At 19, Leonhard Keck grew up fast in the closing days of World War II in Europe.

It was April 1945. Germany's Third Reich was on the verge of collapse. But that didn't mean young American soldiers like Keck, who today at age 84 lives in a quiet Lancaster neighborhood, were going to have it easy. The Nazi regime was going to fight to the last man — even in little German towns like Hitdorf, a place where young Keck was captured by the enemy, and where he recently visited as a friend.

"I never, in my wildest dreams, thought I'd get back there," said Keck.

Or, for that matter, survive the first time.

Today, Keck is fighting a different battle, with pancreatic cancer. He and his wife, Florence, 82, have traveled to Germany since Keck's wartime days, but had never been back to Hitdorf, on the Rhine river, not far from the border between Germany and the Netherlands.

A return to that town wasn't really something that Keck had in mind since 1945 ... until his interest was stirred by a connection to his past from across the Atlantic, a young man born years after Keck's wartime ordeal..

"For years I didn't do anything about it," said Keck, of returning to Hitdorf. He kept busy raising a family and running, first, a butcher business, the former Greenawalt and Keck, and then working for Dantro Associates, a food equipment business.

Keck served with A Company, of the 3rd Platoon of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, part of the 82nd Airborne Division of the U.S. Army. The regiment's story is currently being chronicled by Frank van Lunteren, a 26-year-old teacher and World War II historian living in Arnhem, the Netherlands.

Van Lunteren has maintained contact with several surviving members of the 504th, including Keck.

At the 61st convention of the 82nd Airborne Division Association in Harrisburg, in August 2007, van Lunteren served as guest speaker at the 504th Regimental Dinner.

"It was a great honor, of course," said van Lunteren via telephone from Holland. "I stayed with Leonhard two days."

"Frank motivated me," Keck said, referring to why he decided to revisit the site of his capture. "He urged me to join him and take this route again."

Keck was also spurred to

take the trip, in August, by ill-ness. "We were planning to go next year," Mrs. Keck said, "but the oncologist said to go this year."

Wading ashore
Keck's wartime landing in Hitdorf was an ironic return to native soil. Born in Germany, he had emigrated from that country to the United States and Lancaster County with his parents as a young boy. He still knew the German language.

Around 2 a.m. April 6, 1945, Keck and a riverborne assault force, making its way up the Rhine, landed near Hitdorf. All was darkness and confusion.

"We had no experience paddling [boats] up the Rhine," Keck recalled. "Some of us went forward, some went backward. I'm surprised we didn't wake the whole German army."

Keck and his comrades, under the command of Lt. Richard Hallock, waded ashore — into a minefield.

"My ammo bearer stepped on a mine," Keck said. "He was screaming for his mother." James Emery, of Chicago, had his arms and legs blown off before he rolled onto another mine, ending his life. Overhead, machine gun fire tore through the air.

Keck made it to Hitdorf, where he was called away to a nearby church where German prisoners of war were being held; Keck's native language now came in handy for the Americans.

He spent two days questioning prisoners. "After the second day, things started deteriorating fast," he recalled. The Germans, Keck said, thought another bridgehead was going into the river. They began to move on Hitdorf. Communications were cut.

Keck was ordered to check on an outpost to see if it was still in position. On his way back, a comrade of his, Pvt. Eugene Anderson, from Baltimore, Md., was killed. Keck made it back to the 3rd Platoon's command post. There, he reported to Hallock about the outpost — it was still holding out, according to van Lunteren's account — and about Anderson's fate.

Around dusk, the Germans attacked. Keck and the 3rd Platoon found themselves holed up in a large house. A German tank pulled up and "started dismantling the house over our heads," Keck recalled.

"That was a long night on the southern end of Hitdorf."

Along with Hallock, several other men, and even a few German civilians, Keck "stayed in a basement. The Germans were all around the house." There was a loose stone in the basement wall. Somebody outside, Keck recalled, "pulled the stone out and put a German grenade in."

It exploded, but Keck survived; German grenades, he explained, caused mostly concussion-type damage, compared to U.S. grenades, which exploded into deadly shrapnel.

Escape, however, was now clearly impossible.

"By morning, [Hallock] decided we had to give up," Keck said. A medic, wearing the Red Cross insignia, was asked to offer the surrender, but he refused. Keck's knowledge of German was again put to use; he was the one to voice the surrender.

"I didn't let on I could talk too much German," however, Keck said. The men from the basement were marched outside — to a wall. Some of the men in the back of the group began to panic and one man yelled about making a break for it. Keck knew that was the worst thing anybody could do.

"I said, 'Hold still, it's your only chance.' "

Prisoners march
On foot, the now-captured men were marched in the direction of the town of Plettenburg. Keck didn't know how many miles they walked, or the name of the town where they were heading.

"Each day they marched us as far as we could walk," Keck said. On the first day, "English Spitfires strafed us." The second day, it was American P-51s. On the fourth day, the prisoners were loaded onto a truck that was targeted by American P-38s. "We hit the ditches," Keck recalled.

 The men cursed their Allied attackers, but Keck said he could understand why friends would mistake the Americans for foes.

"Our clothes were that dirty," he said of their uniforms." They couldn't tell if we were Gestapo or what." Also, the men had been ordered to give up their helmets, leaving them less-easily identifiable.

Over the next few nights, the men slept under a variety of conditions. "One night [we were in] in a factory cellar. One night, we were in a town jail." At one point, the men got to bed down in real bunks, in a stalag that had formerly been occupied by French POWs.

"We jumped in those bunks. We were in our glory about five minutes. Then we had body lice all over!"

The men, about 25 of them, ended up in Plettenburg, where they were held in a bunker-like underground space with about 100 townspeople. The shelter had been built to withstand bombs and artillery. "They knew this was coming," said Keck of the Germans' preparation for attack.

It was close quarters, but "we felt pretty safe in there," he said.

At daybreak, Keck and the others heard the cry "kommen sie raus!" or "come out!" But the men on the other side of the door weren't Germans.

Keck said a cry went up from his group. "Don't shoot! We're Americans!" they yelled as they encountered the men of the American 86th Division, which liberated Plettenburg.

On April 16, "they finally shipped us to a reparations depot," where the men's clothing was burned. Then they were sprayed for lice. "That was the longest half-hour," he said of the uncomfortable, burning sensation.

Keck never saw Berlin, which, under the Potsdam agreement, was to be taken first by the Russians, he said. He did see some of the men from the mighty Soviet Army. "We thought we were wild, but they put us to shame," he said of the hard-drinking Russians. They had a fearsome reputation, even among the Germans who, Keck said, knew to surrender to the Americans for better treatment.

He also recalled seeing a concentration camp called Wöbbelin, near Ludwigslust, Germany. Keck said he remembered wondering how people could let such atrocities happen. He was told by one German: "You ask one question, and you're in there with them."

The war in Europe was over for Keck, but going home was not yet to be. He ended up being re-deployed to France, where he spent the Fourth of July and Bastille Day. A constant worry was the thought of being sent to Japan, with which America was still at war. In August1945, however, that fear was put to rest with Japan's surrender.

Keck was finally going home — but not as quickly as he would have liked. He said an announcement was broadcast to the men asking who got seasick, which puzzled them; they thought they were going to fly back to the States. Keck was one of the men who were shipped out by sea on a long, stormy crossing from France to Boston. He didn't get home until October.

Past and present
Sixty-plus years later, Keck returned to the country where he had been both captured and liberated. At Plettenburg, he learned, for the first time, the name of the place from which he had been freed, thanks to van Lunteren and a Plettenburg historian.

Curious to find the bunker where he spent that last, long night before liberation, Keck had the historian show him one place he thought it might be, then another. Neither clicked. Then, "the third one — that was it," Keck said. To his surprise, the historian had a key, and Keck was able to step back in time. "It was a little overwhelming," Keck said.

Today, Keck is facing different odds with his cancer, but he said he's content. He joked about thinking, after surviving all he did during the war, that "I'd probably break my neck." But, he said, although battling cancer, "I'm still here, so I'm well-satisfied with life.

"If he calls," he said of a higher power, "I'm ready."

---

Stephen Kopfinger is a Sunday News staff writer. Contact him at skopfinger@lnpnews.com or at 291-8799.