Steven Karras Read online

  THE ENEMY I KNEW

  GERMAN JEWS IN THE ALLIED MILITARY IN WORLD WAR II

  STEVEN KARRAS

  For the refugees of Nazism who wore the uniform of the Allied Armed Forces during World War II

  If we mean peace by slavery, then nothing is more wretched. Peace is the harmony of strong souls, not the fightless impotence of slaves.

  —Baruch Spinoza

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Foreword

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 Siegmund Spiegel

  Chapter 2 Jerry Bechhofer

  Chapter 3 Adelyn Bonin

  Chapter 4 Eric Hamberg

  Chapter 5 Bernard Fridberg

  Chapter 6 Fritz Weinschenk

  Chapter 7 Peter Terry

  Chapter 8 William Katzenstein

  Chapter 9 Karl Goldsmith

  Chapter 10 Henry Kissinger

  Chapter 11 John Stern

  Chapter 12 Ralph Baer

  Chapter 13 Bernard Baum

  Chapter 14 Harold Baum

  Chapter 15 Edmund Schloss

  Chapter 16 Walter Reed

  Chapter 17 Manfred Steinfeld

  Chapter 18 Jack Hochwald

  Chapter 19 Norbert Grunwald

  Chapter 20 Eric Boehm

  Chapter 21 Fred Fields

  Chapter 22 Peter Masters

  Chapter 23 John Brunswick

  Chapter 24 Otto Stern

  Chapter 25 Kurt Klein

  Chapter 26 Harry Lorch

  Chapter 27 Manfred Gans

  PROLOGUE

  Dearest ones all,

  A collective letter is coming your way, one that will be of particular interest to all the Frankfurters, relatives and friends and foes alike. I have finally fulfilled the nightmare which followed me in my dreams, just like it followed you perhaps. I was there.

  Captain Speckman, Brown, Wolf and I took the jeep this morning and rode. I heard the familiar dialect and I saw familiar sights. Slowly places and names came closer. I can’t deny that my heart was beating a little faster. There was Frankfurt, or was it? On we went slowly, and I tried to absorb every memory. The tower of the Dom was still there, but the church belonging to it was only a skeleton, that is completely uncovered, so that the tower of the Dom stood all alone. The Schauspielhaus has disappeared; there is a tremendous hole in the ground where it used to be, only part of the stage-house has still some walls standing. The familiar sight along the Main River looked changed, it looked familiar and then again it did not. Whatever houses are still standing along the river’s edge, are no more houses, just empty shells. The Gestapo Headquarters on Lindenstrasse is down, so are most of the houses there.

  We turned slowly into Kaiserstrasse and towards the Rossmarkt. This used to be a fairly long block. But now it seems awfully short because between Frankfurter Hof and Rossmarkt all houses are gone, every one of them, to both sides of the street there is space filled with rubble. You can’t walk on the sidewalks, they are roped off or filled with stone, not a single building is even as much as inhabitable. Most of the streets are impossible to pass, by foot or jeep. Then we went to Wiesenau to look for Oma’s house. It is not there any more, don’t worry over it, mom, Oma did not live to see the day. I went into a few houses and asked a few people for her name, it seemed to me she lived on number 54, but nobody knew her. She is not alive any more, I’m sure of that, mom; she is better off that way, believe me.

  Our house, number 53, must have had a direct hit, because it is now a pile of twisted girders, stones and dust. The iron front gate sticks out from the end of the letterbox [which], strangely enough, lies on top of the pile. Just one wall is standing. The “house” looks as if somebody had taken a knife and cut it straight down, throwing everything on one big pile, but leaving the rear wall standing. It was very silent in Gruenstrasse, not a soul, the wind was waning some of the hanging window shades and made a weird noise, as if the bones of old times were shuddering, bringing back memories.

  We traced our steps back to the synagogue. Strangest sight of all: It is complete, absolutely undamaged, copula and all, as if it was ready to open for services any moment. The houses facing it [are] all damaged, empty, burned out, but our synagogue is untouched. Of all things where else could God’s unbelievable justice be more evident than here?

  It is hard to describe the emotions that went through me, it’s just like going home after many years and looking for the people you used to know and all you find is their grave. That’s what Frankfurt is today, a graveyard, a vast terrible graveyard, a sign of Divine justice, of retribution, a sign of God’s wonderful ways to lead us away from the Sintflut [deluge] before it could engulf us. Where else and where more would we have reason to sink down on our knees with tears in our eyes? I almost had them, and thank Him for all he did for us, that he led us away from it all to this land of Liberty, the United States of America. And where else could it be that I, born in that town, would return after so many years, as an Officer of a conquering Army. I felt as if today I was the safe keeper of the many thousands of Jews of Frankfurt or Germany that came with me together in spirit to see what Justice eternal does.

  Walter Rothschild

  175th Regiment, 45th Division

  United States Army

  FOREWORD

  Almost two decades ago when we began working on the final film for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s permanent exhibition, we revisited the riveting testimony of Gerda Weissman Klein and her husband, Kurt. Gerda was a Holocaust survivor who, after a death march of many months, was liberated in the Czechoslovakian city of Volary. Her liberator was an American GI lieutenant named Kurt Klein. When telling the story, Gerda said, “I looked into his eyes and said, ‘I must tell you something … we are Jews.’ And for what seemed like an eternity he stood there and then he answered, ‘So am I.’”

  Gerda weighed seventy-eight pounds, her hair was white, and she hadn’t had a bath in years. Yet Kurt and Gerda grew to love one another, married, and raised children and grandchildren.

  In the testimony Gerda’s story seemed primary. The primary text of the Holocaust is the story of the victims, and the best way to understand their plight—to enter what we now call l’univers concentrationnaire—is to heed their words orally and even visually. Only thus can we understand, only thus can we come close to understanding.

  And yet that is not the only story—the only narrative—of the Holocaust. Kurt was a German Jew who found refuge in the United States and sought with all his limited power to have his parents join him in freedom. He was unsuccessful and they were murdered at Auschwitz, according to the best of information that he could find. That part of his story was covered in the PBS series America and the Holocaust. Kurt was a German Jew who returned to Germany, the land that had killed his parents, had oppressed him, and was only too happy to see him leave, as forced emigration was the first of the German policies toward the Jews.

  Mistakenly, I had not understood that Kurt, too, had a powerful story to tell, a story of not only victimization, death, and destruction, but also of exodus and return, empowerment and vengeance, of turning the tables on his former countrymen. He was the Jew as warrior, the Jew as conqueror, the Jew as liberator.

  More mistakenly, I had presumed that his was an isolated story until I met a young and talented filmmaker named Steven Karras. Steve was working on the film About Face: The Story of the Jewish Refugee Soldiers of World War II, which told the story of the many men and women who shared a common past with Kurt, whose journey resembled his own. Cast out of Germany, often leaving their parents and siblings behind, they found their way to
the United States and England where their adjustment was painful. They were regarded as immigrants in countries that did not welcome immigrants. When the war began, they were regarded as Enemy Aliens and were suspected of being “fifth column” spies for the motherland. For a time, it was beyond the comprehension of the U.S. and British governments that Jews deserved a different category. They had not only left their homeland, their homeland had left them. They had every reason to fight Nazi Germany—every possible motivation. They understood that World War II was a matter of life and death, good versus evil, a true clash of civilizations. At stake was the character of civilization.

  Then, wonder of wonders, the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom realized what a unique resource these men and women were. Their intellectual level was generally quite high, their motivation intense. Their knowledge of Germany was native, and their linguistic skills were unequalled. Some were educated in the best German schools and raised by cultured and intellectual parents. Had the Nazis not come to power, they would have fully participated in German culture and commerce. Soon they were trained by the U.S. and British governments in elite units to be in intelligence, conduct interrogations, and run the occupation, which they did.

  Their stories vary person to person, as they should, and yet each story has much in common with the others. For some, the army experience sped their process of Americanization. For others it created the sense of redemption, personal and historical. From unfortunate refugee, they became members of elite units at the forefront of the battle against Germany, respected and looked up to rather than disdained and looked down upon.

  I am drawn to their stories in ways I understand and in ways I do not. My father, Saul Berenbaum of blessed memory, was born in Poland and came to the United States as a nine-year-old in 1919. He quickly became Americanized and volunteered to fight in World War II. He served valiantly, earning a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts. We did not know of these medals until we went through his papers after his death, but we were raised on World War II stories and understood that this was a war he felt was his to fight. The Nazis were the sworn enemies of the Jewish people, and they were antithetical to every American value he cherished. World War II united both of his identities as a Jew and as an American—even though he had not lived under Nazi rule. So until I saw the interviews, until I read what these soldiers had to witness, I could only imagine how intensely they felt about the battle they were called to wage.

  As a young man of draft age during Vietnam, I clashed with my father who, for a very long time, could not understand why that war was not my war. He could not see why it did not unite my identities the way that his generation’s war reflected who he was, even as it transformed him. I envied the clarity of battle he had, the purity of arms that was so much more so for these men from Germany and Austria.

  We must be grateful to Steven Karras for gathering this testimony, and even more grateful to the men and women who trusted him with their stories. In Karras’ hands, their stories have come to life twice—once in the compelling film About Face and again in this memorable work.

  Read not about Jews as victims but Jews as warriors, proud and defiant, determined, and fighting justly. Read also about their courage and the impact that their courage had upon their later life. Some embraced their Judaism and wore their identity proudly. Others learned from their experience in Germany that being Jewish was dangerous, so it must end with them. All embraced their new lands and gained confidence and power from their experience as soldiers. It shaped who they became. It healed deep wounds and opened up new horizons.

  This is a book about Jewish men and women, immigrants and refugees, who knew full well the menace of Nazism, the promise and the betrayal of Germany, who experienced persecution and danger, who might have only been victims but whose fate was changed because they became warriors able to defeat their enemy. They were able to liberate the Nazis’ victims—knowing that there but for the fate of circumstances go I—and hold the perpetrators partially accountable and run the occupation where they struggled mightily between the need for justice and the honorable desire for revenge. In the end, they gave much to America’s freedom and contributed significantly to Germany’s defeat—and not insignificantly to its rebirth.

  —Michael Berenbaum

  Los Angeles, California

  Michael Berenbaum is a professor of Jewish Studies and director of the Sigi Ziering Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Ethics at American Jewish University. He was also the executive producer of About Face.

  PREFACE

  In 1999 I began conducting interviews with former German and Austrian Jewish refugees who had served in the allied armed forces for the documentary About Face: The Story of the Jewish Refugee Soldiers of World War II, which I produced. The subject had first piqued my interest when I was fourteen at Camp Menominee in Eagle River, Wisconsin. A friend of mine named Roger Fields from Riverdale, a neighborhood in the Bronx, mentioned to me in passing that his father, a German Jew, had fled the Nazis with his family to New York, changed his name from Dingfelder to Fields, and joined the U.S. Army. I was blown away to learn that not only did he return to Europe as a GI to fight the Germans, but once his unit got to Germany, he also drove to his hometown of Uehlfeld.

  Having been raised Jewish and possessing an intense interest in stories of Jewish courage during the Holocaust—such as the Ghetto uprisings and the partisan groups in the forests of Russia—I had never heard anything like this, nor had anybody else I knew. I tried to imagine the tremendous sense of triumph and pride Fields and many others must have felt as part of the vanquishing army when they returned to the towns where the German population—their neighbors and former friends—had betrayed them, passively standing by and watching while Jews were humiliated, arrested, and forced from their homes. Then I wondered if those same Germans were shocked or frightened to encounter these Jews, no longer the cowering youth they had bullied and abused years earlier, who had returned in the uniform of the enemy.

  Word of mouth about my search for interviewees spread after I posted an inquiry for such stories on a World War II veteran internet message board. An Austrian survivor by the name of Leo Bretholz, who lived in Baltimore, heard about what I was doing and introduced me to nearly everyone he knew who would qualify to be in the film. This led to an avalanche of contacts. By January 2000, my answering machine was filled with messages from men named Klaus, Fritz, Manfred, Gunther, Hans, and Otto, each of whom had thick German accents and enjoyed waxing nostalgic about their former units and wartime exploits. By February 2000, fifty men and three women had contacted me.

  The stories presented within this book are based on these interviews which I personally conducted from November 1999 through May 2002, with some exceptions. Ralph Baer’s and William Katzenstein’s stories are drawn from their unpublished memoirs. Eric Boehm’s story is based on a transcript of an interview conducted in 1988 with H. W. Mermagen. John Brunswick, Karl Goldsmith, Jack Hochwald, Siegmund Spiegel, and Fritz Weinschenk’s interviews are augmented with material from their unpublished memoirs. Fred Fields was interviewed by Joshua Franklin in August 2008. Peter Masters’ story is informed by his book Striking Back: A Jewish Commando’s War Against the Nazis (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1997).

  As I prepared for the personal interviews, one of my first tasks was to learn the British and American tables of organization, the orders of battle in the war against Germany, and which units were deployed from the first attack on German forces to the surrender. For this and other background information, the following sources were particularly helpful: Aufbau, “The Truth About Refugee Immigration: A Few Amazing Immigration Figures” (July 15, 1939); Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (New York: Harper Collins, 1986); Walter Isaacson’s Kissinger: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992); Arnold Pauker’s German Jews in the Resistance 1933–45: The Facts and Problems (Berlin: The German Resistance Memorial Center, 1985); Joseph Persico’s Piercing t
he Reich: The Penetration of Nazi Germany by American Secret Agents during World War II (New York: Viking Press, 1979); and Bryan Mark Rigg’s Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2004).

  My pre-interviews over the phone fortunately yielded a large number of units to choose from, so it became easier to prioritize certain stories. For example, when Siegmund Spiegel in Bal Harbor, Florida, told me he was in the 1st Infantry Division, I immediately knew I wanted to interview him. “The Big Red One,” or the “Fighting First” as the division was called, had been a spearhead outfit that invaded North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy. As Spiegel had participated in all of these engagements, his rich firsthand accounts were extremely beneficial to my research. They helped me accomplish my goal of finding veterans from each campaign, demonstrating the refugee soldiers’ ubiquitous presence in the allied war against Germany.

  While the German-Jewish refugee community is now dwindling, it amazes me that it is nevertheless still as closely knit as it ever was. Cousins put me in touch with their cousins and friends with other friends living all over the country. Their knowledge of, and obvious pride in, each other’s personal war histories are remarkable. I’ve been told: “Call Siggy Katz. He won a Silver Star after capturing fifty German soldiers,” or “Call Harry Lorch. His unit held a Passover Seder in Joseph Goebbels’ castle in Muenchen-Gladbach.”

  One remarkable and rather eerie encounter occurred one morning back at the New City YMCA in Chicago when an older gentleman named Herbert Kadden started talking to me in the locker room. When it became obvious to me that he was a German Jew, I told him about my film project. “I’ve probably already interviewed half the people you know,” I remarked rather lightly. Then I randomly picked the name of a refugee, Otto Stern, who was one of my interviewees. The man in front of me became visibly emotional. “Otto Stern found my parents, who were in hiding in Belgium,” he said. As a result of this encounter, I was able to reunite two long-lost friends for the first time in fifty years. Fortunately for me, those I interviewed who had served in the British Army all lived in the United States.