From Chotovenky to the war

Walter Scheinpflug was born in 1925 in the small village of Chotovenka in the former Sudetenland. His native village no longer exists, but it was located near the village of Světec near Bílina, in the former Sudetenland. He was trained as a bricklayer and at the age of eighteen was called up to the Reich Labour Service. Even then he was approached by Waffen-SS recruiters, but on his father's advice he did not sign up. At the beginning of 1944, he could not resist another challenge because he wanted to "experience something".
He graduated from NCO school and was briefly deployed to Denmark. After the Allied invasion of Normandy, his unit was transferred to France, where he experienced heavy retreat fighting. He then spent several months in the Kurmark training area near the present-day German-Polish border. During the last months of the war he fought on the eastern front, where he was captured by the Soviet army at the beginning of May. He managed to escape from captivity and return home. He was then in a Czechoslovak internment camp and worked as an agricultural labourer. In 1946 he fled to the then Soviet occupation zone and lived in the later GDR.
It is one of many war stories of young boys who wanted to "experience something" and were influenced by nationalist propaganda that convinced them that they should prove their courage at the front. The atmosphere at the time is reflected in a statement by one of Walter's superiors. When the number of dead and wounded of his unit was reported to him during the retreat in France, he said with a smile: "Over the dead we go to victory!" He was 27 years old at the time and fell a few weeks later.
In the book, Walter Scheinpflug also recalls his relations with the Czechs in his birthplace. They were without conflict and one of his Czech peers from Chotovenka probably saved his life after the war, during the arbitrary "purges" in the border area.