Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War (3 page)

Maria and her sons realized with horror that the debris on the ground included arms, legs, heads, and other human body parts. They dared
not look closely for fear of recognizing the remains of friends and neighbors.

Turning a corner, they were surprised to see in the distance that their home was still standing, although the houses on either side were gone.

Their next-door neighbor Mrs. Bohler had been visiting a friend in the hospital when the bombs fell. She had hurried home to find her husband and nine children dead. Her husband—still with binoculars around his neck—and the children had been outside watching the planes fly over.

As they came closer, Maria saw that the wooden frame of their house was intact but most of the plaster walls were gone. Pieces of their tile roof lay across the street. Although the house was uninhabitable, Maria declared it “God’s gift” that there was no fire. Unlike many residents, who had lost their worldly goods, the Denglers were able to recover most of their belongings, although everything had “a million pieces of glass in it.” White-hot shrapnel had ripped through the house, singeing fist-size holes in furnishings and clothing. Digging through the rubble, the three boys dropped down into the pitch-black cellar and retrieved most of the remaining canned goods their mother had put up.

Looting had begun, with townsfolk who had lost their homes and belongings scavenging through wrecked and deserted structures whose owners were gone, taking food, clothing, blankets, tools, and utensils.

Finding a working phone, Maria called her parents. Upon hearing that their home and most of Wildberg had been destroyed, her mother said, “You and the boys are welcome here.” A plan was made for Maria’s brother Theo, who was home from the army on medical leave, to come to Wildberg to help with the move to Calw. The next day, Theo showed up in a horse-drawn wagon.

The Schnuerles were already feeding and housing more than a dozen relatives and friends, including several Jews, such as Mrs. Hess, who was fearful of being “resettled” after her Swiss husband was drafted into the army. Although Hermann and his family did not suspect the ghastliness of Hitler’s Jewish plan, they knew that Jews in Calw—such as the butcher, who had owned his own shop that was now boarded up—had disappeared. Having once been forcibly taken from his own home, Hermann did not hesitate to help others.

Maria Dengler with her three sons, 1942. Right to left: Dieter, Martin, and Klaus.
Family photograph.

A year passed, and before all the wildflowers of the Black Forest bloomed that final spring of the Third Reich, the war in Europe was over. The German economy went into free fall. With store shelves empty, hungry people canvassed the countryside, going from farm to farm trading their silver, Persian carpets, and other heirlooms for eggs, milk, and potatoes.

For many German civilians—mostly women, children, and the elderly, as men between eighteen and fifty years old were scarce—the Allies’ occupation of their homeland meant a fight for survival far worse than any they had endured during the war years. The next two winters were bitterly cold. With so many houses damaged or destroyed, there was inadequate shelter, and there were shortages of coal and food. Many people starved or froze to death.

Under the Allies’ division of occupied Germany, the southwest corner of the defeated country—where Calw was located—was in the French zone. It was not long before the residents of Calw met their occupiers: the rugged Moroccan Goumiers, who carried long daggers in their belts and were
frightening in appearance and by reputation. In the final weeks of the war, the Moroccans had breached the fortified Siegfried Line and fought their way through the Black Forest all the way to the Austrian border. They specialized in night raids and were also used to man the front lines in mountainous and other rough terrain. With the spoils of war in mind, these wild and fearless combat veterans arrived in Calw “like a conquering army.”

Young Dieter would never forget the first time he saw the Moroccans. He was standing at his mother’s side in his grandfather’s bakery, “wide-eyed and scared,” when three of the hardened fighters, wearing turbans and striped cloaks, entered with axes and commenced to smash open storage bins, cabinets, and closets, taking anything they fancied. When they left, his grandfather hurried everyone into the cellar where he stored potatoes and made cider. They sat silently on crates and barrels stacked against earthen walls, the only light coming from a single candle. Suddenly, the door flew open and several Moroccans rushed inside. Looking over the huddled group, they chose Maria’s younger sister and another woman hiding with the family, and hauled them away, leaving Maria with her three boys clinging to her. In a while the two women returned to the cellar, weeping but saying nothing about their ordeal.

A postwar routine soon descended over Calw and its 20,000 residents. A contingent of Moroccans moved into an empty schoolhouse next to Hermann’s bakery. The soldiers required the local women to do their laundry, and Hermann was forced to bake for the occupiers, who supplied him with the necessary ingredients that for a time were difficult to obtain. Hermann, whose ancestors had been bakers since 1620, managed to skim some yeast, flour, and butter for his own baking.

Once a week, Maria bicycled into the countryside to trade small packets of yeast to farmers for food and produce. This type of private bartering with farmers was forbidden by new statutes put in place by the occupational forces. Maria, however, felt she had no choice; the family had to eat. Occasionally, she returned with an old, bony hen killed because it had stopped laying eggs. From the scrawny carcass she made a thin gruel that lasted for days.

Maria’s two younger sons joined in the hunt for food, while the oldest, studious Klaus, was content to stay home with his books or practice the
violin, which he would play for so many hours that his chafed neck would bleed. When it was apple season, Dieter and Martin rose before dawn. Although the new laws made it a serious offense to pick fruit from someone else’s trees, it was permissible to take anything on the ground that rolled onto public property. By sleight of hand, the boys made sure some fruit went “rolling down the street.” They also went into the woods to pick wild berries and mushrooms. Whenever they returned with food, they would be followed next time by “a herd of people” they would try to lose in the forest. “Martin, you go left and I’ll go right,” Dieter would order. “We’ll meet where we found the berries.”

Dieter curried favor with the Moroccans by delivering their laundry and running other errands. When the soldiers lined up for noontime chow, Dieter would squeeze through the smelly, jabbering foreigners and hold out an empty container toward the man with the ladle, who filled whatever was placed in front of him. Dieter took the soup home; his mother thinned it in order to feed more people. Once in a while she had a fresh egg to add—one egg stirred in the pot for a dozen people, and a treat for all.

Dieter watched whenever the Moroccans brought in sheep from the fields for slaughter. They first struck a bayonet in the sheep’s throat, and after it slowly bled to death they beat the carcass with sticks prior to skinning it. They then cut up the carcass, throwing the heart, liver, and entrails into the bushes. Instantly, there would be kids coming out from all directions scrambling for the scraps. Whether the prizes were won by speed or fisticuffs, Dieter usually ended up with something, which he took home to his mother to cook. She also cooked wallpaper Dieter tore from bombed buildings, for the “nutrients in the glue.”

As Dieter became an inventive scrounger, he found himself in trouble much of the time—for stealing, trespassing, truancy, fighting, and missing curfew. Growing into the Gypsy that his mother had feared, Dieter was “the most difficult” of her three boys. To punish him, she struck his backside with a rubber hose. Dieter took the blows stoically from the mother he loved, but he could not always find it in him to behave.

Gradually, conditions improved as the Marshall Plan went into effect. Each morning the children were lined up and given a cup of watery hot chocolate and a slice of bread, and once a week they were given a Hershey
bar. The first time links of sausage reappeared in a butcher shop display window, Dieter stopped and stared. So did other passersby, although few could afford to buy any. For two years, until surplus clothing was distributed, Dieter wore the same pair of shorts his mother made from an old flag, and—when not barefoot—shoes with holes in the sole. “Cold and hungry” is how he would recall those years, his “first lesson in survival.”

If those years in postwar Germany were about surviving, Dieter also flourished. He was the first boy in the neighborhood to have his own bicycle, which he built himself. He found the frame at the dump, bartered for one tire here and another there, and fashioned a seat out of a small pillow. During those years Dieter became a leader, too. It was a role that came naturally from his being capable and enterprising, as well as tough and never backing down. His brother Martin recognized that although Dieter was not always the most skilled fighter, he would “never give up or be defeated.” By his early teens, Dieter was “always the leader,” and had his own gang—one of two in Calw, each with more than 100 members. The gangs fought to defend their turf, divided by the Nagold River that ran through town. To his followers, including Martin, Dieter, fiercely loyal to friends, was “the hero of Calw” with “nothing getting past him.” To Martin, Dieter “ran the town” and was “a hero to a lot of kids.”

Martin wanted to grow up to “drive railroad trains,” but he was selected at age five to become a baker and take over his grandfather’s shop one day. As for Dieter, Maria signed him up at age fourteen, following four years of middle school and after he flunked the entrance test for high school, for an apprenticeship to a blacksmith and tool and die maker known as a stern taskmaster. She felt her middle son would benefit from a strong male figure in his life.

The blacksmith, Mr. Perrot, was not only strong but cruel as well. With “calloused hands that were accustomed to forging metal on an anvil” all day, he beat Dieter and the dozen other boys under his tutelage—sometimes bare-fisted, at other times with a metal rod across the back. Six days a week from morning till dark they labored, building gigantic clocks and faceplates for cathedrals across Germany. The boys did so mostly for the experience, as they received only the equivalent of $2 a month. Dieter worked some nights in a butcher shop, his only remuneration being the quantities of
smoked bratwurst he could stuff down while working, and a bag of sausage ends to take home to his mother.

When Dieter was sixteen, an American bookmobile came to town. Browsing through a flying magazine, Dieter spotted an advertisement with a young man wearing wings on his chest standing next to a new airplane. Dieter’s dream of flying had not diminished over the years, and the picture struck a chord. The ad read: “We Need Men to Fly These Planes.” There was a coupon to tear out and send in, which Dieter did. It came back with information about how the U.S. military was training young men to fly. With both military and civilian aviation all but nonexistent in postwar Germany, Dieter decided the only way he could become a pilot was to go to America.

Not long afterward, when an in-law from New Jersey arrived for a visit, Dieter found a way to sit next to her at a banquet in her honor. In spite of being “interrupted a hundred times by everyone wanting to impress her or looking for a handout,” he managed to tell her, in his fractured English (English was taught in German schools after the war), of his hope to come to America to fly planes. Taken with the charming youth with big ideas, Aunt Clara, a fortyish widow who had been married to the brother of Dieter’s grandmother, volunteered to be his official sponsor. She suggested he work on improving his English. Also, he would have to pay for his steamship ticket. At the time, the lowest-class one-way fare to New York was $520—a fortune to Dieter.

It wasn’t long before Dieter had a plan. Scrap metal was in short supply and brought a good price. He became a round-the-clock scavenger, collecting brass, lead, and other valuable metals wherever he found them. The blacksmith had a collection of old brass wheels in the attic of his shop and didn’t seem to miss an occasional one. When Mr. Perrot wasn’t looking, Dieter would toss a wheel into the river that ran next to the shop, then retrieve it late at night by wading in knee-deep water and feeling around for the treasure. He found the roofline of churches a good source of ornamental brass, which he snipped away under the cover of darkness. The phone company was laying lead-coated underground cable throughout the area; he’d sneak into a supply yard at night and unroll a portion that wouldn’t be missed. Most of the pilfered materials he sold to an unscrupulous dealer in
another village. For the first time in his life, Dieter made real money, and saved it for his steamship fare. Taking Aunt Clara’s advice, he found an old soldier, a retired
Wehrmacht
general, willing to tutor him in English.

When he turned eighteen, Dieter received in the mail information about gaining entry to the United States, and was given a date to appear for an interview at the American consulate in Munich, 150 miles away. Wearing an old double-breasted suit of his grandfather’s, Dieter set out hitchhiking for Munich the day before he was due at the consulate.