BY COLLEEN LUTOLF
Staff Writer
METUCHEN — Like most people, Ludwig Knapp, a Clark resident who emigrated from Germany to America in 1954, has a story.
Unlike most people, Knapp’s story includes growing up in Nazi Germany, enrolled in a Kinderlandverschickung (KLV) camp, also known as the Hitler Youth.
Last Sunday, Knapp came to the Metuchen Library to share his story at the Metuchen-Edison Historical Society meeting.
Knapp wrote about his experiences in a self-published memoir, “Growing Up Under Hitler — I Was There.”
His presentation Sunday touched on some of the experiences he wrote about in the book. He wove German World War II history with his own.
“Six, besides myself, from my school class volunteered,” Knapp said. “We stayed there 27 months. We happened to be led by a teacher who was very extreme and preachy. Every day it was Adolf, Adolf. We did not see the inside of a church for two years. Hitler was a replacement for the Lord.”
What led Knapp to become a member of the Jungvolk, the junior group of the Hitler Youth and then the Hitler Jugend, or Hitler Youth itself, began when Knapp’s father, Karl, was drafted into the German army in 1939.
As a construction worker, Karl Knapp was enlisted by the Third Reich to fortify the West Wall, Knapp said.
As a result, Knapp’s mother, Gertrud, was left with two children and deep in debt from the construction of their Dormagen home.
“One of her closest friends, who was Jewish, disappeared,” Knapp said. “She was severely depressed. In December of 1939, my mother committed suicide. My father was on leave, but after the funeral he had to go back.”
With no one to care for them, Knapp’s father enlisted the boy in the KLV camp.
“In 1940, with increasing air raids in my home area, which was 15 miles north of Cologne, the government decided give people with children aged 10 to 14 the chance to evacuate to the eastern part of Germany,” he said.
In 1941, Knapp and 24 other children, ranging in ages 11 to 13, were taken by train to Lengefeld in the Ore Mountains, near the Sudeten border. Once there, he and the other boys were housed in a large, newly built schoolhouse, Knapp said.
He was the only 10-year-old in the group.
“My age did not exempt me from the team leader’s wrath,” Knapp wrote in his book, “and I was frequently slapped for not being fast enough. The team leader, who was 16 to 17 years old, was himself a leader in the senior group of the Hitler Youth. These leaders were the products of the national society and we were to be molded after them. By war’s end, most of them had paid for their enthusiasm with their lives.”
Knapp recounted one story that may sound shocking now, but was an everyday occurrence during Hitler’s regime.
His group had been called upon by the German Army to dig trenches near the French border, Knapp said.
“On the way back, it was pitch black,” he said. “We were quartered in an old farmhouse, where we slept in the barn. One of our comrades went to relieve himself and he chose the hallway of the homeowner’s house to do it. When the woman who owned the house saw the next morning what he had done she became enraged and said, ‘I’d prefer to have 100 Russians here in my home than 10 Hitler Youth.’ ”
One of the boys reported the woman.
“The Gestapo came by her house soon after to take her away,” Knapp said. “Any utterance of things against Hitler was not tolerated. As a result, the concentration camps had a lot of Germans in them too, over 250,000.”
When Knapp’s father remarried in 1943, Knapp returned home to a new mother and 24-hour air raids, he said.
In his book, Knapp recounts sitting in a bomb shelter at the age of 14, waiting to die.