Then we had most of the battalion that guarded Pétain. I personally oversaw and organized their registration. They’re afraid to return to France, which I can well understand. I told them that what I was writing down was for the Red Cross, and then I marked each paper with “French Fascist.” There was one Gaullist among them (he spoke to me later), and I told him to keep on observing them in order to provide the French government with information. It seems there are some among them who’d like to go back to France and organize uprisings. I’ll fix them! I also had a group of Indochinese who spoke only a few words of French. Luckily, I found a Belgian from Schaerbeek who speaks a little Annamite [a region in Indochina that was taken over by the French during the nineteenth century]. I also had a few Russians who fought alongside the partisans, I spoke Italian to them. The Russians are not a problem—a Russian commission took charge of them. Then there was the Italian Fascist division. Oh, what a circus! Some of them asked to join our army. I replied that it was too late to change sides.
You should see this camp. No barracks, just makeshift tents for those who’ve managed to secure one. The rest are out in the open under the hot sun and the twilight sky! (It’s hot.) Too bad it’s not raining! Naturally, they complain—“Why are you complaining?” I ask. “You’re only tasting a small part of the medicine you used to dole out to others. To which they respond, “Dast ist ja wieder Anderes, eine andere Sache!” (That is a whole other matter!) To which I reply, “MERDE!”
Sun and dust at the POW camp in Modena, May 1945.
I personally have no problem dealing with them, since I know you have to give the Germans an order without saying “please.” I always speak with a light American accent, and I’m known to the Major General as Sergeant Anderson. Sometimes, for special occasions, especially for the SS, I become Stabsfeldwebel Kohn [Warrant Officer Kohn]. The other day, we had a good time. We had a group of those pigs to transport out of the camp. One of our sergeants, whose face is like a map of Palestine, made them repeat by heart: “Wir sind die Henker Europas gewesen. Das war doch ein Witz, meine Herren—Jetzt lachen, eins zwei drei.” (We have been Europe’s executioners. That was a joke, gentlemen, now laugh, one two three.)
Their laugh wasn’t loud enough by far, but we were laughing uproariously. These men were none too happy after having to repeat: “Jawohl!” (Yes!) after each sentence. Funny, no? . . . It’s difficult to describe this scene, but tomorrow I’ll ask for permission to photograph it. We also have 600 Stabshelferinnen [secretaries]. We call them “BLITZMAEDELS or FLINTENWEIBER” [Fast Girls or Flinterweiber, a play on the derogatory Nazi term for gun-toting women in the Soviet army]. We have thirty who do our secretarial work. We have a dozen or so trustees, German anti-Fascists, who help us. They’ve been with us for nine months. The Italian carabinieri who guard us just called me. There was an Italian sailor from the anti-Fascist Italian marines who wanted me to provide transport to take the Fascist sailors to prison in Milan. That’s only one example of the problems I have to solve. Whether it’s the electrician who wants a flashlight or a young girl who tells me through tears that her father was wounded by the “Americani” or a woman looking for her brother who was deported to Germany—the carabinieri bring them to me, since I’m one of the two sergeants who speak Italian. And yet my Italian isn’t great. And I’m not forgetting about Spanish, either. This afternoon I tried to speak Spanish to a Turkish internee, and I assure you, that was hard.
There are so many interesting things I’d like to tell you, but although censorship has been abolished, security has to be observed.
Kisses,
Walter
* * * *
After Ghedi, my father left for the camp near Verona, where another 80,000 POWs had to be registered and painstakingly sorted through to ferret out the SS and war criminals.
After a long day, my dad lay in bed puffing on his final cigarette of the day and took a last sip from his three-bottle ration of Cognac as he reread a letter he’d written on stationery left behind by Major General Reinhard Jäeckel. Why waste perfectly good paper? As he drifted off, his thoughts ran the gamut. Not one to express his deepest feelings, he had no choice but to let his emotions raise their voice while he slept. Dreams of soldiers and generals mixed with the red of the cherries he had eaten just hours before, forming a lattice of black and white with splatters of red. Juice ran or blood flowed, he could no longer tell. He watched as the men built the barbed-wire fences, only this time his dream allowed him to exact the revenge he so carefully contained during wakefulness. While the SS man who slept in his bed before him probably dreamed of Jews to torture and kill, my father could finally face what he truly felt from the safety of his unconscious. The red of revenge would come every tomorrow as he continued to interrogate the seemingly endless parade of prisoners. There were thousands of scores to settle, as he balanced their lack of morality with his code of ethics. He thought back to the methods of interrogation he learned at Ritchie. Instill fear in the prisoners through depravity, and a false sense of good will to unearth the truth. The promise of just half a cigarette was enough to elicit information, to coerce the answer to a question. The soldiers were tired, they wanted to go home, or to jail, but most just wanted to stop fighting. The war had been long and they had been defeated.
As part of an effort to draw out the most useful and talented of their prisoners, one of the first things they did was to identify the cooks, many of whom had worked at the finest hotels before the war. With 80,000 prisoners, surely there were some that could put together a good meal? They chose the best and, as my father would forever refer to them, the rest of “the Krauts” were sent off to do manual labor. They were put to work finishing the barbed-wire fences that enclosed their fate, with the major general ordered to do more of the labor than the others. Once a large airfield, the camp was a bevy of activity, with columns of trucks and all-terrain vehicles arriving day and night. The defeated soldiers wandered around barefoot and in boxer shorts, as the early summer sun heated the parched land. Among them were some who had taken sadistic pride in their job torturing human beings in their charge. Tents rose above the flat ground; waves of heat blurred the sharp edges of things. Here the rules set by the Geneva Convention were followed, and while the only shelter was basic, there existed the promise of life. Although the heat felt like an oven, they would never be gassed and burned whole like their victims. Up to and including the last frenzied moments of the war, the Nazis threw the bodies of as many people as they could exterminate onto their tiered oven racks. Finish the job, tally the count, be efficient to the end.
My father’s office was located in a half-finished building once used for administrative purposes. After he learned they would be there for at least another week, he had phones and lights installed. Unlike at Ghedi, where they had authority and their orders were carried out to the letter, here they were no longer allowed to impose their own rules and the process slowed. From the delay, something amazing occurred. Hidden in plain sight were thirty souls, a group of French and Belgian civilians, who had been falsely interned by the partisans. After they’d been carefully interrogated, authorization was granted to liberate them. One older Frenchman had been a prisoner of the Germans for five years before he escaped. Desperate to show my father his gratitude but with nothing to give him, he had another thought.
“La prochaine fois que vous êtes à Paris, venez nous chercher.” “The next time you’re in Paris, look us up,” he implored. His wife owned a glove shop, and he wanted to give my father a pair of gloves as a gift for my grandmother. He wrote the address down on a scrap of paper and handed it to my father.
Moments like this are rendered in the letters with such simplicity that it’s not until sometime later that my emotions surface. This leads me back to the photograph of the POW camp to take a closer look. How, among this mass of humanity who arrived at a rate of a thousand men per hour during the first weeks after the unconditional surrender, did my father find a handful whom he coul
d return to their loved ones, who by then might have given up hope? In this group was also a Belgian man whom my father helped reunite with his wife after they’d been separated by the partisans.
A partisan in Modena, Italy.
For now at least, my father was content with this stop on his Cook’s tour and was looking forward to the next location, which he guessed would be farther north. Whenever he rode through the surrounding towns, whether he was on army time or during his time off, he noted how rubble concealed the former lives of its inhabitants. He remembered things as they had been during peacetime when he vacationed in Italy with his family. My grandparents had picked up my father and Aunt Ellen from boarding school in St. Moritz and driven down the steep, winding roads out of the mountains to Lake Como. Later, we used to make the same drive year after year, and only once, in Bergamo, did my father mention his wartime past in Italy. Maybe he found a sense of control in recapturing the happiness and freedom that was robbed from his youth.
By now, Dad had been back and forth between Ghedi and Verona several times during his first month in Europe, as well as Modena. He loved his assignment, but what he couldn’t get accustomed to was the overwhelming gratitude of those he set free. He was embarrassed by their effusive joy, and if he lingered even a moment too long with them he might reveal a part of himself that he couldn’t allow to show. Certainly not to a group of strangers whose sudden, intense happiness was like a field of sunflowers craning their fragile necks toward the sky after the rains have ended.
* * * *
At this point my father had been away from his family for two years. The void he left at home was filled for Omi and Ellen by continuing their barrage of letters and care packages. They seemed to persist in the erroneous belief that he must be living on tight rations, which brought back memories of their escape. He explained to them that he fed his army rations to the dogs—to be exact, the German police dogs taken from the Nazis who were now being cared for as pets by the other soldiers. He chose not to have one himself, because, after all, the canines weren’t bilingual and he thought better of chasing after a bunch of dogs shouting commands in German.
Among the men he worked with, his lieutenant and two guys from Hanover and Franconia were, as he put it, “chic” (good guys). They understood one another well. But the others, he said, were better classified as a bunch of “miese Jieden.”* Many of them had been overseas for two and a half years without a break. They were battle-worn, yet still hadn’t received the required six stripes to achieve his rank of master sergeant and often resented that fact. They had three (sergeant), four (staff sergeant), or five (sergeant first class), or sometimes none at all. He on the other hand had earned his stripes in fairly rapid succession, in part due to his talent for the languages he spoke not only fluently but flawlessly, without any other country’s accent infringing on the one he chose to speak at that very moment. The only language he spoke with any discernible accent at that time was English, and even that was evolving daily into a more American patois. This made him somewhat of a chameleon, a quality that, as I said, may have saved his life at the château in 1940. The only thing that held him back seemed to be his age. He wasn’t even twenty-one yet, and most of the other soldiers who held the same rank were older.
At Ghedi he had been second in command and had performed his work with ease. Unlike some of the other officers, he had no fear of assuming the responsibilities assigned him. For one example, some Austrian deserters from the German army were fighting with Italian patriots who had been brought to the camp by accident. Against my father’s orders, the Italians had been mixed in with the Nazis. Naturally, things didn’t go well. One poor fellow who was brought to his office arrived looking completely frazzled. When my father questioned him, the Italian slowly ran his thumb across his neck and said the Nazis had promised to slit his throat during the night.
Upon hearing that, my father immediately asked his lieutenant for full authority. That given, he motioned to the man to follow him and they went straight to camp. Remember, it was a former airfield. It was immense; the length end to end was several kilometers. When they arrived he said, “Andare prendere le altri, e tutti i bagagli e rincontra mi di nuovo qui,” telling the Italian to get the others in his group and have all seventeen of them meet him back there with all of their baggage.
“Va be,” said the Italian, in an unidentifiable accent, and he went off to get the others. After waiting about an hour, my father lost patience and began patrolling the camp in the Mercedes Benz he had acquired complete with a WH license plate. When he came upon a crowd, he quickly pulled to stop and, as the motor fell silent, he heard the angry mob yelling, “TÖTEN!!!” (KILL ’EM!!!)
My father screamed out, “ZERSTREUEN SOFORT UND SCHNELL!” (DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY, AND DO IT FAST!)
His order was ignored, so he gestured toward his revolver and repeated, “ZERSTREUEN SOFORT UND SCHNELL!”
An immediate result. At the sight of his hand reaching for the gun at his hip, about three hundred men just stopped dead in their tracks. All they needed was to see a show of force. When things calmed down, my father learned that one of the men in the group had already been taken away and beaten. He ordered one of the Boche commanders to drive him around until he found the man. With no hesitation whatsoever, my father walked into a tent where an Armeefeldrichter (a German army field judge) had been realigning the now more prominent features of the Italian’s swollen face, grabbed the injured man, and took him out of danger. Within an hour of the incident all of the men were en route to a reception center for refugees. We never find out what happened to the Armeefeldrichter or the others involved in the incident, since my father was more concerned about the refugees.
Within days of that incident, my father was informed that he would no longer be retained in his section. He was a member of company 2680 HQ MIS, which was attached to, but not part of, the 5th Army. It seems that someone had protested his captain’s “tour de force” in having placed him in the 5th Army’s interrogation center in the first place, without having done the proper paperwork. As my father explained in his letter, he was “legally” part of the Documents section, so for him the announcement just meant that he would move on to a more interesting position in another location, a further stop on his Cook’s tour.
There is an interesting misdated letter that must be from around this time, which is in response to one that my father wrote to someone named Jimmy, who held a military position in Washington. Jimmy was an old comrade of Mr. Kresser, the family friend who had saved their lives. He wrote back, offering to help my father attain a position with the Allied Control Commission for Germany led by General Lucius Dubignon Clay, who was General Eisenhower’s deputy in Germany in 1945 and who, during Eisenhower’s presidency, would become his emissary. Presumably because of this intervention, my father’s next stop in the tour was set. He would leave the following day with his captain for an overnight in Salzburg, after which he would return to Verona for two more weeks of interrogating high-ranking prisoners and grilling them on the prevailing economic conditions of the Reich. Then he would be responsible for taking his men to Vienna, where one of the perks of the new position was to have airplanes at their disposal. Nice.
With his last weeks of work in Verona came dolce far niente, in other words, time off, and with that an account of life in early postwar Italy as seen through my father’s eyes. These extracts are taken from a three-week period in June 1945 before he left for Austria.
Having finished the main work, our Lt. has made two groups of our detachment of 9 to take off for two days each. We left Ghedi the night before last in our jeep at about 1900 Hrs. We decided to go to Como and then onto Milan. . . .
At 9 o’clock, after a magnificent trip on the Autostrada (with compliments to the house of Mussolini) we had gotten close to Como, to Canzo. Since we spotted a good restaurant, we decided to eat again, which we did with gusto. A guy who worked in the black market, very nice by the way, had recommended t
he restaurant—which was also clean and modern. And, just to prove there was nowhere better, he came with us. On the way we picked up one of his friends, a comedian. We laughed so hard during our little banquet. Later, the owner joined us. By midnight we’d consumed several different wines, all of the finest quality, and four different types of liqueur. [When we were in the area once as a family, walking up an enormous outdoor staircase, my father pointed up and said he remembered having a little too much to drink one night in the army and he drove his jeep straight to the top.]
The country here in the North is so rich that the Boches’ pillaging had little effect. The bill came to 4000 lira—for an 8-person banquet. That’s $5.00 a head. I guarantee that you would have paid at least $15.00 for the same thing. . . We slept in a really clean hotel.
At about eleven we left for Milan—where we arrived just in time to eat again. We brought Marini, our friend from the night before, with us and he led us to a café for another meal. On the way, we stopped for an aperitif and to eat a delicious cake—the kind that one finds only at Hanselmann in St. Moritz.
After dinner we went somewhere where we were introduced to an enormous man with a stomach of fantastic proportions, Antonio. He seemed to be the head of the local black market. We had yet another drink. I then bought two dozen pairs of silk stockings at a ridiculous price. They offered me 100 dozen—it’s not for lack of money, but how to send them to America?
As far as money is concerned, I have yet to touch my salary or my special fund. I’ll send the stockings as soon as possible. Too bad I couldn’t by 100 or 200 dozen. Then we ran a few other errands with our friends and I bought all sorts of things. We find everything here with the exception of coffee, which we have anyway. We confiscated it from the SS (a good source!). If you hear there’s nothing to be had in Northern Italy, it’s not true. Compared to my training in Vichy, Marseille, Lyon, etc. . . . Then I had a haircut and a shave, a rub down, and a manicure etc., etc. for 80 lira ($0.80). . . . Gold on the black market is at 1000 lira a gram. . . .
Someday You Will Understand Page 15