Rudolf Möschter
When Erna Möschter arrived with her children on Christmas Eve 1948 at the end of their flight from the Soviet Occupation Zone in Weddewarden, her husband Rudolf was not there. He had gone to the train station to pick up his family and missed them. Rudolf Möschter’s youngest daughter, Anne Breitlauch, who was four years old at the time, recalls the moment today: “The camp still had a guard post and it had snowed a little. And this image is etched in my mind: that we approached this small guard house, and my mother said who we were. (…) These are my first impressions of Bremerhaven.” Rudolf Möschter had already been in Weddewarden since the summer of 1945, initially as a prisoner of war, then he worked as a housekeeper for the American forces at the airfield there. Until 1948, he had to get his stay renewed every two months. Returning to his farm in Hohndorf was not possible for Rudolf Möschter—Silesia had belonged to Poland since 1945. For the family, this meant a continued separation after the war, as Erna Möschter had to remain at the farm with her five children to assist the new owner. Only in May 1947 did the family manage to move from Sachsen to the Rudolstadt camp in Thuringia, then to Meuselbach. Through a relative in Berlin, Rudolf Möschter located his family there. In the summer of 1948, Rudolf’s oldest son, Werner, escaped to Bremerhaven with the help of smugglers. Although Rudolf obtained permission for Erna Möschter and her four other children to join him in Bremerhaven in the autumn of that same year, the authorities of the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ) prevented Erna Möschter’s departure, so she also fled from the SBZ in December 1948 with the help of smugglers. The camp at Wurster Straße 298, where the family arrived at Christmas, remained their home for several more years. Unlike many other refugees, Rudolf Möschter was not a supporter of displaced persons’ associations that demanded the return of the former German eastern territories from Poland. For him, the loss of the farm was a consequence of Germany’s behavior in World War II. He closed the chapter on his old homeland. This apparently came easier for him than for his oldest daughter, Christa, who yearned for her childhood home for decades afterward. Christa accused her father throughout her life of having volunteered for military service in 1941 at the age of 30, thus participating in World War II—he had a wife and four small children at that time, whom he left behind on the Silesian farm. The family today explains his voluntary enlistment as a soldier by saying he could no longer withstand the pressure from the small village community. Anne Breitlauch and her husband report today that not everyone in Bremerhaven was welcoming to the refugees. In particular, the claim for benefits from the compensation fund caused envy. Rudolf and Erna Möschter also applied for these benefits, which they were entitled to due to the loss of their Silesian farm. With the funds, they started building a house in Leherheide in 1957. The house in Leherheide was also the family’s weekly meeting point until Rudolf Möschter’s death in 1997. Erna Möschter baked Silesian sheet cakes every weekend for this occasion, and granddaughter Inga used Sundays to sift through old “magic boxes”; the family photos from Silesia stored in them fascinated her. Thanks to Inga Herrmann’s ongoing interest in her family history, so much is now known about Rudolf Möschter’s life.
A portrait of Rudolf Möschter is one of the faces visible on the facade of the new Deutsches Auswandererhaus since June 2021. Before the opening of the extension featuring the artistically designed facade, the Nordsee-Zeitung introduced the individuals represented by the faces. You can watch the corresponding film portrait of Rudolf Möschter here.