Jenny Davies, the daughter of Douglas Mortifee, who as a 17-year-old had reached the farmhouse clad in shorts and sandals \u2013 dressed the same as the other boys when they had set out from their hostel with just two buttered rolls and nothing to drink \u2013 said it was finally time to pay tribute to the villagers of Hofsgrund and correct the historical record once and for all.<\/p>\n
\u201cWithout your help we would not be here now,\u201d she said in an emotional address from the church pulpit, speaking on behalf of relatives of five of the 22 survivors and a niece of one of the deceased at a ceremony to mark the anniversary attended by the parish priest and a village brass band.<\/p>\n
The Nazis\u2019 hijacking of the narrative, in which they were able to feign feelings of friendship towards Britain, was supported by promoters of Britain\u2019s appeasement efforts<\/a> to prevent the second world war.<\/p>\n It also allowed the boys\u2019 teacher, Kenneth Keast, then 27, to get off the hook. Equipped with a tiny scale 1:100,000 map and a compass he did not know how to use, he had set out on the hike despite minus temperatures, snowfall and repeated warnings from local people who knew their weather and urged him to turn back.<\/p>\n Afterwards, charges were dropped in Germany<\/a>, and British newspapers portrayed him as the \u201cman of the hour\u201d without whom more boys would have died, although UK authorities did ban him from taking further school trips abroad.<\/p>\n Ninety years on, and in better weather, relatives and villagers retraced part of the boys\u2019 route on the mountain path, visiting a bombastic, rune-style monument erected by the Nazis as well as a modest stone cross on a grassy slope close to the spot where Jack Eaton, 14 years and 10 months old, had collapsed and died metres from the village.<\/p>\n That cross has slowly gained recognition as the true memorial to the boys of Strand school in Brixton Hill, south London. It was commissioned by the father of Jack, the school\u2019s boxing champion, who had flown to Germany determined to find out who was responsible for the death of his only son.<\/p>\n Nancy Whelan, Jack\u2019s niece, visited the spot for the first time on the anniversary, touching its lichen-mottled inscription as she fought back tears. \u201cMy nan [Jack\u2019s mother] and my mother, Jacqueline, who was named after Jack, always said they just wanted the truth to come out,\u201d she said. A blank space on the cross shows where Nazi authorities forced Jack\u2019s father to remove words blaming the teacher, as it impugned the official narrative.<\/p>\n Ewald Lorenz welcomed the boys\u2019 relatives at the Dobelhof farmyard where Douglas Mortifee and RGS Farrants had sought help. His grandparents, Elisabeth and Bernhard Lorenz, had brought the hypothermic boys into the safety of their wood-panelled parlour and urged them to stand some distance from the dark green ceramic oven, which still dominates the room, so as to not rewarm too quickly.<\/p>\n Everyone in the village has their own story to tell of that night. \u201cWe know to always have an open door and an open mind,\u201d Lorenz said.<\/p>\n In the wood-beamed village hall, local people and the families swap stories after the hike. The rescuers included Bruno Lorenz, the village cobbler, who, his son Kurt recalled, said of that night: \u201cThe snow and wind was monstrous.\u201d<\/p>\n Kurt Lorenz, whose father, Bruno, the village cobbler, was involved in the rescue effort, listens to speeches at the Hofsgrund community centre<\/p>\n Marius Buhl, a local journalist<\/a>, said he wished he had had the chance to ask his grandfather Reinhold Gutmann about his role in the rescue, but the village had only truly realised the significance of the event after the publication of research byBernd Hainm\u00fcller<\/a>, a retired teacher from nearby Freiburg, who spent 26 years unearthing the real story behind the tragedy. \u201cWe lived with the towering monument right in front of our noses, but it took an outsider to really bring the story to our attention,\u201d Buhl said.<\/p>\n Marius Buhl, a Hofsgrunder whose grandfather was involved in the rescue effort, speaks during the memorial service in the local Catholic church<\/p>\n \u201cThe rescuers never talked much about it,\u201d said Paula Gnaerhrich, whose grandfather, Ignatz Sch\u00e4b, had carried the boys on a horn sledge back into the valley. \u201cBut it was always something of interest to us youngsters. We often thought of the children, and I was always shocked that the teacher might have ignored the warnings of Black Forest locals who are always going to know their heimat and its weather better than a visiting Londoner, however clever he thinks he is.\u201d<\/p>\n Vanessa Barton, the daughter of Russell Petty, who was 16 at the time, quoted her father\u2019s account of the hike and how \u201cthe wind and snow together were felling small trees\u201d. She said: \u201cOn family holidays he never took us anywhere it was snowing, and certainly not up a mountain.\u201d<\/p>\n Julia and Lucy Warner had brought with them the pencil-written diary of the youngest survivor, their grandfather Ken Osborne, and donated it to the local museum<\/a> along with the postcard he had sent to his parents after the event. \u201cWe got lost. It might be in the papers and so we have been told to write and say that I am quite safe,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n A Guardian long read<\/a> published soon after the 80th anniversary brought Hainm\u00fcller\u2019s work to a wider audience, prompting many relatives of the schoolboys to contact him \u2013 connections that eventually led to the memorial meeting. Research by the Guardian\u2019s Richard Nelsson in UK archives also uncovered a paper trail now central to the understanding of events.<\/p>\n Over kaffee und kuchen the families swapped stories and shared photos, letters, diaries and newspaper cuttings, piecing together details such as who carried whom off the mountain, and where and when the boys subsequently served in the war. Russell Petty had carried Peter Ellerkamp, who was one of those to die. Stephen Hearn said he was reasonably sure his father, Norman Hearn, had put Ken Osborne, the smallest boy, on his shoulders.<\/p>\n \u201cMy dad only ever gave us snippets of information when we were young,\u201d Hearn said. \u201cHe simply told us he had nearly lost his thumbs due to frostbite trying to rescue a boy off the top of a mountain.\u201d<\/p>\n It was only 27 years after his father\u2019s death that Hearn looked through two boxes of documents from his life, found the Guardian article through a web search and \u201crealised what I\u2019d stumbled across\u201d. In October 2024 he sent the information to Hainm\u00fcller, who helped him piece together the puzzle.<\/p>\n Norman Hearn, like one other survivor, Stanley Few, refused to fight against the Germans when war broke out, insisting it was Germans who had saved their lives. Both were sent to Asia instead. It was noted also that several of the rescuers went to war and never came back, two of them killed at the Battle of Stalingrad<\/a>.<\/p>\n Kevin Mitchell, visiting Hofsgrund with his father, Max, whose late brother Hubert had survived the hike, said he felt a great sense of satisfaction. \u201cMost of us had the big picture, but the pleasure has been in the minutiae we\u2019ve been able to share.\u201d<\/p>\n In a video message from Perth, Australia, Debra Cadee, the daughter of Donald Hooke, another survivor, said: \u201cI can remember Dad telling us \u2018the tolling of the bells saved us\u2019.\u201d She said he suffered from the effects of frostbite for the rest of his life.<\/p>\n The local mayor, Klaus Vosberg, has promised that Jack Eaton\u2019s father\u2019s inscription \u2013 \u201ctheir teacher failed them in the hour of trial\u201d \u2013 will soon be re-engraved on the monument.<\/p>\n Whelan said: \u201cAfter nine decades, I feel my family\u2019s painful attempts to get to the truth have finally paid off.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On 17 April 1936, the bells of St Laurentius church in the Black Forest rang out to guide…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":549721,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-549720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=549720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549720\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/549721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=549720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=549720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=549720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Relatives](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Hikers_on_the_way_to_Hofsgrund--43c94b47-8dee-466c-b5ba-3e803128741d-1.0.0000000.jpg\")
Relatives and Hofsgrund villagers retrace the boys’ footsteps on the Schauinsland mountain<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/A_memorial_cross_outside_Hofsgrund--ac7a09d9-0fcf-4e5b-b026-a3365a6eaa11-1.0.0000000.jpg\")
A memorial cross to Jack Eaton and fellow pupils who died on the hike overlooking Hofsgrund<\/p>\n