Ørland Main Air Station, Norway, 23rd March 1942

Scheer’s mother had died when he was young.

He didn’t remember much. Was he supposed to? His memories of her were ragged

and in-between, shifting from a sunny day in a meadow, to her finger tracing the

creases on his forehead as the incessant rain pattered on the window of their

sparsely furnished cottage on the fringes of Lüneburg.

He knew that his father had died in the Great War before he was born, nothing more

than a name of a newspaper’s casualty listing that couldn’t fit on a page. He

remembered seeing his mother’s eyes— pale, blue things— imagining how much

she hated Scheer’s father for leaving her.

He didn’t blame her. When she died, the hollowness it left— he hated her for it, too.

There was one day he remembered in particular— a day in the park after she finally

was accepted for a position in the big city of Hamburg, operating a typewriter in the

reception of the Reichshof Hotel.

“I’m telling you Hans, we’ll be rich soon! When I get some money, we’ll buy an

apartment, then I’ll take you anywhere you want for a day. Doesn’t that sound good?

Hans? Doesn’t that sound good?”

It was good, Scheer thought— too good to be true. She was hit by a car a day after,

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running to her first day of work ensuring she wouldn’t get there late. Yet of course, as

life would have it, she never got there at all.

Not knowing what to do, he stayed on a street corner for two days before someone

stopped. A soldier from the routine Wehrmacht patrol who roamed the streets at 9’o

clock every morning would stop for a few seconds, coming with a piece of chocolate

if Scheer was lucky. He was easy to find; he sat and paced his days away on the

same street corner his mother had died on. Nobody paid heed to a sixteen-year-old

boy in Hamburg during 1936.

He realised then that he didn’t need to concentrate to remember—his regrets had

painted his memories crystal clear.

It happened one morning in November. The soldier took him home to his wife,

feeding and clothing a boy that didn’t even respond with a quiet “Danke”. Eva, the

soldiers wife, died later when she ate glass— fragments of broken glass had

splintered into her dinner. She picked out what she saw and what she didn’t see

killed her, slowly.

Following the loss, the soldier helped him get into Luftwaffe training and officer

school at the age of eighteen. He couldn’t say it made his life easier, but it gave him

a purpose. In the strict competition of the pre-war German military admissions, he

excelled. He passed his Luftwaffe training at the top of his group, and later officer

school second in his class. Scheer then received his first assignment, pilot of an

experimental Junkers bomber over the skies of Spain. Thinking of these things hurt,

as he traced his life’s events like a dimly flickering row of streetlamps he had seen in

Hamburg many years ago.

Being accountable for the seven lives on his Condor bomber kept his mind occupied

enough, but he could not find it within himself to break free of the past.