Christmas celebrations have changed and evolved since the birth of Christ nearly two thousand years ago, but one thing remains constant – the desire for peace.

For Christians, Jesus’ birth was the beginning of making peace between God and mankind. The cultural celebrations of Christmas that have developed over the course of centuries reflect that wish for peace. We hear it in Christmas carols, we wish each other “peace on earth,” and we try to hold on to some kind of serenity while kids open presents while devouring more cookies than they really should.

Of course, Americans have not always sought peace on Christmas Day. The most famous example of this is the Battle of Trenton during the American Revolution, when then-General George Washington crossed the icy Delaware River to attack the Hessian forces right after their Christmas celebrations, 249 years ago today.

But equally famous are the moments when Christmas peace could be found even in the midst of world wars. The Christmas truce of 1914, near the beginning of World War I, is the most well-known example of “peace on earth” being sought by both sides on a large scale.

By the time winter approached in 1914, and the chill set in, the Western Front stretched hundreds of miles. Countless soldiers were living in misery in the trenches on the fronts, while tens of thousands had already died.

Then Christmas came.

Descriptions of the Christmas Truce appear in numerous diaries and letters of the time. One British soldier, a rifleman named J. Reading, wrote a letter home to his wife describing his holiday experience in 1914: “My company happened to be in the firing line on Christmas eve, and it was my turn…to go into a ruined house and remain there until 6:30 on Christmas morning. During the early part of the morning the Germans started singing and shouting, all in good English. They shouted out: ‘Are you the Rifle Brigade; have you a spare bottle; if so we will come half way and you come the other half.’”

“Later on in the day they came towards us,” Reading described. “And our chaps went out to meet them…I shook hands with some of them, and they gave us cigarettes and cigars. We did not fire that day, and everything was so quiet it seemed like a dream.”

Another British soldier, named John Ferguson, recalled it this way: “Here we were laughing and chatting to men whom only a few hours before we were trying to kill!”

Other diaries and letters describe German soldiers using candles to light Christmas trees around their trenches. One German infantryman described how a British soldier set up a makeshift barbershop, charging Germans a few cigarettes each for a haircut. Other accounts describe vivid scenes of men helping enemy soldiers collect their dead, of which there was plenty.

Gradually, news of the Christmas Truce made it into the press. “Christmas has come and gone—certainly the most extraordinary celebration of it any of us will ever experience,” one soldier wrote in a letter that appeared in The Irish Times on January 15, 1915. He described a “large crowd of officers and men, English and German, grouped around the [dead] bodies, which had been gathered together and laid out in rows.” The Germans, this British soldier said, “were quite affable.”

Just how many soldiers participated in these informal holiday gatherings has been debated; there is no way to know for sure since the ceasefires were small-scale, haphazard and entirely unauthorized. A Time magazine story on the 100 anniversary claimed that as many as 100,000 people took part.

Unfortunately, there would never again be a Christmas truce of that scale again. And during World War II, one of the most intense and well-known battles – The Battle of the Bulge – took place over Christmas of 1944. But apparently there was a brief and fleeting moment of Christmas peace and a temporary truce between three American soldiers and four German soldiers – brokered by one woman, and recalled by her son decades later. This account was published in Reader’s Digest in 1973, and then condensed and republished via the American Battle Monuments Commission (their work regarding American military cemeteries can be read about here) in 2020.

This is the story of Fritz Vincken, a young German boy at the time of the battle. Fritz, then 12-years-old, had moved with his mother to a small cottage in the Huertgen forest after their hometown of Aachen was partially destroyed in an earlier American offensive. The area had stayed quiet until nine days before Christmas, when the German Ardennes Offensive had crashed through the area. According to Fritz, “we heard the incessant booming of field guns; planes soared continuously overhead; at night searchlights stabbed through the darkness.”

On Christmas Eve, 1944, Fritz and his mother answered a knock at the door — three American soldiers, one badly wounded, were standing there. While the Vinckens did not speak English nor the Americans German, they were able to communicate to a limited extent in French. Fritz’s mother invited the Americans inside and attempted to make them comfortable. Fritz remembered:

“We learned that the stocky, dark-haired fellow was Jim; his friend, tall and slender, was Robin. Harry, the wounded one, was now sleeping on my bed, his face as white as the snow outside. They’d lost their battalion and had wandered in the forest for three days, looking for the Americans, and hiding from the Germans. They hadn’t shaved, but still, without their heavy coats, they looked merely like big boys. And that was the way Mother began to treat them.”

Fritz’s mother made a meal of potatoes and a rooster, previously being saved for a reunion with Fritz’s father. As they cooked, there was a second knock on the door:

“Expecting to find more lost Americans, I opened the door without hesitation. There stood four soldiers, wearing uniforms quite familiar to me after five years of war. They were Wehrmacht – Germans! I was paralyzed with fear. Although still a child, I knew the harsh law: sheltering enemy soldiers constituted high treason. We could all be shot!”

The corporal leading the German patrol told Fritz’s mother, “we have lost our regiment and would like to wait for daylight…can we rest here?”

“Of course,” she replied, “you can also have a fine, warm meal and eat ‘til the pot is empty. But, we have three other guests, whom you may not consider friends. This is Christmas Eve, and there will be no shooting here.”

The corporal demanded, “Who is inside? Amerikaner?”

Fritz’s mother replied, “Listen. You could be my sons, and so could they in there. A boy with a gunshot wound, fighting for his life, and his two friends, lost like you and just as hungry and exhausted as you are. This one night, this Christmas night, let us forget about killing.”

The Germans stacked their arms by the door, and after a quick conversation in French the startled Americans also turned over their weapons to Fritz’s mother. The entire mixed group, somewhat tensely, sat down and shared dinner. According to Fritz:

“Relaxation was now beginning to replace suspicion. Even to me, all the soldiers looked very young as we sat there together. Heinz and Willi, both from Cologne, were 16. There German corporal, at 23, was the oldest of them all. From his food bag he drew out a bottle of red wine, and Heinz managed to find a loaf of rye bread. Mother cut that in small pieces to be served with the dinner; half the wine, however, she put away, ‘for the wounded boy.’ Then Mother said grace. I noticed that there were tears in her eyes as she said the old, familiar words, ‘Komm, Herr Jesus. Be our guest.’ And as I looked around the table, I saw tears, too, in the eyes of the battle-weary soldiers, boys again, some from America, some from Germany, all far from home. Just before midnight, Mother went to the doorstep and asked us to join her to look up at the Star of Bethlehem. We all stood beside her except Harry, who was sleeping. For all of us during the moment of silence, looking at the brightest star in the heavens, the war was a distant, almost-forgotten thing.”

The truce held through the morning, Christmas Day, when the two sets of soldiers shook hands and departed, each headed back to their own army.

A pdf of the original story can be read here, and the story has satisfying conclusion, according to War History Online:

Just before World War II came to an end, Fritz Vincken’s father, Hubert, returned home to his family. In 1959, he emigrated to the United States and opened a bakery in Honolulu, Hawaii. While building a life for himself in the US, he always remembered the soldiers he met on Christmas Eve 1944 and the mini truce that had occurred in that small cottage in the Hürtgen Forest.

In 1953(sic), aware his chances of seeing the men again were slim, Fritz published his story in Reader’s Digest, an article US President Ronald Reagan referenced in 1985. Nine years later, he appeared on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries (1987-2002), intending to bring his story to a wider audience.

The television appearance worked, with a nursing home chaplain in Frederick, Maryland, contacting the producers of Unsolved Mysteries to inform them of a resident who’d served with the 121st Infantry Regiment, 8th Infantry Division during WWII. Fritz flew to Maryland and met Ralph H. Blank, who, at 76, was in poor health.

Their reunion was captured on camera, with Ralph telling him that his “mother saved my life,” indicating he was the “Harry” in Fritz’s story. Following their meeting, he told the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, “Now I can die in peace. My mother’s courage won’t be forgotten and it shows that goodwill will do.”

The story has been made into short films at least twice, once in 1977 and once in 2015.

This singular story from the Battle of the Bulge, where both sides called a truce for the sake of one woman and her plea for peace on Christmas, should be more widely known. It isn’t on the grand scale of 1914, and it doesn’t evoke the daring risk of the Battle of Trenton, but it speaks to the desires of the human heart. Let there be peace on earth.

This Christmas, may all find and treasure some measure of peace, either in their own hearts, between themselves and others, or between themselves and God.

Featured image: American soldiers of the 289th Infantry Regiment in Belgium, January 1945, via Wikimedia Commons through the National Archives, cropped, public domain

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