I Had An Interesting Talk Yesterday....

[PA Reb]

..... with an elderly woman whom I treated in the hospital. She had an obvious accent which I immediately took as possibly German so I asked her where she was from. Her reply, "Munich". Being a curious person that loves to study the American Civil War and WW II, I asked her what year she was born and when she came to the U.S. Her answer, "I was born in Munich in 1928 and I came to the states in 1953". Now my curiosity is really peaked so I immediately asked if she lived in Munich during WW II. She told me she did and then began to tell me story after story of what it was like living under those conditions and what it was like when the allies began arriving at Germany's doorstep. She was tearful by the time she got to the woman she saw running from bombers and fighters straifing the city. "I watched that poor woman running and then all of a sudden, her head was blown clean off her body". She also told me about bombs falling everywhere and how her mother would quickly get everyone into their cellar. She went on about a bomb hitting very close to their house which started it on fire and eventually burned it to the ground. She ended by telling me that "Hitler was pure evil and the world had better wise up and be very careful"! It seems to me this little old lady not only remembers the past very well but can also see into the future.

I'll be seeing her again today but this time I'm going to ask her if she would like to talk into a digital voice recorder for me over the next few months and tell me more of her story when she feels like doing so. I'm so hoping she says yes because just as our WW II veterans are quickly leaving us, so are the civilian witnesses who survived to tell their tale.

 

[DeathGrip]

I sure hope she's willing to tell more. My wife's from Germany and would appreciate the history lesson from someone that was there.

They didn't teach much about that time in history in German schools. That or she was at the Beer Garden that week.

 

[feralmerril]

I had a girl friend also from germany but her mind blotted it all out. She was from berlin and born I think, in sept of 1941. I was born april 41. I remember a little of it, all my uncles comeing home etc. She claims she doesnt remember any of it and says her mind blotted it out.
Her father was a prisoner in the gulags of siberia and amoung the very last released around 1953 or so. I had another girl friend that was english but older than me. I belive she was born in new castle. Her dad was killed flying a spit and her mother was killed by the bombing. I met fighter pilot at lockheed that was a rep for rolls royce on our engines on the old L-10-11s. We got talking and I told him about martine`s history. She lived just down the street from the victers plant. He almost broke down! He was in that very action and said one german bomber did get through them and the bomb killed some people near the plant! Small world! Martine was raised in boarding schools. She died of cancer at my house december of 1997.

 

[ozo]

Wow.....this is enjoyable.....not the events...
the history being told....
It just made me think.....
Fifty years from now..what kind of history
will be told in stories from the old timers ?

I so hope she continues with her stories and
you get to record them.
Please pass us some more as you acquire.

 

[Roadtrash]

I know when I was in Germany back in the 60's most of the German people would not talk about the war, pro or con. I found an old coin on the side walk one day that had the swastika on it and when I would show it to a German they would draw back like I was holding a snake or something. I think that it was still a very painful subject to them and they were afraid to talk about it.

If you can get the lady to talk about it I think you will learn a lot about how the real German people felt about Hitler and his regime. Most were not for it but you either went along or suffered the consequences. Tape it or write it down and I am sure you will find some great stories and also some heartbreaking ones as well.

 

[steveno]

I was in Germany at Rhein Mein AB from 1970 - 1973. I learned very quickly that unless topic of the war came from a German you was talking to you did not bring it up first. there was a lot of Germans that worked on base and most of the men were of about the right age that they probably were in the German army at least towards the end of the war

 

[feralmerril]

I once was talking to a german bar maid. Cant remember how it come up but I said the word "swastika". She asked me what that word meant! When I drew it she said das ist a halk unt crutz. (Hook and cross.) She had never heard it called a swastika before! She claimed it is not a german word! And she was about my age!

 

[diamonback68]

My wife was born and raised in Bremerhaven and Osnabruck (grampaw's safe house) during the war and came here in '53. She had two houses blown off above her head during WWII. Her mom and dad divorced once and remarried. After the second house in Bremerhaven was destroyed she remembers ending up on a street corner, under the only streetlight for miles and her mother had her in hand and her father had one surviving lamp in his hand. They looked at each other and said "Why start over again". Mother and my wife went one way and her dad and the lamp went the other way and she never saw him again. We later found out in 2003 he survived, remarried and lived to 95. She had tried many times over the years to contact him, but he never returned her requests. We were there in 2003 and twice more and tried to talk to his widow and two half brothers, but they would have none of it. We think they feared inheritance issues, but we never needed or wanted anything from them, just talk. So sad!

 

[BearBio]

I once had a supervisor who was a German Jew. He remembered Hitler speaking at his school. He was on a working vacation in England when Germany invaded Poland. His parents told him not to come home.

One of the most moving memories I have in my life is meeting his mother. Neither of us mentioned it but I noticed a series of numbers peeking out from her sleeve.

 

[itslucky]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCmoAhMKaco

Stalin's army of rapists: The brutal war crime that Russia and Germany tried to ignore | Mail Online

 

[feralmerril]

In my first post that I referred to german lady friend, the rest of the story: When her father got off the train she said her dad was dressed like a executive and was robust. His fellow prisioners were in rags and looked near death. The russians had obvisely got to him. Her mother immediately divoriced him. The russians gave him a high goverment post in east berlin. She lived in west berlin. While she did get to see him a few times growing up their relationship was icey. She has a brother that admired him and is now retired as a officer in the army and still lives there.

 

[Beemerguy53]

One of my best friends, Peter, is a first generation American, the son of a German mother and a Latvian father...

His mother, Frieda, was born in Oldenburg, in far northwestern Germany, in 1914. (She just celebrated her 98th birthday!) When she was just a few months old, her father was killed in World War I. In 1939 she married a Luftwaffe bomber pilot. He flew a Dornier 17 and then a Heinkel 111, and was killed in action on the Russian front in 1943. In the four years they were married, they were together for only four months.

She has many memories, and many stories, about the war. She talks about the Americans bombing by day, and the English bombing by night. She remembers taking shelter in a doorway one day during a bombing raid, and hearing a loud "thud"; there, just a few yards away, was an unexploded bomb sticking in the street!

Early in the war, her husband, Walter, was shot down over Holland, and broke his leg when his bomber crash-landed. While he was in the hospital recuperating, he was visited by Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Nazi governor of occupied Holland. Seyss-Inquart gave Walter a book, and inscribed and autographed it; Frieda still has it. In 1946, Seyss-Inquart was convicted of war crimes at Nuremburg and executed.

Frieda has Walter's scrapbook from the war. It's filled with photos of him and his squadron mates training, relaxing, reading, etc. There are photos of him with his airplane, and his dog, and in traction in his hospital bed in Holland. It looks like something any young man in any military unit might compose...except for the large swastika embossed on the cover.

When the war was ending, and the handwriting was on the wall, Frieda says they were all terrified that the Russians would invade Oldenburg, and she was so relieved that the Canadians and British got there first.

Peter's father, Harjis, was a veterinary medicine student at the University of Riga, in Latvia, when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. After driving the Russians out of Latvia, the Germans drafted young Latvians into the Wehrmacht, and Harjis spent the rest of the war fighting on the Russian front. As Peter puts it, his father did not enlist in the German army...but it didn't take much to get a Latvian kid to shoot Russians!

Harjis, who passed away several years ago, spoke occasionally about how hard it was to fight in Russia. The winters were brutal. He said if they needed a place to sit, they would stack dead bodies -- which were frozen and could not be buried -- like cordwood and sit on them. On one occasion, he was riding a horse (he was in a cavalry unit) when a mortar attack started. A shell landed under the horse, and blew it up, leaving Harjis sitting on the ground in his saddle, uninjured. At some point, he was awared an Iron Cross for attacking and single-handedly destroying a Russian machinegun nest.

At the end of the war, Harjis and his men (he was a Sergeant then) sought out and surrendered to an American unit; if the Russians had gotten them, they would have been killed on the spot. He was interned in a Displaced Persons camp in Oldenburg, which is where he met the young war widow Frieda. They were married in 1947, and landed in New York aboard an old Liberty Ship in 1951, when Frieda was pregnant with Peter.

Talking to Harjis and Frieda over the years has been a real experience; the war was indeed the central defining event in their lives, and they've never been able to put it behind them. Even today, at 98 years old, almost anything can prompt Frieda to call up some story or anecdote from that era. (Having seen what ultimately happened in Germany, she is wary of anything that smacks of socialism, and she is especially leery of glib politicians who make vague promises of hope and change to their people.) She's like a living history lesson, and she offers a perspective on the war that most Americans have never heard.

 

[LedFowl]

My neighbor, born on a Polish farm, was a forced laborer during his teen years at a WWII German refinery. He worked with an American of German descent who had been trapped in Germany when the war began, and gave him many small but meaningful kindnesses, as well as performing acts of sabotage. This American was later sent to the eastern front.

At war's end my neighbor came to the U.S., served in the Air Force and later graduated from college. He worked many years for a military contractor.

 

[Sprefix]

Some great reading here. I, too, am interested in the Wars. It amazes me what people can force others to do. When it gets down to it, you find out how far your mind and body can take you, and what it can endure.

 

[pilgrim6a]

Hildi is my friend John's mom.
She told this story.
"When I was 9 years old the German Army retreated through my village. When they left there was no food. The next morning the Americans came. I was scared. They had told us that all Americans were mad killers from the prisons of America. A big, dirty, smelly soldier came up to me. He opened his pack and gave me his rations. I looked around and saw that all the Americans were giving their own food to the villagers.
I promised myself that when I grew up I would marry an American."
She did.
When someone hears her talk and asks where she's from she tells them. "I was not born here but I AM an AMERICAN, because I CHOOSE to be An AMERICAN!"
I don't have to say this but Hildi is one of My Favorite People.

 

[cmort666]

For the most part, the Germans seem to have accepted their recent past and while not eager (except for academics and a few leftists) to talk about it, admit to what happened.

Contrast this with the Japanese whose general interpretation of the war often seems to be, "We were minding our own business building Honda Accords when the United States dropped a couple of atomic bombs on us. We don't know why."

Most defenses of and excuse making for Nazi Germany seem to come from OUTSIDE Germany, mainly the usual suspects (neo-Nazis), plus those like Pat Buchanan who hate Britain (and Winston Churchill in particular) so much, that they're willing to deny, excuse or justify pretty much anything.

 

[Bullzaye]

I once was talking to a german bar maid. Cant remember how it come up but I said the word "swastika". She asked me what that word meant! When I drew it she said das ist a halk unt crutz. (Hook and cross.) She had never heard it called a swastika before! She claimed it is not a german word! And she was about my age!

It's not a German word. The symbol has been used by several ancient civilizations for centuries. Aside from the term "swastika", it's also been called crooked cross, hook cross, tetraskelion, gammadion, angled cross, and cross cramponned. It's been used in India in Hinduism and Buddhism, it has been used in Celtic, Slavic, Germanic, Finnish and numerous other ancient European cultures...as far back as thousands of years before Christ. It also appears often in American Indian artifacts.

The Nazis just happen to be the more recent, and least savory, of it's users. They didn't invent it, and they don't "own" it.

Tim

 

[Engineer1911]

Fifteen years ago, I saw a swastika on an Oklahoma ranch sign identifying the ranch's brand. The sign further explained that they had been branding cattle since 1905. They didn't have any prairie dogs!

 

[gdauth]

Check out Oral History Association.

 

[Gamecock]

"I watched that poor woman running and then all of a sudden, her head was blown clean off her body".

I had a GF years ago who's mother was a teenager in Quedlinburg during the war. I tried to talk with her about the War, but she would have none of it. I had an extreme academic interest; it was too terribly personal for her.

She did tell me that her 15-year old best friend, sitting in a window knitting, was shot to death by an American fighter plane. Telling me that fighter pilots targeted civilians. I was bothered at first, but later rationalized that there was no difference between dropping bombs on them and shooting them directly.

BTW, GF confided to me that her mother still hates Jews. OP,
if the subject of Jews comes up, you may be shocked by what the lady says.