Steven Karras

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

  I saw a tank that had been shot up right at the Vierville exit, on the crest of the beach. I had just crawled under it for protection when I heard someone scream, “You idiot! The Krauts got that tank in their sites! Get the fuck out of there!” I made it up to the sea wall where guys from the previous waves were cowering. Engineers, navy guys, some from my outfit, and infantrymen from the 29th were crawling every which way. The sea wall was probably an elevation of five feet, and we were all petrified and digging with whatever we had. Everyone looked the same to me. The guys who landed in the first and second waves all had yellow faces, probably from the adrenaline. They all had that skin color. Fear did that to you. I didn’t think I was going to make it.

  The shelling was terrifying. It went whining over our heads and into the water. We saw the tracers coming at us. I saw LCVP (landing craft, vehicle, personnel) boats being blown up and guys thrown up in the air. I saw this all happening as if it were a newsreel. Things were exploding all over the place, the noise was deafening, the smoke and the stink of burning oil was just overpowering. The tide was coming in—parts of dead GIs, boats, cargo, and all kinds of stuff was floating to shore. I can only describe this as a great train wreck.

  A British ordnance unit landed in landing crafts with trucks in our sector by mistake. It was getting shelled badly, and it was just dreadful. Soldiers and trucks were getting hit, and most of these English guys were running around in flames. Corporal Kelly from our outfit left his foxhole and ran out and rolled this guy in the sand to extinguish the flames. He should have gotten the Silver Star.

  That was how we spent the afternoon hours, just dodging the shells. I didn’t have my radio because it was still on the ship, which was on fire and drifting toward the beach. Everybody was petrified and digging in, not knowing what to do. I wasn’t an infantry man, and since my radio was nonexistent, I had no function and felt like I was a passenger on a sinking ship. But my platoon chief, Master Sergeant Coachy, went back and forth onto the LCI, despite all of the small arms fire and the exploding ammunition, and brought all of our equipment, including my radio, to the sea wall. Coachy was my hero. He could have been the model for Private Prewitt in From Here to Eternity. He had been through it all—the fall of the Philippines and Pearl Harbor. I found out later that he crawled onto the beach exit and started to kill Germans.

  By noon, the fire was still very intense and it wasn’t too healthy to stand up. Infantry officers from the 29th were constantly moving up the sea wall, picking out men by their insignia from their unit, and chasing them over the top shouting, “Get going, go over!” and began leading them inland. In the afternoon hours, I started to crawl back toward my exit where I had originally landed because it was getting a little better. I went behind a German bunker that hadn’t been finished and there was a guy, an infantryman, lying there aiming his rifle. I wanted to talk to him and didn’t see that he was dead.

  Despite my fear, I was still functioning and was able to do my thing like an automaton, communicating with the others around me. I found my buddy Newman and we kept moving. All morning I kept passing this one corpse, which at some point I noticed was an officer with stars, a brigadier general. The last time I passed him, I saw that he had been pilfered—the stars were missing. If I had seen the son of a bitch who did that, I would have shot him.

  Newman and I crawled back to where the LCI had been beached at the Vierville exit. We crawled a bit inland, went halfway up the bluffs, crossed the beach, and went onto the hills, still crouching. The artillery had diminished, but there were still snipers, so we couldn’t walk around. I saw all of this German equipment, uniforms, hand grenades, and a German MG42, which was magnificent. I picked up a helmet and kept it as a souvenir for about five minutes, because shells started coming in and I had to run for it.

  We gradually began to reorganize with guys from my unit, the 293rd. We started to dig in and stayed that night on the cliffs on the Vierville exit. I remember looking out at the horizon toward La Havre and thinking, “My God, if I survive this, won’t I have some tale to tell.” The beach looked like a train wreck: burning LCVPs, trucks, and dead bodies everywhere. I also remember thinking that if there was going to be a counterattack, I was going to defend myself; I was going to stay and die there. Thankfully, there was infantry ahead of us on the cliffs and troops had been coming ashore all day.

  The next morning, a squad of us went onto the Vierville Road and to the bottom of the hill. The exit had two hills on each side, and there were two German bunkers. As we got closer, we heard talking and I shouted, “Hande Hoch! Raus!” About thirty Germans came out with their hands up. They were scared shitless. Their faces were white from all of the reverberations from the shelling of the cement in the bunker. We were terribly excited. My buddy, Wroblewski, a coal miner from Pennsylvania, was standing there with an M1 and a bayonet; he looked at me and said, “Fritz, just tell me, and I’ll kill ’em.”

  I said, “Don’t kill them.”

  Then I told the Germans to form a line and I marched them down to the beach. This later became famous in the company and was written up in our unit newspaper: “Weinschenk marched these Krauts down in military fashion.” On the beach, there was an infantryman from the 116th in a rage, cocking his M1 rifle and saying, “These sons of bitches killed all my buddies, and I’m going to shoot them.”

  I said to the German noncom in German “Los Veck, Hau ab!” (Get out of here!) I wanted them to just march down and get on an LCVP. I turned to the GI and said, “Now wait a minute, hold it. Please don’t do this.” I prevented a war crime. I didn’t want to see that happen.

  That’s what I remember about D-Day itself and the day after.

  After that, we organized very rapidly and we set up the beach master communications as we were supposed to do on D-Day. I did duty on ship-to-shore through the beach master’s office. It was a well organized operation. The job was to get the cargo out of the holds of these ships and onto the beach. While I was on these ships, I had the opportunity to listen to the big radio receivers in the radio rooms. On July 20, in the evening hours, I was listening to the Nuremberg Boys’ Choir singing Bach’s cantatas on Radio Berlin when suddenly the music stopped. A voice came on and said, “In twenty minutes, the führer will speak to the German people.” I couldn’t believe my ears, but sure enough, twenty minutes later there was an announcement and Hitler came on. He made that famous speech about “a small band of traitors” that had made an attempt on his life and that by divine providence he had escaped. Now he would take care of these traitors in the manner to which national socialists are used.

  THE TRAFFIC OF ALL OF THE LIBERTY SHIPS coming into the harbor made it look like Grand Central Station. The black quartermaster outfits unloaded cargo, and I passed statistics about the unloading, requested more stevedores, and took care of whatever radio traffic that had to be handled by the ship’s captain. We even used prisoners to work on ships as stevedores; the captured Germans worked like hell for the Allied war effort, and got paid in cigarettes and good food, which they loved.

  I had an interesting talk with an oberfeldwebel (staff sergeant) who had the Iron Cross and the Narvik insignia and was in charge of some of the other “supermen.” They were doing all the work, and he was doing nothing but gabbing with me while smoking those excellent Amerikanische cigarettes. Once in a while, he’d tell one of his men, los, and they’d jump too. We talked about everything from soup to nuts. He was from Constance and was a pretty good egg—I had to grant him that. It was funny to see all those be-swastikad blouses hanging side by side with American field jackets with T-4 and T-5 stripes on the wall. You’d think there was a drinking party of “Axis-Americano” someplace. I remember he looked out at all of the equipment coming to shore and he said, “If we had had this, we would’ve won.” I replied, “Thank God you didn’t have it.”

  One day in August 1944, we were told to leave all our equipment as it stood, except for our personal belongings, and were sent to the mai
n assembly area of the company HQ located on the top of the bluffs. We were taken to the beach, put on an LCM (landing craft mechanized), and shipped out to a British troop transport. We were in Portsmouth the next morning and put on a sealed train. We went to Scotland, had a two-day pass in Glasgow, and boy, did we use it. Soon after that, we were taken to the Queen Mary and were one of the few outfits on that ship. After a few days of sitting on that ship, a barge appeared with Winton Churchill and a British marine contingent, who were off to meet with Franklin D. Roosevelt. They boarded our ship and we landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, five days later. Churchill gave his infamous “V” sign and everybody was yelling and applauding.

  In Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, we were told by a brigadier general that we had one week’s leave and were then supposed to report to Camp Stoneman, California. Before I knew it, the outfit embarked on another transport and took a thirty-five to forty day cruise to New Guinea, where the army was staging for the invasion of the Philippines. We had our naval shore fire control and air liaison to coordinate air strikes and naval gunfire, as we had done in Normandy. When I landed, I saw my first Filipinos and fell in love with the people—I’m still in love with them. I saw Douglas Macarthur land, with all the press and the jeeps ready for him. He was cheerful and waving and I was very impressed. I also found some Jewish refugees in Manila who had come from Germany and had been given asylum in the Philippines. They had been in Manila for a while, and the Japanese didn’t bother them because they did not make a distinction between Germans and Jews.

  One of my biggest memories of that campaign was when the U.S. troops captured the airfields and one of the Japanese POW camps where they kept the survivors of the Bataan Death March. When I saw these prisoners coming out, it was one of the few times that I actually cried during the war. They were in their original uniforms—the blue denims that they had been captured in—and like the concentration camp survivors in Europe, they were emaciated skeletons. It was heart-wrenching to see them.

  I was spared the large-scale invasion of Japan when the United States dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and was back in America in February 1946.

  I was discharged from the army in December 1946, finished college from January to June 1946, and graduated with a Bachelor of Special Studies from City College of New York. I then applied and was accepted for a job (qualification: German speaker) with the War Department, and in July 1946 I was on the boat back to Bremerhaven, Germany.

  I returned to Mainz (in the French zone of occupation) many times, also Gonsenheim where I was born. There were some old friends still there. Mainz had been bombed to pieces and was a desolate, unrecognizable place. My house in Gonsenheim was still standing, but I never went back inside.

  I was at first assigned to the Civil Censorship Division, where I censored German mail and phone calls for evidence of subversive (Nazi) activities. I joined the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in 1947; that’s what I really wanted to do. My rank was a civilian with the War Department (GS-7), but then I moved up to GS-12 and also obtained a commission as second lieutenant in U.S. Intelligence Reserve.

  It was mainly on-the-job training and directives and instructions from superiors. I had an intense (though not necessarily favorable) interest in the Germans and what was happening to them.

  At first, I must confess, we of the occupation looked down on them for what they had done. In the CIC, I located and interrogated Nazi figures, including members of the Gestapo, and reported my findings to my superiors. I also sent some of them to the “special branch”—the Denazification branch of Military Government. I also investigated falsified questionnaires. In my view, the Denazification program was a total and colossal failure. I came in contact Gestapo figures during my CIC time and mainly dealt with Nazi bureaucrats, mostly questioning their Nazi affiliations, etc.—in other words, interrogations.

  One incident I’ll never forget: I questioned one guy who had gotten a job with the Americans by lying about his background. I had his photo in my drawer showing him in the uniform of an SA captain. I asked, “Were you ever in any national socialist formation?”

  He replied, “Oh heavens no, never.” I thought I had him there. I showed him the photo and said, “Who’s that?”

  He said, “Oh that? That was taken during Carnival in my costume.” I had a hard time getting control over myself before I had him arrested. Most Germans admired my knowledge of the language, but never let on that they thought I was a Jewish refugee—at least not to my face.

  My main contact with Nazi crimes really came after my admission to the bar when, from 1964 till about 1995, I acted as commissioner for German courts and a prosecutor in Nazi crimes cases pending in German courts. Germans could not act by themselves here in the United States because of international jurisdictional rules prohibiting one nation to perform judicial acts on the territory of another. Also, most witnesses were in America and refused to go to Germany, so the Germans needed a local “yokel.” I got witnesses for them, interrogated these witnesses, recorded their testimony in affidavits (which, over the years, added up to more than a thousand), looked for evidence in Washington, and even presided over courts that came here. I did this in over two hundred proceedings, including the Majdanek, Auschwitz, and Josef Mengele cases.

  I was, and still am, a member of the board of directors of the Claims Conference, as well as several committees. Furthermore, I am honorary legal advisor. I am also still president of the American Federation of Jews from Central Europe, which was founded before the war by German-speaking refugees. We have about four hundred members, but we are getting smaller day by day, since many members are joining that great refuge in the sky.

  Looking back, I would say that I regarded some Germans as morally inferior people who had succumbed to the biggest criminal in their (and maybe human) history. I also regarded some as having been trapped in a totalitarian net. My feelings are mixed and hard to describe. I had relatives who were murdered; there were two old widows (Morgenthau) living in Paris with their son, Julius. These poor old souls, wonderful people, perished; their son as well.

  In June 1950, after Korean War broke out, I returned to New York and went to law school at New York University to prevent my having to go to Korea. I’d had enough war. I chickened out.

  I was admitted to the New York State Bar in 1953 and got involved in restitution problems almost immediately. In 1958 or 1959, I was hired by Dr. Adolf Hamburger (formerly a lawyer in Berlin) and was busy with restitution and indemnification cases fulltime.

  In my view, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany (Claims Conference) has been a huge success, supplying many thousands of Holocaust survivors with essentials and supporting Holocaust education and research. I have devoted a lot of time and energy to the Claims Conference since my “retirement.” I’m satisfied with what I did, but also feel I didn’t do enough or should have done more.

  Weinschenk lives in Baldwin, Long Island, and continues to practice law in New York City.

  Chapter 7

  PETER TERRY

  VIENNA, AUSTRIA

  3 Troop, 10 Commando Normandy Campaign

  Peter Terry was born Peter Tischler in Vienna. Just after the German annexation of Austria, his family departed for England in 1938. After serving a brief stint in the Royal Pioneer Corps, he volunteered for the commandos and was assigned to 3 Troop, 10 Commando—X Troop—a top secret brigade of eighty-seven refugees from the Nazis. On D-Day, he landed with 47th Royal Marines as a frontline interrogator.

  I had a happy youth, in retrospect, and a very comfortable time until I was fourteen. Austria was a good country to grow up in, provided you weren’t too politicized. But then again, thinking back, it really was a lousy country.

  I grew up in Vienna. My parents had a house on the outskirts. My father, Maurice, was a surgeon who switched to dental surgery: restorative surgery on the face and on the mouth and jaw. He was quite prominent and well known. Vienna was relatively a small town back then. It
was a life surrounded by servants, although I went to public school until I was ten, and then I was sent to a boarding school outside the city. It was a fairly classical education—Latin, Greek, etc.—compared to England, which was very continental, concentrating on learning things by heart and absolutely devoid of any creativity.

  My father had been an officer in World War I and thus, as was usual in those days, there was a fossilized history for the Jew. My grandfather, who was born in Romania and moved to Vienna when he was a small child, was more consciously Jewish. There were occasions when I was consciously made to feel Jewish, but I never suffered from any outright anti-Semitism until my family had neighbors who were German diplomats; that was when I started to be conscious of it. I was ten years old and their daughter and I went to school together. One afternoon, I was invited over for tea and I noticed on their wall was a poster—“Down with the Jewish Press” with a swastika at the bottom. It was obvious I was invited over to their house for a reason. The following morning the two older brothers of this girl beat me up. Their father, the diplomat, came by our house and he and my father had a long talk. To make a long story short, the two boys were made to apologize to me.

  THE ANSCHLUSS, THE GERMAN INVASION, came totally unexpectedly. I remember March 11, 1938, was a Friday. We were dismissed early from school and told to get home as soon as possible. On the trolley car, I noticed a large demonstration, an anti-Nazi demonstration, and I joined in—mostly for fun—chanting, “Red-white-red till we are dead.” Somewhere near the Opera, from our right, a Nazi demonstration was coming toward us, and we noticed they were protected by Austrian police wearing swastika armbands. They started running toward us, and I ran all the way home. I got home just in time to hear the final speech of the Austrian chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, announcing that he was offering no resistance to the invading German forces. It was a very worrying night.