My aunt Minny McCormack, who has died aged 102, was among the first German women allowed to marry a British soldier after the second world war and was one of the last living war brides. That soldier, my uncle, Jim McCormack, fell in love with her soon after knocking on her door and asking for a cup of tea in war-ravaged Aachen in September 1945.
His unit had taken over the adjacent manor house. A year later, she left Germany for Jim’s home in Liverpool. They were married in 1946 and she stayed in the UK for the next 75 years.
Born Berta Wilhemine Roessler, shortened to Minny, in Aachen, to Berta (nee von Knappen) and Emil Roessler, a chauffeur and estate administrator, she went to secondary school in the city, leaving at 16 to start an apprenticeship at a local pharmaceutical company.
Aged 19 when war broke out in 1939, Minny got through the first years with no more hardship than other German civilians. But things got worse for her after D-day. In October 1944, American troops took Aachen, the first German city to fall to the allies. She fled east on a bicycle, on foot and on the back of trucks, carrying only essential belongings in suitcases. For four months, she spent nights in woods, barns and abandoned buildings, once sheltering under a railway carriage during an allied air raid.
Only in May 1945, once Germany had surrendered, did she slowly make her way back to her home in bomb-shattered Aachen, where a period of desperate hand-to-mouth existence began in a country on its knees.
Enter Jim, whose command of the German language made it easy for the couple to quickly get to know each other. Romance blossomed while Minny worked for Jim’s Intelligence Corps section in return for food, cooking for them while they went about the postwar hunt for Nazis fleeing over the border into the Netherlands.
After marriage, Jim and Minny settled in Carshalton Beeches, Surrey, bringing up their only child, Ingrid, in a bilingual and bicultural manner – a brave move in postwar Britain. Jim died of a brain tumour in 1972, leaving Minny a widow for 50 years. But she stayed in the UK, remaining close to the wider McCormack family, teaching German at Sutton College of Learning for Adults and involving herself in her local church.
In her mid-90s she moved to the Cotswolds to be near to Ingrid, who wrote up her parents’ story in The Bride’s Trunk: A Story of War and Reconciliation.
Minny is survived by Ingrid and her grandchildren, Matthew and Gabriela.
