Holtzmiller, J. Don 589 A, POW

[connie]

Holtzmiller, J. Don Cpl. 589 A, POW Stalags XIII-C, XIII-D, VII-A

HISTORY ON THE INDIANA MILITARY SITE:
www.indianamilitary.org/German%20PW%20Camps/Prisoner%20of%20War/PW%20Camps/Stalag%20XIII-C%20Hammelburg/J%20Don%20Holtzmuller/J%20Don%20Holtzmueller.htm

NOTES FROM THIS PERSONAL ACCOUNT:
Per- enlistment
This Ohio native was a senior in high school when Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941. His graduation was followed by a summer of working in the galley of a ferry boat which sailed across Lake Michigan from Ludington, Michigan to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In the fall he entered an Ohio College known as Miami University and in December he registered for the draft.

Initial Training
By mid February of 1943 was notified that he would be]inducted into the United States Army at Ft. Hayes in Columbus, Ohio on February 25th 1943. After only a couple of days at Ft. Hayes, he and fellow inductees we ware put on a troop train. Traveling a slow three days, the train arrived March 8th at Camp Swift Texas. "I was assigned to the Service Battery of the 365th Field Artillery Battalion, 97th Infantry Division. There, I underwent regular basic training,such as close order drill, rifle practice, etc. Truck driving and vehicle maintenance were stressed as the Service Battery was responsible for delivering supplies to the rest of the battalion. I was appointed acting Corporal, which didn’t mean much except that one wore a red arm band and was in charge of a squad at roll call. I trained until April 25, when I was told to report to headquarters and was informed I was being transferred.

ASTP
He ended up on a two-segment train trip that ended with his settling into the dorms at the University of Kentucky to study engineering as a part of the Army's Specialized Training Program.

Several Reassignments
Time in the ASTP program ended with an initial assignment to the 423rd Infantry Regiment of the 106th Infantry Division in early November of 1943. While training with the infantry, he applied for and was accepted into an Air Force position. After shuffling new recruits around, the Air Force finally acknowledge that they had enough pilots & he was sent back to the 106th Infantry, now at Camp Atterbury. Here he was assigned to the 589th Field Artillery Battalion. "We trained all summer long with our 105 millimeter howitzers and I worked my way up to first the glorious position of Private First Class and then to Corporal Gunner of the number one howitzer of the battery. The gunner is the person who moves the barrel to the right and left when aiming the gun."

Moving Toward The Front
With the rest of the 106th Infantry Division, he moved to Camp Myles Standish in Massachusetts to await deployment oversees. With other Field Artillery Battalions, he sailed from Boston to Liverpool and entrained to a British Military camp in the Gloucester area where they collected equipment before crossing the channel in early December on an LST and finally moving toward their position in Germany. (A much more detailed account of this time is available on the link above).



to be continued...

See Stalag VII-A Moosburg: 106thdivision.proboards.com/post/5000/thread

[connie]

Holtzmiller, J. Don Cpl. 589 A, POW Stalags XIII-C, XIII-D, VII-A

HISTORY ON THE INDIANA MILITARY SITE:
www.indianamilitary.org/German%20PW%20Camps/Prisoner%20of%20War/PW%20Camps/Stalag%20XIII-C%20Hammelburg/J%20Don%20Holtzmuller/J%20Don%20Holtzmueller.htm

NOTES FROM THIS PERSONAL ACCOUNT Continued...

Onset of the Bulge, action, and capture:
I recommend you read this personal account if you're interested in what Holtzmiller experienced during these harrowing days.
Some names mentioned during this time include: Executive Officer, Lt. Eric Wood, Cpl. Knoll, his driver, and Sgt. Scannapico, his section leader, Pvt. Campagna, who was manning a bazooka, a Lieutenant Colonel and four black soldiers from an American 155 mm artillery battalion.

POW EXPERIENCE & LIBERATION in Holtzmiller's own words:

My memory of the journey from the front to the prison camp is rather sketchy. I will relate those things I do remember. The first town we passed through was Prum. There, a German officer made me give my rubber overshoes to a German infantryman. The first night we slept in a German bunker on the Siegfried Line. While marching back into Germany we passed a plethora of German war equipment along the roads. Many tanks (Tigers and Panthers), trucks, trucks pulling trucks, cannons of all varieties, horse drawn equipment, and armaments and equipment made in all the countries of Europe. Another night we slept in a big warehouse. At one stop we were made to give up one of our outer coats. Unfortunately for me, they took my overcoat, which left me with just a thin field jacket. As it was getting colder every day, I found I was under-dressed. I had taken off my long underwear the day before the battle and was wearing summer underwear when I was captured. Food during these days was practically nil. Water was also scarse and once I drank water scooped out of a road side ditch with a dirty helmet liner.

We were locked in rail cars with no heat or toilet facilities. It was frightfully cold. I remember, what I believe was on the 23rd of December, we were locked in boxcars in the railroad yards at Bonn, Germany. All afternoon the B-I 7s flew overhead. Fortunately for us they were bombing Cologne instead of Bonn.

That Christmas Eve was pretty bad. I was locked in a boxcar, was very cold, and had eaten nothing in the prior 48 hours. On the morning of the 25th we arrived at Limburg, Germany. We were unloaded and marched to the gates of the prison camp, but were turned away as bombs had been dropped the night before and many of the facilities had been destroyed. I found out later that Lieutenant O’Toole from my battery had been killed in the bombing of the Limburg POW camp. We were marched back to the Limburg station area and had to wait till night to be reloaded aboard the boxcars. The trains ran only at night to avoid the fighter bombers who flew around Germany in daylight looking for trains to destroy.

I stood all day long in the station area. Although no food was available, there was access to water. Not having had a drink for quite a while, I drank more than I should have on an empty stomach. Soon after drinking the water, I got the chills and shakes and felt very weak. That day was the only day during the war that I thought I might die. The Germans then brought the train to the station and we were loaded onto the cars. Usually they only loaded 40 men in each car, but for some reason they loaded at least 80 men in the car and we were packed like sardines. Since it was so crowded, I became moderately warm and got over the shakes.

Camp XIII C Hammelberg

Some time during the night we arrived at the town of Hammelburg, Germany. We detrained and marched up a big hill to German Prison Camp XIII C. Thus, on December 26, 1944 my 128 days of incarceration in a German prison camp began. Prison Camp XIII C at Hammelburg was the camp portrayed on the television show “Hogans Heros”. We were put in wooden barracks which housed about 80 men. We were given a small piece of German black bread and a tin bowl filled with a hot liquid which tasted somewhat like tea. I drank the tea, but the bread tasted so bad that I couldn’t eat it and I gave it away. In a couple of days this bread started to taste like cake! We kept the tin bowl we had been given and this became our eating vessel for the rest of our captivity. Not having an eating utensil,. I carved a spoon of sorts out of a piece of wood. I still had the spoon when I got home, but I gave it to the VA museum in Dayton. Our living quarters were similar to those portrayed on the TV show “Hogans Heros”. The wooden bunks were three high with a thin mattress made of burlap and filled with very little straw. The mattress was supported by very few wooden slats. A few slats in some bunks were burned by prisoners to try to warm the building. We found out later that it was a crime against the German state to burn bed slats.

The next morning we ware assembled outside and the Germans sorted us out. First the black soldiers and the Jewish soldiers were segregated. Initially they thought I was black. The last boxcar in which I had traveled had been carrying what I suppose was black graphite and I was covered with this black material. I had to roll up my sleeve to show I was white. The privates were then taken away. Per the Geneva Convention, privates could be made to work on non-war production jobs and they were put out on what was called Kommandos to do farm work or the like.

In a couple of days we Non Commissioned Officers, Corporals and Sergeants were moved to new barracks. Our new quarters consisted of a large brick building which had been a horse stable. This area had been a training camp for German soldiers. There were three of these buildings, one above the other on the side of a steep hill. The barracks were surrounded by high, triple barbed wire fences with watchtowers at the corners. Ten feet inside the barbed wire fence was a single wire supported about a foot off the ground. This wire was called the dead line. All prison compounds had this particular feature. The rule was that if you crossed this trip-wire, the guards in the tower could and would shoot you. One end of our building was filled with 3 tiered steel bunks with the same thin mattresses. The only other pieces of furniture were a couple of benches. There were two small stoves and we were given one small pail of coal each day for each stove. Needless to say, it was never warm in the building, especially since the winter of 1944/1945 was one of the coldest winters in memory. Water for the 80 or so men in this building was made available through only 2 cold water taps. The toilet facility was an open air latrine which every so often had to be emptied by hand into a tank and then transported away. Thankfully, I never had that duty. We had each been given a blanket when we first arrived. A little later I was given an army overcoat, one which had probably come from an Eastern European soldier. The Germans also provided me with some long underwear. It was not as good as the long underwear that I had left in my barracks bag, but was better than nothing. Needless to say, until I reached the hospital in May after liberation, I never took them or any of my other clothes off except once or twice when we were taken up the hill for a shower and occasionally to search for body lice. Soon after incarceration, these small creatures became a problem. The only remedy was to take off your shirt and hunt through the seams and pick out the little white parasites.

A German sergeant was in charge of the barracks and lived in a little room at the front of the building. He had a very wrinkled face and was probably put on light duty because of wounds from the Russian front. We called him Prune Face after one of the characters in the Dick Tracy comic strip. We didn’t have too much contact with him except that he came through the barracks each morning to wake us up or to shout at us for breaking a rule. Daily we were ordered outside, lined up and counted. Our captors always seemed to get the count wrong and we had to stand in the cold until they got it right. After the weather warmed up, we “got even” with them by moving around while they were counting.

We soon settled into the routine of prison life. After being awakened by the compound guard, our warm morning drink arrived in a big barrel. There were two different drinks. One was made from roasted barley, was dark in color and tasted slightly like coffee. The other, brewed from some kind of leaves which we never were able to identify, was a little like tea.

Around the middle of the morning the bread was distributed. The loaves were rectangular, about ten to twelve inches long. Each loaf was to feed seven men. As soon as we got the bread it was cut into seven pieces. I was the bread cutter for my group. Each day we rotated turns as to which of us would choose his piece first and second and so forth. The first man choosing would carefully look the pieces over to see which one was the largest before picking out his piece.

Usually after the bread distribution, a barrel of cooked potatoes was brought down to the compound. The same distribution procedure used for the bread was followed for the potatoes. Seven piles of potatoes were laid out and, again, the first man to choose a portion was rotated each day. Each man received only four or five very small potatoes. Some of the men had great will power. They would save the bread till the potatoes came and then mix the two together with water and heat the mixture on the stove. I, like the majority of the prisoners, wolfed down the food as soon as I received it.

To complete our diet, we received a ration of watery soup once a day, either at noon or in the evening. It was usually made either of barley or some kind of dried green leaves or sugar beet pulp. Once in a while there would be a little piece of what was probably horse meat in the barley soup. Interestingly, all the prisoners lined up in the same order for the distribution of soup. If there happened to be seconds, the line would then rotate to equitably distribute the remaining soup.

The other foods which we occasionally received were: a tablespoon of a red jam which we had heard was a coal tar product, a small piece of blood sausage and a small piece of cheese. These items were usually distributed in the evening.

The only other food we received while in Hammelburg, was, as I remember, one-fourth of an Australian Red Cross Parcel. Needless to say with this low calorie diet we lost weight very rapidly and were hungry all the time. I probably weighed 170 lb. when I was captured and weighed about 125 lb. at liberation.

We were given one other Red Cross parcel donated by the Australian POWs. The box contained toiletries. The box contained a toothbrush, mirror, comb, and other various items. Since we only had one box we had a drawing for the articles. I think I got the best items, an aluminum spoon and fork.

I became friends with my bunk mates, Charles “Pud” Dissinger from Lebanon, PA. who was in the 99th Division, and Ray Seckler from Buffalo, NY and who was in the 76th division. Ray had a deck of cards and we played a lot of cards, but I don’t remember what game we played.

Most of the time we sat around and talked about food. We traded menus and recipes, and made up lists of all the foods we could think of.

We wore all the clothes we had all the time. We were taken to a shower room twice during our captivity, but any washing and shaving the rest of the time was pretty minimal.

Twice we were marched to an auditorium and shown movies. There was no heat in the auditorium and it was very cold. The movies were in German and the language was unintelligible to us. They were regular films, not propaganda films.

Sometimes they would take 6 or 8 of us, walk us about 2 miles to a forest and allow us to gather wood to bring back to the barracks as additional fuel for our little stoves. There was always a German forester in the woods and he would tell us which pieces of wood we could pick up and take back. We were never allowed to cut down a tree unless it was dead.

There were a couple of houses near the woods which were inhabited by a few young boys who were being trained as soldiers. We stopped at the back door of one of the kitchens once and the cook gave me some sauerkraut juice to drink. Before we got back to our barracks, I wished I hadn’t drunk it.

Another diversion we had was a Bible study class which was started by one of the prisoners. Each evening he would gather everyone together who was interested in his class and conduct a Bible lesson. He spoke on the book of Luke and had just started on Acts when we were moved. The only other diversion we had was when an American Chaplain came to our barracks a couple of Sundays and preached to us.

A group of Russian prisoners was housed in the barracks just next to and above our barracks. They were real brutish looking men and were in very bad shape. We had no contact with them. However, they came down periodically and searched through our meager garbage for scraps of food. At most, they would be rewarded with a few potato skins. Every day they were marched across the road to a building which was filled with sewing machines. I never found out what they were sewing.

There were some Serbian and a few Australian prisoners in this camp. Once we met some of the Serbians out in the woods when they were gathering wood. One of them gave me a cigarette which was greatly appreciated.

To my knowledge, there was only one prisoner who died while in the Hammelburg camp. I don’t know what he died from, but I imagine it was pneumonia. I was picked as one of the dead soldier’s pallbearers. He had a wooden casket, but it was too small for his body and I noticed that when they nailed down the lid some of his hair was sticking out between the boards.

We Americans had become pretty sloppy in the weeks after captivity. I had grown a real good mustache which curled down around my mouth. One day a German officer came into the quarters and really let us have it. He admonished us about our slovenliness, and told us that we were not good soldiers. He wanted us to shave and get cleaned up. This diatribe helped all of us to quit feeling sorry for ourselves. I don’t remember where I found the razor, but I shaved off the mustache and did try to look more soldier-like from that point onwards.

We existed through the cold winter months and when spring came, the warmer weather made our lives much more bearable.

On March 27th our routine was temporarily shattered by nearby gunfire. Not knowing what was happening, we stayed in the barracks keeping a low profile. At the time we were unaware that up the hill from our compound was another compound filled with American infantry officers. We learned later that Gen. Patton, whose army was about 60 miles away, had sent a task force of soldiers and vehicles to Hammelburg to liberate his son- in-law, who had been captured in North Africa. The task force had made it to the camp and managed to afford the officers an opportunity to escape. However, the Germans had rallied and cut off their chance to retreat and succeeded to capture almost all of the task force. A few of the imprisoned officers did take off, among them my battery commander Capt. Menke, who was one of the few to make it back to the American lines. Also, Patton’s son-in-law, who was severely wounded, made it back alive. The story of this raid is documented in the books A Blood Red Tide, and 48 Hours to Hammelburg. Patton’s Only Mistake, an article in the Saturday Evening Post, included in the appendix, documents the events of this operation. Our guards had taken off and we could have escaped, but not knowing where we were ~r having any idea which way to go, we stayed put. Soon SS guards were around the camp and things went back to normal.

Another Train Journey --from Hammelburg to Nurnberg

On the night of March 31 St we were told to get our belongings together and to get ready to leave. After dark, we were marched back to Hammelburg and loaded on boxcars. This time, a German guard was put in each car and, fortunately, we were not locked in. Dawn came and we were still traveling when suddenly we heard airplanes and machine gun fire. The train was being strafed by two American P-51 fighters. The train stopped and the guard opened the door and we all jumped out and waved our arms at the planes. The pilots then recognized that the train was loaded with POWs and wiggled their wings and flew off. We looked in our boxcar and found that an American had been hit in the head by a bullet and killed. The Germans ordered us to get back on the train. We refused to return to the train unless they painted “POW” on top of the cars. They hollered and threatened to shoot us if we did not return to the train. We still refused to board the train.

They finally persuaded us to march to Schweinfurt, which was about 12 miles away, on the reassurance that they would paint “POW’ on the cars and then continue our journey. We walked to the town and it was dark when we arrived. We ended up boarding the cars even though they had not painted the letters on them.

Camp XIII D- Nurnberg
By the next morning (April 1 st), we had arrived at our destination, which was Nurnberg, and were marched to Camp XIIID. We were housed in large tents. In the tent, Pud, Ray and I met two British soldiers, Albert Brown and Edward Macey. They had walked from a camp in Poland where they had worked in a coal mine. The reason for the movement of the prisoners was that Hitler did not want any prisoners freed and, as the front lines were moving closer into Germany, he ordered the prisoners to be moved to other camps in the heartland of Germany. We banded together with the two British soldiers to share any food that we might receive. Albert and Edward were both from London and were typical British soldiers - all spit and polish. Their uniforms were clean and neat as compared to the uniforms of the typical American prisoner, which were generally pretty sloppy and dirty. Somewhere along the line, Edward decided he liked my field jacket. He offered to trade his clean British battle jacket for my filthy, green field jacket. I made the trade at once! I still have the British jacket.


March from Nurnbert to Moosberg
On April 4 we were told once more to get our belongings together and were marched out of the camp and onto the road to march to an unknown destination. We walked for the next two weeks along German country roads and finally reached camp XII A, located at the town of Moosburg, which was about 34 kilometers northeast of Munich and about 170 kilometers southwest of Nurnberg. I do not remember a lot about this march, but I will relate what I can recall. The weather was mild, so cold was not a problem. The pace of the march was slow. Although we could see the autobahn from time to time, we walked on the by-roads away from this super-highway. Also, the food was better because white-painted Red Cross trucks brought us Red Cross packages from Switzerland. I think we received two packages during the trek, one package for each group of five or six men. To also augment our food supply, we could trade cigarettes for good old German black bread.

We slept out in the open only a few times. On most nights we were housed in the barns of German farmers. On these nights, we usually found the farmers potato bin and stole his potatoes. An amusing incident took place one night when we had washed our potatoes in a wooden tub by the front door of the farmer’s home before cooking them. That night, as we were sitting around, an old German granny came out of the house carrying a slop jar and threw the contents on the manure pile in the middle of the homestead. Then she walked over to the wooden tub and rinsed out the slop jar, just like she had been doing it every day of her life.

Another noteworthy aspect of our trip was, how much our British comrades liked their tea. Any time we had a ten minute stop on our hike, they wanted to brew up a pot of tea. I had found an enamel wash pan with no bottom and a length of steel rod which I had bent into an s shape. With these two items we had the makings of a grill. I carried these articles along in loops on my overcoat. As soon as we stopped for a short halt, one of our group would run to find wood, another would find water and we would get a fire started and brew a pot of tea. We drank it with sugar and KIim (a powered milk), which was part of the Red Cross packages. We always had plenty of tea, as some Red Cross packages were British and the Americans were always wanting to trade the tea for coffee or cigarettes.

One other memorable event was that President Roosevelt died while we were on the road. The German guards were jubilant upon learning this, as they thought this might change the course of the war. Another occurrence which I do not remember but was related in a book I recently read, was that the column was strafed by American P-57 fighters which caused some POW casualties. The only large city I am sure we passed through was Regensburg where we crossed the Danube River. The bridge over the Danube was heavily mined with huge aerial bombs ready to be exploded if an allied army came close.

Stalag VII A Moosburg
Arriving at Moosburg’s Prison Camp VII A, we were again housed in huge tents. Prisoners from all over Germany had been brought to this camp and it was very crowded. At night when we all lay down, our bodies were head to toe and side to side. There were prisoners from the allied armies of many countries: Australia, New Zealand, France, Poland, The Balkans, Russia, French Africa, etc.

The officers’ compound was next to ours, but was separated by four barbed wire fences with a guard stationed in the middle. The usual “dead wire” was positioned ten feet further out from the main fences. If anyone stepped over this trip wire, the guard was allowed to shoot to kill. For some reason, we, the enlisted men, had more food than the officers. The officers would trade rings, watches and other valuables for food. At first, the only way to trade was to throw the goods back and forth across the wires. Then the trip-wire became trampled and was discarded. Next, a hole in the first set of barbed wire appeared and the Germans, seeing the writing on the wall, relieved the guard and allowed holes to be made in all the wire so that traveL between the two compounds was unhindered. Some of the good traders had watches strapped all the way up their arms! Our British friends found their commanding officers and had them over to our tent for tea and crackers. It was all very proper.

At last, on April 29th, we awoke to guns firing around the camp. There was a pretty good fire fight going on and bullets were flying overhead,. The prisoners stayed close to the ground while the battle was in progress. Then, about ten o’clock a.m., an American tank broke down the front gate of the camp and we were liberated.


POST LIBERATION NOTES
The next ten days were spent waiting for transport back to an area under American control. Pud’s division was one of the divisions which had liberated us. He went out of camp, found his old mess sergeant and had a jeep-load of food sent in to us. We really pigged out on that food! I ate so much that I got sick. I felt so ill that I couldn’t get out of the camp to see what was going on. I did have someone get me a German helmet which turned out to be my only souvenir from the German army. Soon afterwards it was our turn to be trucked to an airfield in Landshutt, Germany, from which we would be flown back to France. Shortly after we arrived at the airfield there was a rain shower. One of the C-47 transport planes which was flying in to pick up the released prisoners had an accident when landing and the field was closed down for the rest of the day. While we were sitting around that evening, planes of all varieties started landing at the airfield. Apparently the Russians were getting close to an airfield in Austria and Germans pilots, some with their families, were fleeing the area and coming over to where the Americans were in charge. As soon as the planes landed, the men, women and children who were aboard deplaned and immediately ran off, and just leaving the planes where they had landed.

The next morning the field was reopened and we were soon on our way to Rheims, France, our first processing point on our way home. Shortly after arriving at Rheims I was feeling so ill that I decided to see a doctor. I went to the dispensary, not realizing that I would never see my friends again. As soon as the doctor saw me he ordered me to the hospital, as I had developed a bad case of jaundice or hepatitis. As soon as I found a mirror, I saw that my eyes were as yellow as bananas. I was in the hospital for longer than I should have been, as every time they would get my fever down to normal I would eat something fatty and my temperature would shoot up. Finally, I was well enough to be sent home. I traveled to Paris, where I had almost a whole day of sightseeing before catching a train for LeHarve and camp Lucky Strike, where the final processing of POWs was completed....

Also See:

Stalag VII-A Moosburg: 106thdivision.proboards.com/post/5000/thread

Stalag XIII-C Hammelburg 106thdivision.proboards.com/post/5022/thread

Stalag XIII- D 106thdivision.proboards.com/post/5029/thread

[connie]

Added links to board info on Holtzmiller's POW camps to the bottom of the above post.