Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

Missouri-born Lucien Agniel, the first American I had the rare good fortune to meet when I arrived in Germany in 1951, worked for the United States Foreign Service in the Munich Press Office of the U.S. Land Commissioner’s office; six years after the end of World War II, Munich still had no Consulate proper in Munich.  Lu and his wonderfully warm-hearted wife Libba (the only person I’ve ever known who spoke fluent German with the unmistakable accent of her native Georgia) soon made me virtually a member of their family, which included four  children, the youngest of them born in the U.S. Army Hospital in Munich’s Schwabing neighborhood. 

Lucien, one of the gentlest, kindest human beings ever to bless my life, didn’t talk much about his own WW2 experiences only a few years earlier, but I did know he’d participated in the insanely murderous “Battle of the Bulge” that resulted from Nazi Germany’s desperate last gasp before capitulating to the Allies.  On one of the rare occasions he did talk about that with me, he indirectly labeled himself a war criminal when he happened to mention the ever more numerous hordes of young Germans his own U.S. Army unit had taken prisoner during those tumultuous days. 

“Whenever the German prisoners surrendering by the hundreds outnumbered the members of our own unit - and that happened fairly often, over and over and over - sheer self-preservation automatically took priority, and our commanding officer would quietly assign a small commando to take them over and lag with them behind the rest of our marching column until a suitable distance separated them from us, and then, with machine-guns, simply mow them down.  That situation boiled down to ‘Either them or us.’”

That memory has haunted me for more than half a century, and it emerged into my conscious mind most recently this weekend when I came upon a story in the Anglophone online edition that Germany’s top-notch newsmagazine Der Spiegel makes available free of charge.  Sixty-two years ago World War II may have finished Adolf Hitler’s “1000-Year Reich” (which in fact fell short of his prediction by 988 years), but only relatively recently has the postwar German democracy got around to legally “rehabilitating” some thirty thousand Germans the Nazis’ courts martial sentenced to death for desertion from the military.  However, that posthumous rehabilitation has not applied to others found guilty of what during that hideous era classified as anti-Nazi treason.  Legally - and in punctilious Germany such details have serious importance for various reasons - those doubly hapless wretches remain every bit as guilty today as at the time of their execution.  Only now has Germany’s Bundestag (Parliament) got around to showing signs that it may - finally, finally - get around to making recompense for that.

Consider these specific incidents of such “treason”:

One German soldier, his name meanwhile lost to history, in May 1944 tried to smuggle thirteen automatically doomed Jews out of Hungary (where the Jewish population almost unanimously disappeared up Nazi extermination camps’ smokestacks) into Romania to save them from the gas chambers at Auschwitz and the SS’s five other specifically extermination camps on Polish soil.  A border check disclosed his illegal cargo hiding in the back of his army truck - and a Nazi German military court sentenced him to death on the charge  of treason.

At least Adolf Hermann Pogede’s name remains on record.  In July 1944, he also got turned over to the hangman after a military trial found him also guilty of treason, charged with having told Soviet prisoners of war that Hitler had led Germany into an abyss, “thereby awakening the prisoners’ resistance instincts”.

Or Josef Salz, who in February 1944 wrote in his diary that (in the words of a certain General Hoernlein recorded there) “he was a friend of Jews and Bolsheviks and … reviled the German Volk [people], its leadership and army.”

Fifty-six years ago, when for involuted reasons I decided to stick around for a while in Munich, where I’d originally anticipated a sojourn of two months at most (and whence, after five not months but years, I moved my residence to Berlin, where I’ve since spent a total of thirty-seven years - a bit more than 44% of my entire life), I fervently, passionately, implacably hated every German man, woman, and child - the direct result of my last job in New York, where my employer, RKO-Pathé, during World War II received, uncut, every scrap of news footage filmed at such European locations as Dachau, Buchenwald - and of course Auschwitz….

During the decades since then I’ve met - and in some cases become close friends with - Germans who as young men, more or less contemporaneous with Lucien Agniel - and no doubt every bit as gentle and kind - found themselves in precisely equivalent situations as my dear friend Lu during the Battle of the Bulge.

For anyone seriously interested in the horrific nuances of man’s fate during wartime, no matter where, I commend to your attention that entire Spiegel article, available by clicking here.