Steven Karras

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

  Before we emigrated from Germany, my dad turned the accounts over to a German lawyer who made arrangements to continue the collections to support my father’s mother, who died in Theresianstadt in 1942.

  My older brother, Erwin, and I both went to public school and had a lot of gentile friends until the kids were recruited into the Hitler Youth. There were about twenty-two Jewish children our age and they became the only playmates we had after mid 1934. We had problems on the way to and from school, as the kids who used to be our friends beat us up.

  One of our teachers made it a point at least once a week to find a reason to give us a penalty assignment, which kept us up to midnight to complete.

  IN LATE 1934 MY FATHER and one of my uncles were investigating the possibility of driving to Palestine. When this became unfeasible, my parents applied for a quota number to immigrate to the United States. By the end of 1937, my parents made the decision to move to Frankfurt, for my brother and I could not go to school anymore without sustaining bodily harm and my father’s business was closed. It would make it easier to prepare for emigration since there was an American consulate in Frankfurt. There also were Jewish schools.

  My mother’s brother and his family, including my grandmother, immigrated to the United States in 1937. My grandmother had two brothers living in Kokomo, Indiana. When my grandmother arrived in Chicago, she immediately contacted her brothers to secure a sponsor for our family. I had my Bar Mitzvah on May 7, 1938, at the Borneplats Synagogue, which was burned to the ground on Kristallnacht. We just couldn’t wait to leave.

  The first week of June 1938, we took a train to Hamburg and upon arrival boarded the steamship U.S.S. Harding for our trip to the States. We traveled first class and had a wonderful trip. We stayed in New York for a couple of days to visit friends and relatives, and then took a train to Chicago where we settled permanently. Seeing the skyscrapers in New York and Chicago was awesome. A lot of our relatives who had preceded us to Chicago—all on my mother’s side—had settled in Hyde Park. We found an apartment one block from where my uncle lived and two blocks from where my aunt and two cousins lived. Within the Hyde Park area we had about twenty families that were all uncles, aunts, and cousins. We had a big circle of friends and relatives, and life became very comfortable.

  Walking up 53rd Street, it seemed as though everybody was from Germany. All of our family was able to leave Germany except my father’s mother and his youngest sister and her family. They all perished in concentration camp, except my cousin who survived. I found her after the war, and my dad immediately started making arrangements to bring her to the United States.

  My dad found a job in a factory and my mother did odd domestic work for the first couple of years. Then my dad started selling cigars and cigarettes and built up a very lucrative business, finally selling only cigars and tobacco.

  We all knew before we left Germany that the war was coming. We saw the tremendous buildup of the army and air force. I will never forget the Sunday morning when we got up and found out that Pearl Harbor was attacked. My family was very surprised because we thought Germany would declare war on the United States first. I was still in high school when the war was declared. My brother and some of our friends made arrangements to enlist in the army. My brother was rejected due to his eyes. I personally wanted to finish high school first, but received my notice of induction the day after my birthday in April 1943, before I had a chance to finish my last semester.

  I was inducted at Camp Grant in Illinois. From there, I was sent to Camp Fannin in Texas for basic training. I was placed in a specialized training battalion where I learned some interrogation techniques and communications. There were only five refugee boys in the interrogation class. Before being sent overseas, I became an American citizen. My biggest fear was being sent to the Pacific, as many of the soldiers I trained with were. We were trained as replacements and therefore not sent overseas as a unit. I kept reminding the first sergeant of my training company that I had the special training in interrogation and could be more effective in the European Theater.

  I was finally sent to England to a replacement depot in January 1944. We crossed the Atlantic in a forty-ship convoy escorted by a small aircraft carrier, a destroyer, and several destroyer escorts. German U-boats attacked several times, and we lost two ships. I was on the U.S.S. Heritage. I continued to receive training both in communication and interrogation. There was a group of refugees in those classes, but I never saw any of them again after the invasion, as we were all sent to different units in France. We were shipped over without incident and landed at Omaha Beach; of course at that moment in time, the beachhead had already been secured a month before. I was assigned to the 3rd Armored Division. The organization was astounding. We hiked up the cliffs, where there were trucks waiting for us, and were immediately transported to where the division was located. There was a lot of anxiety because I was going to be in the thick of it very soon. The division was located just outside of St. Lo.

  The 3rd Armored Division landed at Omaha Beach the last week in June and, on June 29, entered into combat. I was in the second replacement group when I joined. As a replacement, I was interviewed by the first sergeant and the company commander of the 1st Battalion, B Company, 36th Armored Infantry Regiment. I was told not to reveal to anyone in the company that I was a German refugee. They both felt that if I were captured, it was enough of a problem being Jewish. I saw my first combat near Marigny, Normandy, on July 24 as an assistant radio operator. On August 8, I was wounded by a mortar shell near Avranches (Normandy). The medics sent me to a field hospital near St. Lo. The Germans bombed the hospital every night, and after five days I requested to be sent back to my company. The company medics changed my bandages every couple of days for about three weeks to avoid infections. Four days after I returned to my unit, I passed out during an attack early in the morning. The prognosis was loss of blood due to constant drainage. The medics gave me a blood transfusion, and I was fine after that.

  The division continued south in Normandy to Mayenne and then turned north to Fromentel, where we made contact with the British to close the Falaise Gap and cut off a considerable part of the German Army in Normandy. We were known as the “Spearhead Division” because instead of a frontal attack, we would cut a wedge in their lines and keep going until we could attack them from behind. The Germans would do the same to us. Once we traveled a hundred miles ahead and had to stop so the rest of the infantry could catch up with us. The 1st Division was assigned to the 3rd Armored Division, had to mop up in back of us, and had to fight its way up to where we were.

  The division was commanded by Gen. Maurice Rose; he was a spit and polish West Pointer and had to go into combat in dress uniforms at all times. We shaved every day whenever possible. He was absolutely the epitome of a U.S. soldier; there was never a speck of dirt on his boots. It was unbelievable what he demanded of the troops, but he was respected immensely. General Rose made a point to hand out as many medals on the frontlines to the individuals in our unit. He felt that it should come from him instead of a company commander or a battalion commander. He was always on the frontlines because he felt that he couldn’t ask of men what he wouldn’t do himself. That endeared him to the division to say the least. I didn’t know at the time that he was a Jew and the son of a rabbi who was in Denver, but when I did find out it gave me a tremendous sense of pride.

  The division then turned east to Chartres. At Melun, south of Paris, we turned to the northeast toward Soissons with ultimate target Mons, Belgium. I was now the radio operator for the captain’s jeep. We took Mons with only a few minor skirmishes. We started to clean our guns and equipment when the word came over the radio that a sizable German force was approaching the city. Our company captured two trucks full of German infantry. After I interrogated about ten prisoners—scouts who had come to look at our positions—all hell broke loose. On one of the main streets, a truck had approached with about fifty men and they were asked to put their hands u
p. When they didn’t, we just shot them outright, killed them all in about a minute. We had no choice, for they came out of the truck with their guns blazing.

  The Germans had not known that we had already taken the city. We sent an advance party with big white sheets (the Germans thought we were trying to surrender) to get the Germans to give up, but they refused. Needless to say, it was a massacre. Our tanks and antitank guns were in such good positions that there was no way they could hit us with any great impact. Of course, with the German Tiger and Panther tanks, we had to hit them with our 76mm guns on the side in their tracks because their armor was so good that our shells would bounce right off of them. Conversely, the Germans had heavier guns than what we had on our tanks, until we got the 105s later on.

  It was on this day that I became very upset with some of my Jewish buddies, as several of them kept interfering with my interrogations and started asking the prisoners questions in Yiddish, which of course they did not understand. I must explain, under most circumstances we were able to separate the prisoners from our troops, but in Mons, things were happening so fast that it became quite a problem.

  From Mons, we turned east to Liege, Belgium, and on September 13 to 15 penetrated the Siegfried Line. It was a very tough battle. We made a frontal attack with fifteen tanks and two infantry battalions; of the fifteen tanks, ten of them were knocked out in about two minutes. The Germans concentrated their fire on this one field, and there was no way our tanks could get through.

  We then had to send the infantry in with Bangalore torpedoes, thirty-foot-long sticks of dynamite, which were shoved into their bunkers, killing everyone inside. That is how we took their pillboxes. It took us about a week to do this. Our battalion received the Presidential Unit Citation for this battle. The Siegfried Line had the infamous “dragon’s teeth,”—concrete wedges in the ground—and we had to call in bulldozers to take them out, and then put sand down so we could get the tanks through. It was hard because there was so much steel and concrete.

  While I felt a great deal of gratification that I was there with the American troops, I never felt that, “Here I am, back to fight you guys for what you did to me,” because I became one of the GIs. I never gave revenge a second thought.

  The entire division defended positions in the Aachen, Stolberg, Mausbach area from September until December. We had lost so much of our equipment that we were lucky to be almost completely re-equipped right before the Germans broke through in the Ardennes, during the Battle of the Bulge. In Stolberg we slept in houses, as a matter of fact, the Germans were so close—almost across the street in buildings opposite us—that we could talk to them without even shooting. They knew we had very little equipment and they didn’t have much either. In fact one day I was standing on a teller mine, which was an antitank gun, so I couldn’t get hurt and some Germans came out of a building and we shook hands. We had normal conversations like, “When are you guys going to leave without fighting us?” and that kind of stuff. I pretended like I spoke broken German and never let on that I was German. There was a kind of peace between us for a very short time.

  On December 12, all units of the division were back to full strength, and we attacked the Germans near Echtz and Hoven, driving the enemy across the Roer River. It was during this battle when I became the company’s communications chief, as we lost both our company commander and the communication sergeant. I also adopted a small Spits dog, which was about the only thing still alive in town at the end of the attack. On December 20, when the Germans broke through our lines in Belgium, the 3rd Armored was pulled out of Germany and sent south to Belgium.

  We defended the Hotton–Soy area and stopped the enemy forces whose target was Liege. One morning, the temperature was ten degrees Fahrenheit. I took a patrol out consisting of one squad with a half track and four of us on a jeep to check out a town. As we were approaching the town coming down a sunken road, we saw an American column coming toward the town from the opposite side. Had we not been able to make immediate contact with battalion headquarters, we would have been killed or captured. It was the enemy using captured American equipment.

  We retreated to the crest of the hill and stayed in the deep snow and cold. It was a frightening time because we never knew when the Germans would counterattack; it was tough and a lot of our units had many casualties. One unit had to abandon its vehicles and moved out at night on foot because it was totally surrounded. I asked for artillery fire, but was told we had to wait our turn, possibly for a few hours. The artillery forward observer at battalion headquarters said it was up to me to give the proper coordinates. We were so cold after about one hour that I asked for our group to be relieved, but company headquarters said that no one was available.

  After two hours, we noticed that the enemy troops were starting to move. When I reported that everyone became concerned and we finally were cleared to receive our allocation of artillery fire. We were lucky with my calls and scored several direct hits on the equipment. This kept the enemy from attacking and overrunning us.

  When I was in ROTC in high school, I had a map reading course, which came in handy that morning. After the Battle of the Bulge, we returned to Germany and, on March 5, made our way back to Cologne. On the approach we had to take a town and, as we approached, there were six German 88s sitting on the periphery of the town that started firing at us. There were no tanks with us either—half tracks and foot only. Out of 125 men, we ended up with 29, all the rest of them had either been killed or wounded.

  The 88 was just the most wicked gun you can ever imagine. You could hear the blast from the gun, but by the time you heard it, it was almost too late. These were the kind of things that happened to us all the time. Our casualties were always tremendous because we just pushed through; we wouldn’t let anything stop us. On this day, as I was running from one area to another, I saw a friend of mine standing in a foxhole. He had been hit and he was using an abandoned German foxhole because he had a leg wound. The next time I went by the foxhole, his head was blown off and I was just sick. I lost friends everyday.

  Sometimes we got lucky and avoided ambush. On one approach, we heard talking in German and didn’t realize there was a gulley in front of us; we climbed up this embankment, looked down, and saw a five-gun entire artillery unit with its guns trained over the hill toward us. Our guys stood up on command and the Germans put their hands up without firing a single shot.

  TAKING COLOGNE AFTER THIS was a very rough battle. We hit the outskirts, and the Germans had made a concerted effort to defend the Ford factory. We attacked, and it took us four or five days to oust them from the factory, which was like a fortress. On the second attack, I lost the radio that was on my back while trying to dive into a house because of the way they were attacking us from the side. Once we got through that, we were close to the Rhine River when the Germans blew up the last bridge right in front of us.

  Once a battle started it was total chaos. At a given point, everyone has to be on his own and try to eliminate whatever is in front of them. You coordinate what you can once a battle starts, but after that you’re on your own and hope you can keep up with the rest of the troops.

  We continued southeast to Herborn and then north to Paderborn. On March 30, south of Paderborn, General Rose was killed. It was a very strange day. Earlier that morning, we were on the left of a sunken road—on a hill—and we saw three of our tank destroyers being captured by Germans on one side of a hill. Our two lead companies that day were cut off and that was when the general made the decision to get out front with two armored cars and two jeeps and look for them. That was the last of him.

  As he approached a sunken road, where the Germans had tanks in the gulley pointed at the road that his column was on, they stopped him. When he tried to surrender a trigger-happy German shot and killed him. It was devastating; we all said, “Why did he always have to get up in front?” We couldn’t figure out why the man in a situation like that would want to take a chance, when we who had the tanks an
d the half tracks weren’t going to take it. What made him think that two armored cars and jeeps could get across?

  The next day we took several prisoners. During my interrogation, I found out that the SS Panzer training school was in Paderborn and they were not going to surrender. After a fierce two-day battle with heavy causalities on both sides, we took the city.

  We continued pushing east, and on April 22–23 we took Dessau, where we met the Russians. I was glad the war was over and proud to be one of the guys who was kicked out of Germany and was able to become one of the conquerors. It was a revelation to see what we had done to Germany; I was elated when I saw the German cities destroyed, because I thought that it was justice and they got what they deserved. I felt that I did my job, but most importantly I was grateful that I had been given the opportunity to do this job.

  When the war was over, I applied for a job with the military government. I was turned down because I was not yet twenty-one years old; I had been the youngest in my battalion. The military government was desperate for interpreters, however, so I was assigned a job in a unit that set up displaced persons camps for all the people escaping from the Russian zone. We set up three camps near Heidenheim and for three months I lived like a king. We had German servants that cooked, made our beds, polished our boots, did our laundry, and made us feel very comfortable.

  I had enough points to be sent home at the end of August 1945. We were sent to Marseille, France, in the beginning of September for our journey home. Due to a dock strike on the East Coast of America, we were held up until the end of November. This obviously was very boring, as all we could do during this time was read, watch movies, and do calisthenics three times a day. I was in the best physical shape ever.