As the “mayor” of his Colorado Springs retirement home, Jim Osburn makes it his job to welcome each new arrival at the Inn at Garden Plaza.
Earlier this month, this custom brought him face to face with Hans Ressdorf, a 92-year-old retired contractor with shrewd eyes, a thick German accent and an incredible past.
“I was a German soldier,” Ressdorf told Osburn as they sat down to lunch.
“Tell me more,” said Osburn, 87, a World War II veteran with a story of his own.
Over the course of the meal, the men were stunned to learn of the experiences they shared, albeit from opposing sides in a global conflict.
Both were inexperienced young officers. Both saw their men overrun during the Battle of the Bulge. Both nearly starved as prisoners of war waiting for the war to end. And more than 60 years later, here both were in Colorado Springs, combatants-turned-neighbors in a home where a two-bedroom apartment goes for $4,000 a month and residents enjoy gourmet meals, a putting green and Sunday afternoon ice cream socials.
“It’s interesting how life tosses you around,” said Ressdorf, who moves slowly with the help of a walker.
“Only in America,” Osburn answered warmly.
Ressdorf’s oxygen tank hissed rhythmically one recent morning while the pair recounted their experiences, occasionally shaking their heads in empathy and chuckling over their shared past.
Osburn retired as an Army major in 1961 and settled with his family in Colorado Springs, where he worked as a teacher’s aide in Colorado Springs School District 11 and in real estate. He said he knew early on he wanted to serve in the military.
A native of Fayetteville, Ark., he signed up with the Arkansas National Guard at the age of 17 and left high school when his unit was mobilized in the middle of his senior year. Later, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant and assigned as a forward observer in an all-black artillery battery.
He landed on French soil a month after D-Day, and fought through the French provinces of Normandy and Brittany and into Belgium. But his wartime experience was defined by the Battle of the Bulge, the six-week campaign that eventually broke the German Army, at a cost of some 20,000 American lives.
Osburn was captured on Dec. 16, 1944. For more than four months, he struggled to survive as a POW. By the time he was liberated on May 2, 1945, he had been shelled by Americans, held in an explosives-lined bunker — rigged to explode should Allied forces attack — and nearly starved to death during a days-long ordeal in which he was crammed into a stationary box car with scores of other American prisoners.
Ressdorf, for his part, said he never wanted a life in the military.
As a boy, his family moved to Brazil, and he and his brothers were put to work on a coffee plantation. He returned to Germany as teenager intending to train as an architect, but the German Army got to him first.
He, too, was captured — in Belgium in 1944. Upon his release, Ressdorf returned to Germany and assisted the Americans with the Berlin Airlift that dropped supplies to West Berlin amid a tense confrontation with the Soviet Union.
By his account, he impressed American officers, and they were instrumental in arranging his immigration to the U.S.
In the 1970s he moved to Colorado Springs, where he raised two stepchildren with his second wife and had a career in construction.
