Steven Karras

by The Enemy I Knew: German Jews in the Allied Military

  THERE WAS A LARGE GERMAN AMMUNITION DUMP on top of a hill adjacent to our camp; it was located in a wooded area half a mile behind and two or three hundred feet above the estate. The dump was filled with a great variety of stuff. We had been up there repeatedly to take a rough inventory. Various types of ammunition and rockets lay piled up in stacks throughout the dump. After we had been up there to inspect the place, Mauksch made an offer to an interested ordnance officer of letting him have him at least one sample of each of the different types of ammo we had found up there. Hans also offered to transport these selected items to a designated ordnance depot located elsewhere in Normandy. I didn’t comment on the wisdom of this offer, although my intuition told me it wasn’t a great idea.

  That German ammo dump occupied several thousand square feet of wooded terrain. Everything that was ever fired out of a barrel or otherwise launched into a suborbital trajectory seemed to be stored there. We found Polish mountain howitzer rounds, German rockets in their wooden launch crates, Italian, French, and Spanish artillery shells, and mortar rounds of many types and calibers. Cases of small arms ammunition were piled everywhere in no apparent order. It was our guess that the Germans had hoarded this stuff for emergency use with captured weapons, or perhaps it was stored there just to keep it out of the hands of the underground army. There was no sign of matching weapons anywhere, however.

  Our job was to deliver as many different samples to that ordnance depot as we could manage to squeeze into a two-and-a-half-ton truck. Our route was a drive of about seventy-five miles over bumpy French country roads that sported large potholes left over from World War I, never mind the current one.

  Throughout this trip, I was in the back of the truck, sitting on the wooden launching crate of a German rocket. Assorted pieces of ammo were bouncing up and down on the floor of the truck during the entire trip. Mortar rounds and artillery shells were clanking and banging into one another—but what the hell, there was a war on! Those rounds weren’t designed to go off by merely bouncing around. All the same, we were not too unhappy to unload the stuff at our destination.

  I wondered what the recipient was going to do with that motley collection of bullets, shells, and rockets. Possibly, he was an ambitious, self-elected collector of foreign arms, like myself, who would eventually make them his ticket to go home, bound for some appropriate U.S. destination ordered up by the War Department. A kindred spirit—good luck to him!

  The following month, on April 20—Hitler’s birthday—someone sabotaged the ammo dump, and it went up in flames. The bushes and other combustibles burned for the next week until the fire spent itself. At the height of the heat up there, stuff would cook off and come flying through the air. Those projectiles didn’t actually explode on arrival, thank heaven! After all, they were not armed, but some of the pieces weighed several hundred pounds.

  SUMMER OF 1945: The war in Europe was finally over. The Allied armies were in parts of Eastern Germany, but we were still in Normandy. Plans for redeploying troops to the Pacific were being put into action, so I was ordered to start training U.S. artillery officers in the recognition and handling of Japanese heavy weapons, just in case these officers were redeployed to the Japanese front. Of course, those transfers never happened. We dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and that ended the war over there before any of my student officers had to make that move.

  In January 1946, I boarded a Liberty ship and our vessel began to plow through an Atlantic winter storm.

  When I returned to New York, I went through the discharge process; I was handed a Bronze Star for meritorious service and they gave me a “ruptured duck,” the embroidered eagle emblem of the discharged World War II vet, which was sewn onto the Eisenhower jacket I was wearing. Overseas, I had already received a Bronze Star, a Marksmanship Medal, a Good Conduct Medal, an ETO medal, and four overseas stripes for the left sleeve of my jacket—one for each six-month period of overseas service. And so I came to the end of my army career—being unceremoniously tossed out into the streets and on my own now!

  It was April 2, 1946. More than three years had passed since I was inducted, three unforgettable years.

  After the war, Ralph Baer pursued his interest in electronics, graduating from the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago in 1949 with a bachelor of science degree in television engineering. He went on to pioneer the development of console video games and other electronic peripherals and games such as the handheld game Simon. In 2006, President George W. Bush awarded Ralph Baer the National Medal of Technology and Innovation for his “groundbreaking and pioneering creation, development, and commercialization of interactive video games.”

  Chapter 13

  BERNARD BAUM

  GIESSEN, GERMANY

  66th Infantry Division

  Bernard Baum was born in Giessen, Germany, and spent the first eight years of his life there before his mother, an American citizen by birth, was able to arrange exit visas for the family to emigrate in 1933. He grew up on the North Side of Chicago and attended Senn High School. After graduating at seventeen, Bernard enlisted in the army and was sent to Lawrence, Kansas, for the Army Specialized Training Program until he was sent to combat in France as an infantry replacement. He is pictured above in France, 1945.

  My father was reared in a small town, Hessen, Germany. His father was a cattle beater, which was a common occupation for Jews at the time. My father was the first university educated member of his family. I was born in 1926 in Giessen, Germany.

  My family was German by nationality and Jewish by religion. My father’s military service in World War I left him very German. He fought for the Fatherland and carried shrapnel in his back for the rest of his life. At the same time, he was aware that Judaism made a difference to being a full-fledged integrated German.

  I remember a couple of incidents of anti-Semitism in childhood, prior to September 1933 when we left. When I was on my scooter in a park across the street from our residence, I had been given a little swastika flag, which I tied to my scooter. One of the older women came up to me and said, “You can’t fly that flag! What are you crazy?” I think she probably was Jewish. She took it away from me. She said, “You don’t want this flag.”

  When I was in second grade, the teacher wore a swastika button on his lapel. He became a Nazi very early on. My older brother was tossed into a garbage can by his classmates or some other children at his school. They all chanted, “Jude, Jude.” There was a parade of brown-shirted Nazis on the street right outside of our building. My father had an enameled sign that said, “Dr. Theodore Baum, Dentist” outside our door. Some ruffians came along, ripped it off, and threw it in the river. One night the police came to get my father and kept him all night. My mother was terrified. They released him, however, because it was sufficiently early in that regime so that they couldn’t do much other than scaring the hell out of him.

  My father was a reader and liberal by orientation and politically. He read Mein Kampf in about 1929 or 1930. As the story goes, when he finished that book, he turned to my mother and said, “If this man Hitler comes to power, we’re leaving Germany.” That was about 1930. In January 1933, when Hitler became chancellor, my father got the papers.

  He said, “We’ve got to leave because these Nazis are bad for us.” It wasn’t a very sophisticated statement, but clearly we three brothers wanted to understand why this was happening. To this day, I have the occasion to say to my students, “Sometimes there’s a payoff for reading a book,” and I repeat the story that my father read that book and believed it. There is another factor that I think is significant: my father was a World War I hero, he got the Iron Cross. People would ask him, “Why are you leaving? You’ve got a successful dental practice. You’re living well.” My father would say, “I’ve got three sons.” The final irony in that regard was when in 1936 or 1937 Hitler sent my father a medal in honor of his service in World War I. I very much regret that my father didn’t keep it, but he was a prin
cipled man. He sent it back. It must be documented that Hitler gave these medals out. There were many cases like my father, but clearly not the majority. My father was farsighted, for which I’m eternally grateful.

  By September 1933 we were on a boat, the Albert Belling. I cite the name because it was named after a big Jewish industrialist and ship owner from Hamburg, Germany. At that point the ship was still named after him, but of course, it was erased soon after.

  I remember dreaming we were going to cross the ocean in a rowboat because I didn’t know anything about big ships. I thought to myself, “My gosh, how can we cross a vast body like that?” It was more like a nightmare.

  My mother had family in Chicago and was, in fact, born on North and LaSalle in the city, so, it was a relatively easy decision. My mother’s father was a widower, and he went back to Germany to get a bride in about 1890.

  My uncle owned a clothing store that had decorators, so when we got to Chicago, they had made a big red, white, and blue sign with stars that said, “Welcome to the USA.” I was very impressed that this sign was for us, and we did feel welcomed. We moved into a small apartment, and then we began to integrate. It was difficult to learn English. I remember asking a classmate of mine, “What does ‘a few’ mean?” She said, “Well, this is one, this is two, and three is ‘a few,’ but four might be a few and five might be a few.” That kind of confused me. Now I understand it’s a relative term, but I remember the difficulty of absorbing that kind of concept. It was not fun.

  We grew up in a family that distinctly didn’t want to live in a Jewish neighborhood. Americanization really put the emphasis on becoming an integrated—not assimilated, but integrated—American. Whereas some of the other German-Jews tended to congregate in their own German-Jewish communities, such as Hyde Park, or Washington Heights in New York, my father was in line with FDR. He put a national recovery act poster in the window. He was always kind of a political activist. Those two kinds of Americanization processes are really distinguishable—the ones who stayed very solidly German-Jewish, in their own communities, and those of us who branched out into other neighborhoods. I think those of us who grew up, who were immigrants, as I was perfectly glad to give up an upper middle-class life for something less secure for freedom.

  My father predicted the war. Once again he was farsighted, and he didn’t see any escape from war. I remember how vehement he was about Neville Chamberlain saying “peace in our time” and capitulating to Hitler for Czechoslovakia. He figured it would be another world war. Even though he had those experiences in World War I, he never for a moment thought that my brother Werner or I should not go into the armed forces; that would be unthinkable. I was an American and there was a war with a clear-cut enemy.

  The year 1941 was a thoroughgoing shock with regard to the Japanese attack, but it was no shock to my father when we finally said, “We’re with you.” Of course we were interested, we had family over there. My mother’s mother went back to Germany after she had become a widow and when my mother was only five years old. My mother went back to take care of her mother in Germany, so she grew up as a German. My father got two of my aunts and uncles out and my grandmother in 1937. However, my father’s sister and her husband, and my cousin, her husband, and their baby were killed in concentration camps.

  As for what was happening in Europe in the 1930s, my parents’ attitudes were unambiguous about Hitler. We all thought that we needed to get rid of this son of a bitch. I think my father would have enlisted if he hadn’t been too old. I was a high school senior and turned seventeen in April. I was to graduate in June, so it was just a couple of months. When I enlisted after graduation, I think my parents had to sign because I wasn’t eighteen yet.

  I became a citizen in 1934 by virtue of the fact that my mother never renounced her U.S. citizenship. So I was granted what was called a derivative citizenship, though the army, in 1943 or 1944, processed me again and gave me my own citizenship.

  THINKING BACK ON WHEN I WAS SEVENTEEN is a bit difficult. I was nervous about being inducted, but I had a high respect for the armed forces. When I swore to uphold the constitution, I took that very seriously—perhaps more seriously than people who hadn’t thought about it. I thought a great deal of it. I realized that this was a major decision of life. Without ambiguity I had some nervousness. I remember walking to 226 W. Jackson, which was a government building at the time, and going up there to be inducted, thinking, “My God, what am I doing?” At that time I didn’t give it much more thought afterward. The decision had a considerable influence on me. I think I felt some sense of pride too. My brother was in the navy at that time.

  I enlisted in June. The army sent me home for about eight weeks, then it ordered me to report to the University of Kansas for the ASTP (Army Specialized Training Program) in August. I went there, got fitted for a uniform, and got a duffel bag, toothbrush, and a razor, even though I didn’t need one. I think there was more emphasis on leaving home for the first time than there was on the fact that I was going off to fight the Germans. Who knows, they could have sent me off to Japan.

  I don’t remember what my parents’ reaction was the first time they saw me in uniform, but I think they were proud.

  IN KANSAS, THEY WERE GOING TO TRAIN ME as an engineer. I took mechanical drawing and geography. Of course we also had discipline formations, marching and so on.

  I had a distinct preference that I wanted to go to Europe, but I had no control over this. I was eighteen in April and in May the program was closed in Kansas. I went off to Fort Sheridan, got re-outfitted, and went on active duty. Then I went to basic training and was a member of an infantry cannon company, learning about cannons and mostly about how to fight. After basic training, I was sent to Alabama to join the 66th Infantry Division. While there, I went to the first sergeant of my company and said, “I want to join the paratroopers.”

  He said, “It’s too late. We’ve been ordered to ship out.”

  At that point we shipped out to New York. I had one visit with my brother Werner who was stationed at Norfolk. My mother and I got together in Philadelphia. I have a picture of that. That was it. Her baby boy was going off to combat. I was a private in the 1st Platoon, the 66th Division, Company A, 262nd Regiment. I learned how to stand up straight at attention, live in a foxhole, and pull guard duty. We were being shipped over from the East Coast, so we knew we were going to Europe.

  We really didn’t know where we were going in Europe. We shipped out somewhere in England on Christmas Eve 1944, and the Battle of the Bulge was on. Our 66th Division was aboard two ships, the Leopoldville and the Cheshire. The Leopoldville was torpedoed, and we lost eight hundred lives as a result. We were out on a deck in life jackets and I watched, in horror, our buddies drowning and freezing to death. That was no way to spend Christmas Eve. Then we landed and ended up on an airstrip that night. I had gotten so close to a fire that my overcoat was burned. We went straight to France. We relieved the 94th Division that was holding the pockets of St. Nazair and Lorient, in France, when it moved out to fight the Battle of the Bulge.

  In combat you’re scared. You don’t think as much of the enemy as saving your ass. There’s no other situation like it. Yes, you cross the street and you run the risk of getting run over. But when you enter a combat zone, you dig a hole in the ground to survive. It’s terrifying. I remember one particular scary moment. We were having lunch out of mess kits and the Germans started bombing us right where we were. All I remember was that I flew to the ground and my lunch went somewhere in the air. That was one nasty scary thing. I didn’t think much about that the enemies were the Germans. I just thought, I’m here, I’m doing my job, and I’m going to dig the hole deep enough to accommodate me.

  The 66th Division’s main task was to contain and probe the German garrison and attack selected enemy installations in the port cities of St. Nazair and Lorient. It was essentially limited warfare. These were relatively fixed positions. It wasn’t like the Battle of the Bulge, which
was moving all the time. At the same time, we were very well entrenched. They shelled us, and we shelled them back.

  One night I went out on patrol, as I did many times. We came under attack and I began to shoot. It was scary; that is the overriding, overpowering emotion. What else can you possibly think about in that situation? I did not think grand thoughts about “This will help to overcome Hitler’s regime,” or “This will put Germany in its place.” Then, when we had victory on VE day, I think most of us thought: “Now they’ll ship us to Japan.”

  I’m no hero and I don’t have that much of a fighting spirit, but I think we have to be prepared to defend our liberty. We can’t take them for granted. I have strong feelings about that. For me, it was also a feeling of wanting to get revenge with a tinge of remorse for fighting citizens of the country of my birth. It was the right thing to do. By the time I got there, there was no doubt: they had to be done away with. I never thought about killing as a crime in that sense. I don’t know that I ever killed anybody. I never saw a body fall as the result of my shooting, but there would be no regret if I had. This was, if not revenge, at least justice.

  After I had served in combat, I volunteered in the Military Intelligence Corps because I thought I’d be of more value to it since I spoke, read, and wrote German. So I went to the chief of the intelligence in Vienna when I was in the army of occupation and said, “I am standing guard at a little-used railway yard and that’s all right. That’s what infantry men are for, I guess, but think I can be of more help.”

  The colonel who interviewed me said, “I’ll request your transfer of course.”

  When he requested my transfer, my company commander said, “Baum, you stupid idiot.” He was out for me because I had broken the chain of command. I had gone from being a private to a full colonel, so my life was going to be a misery. Fortunately, I received an order that was signed by Gen. Mark W. Clark that said, “PFC Bernard Baum is hereby transferred.”