Reunited, German soldier and starving kids he saved
A GERMAN soldier who risked execution in occupied Guernsey by secretly feeding a starving widow and her family yesterday said he has “no regrets”.
Rudi Schoberl, then aged 23, swapped his cigarette rations to feed Netta Hallett and her eight children while he worked as a radio operator.
The pair had struck up an unlikely friendship and remained in contact after the war, writing to each other when Schoberl was a prisoner of war.
This week the 96-year-old great-grandfather travelled back to the island for the first time in 43 years for a reunion with some of Netta’s children, including Loretta, 86, Joyce, 83, Margaret, 80, Sheila, 77, and Brian, 78.
Lorretta said: “He did so much to help my mum – our dad died just before the war started.
“He was so good to us and he’s wonderful even now, at his age. He risked his life with so many of the things he did for us.
“If he’d been caught, would have shot him.”
Mr Schoberl, who recalled how the Germans were forced to cook cats, dogs and rats at their encampment to avoid going hungry, said: “I think back and I wonder how I got away with it.” they The young recruit had already helped another family in France.
“My whole life was just helping people. I have no regrets,” he added.
After the island was liberated in 1945, Mr Schoberl was sent to a PoW camp in Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire, for two years.
Netta returned his kindness by sending him food parcels, including his favourite Guernsey butter.
He proudly declared to fellow prisoners it had come from his “Guernsey mum”.
The former Luftwaffe radio operator was finally released in 1948 and moved to Essex.
He opened the UK’s first Volkswagen garage and married wife Joyce before the couple had daughter Carol together.
They have one granddaughter, Kelly, and great-granddaughters Xanthe, six, and Ariadne, three.
Mr Schoberl now lives in a care home in Banbury, Oxfordshire.