WHEN I TELL OTHER AMERICANS that I am from Germany, they often respond that they also have relatives who came from Germany. At least 50 million Americans claim a degree of German ancestry, making Germany, after Britain, perhaps the second largest country of origin for the United States.
At the same time, German-Americans are perhaps less visible than many other ethnic groups in the United States because they tend to integrate into the general population rather than concentrating together like other ethnic communities. While I remain proud of my German heritage and occasionally participate in various cultural activities, my ambition has been to become a full participant in mainstream American life.
Theodore Roosevelt perfectly expressed my own feelings about immigration in a written message he composed for a public gathering on January 3, 1919, three days before he died:
In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American and nothing but an American… There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American but something else also, isn’t an American at all… we have room for but one [sole] loyalty, and that is to the American people.[1]
At the same time, I have not forgotten the values that I learned in my younger years in Germany: discipline, the need for education, and the importance of family. The United States gave me a chance to fulfill my potential and live a life in harmony with those values. Though planning to be buried next to Anneliese in Germany, I have also grown to feel completely American in my national identity.
The United States has been good to me and has allowed me to build a life I could only dream of when I left Germany with ten dollars in my pocket. My son Harold served as an officer in the U.S. Army. Tears come to my eyes when there’s a funeral for an American soldier or a band plays the national anthem at the raising of the Stars and Stripes.
Some interesting experiences have resulted from my unique background. June 6, 2004 was the 60th anniversary of the American DDay landings in France. To honor a local American veteran and friend who had fought at Normandy, a group of us held a dinner celebration at a local Asheville restaurant. Having participated in a number of these types of activities over my five decades in the United States, it did not seem odd to me to honor someone who had fought against the army in which I had served. I respected him as a fellow veteran serving my adopted country.
At the end of the meal, the waitress suddenly appeared at my side with cake and ice cream. Thinking that I was also a U.S. Army veteran, she said in a sincere tone, “Thank you for your service.” The whole table erupted in laughter and I joined them.
There was an obvious irony to be accidentally honored as an American veteran. Yet, I still feel a deep sense of pride in my own military service, even if it had been in service to my old homeland of Germany rather than for my new home in America. Just as the two nations have made peace, I have made peace between the parts of my past.
Since the end of the war, I have not had contact with anyone in my old 58th Infantry Division, except my regimental commander, Werner Ebeling, who became a general in the post-war Bundeswehr (West German Armed Forces). It was a choice of career that was not popular after the war.
In Germany today, few people want to serve in the armed forces, and military conscription is unpopular. In my youth, citizens treated soldiers with respect and you saw many uniformed troops out in public. Contemporary German soldiers lack this same respect and rarely wear their uniforms when they leave the barracks. In my opinion, today’s Americans are more patriotic than most Germans, displaying a love and belief in their country resembling that found in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s.
Despite the numerous books, movies and television documentaries about the Second World War, I never encountered any serious discrimination because of my German background, nor has anyone attempted to link me to the crimes of the Nazi regime. I was not a Nazi soldier; I was a German soldier fulfilling his duties as a citizen and a patriot.
Many histories of the war misrepresent this situation, but I believe a majority of Americans realize the difference. While it is true that Germans put Hitler in power, they did so only because the economic misery caused by the Great Depression made many Germans susceptible to Nazi propaganda. The Nazi Party did not obtain the largest share of the vote because of German support for its racial policies or its aggressive territorial designs.
Looking back, I believe the Second World War started with the harsh Treaty of Versailles ending the First World War. Yet I think the Allied powers made a similar mistake after the Second World War by dividing Germany and stripping its centuries-old eastern agricultural provinces of East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, and eastern Brandenburg.
While West and East Germany have been reunited, the tragic experience of the people expelled from these former German provinces has been largely overshadowed by Hitler’s crimes. Literally millions of people lost their homes and land and became refugees. Compared to the difficulties my family experienced after the war, those Germans suffered a much worse fate. The costs and consequences of the war still reverberate to the present.
The history of the last 60 years has turned out much differently than I expected. West Germany experienced a rapid economic recovery soon after my wife and I emigrated, which I attribute to two factors. First, the German people showed great energy and determination to rebuild in the post-war ruins. Confronted with these conditions, business management and the trade unions worked cooperatively to rebuild industry. Second, the Marshall Plan helped provide the financial resources to reinforce this process. Though I have never regretted my decision to emigrate, I believe in retrospect that I could have succeeded there as well.
It was only with the end of the Second World War and the start of the Cold War that Germans began to think in terms of West and East, but the Western countries and Russia were always viewed very differently inside Germany. Before the war, Germans had felt excluded from the more developed group of Western states on the one hand, and culturally superior to the Soviet Union on the other.
Following the nation’s defeat, most West Germans came to feel themselves full members of the Western community. Beyond sharing a common sense of the external threat from the USSR, West Germans also adopted a much more liberal culture, which made it more similar to other Western societies. Integration into the European Union has only reinforced Germany’s sense of identity with the West. Perhaps this process of integration rather than isolation partly explains why Germans were more willing to accept the territorial losses inflicted on the nation after the Second World War than they were after the First World War.
With my personal experience of living under the Nazi dictatorship for twelve years and having had family living under the East German Communist dictatorship, I learned that dictatorial regimes can be much the same in practice, whatever their ideological differences. They will do whatever is necessary to maintain their hold on power. In this struggle to retain control over society, the media’s influence is very powerful, especially when the government prevents the expression of alternative points of view.
The passage of time has left me with a much more questioning and cynical attitude toward authority. I have learned much about Hitler’s regime of which I was unaware during the war. As I read about the concentration camps and other aspects of the Nazi dictatorship, my eyes were opened to the repressive and sinister nature of the regime.
In retrospect, it is clear that the Nazi propaganda against the Jews was highly effective in generating a climate of indifference toward their fate. At the time, I wondered if it was just when Jewish people lost their shops or were banned from a particular area, but I did not seriously concern myself with what was happening to them. Other than the anti-Jewish attacks on Kristallnacht, I was personally unaware of any other incidents of violent mistreatment.
Although I knew that the Nazis incarcerated political enemies of their regime, including Jews, I had no idea where they went or what happened to them. Some of these opponents emerged from confinement and I assumed that the others who had been arrested would also eventually be released. Of course, none of these matters was ever publicly discussed under the Nazi dictatorship.
If German citizens had come to widely learn about the mass murder of Jews and other ideologically targeted groups in the camps during the war, I believe it would have provoked a strong anti-Nazi reaction. Mass extermination was legally unconscionable as well as morally revolting to most Germans. It was a criminal atrocity perpetrated by racist fanatics.
When looking back at the suffering of Soviet civilians during the conflict, I see it as part of the broader suffering caused by the war. The tragic starvation of the hundreds of thousands of Soviet civilians in Leningrad during the siege was paralleled by the deaths of hundreds of thousands of German civilians from Allied bombing. Our struggle was against the Communist dictatorship, not the Russian people, just as the Allied fight was against the Nazi dictatorship, not the German people. War’s victims are too often the innocent and I mourn for all of them.
Whatever our misgivings about the Nazis and their policies at the time, the soldiers I fought with shared an optimistic vision of Germany’s post-war future. Instead, it turned out that we were simply the guinea pigs in Hitler’s mad scheme to build an Aryan utopia in Europe.
When Americans look back at the war, it is important they understand why so many Germans were ready to fight and die. As I have tried to convey in this book, we risked our lives out of a sense of patriotic love for and duty to our country in a war that we then believed was unavoidable.
Although it is obvious to me now that the Nazi propagandists greatly manipulated the German public, we sincerely believed that the West was trying to maintain the unjust peace forced on Germany at Versailles, while the Communist government of the Soviet Union posed an imminent and mortal threat to Germany and European civilization. No German soldier I knew was fighting out of a devotion to the Nazi regime or in support of its racist policies, which we did not even begin to fully comprehend at that time.
The Nazi crimes happened long before most of today’s Germans were born, but almost all Germans now willingly acknowledge and utterly abhor the evils of that period. It is my hope that my fellow Americans will likewise come to fully appreciate that Germany today is a far different place than the one that existed in 1945.
The war ended more than 60 years ago and I left Germany 55 years ago. Coming to America as immigrants from Germany, my wife and I were able to build a new life and become full citizens in its society. Our children are successful and have given us ten grandchildren and great-grandchilden who are completely American in their identity and outlook.
This is the legacy of a former German soldier who 60 years ago fought for a nation at war with the United States. My immigrant experience is in some ways unique, but it is really part of the collective story of the American people. Perhaps it is also in a small way similar to the experience of the German people, who have made a difficult journey to become full members of the Western community of nations since the end of the Second World War.
This book is left as my testament to my family and to my fellow citizens in hope of presenting a better understanding of the suffering experienced on all sides during war. Life is short, but for many it was far too brief.
May the future be guided by the Almighty to bring hope, love, understanding, and peace to this world.
Federal Textbook on Citizenship Training (US Government Printing Office, 1931), Lesson 61.