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Flakhelfer to Grenadier: Memoir of a Boy Soldier, 1943–1945
The story of a German boy drafted into military service during WWII is vividly recounted in this memoir of combat and survival.
On January 7, 1943, the German Government ordered that boys as young as fifteen be drafted into anti-aircraft service, the Reich Labor Service, and the armed forces. Throughout the war, about 200,000 boys became Flakhelfer and served in batteries of light and heavy flak.
Drafted at fifteen, Karl Heinz Schlesier served in regions that suffered some of the heaviest air raids of the war. His memoir is a coming of age story in a world gone mad, where working beside Russian POWs, protecting industries with slave labor, courting a girl among bombed-out ruins was unremarkable. As the war approached its bitter end, Schlesier was thrown into a disintegrating frontline only fifty kilometers from his childhood home.
Basing his memoir solely on his diary notes and memories of that period, Schlesier has consciously avoided including what he learned after the war. Flakhelfer to Grenadier gives a voice to the silent generation of boys born in Germany in 1926 and 1927. This generation has been silent because the horror it knew pales in comparison to the horror of the war machine it was conscripted into.
On January 7, 1943, the German Government ordered that boys as young as fifteen be drafted into anti-aircraft service, the Reich Labor Service, and the armed forces. Throughout the war, about 200,000 boys became Flakhelfer and served in batteries of light and heavy flak.
Drafted at fifteen, Karl Heinz Schlesier served in regions that suffered some of the heaviest air raids of the war. His memoir is a coming of age story in a world gone mad, where working beside Russian POWs, protecting industries with slave labor, courting a girl among bombed-out ruins was unremarkable. As the war approached its bitter end, Schlesier was thrown into a disintegrating frontline only fifty kilometers from his childhood home.
Basing his memoir solely on his diary notes and memories of that period, Schlesier has consciously avoided including what he learned after the war. Flakhelfer to Grenadier gives a voice to the silent generation of boys born in Germany in 1926 and 1927. This generation has been silent because the horror it knew pales in comparison to the horror of the war machine it was conscripted into.
- GenresWorld War II
159 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 4, 2018
4.5 stars. A great memoir of life in Germany between 1942 and 1945. I was originally sceptical as it was written well after the event but the author based it on his own diary from the time plus interviews with other survivors. He generally restricts himself to describing what he was seeing and feeling without getting into the technical aspects of the overall war. Focuses on the life of a German in Germany in this period and the people around him.
August 14, 2017
A gem of a book. Imagine, at 15 or 16 years old, you are sent off to man an anti-aircraft gun firing at a fleet of enemy bombers raining fire, destruction and death down upon the towns and cities where you live. Then when you turn 17 you are drafted into the army, forced to stand under artillery bombardment, for a cause you don't believe in of evil intent, a lost cause. You don't know if your parents are still alive, have no idea if you will ever see them again, and you face up to possible...probable long imprisonment in a POW camp because now you know exactly what the regime that sent you to war has been doing in the name of its people.
To have survived such trauma and to have made a life that does justice to that survival for all the boys like him who didn't get to return home, to make us think upon the nature of war and child soldiers, to try to ensure it never happens again on such a scale. That is why he broke the silence as an old man.
My words are inadequate to do justice to Karl Heinz Schlesier's powerful little book. Here are some extracts, to give you an idea what to expect, to explain why, over 70 years later, his testimony deserves to be read.
Testimony and trauma.
"And then it was over. The bombers were gone but a large part of the city was aflame. The fires continued to spread. Columns of black smoke rose into the sky. We stood by the parapet and looked toward the city in silence. The adults smoked cigarettes, the boys stood without. I suppose I was in shock. Our parents were on our minds."
"We had lost out on almost everything kids our age in normal times had access to and were able to experience. We knew that. We also knew we would have to make up later what we lost, including learning, if we made it to later."
"Having been trained for military work from Jungvolk times on, when we were ten years old, we were not bad in military craft and did well on the shooting range. But we believed in nothing anymore. The rhetoric of the Nazis, of nearly everyone in authority, we had found to be lies, empty promises....I think there was not one among us kids who believed that the war could still be won. I was not sure whether the officers and non-coms thought otherwise; I doubted it. They were caught with us in the same trap. We had become totally nihilistic. We trusted only each other, no one else. We expected to be thrown into the great grinder....Considering the situation and the apparent senselessness of it all, it was no surprise that some kids ran away....The Heer [army] called it desertion and punished it with death.
‘Truth”, “Witnessing”
"Because of the many nights we spent by the guns we became physically and mentally exhausted. We kept asking the question why, to the RAF, civilian populations seemed appropriate targets as much as industrial and military installations. “Terror bombing,” as it was called, confirmed to many that the Nazis were right at least in one claim. The Allies intended not only to win the war, but to destroy everything German....As we watched the cities burn around us it felt that way. When we kids worked the guns, we did not shoot for an ideology or a government. We shot for something immediate, direct and close by. We tried to protect, as best as we could, the civilians, including our parents, women, children, old people, crouching in bomb shelters and bunkers behind us."
"We never knew what they expected to gain from burning civilians in one city after another, and attacking the same targets again and again. If they thought the stricken population would buckle, they were mistaken. People living under the constant threat of death, with no chance to change it, were forced to accept it....The general frame of mind of our people under such horror was apathy, resignation, impassivity. Soldiers on the battlefields fought on with desperation, more so because they knew what was happening to their families back home."
"We saw a group of prisoners under guard marched by. They all wore striped clothes and caps in blue and white and had detached, emotionless, forlorn faces. It suddenly struck me that they had to be concentration camp prisoners, the first I ever saw. Their eyes glanced over us as they passed. Lifeless. What might they think of us in our uniforms? Fanatical Nazi kids?"
"But what I had seen stayed with me. As Flakhelfer we were not prisoners like the workers in the factory or our Hiwis. We had some freedom, even got furlough to see our families. But in a way, we were also prisoners of the State and its system. We thought we defended our cities. But without the war our cities would not be bombed, would not need defenses. Yes, there was a war going on, many people dying. Who was responsible? My parents knew. I knew. Most of my buddies didn’t dare think that way. What could you do when you know what is wrong? The Nazis executed those who openly questioned the government."
"There was more news. Pages and pages of photographs taken by Allied photographers in such liberated concentration camps as Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and others that showed mounds of nude, emaciated dead bodies. We looked at these pictures and said, no, that can’t be. That can’t be true. This is Allied propaganda. We looked again and again. Eventually we understood: these pictures must be true. This could not be staged. Finally the full horror of the Nazis revealed itself to us. What was also revealed was that we had been suckers, fighting a war while, behind our backs and in secret, the SS slaughtered innocent men, women and children by the hundreds of thousands, even millions, as we learned later. We were shocked, dumbfounded, depressed."
Preserving sanity in the face of war’s chaos.
"We found a little hotel with friendly people who treated us as their own. Perhaps they were sorry for us. The war was a distant menace in this green valley nestled in magnificent mountains. We spent four marvelous days, hiking, climbing, swimming, and without concern for the rest of the world. A vacation from ourselves or, perhaps, to ourselves. This was life as it should be lived. I remember my time in that place as one of the most precious of my teenage years."
"Excluding the Wednesday of the Düren raid, we had eight days of school, ranging from the Gallic Wars to the intricacies of math."
"My mother had talked with our old librarian friend at the Unter den Eichen Stadtbibliothek. She had removed Werfel and other outlawed authors from the shelves as had been demanded, but she had not destroyed them. Instead, she kept them for the future, she said. She had given the Werfel from her treasures for my birthday."
“Redemption”
"I wondered how all of this had happened. The Nazis, of course. But why had so many people gone along with them? Why had German generals sent men into battle when they knew the war was lost, and by perpetuating it, they squandered so many lives and so much more? Why the desperate fighting to the end? Was this a German thing? What was German in that? And what should I do with that knowledge now? How could things be changed if we were given a chance? Should we be given that chance, I promised myself, I would work for change, for truth."
"I wrote it as an old man, one of the still living survivors of the 1926-1927 generation of Germans that is called the “silent generation.” We were silent because the horror we lived through paled against the horror of the Holocaust. I have broken my silence now. I hope that it measures as a contribution to understanding a time gone but not forgotten."
To have survived such trauma and to have made a life that does justice to that survival for all the boys like him who didn't get to return home, to make us think upon the nature of war and child soldiers, to try to ensure it never happens again on such a scale. That is why he broke the silence as an old man.
My words are inadequate to do justice to Karl Heinz Schlesier's powerful little book. Here are some extracts, to give you an idea what to expect, to explain why, over 70 years later, his testimony deserves to be read.
Testimony and trauma.
"And then it was over. The bombers were gone but a large part of the city was aflame. The fires continued to spread. Columns of black smoke rose into the sky. We stood by the parapet and looked toward the city in silence. The adults smoked cigarettes, the boys stood without. I suppose I was in shock. Our parents were on our minds."
"We had lost out on almost everything kids our age in normal times had access to and were able to experience. We knew that. We also knew we would have to make up later what we lost, including learning, if we made it to later."
"Having been trained for military work from Jungvolk times on, when we were ten years old, we were not bad in military craft and did well on the shooting range. But we believed in nothing anymore. The rhetoric of the Nazis, of nearly everyone in authority, we had found to be lies, empty promises....I think there was not one among us kids who believed that the war could still be won. I was not sure whether the officers and non-coms thought otherwise; I doubted it. They were caught with us in the same trap. We had become totally nihilistic. We trusted only each other, no one else. We expected to be thrown into the great grinder....Considering the situation and the apparent senselessness of it all, it was no surprise that some kids ran away....The Heer [army] called it desertion and punished it with death.
‘Truth”, “Witnessing”
"Because of the many nights we spent by the guns we became physically and mentally exhausted. We kept asking the question why, to the RAF, civilian populations seemed appropriate targets as much as industrial and military installations. “Terror bombing,” as it was called, confirmed to many that the Nazis were right at least in one claim. The Allies intended not only to win the war, but to destroy everything German....As we watched the cities burn around us it felt that way. When we kids worked the guns, we did not shoot for an ideology or a government. We shot for something immediate, direct and close by. We tried to protect, as best as we could, the civilians, including our parents, women, children, old people, crouching in bomb shelters and bunkers behind us."
"We never knew what they expected to gain from burning civilians in one city after another, and attacking the same targets again and again. If they thought the stricken population would buckle, they were mistaken. People living under the constant threat of death, with no chance to change it, were forced to accept it....The general frame of mind of our people under such horror was apathy, resignation, impassivity. Soldiers on the battlefields fought on with desperation, more so because they knew what was happening to their families back home."
"We saw a group of prisoners under guard marched by. They all wore striped clothes and caps in blue and white and had detached, emotionless, forlorn faces. It suddenly struck me that they had to be concentration camp prisoners, the first I ever saw. Their eyes glanced over us as they passed. Lifeless. What might they think of us in our uniforms? Fanatical Nazi kids?"
"But what I had seen stayed with me. As Flakhelfer we were not prisoners like the workers in the factory or our Hiwis. We had some freedom, even got furlough to see our families. But in a way, we were also prisoners of the State and its system. We thought we defended our cities. But without the war our cities would not be bombed, would not need defenses. Yes, there was a war going on, many people dying. Who was responsible? My parents knew. I knew. Most of my buddies didn’t dare think that way. What could you do when you know what is wrong? The Nazis executed those who openly questioned the government."
"There was more news. Pages and pages of photographs taken by Allied photographers in such liberated concentration camps as Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and others that showed mounds of nude, emaciated dead bodies. We looked at these pictures and said, no, that can’t be. That can’t be true. This is Allied propaganda. We looked again and again. Eventually we understood: these pictures must be true. This could not be staged. Finally the full horror of the Nazis revealed itself to us. What was also revealed was that we had been suckers, fighting a war while, behind our backs and in secret, the SS slaughtered innocent men, women and children by the hundreds of thousands, even millions, as we learned later. We were shocked, dumbfounded, depressed."
Preserving sanity in the face of war’s chaos.
"We found a little hotel with friendly people who treated us as their own. Perhaps they were sorry for us. The war was a distant menace in this green valley nestled in magnificent mountains. We spent four marvelous days, hiking, climbing, swimming, and without concern for the rest of the world. A vacation from ourselves or, perhaps, to ourselves. This was life as it should be lived. I remember my time in that place as one of the most precious of my teenage years."
"Excluding the Wednesday of the Düren raid, we had eight days of school, ranging from the Gallic Wars to the intricacies of math."
"My mother had talked with our old librarian friend at the Unter den Eichen Stadtbibliothek. She had removed Werfel and other outlawed authors from the shelves as had been demanded, but she had not destroyed them. Instead, she kept them for the future, she said. She had given the Werfel from her treasures for my birthday."
“Redemption”
"I wondered how all of this had happened. The Nazis, of course. But why had so many people gone along with them? Why had German generals sent men into battle when they knew the war was lost, and by perpetuating it, they squandered so many lives and so much more? Why the desperate fighting to the end? Was this a German thing? What was German in that? And what should I do with that knowledge now? How could things be changed if we were given a chance? Should we be given that chance, I promised myself, I would work for change, for truth."
"I wrote it as an old man, one of the still living survivors of the 1926-1927 generation of Germans that is called the “silent generation.” We were silent because the horror we lived through paled against the horror of the Holocaust. I have broken my silence now. I hope that it measures as a contribution to understanding a time gone but not forgotten."
December 25, 2025
„W służbie III Rzeszy” Karla Heinza Schlesiera to poruszające i bardzo uczciwe wspomnienia człowieka, któremu wojna odebrała młodość, zanim zdążyła się ona na dobre zacząć. Autor nie opisuje wielkiej polityki ani ideologii, lecz codzienność nastoletniego chłopca wrzuconego w tryby rozpadającej się machiny wojennej. Dzięki temu książka oferuje rzadką i niezwykle autentyczną perspektywę niemieckiego społeczeństwa w ostatnich latach wojny.
Schlesier z dużą wrażliwością relacjonuje moment wcielenia do obrony przeciwlotniczej – decyzję, na którą nie miał wpływu i która stała w sprzeczności z poglądami wyniesionymi z domu. Wyraźnie podkreśla dystans wobec nazistowskiej ideologii oraz antynazistowską postawę rodziców, co nadaje jego wspomnieniom dodatkowej wiarygodności. Autor nie próbuje się wybielać ani usprawiedliwiać, lecz pokazuje dramat młodych ludzi zmuszonych do służby w imię obcej im sprawy.
Szczególnie mocnym elementem książki są opisy życia codziennego w bombardowanych miastach Nadrenii i Zagłębia Ruhry. Naloty alianckie, prowizoryczne schrony, praca przy działach przeciwlotniczych ramię w ramię z jeńcami wojennymi, strach, zmęczenie i wszechobecne ruiny tworzą sugestywny obraz Niemiec stojących na krawędzi całkowitej zagłady. Obok grozy wojny pojawiają się jednak także drobne, bardzo ludzkie momenty: pierwsze zauroczenia, przyjaźnie, ironiczny humor i próby zachowania namiastki normalności.
Dużym atutem wspomnień Schlesiera jest ich rzeczowość i brak patosu. Autor nie heroizuje ani siebie, ani kolegów, nie buduje mitu „bohaterskich flakhelferów”, lecz pokazuje chaos, dezorganizację i desperację państwa, które sięga po dzieci, by przedłużyć własne istnienie. W późniejszych fragmentach, gdy trafia do Służby Pracy Rzeszy i następnie na front w 1945 roku, jeszcze wyraźniej widać absurd i bezsens końcowej fazy wojny.
„W służbie III Rzeszy” to znakomita lektura dla wszystkich zainteresowanych II wojną światową, którzy szukają spojrzenia innego niż narracja frontowa czy polityczna. To ciche, przejmujące świadectwo straconego pokolenia i dowód na to, że ofiarą wojny bywali także ci, których zmuszono do służby po „złej stronie” historii. Książka, która zostaje w pamięci na długo i zdecydowanie zasługuje na polecenie.
Schlesier z dużą wrażliwością relacjonuje moment wcielenia do obrony przeciwlotniczej – decyzję, na którą nie miał wpływu i która stała w sprzeczności z poglądami wyniesionymi z domu. Wyraźnie podkreśla dystans wobec nazistowskiej ideologii oraz antynazistowską postawę rodziców, co nadaje jego wspomnieniom dodatkowej wiarygodności. Autor nie próbuje się wybielać ani usprawiedliwiać, lecz pokazuje dramat młodych ludzi zmuszonych do służby w imię obcej im sprawy.
Szczególnie mocnym elementem książki są opisy życia codziennego w bombardowanych miastach Nadrenii i Zagłębia Ruhry. Naloty alianckie, prowizoryczne schrony, praca przy działach przeciwlotniczych ramię w ramię z jeńcami wojennymi, strach, zmęczenie i wszechobecne ruiny tworzą sugestywny obraz Niemiec stojących na krawędzi całkowitej zagłady. Obok grozy wojny pojawiają się jednak także drobne, bardzo ludzkie momenty: pierwsze zauroczenia, przyjaźnie, ironiczny humor i próby zachowania namiastki normalności.
Dużym atutem wspomnień Schlesiera jest ich rzeczowość i brak patosu. Autor nie heroizuje ani siebie, ani kolegów, nie buduje mitu „bohaterskich flakhelferów”, lecz pokazuje chaos, dezorganizację i desperację państwa, które sięga po dzieci, by przedłużyć własne istnienie. W późniejszych fragmentach, gdy trafia do Służby Pracy Rzeszy i następnie na front w 1945 roku, jeszcze wyraźniej widać absurd i bezsens końcowej fazy wojny.
„W służbie III Rzeszy” to znakomita lektura dla wszystkich zainteresowanych II wojną światową, którzy szukają spojrzenia innego niż narracja frontowa czy polityczna. To ciche, przejmujące świadectwo straconego pokolenia i dowód na to, że ofiarą wojny bywali także ci, których zmuszono do służby po „złej stronie” historii. Książka, która zostaje w pamięci na długo i zdecydowanie zasługuje na polecenie.
May 18, 2017
A prime example of a war's memoir.
Giving a true perspective of war from the eyes of children and families. How they fought and endure the horrors of war.
It's not really a spoiler though, but imagine a 15 year old boy that conscripted to the armed forces and trained to man an anti aircraft cannon that shoots 200-400 British and US planes every day. And still doing his homework despite the absurdity of war (Math and History).
Giving a true perspective of war from the eyes of children and families. How they fought and endure the horrors of war.
It's not really a spoiler though, but imagine a 15 year old boy that conscripted to the armed forces and trained to man an anti aircraft cannon that shoots 200-400 British and US planes every day. And still doing his homework despite the absurdity of war (Math and History).
May 10, 2020
Essential memoir puts perspective in place for restorative justice.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews