McIntosh Memorial Day brings a Patriotic story from WWII

Theo Scheytt was born in Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany in 1930, 3 years before Hitler became Chancellor. As a young man, he was on the receiving end of Nazi propaganda which told him and all of Germany that Americans were gangsters like Al Capone.

From 1939 to 1945, he was a member of the Hitler Youth, and began Youth Flight Training with gliders in 1944 with the goal of becoming a fighter pilot against the Yankee b-17 and b-24 bombers.

At the end of the war, he had his first personal experience with Americans when the 7th United States Army occupied Southern Germany. In contrast to what he had been told, he found the American soldiers to be very friendly, supportive and funny, dropping chewing gum, Hershey’s candy bars and Camel, Lucky Strike and Chesterfield cigarettes from their trucks.

Theo graduated from college in 1956 with a textile engineering degree and later became manager of production and machinery in several textile companies. In 1970 he had a change of profession and studied Evangelical Lutheran theology, becoming a pastor in 1974 in and around Ulm, Germany. He retired in 1992 and lives in Weissenhorn (near Ulm) with his wife, Erika.

His interests include reading, jazz music, and airplanes, particularly American WWII aircraft. His interest in the USA was instrumental in his son’s decision to become a Foreign Exchange Student in 1976, with 4 of his grandsons later following suit.

A series of change (of divine) occurrences led him on an expedition in 1994 to help solve the mystery of what happened to U.S. Army soldier Herbert Harms or Rutland, Illinois. Herb was the tail gunner in a plane that was shot down in August 1944 near Leipzig, Germany.

In 2014 Theo had the opportunity to meet Herb’s family in Illinois and tell them firsthand what happened to their brother-in-law and uncle, and how Herb gave the ultimate sacrifice for our country. Theo shared his story with the McIntosh community during the Memorial Day program held last Monday, May 28th at the McIntosh Community Center.

The Story of Staff Sergeant Herbert Wayne Harms

As told by Rev. Theo Scheytt

My family and I were on summer holidays in Guernsey in the Channel Islands in 1993. One Saturday evening, we went to the beach. But I left the others because there was a Second World War museum. As I was very interested in history, I went to the museum and said to the members of the family, “You go down without me. When you come back, we will go to the grocery store”, as it was Saturday evening and the stores would be closed on Sunday.

In the museum, I lost track of time and forgot, and the family came up angry. I got angry also. I said, “We will go into the town maybe and we will get some food.” And so we did. We drove back with my son Christian’s car, a Chrysler Voyager, to the next supermarket. Usually, I also go every time into the supermarket to find my own things, but this time I was too angry and remained in the car until they would come back.

So, as I was sitting in the car, a few minutes later there was a visitor. He came to the car and through the open window he asked me in German, “May I ask you how many horsepower has this engine?” I got much more angry (about having to converse in German while in an English-speaking country) and said, “This is not my car. It is the car of my son. And I don’t know how many horsepower it has, or fuel consumption, or things like that.”

And there was a long pause; quiet. I thought, “You are an unpolite man. A very unpolite man.” And so I tried to make the climate a little better. I asked him, “How did you come from Germany? Are you also on holidays, or are you a German Officer from the Air Force shot down?” He said, “No, no. I am living here.” I asked him, “Maybe you have been in the German Air Force?” He said, “yes”, Oh, I got great interest.

I asked him, “What type of German aircraft were you flying? Was it the MA-109 or the HE-111 or the Dornier 17?” He said, “You also were in the air war?” But I said I was just in the Flieger Hitlerjugend (The elite Flying Hitler Youth) preparing to be a fighter pilot. He said, “You must come to visit me and together we will have a cup of coffee.” I told him, “I will wait for my family to come back from the supermarket, and then we will come and join you.” And so we did.

I was very astonished when we arrived. It was like a castle high up over the beach on the coast with a large field around it, like a meadow. Huge. We Looked over the sea. “Wonderful,” I thought. That was interesting. And so we had a cup of coffee and he said, “Next evening, you come again. I have a friend, an English traffic pilot, and we will have a discussion on the battle of England in 1940.”

So we did, and the next evening did come also this British pilot, Chris Unitt. He asked me after our conversation, “Could you help me to find out the last trace of a member of an American bomber crew which crashed down in Germany?” I said, “Give me information, I will do what I can,” but I was from the beginning very skeptical about the result about any positive effect.

So we went back to Germany, and later on I took the information from the papers and thought about them. I was a minister at the time in Ulm in Western Germany. We had a parish in Eastern Germany in the Soviet zone to support them with the most necessary things and money and so on. And the minister of this parish, Ulrich Hochbaugh, I had a very good connection with.

I phoned him up and said to him, “Ulrich, I have some information about a missing American 50 years ago. Maybe you can help me find something about this lost member of an American bomber crew. I only know that the crash of this American four-engine B-17 “Flying Fortress” went down near Meineweh on August 16, 1944 after bombing an oil refinery.”

His reaction was very, very emphasized, “Oh, my uncle is a minister in Meineweh!” Meineweh is about 40 miles away from where he was. I said, “Well-given information. I am thinking about an expedition to find out something about the missing bomber crew member.” He said, “Well, come over; I’ll do what I can.” And so I gave information to Chris Unitt in England. I said, “Chris, we may have information about the last place of Herbert Harms. Maybe we go there and you can accompany me.” And he said, “Oh, I will come!”

And so he came, a few days later. It was in the middle of August in 1994. I prepared our expeditionary course and I asked my very good friend, Konrad Schall, our family doctor. I said, “If you want, we will make an expedition to eastern Germany to find some last days of a missing American.” And he said, “I would also like to go with you.” And so we started the next morning. Chris Unitt arrived a few days earlier.

So, we went to Meineweh and Hochbaugh. The next morning we discussed it, and he said he knows nothing exactly about the air raid, other than that there were very heavy air attacks in this summer of 1944. And so we said we’ll try to find out some dates of that time, and would go to Zeit, a nearby village, to the local paper and try to get into the archives of the paper to find out about reports about the air raids in August 1944.

So we did, and we found a lot of reports in the paper archives but no special information about the B-17 which must have crashed near Meineweh. (Meineweh is a small village near Zeitz.)

We went back in the afternoon and we tried to get further information but weren’t very successful. Nobody knew precise information. In the evening we were convinced we had done what we could do; we go home the next morning.

I said, “It’s now evening, we’ll make a short information tour all over the region especially, to the west,” as a German pilot was shot down there, and I wanted to go to see his grave. We went there and on the way back we stopped in a small village called Osterfeld. We went through this, where there were only a few farmers. There was a big court and a big farm and two people stood at a distance of 100 meters and watched us skeptically, as they saw we had a Western Germany identification number and thought we were from the government. They were very skeptical.

I said to a woman and a man, “Good evening. We are coming from Western Germany looking for a missing American who had been flying in an air raid on Zeitz and must have crashed down in this region. Nobody knows anything else about him. Maybe you know something about a four-engine bomber.”

He said, “I know exactly. IT was 12:30 on the 16th of August. I was coming home from school at 12:30 exactly and the bomber came over here” (He pointed to the heavens>) “The engine was burning. He made a large curve and crashed down there by the forest.” I said, “Can you exactly remember where it crashed?” He said, “I can show you exactly where it crashed.” I said, “Come into the car and we will go and see the site.”

He came into the car, and directed us to drive out from the village I can remembers: Drive right; Drive up this narrow way to the forest; go through the forest and at the end of the forest is a large tree field. Drive a little right; stop; exactly here was the bomber crash site. He said, “ I didn’t go there because the munitions were exploding. It burned.”

I asked, “Are you quite sure?” He said, “Absolutely.” We went out after the wheat was cut. I went with my shoe and tried to dig the earth and at once I had three, four, five aluminum parts in my hand. I have parts of the Boeing.”

We went home to the guest house we had rented for the night; we knew exactly where Herbert Harms” aircraft was shot down. It was exactly 50 years later.

The next morning, we made a small voyage through Meineweh to say goodbye with Minister Hochbaugh Just when we were driving there, he said, “Stop!” There was an old man coming on the right, and he said I must ask him, as he is an old one and he knows something. I asked the man, “Do you know something about this bomber which crashed nearby in Osterfeld? We are looking for a bomber crew member who was never found.”

He said, “Oh, yes; I know. It was up there southward from Meineweh on a slight hill. There, they came out with their parachutes and they got sent to prison from the German police. Six weeks later, a farmer was cutting his corn. Suddenly he stopped his machine and looked further; there was something lying in the corn. He went down and said, “Oh, God, a dead Frenchman.” Lying there was a bomber crewman with a parachute. He was dead and his hands were clamped into the ground.”

This was very strict information and we said we would go there. Hochbaugh also said there is someone who might know something about this missing person who was a Hitlerjugend commander in Meineweh We contacted him and asked him about this and he said, “I saw this aircraft burning and flying westward. I saw all the crew bailing out with the parachutes and I went up to look what happened. Towards me came the pilot, hands up, so I could see he has no gun and he doesn’t shoot. The other ones all came, one after another, because it was a large distance. They got captured.”

I gave him this paper with the photo and I asked which one of them came towards you. He watched it for some time and then pointed out someone and it was the pilot.

We also had contact with an older wife living in the next village southward from Meineweh. She saw the parachute from Herbert Harms falling down unopened. So it is absolutely sure that Herbert Harms was killed because his parachute didn’t open.

(Note from Theo: In the B-17, there was a strict rule for bailing out: first the tail gunner, then the other gunners, then the pilots, navigator and bombardier – from back to front.)

And so it happened that Herbert Harms was the first one to bail out. The rear gunner cockpit was very narrow, so the tail gunner had to be very small. I suppose Herbert Harms tried to get out, and possibly the cabin malfunctioned The aircraft was very low; he had no chance. He lay about six weeks in the corn field until the farmer found him. And then we could reconstruct from the people there what had happened.

In the end, he was buried in the cemetery in Meineweh in the corner, and so ends his life in Meineweh.

In the summers of 1945, one year later, came an American Inquisition command from the U.S. Army, to all the villages and towns. They wanted to know what happened with missing Americans. They exhumed his body and had it transported to the collective cemetery in Liege, Belgium. There is a memorial stone where is written, “Herbert Harms, missing in action over Germany 16 August 1944.”

Footnote from Darlene Dierkes:

Theo is the grandfather of two foreign exchange students we hosted in 2007 – 2008 and 2011 – 2012. While we were visiting the family in Germany in March 2014 he shared this story with us.

The British pilot, Chris Unitt, was responsible for reporting the results back to the family member he had met in Florida. However, if he did, Theo was not part of that communication. As a result, this 20-year-old story still had no final chapter for him.

Through Ancestry.com, I was able to contact some family members. The ones I spoke with had not heard the details of the expedition. So, I arranged a meeting between them and Theo at the American Legion in Herb’s hometown of Rutland, Illinois in August of 2014.

That day, Theo was able to tell the family about the trip to Meineweh and what happened to Herb. He presented them with the pieces of Herb’s plane he had kept in his possession since the day he unearthed them with his foot in 1994. 

The family had Herb’s uniform, his Purple Heart, and other artifacts on display. It was an emotional day for everyone in attendance.

We also stopped by the local memorial, as well as the farm where Herb had grown up.

To this day, Herb is still officially listed as MIA. The family has no idea where his remains are located, or why the Army did not return them after exhuming them from Meineweh cemetery in 1945. 

However, a nephew was recently asked to submit DNA through a Marine Corps initiative to find matches for unidentified remains. His family is hopeful that this will provide the link to be able to bring Herb home.