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.....

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.

Physical Labor

Few Americans realize that World War II did not really end until 1957, with the surrender of the last SS unit operating as a terrorist group in the Austrian and Bavarian Alps, against American targets.  Up north, it was 1946 now and another story.  The war was over and the rebuilding of Germany was to commence.  The only fighting was verbal between the British, Canadian and Americans - and then again, collectively against the Russians on the east bank of the Elbe River.
Fritz and Irma had been wealthy before the war.  He was an architect and a decent investor.  However, the banks were gone, the Deutschmark devalued and any bank balances decreased by 90% automatically.  They were wiped out, but at least they still had something to pull from in an economy where cash ruled - as few had it.  And luckily for them, there was a real need for architects.

Drilling a new well, father center.

Father was able to get a job as a day laborer for basically starvation wages, especially considering that he now had a wife to support.  Hamburg had been flattened and the entire infrastructure had to be replaced.  You also must realize that by the time of father's capture he was more dead than alive.  The regular meals from working on the farms had helped him to recover somewhat, however he had little muscle to rely on and he really had need of them!

Ditches needed to be dug for sewers, water supply and gas pipelines - there was little machinery to do the jobs.  Roads rebuilt, factories restored, apartment complexes built, everything everywhere had to be replaced.  So the work was there but the economics were not.  There was nowhere to live other than the street and a day's labor provide little enough food for one - much less two.  Then there was the question of being able to find food for sale in the first place.  And father was stuck as he had no real skills for this labor market.

Something had to change and father had few resources in his favor.  He held a mathematics doctorate, however the university was gone and little need for instructors anywhere.  He could go over to the Americans under the Operation Paperclip offer to German scientists, but he still believed he would be executed, if he did.  The British and Canadians had no use for him, nor did the Germans for that matter.  His education had left him fluent in French, 5 forms of German and English.  So on weekends he was able to hold down a job as a waiter.  Notice in the photo that he is 6'1" tall and weighed all of 96 pounds at the time!  Interestingly, at the table is Uncle Fritz; I assume the dress is attached to his wife Irma.

In the local paper one day he saw an advertisement for seaman needed immediately for shipping out of Bremerhaven.  And so he had to take a chance and identify himself as a Captain in the now defunct German Navy, in hopes of at least being able to feed his wife.  As I mentioned earlier, how he acquired his commission, much less in the Navy, is beyond my knowledge.  Yet, he had managed it during the war and as a teenager to boot.

His hope was a posting on a North Sea freighter.....

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!