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....

Return To America

It is now fall of 1953.  My mother had successfully raised the $100 to have father allowed back into the US and father, under who knows what pretense, leaves his now pregnant wife and returns to America.  (Of course, this instantly raises the thought of father being a "dirty double crosser", since he crossed the Atlantic Ocean a second time to return to America.  And, a double entandre as well it would seem.....)

Father with a customer at the Duncet

Back in Portland, he needed employment and went to work at a sandwich shop near the train station I believe.  Though this is where a bit of a conflict comes up as he claimed later in life that he had owned the sandwich shop and went bankrupt later on.  This might be true however, but no matter which - the US Government now had him pegged as to whom he was and the wheels were quietly in motion to suck him to their employment.  Very innocently, the man whom had been father's INS case worker during his deportation jail time and trial, looked father up, was to become his best friend and gently guide father in the direction the government wanted.  It was almost Machiavellian how it worked out.  And though he was a family friend, even to a small child as I was, I could plainly see that there was an agenda being played - but then again, I needed to be an adult to understand why what happened, actually happened.

So father married the now 15 year old girl he had saved two years earlier and blam! she was pregnant.  Well, now father needs to do something because there is a family coming along and lots of expenses.  His new best friend sells him on the idea of joining the US Military - free medical, good income, career training, blah, blah, and blah.

This was so contrived you will not believe what happened next and father did not suspect a thing - ".....it had to have been circumstance.....".  After all, father (like most liars) believed he was smarter than everyone else ...  Unfortunately, that was both true and his eventual undoing.

Return To Germany

During father's free time in Portland, Oregon, he spent most of it visiting with mother's family on the houseboat.  Grandmother thought him charming and often commented in her later years that he was quite the "talker", ie: "real smooth".  Mother's brothers all hung with him and probably appreciated the male companionship, as their father had left them when they were all young.  As for mother, well, if she had been mine, it would have been over the knee with her!

She is now 14 years old and decided that my father was "it" and father had no problems with that idea.  But, he was after-all up for deportation.....

So, father was returned to Germany and faced court-martial hearings for his part in the mutiny of the SS Riviera.  In the end, the court ruled the mutiny to have been justifiable - however, his role as the leader of the mutiny was found to be inexcusable - he was after-all a German officer.  He was stripped of his captain's rank and removed from the seaman's listing.  So, he would never sail again.  It is interesting to note that they also had the power to remove his German Naval rank of Captain and did not do so.  Which he spoke of with pride - at their backhanded approval of what he did.

Father with Edi and Udi in Buchholz

Father returned to Buchholtz, to his wife Monika, Fritz and Irma. It must have been some reunion since my half-sister Martha was born in 1954.  As to whatever happened in Buchholtz, father would never say.  Fritz and Irma continued in their role as his friend and members of his "family".  Monika was to continue to write him weekly for decades - leaving me to assume he was writing her back.  And, again, one must remember that there was no divorce filed I could find in the German archives.  Did father turn over his bank account to her to keep her happy?  Even in his 80's he was still harping about having "lost" all of his money.  Makes one wonder what the real truth was.....

Back in Portland, mother set herself to raising the $100 immigration fee for allowing father back into America - she was determined to get her "man".  And let me tell you, when I found that out, me and Grandmother had a very long talk about where she had failed with my mother.  But, what I did not know was that mother was - uhm - a bit of a problem child it seems.