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Obergefreiter Henry Metelmann Heinrich Friedrich Carl Metelmann was born on Christmas Day 1922 into a working-class family in Altona, an industrial town near Hamburg. His father, an unskilled railway worker, was a socialist. When Heinrich was 11, his Christian youth group was subsumed into the Hitler Youth, of which he was soon an enthusiastic member. Called up in 1941 when he reached 18, Henry Metelmann was posted to join the 22nd Panzer Division and was in training as Operation Barbarossa commenced in June. Shortly after the Division was sent to the Crimea for the winter of 1941 as part of Mannesteins 11th Army, fighting the first of many tank battles in the early spring of 1942. He took part in the push to the River V, and the approach to Stalingrad. But as they advanced the 1,000 miles towards Stalingrad, Metelmann – who spoke a little Russian – got to know some of the people whose homes he occupied: I fell in love with a Russian girl, although nothing ever came of it, and for the first time I began to doubt our racial superiority. How could I be better than her? His unit was nearly destroyed in the Russian pincer movement at Stalingrad in November 1942, and Metelmann only narrowly avoided being captured. Yet the reversal of the Wehrmacht's fortunes did not lead him to disobey orders. Wounded, he spent time in hospital before rejoining his unit for the Battle of Stalingrad. Detached from his unit during the chaos of the fighting, he walked west for days before crossing back into the German lines. Wounded again, he was captured while defending a small town on the Rhine. but escaped, and in early 1945 was sent to join a Panzer unit in the West defending the Rhine from the advancing US army under General Patton. Taken prisoner, Metelmann was shipped to America, where his turning point came en route to a prison camp in Arizona, when he picked up a magazine showing pictures of the piles of corpses and walking corpses at the newly liberated concentration camps. Metelmann had swallowed Nazi propaganda that the camps were merely places where unsocial elements were made to do a hard day' work. At first I said to my mates: 'Look, just because we lost the war, they blame us for everything.' But when he studied the pictures more closely he realised that they were not fabrications. Later Metelmann was transferred to England, where he remained a PoW until 1948, working as a farm labourer in Hampshire. By the time he returned to Germany, his parents were dead (his mother from Allied bombing). After just four weeks he returned to the farm in Hampshire, where was given his old job back. Later he took a job as a railway signalman and, on his retirement in 1987, Charterhouse offered him a job as groundsman. While several of Metelmann's old army comrades committed suicide, Metelmann joined the Communist Party and CND and became a committed peace activist. In the 1960s he protested against the Vietnam War. In recent years he attended all the Stop the War marches against the invasion of Iraq and protested against the American bombing of Afghanistan. Henry Metelmann died on July 24th 2011. |
| Obergefreiter Henry Metelmann - Signed Aviation Art Prints, Paintings and Drawings Pilot and Aircrew Signatures |
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