All Those TDYs

Father was gone so much of the time from 1962 on, that one is forced to consider what it was the government had him up to!  You can look at world events, look backwards in history later on, as well as, note interesting occurrences. In this case, occurrences may have more of a clue than usual and we knew almost instantly what was up once the German State Police raided the village!

I was in training to be a long distance runner, so every morning I was out the door at 5 am for a cross-country training practice at mother's insistance.  Make no mistake, this was not my idea.  But, there was a little shoemaker about half way through my run and I would spend several minutes with him every morning to keep my time average high for mother's records.  He was a very nice man.  Lets call him Hans.

Hans was in this later sixties, sort of a broken man I would call him.  He knew almost nothing of the village history and carefully avoided all wartime discussions.  He made himself more interesting than he should have been.

One Saturday morning, even before the cows were up, I ran past Hans' and noticed the shop in disarray, with no Hans.  I ran for the Police.  Not the friendliest people in town but they were honest and reliable.   The Sargent was ash white when I told him Hans was missing.  Within minutes, before I could even get out the door - there were several calls concerning missing citizens.  The Sargent understood what I could not fathom.  I jogged back past the shop and now the State Police were there and I was instantly detained for being "of interest".

One of the patrolmen sat and told me about how they were hunting Nazi war criminals and Hans had been one of those being sought.  I then repeated how I had reported Hans' absence to the local police and had over heard of missing people all over the Pfaltz....  The officer swore, ran for the door and quickly sped away.

I quietly re-entered Hans' little shop and remembered the humor and fun we had enjoyed.  I have always had the utmost respect for my elders, because they were interesting and I saw value in their knowledge.  I saw Hans had dropped a vest pocket wallet, which I picked up.  I burned the photos and papers inside, to his memory and perhaps protection.  I kept his SS Identification, dated August 1944, issued in Odessa.

Father moved us from the village to military housing following this.  There are no coincidences in life, one did not have to search far to find a similar SS Id Card carefully hidden amongst my father's papers.  This I followed up with also collecting my uncle Fritz's as well.  The three of them I imagine make quite a unique collection.  I have yet to see even one, even in photographs on the internet.  Hmmmmmm.....

However, this post is not about outlawed SS organizations, it is about the SS funding rocket research with the Egyptians in order to hasten the removal of the Jewish State in 1962 through 1967.  Egypt finally went with the Russian Scud missile as its offensive deterrent to the Jewish "aggression".  Nasser was nothing if not a scum bag himself.

As for father?  That is a pretty easy one: he and his fellow team from the V-3 (A-9) were all in on the project.  They all had the backgrounds, were all German and the three also had the nuclear background - because a missile has to deliver something!  Was the US Military Intelligence involved?  Was father and his friends all on contract to the Mossad?  Military to CIA to Mossad?  Certainly, enough of their co-workers met with horrible deaths back in Germany.  Makes you wonder about their absences and whom exactly was fingering German Nationals and European suppliers.....  Someone was feeding the Mossad and father was a Jewish convert after all.  To further add to the discussion, he received his second Bronze Star just after the missiles failed to launch in 1967 War.

Monika

I know very little about Monika.  I know she was Jewish and had been a prisoner at the Wöbbelin labor camp outside of Hamburg.  Her presence here means she had been originally held in the Auschwitz complex, and was one of the 10,000 women transferred to Wöbbelin.  Seems there had been a female uprising at Auschwitz, with one of the oven buildings destroyed by smuggled munitions being dumped into it.  Those whom could be identified as complicit with the bombing were executed, others scattered to various camps.  Further, her presence in Auschwitz, meant she was originally from a conquered territory.  Dutch, French, or even a Sudetenland Jew are all possibilities.  Since she stayed in Germany after the war, I will go with her being a Sudetenland German Jew.

These were the only women to have been at Wöbbelin.  I know that father met her here.

In my research I have managed to find exactly 5 photos of females whom were held at Wöbbelin; three of them are of the same woman.  Quite photogenic considering what she had gone through and young.  If anything, father was always drawn to light haired, small, young women.  Could this have been Monika?  Absolutely no idea, but given father's taste in women, a darn good candidate.  As you will see for yourself much later in my postings, ALL of father's wives were not so far removed from this young lady's appearance.  Too much coincidence here for me to believe!  I think he kept marrying Monika.

I have mentioned already that father was haunted by what the SS had done at Middelbau-Dora and Nordhausen, and what he saw.  I sincerely doubt father had much interaction with the prisoner population, other than the prisoner scientists.  But, he probably "knew" many whom were working on the A-9/V-3 project.

So, father is fleeing from the advancing Soviet Army and expects to find shelter at the underground complex.  Only, everyone is dead.  Well, the prison population anyways, the Germans were long gone.  People he "knew" and saw daily had been gunned down, some had been hung.  On the road in he had to have traveled, he would have come across the smoldering remains of a barn which had been stuffed with the "final solution" helpers - some 1,016 prisoners whom had helped and were rewarded with the fiery death of a barn burning by their SS keepers and those whom got out were gunned down as well.

At Nordhausen, where the scientist prisoners had been housed, the camp had been deserted.  Hundreds of bodies lay where they had been felled.  And we will look at this later on.

But, point is, these were the Jews.  He saw first hand the Reich's ruthlessness in dealing with the Jewish question.  It was not a matter of killing those whom could help their enemies, which he could have understood.  No, it was killing Jews, because of who they were.  Genocide was a new concept for him to come to terms with as a teenager in the camp.  In all honesty, he never was able to understand how his Fuhrer could have done this - "..... no, this must have been on orders from someone in the General Staff....".  Always protecting the Fuhrer.....

And then he was to meet a Jewish girl, one of the prisoners for her faith, and discovered that maybe Jews were human after all.  And knowing the way in which my father thought, he saw in her his ability to atone for what his chosen country had done.  He married her.

But, first he had to convert to Judaism himself, a Rabbi found - whom were a little scarce by this time and he had to have some form of support.  I like to think of her as sort of a female version of Daniel, standing for her faith even in the ruins of her life.  I will talk about these things later.

And he did convert, did marry and you guessed it - later abandoned Monika.

I only knew her through her letters.  She wrote father weekly, through the entirety of my young life.  She lived in Frankfurt and that was about all I can say.  When the internet became a reality, I spent many hours a year sifting through all of the Monika's living in the Frankfurt area and eventually did find her - about three months after she had died.  She had never remarried, which I found a little interesting - until I realized there had never been a divorce filing!

I also found she had a daughter, my half sister, and was very surprised she had been named for father's mother.  I thought about striking up a long distance relationship with her - but to what end?  What can you say to someone whom shared the same father, and she had been too young to even have a memory of him?  "Hi, I am your half brother and never knew our father either."  Yeah.  I am guessing the daughter was told he had died.  It would have been far more comforting than the truth.

And I know, as a post-war child of Germany myself, there were darn few children and even fewer men in my village.  No reason to assume Frankfurt was any different.  One thing war is good for is leaving a lot of widows and fatherless children behind.

So, if you are reading this and you are of Hebrew extraction, named Martha, had a mother named Monika - email me! 

Wöbbelin

To me, it is almost a sacrilege to even add comments to these pictures of the Wöbbelin Concentration Camp.  As a German, I have been appalled by the actions of my countrymen.  Lots of excuses but no sound reasons for what they did, save for as a group, they abandoned their Lutheran upbringing to cause chaos and destruction on a scale I hope to never encounter again in my lifetime.

I post these in hopes that by knowing what happened, you too will strive to do what you can to see that politicians are never again trusted with sufficient power to ever repeat what was done to Europe from 1933 to 1948.

*****

On May 2, 1945, the 8th Infantry Division and the 82nd Airborne Division encountered Wöbbelin. Living conditions in the camp when the U.S. 8th Infantry and the 82nd Airborne arrived were deplorable. There was little food or water and some prisoners had resorted to cannibalism. When the units arrived, they found about 1,000 inmates dead in the camp. In the aftermath, the U.S. Army ordered the townspeople in Ludwigslust to visit the camp and bury the dead.

 

200 Found Dead in 1 Barracks

The Dead and the Dying Found Together

Compulsory Viewing

On May 7, 1945, the 82nd Airborne Division conducted funeral services for 200 inmates in the town of Ludwigslust. Attending the ceremony were citizens of Ludwigslust, captured German officers, and several hundred members of the airborne division. The U.S. Army chaplain at the service delivered a eulogy stating that:

    "The crimes here committed in the name of the German people and by their acquiescence were minor compared to those to be found in concentration camps elsewhere in Germany. Here there were no gas chambers, no crematoria; these men of Holland, Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and France were simply allowed to starve to death. Within four miles of your comfortable homes 4,000 men were forced to live like animals, deprived even of the food you would give to your dogs. In three weeks 1,000 of these men were starved to death; 800 of them were buried in pits in the nearby woods. These 200 who lie before us in these graves were found piled four and five feet high in one building and lying with the sick and dying in other buildings."

The Funeral Service

The 200 Graves

The death register at Neuengamme indicates that about 40,000 prisoners died in the camp by April 10, 1945. Perhaps as many as 15,000 more died in the camp in the following week and during the course of the evacuation. In all, more than 50,000 prisoners, almost half of all those imprisoned in the camp complex during its existence, died.

Beds made of barbed wire, rags and straw

Forced labor

The Survivors.....

This is the heritage, the legacy, left to those of us whom are the next generation of Germans.  Yeah, try growing up as a child in a country destroyed by war, a heritage of racism and an occupation force willing to make your life miserable because your forefathers deserved execution.   Yeah, as a child, it was galling.

The Internment Population

The internment population of the Wöbbelin repatronization camp, outside of Hamburg, had to have been very interesting.  First, you had refugees from the complete destruction of Hamburg via its firebombing.  Then you had captured soldiers.  And, finally, there were people like father whom were caught fleeing the Russian advance.

For those of you whom do not know of what life was like during the Cold War:

• There was no internet nor its abundant supply of information available
• Most of the documents captured by the Soviets were held until just recently.
• Britain and Canada sealed their repatronization files and are still not available.
• The Red Cross lost most of its European documents in the bombings.
• Even the Lutheran Church's records were sparse beyond just names of people and towns.

So, it was very hard to mine the information about father, except for what he was willing to talk about.  And, talk he did but on things he should have had NO knowledge of.

Which brings us to the point that he must have been able to gain a great deal of knowledge during his internment years from first hand witnesses.

Case in point is knowledge of Breslau.  This an old German city in what is now Wroclaw, Poland.  Father decided that this was the city of his birth - since he was able to learn of the destruction of both the University and the city hall (along with all records).  This allowed him to begin to fabricate a new identity.  You have to remember he was still convinced that he would be turned over to the Americans and executed.  And Poland did not exist back then.  So, safety for him - with a story which could never be verified.

Someone in either the British or the Canadian camp had to have been from Breslau.  Someone whom was released early on and someone whose identity father then stole.  This will come up again much later and you will find what happened about as appalling as I.

Also amongst this crowd were some number of SS troops whom were in hiding.  Unknown to most Americans, SS troops were executed without trial by the Americans under the direct orders of then General Eisenhower.  Were it not for the eventual Canadian protests before the League of Nations, no SS staff would have ever survived their capture.  I am not arguing what Eisenhower did was "wrong" - the SS were a brutal group whom took life lightly and had dedicated their lives to the Fuhrer - in fact, many did not surrender and continued the fight into 1957!  But, it would still be nice to have a trial so guilt could first be established, and then execute them.  More on this later as well.

So father learned all of the SS trivia, all of the songs, all of the stories of what had been going on.  Some of this had a great impact on father - he had after all stumbled upon the remains of his old posting involving Nordhausen and Mittelbau-Dora/Buchenwald concentration camps.  He learned about the cold winters outside of Leningrad and the building by building siege and battles.  And what worked or did not work in German armament during those long Russian winters.   All of this began to form the background of his new identity.

He also learned, from those fleeing from the east, the existence of the Soviet execution squads whom were patrolling and executing those found in the area to the east of the Elbe River.  I really do not believe he had encountered these patrols since his three friends never told similar stories.  So, again, gaining information to help with his new identity.

And all of this knowledge not only laid a groundwork to hide his true identity but also was to become his own truth.  As later in life he could no longer remember which story he had told to whom or even what was actually true ...

There was one other population group in the camp, they had been there since before the British had liberated the camp - they were the Jews whom had been rounded up from elsewhere in Germany.  One of them was to soon be his bride.....