The late-evening mood was one of high expectation, even celebration. A brass band was assembled in front of the station, and it was already playing a selection of patriotic music that was at the same time politically acceptable to the ears of the British, whose zone of occupation this was. Of the train there was as yet no sign, but that autumn evening several hundred people were assembled on the platform and around the station to greet the returnees. You would have thought we were expecting to see West Germany’s FIFA World Cup team arriving home, victorious, from the “miracle of Bern” and not a train carrying SS and Wehrmacht, none of whom had expected ever to be released from Russia and who were all of them entirely ignorant of the fact that Germany had won the World Cup or even that Konrad Adenauer, the former mayor of Cologne, to whom they owed their freedom, was now chancellor of another German republic—this time the Federal Republic of Germany. But some local men, keen to remind the returnees of the chancellor’s crucial role in their delivery from captivity, were carrying a sign that read “We Thank You, Doctor Adenauer.” I wouldn’t have argued with that, although it sometimes seemed to me that the Herr Doktor was intent on becoming another uncrowned king of Germany.

Other signs were much more personal, even pathetic. Between ten and twenty men and women were carrying signs on which were written details of a missing loved one, and of these, that of an old bespectacled lady who reminded me of my own late mother, seemed typical:

Do you know him? Untersturmführer Rudolf (Rolf) Knabe. Second 9th SS Panzer Division “Hohenstaufen” (1942) & Second SS Panzerkorps (1943). Last heard of at Kursk, July 1943.

I wondered how much she knew about what had happened at Kursk—that this place had been the scene of the largest and bloodiest tank battle in history and had probably marked the beginning of the end for the German army.

Others, perhaps less optimistic, were holding little candles or what looked like miners’ lamps, which I took to be memorials for those who weren’t ever coming back.

On the actual platform of the station were those, like myself, Grottsch, Vigée, and Wenger, whose role was more official. VdH and others veterans’ organizations, policemen, churchmen, Red Cross volunteers, British army soldiers, and a large contingent of nurses, several of whom caught my bored eye. All were facing south, down the track toward Reckershausen and beyond, to the DDR.

“Now, now,” said Vigée, noticing my interest in the nurses. “You’re almost a married man.”

“There’s something about nurses that always attracts me. I used to think it was the uniform, but now I don’t know. Maybe it’s just sympathy for anyone who has to do someone else’s dirty work.”

“Is it so dirty? To help someone who needs it?”