[The following is taken from a memoir of Irmgard A. Hunt, who grew up in the mountains under Hitler’s Eagles Nest during the Second World War.]
As always, the most personal was the most disturbing. We heard – and this rumor turned out to be true – that two young sons of a neighbor halfway down the road had tried to desert and been summarily shot by their officers so close to the end [of the war]
The only real question was whose flag would replace the swastika on Obersalzberg. We tended to lump Soviets, Bolsheviks, Communists, Stalinists, and Marxists into the one phrase, Die Russen (the Russians), and we feared them the most. This fear was fed by stories from refugees from the eastern front who arrived in our mountains and valleys by the thousands. My old playmate, the former Ruth, now Ingrid, and her family had been kicked out of Austria and returned to a small makeshift apartment on Salzberg. She joined Wiebke, Else, and me to make a foursome of friends.
In her rather stoical way she stopped in the middle of a game one day and told us that fleeing west from Prussia her grandmother had been pinned against a barn door with a pitchfork by a Russian soldier. He had held her there until she was dead. We interrupted our play just long enough to briefly contemplate the horrific story, then tried to banish the image from our mind as fast as possible. But it lingered, as did the most mythical and terrible word Stalingrad. Our fear mounted when we heard that the Russians were approaching from Vienna at about the same rate as the U.S. troops from the northwest.
Source:
Hunt, Irmgard A. “War Comes to Berchtesgaden.” On Hitler’s Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2005. 198. Print.
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