Sons and Soldiers

by Bruce Henderson

  The doctor responded sympathetically and said he appreciated how Martin must feel, but his advice was to “take it easy, son. Things will turn out all right.” Martin would be serving as a hospital orderly, the doctor explained; it was an important job, and he wished Martin luck.

  The first weeks of medical basic training were filled with marching drills, exercises, barracks cleaning, lectures on sanitation and the treatment of wounds, and endless hours on KP duty, scrubbing pots and pans.

  Then, in February 1943, after only six weeks at Camp Pickett, Martin was summoned to battalion headquarters. The clearly baffled sergeant had a train ticket and a set of orders for him. Martin was also surprised and confused by this state of affairs. A recruit was never transferred when he was only half finished with basic training, the sergeant said. On top of that, Martin was being sent to a top secret base the sergeant knew nothing about.

  “What crime have you committed?” the sergeant asked.

  Martin had no idea, but after all he had been through, being imprisoned as an enemy alien seemed as likely as any other scenario.

  Wearing fatigues and carrying his duffel bag, Martin boarded a train early the next morning. He traveled all day by train and bus to a small army camp tucked into a wide valley between two mountains in rural Maryland. The main entrance had tall, rock turrets befitting a Norman castle. The only signage in front of a set of wrought-iron gates read stop.

  Stepping up to the guard booth, which was manned by a tall military policeman (MP), Martin handed over his orders. To his disbelief, the MP addressed him in German.

  When he had first read the orders directing him to report to the Military Intelligence Training Center (MITC) at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, Martin had wondered what he could possibly know or do that would be of any value to U.S. Army Intelligence. Now, conversing in his native German with the MP, he had his first inkling of why he had been transferred here. The next one came soon after he walked into the top secret Camp Ritchie. A platoon of soldiers was marching smartly down a street. In full-dress Wehrmacht uniforms, a sergeant was counting cadence in German:

  “Links, zwei, drei, vier.”

  Camp Ritchie’s front gate when the only sign read STOP. (U.S. Army Signal Corps)

  Soon after Werner Angress’s close call in October 1938, when the Gestapo agents boarded the night train out of Germany as he fled to Holland, he signed up for a farming collective. With his parents and younger brothers settled in Amsterdam, where his ex-banker father, Ernst, had bought and was managing a women’s lingerie shop, Werner moved to Wieringen, on Holland’s north coast. As at Gross Breesen, he thrived on the farm, rising with the sun and the roosters each morning and working outdoors all day long.

  Early in 1939, plans jelled for the Gross Breesen people to start an agricultural training operation in Virginia. Program director Curt Bondy remembered his promise and offered Werner the opportunity to join them. He told Werner it would likely be possible for him to emigrate to America on an agricultural quota, and Werner, now nineteen, signed on.

  After Germany invaded Poland in September, Werner’s pending emigration became as important to his parents as it was to him.

  “Sooner or later,” his father warned, Hitler would attack neutral Holland. “It’s important for Mutti and me to know you are safe.” If things looked bad in Holland, Ernst added, he would try to get the family out of Europe, and perhaps join Werner in America.

  Through Bondy’s connections, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in New York found Werner a sponsor: Lewis L. Strauss, co-owner of the New York investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Werner’s father was in awe; when he saw Strauss’s affidavit, he exclaimed, “He is a senior partner of one of the biggest banks in America!”*

  In late September 1939, Werner was summoned to appear at the U.S. consulate in Amsterdam. The official asked him a series of questions, most of which called for only one-word answers: Had he ever been a member of the Communist Party? Did he want to murder the president of the United States?

  A week later, Werner returned to the consulate to take a physical examination, which he passed, completing the last step toward obtaining his visa. Farewells with his family were short but emotional. None of the Angresses knew when—or if—they would see each other again. His mother, Henny, tried hard to smile as she kissed and hugged him. His youngest brother, Hans, now eleven years old, cried uncontrollably. Werner’s last glimpse of his father was almost a still-life of Ernst, wearing a three-piece suit and looking like the respected banker he had once been, standing by the car, faintly waving. Werner struggled to hold back his own tears as he walked away from them with a pounding heart. He boarded a train for Antwerp; there, he would board the SS Veendam of the Holland America Line for the voyage to America.

  The Dutch ship was overcrowded with Jewish refugees, and there were often at least four people staying in cabins meant for two. Most of the twelve-day crossing of the North Atlantic was stormy, and many people spent all day in their bunks. Werner was among the few who did not get seasick, and with so many not eating because of their upset stomachs, he enjoyed double and triple portions in the nearly deserted dining room.

  The SS Veendam arrived in New York on November 11, 1939, and with a Breesen friend who met him in the city, Werner did a little sightseeing, including a stroll through Central Park. The boulevards and skyscrapers were impressive, but also overwhelming. The “city that never sleeps” seemed too big and too crowded, with masses of people every which way Werner turned. After a couple of days—and nights spent in a youth hostel crammed with other foreigners—he was more than ready to find his way back to a quiet life on the farm. But before he did, he wished to personally thank his sponsor. He went to the Manhattan offices of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., but was told by a secretary that her boss had “no time for that.” Still, Werner later wrote Lewis Strauss a thank-you letter.

  Werner had gotten off the boat with fifty dollars his father had given him, and he still had most of it when he boarded a Greyhound bus headed to Virginia, where his destination was the sixteen-hundred-acre Hyde Farmlands, located not far from Richmond. Two Jewish American businessmen, cousins Morton and William Thalhimer, owned the property, and they supported Bondy’s mission of teaching Jewish refugees to farm and become self-sufficient.

  The main house was a white-columned antebellum mansion surrounded by picturesque lawns dotted with mature Virginia willows. About a hundred yards away was the former slave house, used in recent years to store livestock feed. Werner and two old friends from Gross Breesen cleaned it out, and the three of them moved in. They were soon busy planting two hundred cherry trees and fifteen fig trees, and making concrete cinder blocks for chicken coops.

  The next six months passed quickly for Werner. He found the labor in the fields hard but rewarding, and in his free time he fell in love with his new surroundings. He enjoyed walking through virgin woods, showering under a waterfall, riding horseback on a moonlit night—they all reminded him of his youthful cowboy dreams from reading the adventure books of Karl May.

  Then, on May 10, 1940, came the news that Hitler’s armies had invaded Holland, just as Werner’s father had predicted. The fighting lasted only a few days before Dutch forces surrendered, and within a week, German troops occupied Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

  Everyone at Hyde Farmlands, all Jews from Germany or other Nazi-occupied countries in Europe, talked of little else but war and what was happening in their homelands. Werner was sick with worry about his family, and desperate for contact and news. Had they gotten out? Holland had fallen so quickly; they’d had only a little time. He thought of his mother struggling to smile as she kissed him farewell and of his little brother Hans, who couldn’t stop crying. And of his brother Fritz, who at sixteen had stood tall when they shook hands good-bye and kept his emotions in check like a big boy. Werner believed in his father, who had not only orchestrated their escape from Germany, but had smuggled their savings out of the country under the noses
of the Nazis. Had he been able to pull off another miraculous escape for them?

  In late June, Werner finally got a letter from his parents. There had been no desperate flight; they were still in occupied Amsterdam, “for the time being doing well under the circumstances,” they wrote. Their lives continued mostly as before, Papa working at his store, and Fritz and Hans going to school. Werner’s spirits soared, but as delighted as he was with their news, he wondered just how long such normalcy could last with the Nazis occupying Holland.

  On the evening of December 29, Werner joined a group seated around the wood-cabinet radio in the mansion’s clubbish library and listened to President Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chat about defense.

  “My friends: This is not a fireside chat on war. It is a talk on national security, because the whole purpose . . . is to keep you now and your children later and your grandchildren much later out of a last-ditch war for the preservation of American independence and all of the things that American independence means to you and to me and to ours.”

  The American president’s deliberate, calm cadence filled the room, and Werner found himself unable to look away from the radio. Roosevelt called for a national effort to provide “as much as possible,” to give economic and military aid to keep England “as strong as possible” against the Axis powers. He wanted his listeners to understand that “the Nazi masters of Germany have made it clear that they intend not only to dominate all life and thought in their own country, but also to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe to dominate the world.”

  Though at this time Roosevelt was still maintaining that the U.S. would not enter the war, he concluded his forty-minute speech with a rousing call to arms. “We must be the great arsenal of democracy. For us, this is an emergency as serious as war itself.”

  After the speech, everyone seemed too deeply lost in his or her own thoughts for much discussion. Werner went to his room and wrote in his diary, “great speech, clear, simple and honest.” The next morning, he saw Bondy, and they talked about the radio speech. Bondy shared his sobering assessment with Werner: “We will soon be facing totally new conditions,” he said. “Probably no more people will be able to leave the occupied countries.”

  Like a shot, Werner’s thoughts again went to his family—in truth, they were never far from his mind. Were they now trapped in occupied Europe? His diary entry from that night revealed his anxiety and concern: “I am so damned tired, in body as well as mentally. Damned, what is going to happen now?”

  Two months later, the owners of Hyde Farmlands informed Bondy that their philanthropic endeavor had become financially untenable, and they had decided to sell the property. The thirty residents, most of them young men and a handful of women, discussed the future. For the men, Bondy suggested the army, and many—Werner among them—agreed that the military was preferable to bouncing around local farms looking for work. If America was drawn into the war, as they all hoped would soon happen, they would have a jump on the wave of new recruits and be able to do their part that much sooner.

  Werner volunteered for service, and was inducted into the U.S. Army on May 7, 1941. That day, he took the train with the other recruits to Maryland’s Fort Meade, home of the 29th Virginia National Guard Division, to begin training. The day before he left, he gave the diary he had been keeping for the past five years—starting with his arrival at Gross Breesen and ending with his last day at Hyde Farmlands—to a friend for safekeeping in the event that “anything should happen to me, and that is not unlikely.” His final entry read:

  May 6, 1941: Tomorrow my time as a soldier begins. During these five years I have learned agriculture, left Germany, seen western Europe, and immigrated to the U.S. Most of it was full of excitement, restlessness, wildness. The world is at war and maybe I will perish in this war. Maybe it will be true some day that Germany will be there again for me. If I were to end up over there, my life would make sense. Next month I will be 21 years old. What will become of me I don’t know. I only know one thing: there is no laying flat for me, there is no time without fighting and without longing.

  Werner was assigned as an infantryman to B Company, 116th Regiment of the 29th Infantry Division. Many of its members were from Lynchburg, Virginia, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, but they readily accepted the foreigner with the strange accent and regaled him with stories of their hometown, located on the tree-studded banks of the James River. Eighty years after the Civil War, pride was obvious in their voices when they explained that Lynchburg was the only major city in Virginia not captured by the Union Army.

  For Werner, the long practice marches were the most difficult part of the training. During maneuvers around Fort Meade, and in other parts of the South, the recruits could go twenty miles or more in the blazing summer heat and humidity, all the while loaded down with packs, rifles, ammunition, bayonets, and other gear. Werner credited his ability to meet the physical challenges of the infantry entirely to his strenuous work on the farm.

  In the army, he quickly made a new friend: John G. Barnes, a civil engineer from Newport News, Virginia. A tall man in his mid-thirties, Barnes had a face that Werner, at first sight, thought was so ugly as to be distinctive. But there was nothing off-putting about his personality and his genuine concern for others. Upon hearing Werner’s fractured English, Barnes asked if he would like a tutor, and Werner accepted the offer. Barnes began by reading to Werner from the political section of the New York Times; he would then have Werner read back an article and explain it. Within a few months, Werner was reading and speaking proficiently and had no trouble understanding others, even the down-home twang of southern drill sergeants.

  Although Werner still had a definite German accent, no one in the division seemed bothered by it or by his German heritage. Until December 1941, he was able to keep up a regular correspondence with his mother, and among the things she told him was that, earlier in 1941, officials from a German agency that enforced laws against currency transfers abroad had come to the house and arrested his father. A short time later, Werner received a brief note from Ernst, written from an Amsterdam jail cell. In his mother’s most recent letter, she told him that Papa had been moved to Berlin, tried for smuggling money out of the country, and sentenced to Brandenburg Penitentiary, one of the most secure prisons in Europe. Its inmates were doomed to lengthy sentences of hard labor.

  This heartbreaking letter, which arrived shortly before the U.S. entered the war, was the last one Werner received from his mother. After that, nothing came—from her, his brothers, or his imprisoned father. A desperate Werner wrote letters to Holland but received no replies. He began to fear the worst.

  In June 1942, the 29th moved to Camp Blanding, near Jacksonville, Florida, and went on alert and was ordered to prepare to sail for Northern Ireland. Werner was excited by the news, and his disappointment when he was told that he would not be going overseas with them was profound. His U.S. citizenship was not yet final, even though a new law had been passed to expedite the process for those in the military.* Because Werner had joined the army during peacetime, no restrictions had previously been placed on his training or assignments, but after Germany declared war on the U.S. in December 1941, and given that he still held German citizenship, he automatically became an enemy alien.

  Saying farewell to his friend John Barnes, whom he would never see again, Werner was transferred to the 79th Infantry Division, which also trained at Camp Blanding. After more months of maneuvers, he was notified that he would be joining the other soldiers who hadn’t yet received their citizenship papers in a new creation called an “alien detachment.” There were twenty men in the division, most German-born Jews, and a few non-Jews of German descent from the Chicago area. They were ordered to turn in their weapons and dress uniforms, and were refused weekend passes to go into town. They were not quartered in barracks, like the other soldiers, but were relegated to small tents in the middle of a field. For the next six months, they
did menial chores like cleaning windows, raking leaves, and scrubbing latrines. At night, drunken soldiers coming back from town would curse loudly at them, calling them “Nazi pigs” and worse.

  How had he ended up in such a situation? Werner wondered. After all, he had been an enemy alien for his last six months in the 29th Division, and nobody had said anything about his German heritage or lack of U.S. citizenship. No other divisions were known to have alien detachments. At length, he heard that the unit was the brainchild of a “nearly senile” colonel and his sergeant from Brooklyn. The sergeant had persuaded the colonel, who was the division’s intelligence officer, that the enemy aliens, even those claiming to be Jewish, might be Nazi spies.

  After almost a year, to the surprise of the men in the alien detachment, they were given their uniforms back and granted ten days’ leave in the summer of 1943. No explanation was given, and they all quickly left the base on the same day before the higher-ups could change their minds. Werner went to Richmond, Virginia, where Bondy had moved after the Hyde Farmlands closed.

  Coincidentally, Werner arrived just as an army officer was interviewing Bondy—part of the investigation into Werner’s work history for his naturalization application. Asked by the officer how his army service was going, Werner took a deep breath, decided what the hell, and told him all about the alien detachment, holding back no details. The shocked officer said such a detachment was in violation of regulations and promised to report it.

  By the time Werner returned to Camp Blanding, the tents in the field were gone and the alien detachment had been disbanded. Werner and the others were given back their weapons and assigned to regular units and duties on the base. But it was not so easy for Werner and the others to forget the treatment they had been subjected to for nearly a year.

  A few weeks later, Werner saw a notice on a barracks bulletin board calling for any soldiers who spoke a foreign language to apply at the Military Intelligence Training Center to become translators, interpreters, and prisoner-of-war interrogators. Realizing this could be his ticket out of the division he had come to loathe, he immediately applied and was accepted. He was soon on his way to Camp Ritchie.