Steven Karras

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

  The other half of our team—Michaels, Jancowitz, and Wilder—was in charge of a collection place about thirty miles farther south. They were to send any POWs as quickly as possible by truck for processing. The reason for all the rush was simple: food. The U.S. Army never realized that within a few short weeks, hundreds of thousands of Germans would give up. Obviously, they had to be fed prior to processing. We, in our camp, had a simple solution: one to three horses had to be delivered daily to the camp to be butchered. Obviously that, in combination with whatever flour and vegetables could be acquired, was the POW diet. So, unless we wanted a bunch of wild POWs, we had to process quickly. It all went well, and everyone was moderately content. One day, a fairly high-ranking Nazi was brought to me. After asking him a couple of questions, all of the sudden he popped something in his mouth, fell to the ground, and in an incredibly short time—probably less than a minute—was dead. He had a cyanide capsule, which many of these people were provided, just like Goering who took the same route.

  One day, we were expecting a truck load of about fifty POWs from Lieutenant Michaels’ group. More than an hour later, there was no truck and no prisoners. I took one of the CIC fellows with me in the jeep to trace the route. About halfway, two hundred or so feet from the road, I saw an awful sight—fifteen dead POWs obviously all shot with submachine guns. Some of them were even some stray civilians. That happened sometimes when soldiers rounded up POWs and suspected that certain young types had thrown away their uniforms and picked up civilian clothes. Unless we cleared them, they were treated as prisoners. But what on earth happened here?

  Apparently a bunch of new soldiers who had never seen combat were to guard the POWs on their route from the collection point to our camp. Apparently they “borrowed” the submachine guns from our three guys down there and just decided to kill these Germans. In the pocket of one of the dead men, I found a letter to his wife about how happy he was that this mess is over and soon he would be home. My God, what horror that was. That was not war, it was murder. We decided something should be done. We had the names of the soldiers who did it and the guns, and we forwarded a full report. In short, the judgment came through as case dismissed because of insufficient evidence. What they were really saying was that the 13th Armored Division was ready to go home and this would unnecessarily delay their departure.

  I just want my feelings on record that Germans, Japanese, Arabs, or whatever are not the only humans who have acted inhumanely, even though I doubt whether anyone would be able to do what the Germans did in World War II. Six million people—men, women, children—shot and gassed because of some people’s crazed racial superiority complex over others just because they were Jews. My mother’s sister Anne, her husband Emil, and their daughter Lore are part of this statistic.

  WHEN THE WAR FINISHED, I immediately put in a request to be involved with the Denazification of my hometown. I wanted to do that so badly. They kicked the shit out of me so much as a kid. I had earned some brownie points with a whole bunch of bigshot officers, because I had done them favors in my team’s capacity as interpreters and interrogators. I got the transfer, and as far as I know, I was the only one of the interrogators who ever succeeded doing that.

  The first thing I was concerned about was get the dammed Nazi teachers out of the schools. I worked bitterly hard to get things straightened out.

  This was my town, Eschwege, the birthplace of the Goldschmidt and Plaut families—the gardens, woods, trails, hills, friends, enemies, Bar Mitzvahs, parties, frightful beatings, Nazi torch parades, Kristallnacht, and the end of the town’s Jewish population in 1942 after more than six hundred years of settlement.

  As the military governor, I really think I was a pragmatist. I believed in law and order, and I was a presence in that town. Yes, I found the Nazi perpetrators and they wound up in jail. Aside from that, we cleaned the town up. Everyone knew me, and naturally, people came and asked me for this and that—and I did nothing. I wasn’t going to treat this one better than that one. Old acquaintances would come to me and say things like, “Oh, you remember Analee?” Of course, I remembered Analee, she lived four houses away from us. “Well, she’s expecting a baby anytime and she is in a third floor walkup. Can you help us?”

  My answer was always: “I’m sorry, I cannot do anything about it.” What was I supposed to do, inconvenience one miserable German for another miserable German? I was flabbergasted that these people had the temerity to face me and say these things to me, when they knew what they themselves had done to me and my family. Forget about all the other people who got burnt up in concentration camps.

  One of the old neighbors called me Der Ungerkronte Konig, the “uncrowned king.” I lived well and had a great social life. I doubt if my father would have approved, but I did not compromise or bring dishonor on my adopted country or family.

  About two years later, after I’d come back to America, my mother had gone to Eschwege to take care of our properties there. When she came back, she said, “Karl, you can never go back to Eschwege; they’ll kill you.” So, I didn’t have a good reputation.

  One day I was told that thirty Hungarian Jewish girls had come across the border. It turned out they were the remnants of Hungarian ultra-Orthodox families that the Germans used as a labor force in concentration camps, but if any German touched them they would commit suicide. The youngest was thirteen, and the oldest, their leader, was twenty-one. I immediately got them a house and requisitioned from the Germans clothes and food. The most beautiful moments in my memory will always be when I was permitted by them to come to their home and sit in the dark with only the Shabbat candles burning, while they sang the beautiful songs sung on Friday evenings (Sabbath). I understand that shortly after I left to go back to the States in January 1946, they found enough families and mates of their background and by now are probably all grandmothers either in the States or in Israel.

  When I eventually left to go home to America, I believe I was on the noisiest ship that ever existed. It was wonderful. When we pulled into New York Harbor and saw the Statue of Liberty, the ship listed to one side because everyone was going to the side to see it.

  Then there was some kind of welcoming ship, that was small but had huge loudspeakers, and they played “God Bless America.” Saying I wanted to kiss the ground is putting it mildly, because it was only at the time when we really did know how lucky we were that we went through that war and survived. We returned as vets and were a different breed. Our innocence was gone. We were all better students because we had a greater sense of purpose. I was an ex-GI, had the GI Bill money in my pocket, and I bought a 1930 Chevy for $125. I had wheels and returned to Cornell University to finish my studies.

  I really think I tried very hard to do what I consider as fulfilling the debt. I think I paid back a little bit to the good old country, and what I was given was a new life and future. My reward for going to war was a free country.

  Karl Goldsmith entered the insurance industry in 1957 and worked until his death in February 2002. There is a bench named for him in the Cornell Plantations botanical gardens at Cornell University, from which he graduated.

  Chapter 10

  HENRY KISSINGER

  FÜRTH, GERMANY

  335th Infantry Regiment, 84th Infantry Division Division Headquarters, G2, Intelligence

  Heinz “Henry” Kissinger (left) was born in 1923 in the town of Fürth, located on the outskirts of Nuremberg in Bavaria. His father, Louis Kissinger, a highly educated teacher, earned the prominent role of schoolmaster at three different private schools in Fürth and was a proud member of the town’s middle class. The Kissingers were observant Jews, and Heinz, the older of the two sons, was eventually sent to the Israelitische Realschule with other Jewish children from Fürth who could not attend the state-run schools after 1933. Finally, with help from a cousin in New York, the family obtained visas in the spring of 1938 and fled to the United States via England.

  In New York, the Kissingers lived in the Wa
shington Heights neighborhood. Kissinger was drafted in February 1943 and became a private in the U.S. Army. He was assigned to G Company of the 335th Infantry Regiment of the 84th Infantry Division and returned to Germany in November 1944, initially as a rifleman. Upon reaching the frontlines, Kissinger was reassigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), where he served until the occupation of Germany, when he became the military governor of Krefeld. In the photograph on the previous page, Kissinger stands with Fritz G. A. Kraemer, an early mentor while in the Counter Intelligence Corps, in Germany, 1945.

  One didn’t need a huge amount of foresight to leave. The policy of segregation for Jewish people was created so it would become increasingly uncomfortable to stay. When we left, it had not yet reached the killing stage, so we were fortunate in that respect. Also my mother had an uncle in America who had left a tiny amount of money when he died. All of this induced my parents to leave.

  I came to New York in December 1938. We settled in Washington Heights where there were many other German Jewish refugees, a lot of whom came from my hometown. Of course it was a totally new experience. I had never seen any African Americans before; the architecture was very foreign to me as well, and I thought the fire escapes were balconies.

  We didn’t have any money. My mother’s inheritance was negligible, so I had to go to work when I was sixteen in a shaving brush factory and go to high school at night. I did not have the normal teenage existence, but then again, all the people that I grew up with, most of whom were German Jewish refugees themselves, all worked during the day, went to school at night, and helped their families. That was the normal way to live for us.

  I must say, however, I did not think I was having a hard time. Now I don’t know how we lived that way. My brother and I slept in the living room. We had no privacy and no rooms of our own, but I did not feel that I was suffering. I felt like we were accomplishing things, and now I look back to this time period with great satisfaction.

  Above all, I didn’t realize how discriminated against we had been until I came to the United States, and so it was a tremendous sense of relief and freedom. Those of us who grew up in a dictatorship always appreciated America more than some of those who were native born. It’s one reason why, during the Vietnam protests, I never joined any of the people who were saying that America was a dictatorship and spelled America with a “K.” I had seen a real dictatorship; to me, these people didn’t know what the hell they were talking about.

  I wanted to be inducted after Pearl Harbor, but I was seventeen when the war broke out. I had to wait until I was drafted at nineteen. I made no effort to defer, or delay being drafted, or get a special position. Our formal induction took place in Fort Dix, New Jersey. We got our uniforms there and stayed for a couple of weeks.

  I remember that my father took me to the train station where we were put on the trains for Camp Croft, South Carolina, near Spartanburg. I did my basic training there and became a citizen about a month after I arrived. They took all foreign-born GIs in my basic training unit; there must have been about fifty boys that were sworn in together. We had to go to court in Spartanburg and take the oath. It was one of the proudest moments of my life.

  Before I got into the army, I had never met any really native-born Americans, so being in the army was a way of Americanizing me. In New York I only knew either German refugees or the Italian immigrants with whom I worked in the shaving brush factory. When I was in the army I met real Americans, and these soldiers, mainly people from the Midwest, were very tolerant and friendly—so much so that I thought I’d lost my accent because they never referred to it.

  At the end of basic training, especially qualified people were sent to college. I was sent to Clemson University and Lafayette College to the Army Specialized Training Program until Congress closed it down and sent us all back to the infantry. I wound up in the 84th Infantry Division in Louisiana as a private. That meant I had to undergo additional infantry training in the summer months, which were unbearably hot in Louisiana.

  I went overseas with the 84th Infantry Division, first to England and then to France, where we landed at Omaha Beach in early September, after the breakout of Normandy. We then went to the front on the border of Germany and Belgium in November, and our regiment was assigned to the 30th Infantry Division for combat experience.

  Combat is usually an ordinary experience of extreme boredom, followed by moments of intense danger, but the period of intense danger is very short. I initially came to the front as a rifleman. Then one day, while I was on latrine duty, an encounter happened that changed things. The man in charge of latrine duty had to keep the situation map, which was in the dayroom, of where the front was. Our general came by for inspection, and said, “Soldier, come over here and explain this map to me.” I translated it and he said, “What are you doing in a rifle company?” I must have said, “I don’t know. I was assigned here.” So, while we were still on the frontlines, he gave an order to pull me back to his headquarters, but this wasn’t executed for a while, so I remained at the front.

  After we had left the 30th Division, I reported to division headquarters for the G2 Section, which was Intelligence. My job was to recapture documents and help interrogate prisoners. However, my primary task was to look after security, catch spies, and prevent our documents from falling into enemy hands.

  Once I was more or less assigned to the CIC, I was then sent down from division headquarters to regimental headquarters, which was even closer to the front, and I worked on counterintelligence there.

  After that combat phase was over, I was assigned to regional Germany, a county in the American zone of occupation near Frankfurt with a population of about two thousand. My job was to maintain the security of that area and arrest all Nazis above a certain level. I had the right to arrest anybody I wanted for security reasons, which was a strange reversal of roles. Of course, no German ever claimed to have been a Nazi.

  Everything had broken down in Germany; there was no postal service, there was no telephone, there was no communication—a total catastrophe. We in the military had our own telephones to other military posts, but no one could call a German on the telephone. There was a food shortage and a terrible black market. It’s hard to imagine today how a society could break down that completely. At that time, if anyone had shown me a picture of what German cities look like today, I would have said, “You’re insane. It would take thirty years just to clear away the rubble.”

  At some level, being back in Germany as a conquering soldier gave me some degree of satisfaction when I saw the people who had been so swaggering now on the other side. But on the whole, I felt that I had a job to do, which incidentally I found very interesting. I had always been interested in foreign policy, but I tried to keep my own personal experiences as much out of it as I could.

  After the surrender, the first thing I did was look for members of my family to see whether any of them had survived, but they hadn’t. I went back to my hometown, the place where my grandparents had lived, and that was somewhat of an emotional experience. Having lost many members of my family to the Nazis, I had considerable animosity toward them, but even with this, arresting people and seeing crying wives and children, was no fun. At least it wasn’t fun for me. It gave me some abstract sense of satisfaction, but no personal satisfaction.

  For us German refugees, going to war was something that we felt needed to be done, but that we might not particularly enjoy once it happened. For me, however, I now think that it was the most important experience of my life.

  Henry Kissinger was the national security advisor and later secretary of state in the Nixon administration.

  Chapter 11

  JOHN STERN

  GILSERBERG, GERMANY

  100th Infantry Division, 397th Infantry Regiment

  John Stern was born in Marburg, September 14, 1923. His father was a businessman and owned a general store. When the Nazis came to power, his father sold his business for pennies on the Mark to a lo
cal German businessman, and the Stern family was forced to move to Frankfurt am Main. He left Germany on the Kindertransport in June 1939 and stayed in England until May 1940. Upon reaching the United States, he settled in Oklahoma where he completed high school before going into the service. He is pictured above in 1945.

  I lived in Gilserberg until I was nine years old; at that time I was no longer allowed to attend school because of Nazi intervention. After that I lived with my mother’s sister in Marburg, Germany (about an hour away from Gilserberg), where I attended the Jewish school until age thirteen when I graduated. At age thirteen I returned to my family in Gilserberg for my Bar Mitzvah, but my father was arrested by the Nazis the day before and incarcerated for approximately eight weeks. My father had made a comment to a little boy that he should clean his yard because the German Army was going to be marching in the next day. The Gestapo heard it and said my father was slandering “the glory of the army.” It was just an excuse to arrest him. When the SS came, they looked at me (I was very little at the time) and said, “You’re too small. We’ll come back in a year and get you.” When my father came back, he was a broken man.

  All I can say is that country treated our family so incredibly bad. I saw my mother and father being beaten by a blacksmith who owed them money. My father asked him for some money and he came in and beat them. We then moved to Frankfurt am Main, where he died on November 3, 1938, five days before Kristallnacht.