The incredible true story of Ernest Salter
On D-day, he was aboard a Royal Navy minesweeper that played a crucial role in ensuring the invasion was a success. Later, he was moored off Omaha Beach, helping to establish Mulberry harbours amid the drowned bodies and enemy shells.
Yet had events taken a slightly different turn, Able Seaman Ernest Salter could well have found himself on the other side. Indeed, many in his family had already sworn allegiance to Hitler and, at that very moment, as the battle raged 75 years ago, had him in their sights.
Born in Cologne to an English father and German mother, his was a family and identity cleaved in two by war. Ernest’s involvement on D-day marked the final act in a dramatic reversal of a childhood partly spent on the fringes of the Hitler Youth.
“I’ve thought several times about the other path I could have gone down,” he says, speaking aboard the Royal British Legion chartered cruise ship MV Boudicca, which is transporting 255 Normandy veterans back to France for the 75th D-day commemorations. “But I felt very English during the war, and never once like I was betraying my heritage.”
In 1944, there used to be a running joke at Ernest’s expense aboard the Royal Navy minesweeper HMS Boston
as they skirted the French coast. Contemplating what U-boats might be lurking beneath them, he would often be teased by his comrades: “Don’t worry, we’ll get that German first.”
“That” German in question was his uncle’s brother, Heinrich, a submariner aboard German submarine U-33. Ernest did not know it then, but other family members were also fighting for the Nazis: an uncle served in the Luftwaffe, while a favourite cousin of his childhood had become a Panzer tank commander.
And, in one instance during the run-up to D-day, when Ernest was sweeping mines along the French coast, his mother’s cousin, Peter, who in peacetime during summers in Germany had let Ernest ride pillion no-handed on his BMW motorcycle, was manning a Nazi coastal gun battery at Cherbourg.
Later, when they reconciled after the war, Peter told Ernest that, at one stage, he actually spotted him on the decks of his minesweeper through his binoculars… and decided not to shoot. “Whether that is true or not, I don’t know,” the now 93-year-old Ernest says.
His father, also called Ernest, had served in the First World War and remained in Germany, where he met his mother, Barbara Schweikert, at a Cologne dance hall owned by her parents. They married soon after and when Ernest was born the family moved back to England to live in Slough.
Every summer, he would return to Germany for six weeks to live with his grandparents, Anton and Maria, in a suburb called Kalk. Those were idyllic, long days spent larking about with his German friends and cousins. Ernest quickly picked up German, which he still speaks today.
But after Adolf Hitler was made chancellor of Germany in 1933, events began to take a darker turn.
Ernest would watch mounted cavalry driving Communists away from street gatherings. Soon, every house on his grandparents’ street was flying the swastika outside. “My grandfather hated the Nazis and would only fly the German flag instead,” Ernest recalls. “I would ask him, ‘Why don’t you fly it as well?’ and he would only say no.”
Around the same time, his friends – and a favourite cousin, Karl-theo Scholl, who was 18 months his senior – started inviting him to attend local meetings of the Hitler Youth.
“After lessons, we would meet up and go and sit and listen to what the leaders had to say,” he recalls. “My German wasn’t that good, so I couldn’t understand everything.”
With the innocence of a 12-year-old, he assumed the meetings were simply the equivalent of the English boy scouts. “All my mates were in it,” he recalls. “They wore the same uniform, except they had a strap on their shoulder.”
As well as attending meetings and the occasional dance, Ernest was given a special Hitler Youth knife with a swastika on the handle. Eventually, the troop leader, known as the Truppenführer, paid a visit to his grandfather asking if Ernest could officially join. However, he baulked at paying a monthly subscription when Ernest would be in England during term time, so refused.
“At the time, I was all for it but my grandfather wouldn’t pay,” he recalls. “I didn’t realise then what the consequences of joining would be.”
At the same time, his cousin, Karl-theo, was quickly rising through the ranks of the Hitler Youth and given his own troop to command.
Ernest recalls one Sunday morning when he was walking to the bakery with his grandfather and they saw Karl-theo out posturing with his troop. “Grandfather told
us to cross to the other side of the road,” he says.
Ernest’s last visit to Germany was the year before war broke out – when he was 13 years old. He was spotted by a neighbour jokingly chasing some German friends with his Hitler Youth knife, and reported to the police. An officer came round and told his grandmother that he was going to be deported. “They said you’ve got a fortnight to get him out – do it as quickly as you can,” he says.
Back in England, he left school aged 14 and started working in a factory in Slough making incendiary bombs. Later, when he visited Cologne after the war, he discovered the ballroom belonging to his grandparents and a nearby barber’s shop they owned had been flattened by Bomber Command crews dropping the same devices he helped to fabricate.
A short spell in the Home Guard followed before he volunteered to join the Royal Navy in November 1943.
As suspicions of German spies started to fester in Britain, he heard rumours circulated about Germanborn women living nearby who distrustful neighbours claimed were Nazi agents. No such accusations were levelled against his family, he shrugs, or at least not to his face.
When war broke out, all contact with his German family was lost – save for the occasional message confirming that they were still alive sent to his mother via the Red Cross. “She found the war extremely hard, although she didn’t show it,” he says.
He knew his uncle’s brother, Heinrich, was aboard a U-boat as he was a submariner, but had no idea until many years after of the rest of the involvement of other relatives.
“I pushed to the back of my mind what I would do if I ever came across a family member during the war,” he says. “Although I often thought if we ever captured a U-boat I would go around asking if anyone knew where Heinrich was.”
After leaving the Navy in 1954, he returned to Germany to reconcile with his mother’s side of the family. He discovered Heinrich’s U-boat had been sunk off the coast of Scotland in 1940, and he had perished. His uncle in the Luftwaffe, meanwhile, had been killed in an ambush by members of the French resistance.
His mother’s cousin, who manned the Cherbourg battery, had survived, so too his cousin Karl-theo, who had progressed from the Hitler Youth to become a lieutenant in a German Panzer Division.
The pair reunited in 1955. “Like a lot of people in Germany who, during the war, had been very Nazified, afterwards, when Karltheo discovered about the Holocaust, he realised that he had made a terrible mistake,” he says.
This week, as Ernest travels back to the same Normandy beaches that he helped to breach 75 years ago, he says his thoughts are with those family members forced apart by war. And, above all, of the many young lives snuffed out in between.