Tag #154394 - Interview #90535 (Leonid Kotliar)

When we came to our barracks in the evening they allowed us to sing songs. Our interpreter Fritz was born in Germany, but his parents were Crimean Germans. They spoke Russian and he learned from them. When in winter 1943 Germans were defeated near Stalingrad he ordered us to line up and said: ‘Listen carefully. You cannot sing for a week. Our Germany is in the mourning. We lost 600 thousand men near Stalingrad’.  Someone shouted: ‘Fritz we are ready to not sing for another week’. He grasped this hint and said: ‘You’ll get from me now!’ However, the time was changing and there were no consequences to this comment. After Germans were defeated in the Kursk battle, the regime in the camp weakened. In early 1944 the air forces of allies struck and destructive blow on Stuttgart. All laborers at the plant were ordered to clean up the ruins of one shop pulled down by blast wave. In spring 1944 air raid warnings were activated several times a day. Enterprises stopped work. There were air raid crews consisting of Germans and 10 ostarbeiters.  In spring 1944 we were taken to a smaller camp that we built. There were no bugs in breezeblock barracks. A group of Polish inmates arrived to the camp. Car engineer Vinogradov had a good conduct of German and he always brought newspapers in German to the barrack.  We learned about the situation at the front from these newspapers. When our troops began to advance Germans began to give us a package of good tobacco once a week. Chief of the camp began to fire us and we had to pay our fines with tobacco and he was selling it. One night in June 1944 the last and the hardest air raid occurred in Stuttgart.  The town was ruining and was on fire and the world was turning upside down. My boss Gliazer began to take me to town to fix the roofs and equipment damaged during air raids.