European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

The connection worked in no time.

It did not take six weeks any more, but took fourteen days or three weeks

until the message moved back and forth – coded, of course.

Resistance in the German Wehrmacht

After the ‘Munich Agreement’ we had the 36 divisions, which marched into Czechoslovakia from all sides.

Bohemia and Moravia were encircled by ’Großdeutschland’.

At the beginning you worked as a civilian

and only when in 1939 the war began, the enlistments started.

I was not enlisted until the end of 1940, so that we had two years of time for the illegal work.

Only when we had to enlist, where the alternative would have been going to a concentration camp,

the work in the ‘Wehrmacht’ started and the attempt to form anti-fascist cells.

Like many others of us, I was enlisted to the ‘Wehrmacht’ after doing illegal work for nearly two years.

We discussed what we were going to do; either refuse to accept the enlisting order,

meaning torture and concentration camp or agree that we have more opportunities as soldiers.

That was our collective decision.

Being a recruit, I was in Bayreuth and there was an illegal group.

A commercial traveller, an anti-fascist who commuted between the borders,

associated me with the anti-fascist group there.

For them I was a stranger, they wanted proof:

How reliable is this man and what can he do?