Steven Karras Read online

  The biggest revelation that came out of my research was the veterans’ overriding emphasis on the importance to them of having become allied soldiers. Acceptance into the allied military—not the fact that they were victims of the Holocaust—was the formidable life-shaping event of their lives. This fact indicated to me that the story I was researching was far more complex than I had expected and was not the revenge tale that had attracted me to the subject in the first place. It really was a story about identity as well as courage. In Germany, their national identity was taken away and they became hate objects and then refugees. Their military experience transformed them from victims into valued members of a victorious army, and finally their national identity was restored when those in the United States and the United Kingdom became naturalized citizens.

  It is also the classic immigrant story of rebuilding one’s life and the determination to live up to an adopted country’s expectations. In the United States, the GI Bill offered refugee soldiers the education they had formerly been denied, and many thrived and became physicians, architects, chief executives of international corporations, small business owners, Wall Street scions, economists, attorneys, educators, inventors, entertainers, writers, public servants, and simply productive and hardworking citizens. As such, their trajectory is in every way a highly American story, as well as part of the story of America itself.

  This speaks to an even larger lesson: individuals have the ability to choose whether or not to be victims, as well as the power to redefine themselves. Even more than the great historical significance of the stories themselves, this notion inspired me throughout my work on this ten-year-long project and continues to do so every day. With the tragedy as monolithic as the Holocaust, nothing will ever eclipse the fact that there was a near successful attempt to eliminate the Jewish seed from Europe. There are, however, stories of courage that continue to emerge within the margins of the greater story, and they should be told. This is one of them.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am indebted to all of the veterans and their families—wives, children, and grandchildren—who graciously answered my many questions; shared their stories, family documents, photographs, and memoirs; opened their homes to me and my colleagues; or answered queries via letter, email, or telephone.

  Special thanks to Gayle Wurst at Princeton International Agency for the Arts for quickly taking a shine to me and this largely unknown subject, for finding a home for this book, and for her friendship.

  I am particularly grateful to the people at Zenith Press: Richard Kane for recognizing the value of these stories and taking this project on, Steve Gansen for taking the time to help guide me through a new process, and Scott Pearson for his real-time direction and his inimitable humor.

  I am profoundly grateful to Fritz Weinschenk, Marty Peak, and Frank Helman of the Otto and Fran Walter Foundation for championing this project and granting the necessary resources for research, travel, and interviews—as well as access to the foundation’s rich archive of oral histories—so that this book could be written. This was a dream realized, and I can only hope that I have lived up to their generosity and expectations.

  Special thanks to Rose Lizarraga, my co-director on the documentary About Face, for her hard work around the clock (and globe) for the past seven years—interviewing and scouring archives for relevant material in Washington, D.C., New York, and London’s Imperial War Museum—and for her continued dedication to getting this important story told.

  Most especially I would like to acknowledge Dr. Michael Berenbaum for his valued advice, guidance, and approbation; Julia Rath, an early colleague who was enormously helpful in seeking out willing interviewees, many of whom appear in this book; and Ilko Davidov and Carmen Cervi at BulletProof Film in Chicago for their technical help, recording the interviews in many cities and managing the archival materials.

  Leo Bretholz enthusiastically contacted dozens of his veteran friends on my behalf in the winter of 2000 and, along with wife Flo, was very hospitable whenever I visited Baltimore. Joshua Franklin, an expert on the subject of German refugee soldiers and whose grandfather, Walter Spiegel, was a refugee and GI in the European Theatre, generously shared his research with me and conducted a videotaped interview with Fred Fields in Riverdale, New York.

  For their warm friendship, opinions, sound advice, and frequent correspondence, I wish to thank Sig Spiegel, Peter Terry, and Walter Reed.

  Warren Leming in Chicago was a tremendous help in translating German articles and documents.

  I would like to thank my friend Christa Fuller for her insights into all things German and historical, and for sharing the many wonderful anecdotes about her late husband, Samuel Fuller, both as an infantryman in the Big Red One and as a film director in Hollywood.

  For their love and support, I wish to thank my family: my mother Rita Kanne and her husband Jeff; my father Sheldon Karras and his wife Karen; and my brother Michael Karras, his wife Jennifer, and their kids Noah, Reese, and Blythe.

  Lastly, I am most grateful to my wife, Andie, whose humor and love sustains me.

  INTRODUCTION

  Many people often think that they know the history of the Holocaust and that they have heard all the stories. Each story is different, yet each story seems the same. These particular stories, however, are different. True, like most Holocaust memoirs, they are divided into three: before, during, and after. The before segment reads like many memoirs about the wonderful days of one’s youth, the well-integrated life of Jews in Germany before Hitler and the Nazis came into power. Then the story describes the growing oppression, persecution, loss of status, and collapse of self image as a German Jew—but suddenly this narration veers off course and introduces a new element. These Jews left Germany while there was still time. Often they left by luck or fortitude, but they were living outside of Germany when the Holocaust began.

  This is not the story of powerless Jews or helpless refugees, though many were the latter for a time. It is the story of men and women who were drafted by the Allies and returned to their native lands as empowered soldiers on the vanguard of war. This inspiring turn in the narrative of the Holocaust is told through twenty-seven firsthand accounts taken from interviews and memoirs of German- and Austrian-born Jews who served in the Allied forces in Europe and North Africa. Though seemingly indistinguishable from the ranks of millions of other American or British troops, they were Jewish refugees. They had recently suffered persecution and discrimination and had escaped from almost certain death in Nazi Germany—only to return and fight the Nazis and strike back with a sense of fury for what had been done to them. They faced the shock of the Holocaust, knowing full well that had they not left in the nick of time, they would have been slaving in the camps, they would have been the skeletal remains, and their families (or more members of their families) would have been murdered and would have disappeared into mass graves.

  In the aggregate, each story paints an unfamiliar picture of how the U.S. and British military valued and took full advantage of the unique skills, motivation, and experience of the German Jewish refugees. They had firsthand knowledge of the enemy, a nuanced understanding of the psyche of the German people, detailed knowledge of the country, and, of course, skills as native speakers of German. Each personal story reveals never-before-heard experiences of refugee soldiers in wartime: their varied roles in the gathering and use of military intelligence, their contribution to elite units like the British Commandos, being entrusted with running the occupation of Germany and Austria, and their prominent and fitting roles in frontline interrogation units interrogating the very Nazis who had once persecuted them.

  Most of these young men (and women) were born into middle or upper-middle class families, and many came from small towns and villages like Fürth or Lehrberg, as well as large cities like Munich or Vienna, located across Germany and Austria. Each veteran experienced life differently after Hitler came to power and has varying sagas of escape. Some parents had foresight a
nd were lucky enough to get out (or at least get their children out) of Germany in the early days of the regime; yet many remained and suffered the hardships of years of discrimination, second-class citizenship, and a brutal campaign of state-supported violence and propaganda that incited anti-Semitism throughout the country, turning neighbor against neighbor. While some Jews emigrated with their families intact, others were forced to leave alone, devoid of companionship or support. All, however, understood one thing about themselves and one thing about the Nazis: they knew that they had gotten out just in time and they knew how menacing this regime was, thus how imperative it was to defeat it.

  The refugees had varied war experiences; each had different perspectives and emotions and served in various non-combat and combat roles. Ironically, these former victims of Nazi terror landed on beaches during the Normandy invasion, only a few miles from the ports where they had boarded ships to go the United States or Britain four years earlier. Some captured or guarded former classmates and neighbors and interrogated high-ranking Nazis such as Hermann Goering, Josef “Sepp” Dietrich, Julius Streicher, or Jurgen Stroop. Others occupied and governed their hometowns or liberated family members from death camps. When coming face to face with their tormentors, these soldiers grappled with the decision of whether or not to exact revenge, as their judgment was far more complex than that of the average soldier.

  BEFORE THE WAR

  In the years leading up to the rule of Adolf Hitler, Germany had been a place most hospitable to Jews; Jewish communities in Germany went back to the early medieval era. Even when Europe’s different monarchs expelled Jews out of their countries, they were never completely driven out of Germany. In the Rhineland, Jews had been settled there for hundreds of years, had achieved legal equality from 1870 on, and were woven into the fabric of German society. Thus, Germany was a country in which Jews felt at home and relatively safe.

  In World War I, around a hundred thousand German Jews—a high percentage, more than one in six—fought for Germany on all fronts. Some 78 percent of these saw frontline duty; twelve thousand died in battle, over thirty thousand received decorations, and nineteen thousand were promoted. One of the great ironies is that the officer of the 16th Bavarian Reserve who recommended Hitler for the Iron Cross First Class was a Jewish captain named Otto Guttman.

  It was Adolf Hitler’s initial intention to drive every last Jew out of Germany—to make Germany Judenrein. As a consequence, the Nazis implemented a number of policies designed to create a national atmosphere so hostile and unstable for German Jews that they would have little choice but to emigrate. The first of these measures was the nationwide boycott of all Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933. Dispatched in small teams and hovering around storefronts, the Sturmabteilung (SA)—better known as “stormtroopers” or “brownshirts” because of their black and brown uniforms—were vicious street thugs who took pleasure in intimidating and assaulting defenseless Jews at the slightest provocation. During the boycott, the SA defaced Jewish property, painting Stars of David and “Jude” (Jews) on the windows and buildings of Jewish-owned supermarkets, department stores, legal offices, and medical clinics. They held signs that read, “Germans, Defend Yourself, Don’t Buy Jewish Goods,” and goaded enthusiastic crowds into joining them in reciting popular anti-Semitic mantras like “the Jews are our misfortune.”

  In 1933, German Jews numbered 564,519, less than 1 percent of the overall German population of 65 million, yet they were far more prominent and visible than their numbers. In Berlin, almost half of all doctors and lawyers were Jews. Nationally, 16 percent of Germany’s dentists were Jews. There was also a disproportionate presence of Jewish students and professors in universities, medical schools, and law schools. The high visibility of Jews as a distinct element in German cultural circles, such as in cinema, music, and literature, further contributed to the feeling that Jewish accomplishment had gone too far and that Jews were over-represented in German society.

  In spite of the high-profile intimidation of the April boycott, it hadn’t made the impact the Nazis had hoped it would. Nevertheless, it had struck a major blow to the diminishing morale of German Jews. Most had experienced discrimination in their lives, but this was different. Here was a regime with such monumental power and authority that it could turn modern anti-Jewish rhetoric into state policy, all the while emboldening the Jew haters of an entire nation.

  One week later on April 7, 1933, the Law for the Restoration of Professional Civil Service expelled Jews from the civil service, including professors at state universities and government-employed physicians. On May 10, Hitler’s one hundredth day in office, mobs of pro-Nazi students stormed administration buildings, lecture halls, and libraries of universities all over Germany, purging bookshelves and burning books written by Jews or others deemed enemies of Hitler’s Reich.

  Jewish children were equally affected by these policies. The Law against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Institutions of Higher Learning limited the amount of Jewish students in state schools. It was the first of many stages to force Jewish children out of the German school system. Siegmund Spiegel, then a teenager in Gera, Germany, and later an infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army, was one of those students: “In April 1933 my father was called to the Gymnasium [high school] and told, ‘Mr. Spiegel, take your son out of our school, we want the school to be Judenrein’—and that was the end of my formal education at the age of fourteen.”

  Jewish youth who remained in German schools were constant targets of ridicule and abuse by teachers and non-Jewish children. Karl Goldsmith was one of the few remaining Jewish students attending a German school in Eschwege, Germany. He recalls, “I was in the third class of the Gymnasium when it became brutal… . My teacher, Mr. Almerodt, one day simply ordered me in front of the class and caned me with the words to the class: ‘So verfrugelt han einen Jude’ (This is the way you beat up a Jew). For this episode, which I never forgot, I ordered him to pull weeds in the Jewish cemetery in 1946 when I was back in Eschwege in charge of Denazification for the U.S. Army.”

  In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were introduced to segregate Jews entirely from the rest of German society. Some of these laws were symbolic and inconsequential, such as the Reich Flag Law, which forbade German Jews to fly the official state flag, the swastika. Others impacted on the very status of Jews, such as the Reich Citizen Law, which stripped Jews of their German citizenship, and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, which forbade Jews from marrying or having sexual relations with non-Jews, or employing non-Jewish women under the age of forty-five in their homes. Most importantly, the laws defined Jews as a racial, as opposed to a religious, group and used race to separate them from the general population. If one had two or more Jewish grandparents, or was a practicing member of the Jewish community, it was sufficient to define their legal status as a Jew and discriminate against them as such.

  Historically, the distinction between Jews and Christians was religion. Conversion to Christianity often provided Jews with an entree into the social, professional, and political circuits of Christian society that had been traditionally denied to them. Gustav Mahler, a Viennese Jew, is a well-known example. His conversion to Catholicism allowed him to accept the coveted directorship of the Vienna Opera in 1897.

  Remarkably, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor impacted those who had long since intermarried with Christians, had converted to Christianity, or had completely disavowed their Jewish past. The definition of Jews here was racial, based on bloodlines, not on the values they accepted, the traditions they embraced, or the religion they practiced. Under the Nuremberg Laws, Germans of the Jewish faith were now only Jews. As a child in Berlin, Adelyn Bonin had been baptized and raised as a Lutheran by her parents, Otto and Lilli Bonin, and was unaware of her Jewish heritage: “When Hitler came to power I returned home one day with a swastika on my coat and my father told me, ‘We have to have a long talk.’ He told me that I was Jewish, and this was devasta
ting to me.”

  The Nazis’ legal separation of Jews from the rest of German society was seminal in driving them completely out of the German economy. Aryanization of all German businesses—the euphemism for taking over Jewish businesses—allowed the Nazis to manipulate and extort Jews by liquidating assets, stocks, and companies over to German companies at prices far lower than their worth. Additionally, Jews were increasingly driven from nearly every professional field; by 1935 physicians and lawyers who had continued to practice after 1933 would never work again. In rural areas, Jewish cattle dealers, farmers, and land owners were forced to sell their property. Fred Fields, a future U.S. Army interrogator in Lt. Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army, was a nine-year-old in Uehlfeld, Bavaria, when his father, a wealthy cattle dealer, was forced to sell his property: “We had to turn over our house, acres of land and meadows which we leased to other farmers, and sold everything for nothing, one thousand marks, which was the price of two cars at that time. The Nazis took away my father’s ability—like most Jews—to make a living and my family had to resettle in Bamberg for my father to find work.”

  The psychological toll on the Jewish youth during this period was significant. Their friends with whom they had forged strong bonds suddenly joined other students in taunting them, even throwing rocks at them. They felt betrayed by the government, by society, and most importantly by neighbors and friends. From street corner kiosks, newsstands, and radio broadcasts came vile propaganda that resonated with average Germans. Park benches were forbidden to Jewish youths, as were school assemblies, community swimming pools, museums, cinemas, libraries, and, by 1938, education itself. Not only was their world outside of the home unsafe, but parents could barely protect themselves or their children.