"A few days after New Years Day 1950, around the 3rd or 4th, I had to go back to school. Legally I was a resident in West Berlin at that time, and we could still travel back and forth between West and East Berlin. As I got to the trainstation in Gransee, the police were checking everyone's papers. I had just come back from England a few weeks before and was carrying my passport. I probably didn't realize that the passport was bad, I was probably rather proud of since it was such a prestigious program I had gone on. However, the police didn't think so. They arrested me. I was handcuffed and taken to the police station in Gransee. I spent the night there and the next day I was given to the Russian police, who took me to a smaller town and put me in a basement or a barn or something, anyway it was a very cold room half full of hay. I had no bathroom facilities, but I did have a little fire pit. so when I had to go, I crapped into the hay and burned it in the fire pit.
After a few days I was driven to a big stone building in Potsdam - I only found that out later though. I remember the roads were icy, I was handcuffed and put in the back seat of a car and taken for a drive on the autobahn, around Berlin south to Potsdam. There were two Russian soldiers, one driving and one guarding me. The car slid off the road at one point, and I was flung around, with my handcuffs on, but I didn't have to get out and push. The soldiers got the car back on the road and we went on.
In Potsdam, I was put in a prison cell with two other men. One was a young man who was an East German policeman, the other was a middle aged West Berlin newspaperman from Der Tagespiegel, who was kidnapped in West Berlin, taken to East Berlin and arrested. This kidnapping was very common at that time. It was only a few blocks from West to East Berlin so it was very easy to kidnap people and drive them over the border. (When I got out I went to the Newspaper and told them what I saw of their worker, but I never knew what happened to him).
We weren't really mistreated, just left in suspense and not really treated well. There was no toothpaste or toothbrush or anything for the entire time but we were given a piece of dry bread to use to clean our teeth. I guess the Russians cleaned their teeth with dry bread and vodka, but we didn't get any vodka. Once every couple of weeks we got a shower. They didn't beat us or anything. They just left us alone mostly. At some point they started interrogating me every day, in German, French and English. I did hear all kinds of screaming from other rooms there, but not from our cell. We tried to communicate with the other cells by tapping on the walls (A was one tap, B was two taps and so forth), but didn't really amount to much.
This interrogation went on and on for months. Who sent us to England? Who in Berlin managed and arranged the trip? Were they CIA or the British intelligence? The interrogators tried to get quite friendly to try to get info out of me, but I just didn't have any answers - all I knew was this trip was through the school. The interrogators knew I was a student so towards the end of the school term, they said I could go back to school to find out the answers to their questions. So they told me to take the S-bahn and go back home, and I was to meet them in two weeks to tell them what I found out about the people that sent me to England. I told them I would, but I went back to my apartment in West Berlin, and never went back to East Berlin. I never spoke of their request to anyone, ever.
But for my mother, this whole ordeal was horrendous. She had absolutely no idea where I was or if I was dead or alive. My second cousin and close friend, Hans Wacker's father was at the train station in Gransee and saw that I was arrested. He told my mother. She went to the police station the next day to ask where I was. They wouldn't tell her The german police had already turned me over to the Russians, so maybe they really didn't know where I was, but she told me that one policeman started to say something like "Oh, you mean the young man ....." and another policeman immediately shushed him, so she knew that I had been arrested. They would not tell her if i had been sent to Siberia or anything else. She tried to find out from anyone she could - the Church bishops, family connections - nobody could help. She had absolutely no idea what happened to me.
When I disappeared and she couldn't find any answers, she realized she couldn't stay in the Russian zone anymore. She packed up everything she had in Schoenemark and sent it to my father in Munich, who by that time had arranged a small apartment. She sent my younger brother who was about 13 years old to a West German refugee children's camp. She refused to leave herself, however, until she found out what happened to me. She moved herself into my little West Berlin apartment. When I got out of the prison, I went there immediately. I did not know she was there, and she nearly collapsed when she opened the door and saw me. Once she knew I was o.k., she got out of Berlin and moved to Munich with my father. Summer of 1950. It was the first time in 5 years that she was able to see and be with him."
Above photo: Walter, his mother, brother Dietz and father in summer 1950, after the family re-united in Munich.
Below: Letter from a friend he met in England, Odile Roze, to Walter, April 12, 1950, just after he was released from prison.
