by Adam Makos
Franz was thirty years old but looked older. His strong jaw was gaunt from weight loss, and his sharp, hawk-like nose seemed even pointier in the icy air. His dark eyes bore hints of exhaustion but still glimmered with optimism. A year after the war had ended, the economy across Germany remained broken. Franz was desperate for work. In a land destroyed and in need of rebuilding, brick making had become Straubing’s primary industry. Today he had heard the brick mill was hiring day laborers.
Franz scurried through the town’s massive square, Ludwig’s Place, his black leather boots clopping along the frozen cobblestones. The square faced east and welcomed the morning sun. In its center sat City Hall, an ornate green building with a tall white clock tower. The hall’s tall windows and carved cherub figurines shimmered. City Hall had been one of the few buildings spared. Around Franz, clumps of other buildings sprawled in the shadows, vacant and roofless, their window frames charred from bombs and fires.
Straubing had once been a fairy-tale city in Bavaria, the Catholic region of Southern Germany where people loved their beer and any excuse for a festival. The city had been filled with a rainbow of houses with red roofs, office buildings with green Byzantine domes, and churches with white Gothic towers. Then on April 18, 1945, the American heavy bombers had come, the planes the Germans called the “Four Motors.” In bombing the city’s train yards the bombers had destroyed a third of the city itself. Two weeks later, Germany would surrender, but not before the city lost the colors from its rooftops.
The clock chimed, its echo bouncing throughout the square—8 A.M. A line of German civilians extended across the square from the City Hall, where the American GIs handed out food stamps. Most of the people waited for their stamps in silence. Some argued. Ten years earlier, Hitler had promised to care for the German people, to give them food, shelter, and safety. He gave them ruin. Now the Western Allies—the Americans, British, and French—cared for the German people instead. The Allies called their effort “the reconstruction of Germany.” The reconstruction was mostly a humanitarian undertaking but also a strategic one. The Western Allies needed Germany to be the front for the Cold War against the Soviet Union. So the Americans, who occupied Southern Germany and Bavaria, decided to fix what was broken—in Germany’s interest, as well as their own.
Rather than traverse around the line of somber people, Franz wiggled through them. Some yelled at him, thinking he was trying to cut in front. Franz kept waddling through the masses. He noticed that the people’s eyes were drawn to his boots.
Franz’s jacket had moth holes—it had been his father’s. His green Bavarian britches had patches on the knees. But his boots were unusual. They covered his calves, and yellow mutton wool peaked over the tops. A silver zipper ran up the inside of each boot, and a black cross strap with a buckle spanned the front of the ankle.
His boots were the mark of a pilot. A year earlier, Franz had worn them proudly in the thin air six miles above earth. There he flew a Messerschmitt 109 fighter with a massive Daimler-Benz engine. When other men walked in the war, he flew at four hundred miles per hour. Franz had led three squadrons of pilots—about forty men—against formations of a thousand American bombers that stretched a hundred miles. In three years, Franz had entered combat 487 times and had been wounded twice, burned once, and somehow always came home. But now he had traded his black leather flying suit, his silk scarf, and his gray officer’s crush cap for the dirty, baggy clothes of a laborer. His pilot’s boots he kept—they were the only footwear he owned.
As he hurried along the street, Franz saw men and women crowded around the town message board to read its notes held by thumbtacks against the wind. There was no mail service and there were no phone lines anymore, so people turned to the board for word of lost family members. Some seven million people were now homeless in Germany. Franz saw a cluster of women standing behind the lift gate of an American Army truck. From inside the covered truck bed, gum-chewing GIs dropped duffels of laundry to the women while practicing sweet-talking in German. The women giggled and departed, each carrying two bags. They were headed for the old park north of the city where a branch of the Danube River curved along the town. There, the women would kneel on the banks and scrub the GIs’ laundry in the icy water. It was cold work but the Americans paid well.
The city’s main street ran north to the river. Franz turned, started down it, and encountered a new rush of humanity. He stopped in his tracks and gulped. He was too late. Every building on this block had a long line of men standing in front. They were all looking for work. Some men blew into their hands. Others twisted back and forth at the waist to stay warm. Most were veterans and wore the same gray tunics and long coats they had worn in the war. The thread outlines from patches they had torn away were still visible. Like Franz, they were competing for the scraps of a desolate economy.
The brickyard was farther down the street, and Franz hoped its line was shorter. He kept walking and passed people working in a bombed-out building, its wall open to the street. Under a canvas tarp, men in winter clothes huddled at their desks while repairing small motors. A woman missing an arm walked among them, delivering their work orders.
A honking horn warned Franz to jump to the curb as an American jeep, the Constabulary patrol, raced past—its GI riders wearing clean, white helmets. The Americans provided law and order while a small force of unarmed German police assisted with “local” matters. Some of the German veterans still looked away whenever the jeeps raced by.
Ahead, sitting on the bench where the buses used to stop, Franz saw the footless veteran. Every day the same man sat there in his tattered Army uniform. He looked forty years old but could have been twenty. His hair was long, his stubble gray, and his eyes blinked nervously as if he had seen a thousand hells. He was a vision of a bad past that everyone wanted to forget.
The footless veteran wobbled his mess kit in the air, looking for a handout. Franz fished in his pocket and dropped a food stamp into the man’s empty dish. Franz did this every time he saw the veteran, and he wondered if that was why the man always sat on the same bench. The veteran never said thanks or even smiled. He just gazed at Franz forlornly. For a moment, Franz was glad he had flown above the ground war. Six years of hand-to-hand fighting and months in Allied P.O.W. camps had left scores of veterans in the same predicament as the panhandler, listless and broken. But they were the lucky ones. The men captured by the Soviets were still missing.
Franz felt his lunch in his pocket—two slices of oat bread. He was not too proud to take handouts from the victors. Handouts meant eight hundred calories of food a day and survival. When Franz was a pilot, he had been well fed, a tradition begun in the First World War, when pilots were aristocrats who had to live well if they were to die painfully. In WWII, good food was considered a job perk, since no amount of money could convince a man to do what pilots did. During the war Franz had dined on champagne, cognac, crusty bread, sausages, cold milk, fresh cheese, fresh game, and all the chocolate and cigarettes he could handle. After the war, Franz had forgotten the feeling of being full.
A long line of workmen had already gathered at the brickyard. Franz groaned. The line wound down the length of the sidewalk from the destroyed building that had become the mill. These days, bricks didn’t have far to travel to be useful—only a block or two away—so the mill had sprung up in the middle of the city.
The men in the brickyard line were a rough mix of laborers. Baking bricks and distributing them was hard work. As Franz approached, they eyed his boots with silent judgment. Franz pretended not to notice. All he wanted was to work and blend in. He had been born an hour away, in tiny Amberg, Germany, where his girlfriend was now living with his mother. Franz had tried to fit in there after the war, but the people knew he had been a fighter pilot and blamed him for the country’s destruction. “You fighter pilots failed!” they had yelled at him. “You did not keep the bombs from falling!” So Franz decided to start over in Straubing, where he was a stranger. It was
no use. The people of Straubing were as disenchanted with fighter pilots as everybody else in Germany. Once, fighter pilots had been the nation’s heroes. Now the hostile eyes of the men around Franz confirmed a new reality. Fighter pilots had become the nation’s villains. Franz turned from the glares of the men.
Two American GIs strolled down the street with German girls on their arms. In daylight, they could do this safely. At night they were liable to be attacked. The girls were cold and starving like everyone else, but they faced a choice: date a German man and go hungry, or date an American who could give them coffee, butter, cigarettes, and chocolate. Next to the boyish conquerors from the richest nation in the world, Franz and the German men in their work lines looked emasculated. “He fell for the fatherland, she for cigarettes,” the bitter German men would quip.
Finally the line moved forward, and Franz stood in front of a wooden folding table inside the brick mill. Behind the table sat the manager, a bald man with spectacles. Behind him, Franz saw workers packing red clay into molds and wheeling wheelbarrows of bricks. Franz handed his papers to the manager then looked at his boots, hoping the man had not yet noticed them. Franz’s papers listed: “1st Lieutenant, Pilot, Air Force.” Upon the war’s end, Franz had surrendered to the Americans, who were hunting for him because he was one of Germany’s top pilots who had flown the country’s latest aircraft. The Americans had wanted his knowledge. Franz had cooperated, and his captors had given him release papers that said that he was free to travel and to work. They had him released because his record was clean—he had never been a member of the National Socialist Party (the Nazis).
“So you were a pilot and an officer?” the manager asked.
“Yes, sir,” Franz said and looked at the floor.
“Bombers?” the manager asked.
“Fighters,” Franz said. He knew the man was baiting him, but Franz was not about to lie. The other workers in line began to whisper.
“So a fighter pilot wants to get his hands dirty now?” the manager said. “He wants to clean up the mess he caused?”
“Sir, I just want to work,” Franz said.
Gesturing to the ruined city around him, the manager recited the line Franz had heard countless times before. “You didn’t keep the bombs from falling!”
Biting his lip, Franz told the manager, “I just want to work.”
“Look elsewhere!” the manager said.
“I need this job,” Franz said. He leaned close to the manager. “I’ve got people to care for. I’ll work hard—harder than anyone else.”
The other men in line grumbled and crowded closer. “Move along,” yelled a voice from behind. Someone pushed Franz. “Stop holding up the line,” yelled someone else. They were angry for losing the war. They were angry at Hitler for misleading them. They were angry because another country now occupied theirs. But none of the men who surrounded Franz would admit this. They needed a scapegoat, and a fighter pilot stood right in front of them.
“Get out!” the manager hissed at Franz. “You Nazis have caused enough trouble.”
Nazi—the word made Franz’s eyes narrow with anger. “Nazi” was the new curse word the Germans had learned from the Americans. Franz was no Nazi. The Nazis were known to Franz as “The Party,” the National Socialists, power-hungry politicians and bureaucrats who had taken over Germany behind the fists of violent, disenchanted masses. They shouldn’t have ever been in charge. They’d only come to power after the elections of 1933, when twelve parties campaigned for seats in Germany’s parliament. Each party won a portion of the vote—there was no majority winner. In the end, the National Socialists won the most votes—44 percent of Germany had voted in their favor. This 44 percent gave the Nazis, and their leader, Adolf Hitler, enough seats in parliament to eventually seize dictatorial powers. Soon after, Hitler and his Nazis outlawed all future elections and all other political parties except for theirs, which became known as “The Party.” Hitler and The Party took over Germany after 56 percent of the country had voted against them.
Franz felt the blood beginning to boil behind his ears. He had been just seventeen, too young to vote in the 1933 election although his parents had voted against The Party. When Franz had come of age, he had never joined The Party. The Party had ruined his life. “I’m not a Nazi!” Franz told the manager. “All I want is to work.”
“Be a man and move along,” yelled someone from the line of men. Others jostled Franz. He felt the wind of angry breath on his neck.
“Get off my back!” Franz shouted to them, twisting his shoulders. Nothing bothered Franz more than someone standing too close behind him. It was his fighter pilot’s survival instinct to fear anyone or anything that approached from his back, his “six o’clock.” Franz knew if he turned around to face the angry men it would only start a fight, so he avoided eye contact with any in the crowd.
The manager picked up a phone mounted on the wall. Its line ran out the shattered window and into the street. He made a call, then told the other workers, “The police are coming.”
“Please don’t,” Franz said. “I’ve got a family to care for.”
The manager just sat back, his arms folded. Franz removed his cap, revealing a dent in his forehead where an American .50-caliber bullet had hit him in October 1944 after piercing his fighter’s armored windshield. Franz pointed to the dent and said, “Don’t rile me!”
The manager laughed. Franz fished inside his pocket and slapped a piece of paper on the table. It was a medical form from his former flight doctor, who had written that Franz’s head injury and its resulting brain trauma “could trigger adverse behavior.” In reality, Franz had not suffered brain damage, just a dented skull. The doctor had given him the slip as a sort of “get out of jail free” card for anything Franz said or did wrong.
The manager took the note, read it, and crumpled it up.
“An excuse for cowardice!” he told Franz.
“You have no idea what we did!” Franz said, clenching his fists. He had watched his fellow fighter pilots fight bravely until they died, one by one, while The Party’s leadership called them “cowards,” deflecting the blame for the destruction of Germany’s cities onto them. In reality, Franz and his fellow fighter pilots never stood a chance against the Allies’ industrial might and endless warplanes. Of the twenty-eight thousand German fighter pilots to see combat in WWII, only twelve hundred survived the war.
Franz leaned close to the man and whispered in his ear.* Leaning back in his seat, the manager said, “Go ahead, try it.”
In one motion, Franz grabbed the manager by his collar, pulled him across the desk, and punched him between the eyes.
The manager stumbled backward into a cabinet. Other laborers seized Franz and slammed him to the floor. One kicked Franz in the ribs. Another punched him in a kidney. Together they ground his face into the dust-covered floor.
“You have no idea!” Franz shouted, his cheek pinned to the tiles.
THREE GERMAN POLICE officers arrived and blew their whistles to part the mob. The laborers lifted their knees from Franz’s back. The police hauled Franz up to his feet. The officers were strong and well fed by their American overseers. Franz wanted to run but could not escape.
With tears in his eyes, the manager told the police that Franz had demanded work ahead of the others and refused to leave. The angry mob confirmed the manager’s story.
Franz denied the accusations, but he knew a losing battle when he saw one. He was going to jail. But he needed to get his papers back. Franz told the officer in charge that the manager held them.
The officer motioned for the other police to take Franz away.
“Wait! He still has my medical form!” Franz objected. The manager handed over the note. The officer uncrumpled the waiver and read it to the other policemen:“… head wound, sustained in aerial combat.” The officer pocketed both of Franz’s papers and announced, “You’re still coming with us!”
Franz knew there was no point in res
isting. The officers dragged him past the line of workers and into the street. A rush of fearful thoughts raced through Franz’s mind: How will I ever find work with an arrest record? What will I tell my girlfriend and mother? How will I provide for them?
Exhausted from struggling against the mob, hurting from the beating, and overwhelmed with grief, Franz fell limp as the police hauled him away. The toes of his heavy black flying boots dragged against the rough, upturned stones where bombs had fallen.
* * *
* Franz would remember what he told the manager: “See, I have a hole here, and if you don’t keep quiet I can’t control what I’m going to do.”
2
FOLLOW THE EAGLES
NINETEEN YEARS EARLIER, SUMMER 1927, SOUTHERN GERMANY
THE SMALL BOY sprinted through the open pasture, his feet in tiny brown shoes. He chased the soaring wooden glider as its pilot took off into the sky. The boy wore thick knit Bavarian kneesocks, green knickers, and a white shirt with short sleeves. He ran with arms outstretched. “Go! Go! Go!” he shouted as he waved the machine and its pilot onward. The glider resembled the skeleton of a dinosaur with a web of wires running within it. It flew one hundred feet above the pasture, and the sound of flapping fabric trailed in its wake. The boy followed the glider to the pasture’s edge and stopped when he could go no farther. He watched the contraption shrink into the distance over the rolling hills of Bavaria.
The glider soared with a whoosh over a farmer herding cows. An older boy flew the craft and sat in a wicker seat positioned over a ski that ran the glider’s length. There was no windshield or instrument panel and only straps across the young pilot’s shoulders secured him to the spartan craft. Minutes later, the pilot steered the machine in for a landing. He aimed for a worn white strip of grass in a green field where many landings had happened before. There, on a hill next to the landing strip, sat a short, wide shed where the youngsters and their adult advisors of the glider club were finishing a picnic. The small boy stood waiting at the shed. He held a short-brimmed tweed hat in his hands. The pilot coasted from one hundred feet to fifty feet to twenty-five feet and made a gentle three-bump landing. The pilot put his legs down to keep the glider from tipping over as the small boy ran up to the machine and darted under its wing. The boy was twelve-year-old Franz Stigler. The pilot was Franz’s sixteen-year-old brother, August.