The Subject of Religion

This is the appropriate time to discuss father and his religious beliefs.  Why?  Because you have to remember earlier I told you about father converting to Judaism before marrying Monika, the young female prisoner he had met while interned at Wöbbelin.  So father was circumcised and this knowledge may have lead to a mis-identification of him by the US military.

To the US Military they had a quandary on their hands.   Father was known to have escaped from the advancing Russians, placing him on the east side of the Elbe River.  He was Jewish, that was obviously apparent from his medical examination.  Jewish, eastern Europe, survivor.  That pretty limited him to Nordhausen or Mittelbau.  But, was it possible to have escaped the SS carnage the US Army had discovered before the Russians had advanced on the Mittelbau complex?  This also meant he was a scientist or at the least science labor.  He had to have been familiar with the rocket programs.  So, his enigmatic past drew attention to him he really did not want.  Could it be there was anyone whom could be found whom knew him before his marriage to mother?

Father was really born into a Lutheran family in the small town of Munchstein, in Baslestadt, Switzerland.  The year he ran away from home, to join the Nazi cause, was also the year he went through Lutheran confirmation.  His family, and the church's pastors, all believed father was destined to join the priesthood.

Those Lutheran beliefs were obviously killed by the war - he saw what Lutherans were capable of - first hand.  His conversion to Judaism I am fairly certain was completely based on his sense of national and personal guilt.  What happened in the concentration camps was to have quite an impact on all of Germany and all whom I grew up with.  (And, yes, I understand that it was not the Lutherans whom were running the Nazi Party, but this was HIS take on the situation!  In truth, 7.5 million Christians were sent to the concentration camps for opposing Hitlers agenda.)

Father still held to his Judaism.  When I was born he personally brought in a Rabbi from Sacramento, California to see to my circumcision, on the eighth day, as required.  I was unable to be taken out the hospital for the first several months of life.  Babies of extra young mothers have a great many challenges in just surviving.

As I grew up, father taught me the Law of Moses, how to pray - in Yiddish, God's language of course!, and with a firm understanding that there is God - but you really do not want to know Him since he is not a very good god to his people.  I should say that part was beaten into me more than anything.

As I grew older, into teenage hood, father and mother clashed more and more over religion and food, eventually this brought about their divorce.  But we can look into that episode much later!

Following his divorce from my mother, father became an outright atheist.  Except he knew there was a God, he just did not what any part of him any longer.  So, perhaps it would be best to categorize father as a gnostic for the final fifty years of his life.  And, my becoming a Christian was about the final straw for him concerning me.....

Joining The Military

So, for whatever reason, the sandwich shop failed and father took his friend's advice and joined the military.  I do not know where his basic training was at but I do know that mother went back to live with grandmother on the houseboat opposite Swan Island in Portland.

Having completed his basic training, father was stationed temporarily at a base in California - where I was then born.  Under the US laws I was born under, if your father was foreign and you were born on Federal property - not US soil - you were not granted automatic citizenship.  So, I was born a German citizen, since this was father's nationality at the time.  The state of California, wondering how to register the birth, ended up issuing me a permanent voter's registration card!  But, no birth certificate.  The hospital on the base issued me a live birth card, stipulating me foreign born - and a female.  (Thank you, you worthless military typist!)

Anyways, that little distinction - Federal property - not US soil, was to haunt me until I was 20, when I finally went through naturalization - even though I WAS a US citizen according to the US agreement father signed.  So, that closed that problem, mostly!

Probably the greatest of father's inabilities was the lack of knowledge as to how people behave.  He judged all by the standard of himself and though he was a world class liar, he was never sneaky.  A very odd combination.  You could not trust his words but you could his motives and actions.  If your life was in his hands, he would lose his first to save you (not me, I'm the troubled son, remember?).  Weird.

So, had father of been of just even average knowledge concerning human behavior, he would have looked at his first post and wondered - "Why am I here?"  Why would a foreign national have immediate access to weapons of mass destruction?  Had he of thought about it - he would have realized he was being tested and set up for the next step in the devious US plot to draw him out into the open.

But, in any event, father was shortly to find himself in hot water with the US Government.  We can call this one Cold War paranoia, however this time it was for all Germans in the US employ.....

And, I now am at a bit of a breaking point.  So far I have been fairly free to write about father's life - however, his work for the US Government was very hush-hush and I have no desire to go through yet ANOTHER citizenship hearing, with the threat of being deported - again!  So, we will ignore a great deal of father's professional life.  Sorry, I am not going to tell you how to build weapons of mass destruction - go to the library and read up on it, everybody else does.  Though you may find that libraries are more accessible on such subjects in other countries than in the US....