April 2, 2024 
This is where my great-grandmother, Katharina Ochs, was born in 1900.
I. Prologue
My family on both sides were Germans from Hessen who migrated to Hungary in the 1720s, likely for economic reasons.1 Over a century later, Emperor Franz Josef I announced that he would allow Protestants to settle in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the region now known as Croatia.2 They moved there in 1865, but less than a century later, in 1944, they were forced to leave their adopted homeland, refugees with three small children, marching north into the horrors of war-ravaged Germany, a country in its death throes. This is the story of their harrowing escape from Yugoslavia and, later, East Germany. It is also the story of an ominous warning a grandfather gave his teenage grandson 30 years later. That warning contains a lesson that I fear has not been learned, but that must be learned if western civilization is to survive.
Back Row: Sons Jakob (1) and Philipp Ochs (2)
Middle Row: Daughters Christina Ochs (Drexler) (3), Katharina Ochs (Petz) (4), who is my great-grandmother, granddaughter Katharina Petz (Fleisch) (5), who is my grandmother, Katharina Ochs (6, her husband, Jakob Ochs was a soldier who died in 1917 in Russia in WWI ), grandson Josef “Sepp” Biermeyer (7), daughter, Elisabetha Biermeyer (Ochs) (8), and son Peter Ochs (9).
Front Row: Granddaughter Elisabeth Petz (Wellman) (10), granddaughter Elisabeth Beiermeyer (Wurm) (11) and her brother, Jakob Biermeyer (12).
Missing: Daughter Anna Marie Ochs (Kaufman)
II. The Immigrant’s Song
My mother’s family was among the initial seven families who left Hungary in 1865 to settle in what is now Croatia. They were given land on condition that they cleared it and established farms. The land they were given was so difficult to clear that it was unused by the locals. The land they were given was a swamp, which made clearing it an arduous and deadly task for those seven families. As a result, only two families survived the first year, but after that, more families came, and the village grew. They called it Eichendorf (translation: Oak Village), and the Croatian name was Hrastovac. It is located about an hour southwest of Zagreb.
They settled the land, farmed it, and traded locally but occasionally traveled to Zagreb to trade goods and buy/sell horses and other livestock. From their stories, they appeared well integrated into the multi-ethnic communities. The village itself was mostly Germans, but the surrounding villages were Croatian. My grandfather spoke Croatian and a bit of Serbian and served in the Yugoslavian Army—his army field sack hangs in our living room.
It was a difficult life, but they persevered and built a lovely, rustic village where they raised their families, farmed their land, and lived peacefully. With the advent of WWII, that peaceful life would soon come to an end.
Couple seated together at the top right are my great-grandparents, Heinrich and Katharina Petz (Ochs). Kneeling on the far left is my grandmother, Katharina Petz (Fleisch).
III. Balkanization in the Balkans
Josip Broz, known as “Tito,” was the leader of the communists in Yugoslavia. Tito was a brutal communist dictator who ruled with an iron fist. His foot soldiers, the Partisans, were part of the resistance movement against the Nazis, and they terrorized the citizens, especially those of German descent. In the years before Tito officially took over, they harassed the ethnic Germans—stealing livestock and crops and robbing them of currency and jewelry. After Tito took over, they escalated to outright terrorism and began slaughtering them. Here is an account from Völkermord der Tito-Partisanen 1944-1948: Die Vernichtung der altösterreichischen deutschen Volksgruppe in Jugoslawien und die Massaker an Kroaten und Slowenen (“Genocide Carried Out by Tito’s Partisans, 1944-1948: The Annihilation of the Old Styrian German Folk Groups in Yugoslavia and the Massacre of Croatians and Slovenians”).3
The Tito Partisans thought up various ways and methods, which, in their eyes, were appropriate for the extermination of their victims to maximize their suffering. For instance there was the Schichttorten Effect (the “Layer Cake” Effect). For this purpose old and abandoned wells and mine shafts were used. They threw in a group of men in the shaft or well and then tossed in hand grenades after them. Then another group of men were thrown in, and the process repeated itself until the last layer, who were left wounded with no way of getting back up to the top.
The accounts of brutal torture, rape, dismemberment, and mass execution committed by the communists are legion. They are so inhuman that the translator of the text, Henry Fischer, cannot bring himself to list them all. He includes a translator’s note that says, “The bestiality and sadism perpetrated against certain individuals is described, but I decline to translate [these instances] out of consideration of [my own sensitivities] and the sensitivities of the reader…”4 Estimates are that there were 500-600,000 ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia, and approximately 25%, roughly 125,000 people, were exterminated, starved, or died of diseases in concentration camps.5
IV. Into and Out of the Heart of Darkness
They left Hrastovac in November 1944 with some livestock and a horse-drawn wagon. My mother, Katherine, was a month shy of her fourth birthday, my uncle Heinrich was two years old, and my aunt Anna was an infant. They made it to a train station about 20km away that was being used as a refugee camp. They stayed for two weeks before leaving by horse-drawn wagon for northern Germany. They traveled almost 600 miles to Schlesien, near the border of Germany and Poland, about 70 miles west of Dresden. They were there for two months, but it was clear that the heavy bombardment of Russian artillery was coming closer, and they had to leave. In mid-January 1945, they left Schlesien, as always, by wagon.
From there, they went 200 miles east to Wiedgendorf, Germany, but only stayed for two weeks because, as before, the Russians were quickly advancing. Their next destination was Czechoslovakia, and they remained there in a village called “Sudetengau,” which no longer exists under that name. They stayed there in what must have been the Sudetenland until the November of 1945. For reasons unknown, they left for Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, where they encountered their first Americans, who occupied the city. They applied to stay at an American camp, but that request was denied. Sometime in early January 1946, they went to Budapest and were told by the Yugoslavian consulate that they should not return to Hrastovac.
They then left for Prague, but the conditions there were very dangerous, with pneumonia and other diseases ravaging the population. So, they decided to return to Pilsen, where they were now allowed to stay because the American occupation was over. They remained in Pilsen for nine months and celebrated Christmas there, but it was also dangerous, and they thought it best to return to Germany. They traveled to Liebschwitz-Lietzsch, where my grandfather found work.6 In 1947, after a year in Liebschwitz-Lietzsch, they moved once again to Hermannsfeld, a small village on the border of what became East and West Germany. They lived there until July 1950, when they escaped to the West.
In front of the church in Hrastovac.
In Hermannsfeld, there was a blueberry patch near the border that the community had access to, but permission from the authorities was required. In 1948, my grandfather applied for a permit for the family to pick berries, and it was readily granted, but there was a two-year waiting period. During that time, the authorities watched them closely to see if they were doing anything that would indicate they were planning to escape. He had a contact in West Germany, and somehow, he informed the contact that they would be coming through on a specific day and time in July 1950. The agreement was that the contact would be waiting on the other side of the border with a car to whisk them away after they emerged. He did not know this person well—he must have been paid for his assistance. My grandfather told me that he had no idea if this person would show up at the right time, if at all. He also feared that his contact might be a government agent who would betray them to the authorities.7
Nonetheless, they surreptitiously prepared for their flight from East Germany. My grandfather slowly collected scrap wood and prepared it to mount onto their wagon as a false bottom, where they hid items they wanted to bring with them.8 In the days leading up to the escape, he installed the false bottom into the wagon. On the day of the escape, they dressed the kids in layers of clothes they wanted to bring and proceeded to the berry patch. They approached the border guards and gave them the permit. The guards asked them some questions and then allowed them to pass.
My grandfather must have closely monitored the border guards’ behaviors and schedules in their first year in Hermannsfeld. The time of their escape coincided with the border guards’ change of shift. They went into the field, and when the guards changed shifts, they told the children that they should “run as fast as they could…be very careful not to stumble and fall, and if [you do, you] shouldn’t cry.”9 When the guards were changing shifts, my grandparents told the children to run across the 40m border to the other side, and they followed with the wagon. Before the guards could react, they crossed the border into West Germany, and miraculously, the mysterious contact was waiting for them as promised. They escaped from communist tyranny for a second time, and their six-year-old traumatic ordeal was finally coming to an end.
They hid at the home of their contact, waiting for a ride to Weißkirchen, where my grandfather’s brother lived. They stayed with him for three months while arrangements were made to immigrate to Canada.10 Once those arrangements were made, they left for Bremen, where they were housed in an American camp for six weeks. This was a difficult time for them because my mother, Katherine, had sores on her feet and a significant infection near her eye that required hospitalization. Her sister, Anna, was also sick. Luckily, they recovered by the time they left for Canada in November 1950.11
They departed Bremen by ship, and the trip took 11 days. It was quite unpleasant—everyone was seasick the entire time. They arrived in Quebec, took a train to Windsor, Ontario, and moved into their sponsor’s home. They were not there long. My grandfather got a job at a large foundry in Windsor, Dominion Forge, where he worked for the rest of until he retired in 1986.12
V. Life with Oma and Opa in Canada
I was very close with my maternal grandparents, Heinrich and Katharina Fleisch. They lived a block away from us, and from early on, I visited them almost daily. (When our dog, Lucky, would go missing, chances were we could find him at my grandparents’ house, being spoiled with treats by my grandmother!) There was always a warm hug, a big welcoming smile, great food and pastries, and many stories about the “Old Country.” They took care of my sister and me many Friday and Saturday nights when our parents went out for dinner and dancing at the Teutonia Club (a German club in Windsor), which featured many of the famous German entertainers at the time, like Heino, Freddy Quinn, Die Goldene Drei, and others. These evenings with them are a favorite memory from my childhood. Being with them had a fairytale quality—life could not get any better than spending time with these incredibly kind and loving grandparents.
As a child, I had no real understanding of what they went through, but as an adult, I couldn’t imagine how they were able to survive, with an infant and two toddlers in tow, and without food or shelter, going north into Germany towards the Eastern Front as Russian troops were approaching in the winter of 1944-45, walking headlong into a nightmarish wasteland of death and destruction. I will always be astonished at how they did not let that horrific experience cast a pall over their lives. They were the most grateful people I have ever known—their profound gratitude was palpable in their behaviors and attitudes, almost as if they decided to exorcise the trauma by overwhelming it with thankfulness and grace.
50th Wedding Anniversary. January 23, 1990
VI. My Grandfather’s Warning
I visited my grandparents regularly, often after school. When I was 16, I stopped by, and my grandmother was gone, so my grandfather was home alone, which was not common. (My grandmother never drove a car, so if she was gone, she was probably shopping with my mother.)
He started talking about the “Old Country,” and I was always curious about what life was like there, so I asked a lot of questions. It seemed like I had a time machine in my possession—I was living in the 1970s, but talking to my grandparents about their life in Yugoslavia immediately sent me back to the 1800s. I couldn’t imagine how their lives had changed so drastically in such a short time.
He was talking as always, and I responded with questions and prompts. I don’t remember what triggered it, but he suddenly became quiet and had a serious look on his face. He was such an easygoing, cheerful, and sweet man—I had never seen this countenance on him before.
He told me he wanted to talk to me about something, and I knew something was up. He started talking about the relations with the different ethnic groups in Yugoslavia,13 which he said were generally good, at least within the communities he engaged with. They lived together for generations, spoke two or three languages, traded together, and, of course, there was occasional intermarriage. By the late 1930s, he told me, things started coming apart.
He said that rumors were spreading constantly—“A Croatian murdered a pregnant German woman in Zagreb.” And the same thing the other way around, “A German raped a Serbian teenager in Zagreb.” He said it was always “in Zagreb” or some other town, never in their village. At first, he said, everything was fine; no one would believe that ethnically driven violence was something that would happen in their community. Their attitude was something like, “Well, that may happen in Zagreb, but that would never happen here.” However, over time, he said that the relationships changed as the society balkanized on ethnic lines.
Initially, they started to be suspicious of each other. He said it was noticeably different, and it worsened so that by the early 1940s, they tried to avoid the other ethnicities as much as possible. And then the rumors turned into facts—Tito’s Communist Partisans started harassing the ethnic Germans as previously described, but that quickly escalated to horrific violence and genocide.
My father, Frank Ellenberger, lived in Kapitonovo-Polje, a smaller village about 20 miles from Hrastovac. Here, he describes the Communist Partisans coming to their house and violently attacking his mother, Adele:14
On the 29th of May, 1944, Tito’s Partisans came and wanted money. My dad was hiding either in the barn or out in the fields. They demanded money from her [his mother] and she didn’t have any money to give them, so they put a bayonet on the end of the gun to try to scare her into giving money, but she couldn’t because she didn’t have it…they cut up her arms because she was fighting off the bayonet.
My grandfather said that by the summer of 1944, he saw the horrors of ethnic cleansing as another village nearby was slaughtered. He told me that they tortured them one by one before executing them—“Children in front of parents, parents in front of grandparents, one by one, the entire town.” I didn’t know if he was there or not and didn’t want to ask. He was so shaken by it that I felt like he had to have seen the carnage firsthand and all of it visited upon them by their former friends and neighbors.
At one point, I said: “But that could never happen here.” He looked me straight in the eye, paused, and said, “That’s what we all thought.”
His warning was straightforward: “When you see the government pitting groups against each other, and you see that in the news and schools, you must understand that it will eventually lead to this. Communists need chaos to take over a country, and this is how they do it. When that happens, you’ll know it is time to prepare. They promise equality and a better future, but all they can bring is death and misery.” I said: “But why do you think it will happen again?” He said: “Because human nature is that way. It will happen again.”
It was a sobering discussion. I was shaken by it for days. At the time, Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm were required reading in high school, so I was aware of Orwell’s characterization of communism. My grandfather’s dire warning brought those books to life in a personal way—my family experienced and somehow lived through the nightmares described by Orwell.
As I learned more about 20C history, I saw my grandfather’s warning repeated over and over again. In Russia’s communist revolution in the 1920s, they launched a campaign of terror against the farmers and business people, and it ended in wholesale starvation and slaughter. In Germany in the 1930s, the Nazis15 did the same thing, only it was the Jews, Gypsies, and other “inferior races” that were blamed for the nation’s woes, and we all know precisely how that ended. In Mao’s China in the 1950s and ‘60s, it was the Red Guards and student groups attacking the bourgeoisie and the intellectuals until it consumed the entire country, resulting in mass starvation, abject misery, and death on a scale that was simply unimaginable. The examples are too numerous to list, and the approach is always the same—blame a group for all the problems, slowly marginalize and isolate them, and finally, eradicate them.
And here we find ourselves in the present day, a century after the Russian Revolution, dividing us into groups who are “oppressed” and other groups who are “oppressors.” We are told that this is progress, that we are confidently marching towards a bright new future where Equality will finally be achieved, but to do so, we need to “tear the system down first.” What will replace this rotten system? We’ll find out when we get there. How will food be grown and distributed in the glorious new system where everyone is equal? We’ll figure that out when we get there. How will businesses and markets function in the imagined utopia that awaits us? We’ll figure that out when we get there. Will there be banks and money? We’ll figure that out when…
At the heart of this ideology lies a powerful belief that the destination will be a utopia, but that utopia is entirely undefined. The purveyors of this Ideology–academics, educators, politicians, think tanks, foundations, media, and many corporations–have no idea what it is or how it will work. They are convinced, however, that their promised land will be a place where all needs are magically met by some miraculous new economic system as yet undiscovered. We have a word for that type of belief system—it is called “faith.” This reveals that this is not a political movement at all. It is, in reality, a quasi-religious movement masking itself as a “scientific” secular political and cultural movement.
I am hardly the first to come to this realization or to make this claim. In his acceptance speech for the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1983, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said the following:
Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions.16
This is why it is so hard to combat—its adherents are indistinguishable from cult members, which means the ideology is always right. Facts, evidence, logic, or reason have no power to sway the hearts and minds of the initiates. When the ideology is contradicted by reality, reality must conform to the ideology, not the other way around. As such, we see that reality itself is the real enemy and is subjected to a sustained and pernicious rhetorical assault. History, however, provides ample evidence that reality will not bend its knee to an ideology whose artillery fires words. Ultimately, their mythical utopia is thwarted by the same reality they attempt to deny, and the utopia never arrives—instead, we find its opposite: hell on earth.17 History also clearly teaches us that the Neo-Marxist (or perhaps Neo-Maoist is more accurate) Identity Beast, once summoned and unleashed, consumes all in its path, entire continents ravaged and laid to waste to feed a divisive and demonic18 spirit whose hunger can never be sated.
So, my grandfather was right—it is happening again. What we are living through is a communist cultural revolution that is using different rhetorical levers to power the same neo-Marxist machine. While this is a variant of the aforementioned revolutions, it is essentially the same process that destroyed many societies before us, and now, apparently, it is our turn.
Anna Rangeloff, Katharina Fleisch, Heinrich Fleisch Jr., Heinrich Fleisch Sr., and my mother, Katherine Ellenberger
VII. Epilogue I
When they left their homes in Hrastovac, Croatians claimed the houses. To add insult to injury, they destroyed the cemetery and used some tombstones for paving stones. The rest were removed and dumped in a pile away from the cemetery. In the 1980s, the then-grown children of the Hrastovac Germans raised funds for a memorial building where all of the broken, disembodied tombstones are now stored. They lay there in a pile, all akimbo, in a lonely corner far away from the lavish new cemetery, far removed from the caskets in the ground where the bodies lie, unmarked and unknown.
Translation: “To the Settlers who built this village, which is their final resting place, may Peace be with you and all of the generations that follow you.”
VIII. Epilogue II
I released my first recording in 1999. It is called Songs from Far West (Challenge-A Records, Amsterdam). One of the pieces is entitled Herr Mann’s Fell’d, which is a play on the name of the village, Hermannsfeld, with an obtuse reference to Thomas Mann thrown in for good measure. It attempts to musically portray their journey as refugees in war-torn Europe during and after WWII.
Special thanks to:
Henry Fischer, Tony Kaufman, Shelley Ryan (Ochs), and Rosina T. Schmidt who have done so much excellent research to document these stories.
And to my sister, Karin Kouvelas, for having the foresight to interview our grandmother in 1987 which provided us with an invaluable primary source.
ENDNOTES
- My mother always said that they moved because of religious prosecution, but Hessen at that time was friendly to Lutherans. They likely moved because farm land was cheaper in Hungary. ↩︎
- Email exchange with historian Henry Fischer, March 29, 2024. ↩︎
- Graz Österreichische Historiker Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Kärnten und Steiermark, and Henry Fischer (trans.). “Chapter 1: The Mass Liquidations.” Völkermord Der Tito-Partisanen 1944-1948: Die Vernichtung Der Altösterreichischen Deutschen Volksgruppe in Jugoslawien Und Die Massaker an Kroaten Und Slowenen, Oswald Hartmann, Graz, Steiermark, Austria, 1992. Translation by Henry Fischer accessed on March 25, 2024 at https://hrastovac.net/historical-information-2/genocide-by-titos-partisans/ ↩︎
- “Apatin.” Translated by Henry Fischer, Völkermord Der Tito-Partisanen 1944-1948: Die Vernichtung Der Altösterreichischen Deutschen Volksgruppe in Jugoslawien und Die Massaker an Kroaten und Slowenen, Chapter 2: In the Batschka, 2003, http://www.dvhh.org/history/atrocities/chap_2_tito_1944-48.htm. ↩︎
- Graz Österreichische Historiker Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Kärnten und Steiermark, and Henry Fischer (trans.). “Chapter 1: Introduction.” Völkermord Der Tito-Partisanen 1944-1948: Die Vernichtung Der Altösterreichischen Deutschen Volksgruppe in Jugoslawien und Die Massaker an Kroaten und Slowenen, Oswald Hartmann, Graz, Steiermark, Austria, 1992. Translation by Henry Fischer accessed on March 25, 2024 at https://hrastovac.net/historical-information-2/genocide-by-titos-partisans/ ↩︎
- My grandfather had a job in Liebschwitz-Lietzsch and I don’t think he would have left that job without a good reason to do so. At this point, my grandfather had a great deal of experience with Communists so I assume that they moved to Hermannsfeld because it was a border town that would provide, in theory at least, the opportunity to escape to the West. ↩︎
- Unbeknownst to my grandmother, my grandfather had a fair bit of silver and gold in small denominations. He told me this is how they were able to get food, water, and shelter, but by the time they got to Hermannsfeld, he had none left. I assume the last of his hard currencies went to the contact in West Germany who helped them escape. ↩︎
- My sister and I had to go through all of the boxes we found in our parents’ possession when we moved them into assisted living in 2022. It was astonishing to see how much must have come in that false bottom—pictures, bibles, books of poetry, etc. It was clear to me that they brought items that preserved their family history, not clothes, shoes, tools or other replaceable items. ↩︎
- My sister, Karin Kouvelas, interviewed our grandmother in 1987 for a school assignment entitled Case Study of a 67-Year-Old Woman. This document is the source of the timeline and some of the other details found in this document. It can be found here. ↩︎
- There were friends who moved to Canada many years before who had a farm near Windsor, Ontario and sponsored them by guaranteeing employment and housing. ↩︎
- Whenever my mother, Katherine, talked about this time she said that she had a lifelong regret: At the camp, she saw a soldier who was black—she had never seen a black man before. He was trying to give her candy through the fence, but she was too scared of him to take it. She has said many times that she wishes she could find that soldier and apologize to him. ↩︎
- They did have some contact with Windsor before the war. My great-grandfather, Heinrich Petz, left Yugoslavia in 1926 and worked in Windsor for about five years. He was a construction worker who worked on building the Ambassador Bridge that connects Windsor and Detroit. There is another example on my father’s side of the family—my great-grandfather left Kapitonovo-Polje (near Hrastovac) with his wife to work in Milwaukee, WI. While there, my great-grandmother gave birth to my grandfather, Johann Ellenberger, who was born in Milwaukee, WI on January 11, 1907. This was quite common—they worked in the United States and Canada and returned to Yugoslavia with money to buy more land. ↩︎
- The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a very ethnically diverse, polyglot empire—Germans, Croatians, Serbians, Hungarians, Austrians, and others coexisted fairly well, for the most part, until the disasters of the 20C. ↩︎
- We recorded my father’s recollections in 2018, shortly before he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. The recording can be found here. ↩︎
- I am astonished that we continue to characterize Communism as “left” and Fascism as “right.” They are both totalitarian ideologies that require government control of everyone and everything—in practice, there is no difference between their disastrous outcomes. These two murderous ideologies cannot be found on opposite sides of any internally coherent political spectrum. ↩︎
- Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. “Remembering Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Men Have Forgotten God’ Speech.” National Review, 11 Dec. 2018, https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-men-have-forgotten-god-speech/ Accessed on March 20, 2024. ↩︎
- I am a lifelong student of philosophical, cultural, and political movements, and as such, I studied Communism and Fascism, but always from an economic and cultural perspective. I am greatly indebted to author James Lindsay and his New Discourses podcasts, who makes a compelling case that these systems are not fundamentally economic or political systems, they are quasi-religious cults in disguise. ↩︎
- A very good case can be made that Marx was indeed a Satanist. Consider the following:
i) When asked what his primary objective in life was, he said “to dethrone God and destroy capitalism.”
O’Connor, Bill. “The Marxist Dream of Dethroning God Must Fail.” The Christian Post, 25 June 2022, http://www.christianpost.com/voices/the-marxist-dream-of-dethroning-god-must-fail.html. Accessed March 23, 2024.
ii) One of his favorite texts was Goethe’s Faust. His favorite character was, of course, Mephistopholes (the Devil) and he gleefully quoted the demon’s lines from memory. His favorite quote from Faust, in which he displays his utter nihilism and bitter contempt for existence itself, was “Everything that exists deserves to perish.”
Kengor, Paul. The Devil and Karl Marx, Tan Books, Gastonia, NC, 2020, p. 36. ↩︎
Also Sprach FraKathustra 
Nice job Kurt – this is wonderful!
Thanks Rob–it was something I felt compelled to do.
Kurt,
You and your sister have done remarkable work gathering your family’s history.
Your presentation of your family’s journey through time and placing it in context of current events is moving and chilling.
Bravo! And thank you for reminding of us to continue to heed history’s lessons.
Thanks Ric! It is an unbelievable story that unfolded in surprising ways as I researched it. And here we are.