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.....

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.