"My Leg Is Rotting" – A 18-Year-Old German POW Girl Arrived On Crutches With Gas Gangrene

Описание: An 18-year-old German girl arrives at a Soviet-American transfer point on crutches, dragging one leg behind her, and the smell reaches the intake desk before she does—a rotting-meat stench that makes the Soviet guard stay three steps back and stops the American medic halfway through his examination. This video follows Erika Hartmann, an auxiliary communications clerk captured during Germany's chaotic April 1945 retreat, who stepped off a truck and caught her calf on something sharp—maybe shrapnel, maybe a broken fence post—then walked on that infected wound for more than three weeks without antibiotics or rest because falling behind meant being left behind. When Captain Albert Lawson cut away her trouser fabric in a medical tent near Torgau, he found mottled gray-and-black skin swollen tight with wet tissue glistening under the lamp, and when he pressed near her ankle, he heard a crackling sound—gas bubbling under the surface from Clostridium bacteria that were literally destroying her leg from the inside out, giving him 12 to 24 hours to amputate or watch her die from septic shock. Before the surgery, Erika wrote a four-line letter to her father that she never expected him to read, telling him she tried to stay strong the way he taught her—then survived the amputation, spent three months learning to walk on crutches in a bureaucratic gray zone where nobody knew what to do with a teenaged German girl with one leg, and became the hardest-working prisoner in camp by making herself indispensable, translating for others and folding bandages because she understood that usefulness was the only currency that mattered.