National Socalism

Father was born Swiss, his father Swiss-German (Hapsburg) and his mother Swiss-Austria/Hungary (Kyburg) parents.  So just like every other little kid on the block - he was a Swiss National in a German speaking family.  The area he grew up in was decidedly German.

Albert Plattner, center.  1937

But, unlike every other kid on the block, father was a member of the Hitler Jugend - the Nazi Youth  Movement, also known as the Kinderkorps.  Apparently, this was quite a sore point between him and his father, whom was not a German sympathizer in Germany's international problems. He had marched for Bismark and learned the futility of war in The Great War.

Father never would discuss  with me why he left home and his sisters told me that he simply ran away from home one night.  End of story.  No one knew anything else.  However, father in his highly fictional tome on his life - said that he left home when he and his father got into a fight over his political leaning and his father struck him for the first time!  (I think I shocked my aunts when I told them that should have happened years earlier in my opinion!)

It would not be hard to see how it all fell together.  Father was a closet Nazi, Germany was triumphant over the world, his math professors probably had told him of the need for his mind working with Heisenberg on Germany's ultimate weapon, and he was gone.  After, of course, a brief "discussion" with his father.

Nothing was known by his sisters or brother, of him being a Nazi; apparently this was one encounter and bit of news the father kept to himself.  What a burden that poor man must have bore to his grave!  His beloved son had run away from home to conquer the world.....

In the declining years of his life, I decided to address the issue with father on his persistent beliefs in National Socialism and directly attacked its principals and Adolf Hitler.  Oh man!  You would not have believed the reaction from that man!  He could still sing the glories of Adolf Hitler - 60 years after Hitler was dead and the Reich fallen!  According to him, any German failure was all because of those "damned meddling Americans".....

Of course, given the choice, he did surrender to the West rather than to Russia.