Klaus Grutzka

Who was Klaus Grutzka?

Klaus Guido Grutzka, born Feb.9. 1923, in Breslau, Upper Silesia, Germany. He died March 28, 2011 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, USA;

His father, Johan Grutzka, was born in Krakau, Upper Silesia. He began working as a young man in a coal mine and enjoyed drawing and painting in his spare time. His artistic talents came to the attention of a local nobel man who decided to sponsor young Grudska. Throughout his career he painted industrial motives as well as the insides of catholic churches. Johann Grudska met his wife Helene, they got married and had two children, one a girl, named her Marianne and a son, whom they named Klaus Guido. As a young man, Klaus moved from Breslau to Kiel, a Baltic harbor town and one of the major naval ports in Germany, the Baltic port at the end of the Kiel Canal. There, around 1940, he joined the Kriegsmarine as an officer’s candidate. During his navy time he underwent training as an engineer. First on a destroyer, which was attacked and sank and he barely survived this harrowing experience. His next command was that of a Chief Engineer on a German submarine, in charge of its massive diesel engines.

At the end of the war the crew of his U-boot as well as the crews of many other U-boots became P.O.W. He had married his first wife, Eva, née Koenn, in Kiel, around the end of 1942. They had a son, Claus, who was born in 1945. Before the son was born, Klaus Grutzka went into P.O.W. camp in Scotland. These German navy soldiers were told that they had to transfer the U-boots to a Scottish port, Stranraer in order to scuttle the vessels off of the Scottish shoreline. He remained a P.O.W for a while, but then returned to Kiel, to his wife and young son.