A Life Outside My Father's Shadow

War and post-war years of our family and formative experiences of my life.

After joining the SS in 1935 at one of its headquarters, in Arolsen, a small town in central Germany, my parents moved to that city. We lived there throughout the war and while my father was imprisoned.
My father’s duties as a member of the Race and Settlement Office (RuSHA) required frequent absences. The SS did not have military training camps and its members initially took their basic training with regular army units. He completed this service in an army infantry regiment and was called to active service at the beginning of the war. He served in France and Russia. An injury at the Russian front resulted in a life-long deformation of one of his ankles. After his recovery he was assigned to full-time service at the RuSHA headquarters in Berlin.
After Germany had occupied parts of Poland, he was assigned by the RuSHA to train personnel in Poland to determine if Polish citizens with German roots were qualified for resettlement to Germany.
Like most other families during the war, we were used to his absence and short visits during furloughs. We were too young to understand what his duties were and lived, at least until the end of the war in 1945, in a sheltered environment. My siblings were born in 1939, 1941 and 1944.
One day before the American occupation army reached our town (during Easter 1945), my father suddenly appeared to retrieve some documents from his local office. After that, we had no information about him until Christmas 1945 when we received a short notice: “I am in British captivity. I am well.”

Since we were under the military government of the U.S. occupation force, discrimination against supporters of the Hitler regime by the German population was limited. However, when the new German authorities had any say, they preferentially identified families of supporters of the previous regime to provide quarters for the occupation army. But otherwise, the general population supported each other across political boundaries. Thus, we found accommodation in the servant rooms of the local castle, when we were evacuated from our sizeable flat for over a year. The castle was owned by the Count zu Waldeck who had, like most members of the former German nobility, never condoned his son’s, SS general Josias zu Waldeck, affiliation with the Hitler regime. Josias had been in charge of the SS headquarters in Arolsen where my father had been employed.
Members of the U.S. occupation army even ameliorated unreasonable assignments on occasion. At one instance, my mother had been assigned to work clearing brush for a military facility. Since she spoke English, a supervising officer found out that she had four children at home and sent her away. People who met during some of the municipal assignments often established new connections with former strangers and thus strengthened the solidarity in the local population.

Reaction of the German population to the establishment of the Nuremberg trials.
From our perspective, these trials were widely considered to constitute “Justice designed by the victors of the war” (Siegerjustiz). Some concepts – like “membership in a criminal organization” had no counterparts in the German legal tradition. It did not help that regular law and order and some military organizations like the armed SS (Waffen SS) which, in my father’s notes, was compared by a British officer to the Marines of the U.S. as an elite troop and admired for bravery and success, were included in this category. As I experienced this ambivalence between the age of 9 and 15 when my father returned home, I certainly did not have any feelings of guilt or shame, but my education during this time and my personal world view were certainly influenced by these observations (more is elaborated in the chapter “Gretchen’s Query”).
The economic conditions of our family during the years until 1948 have never become really clear to me and my siblings. The German currency reform replaced the worthless Reichsmark with the Deutsche Mark, as part of the Marshall Plan in June of 1948. At this time my mother became employed at the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) which established an office in Arolsen. (Since she had not been denazified by this time, she was not allowed to work as a teacher of home economics.)
In fragmentary recollections I remember that we relied on gardening, for some time being allotted an acre in a community garden about a mile from our house. Like most families, we raised rabbits. Food was rationed but often not available. I don’t recall participating in the “black market,” although my mother had a supply of the most valuable items for trade: cigarettes. Her hand-knitted Norwegian pullovers had become popular among the GIs stationed in town who made payment in cigarettes. The exchange rate for a cigarette was 6.00 Reichsmark (RM), and one could trade a four-pound loaf of bread for RM 120 for a pack of Lucky Strike!
The older children often spent the summer vacation on farms of my father’s friends. When German refugees from the east arrived, we were required to sublet part of our sizeable apartment to refugees. The entire family shared one bedroom. While the U.S. army took over our apartment, we lived rent-free in the castle.
The concept of “pocket money” was unknown to us as children, and we all sought any kind of job we could find in town.
We had grown up in an environment dominated by national socialist propaganda and did not know any adults that would be critical of the system. My contemporaries were looking forward to joining the only official youth organization, the Hitler Youth.
Skeptical analysis of the political developments could only arise during our high school years, when we learned about the political manipulations that had established the Third Reich. Since most of our teachers had lived through the complexities of the early years of Hitler’s regime when Germany was recovering from the economic decline of the 1920s, their discussion of history and politics rarely extended beyond the time when the Third Reich was founded. Germans who were not active supporters of Hitler had condoned many of his actions. Subsequently, there were limited retributions against the families of those who had supported Hitler, and we children only learned in later years of the responsibilities of our parents and their generation.