Chapter 1

MY CHILDHOOD IN BERLIN

On the 16th of December 1923 rain was coming down on Berlin, Germany, when I, Hans Bernhard Paul Thielemann, was born. I was baptized with Spree River water, supposedly to confirm that I was born in Berlin. One month before my birth Germany’s worst inflation had ended, but the economical and political situation was anything but solid.

My parents and paternal Grandparents occupied a large apartment at Georgen Strasse No. 43 in Berlin NW 7 . The apartment building was only 2 blocks from the Kupfergraben, a branch of the Spree River, that surrounded the Museums Island with the Bode-and the Egyptian Museum. I grew up with my mother and grandparents.I didn’t see father often because he was a sales rep for a big machine manufacturing company (Deutsche Werke) and was traveling, often in foreign countries.

During father’s absence my paternal grandfather Johann Maria Joseph Bernhard Thielemann was often a substitute father. According to my parents, I was growing up fast and started walking when I was only 9 months old. Grandfather Thielemann and his wife Elise Anna Klara Scholz had three kids, two girls and one boy, Klara, Bernhard and Hanna. They all were married before I was born, and six months after my birth Klara and Hanna had kids too.

I remember actual happenings of my early childhood when I was about 12 months old. I was a rather rambunctious kid and after my first successful attempts in “vertical locomotion” I was determined to expand my exploration areas. My exploration was blocked however by the guardrail surrounding my playpen. It didn’t take me very long to find a way to overcome that obstruction.

I leaned up high against the guard and that tipped the whole playpen on its side and if I crawled very fast I was out. Since the playpen righted itself after I got off the guardrail, my escape was not noticed right away. A whole new world opened up for me now if I walked around quietly. Pretty soon my adventures into adjacent rooms were causing me some pain, because I bumped into some furniture or tripped over obstructions. This always caught the attention of my mother or the grandparents and they curtailed my freedom again. But as I advanced in age, I was allowed more exploratory space.

I have to explain the layout of the big apartment (approximately 2,500 square feet) we lived in. The rooms were arranged in L-shape, with the larger rooms up front facing the street for the owners, and the rest of the rooms in the “L” for their servants. The servant quarters also had a small kitchen and bathroom. This wing was occupied by my parents, while the grandparents lived up front. Now being “very experienced” in upright locomotion I had an enormously large area for my exploratory roamings. My prime target were the grandparents, whom a called Oma and Opa.

As a small kid I had already acquired very specific tastes for food, and in general Oma cooked food that I liked better than my mother. This was primarily due to the fact that mother had less household money than the grandparents.

Opa had been the chief butler of the Empress of Germany for more than thirty years and after their abdication and move to the Netherlands he joint the Reichsbank (the federal bank) of Germany in Berlin. Due to his long association with the Royal household he knew a lot of VIPs in Berlin including Hjalmer Schacht who was the president of the Reichsbank. From where he lived, he could walk to work, and every day he came home during the noon brake (1:00 to 3:00 pm) to eat. Oma had to have dinner ready at exactly 1:15 for him.

When I became aware of that daily schedule I turned into an opportunist. If the smells from my mothers kitchen indicated that she was cooking stew again which I disliked, I wandered up front to Oma and asked what she had for dinner. When that was more to my liking, I asked if I could eat with them. This was never denied. When my mother could not find me, she walked up to the grandparents dining room to look. After she opened the door I would yell “I eat already”, which of course didn’t sit too well with her. But Oma smoothed the embarrassment out immediately and no quarrels started.

In 1924 Wolfgang and Ellen were born, which gave me two cousins. Wolfgang’s mother was Klara, the older sister of my father and Ellen’s mother Hanna was father’s younger sister. Since the three of us were born within 6 months they called us the “three musketeers”. Ellen’s parents moved from Berlin to Ahlfeld, so we three cousins were rarely seen together.

Wolfgang lived near by and as we grew up, we had all sorts of fun together. At times our mothers would take us out for a walk. Wolfgang 6 months younger than I was in a stroller, while I had to walk. They would take us counter clock wise “around the carré” as they said. Their carré was in the center of Berlin and about 3 km long. We walked east along Georgenstrasse to Friedrichstrasse, turned left and went up to Unter den Linden Boulevard and past the Zeughaus we turned left again into Am Kupfergraben following it to Georgenstrasse and back to home. This was one of the busiest street carrés in Berlin, and acquainted us with the traffic at a very early age.

When my father was home he would take me along on his bicycle if he had some errants to do. On one of those trips he pointed a Negro out to me, who was walking along the street. It was the first one I had ever seen. He was probably a musician at one of the famous night clubs, such as the “Wintergarden” or the “Kabaret der Komiker” or “Haus Vaterland”. Opa also acted as a “tour guide” and showed me Berlin by riding on streetcars with me. In summertime some streetcars ran double decker cars and the upper decks had no roof. This was like riding in a convertible and a splendid way to see all the buildings and monuments in Berlin.

Wolfgang and I often played on the floor of the grandparents living room, but at times there were strict prohibitions to our crawlings. That was at a time when the news came over the radio. My father had hooked up a detector and connected several earphones to it, which made it possible for the whole family to hear Radio Berlin. If we hit the table, the detector lost the station and my father called us to order and fiddled with the detector to get the broadcast back again. Opa usually fell asleep during these sessions and woke up when the news was finished. He then asked everybody what the radio had said and, getting different answers from everyone who had listened, he decided that he simply had to read the Morgenpost (newspaper) to see what was really going on.

During one of my “explorations” at home I went out the front door and was trying to leave the building. There were several granite steps down to the sidewalk and I fell down the stairs, head first and banged my head on the ice scraper (for cleaning the shoes in winter time). I didn’t remember anything of that crash, but woke up with terrible pains at a doctors office who was stitching the skin of my forehead. I had of course a concussion and Mother severely restricted in my explorations after that.

Later in my life my father often sarcastically said: “I think your crash as a kid did some damage to your brain” after I had done something stupid. When I was about four years old mother took me downtown for shopping. We took the streetcar to Leipziger Strasse and did window shopping along that busy area. We visited the biggest department stores like Wertheim, Tietz, and the many specialty stores. Then we had lunch at some of the first fast food stores, like Aschinger and one store that really intrigued me, a store where sandwiches were sold by vending machines. Even the beer came out of a tap when you put your glass under it and a coin into the slot. None of the tables had chairs they were stand up eating platforms. My favorite store was a big Italian ice cream parlor which had dozens of different flavors. To buy shoes for me and Wolfgang we went into a big store called Leiser and they had an X-ray machine that would show, how our feet fit in the shoes. Wolfgang and I didn’t believe that we could see our own toes in the shoes, and wiggled our toes, to ascertain these were our feet. Much later these machines were outlawed because of the radiation.

Moving from Berlin

My father, who had been out of a job for a short period, was hired by the “International Harvester Company”, probably because he was fluent in English. His job change meant we had to move into the “province” as he put it. We would be living in Breslau, Silesia.

Father had rented a big downtown apartment on the fourth floor, and mother was bragging that the master bedroom was 12 m (almost 40 feet) long. The apartment had been completely repainted and looked very nice, but soon turned into a disaster. We had the worst house pest, bedbugs! The damn painters had even painted over the bedbugs and when they moved we had an interesting wall pattern. My mother cursed the painters when she woke up in the middle of the night, grabbed a ladder and smashed the bugs at the top of the wall. That did not accomplish anything because there was an unending supply of the bloodsucking beasts. Next morning she called the manager and raised hell about the infestation and demanded that an exterminator come immediately. He came and we had to move to a hotel for two days. We could come back after it was safe to re-enter the apartment. In those days the poison that was used was also very toxic to human beings. All mirrors and pictures in the apartment had to be taped so they wouldn’t get damaged by the gas.

After we got back it took only 48 hours and the bedbugs attacked us again. They had only been disturbed by the exterminator and started a counterattack. Now my father had to get into the act. My mother complain bitterly about this damn apartment he had rented, but he said, he didn’t get stung and added that he wasn’t as sweet as she was and consequently the bedbugs only bit her. His remark infuriated mother even more and he quickly had to take some action. Breslau was ill-famed for its bedbug contamination and he got another exterminator who was recommended by his colleagues.

This man looked at the place and started to remove all baseboards and the jute tapestry in one room before he gassed the place again. This time the bugs were exterminated and he vacuumed the dead ones up, because some of them are not quite dead and recover, he said. His more vigorous approach worked and we were able to sleep peacefully after that battle was over.

I celebrated my 5th birthday and had to go to Kindergarten now. It was the first time in my life that I had to play with kids I wasn’t related to. I discovered that I could get along better with girls, than with boys and I liked two girls right away. Ursula was a red head and also an only child and she lived near our apartment. Our mothers talked to each other and thought it would be good if we would play alternately at our or her place. We really got along very well and the mothers were pleased.

As kids of that age we were both in the “discovery phase” of our lives and we discovered that there were some differences between boys and girls bodies. We explored these differences unperturbed for a while until Ursula’s mother noticed what we were up to. After she had talked to my mother about it, we were more closely supervised. However our mothers must have spun out our play in their conversation and decided to start an experiment to find out. They never told us anything about their plot but in my later years it dawned on me what their plot was. They wanted to find out whether I would get aroused looking at a naked girl. During the summer we went to a nearby lake with a beach and they took all our clothes off. This was quite common in those days. Ursula and I played naked on the sandy beach and we built sand castles and didn’t even notice that we were naked.

While we lived in Breslau my mother and I went to visit some distant relatives in Silesia. Uncle Max was a chef, cooking for some very rich uppercrust people, who owned a small castle there. They used it for hunting and vacations. He introduced me to some new meals that I had never eaten before. He prepared breast of pheasant with fancy sauces and vegetables that he cooked differently than my mother. I was very fond of that and many other dinners we eat at their house.

I got into trouble with their dog that I was supposed to take for a walk. Hasso, an Irish Setter, tore himself loose from me and chased other peoples chickens. I was not able to catch him and soon these chicken owners called the local cop. He knew already who the owner of that dog was and called them to retrieve their beast. I, who was not familiar with dog handling, got blamed by my mother for it and she had to pay for the killed chickens.

From Breslau we went into the Riesengebirge, a mountain rage that was at the border between Germany and Tschechoslowakia, where we met with Opa and Oma Thielemann. We hiked up to the Schneekoppe, the highest mountain of the range. I was doing well at the high altitude, but had constantly problems with my knees whenever I fell down on these rocky hiking trails. My mother just washed the blood off and put some large band aids over them. The band aids got stuck and when she ripped them off, it tore the wound open again. That was very painful, but when I cried I never got any sympathy from her . She didn’t want me to be a wimpy kid.

Moving again

After about 18 months in Breslau my father was transferred by International Harvester Company to their factory in Neuss at the Rhine River. So we had to move one more time. Father was promoted to a much higher level and decided we would live in Düsseldorf, the biggest and richest city in the area.

He had rented a very large apartment and when mother and I arrived we noticed that he had furnished one room as his office with a new, heavy oak desk and matching furniture. We were surprised and delighted that we could afford such high class furniture now.

The apartment was located at a boulevard that had a creek running at its centre. I don’t remember the names anymore, but it was a very elegant area. The entrance hall of the apartment building was clad in white marble and my mother instantly had a negative attitude about it, because she said it would be difficult to keep the marble clean. She never saw anything from a positive point of view, an inheritance from her mother, who was constantly bitching about anything. It took a while before our furniture arrived and we got settled with the help of Agathe a maid, whom my mother was now able to hire. The apartment also had a covered back patio.

My first school year

I was six years old and we had to find a school that I was going to attend. That was complicated since the Rheinland was primarily catholic and my mother did not want me to go to a catholic school. She finally located a non religious school that wasn’t too far a way, so I could walk to school. School busses didn’t exist in those days. I was surprised that we had to do our letter writing on slates. That was different and outdated from what I had seen at Berlin schools. I really liked school and had no problems with homework which was always checked and supervised by my mother.

Outside of the school I found a few kids in my neighborhood whom I played with. I had the most unusual toys which came from the International Harvester Company (IHC). They had pickup trucks, tractors and plows in toy size and my father brought home those toys from IHC.

Father was in a sales manager position, and had to interface with some of the American managers on a social level. We got to know their families and kids. At one of their kid's birthday parties I played with American (US) toys. These older US kids had mini automobiles that were pedal powered and steerable like real cars. I thought they were impractical for people who lived in apartments because of their size. I could not imagine me riding on the sidewalk with these toy cars.

During the summer vacation time the creek that was flowing past our building was cleaned and we created all sorts of problems for the workers who did that job. Another time we went out to the garbage dump area and found all sorts of interesting things. My mother of course didn’t know where I had gone to and was worried. Several kids had been abducted during our time in Düsseldorf that had made headlines in the papers.

An incident that drastically changed the family’s life.

I started into the second half of my first school year and physical education was added to the curriculum. Long jump, high jump and several running events were now practiced. A mishaps at one of these events would change my life and my family’s life. At high jump I made it over the bar, but my landing was askew and I hit the surrounding 4x4 with my right leg. The impact wasn’t that hard and there was little skin damage. It felt soar but I could walk away from the incident. When I came home, my mother applied hot towels to the leg. After getting up the next morning I was in real pain and could not walk because my right lower leg was inflamed and felt real hard above the calf. My mother ordered me to go to bed and called a doctor.

Two days late when the MD examined my leg he found that there was a considerable amount of pus at my ankle. He made an incision to drain it and send me to get an x-ray to find out if there was some bone damage. When the X-ray picture was evaluated it was obvious that there was a problem with the bone marrow of my fibula, and he would not be able to do anything more for me. He advised us to see the best bone surgeon we could find.

His diagnosis and the way he expressed it was a shock to me and my mother. My father called Opa Thielemann in Berlin to see whom he could get us in touch with. He knew all the top MDs in Germany from his work at the royal household. Within 48 hours he called back and said we had an appointment with Professor Dr. Bier at the Charité Clinic in Berlin. Professor Bier was the top bone surgeon in Germany and was teaching at the Charité.

My mother and I took the train to Berlin, which was a ride of more than 5 hours in those days. The next day Professor Bier examined my leg and some more X-rays were taken. His diagnosis was that I had osteomyelitis, an infection of the bone marrow in the fibula. He said he would try surgery, but told my mother that I might never be able to walk in a normal way. When my mother started to cry, he assured her that he would try his best to solve my problem.

Antibiotics can cure osteomyelitis today, but in 1930 there were none. I was scheduled for surgery just two weeks before Christmas in 1930 and would unfortunately have to celebrate my seventh birthday in a hospital bed. There were numerous preparatory steps before the surgery. Medical students performed most of the work and finally an hour ahead of going into the operating room, I was given anesthesia in form of an enema. Finally med student rolled me onto a forum like stage with doctors sitting above my level in circular ranks to watch my surgery. It was like the Forum in Rome where people watched the lions tear the prisoners apart. Professor Bier explain my predicament to the audience and during his lecture.

I came out of it 72 hours later when an MD and a nurse desperately tried to talk to me. They seemed worried about my consciousness, because I had apparently been overdosed. It took another 24 hours until I was really alert. I noticed then that my right leg was completely bandaged up to above the knee and was wondering about the reason. Then Dr. Bumm (his real name) who was the assistant surgeon to Professor Bier came, and sitting next to my bed explained what had been done in the surgery. He said there was some good news and some bad news. The good news was that Prof. Bier had been able to open my fibula and remove all the bone marrow and we have to hope that my body would be able to replace the marrow. The bad news was, that during the surgery a motoric nerve, the peroneus, “jumped over the scalpel” as he expressed it. Consequently I would not be able to lift the tip of my right foot again. In other words I would have a drop foot

Several days later he brought me a very big chocolate bar for my seventh birthday, together with a new X-ray that he showed to me and my mother indicating that my body already started new bone marrow at the top of the fibula.

A few days later he came again and together with the chief nurse cut off the enormous bandages on my leg. I saw for the first time now how much “damage” the medical profession had inflicted on my leg. I had a 44 cm (17”) long scar along my leg. I would certainly always been identifiable by that scar. He told me that I was going to be released just a day before Christmas and I was happy about that.

It took me a few months to recover from that surgery. I had to visit the Charité every week so they could check on my healing process. I got all sorts of massages at a sports clinic, which didn’t accomplish anything. I simply had to accept the fact that my right leg had a permanent impairment and I had to find ways to live with it. I tried different kinds of elastic bandages that I wound around my ankle to give the foot more support. What was most depressing to me was that I would not be able to ski or skate, because I could not control my foot properly. In those days custom boots that would partially compensate for my impairment were not made or too expensive.

Another move

My health problem also affected my father’s life. He had to ask for a transfer to IHC’s office in Berlin which was a demotion for him. I think we could have stayed in Düsseldorf without any problem, but my mother didn’t like the catholic people in Düsseldorf. Father never mentioned or blamed my accident for that, but he was not happy in the Berlin office.

I had missed a whole year of school. My mother went to the local school in Berlin-Mariendorf with me and they tested me to see if I could fit into the second grade without causing gaps in my education. The teachers of my second grade class doubted that, but my mother railroaded them and said that she would take care of the necessary tutoring and assured the headmaster that I would finish in the top 20% by the school year end. That was a tall order and throughout that year my mother gave me no time to play with other kids.

I had to study and study to catch up with grade two curriculum. At the end of that school year I was in the top 10% of grade two. My teachers had already noticed during the school year that I was way above the average students in that grade. Wow, I was really proud of that. The negative side was that I was constantly ridiculed by the kids. I was excluded from physical education because of my leg injury. That doesn’t get you any friends and I concluded that for the rest of my life I would always be an outsider.

Now that I was caught up with my schooling I had some time to do things that kids do. The apartment building where we lived was owned by a gentleman, Mr. Hirsch, who lived there too. He was a hobby gardener and practised it right behind his five story building. He also had a big German shepherd dog that made sure that nobody stole any fruit from his master’s garden. Every day Mr. Hirsch took the big dog for an hour long walk around the neighborhood, but at times his sciatica bothered him so much that he could not take the dog out. He then asked other tenants to do that for him, which I thought was quite an imposition.

One time my father had the Schnaps-idea to suggest that I take the dog for a walk, even though he knew about my previous experience with a dog down in Silesia. So I had to take the damn beast for a walk and my previous experience was repeated. The dog tried to get away and I tried to hold on to the leash and fell and got some very nasty scrape marks on the leg I had surgery on. I was really pissed off at my father and told him so. I was turned off at dogs for the rest of my life.

All along our street we had plane trees which have golf ball size seeds in the fall season. We kids used the seeds as projectiles for our sling shots or pitched them by hand. We competed in throwing them over the double decker busses that frequented a nearby street. The timing and aim was difficult because the busses approached at about 35 MPH and the seeds were not supposed to hit the bus but to sail right over the top of them. Naturally at times our trajectories were off somewhat and hit the side of the bus. An impact damage was not noticeable, but it landed with a fairly loud bang. The bus driver probably didn’t even notice the impact bang over the engine noise, but one day when my trajectory was off the bus driver stepped on the brake jumped out of his cab and went after me. For a moment I was perplexed but then burned the rubber of my shoe soles to get away. The driver was a really fast runner, but knowing all the nooks and crannies of my neighborhood, I escaped. Wow, that scared the hell out of me I didn't participate in that “game” again.

Grandpa retires

Since Opa’s retirement they lived in Bergfelde at the very periphery of Greater Berlin. I had to take the S-Bahn to get there and the trip usually took one hour, if I got the right connections. I had to switch S-Bahn lines twice and sometimes three times to get to Hohen Neuendorf. From that station it was a 40 minute walk through the forest to Bergfelde. If I arrived at the right time I could catch a bus to my destination but most of the time I had to walk. This was a bit scary in winter days when it was dark and I walked very fast to get to the grandparents house.

Cousin Wolfgang had been “parked” at their home, because his parents had divorced and his mother had to work. We had one hell of a good time when I visited. Opa had a large garden with all kinds of vegies and fruits. Wolfgang and I picked whatever we liked and that was great, but we also annoyed him because we made “earth movements” as he said. We had dug a big hole near the fence and build a “cave” to play in.

My father was interested in flying, so one day in 1932 we went to the Tempelhof Airport where a school buddy of his was a manager. Dad had made arrangements with Mister von Germershausen, who showed us the airport departments and we went through different commercial aircraft parked in the hangars. This was quite a show since one doesn’t get into an aircraft unless one flies to another destination. He surprised me by channeling me into a Lufthansa excursion flight above the city of Berlin. I was a bit uneasy about it, because I was the only boy in a class of girls who were seated in the single engine Junkers (probably a G 31). This flight opened a different point of view for me. Seeing buildings and streets from the air was new and I enjoyed recognizing distinct areas of Berlin. A teacher who was on board pointed out various outstanding features of our home city.

Several months later there we went out to the large Müggelsee to visit the world's largest airplane, the Dornier Do-X, a 12 engine flying boat with a wingspan of 157 feet and a power of 7,680 HP. It had been designed for the transatlantic passenger service (100 passengers and 15 crew). The big aircraft had just come back from a 30,000 km round trip to South America, a continuation north to New York and then back to Berlin.

From Republic to Dictatorship

In January of 1933, when the army’s “eminence grise” manipulated and coerced Reichspräsident von Hindenburg to name Hitler as the next Reichskanzler, the trouble began. My grandpa, who was vehemently against Hitler, made his usual sarcastic remarks. He had been the personal attendant of the last German Empress, Auguste Victoria, for over 30 years and couldn’t understand how the President of the Weimar Republic, Paul von Hindenburg, was taken in by a man like Hitler. How could he appoint a former deadbeat like Hitler, with hardly any education and an Austrian on top of that, to be Chancellor of Germany? There were endless discussions in the family about the Nazi party, Hitler and his cronies, the situation disturbed me a lot.

Another job, another move

Father was hired by the Swedish company of Alfa-Laval. They manufactured farm equipment too and brought the first automatic milking machines on the market. We also moved to a different location in Berlin. A large apartment in a new building in Berlin-Baumschulenweg. When we moved into our first floor apartment, the upper two levels were not even finished. The location at the Neue Krug Allee was ideal because across the street was the Plänterwald, a large park area that was bordered by the Spree River and I now had a large green area to roam in.

My Best Friend Dies

Grandpa Thielemann died just a few days after my 12th birthday, in 1935. Grandpa had not been well for a few months and the events on the political scene did not help to cheer him up. As I learned from Grandma later on, he had some very upsetting disputes with neighbors who were members of the Nazi party. I think he was so depressed over the political scene that he just lost his will to live.

At his funeral members of the German Royal Family, wearing the military uniforms of the Imperial Army, came to pay their respect. The loss of my favorite person and the pomp and circumstances surrounding the funeral, with the old Imperial German flag being draped over grandpa’s coffin, overwhelmed me. Grandpa had been a stand-in father whenever my father was away on business. I was heartbroken.

A new school

My new school was quite a distance from our home and it took a 30-40 minute walk to get there, depending on the weather, . We had no school buses and public transportation was not convenient since I would have to use two different streetcar lines to get close enough to the school. It took me a while to get established at that school, but the teachers were good and I liked the curriculum which also included chemistry in a school laboratory. Then new and political problems started at school. After Hitler’s power was established all sorts of new requirements were imposed on us. Whoever was not a member of the Hitler Youth (HJ) had school on Saturdays, doing physical education. My parents did not object to me being required to partake, probably for political reasons.

Nazi ideology filters into our life

The family scenes gradually changed too, because the “new order” had penetrated down to the family level. The discriminatory rules that had been decreed by the Nazi government made open discussions dangerous and difficult. Acquaintances disappeared from our family circle, but the family members were afraid to talk about it. Certain books by Jewish authors were no longer allowed in school. The teacher’s rhetoric began to be anti-Semitic. My teachers let me know that my Jewish friend should be avoided, but I didn’t followed their advice.

At the beginning of the next school year each student in our class had to produce a family tree. We had to come up with documents that proved our “Aryan” ancestry at least back to our grandparents. This meant that birth, marriage and death certificates had to be obtained from registrar’s offices wherever these relatives had lived.

All ancestors on my father’s side came from an area near the Luxemburg and Belgium borders, about 500 miles away, while the family on my mother’s side came from Saxonia. It took a lot of writing and money to obtain these documents. Some branches of my family tree were traceable back to the year 1625. It was clear however that some branches of the family tree on mother’s side had been Jewish, but they were beyond the grandparent’s level and so I omitted them.

I was upset when the Jewish kid and his parents who lived upstairs, decided to leave Germany. I overheard my parents talk with friends about other Jewish friends, but they talked quietly because they never knew who was listening in. The newest political jokes about Hitler were also quietly shared.

My father said that I would be better off joining a sports club than the HJ. He had been in a rowing crew when he was attending college and thought that would be a good sport for me considering my leg injury. He checked where the next club was located and took me to the Berlin Youth Rowing Club to enroll me. Their boat house was in Oberschöneweide on the Spree River. When he found out that the club’s president was a Mr. Buchholz Jr., he was quite surprised. A Mr. Buchholz, Sr. had been father’s trainer at the college and he turned out to be the club president’s father. When Buchholz Sr. appeared there was a great big reunion and a mini party started right away. Buchholz Sr. had retired from college and was the trainer for this club and he would take me under his wing and introduce me to the rowing sport. I felt right at home there. The club had an indoor “boat” in which I and other members were trained.

Berlin is the ideal city for any kind of water sport. In and around the city are several rivers, numerous canals and a lot of lakes. After basic training we would be rowing to many places and see beautiful areas. The club had a great variety of boats from skiffs to 4 and 8 oar rowing boats with and without coxswain. I took many weekend tours with that club and we went to many distant lakes and camped there. At a bird sanctuary we were attacked by a swan when we came too close to their nest. We were defended by a farmer’s dog who chased that huge bird. Their wing span can be up to 6 feet.

The Government decreed that farmers were not allowed to centrifuge their milk anymore to make butter to sell it on the open (farmers) market. They had to deliver the milk to a government agency. Hitler wanted to cut down on all agricultural imports to save money. Germany bought a lot of butter and cheese from Denmark and Switzerland and that had to be paid in foreign currency, which the government was short of. It was one of those typical Nazi government bullshit claims. As a consequence Alfa-Laval had to leave Germany, they could not sell their products anymore. Father was out of a job and we had to move to a cheaper apartment. My mother found a place just a block away on Neue Krug Allee and so I could stay in the same school. We were terribly cramped there, because we had to move the furniture of a three bedroom apartment into a 1 1/2 bedroom apartment and that wasn’t easy. The 1/2 bedroom was my room but I had to share it with the piano, a couch and some other furniture.

The new political situation stirred up everybody except the members of the Nazi party. Our family was split politically, the Thielemann side was against Hitler while my maternal grandma and some other family members were for him. Whenever we had a get together on a birthday or an anniversary, the political opinions exploded and often ended in shouting matches. My mother was often upset for weeks because her mother put Hitler on the pedestal. Another pro Hitler man in the family was my great-uncle Paul Thielemann, the older brother of my grandfather. He was employed in the Reichskanzelei and worked for the State-Secretary Otto Meissner, who was in charge of protocol in the German government. Uncle Paul urged my father many times to join the Nazi party but my father didn’t want to have anything to do with the Nazis. At these parties however a lot of political jokes were told, but one had to be more and more careful telling them, because the “Party” had their ears open everywhere.

Here are a few of these jokes that I still remember:

Why does Hitler like to sit on the toilet? Because then he has the whole brown mass behind him.

A Berliner walks into a store and says “Good morning” instead of “Heil Hitler” and the owner comes running and asks, “what do you mean? Is he dead?

Goering and Goebbels die and go to hell. The punishment: for Goering 1,000 new uniforms and no mirror; for Goebbels 1,000 radios and no microphone.

All roads lead to Rome, but all of Hitler’s streets lead to Irrland (the German spelling of Ireland).

Karl Valentin (a Munich comedian) goes on stage, raises his arm in the Nazi salute and shouts: Heil...then scratches his head and says dammit, now I forgot his name!

Grandfather Rausch, the black sheep in the family

My maternal Grandfather Paul Rausch a very elegant man, played excellent tennis and was always dressed according to the latest fashion. He was a textile chemist by profession, who had specialized in fur dyeing, a very difficult field. He was working all over Europe. He had well paying jobs in countries that were in the fur business. Furs were the style during the 1920 to 1940 years and especially the upper class people wallowed in them. Wherever he worked he had girlfriends, since his wife didn’t want to move to different countries. Grandpa had affairs all over Europe and many times when we traveled in Germany, my mother would say, “There’s supposed to be a half brother or sister of mine in that town.” Grandpa’s last job was in Poland and he supposedly had a stroke there. He was brought back to Berlin to get better medical care. Grandma Rausch was not enthusiastic about having him home after the doctors found that he had syphilis in an advanced stage.

Grandpa Rausch slowly went into the delirium stage and had to be transferred to Herzfelde, one of the “funny farms” of Berlin, where he died the same year. In contrast to Grandpa Thielemann’s funeral, his was very small and family oriented. I thought Grandma Rausch was glad to get rid of him, even though it meant that she had to give up her fancy apartment in Lichtenberg. She found an apartment in the same block where we lived. Grandma Thielemann also could not stay by herself in Bergfelde, so my mother arranged for her to move to a nearby flat too.

Now I had both grandmothers practically living next to each other. I called both grandmas “Oma” and to distinguish between them, one was the White Oma and the other was the Brown Oma. Referring to the color of their hair.

Nearly Fatal Pre-Olympics

In early 1936, there was much ado about the coming Olympic games in Berlin, and feverish construction was underway to build the facilities and stadiums for the games. The papers and magazines were full of articles about the various sporting activities, and we kids staged our own Olympic games in the Plänterwald. Since we didn’t have any money, we had to devise our own equipment. We used an appropriately sized stone for the shot-put, and came up with a discus and a javelin for the field and track competitions. It was all great fun. However, one of the kids in the javelin competition got angry when I beat him. Just as I turned my back, he threw the metal javelin at me. I felt a piercing pain in my right leg, looked down and saw the javelin stuck through my pant leg. I reached down and yanked it out. Blood was running down my leg and I thought I would bleed to death, so I ran home as fast as I could.

Mother immediately put a tourniquet around my thigh. My stockings, shoes and the kitchen floor were full of blood. Mother washed the blood off and had a closer look at the damage. I had been extremely lucky, because the metal entered underneath the main tendon running down the inside of the knee, without damaging the tendon itself. It was just a flesh wound, and mother patched it released the tourniquet, and ordered me to bed. She had worked in a hospital at the end of World War I, and although not a nurse, had sufficient experience to cope with all my childhood mishaps.

And another move

My father was hired by the Shell Oil Company, that was allowed to remain in Germany even though they were a foreign company. The president of that Dutch/British company was an admirer of Hitler, and Hitler needed oil for his armed forces. Father worked in their big, modernistic Shell office building in Berlin, built by Emil Fahrenkamp (Bauhaus) in 1930. He was being trained in the oil and gasoline business. After several months he came home and said that we would have to move again, and this time really into the “province”, as the typical Berliner saying was for anyplace outside of the German Capitol. Shell had given him his own sales district, the eastern half of the Province of Brandenburg. We were to be relocated in 1936 to Landsberg/Warthe (45,000 population). Well, that was quite a change. We had never lived in a city that small before.

hanspogi@shasta.com

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