19th September, 2024 in Aviation, Biography & Memoir, Military

To all who fell at Arnhem – Allied and German

By Louis Hagen

In 1934, aged just 16, Louis Hagen was sent to Lichtenberg concentration camp after being betrayed for an off-hand joke by a Nazi-sympathising family maid. Mercifully, his time there was cut short thanks to the intervention of a school friend’s father, and he escaped to the UK soon after.

He went on to fight in the Battle of Arnhem during the Second World War. Of the 10,000 men who landed at Arnhem, 1,400 were killed and more than 6,000 were captured – a bloody disaster in more ways than one. Arnhem Lift is Hagen’s breathtaking and frank account of what it was like in the air and on the ground, including his daring escape from the German Army by swimming the Rhine.

‘I crawled right under the brushwood and saw and heard the bullets splashing the ground and hitting the branches and tree stumps all round me. I was sure this was going to be the end and kicked myself for doing such an idiotic thing; trying to take a strong German position on my own. I swore that if ever I got out of this hopeless position I would never again be such a bloody fool. I lay completely still, bullets whizzing about me. I wondered if I wanted to pray; that is what everybody is supposed to do in a position like this; but I just did not feel like it, and to calm and steady myself I watched a colony of ants go about their well-planned and systematic business.’

Louis Hagen

This quote describes my Father’s attitude to life; brave , reckless and amusing which hopefully the reader will understand from his newly published autobiography Suddenly An Englishman and Arnhem Lift.

By Caroline Hagen Hall