Gertrude Wright, German who dodged bombs, fled the Russians and translated for Montgomery – obituary
Gertrude Wright, who has died 18 days short of her 100th birthday, lived an adventurous life. She was born in the German city of Magdeburg, and survived the massive Allied bombing of early 1945; witnessed American forces searching for the inventor of the V2 rocket; fled from the advancing Russians; and ended up as a translator in Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s headquarters in Lüneburg shortly after the German surrender, where she met her future British husband.
Moving to England she was an Army wife and schoolteacher, and in retirement set up a primary school in Ladakh, Kashmir, India.
She was born Gertraud Frieda Luise Schröder on February 27 1924, to Ernst Schröder and the former Friederike Kühne. Her father, who had served in the Great War, had trained as a teacher, but preferring practical work, ran a large bakery with his brother. She recalled the 1930s as “very difficult. There were many big books of very poor debtors who could never pay for their daily loaf.”
War prevented her from taking up her university scholarship to study languages at Bremen or Cologne, and she trained as a secretary with foreign languages, rather than join the Land Army. She was employed at Maschinenfabrik Buckau-Wolf in Magdeburg, which manufactured navy supplies and armaments. After work she would cycle to college to improve her English.
One Sunday morning, as she was cycling home from church, she was strafed by a lone Spitfire. “I dived off my bike into a ditch. After that, mother banned me from going to church. Looking back, it was quite funny – I would like to find out which pilot dared to fly about on his own.”
Magdeburg, on the banks of the Elbe, in April 1945 after Allied bombing
Credit: Keystone/Getty Images
Magdeburg was heavily bombed on January 16 1945. From her home five miles away, she watched flares being dropped by the Pathfinder Force. She went every day for a week to search for relatives. “Soldiers were everywhere extracting bodies onto the street to await identification. Eventually I found them; all dead; they had asphyxiated in the firestorm and were badly discoloured and swollen up like balloons.”
One morning in early June 1945, the factory manager summoned her to translate for a small group of American Intelligence Corps officers who had suddenly appeared wanting to know if they had branch factories in the Harz Mountains to the south. “A year later we learnt this was part of the American operation to evacuate a group of V1 and V2 rocket scientists to America, including Werner von Braun, a few days before the Soviets tried to capture them.”
By April 1945, Magdeburg had been occupied by the Allies, and Gertrude was persuaded to volunteer as an interpreter for the British army. Then in early July, without warning, the British announced they were leaving the next day because the Russians were taking over.
Gertrude Wright
Knowing what horrors would befall young women in their hands, her mother packed a suitcase and told her to flee, which she did, with another girl. “We were the last to leave on a British Army truck and we could see the Russians. Mother stayed behind, awaiting father who was a prisoner-of-war in Belgium.”
They ended up in a tiny house in the British Zone, three miles south of Hamburg. “We were still enemies. Fraternisation was strictly forbidden; there was to be no talking other than for work; but the British were kind and tolerant unlike the horrible suffering under the Russians – we realised this and were pleased. We were safe; absolutely wonderful! Later we heard that in Magdeburg terrified young women jumped into the river Elbe to drown themselves. We worked six days a week translating and typing short military reports; there was little food.”
The translation group later moved to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s military headquarters in Lüneburg. Interactions between the British and Germans gradually relaxed and became more friendly, and the interpreters were permitted to have breakfast in the Officers’ Mess after the officers had departed, “a real treat; real bread for us to eat!”
Here, Gertrude wondered why she was frequently being given items to translate, some of them for Montgomery, by the same English soldier, Tank Captain Arthur “Jack” Wright of the 1st Royal Tank Regiment, one of Montgomery’s bodyguard, realising only later that she had caught his eye.
In 1947, Gertrude sneaked back home a few times into the Russian Zone. She had heard where it was best to cross the border, from people sneaking in from the east to buy tins of fish in Hamburg because they had no food.
Gertrude with Arthur Wright in Germany
“It was cat and mouse,” she recalled. “You’d cross at night, alone, and run as fast as you could over meadows and a river before the Russians had finished their breakfast, hiding in the snow, in a ditch, behind trees or gravestones, especially if you heard soldiers shouting “Stoi! Stoi!” (Stop! Stop!) Then on to a railway station to catch a train. You had to avoid the Russians and I had to keep hidden at home. It was very exciting – it is amazing what you can do and survive.”
When the British army left Lüneburg, Gertrude worked as a languages and engineering secretary in Frankfurt-am-Main for several years, spending a year at university in France. In 1950, English friends from the university invited her to London where she took the opportunity to meet many of her demobbed friends from The Royal Scots Guards.
Serendipity struck at one reunion when she again chanced upon Arthur Wright. They married in spring 1957 in Richmond, Yorkshire, Gertrude taking British citizenship a month later. The couple moved with the army, spending three years with BOAR. – ending up in Chester where Arthur retired in 1963 with the rank of Warrant Officer II (RQMS). As a Civil Servant he then de-commissioned Chester Castle as an active army headquarters, it having been in use since Norman times.
Arthur Wright
Gertrude meanwhile trained as a teacher of German, in 1971 taking a post at West Kirby Grammar School for Girls. In 1977, Arthur died of a sudden heart attack aged 62. After a year of deep grief, Gertrude decided it was no use moping alone at home, and travelled to Egypt, Australia, Thailand and India.
Falling in love with the Western Himalayas in northern Kashmir, with help from the Anglican Bishop of Amritsar, she rebuilt a small primary school for Tibetan refugee children in the village of Shey, near Leh, Ladakh, at 13,500 feet, spending one freezing cold winter there.
Once, with their parents’ blessing, she returned unannounced to her home village of Christleton near Chester with five young Ladakhi girls for four months, at her expense, hosting them in her house. With all round excitement they were enrolled in the local primary school always wearing their colourful traditional costumes. (Two of the women are now doctors in their hometown.) In the opposite direction, she took groups of sixth-form girls from her West Kirby school to experience the delights of Ladakh.
Gertrude Wright at Christleton with her Ladakhi guests
In 1984, aged 60, Gertrude decided to drive to Magdeburg in East Germany to visit a surviving uncle and seek out a couple of old school friends, despite her West German friends thinking her mad to go. Returning westwards on a motorway she got caught up in a Russian army convoy when her car brakes failed. Told by them there were no spare parts in East Germany she was instructed to continue alone and use the handbrake as far as the border.
The police tracked all foreign cars, yet somehow hers had been missed, resulting in a police car rushing past, stopping and flagging her down to stop, “but I couldn’t – I shot past him, fearing I’d be shot!” Crossing into West Germany, with great relief, she was told to go no further until the car was fixed.
It was only in 1993 that she was able to discover the precise fate of her younger brother Siegfried, who was drafted into the Kriegsmarine, and killed on the destroyer Z32 at the battle of Ushant soon after D-Day.
Gertrude and Arthur had no children. She is survived by a few distant relatives in Germany.
Gertrude Wright, born February 27 1924, died February 9 2024
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