Christine Wachsmuth

Title

Christine Wachsmuth

Description

Christine Wachsmuth's account of the events at Magazinstraße 4.

Date

1944-04-18

Temporal Coverage

Spatial Coverage

Coverage

Language

Type

Format

BKasselVdObmv10071

Rights

This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.

Contributor

Identifier

BKasselVdObmv10071

Transcription

Translated from the original in German: Present is Mrs Christine Wachsmuth, née Brill, born 14 October 1889, formerly of Magazinstraße 4, now of Ecken-stückerweg 37 in Harleshausen and makes the following statement:
I was sitting at the table, my husband had just come home from work. We wanted to eat but had not yet finished when the alarm came. So we got ready and went into the cellar. Well, after we had been sitting in the cellar for ten minutes, the first bombs started dropping. My husband and I were in the cellar and all the other people from the house with two little children. And then suddenly, as the bombs were dropping, there was a terrible storm and we moved into the corridor. Then one bomb dropped after the other and it went on and on. We had had our flat on the fourth floor. And every time when a bomb came we crouched and were very quiet. And we kept thinking, if only it stopped, so that we could get out again. And then my husband wanted to go up and fetch something down and as he got up, there was nothing there; it had all burnt down. It must have been a quarter to eleven when we got out of the cellar. And as we come up from the cellar, my husband said: “We have to get out.” I said: “We won’t get through.” Because everything was on fire, above and below, and we did not know where to get out.
So we went down Möncheberg down to the artillery barracks, to the watch. And then we sat there, right?, until about two, when we had to leave because everything above us was on fire – because there was a danger that the building would collapse. A soldier guided us down to the Katzensprung. He led us to the Weserspitze where the barracks are. And then we had to look for shelter, right? And then a guard came and stood there and said we should go to the horses’ stables and fetch straw and cover ourselves with it. And that’s what we did, right? And in the morning I headed off into the city and got a loaf of bread. My husband had stayed in the barracks. That morning, after I got the loaf of bread, I wanted to go to the other daughter-in-law in Hohen-torstraße and see whether they were still alive and on Pferdemarkt. But as I got up there, people said that the one-price shop was still on fire; I should go away as I wouldn’t be able to get down there. And then I did not see anyone anymore and I thought: Now they’ve been killed too. Well, and as I saw that everything was gone, I went back down to the barracks. We stayed there until midday on Saturday. And then my husband went up to the daughter-in-law in Harles-hausen. Towards evening he came back and said: “Come on, let’s go up there, Martha and children live.” There were many women there whom she had taken in now, right?.
We still live in Harleshausen with our daughter-in-law. We went back every day to look for the children. The daughter-in-law who lived at Pferdemarkt 3 (Elisabeth Wachsmuth) was burnt to a cinder in her cellar. The other one died with the three-week old grandchild in Hohentorstraße 23. And my son too. Wife and child have been found and buried but my son is still lying under the debris. I don’t know anything about him, he’s just gone. This is what happened to us. He was such a nice boy. If only we could find a lead, maybe we could dig. He had a good reputation everywhere, with his employer too. Only one man from our house is still alive because he was away at work.

Citation

Vermisstensuchstelle des Oberbürgermeisters der Stadt Kassel, “Christine Wachsmuth,” IBCC Digital Archive, accessed March 29, 2024, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/8737.

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