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fter Bertha (my
first wife) and I arrived and settled in this country more than half a century
ago, several of our friends urged us to write a biography of our lives in Nazi
Germany. We often talked about it, but put the idea on hold because our
day-to-day activities seemed more productive and satisfying than turning the
clock back to the dark and long past times in
Perhaps we did
not think hard enough, but we also had a problem finding the perspective and
form which would interest the American public. It had to be different from what
had already been written about the Nazi regime. Obviously, we never considered
writing another “History of the Third Reich.” That had been done many times
over. And the mass-murder of millions of Jews and other minorities has been
well documented and retold by thousands of reliable eyewitnesses.
Those who
perished in the Holocaust were “Innocent Victims.” Neither Bertha nor I ever
considered ourselves to be victims. Racially, we had nothing to fear. Bertha
came from old, German peasant stock with large and poor families.
My own ancestry
was more complex. My mother’s forefathers were lower middle-class, small-town
Germans. I remember her father, a rural policeman (Gendarme), patrolling the
streets of Blankenhain and its surrounding forests with two huge, black
Doberman dogs. He did everything “by the book.” Her brother Paul, an official
of the Justice Department, wrote poetry about his heroic adventures in the
First World War.
My father’s
roots, as well as the lifestyle of his parents, were entirely different from
those of Bertha’s family. My parental grandmother was a well educated woman.
She loved books and the arts. Grandfather was a good musician and piano tuner,
very intelligent, a free spirit with a great sense of humor. On one of his
visits he showed me a booklet in which he had traced our family roots back to a
small village in
Both Bertha and
I liked the simple spelling and in March 1952, when we became
Bertha and I
were political activists. Bertha enlisted very early; she was not even 18 years
old. Political considerations and duties were for nearly two decades the
guiding stars of her life. My decision to get seriously involved into politics
came later. I was already 21 years of age by the time I became convinced that
the Nazis presented a real and imminent danger.
After Hitler’s
rise to power we made a conscientious decision to join thousands of others by
going underground and continuing our fight in one of the resistance
organizations. We knew what we would be up against and had no illusions about
what might happen to us. We considered ourselves active opponents of Hitler and
the German government, not innocent, persecuted victims of the Nazi regime.
After Bertha’s
sudden death I realized that we had made a serious mistake in not writing down
our experiences earlier. Her contribution to this work would have been
invaluable. I finally made up my mind to sit down and record our lives and our
experiences before and during the years of Hitler’s rise to power as well and
as honestly as I can remember. I hope they will add to the understanding of a
time which almost defies understanding.
I want to thank
my wife Margaret for her consistent encouragement and patience. I also wish to thank my editor, Tara Smith,
for her corrections and insightful suggestions.
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