My full name is Gert Friedrich Franz Schmitz.
And I remember, on September the 1st, 1939,
Hitler was on the radio telling that the war started.
"Since 5:00 this morning, our troops marching into Poland..."
...doing whatever they do best.
Six months later, Hitler marched into France.
The British came, and Americans came into the war.
And I talked to my grandpa, and he told me, he said,
"If they want to win the war, it don't look too good."
I said, "Don't say that, Grandpa!
We cannot lose the war!"
That was not even remotely in my mind that we ever could lose the war.
Because we were so conditioned, politically.
Hitler controlled the newspapers, he controlled the radio.
And Goebbels, the propaganda minister, he controlled everything else.
And we listen to the news, and they told us all what's going on in the Western Front
and how successful they are and all that.
Then we walk outside and we heard the guns.
And you say, "Well, that is too close for what they tell us where they're supposed to be."
Following their defeat in the First World War,
Germany was reeling from the harsh conditions of a peace treaty
that left the country shamed and buried in economic crisis.
But in 1933, when a radical new leader rose to power,
promising to restore Germany and place it at the forefront of world powers,
the people were captivated.
Adolf Hitler's reign brought swift economic relief, and the German military was quickly on the rise.
But his radical political party enforced totalitarianism over the government and the public,
making Nazism synonymous with the German way of life.
They had everything organized.
You get couldn't get lost through the -
fall through the cracks.
There were no cracks.
You were part of it if you liked it or not.
I got drafted into the Hitler Youth when I was ten years old.
And they gave us a uniform and all that, you know.
Like thousands of other German boys, Gert Schmitz was swept up in the Hitler Youth.
But the draft was not without its benefits.
Upon graduation, Gert was offered the opportunity to fly with the Luftwaffe.
They said, "Do you want to go to a jet pilot training school?
We have one in Fulda, Germany.
And you'll go over there and you'll start training for flying Messerschmitt 262 jets."
I said, "Shoot, yeah!"
But before he would reach the airfield, the Allied bombing campaign would reach it first.
And when I got up there,
the hangars were bombed, the runways were bombed, the airplanes were bombed.
And there was nothing left for us to do.
And they said, "Well, we'll temporarily assign you to a paratrooper outfit
and send you to the Western Front."
So we got on the train that afternoon.
We ended up in Pasewalk.
We talked to the people - the local people there.
They heard on the news that the Russians had just come
from the east and south and cut off that airbase where we were.
And that was bad news.
Gert may have escaped capture by the Russians,
but now he was headed to the Western Front
where the British and Americans were on the advance and the German Army was in disarray.
That was chaos.
The whole German Armed Forces was in total chaos.
We didn't know where they were, I didn't know where the headquarters were,
you didn't know where the real front was or anything.
You were so busy surviving and fighting -
We either won here, or we lost over there, and then go to the next.
We don't know the overall picture.
We have no idea what happened.
And then we finally marched into Holland.
The street was open between the town and the woods-
that forest where we're supposed to go into.
And it was kinda exposed, you know.
And the Allies always flew eight fighter planes, roaming in the sky.
They had total sky superiority.
And we had to get across that open space, and those guys were flying around there, see.
If you go in a column over there, they'll see us and they're gonna mow us down.
But if you go one guy every hundred feet, they may not even pay attention to us.
So it came my time to go across, and the guy paid attention to me.
And he came and started shooting at me, and I ran into that deep ditch.
And as soon as he went past me, I got out and ran down toward the woods.
And when he came the other way, I jumped back in the ditch.
And finally he got wise.
Instead of going across,
he came down alongside the ditch and just unloaded.
Bullets flying behind me and in front of me.
I mean, there was bullets flying every which way.
So he got up, and I ran, and I didn't go back in the ditch -
I ran all the way into the woods.
Yeah, that was kinda nasty.
But I hate Mustangs to this day.
We were in Ramsdorf - that was my buddy and I.
We were up at one end of town.
And we had a bazooka.
A tank came down the street, and they started shooting.
And we ran behind those big logs there.
And they couldn't hit us there.
He pulled that trigger and when it hit, it said...
He got that warhead right between the tracks, in the body.
And he just blew the hell out of the inside.
Nothing moved anymore after that.
There was another tank that was up the street.
And we were standing there, kinda looking down the street to see what we could do.
And he said, "I'm gonna go on the other side of the street."
Because it was curved a little bit - he could see better.
I said, "Don't go over there.
That tank is up there."
And while he was in the middle, in the street,
that tank shot one round right between his legs.
I went over there and got him.
The shrapnel went into his uniform and ripped his chest open.
And he was sitting with his butt in the street.
And he said...
And then he collapsed.
When we marched into Ramsdorf first, earlier, the company commanders told us,
They say, "You'll go point to make sure everything is alright."
And way later on after we supposed to move out,
I said, "Man, we're probably on point again."
"We'll be the first ones out of there."
And the company commander said, "You're the rear guard."
I said, "No!"
You don't want to be in the rear on the way out.
You want to be front.
But anyway.
There was an open field, and they wanted to march into the woods.
And while we were way behind as the rear guard, they walked into a trap.
The Americans, they already were on three sides.
And they waited 'til the whole battalion marched in there, and they mowed them down.
So - the four of us - we went off to the right,
into the woods and disappeared into the woods.
And that's how we ended up behind enemy lines.
Gert and his three comrades were on their own,
disoriented, and desperately searching for ever elusive friendly territory.
And then when we finally got into Dortmund, it was daylight.
And there was a six-foot fence - a chain link fence.
We said, "That must be a park.
Nobody is fighting in the park,
so we're gonna be pretty safe."
So we got over - climbed over that six foot fence...
G.I.'s walking all over the place there!
And they saw us and they started shooting at us.
They had a deuce and a half truck with machine guns one there.
They came around and started shooting at us with that.
And then we said, "We got to get out of this park!"
So we jumped over the fence,
and there was tanks on the outside.
We said, "That is not safe either.
Let's jump back in the fence."
We jumped back over that six-foot fence,
and then that truck came and started shooting at us.
We went back over the fence - again - and went in the other direction.
And we saw a pine forest over there,
and I said, "Let's get in to that forest and get the heck out of here!"
And we crawled on our stomachs, and we finally got into the woods and they came after us.
And I said, "Well, let's hide behind the trees 'til they go.
If they don't see us they might go away."
And they came and I stood behind that tree, you know.
We all stood behind each one of those trees - just big enough to hide us.
And I said, "What am I gonna do?"
We can't run - they're gonna start shooting at us.
And I finally - I put my hand out and waved.
You know, said, "Hi."
And they said, "Come on out!
Come on out!"
You know.
"Hands up!
Hands up!"
And that's how we got captured.
Now in American custody, intended for relocation to a POW camp in the United States,
Gert began the long journey across Europe.
From prison camp to prison camp,
he passed the time by drawing pictures to document his experiences.
But before Gert would reach the French coast, Germany surrendered,
the war came to an end, and the prisoners were sent back to their homes.
The Germany Gert returned to was very different than he remembered.
Hitler was gone, the Nazi party dissolved, and Gert himself had acquired a fresh perspective.
I didn't realize how bad it was.
But then after the war, everything became democratic, you know, and peaceful.
And I said, "Wait a minute.
That's a heck of a lot different than
what we went through - all that." You know.
I didn't know about the full extent of the concentration camps
because that was kept so well secret, you know.
We heard about it, you know.
But they said that's where
murderers go in, and wife beaters, you know.
And they - supposed to be rehabilitated.
But they didn't do that.
And I didn't know the full extent 'til I came to the United States.
Following the war, Gert immigrated to the U.S., served with the Army,
and went on to a career in Aerospace Engineering, working alongside Wernher Von Braun.
Gert served his country honorably in the Second World War.
But like all of those who survived, regardless of what side,
he hopes to one day live in a world free of violent conflict.
War is the stupidest thing that man invented.
If you can't talk it out - if you cannot communicate, you start fighting.
You have to do away with your problem.
You have to annihilate your problem.
But, that is not a solution.
That just creates more problems.
Don't fight.
Talk it out.
There's got to be a solution.
There is always a solution.