2023-12-05 18:25:22
Four weeks ago, on All Saints’ Day, Kurt Salterberg spoke again about the day that shaped his life – in his beautiful house in the hamlet of Pracht on the edge of the Westerwald, where he was born on January 8, 1923, where he spent his childhood, youth and his life spent his entire life, with the exception of the war and only interrupted by regular vacation trips to his daughter in Austria.
Even in old age, his phenomenal memory, which had amazed many historians, never left him. He showed the visitor a sepia-colored photo of his mother Emma Reinhardt in the middle of her large family, taken around 1900 by August Sander, who also came from the region. Once again he remembered the century: growing up in nature, attending school with Sütterlin script, training at the tinplate works in Wissen/Sieg. He remembered his time in the Jungvolk and Hitler Youth, but also the burning synagogue in Hamm/Sieg on November 9, 1938, and finally the Reich Labor Service from 1942 and the war that robbed him of part of his youth.
For decades he had remained silent about his painful experiences in the war, which he fought as a soldier in the 13th Company, an anti-tank unit of the 34th Infantry Division on the Eastern Front, then in 1943 he was assigned to the Führer Escort Battalion and finally in the division commanded by General Otto Ernst Remer. “Great Germany”. The seriously wounded sergeant experienced the end of the war in the hospital near Lauben in Upper Silesia. There he met the nurse Charlotte, his future wife from 1948 to 2003.
After the war, Salterberg worked as a commercial clerk and accountant at the Feld company in Hamm. He was also mayor of his hometown from 1956 to 1982, co-founder of the Raiffeisen Museum and founding member of the German Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen Society in Hamm, as well as founder of the “Heimatfreunde im Hammer Land” association. He always paid particular attention to mining in the Westerwald.
A long process of discovery
It was only in the mid-1980s that an appeal in the “Rhein-Zeitung” inspired him to make his life story public. He has been interviewed many times and invited to give lectures in school classes and at conferences. He warned young people about demagogues and extremists of all stripes and pleaded for civil courage and democratic awareness: “Our idealism has been terribly abused.” What had previously been repressed was now dealt with even more intensively.
In the FAZ, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the assassination attempt on Hitler in July 2019, he spoke about the dramatic events in the “Wolfsschanze”, the East Prussian leader’s headquarters. On that July 20th, the young guard soldier in restricted area 1a let General Field Marshal Keitel’s entourage pass for a briefing on the situation, where he was impressed by the severely disabled Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg: “With his war injuries, his black eye patch and his proud posture.” The He experienced the explosion of Stauffenberg’s bomb and its aftermath up close. At first he did not regret the failure of the coup: “We in the troops unanimously condemned Stauffenberg. We were soldiers with heart and soul and had sworn our oath to the Führer. For us, Stauffenberg was a coward who didn’t pick up a pistol, but used explosives with a timer in order to get away safely – that was not our ideal of a Prussian officer!
It took a long cognitive process, supported by research into resistance, to change his mind. He also revised the negative image of Stauffenberg in his memoirs “As a guard in the Wolf’s Lair” (2016). He told the FAZ: “The attack was right and important. Stauffenberg had to use explosives because they were also indispensable in Berlin. Although he failed in his attempted coup, he set a symbolic signal and showed the world that there was serious resistance to Hitler’s criminal orders.
Gina Thomas Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 17 Peter Körte Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 8
Kurt Salterberg was part of the escort company at the Führer’s headquarters. 75 years ago, he witnessed the assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler up close on July 20, 1944.
Thomas Molzahn Published/Updated: Recommendations: 30
In 2015, Prime Minister Malu Dreyer awarded him the Medal of Merit of Rhineland-Palatinate for his social, historiographical and local political commitment. As a good speaker, Salterberg brought the history of the German resistance to life. In this way he preserved the memory of the conspirators and the memory of Stauffenberg. On November 27th, Kurt Salterberg passed away peacefully at home at the age of 100.
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