DARMSTADT: Thanks, Bud

This year, my annual trip to Germany was built around saying thanks to Sergeant Major John “Bud” Mazur, who volunteered for the U.S. Army during World War II.

Still in his teens, Bud fought his way across northern Germany with the 5th Armored Division until the enemy quit.

Bud was my wife’s dad, and he and I talked about Darmstadt, a half hour’s drive south of Frankfurt in south-central Germany. He’d been stationed there in 1946-47 and I lived and worked there during parts of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. 

“Sergeant Major Mazur” (he laughed at the way it didn’t roll off the tongue) was one of the “greatest generation” that destroyed the Nazis’ fortress Europe. We know too little about his war years because like so many other real heroes, he rarely talked about it afterward. 

Bud took photos from a 100-foot tower in the middle of the city that showed the massive destruction from a late-war bombing. He said he wanted to get back to see what Darmstadt looked like today, but he didn’t make it. He died in 2012.

I wanted to take photos from the same tower and show what the city looks like today, but the tower didn’t open as scheduled. Health authorities kept it closed because a communicative disease was circulating in the area.

Bud took his photos barely a year after the shooting stopped. He wrote this about them:

“They show only a small part of the destruction which resulted from two allied air raids. On March 19, 1945, 300 bombers hit the city. On March 20, 1945 an additional 450 bombers struck.

“Darmstadt was virtually undamaged prior to these raids, but she lay directly in the path of General Patton’s armored advance and the city was reported to be heavily fortified with German infantry, and so the bombers were sent in. Some Allied officers were of the opinion that the severity of the raids was unjustified.

“In any case, a beautiful old city was completely gutted and it seems a tragedy. Even in ruins, to me, Darmstadt was an impressive place. It will take years to rebuild her. I would like to see it then, and take more pictures from the top of the Ludwig Monument.”

Today Luisenplatz, where the statue stands, is a fully functioning modern transportation hub for the city. The gleaming buildings, full of shops and professional offices, showcase the Darmstadt that rose literally from ashes.

Bud’s war

“Sixteen million Americans served in uniform, mostly boys in their late teens and early twenties who joined U.S. allies in fighting the largest, costliest, and bloodiest war in human history ….” 

That’s from a U.S. government record about WWII, and it fits Bud, who hailed from Chicago. Look at his official Army photo. To me, that look is like an icon, the stereotypical young, middle-American boy who appears in all the WWII movies.

Bud enlisted in the Army at 18. He told a daughter he crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary in the winter of 1944 and joined the 5th Armored Division. The 5th crossed the Channel, rumbled from the coast across France, turned north, liberating Luxembourg, and battled its way across northern Germany, engaging increasingly desperate Germans defending their homes and land. 

Bud emphasized he was “combat infantry,” not tank or supply. He said he spent time in the hospital in Europe after the foxhole he was in collapsed under a German tank. Broken bones left one leg crooked and slightly shorter than the other, but I never heard him complain about it.

One day, a business executive from Luxembourg learned that Bud had been with the 5th. He traveled to Chicago and thanked Bud personally for the liberation of his country.

The Germans surrendered in May 1945. Millions of American troops were shipped home, but Bud, a relatively recent arrival, was kept on. 

Military police: Kelly Barracks

By 1946, Bud became part of the 14th Constabulary Squadron, which had headquarters in Darmstadt at the time.

When I was there in the 70s and 80s, Americans had renamed his base Kelly Barracks, in honor of a Medal of Honor winner. It’s still called Kelly Barracks. At the moment, it’s providing temporary housing for refugees. But a long-term contract has been signed with an organic-food company to locate on the site.

Bud served during an incredibly chaotic postwar time for the victors. American authorities were dealing with a host of problems, while at the same time sending away many of the assets — people, money, equipment — that could enable solutions.

The Americans had a zone about the size of Pennsylvania to administer, but a high priority was to get the troops home. During the first year after the war, the U.S. redeployed more than 3 million or 99% of soldiers in Europe to the Pacific war or home. 

Top leadership decided that the answer to many of its German problems might be a highly mobile corps, especially veterans of armored units, that would operate throughout the American zone. The U.S. Zone Constabulary was created in July 1946. 

At first, Bud’s unit was tasked with traditional police duties. The Germans resented the American constables — “understandably,” he told a daughter — and there were many incidents of jeering and rock-throwing.

But expected German resistance never materialized, so the unit focused on weapons smuggling, black marketing and apprehending war criminals. The unit’s challenges included keeping the peace among soldiers and civilians and sheltering millions of displaced persons amid a lack of basic services such as food, fuel, water, toilets and sewers, power, trash collection and banking.

“White death“

Bud and his buddies had to battle the weather, too. We can’t tell exactly when Bud got to Darmstadt, but many of his photos are dated 1946 and 1947. So he was there for the winter of 1946-1947.

That winter is still talked about. According to German records, the “average” temperature across the country from December 1946 to February 1947 was 27 degrees F, the fourth lowest since they started keeping records. 

Bud’s photos show the town’s buildings were skeletons. Food was limited by rationing. Germans quickly exhausted the wood in destroyed buildings and then turned on parks and forests. Germans call the time the “weisser Tod” (white death). An estimated half a million Germans froze or starved that winter.

International policing

Meanwhile, the Soviets were requiring more attention as they demanded reparations and installed governments in Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. American authorities decided they needed not just police but help watching the East-West border. By the time Bud left, the Constabulary was in transition to a mobile fighting force. 

A 2013 paper at the Command and General Staff College portrayed the 14th as a poster child for a unit always in change. The 14th lived only six years (1946-1952), but the paper said lessons from the unit’s adaptation to constant change could help U.S. ground troops as they changed roles in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Cambrai-Fritsch

I came to Darmstadt 25 years after Bud, but one of the topics we discussed was the town’s biggest base. It was still there. He remembered Cambrai-Fritsch, which by the 1970s was the heart of town for thousands of Americans in the Darmstadt region.

Cambrai hosted the American department and grocery stores, restaurant, bank, gas station, gym, theater, schools and much more that would be found in a community in the States. Large apartment buildings nearby were home to American service members and their families. Everything was done in English.

After the Berlin Wall fell, many German bases occupied by Americans were returned. The unit flag went down at Cambri-Fritsch for the final time in 2008. Today the area, called Ludwigshöhviertel (Ludwig Heights Quarter), is being refitted as badly needed housing for 3,000.

In 2024, half a dozen buildings stood behind wire fencing, perhaps destined for renovation rather than destruction. We can be pretty sure Bud was at the one above. As I was walking around the construction area on a Sunday morning, I met two German men doing the same. One said he had been a military police sergeant at the time Bud was in Darmstadt and this building was the headquarters.

To Destroy Darmstadt

Coincidentally, I visited Darmstadt when the city had erected a two-month anti-war exhibition on Peace Plaza in front of the city palace. The title comes from words in wartime orders regarding bombing the city.

The wartime photos were remarkably like Bud’s …

and people stopped and stared, as I did.

Stars and Stripes

A generation after Bud was there, the Army sent me to Germany, and I ended up across town in a Darmstadt suburb, reporting for the newspaper “Stars and Stripes.” I returned as a civilian years later and spent five years in all in Darmstadt. Today the unkempt base of The Stars and Stripes looks unused behind barbed-wire and locks.

Coda

Bud kept in touch with several buddies as they returned to their American lives, a daughter said. Given the number of times Les and Sig appear in Bud’s photos, they must have been among his closest friends in Germany.

Sig and Bud found each other literally on their deathbeds and had one last conversation in which they talked laughingly about buddies, she said. They chose to remember not so much a war but the men they served with.  

Bud didn’t smile when he talked to me about Germany. He must have lost friends there. I suspect he may have had a hard time with my rather academic interest in the Germans and their language. If he did, he never showed it. If he had, I couldn’t have blamed him.

And then he was.

That’s Bud to the left of the bride. In the late 1940s, Bud got back to living his real life. Others in the photo are family that grew up after the war.

So, this one’s for you, Bud. And thanks.

Next: DARMSTADT: Art Nouveau