Texts and Research

For Rondorf, the war ended on 6 March 1945

A simple gravestone prompted further inquiry and brought long-forgotten events to light.
“Bernhard Steiner – 1921–1945.”

The inscription on this modest war grave had caught my attention on several occasions during visits to the Rondorf cemetery on Giesdorfer Straße.

The family of my husband Peter has lived in Hochkirchen / Rondorf for several generations. The maternal line of the grandmother, née Blindert, originated in the area around Bad Münstereifel, while the Steiners moved from Lich to the outskirts of Cologne around 1880.

Peter Adam Steiner, my husband’s great-great-grandfather, ran a laundry and mangling workshop on the Zuckerberg in Hochkirchen. Eleven children grew up there.

But who was this Bernhard Steiner? Was he related to us?

The first step in researching a fallen soldier is the online grave search provided by the German War Graves Commission (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e.V.). There I also found his name. One must enter personal details into a form and then wait for a response. After a short time, I received a letter informing me of Bernhard Steiner’s dates of birth and death, as well as his identification tag number: he was born on 7 October 1921 in Sand and died in Rondorf on 5 March 1945.

His identification tag number was: –767–I.G.E.Kp.18.
Grave designation: Cologne-Rodenkirchen, Feh. Rondorf V / Grave: 122.

At the Cologne City Archive, civil status registers can be viewed digitally. Due to data protection regulations, only death certificates from this period are available online (1). To be certain, I checked the registers up to 1960, as entries for fallen soldiers were sometimes added later due to the chaos of war. Unfortunately, I found no death certificate entry for Bernhard Steiner.

Monday, 5 March 1945, was a cloudless day (2). The final days of the war were beginning for left-bank Cologne (3). Before the war, Cologne had a population of 770,000; shortly before the Americans liberated the bombed-out city, only about 40,000 people remained (4). Around 20,000 people were killed in air raids. The survivors had fled or been evacuated, like my mother-in-law’s family. Her nine-member Degen family from Raderthal was evacuated to Gügleben in Thuringia (5), where they lived for two years near Erfurt.

The Gauleiter responsible for Cologne and Aachen, Josef Grohé (6), demanded fanatical resistance from the population in his final speech and fled himself that very weekend, on 3–4 March. Only a year and a half later was he apprehended and imprisoned by the police.

Back to Cologne. What happened in Cologne-Rondorf around 5 March 1945?

Contemporary witnesses report on this period in the book “Rodenkirchener erinnern sich” by Cornelius Steckner. There I read about the forced evacuation of 120 citizens of Rodenkirchen in January 1945.

Rodenkirchen was severely affected by Allied air raids on the Rodenkirchen Bridge, which had only been inaugurated on 21 October 1941. Just three years later, it collapsed into the Rhine after its suspension cables were destroyed by several direct hits on 14 and 28 January 1945.

The authorities in Rodenkirchen decided that those whose homes had been destroyed should be forcibly evacuated toward the Harz region. Due to an administrative error, however, the group was not sent to central Germany but ended up in Drossen, about 30 km east of Frankfurt an der Oder. There, they found themselves caught between the fronts, as the Red Army was only 120 km away. After one week, they were sent onward by train, which came under fire from Soviet tank artillery. After an almost endless and dramatic odyssey, the survivors returned to Rodenkirchen on Christmas Eve 1945. Twenty-eight citizens of Rodenkirchen paid for this journey with their lives.

One of the survivors, Agnes Widdig, née Spelten, endowed an annual memorial mass on 2 February in the parish church of St. Maternus. This service was held every year until 1988.
Unfortunately, these memorial masses have since been discontinued, and the commemorative plaques bearing the names of the deceased have also been removed.

In the meantime, I finally received a response from the German Office (WASt) for the Notification of Next of Kin of Fallen Members of the Former German Wehrmacht regarding my inquiry about Bernhard Steiner.

He fell as a member of the 4th Company of Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion 103.
His parents were named Josef and Maria Steiner. (Information from WASt, 16 February 2018.)

Fortunately, the files also contained an address for the parents. In 1946, they were living in Minden, where I found no records relating to Bernhard Steiner at the civil registry office. I then contacted the residents’ registration office, hoping to find further information about the place of birth, Sand. There are or were at least six different places named Sand in the Federal Republic of Germany.

An old index card was eventually found at the registration office stating that the Steiner family originated from Frankenberg, district of Frankenstein, in what was then Lower Silesia, and that they came to Minden in 1946. Today, this place lies in Poland and is called Przylęk. There was also a district there called Sand.

Through various portals for displaced persons from the former German eastern territories and through the Association for Computer Genealogy (Verein für Computergenealogie e.V.), I found further information and a contact person who had compiled the local family registers for this place. Such local family registers are a great help for genealogists, as they compile family relationships using sources that are usually parish registers from a community and its neighboring parishes.

There was a Steiner farm in Sand, which gave me strong confidence that the information was correct. Church records allow the Steiner family to be traced back to the 17th century. Bernhard Steiner was therefore born in Lower Silesia, and his parents were among the approximately nine million Germans who were expelled from the former eastern territories after the war.

The families of Frankenberg were informed on the eve that they were to assemble at the entrance to the village on the morning of 6 April 1946. They were allowed to take only what they could carry. Packed forty people to a cattle wagon, they were transported to Minden. It can safely be assumed that Bernhard’s parents learned of their son’s death no later than upon their arrival there.

Whether the families in Silesia and Cologne are related has not yet been determined. It is noteworthy, however, that both were and are of Catholic denomination. This is remarkable insofar as the Evangelical Lutheran confession is more prevalent in eastern Germany.

My search has therefore not yet come to an end. Perhaps Bernhard Steiner was, after all, a distant relative.

Sources

(1) http://historischesarchivkoeln.de/lav/index.php
(2) https://geboren.am/5-maerz-1945
(3) http://www.luftfahrtarchiv-koeln.de/luftwaffenhelfer_kriegsende.htm
(4) https://www.mz-web.de/8874180
(5) http://www.rheinische-geschichte.lvr.de/themen/Das%20Rheinland%20im%2020.%20Jahrhundert/Seiten/Kinderlandverschickung.aspx
(6) http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13513534.html