talked about or shown any doubts in the German victory.

In 1944, the German troops were falling back to the west, towards the Baltic Sea. In East Prussia, the surviving troops regrouped in an attempt to defy the Red Army. Edwin Wagner, by now injured three times in the last four years, was still in combat. His last injury had been a grazing shot, he had suffered to his head but survived. One day, a grenade was thrown into the trench where he was lying. He took it and threw it out so that it exploded in the air. However, he was a bit too late and the explosion took one of his fingers, paralysing two more. Again, he was sent to a military hospital to recover and afterwards, he was not drafted to the front again. Instead, he was assigned as instructor for new recruits in Hirschberg (Jelenia Góra) in Silesia, not too far away from his Bohemian home.

When the Red Army approached in 1945, the civilians of Hirschberg fled and the troop went to the west. On their journey, they were tracked by Soviet tanks that shot their vehicle while Soviet air crafts dropped small bombs on them. So they left their car behind and ran on foot into a forest, where they found cover. This is when the lieutenant announced his plan, to go further to the west, until the Americans would take them captive. This way, they could avoid becoming Soviet prisoners of war. However, Edwin Wagner, being so close to home, decided to break away from the troop and return to his family. He was accompanied by two Austrian and two Silesian comrades, who had a similar way home.

The five soldiers walked together to Mosern, Edwin Wagner’s home. When they rang the doorbell, a strange woman opened the door. Edwin Wagner explained to her, who he was and that this was his house. As it turned out, she had fled from the bombings in the Rhineland and had been taken in by Martha Wagner. With the Red Army approaching, Martha Wagner and her son Josef had moved in with her parents in Drahobus, leaving the woman to look after the house in Mosern. Nonetheless, she let them in to stay the night. The next morning, the two Silesian soldiers left immediately to return home. The two Austrians had a longer way ahead, on which they planned to masquerade as civilians. Edwin Wagner gave them some of his regular, civilian clothing as well as two identification documents: one of them received his membership pass for the alpine club and the other one for the tramway. They replaced the photographs with their own and could identify themselves now as civilians. After they left, Edwin Wagner paid his parents a visit and then went directly to Drahobus, to see his wife and son. He had been away for so long, that at first, he did not recognize his own son.

Edwin Wagner was not the only man in his family who was drafted as soldier. One of his brothers, Herbert, had already been drafted to the Czechoslovakian army before the annexation of the Sudetenland and was posted at the German-Czechoslovakian border. Because he did not want to shoot Germans, he deserted together with a few other comrades and went to Bavaria. When the Sudetenland was annexed by Germany in 1938, Herbert Wagner returned home and was soon drafted by the Wehrmacht. He had been convinced by the National Socialist ideology and remarked often “The last bullet is for me.” Whether he would have gone through with it, we cannot know. He was last seen near Stalingrad and declared missing.

Martha Wagner’s younger brother Josef suffered a similar fate. He, too, was posted at the eastern front and would eventually go missing, never to be seen again. Initially, he had wanted to go to university to study theology. These plans were interrupted by his draft shortly after graduating from high school. When he returned from the front for a few days of furlough, he told his sister, “We have to win the war. Because if they do to us, what we did to them, we will truly suffer.”

Now that the war was over, the Wagner family hoped to return to the pre-war status-quo. Edwin Wagner wanted to reopen his building business but was prohibited from doing so by the Czechoslovakian authorities. One day, the Czech trustee of the business arrived and took over the company. Edwin Wagner handed over all his inventory and was from now on employed as mason, alongside his father and eldest son. The company was not the only thing, the Wagner family soon lost. On another day, a Czech woman arrived at their home, told them she was the trustee for their house and moved into the vacant apartment. From this day onwards, they had to pay rent in their own house. Anything she needed, she took from their possessions and kept it as her own property. They even had to give up all their furniture, except for their kitchen. Eventually, another Czech woman arrived and laid claim to the apartment where Edwin and Martha Wagner were living with their second son. So they had to move out.

In general, the atmosphere had changed for the German population in Czechoslovakia. Now it was them, who had to wear white armbands, who were not allowed to sit down in the tram, who were prohibited from using the sidewalks. The Wagner family moved into a house where two Czech families lived as well. They got along quite well and the Czech families sometimes gave them food. But out in public, on the street, they had to pretend that they did not know each other. One day, Edwin Wagner went to Aussig (Ústí nad Labem) for work. There, he saw a suspicious amount of soldiers, so on his way back in the afternoon, he decided to use hidden paths, to avoid the soldiers. He heard a loud bang and in the evening, he learned that today, many people had died in Aussig, their corpses floating in the river Elbe. It was the Ústí massacre, where ethnic Germans had been lynched, that Edwin Wagner had escaped from without even knowing that he had been in danger.

In August of 1945, the first expulsions began. Germans were forced to leave the country with only as much as they could carry, leaving behind everything else. Edwin, Martha and their son Josef received the order to leave the country on the 28th of July, 1946. They had to leave until the 1st of August, so three days later. Furthermore, they were informed that they were allowed a maximum of 50 kilograms worth of luggage and had to bring food for three days. All of their valuables, they had already been forced to hand over “for safekeeping”. They never saw them again. So, on the 1st of August 1946, Edwin, Martha and Josef Wagner walked to the appointed gathering point. From there, they were first sent to a transit camp and then transported in goods wagons to the Soviet occupation zone in Germany.  Their journey ended for the moment in Ahlbeck, north of Berlin. First, they were put in a transit camp, where they had to share a room with three other families. Then, they were assigned a family, who let them live in their hallway, putting straw on the bare floor, for them to sleep on.

Edwin Wagner’s parents had been expulsed a few days earlier together with his eldest son Heinrich. He knew that they too had been brought to the northern part of the Soviet occupation zone but knew nothing of their exact whereabouts. As refugees, they were prohibited from leaving the village or town, they had been assigned to. The only exception to this rule was if the refugees were looking for work. And as Edwin Wagner could not find any work as builder in Ahlbeck, he had a perfectly good reason to leave the village for a few days. First, he went to Schwerin, the capital of the region of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and from there via a few detours to the village of Petackel. When he arrived there, he saw just outside the village his mother and sister collecting leftover potatoes on the fields. This is how Edwin Wagner found his parents, sister and son again.

His father told him about a nearby small town called Neustrelitz, where he might be able to find work and an accommodation. So Edwin Wagner went to Neustrelitz and found a job as peat burner in a building company. Then he asked around on the streets whether anybody had a place for him to stay. He eventually found a war widow who agreed to let a spare room to him. So in September of 1946, to his landlady’s great dismay, he showed up with his wife and son to live in her spare room.

After a while, the family started to settle in. Because the region of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern was predominantly protestant and many Bohemian refugees were Catholic, they found each other at church. It helped them at creating a community and processing the loss of their home. During weekday mass, the minister always chose a song, that everybody sang with much fervour, that begins with the words, “We are only guests on earth / and wander constantly / with some troubles / towards the eternal home.” At church, Edwin Wagner met other refugees who he employed, when he founded a new building company. Because they were expelled refugees, they never got any lucrative jobs, and mostly built barns for farmers, far outside of town.

In 1948, the Red Army started withdrawing some of their troops. Because of that, five houses in Neustrelitz, that had been previously occupied by Soviet soldiers, became free. Edwin Wagner’s company was responsible for repairing the houses and subsequently he managed to secure an apartment for his family that they shared with another family. Edwin and Martha Wagner moved in with their sons Heinrich and Josef, and later that year, their third son Herbert Wagner was born there. These five houses became the homes of refugees, who suffered similar fates to the Wagner family, furthering the social division between the old-established families and the newcomers. The children in Neustrelitz formed rivalling gangs alongside this division. They only united in their fight against the children of the Soviet officers who were still stationed in Neustrelitz.

In 1949, the Soviet occupation zone was declared as state, the GDR. It introduced the Soviet social and economic system. Within this socialist economy, artisans and craftsmen were seen as the core of capitalism and therefore restrained. For example, they did no longer receive food stamps and some people were abducted by the Soviets and vanished overnight. Edwin Wagner bought an extra lock and made an elaborate escape plan, should Soviet soldiers knock on their door. Fortunately for him, he never had to implement his plan. In 1953, the government decreed that all artisans and craftsmen had to pay their taxes in advance. Edwin Wagner was financially unable to do so and closed his business. He found a new job in a design and project planning bureau where he was employed until his retirement.

The loss of their home and the loss of their community had hit the Wagner family hard. In 1967, they visited Ústí nad Labem for the first time after their expulsion 21 years ago. They showed their youngest son Herbert, where they had grown up and even visited their old house in Mosern. The people who lived there now even invited them in for a cup of coffee and exchanged their stories. Afterwards, Herbert Wagner asked his parents, whether they wanted the house back, but his father said, “No, that would only create another injustice.” The only thing he wanted was that the injustice they had suffered was acknowledged. This had been prohibited in the GDR, where the refugees and expellees were called “resettlers”, implying it had been a voluntary change of residence, rather than a forced expulsion.