I had arrived in Stuttgart with the clothes my Uncle Gerd had given me, that was all. I had no friends or contacts in the city.

My job was not paying much, but even with money, there was little to buy. Every article of value was available on the black market for exorbitant prices, or for American cigarettes. I could truthfully say that Chesterfields, Lucky Strikes, and Camels, preferably by the carton, opened every door, got every service, and bought any goods. It was the only currency that was universally accepted, since the “Reichsmark” was nothing but a worthless piece of paper.
I could buy American cigarettes on the black market for five to ten Reichsmarks per cigarette. I smoked and could occasionally afford a few cigarettes for my own use. I had to have either items of value that were in demand by the GIs, such as Leica cameras, binoculars, Mercedes cars, or be of female gender and willing to make a deal.

A horrible encounter

Going home from work one evening, I was in a streetcar when a man came on board who looked like the spitting image of Adolf Hitler. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The streetcar was crowded, and the “Hitler type” gradually worked his way towards the center of the car. He wore a light colored trench coat, the way Hitler often did in his earlier years. There was no sign of any makeup, which would have identified him as an actor involved in a play.

The people in the streetcar did not instantly recognize this “image” before them, because in those miserable postwar years everybody had a lot more important things on their minds. Then people gradually started to wake up and alerted their neighbors to the Führer image. I expected everybody to raise their arms and shout “Sieg Heil”, and address him as “Mein Führer”, but the reactions were dead stares, with expressions of disbelief, even fear, on some of the faces. I wished I could have filmed the faces of the people as they eyed the man standing there in an authoritarian posture. He was staring out of the window with a cold and arrogant expression on his face, projecting every bit the image of the real Adolf Hitler.
I didn’t know if a Stuttgart theater was playing Zuckmayer’s “The Devils General”, it was possible. It was also possible that he was an intelligence agent testing peoples’ reactions. Anything was possible in those post war days. When he left the streetcar a few stops later, I heard, “My God I thought he was dead and I hope he is.”

The place were I was living was nice but expensive and it was quite a distance from where I worked. Finally Mr. Schmidt, who worked with me, suggested that if I wanted to stay with them, they would make room for me. He and his wife lived in Heslach, a few blocks from where we worked. The Schmidt’s had a small apartment on the third floor, with a storage space, actually a room with a door, right under the roof. The room was fairly large, and the ceiling was the slope of the roof with a small swing out window, but it had no heat or water. Fortunately there was a toilet and wash basin on the same floor. I immediately saw that I could have a nice little place of my own, and was delighted to get it. There was a bed, a set of drawers with a stoneware wash basin on top, a table and a chair, and enough room for big steamer trunks, book shelves or such, and maybe even a stove. It was primitive, but adequate.

Repairing typewriters

My employer was a man from Saxonia, probably also a refugee, by the name of Möckel. The company’s name was Schreier & Möckel. The shop was in a semi-basement with windows above ground, about 20 by 20 feet in size and had several work benches with simple equipment. Mr. Schmidt, who was a master tool maker, showed me how to repair various typewriters. I was a fast learner and we soon had a good working relationship. Mr. Schmidt had been a manager of the tool department of a large company, but because of his membership in the Nazi party he was not allowed to work as a manager anymore. Such was the decision of the de-Nazification court.

No existence without papers

My most serious problem was to get duplicates of my technical education papers, birth certificate and savings account books. I was also putting my feelers out for a job as an optician. I wrote numerous letters to the appropriate institutions, but they either had been destroyed during the war, or the archives had been evacuated and were still inaccessible. The whole tragedy of war, and its senseless destruction came back to haunt me again and again. It was a constant uphill battle, even in these “peace” times.

Here and there were signs of small improvements, manifestations of the indestructibility of the human spirit which warmed the heart. Despite the mountains of misery, destruction and tragic personal circumstances that surrounded me, I began to believe that there might be better days ahead.

Early in 1946 I was able to buy stationary to write Hannes Rhode’s wife in East Germany about what had happened to him. Several weeks later she replied, she had just received a Red Cross card from Hannes, saying that he was OK. She was surprised to hear that he had been shot, since Hannes hadn’t mentioned it on his card. I was relieved to hear that he had come through all right. I also wrote to Kurt König’s (King’s) mother to find out if she had heard anything from Kurt.

The Russians had confiscated all of my notes and addresses, and the chaotic situation between the occupation zones made communications difficult. The postal system, like anything else, was not back to normal, and all the interzonal mail went through a censor. I wrote to the von Collins family in Austria and I got an answer from his sister telling me that Sepp had shot himself. I was very distressed about that. She referred me to Siegfried Penzel, who was in the other group that had attempted the “Journey of no return”. He wrote me that they also had been caught near the former German border with Lithuania, and when that happened, Sepp von Collins had committed suicide by shooting himself. I just couldn’t believe that an intelligent and well educated person would do that. Siegfried had notified Sepp’s family. I send a letter of condolence to them and later on got a reply, saying that she and the family just couldn’t comprehend that it happened, especially since he had survived the war.

I missed having a close friend I could talk with. Most of all I missed my father, with whom I could sit down and objectively analyze the problems on hand, and find the best solution. When I had left my parents in Landsberg, I was seventeen years old. I spent the next four years in the military. At age twenty-two I had no experience dealing with civilian human problems.

Solving a mystery

One day I hit upon a magazine article about the radio station “Soldaten Sender West”, which I had listened to so often in Courland. At the end of the war the station had gone off the air, without revealing anything about its identity. The general public concluded that it might have been a German underground transmitter that was shut down by Germany’s surrender.

Nothing was further from the truth. The station was in England and was manned by German internees, many of them Jewish, who were well informed about events in Germany during the war. The security surrounding the station was incredibly tight. At its peak, the station had over 2,000 reporters all over Germany. I was sure that hardly any of the “reporters” knew that they were not contributing to a German Armed Forces radio station, but to a British propaganda effort instead. The information these reporters gathered were usually only of minor military significance. They were reporting the daily lives of the people in towns and villages. It was sprinkled with sarcastic comments on occurrences in Germany, mixed with very detailed military information. That is why it looked like legitimate German information.

The radio announcer would for instance say, “The clock in the steeple of St. Mary’s Cathedral in Munich has been ten minutes late, since the clock custodian Hubertus Huber has been drafted into the “Volkssturm”. Nobody else seems to know how to correct the problem.” This information was factual, of no military significance, but it made people in Munich, who could verify that information, think that they were listening to a German radio station.

The chief editor of the station turned out to be a top English newspaper man by the name of Sefton Delmer. After the war he packed a rucksack and hiked through Germany to personally interview people about the effects of his information service. I considered his efforts and his accomplishments the ultimate of intelligent Allied propaganda. The listeners had just loved it.

More facts emerged about the effects of the war. Of my birth year, 1923, only 30 percent of the males came back from the war, that is, 70 percent were killed. The years from about 1920 on to 1926 suffered equal or higher losses. It was only natural that the few men of these birth years who did return had enormous opportunities. Young women looking for boyfriends, widows looking for husbands, and businesses were looking for bosses. I had made a fundamental mistake by staying in Stuttgart but was trying to correct it.

I had found a job in Straubing, Bavaria. The owner of the store had been killed in the war, and his daughter was trying to keep the business in the family. She was a pleasant woman in her mid twenties, and I thought we might be compatible.

The town bureaucracy told me that with only my Russian release papers I could not get permission to live in Straubing. They advised me to go through the U.S. release camp in Regensburg to get American release papers. I thought they were kidding, but they were not. I told them, thank you, I will not voluntarily go behind barbed wire again. I later read that the Regensburg US POW camp was notorious for transferring POWs to France to work there.

When I got back to Stuttgart, I had to move to another room, because the one I had occupied was given to a couple. My new room was only about half as large, there was just enough room for a bed, a night stand and a wash basin, but I was glad to have a roof over my head. In winter time it was damn cold up there. The temperature often didn’t climb above 50°F. Sometimes Mrs. Schmidt brought me a hot water bottle to keep my feet warm in bed.

Shortly before Christmas 1946 I met Traudl, who was also a refugee. She was from Silesia and was teaching home economics at a high school for girls. She had a small apartment and was lonely too. She told me that she would have to confess to her priest about any extramarital sex. I couldn’t believe such nonsense, and asked her what damn business of the priest’s it was if we made love. She was hemming and hawing about it, and told me “that’s just the way it is.” I had broken with the Protestant church shortly after my confirmation. I considered all religions to be man made inventions conceived to manipulate the mass of the people for the advantage of a few, the priests. I had seen enough of mankind’s senselessness with respect to religion during the war. The war prayers on both sides of the combatants, and the “God with us” blasphemy on our military belt buckles, told me not to believe in religion any more. I considered it as bad as the games the politicians played, just another way to enslave man’s mind. I tried to discuss it with Traudl, but I didn’t get anywhere.
Shortly after my 23rd birthday, she came up to my room to borrow two suitcases. She was going to spend Christmas with her family somewhere in Bavaria. When we were in bed, she actually had to teach me how. It was my first time, and I was embarrassed about my ignorance. We hugged and kissed and did it again, and it felt so good. She told me that she had done it before, but didn’t really like it much, because of the confession requirement in her church. She got up, dressed and left with the suitcases. I was very disappointed that she was so businesslike about sex.

After she came back from Bavaria we had sex again, but like the first time, she was not enthusiastic. We did it without a condom a couple of times, and it felt even better, but I had to withdraw before I went off. That wasn’t satisfactory. When I started to explore her body and caress her breasts, she didn’t like that either. She wanted to get married in the worst way and have children, but she seemed to be completely indifferent to enjoyable sex, as if it was an unpleasant duty. Her attitude about sex and religion turned me off completely. Anyway, I wasn’t ready to get married since I didn’t have a pot to piss in. I could also see that she would not change after we were married. About a month later she told me that her period was overdue. Two weeks later her period came and we were both relieved. I had the feeling that she was trying to manipulate me, and we parted amiably.

We lived in a bombed out city, with food rations so small that we could barely survive, no available living quarters to raise a family in, and prospects for improvement years away. Birth control pills had not been invented and abortions were illegal in Germany. Doctors faced severe penalties if they were caught. I felt that it would have been irresponsible to bring children into this world.

Finally I found a job with a local optician in downtown Stuttgart. The store was in the old part of town in temporary quarters. The workshop was extremely crammed, but the owner, Mr. Milten, already had plans and permits for a store in another building nearby.
I was replacing another optician, with whom I worked just long enough to be shown how things were done in this company. I questioned him about his next employment, and to my surprise he said that he was going to move into the Russian occupation zone to work there. I just shook my head and told him about my experiences in Russia and East Berlin. The man was not to be deterred. In his opinion the only power that had any say in Europe would be Russia. I told him that would be the worst thing that could happen to all of us. He said that I was not realistic and didn’t want to see the facts. He seemed to be a genuine communist and as far as I was concerned it was good that he left.

The new store construction for my employer progressed despite the fact that all the building material had to be bought on the black market. Mr. Milten had a business partner, who appeared to be a big black market racketeer. His mannerisms resembled that of an SS officer. I wasn’t at ease with that guy at all. He pulled too many shady deals, but that was how people were getting ahead. In a way I was envious of people like him. They were the only ones who seemed to accomplished anything. All one had to have were connections and absolutely ruthless determination.

When we moved into the new store, I set up a nice work area. Mr. Milten hired an apprentice I would train. Next to the new store was an old established orthopedic business, that employed a podiatrist, an attractive woman, who took an instant liking to me. Hedi was a dyed-in-the-wool Schwab from Ravensburg. She knew her way around Stuttgart, had many friends, and even more connections. She was tall, blond, well-dressed, spoke French and German, was a terrific dancer, and a good figure skater, with the muscular legs that are essential for that sport. She wore glasses and hence the interest in me. She had beautiful green eyes, and was one of the first people I knew who used contact lenses. She had an unusual tolerance for these large hard glass contacts lenses and could wear them up to eight hours. I bought some for myself, but could only tolerate them for four hours, since I had tight eyelids.

The first time I went out with Hedi was to a Carnival dance, for which costumes were required. Since I didn’t have much in the way of clothing and couldn’t afford to rent a costume, I wore the white lab coat I usually worked in, and put a stethoscope around my neck. It was an unexpected hit, because women walked up to me to have their “hearts” checked. I was often embarrassed since many wore transparent, skimpy tops. My dancing was too rusty to dance well with Hedi who was in a dance club, and did competitive ball room dancing, but we had a good time anyway. Hedi acknowledged my popularity with the ladies at the dance and to prevent my escape, she asked me to share her bed for the rest of the night. She motioned me to walk quietly to her room. She had a single bed, and for two tall people, it was on the snug side. We bedded down in spoon position, made love and went to sleep.

The next morning, a Sunday, we had to wait until the family Hedi lived with had left for church before we could get up. We had slept in the nude, and it was fun to be with somebody who wasn’t shy and inhibited. Hedi had lots of sexual experience, small firm breasts, and a good muscular body. We made love several more times during the morning. Since she had other commitments for the day, I left. I sensed that she wasn’t quite sure about me, probably because I was so inexperienced and a couple of years younger than she was.

After my return from the Russian POW camp I had started to think about leaving Germany. I had contacted ophthalmic companies in Sweden, Holland and Switzerland for job opportunities, but nothing came to fruition. There were too many obstacles in the form of time limited employment permits and too much hatred of the Germans.
In late 1948 I finally got mail from my old Luftwaffen buddy King (Kurt König). He had just returned from a Russian POW camp, and he wrote that he had worked in a coal mine in the Ukrainian Donez region. He said his health wasn’t the best, so I sent him a parcel with vitamin tablets and condoms, all goods that were in short supply in the Russian occupation zone. He thanked me and told me, that he had joined the “Volkspolizei”. I was appalled, he was a very intelligent, well educated man, whom I really liked, and he was now working for the Russian police force.

I tried to talk him into emigrating with me, but I could not convince him. I sensed that he was in a political straight jacket, particularly since he was in a police unit housed in a compound. It was obviously not an ordinary police unit he belonged to, but a paramilitary unit. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that we would be on opposite sides of the political spectrum, and in case of another war would have to shoot at each other.
Kurt had been drafted right after high school, and didn’t have a professional skill to fall back on. His mother had lost their belongings in the war, so he had to provide for both of them. The work he had chosen was an easy way out for him. Our correspondence was interrupted by political pressure from the unit he had joined. All interzonal correspondence still went through mail censorship.

At the U.S. Immigration Department I learned that the waiting list for German emigration to the U.S. was about two years long and I dropped the idea. My relatives in New York might have been willing to do something for me, but I was too shy to ask them. They would have to post a security bond for me, and I knew that they were not well off, so I applied for an immigration visa to Canada instead. I also applied for a visa to Brazil. This odd combination came about because I had met a gentleman who was a specialist in the newest ophthalmic field, contact lenses. He worked for the only contact lens manufacturer in Germany, the Müller-Welt Company in Stuttgart. I had met him through the South German Optical Journal that I occasionally wrote articles for. He was going to Sao Paulo, Brazil, to open his own business there. He promised to help me, if I decided to come to Brazil. I took courses in Portuguese and in American English languages to prepare myself.

The Canadian Immigration Mission was in Karlsruhe. In Stuttgart, where I lived, it was impossible to get information of preferred professions or skills wanted in Canada, or anything that would be helpful. Everybody wanted to get out of the piles of rubble left by World War II. We all waited patiently, hoped, prepared and cursed the snail’s pace of the institutions which issued the coveted immigration visas.

In the meantime Hedi had found a better place to live. It was a small, attractive place, that she decorated with unique, contemporary style furniture. I liked her taste. We were both busy, so had rarely time to spend a whole weekend together, but we made passionate love and enjoyed each other’s company as often as we could. Sometimes we just talked or soaked up the sun on her balcony.

Hedi’s past was shrouded in mystery. During the war she had been working in a hospital in Ravensburg which treated wounded soldiers, a hospital that also specialized in VD treatments. She told me horrible stories of soldiers dying of syphilis. Having lost a grandfather to the same disease, I knew enough about it. Penicillin had not been available in Germany during the war.

For Hedi’s birthday I brought her a large bouquet of lilac, but to my dismay she told me that she hated lilac. She finally told me about her tempestuous love affair with a French POW during the war, strictly forbidden during the Nazi regime. They got engaged after the war and planned to get married. Just days before the wedding however, Pierre was killed in an automobile accident. At his funeral it had been lilac time and since flowers were hard to get in those days, there were huge bouquets of lilac in the chapel during the funeral service.

I also started to date Martha, a salesclerk in a grocery store just around the corner from where I worked. As a bachelor I had to live on skimpy ration tickets, and a little extra food would be welcome. The initial feelings in the relationship were of mutual antipathy. I didn’t like her legs, they were flabby and she didn’t walk gracefully, she waddled. She wasn’t the athletic type that I adored. I should have followed my first impressions and left her alone. I was naïve and didn’t know that it is impossible to change a person.
Even our first attempt to make love was a problem. We had gone to a quaint little inn near Stuttgart but had to keep that camouflaged, because Martha’s parents were so old fashioned.

We took a lot of trips into the beautiful countryside around Stuttgart. The public transportation system gradually returned to normal, and more areas became accessible. We took busses or the railroad to an area and then went on hikes. We went along the Neckar River Valley and to the Schwabian Alps and at times made love out in the forest. At one time, even on top of a wooden observation tower with a Hornets’ nest right above our heads. Another time we did it on a stone wall surrounding a cemetery. Whenever we felt like doing it, we did, and probed every possible position. Pregnancy was a constant worry.

A new start with new money

In the late spring of 1948, there were rumors about a replacement of the worthless Reichsmark. The old Reichsmark had been stabilized once before in 1923, and that had ended the most disastrous inflation in German history. Twenty-five years later the Reichsmark was totally overvalued again. It was obvious that a devaluation had to take place to get the West German economy on its feet again.

I was working with a different optician now. Next to the optician store was a small, boutique which had elegant woman’s fashions. Ronney was an employee there, a super good-looking woman, with a typical model figure, tall and skinny. She was young, maybe 19 years old. Her boyfriend was an American civilian, Henry Kaminski from New York, who was in his thirties, overweight, and overbearing at times, but a hell of a nice guy. He drove a light blue 1946 Dodge coupe, and supposedly worked for the Joint Export/Import Agency (J.E.I.A.) of the American Military Government in Stuttgart. Martha, Ronney, Henry and I became good friends, and did a lot of fun things together.

I think an American customer gave me a draft copy of the scenario for the planned reevaluation of the money. What I read was shocking to me and everybody with whom I shared the information. I remember the reactions of my aunt and uncle in Reichenbach, they just couldn’t believe it would happen that way.

A new currency was going to be issued. Only a small amount of cash and savings up to 3,000 Reichsmarks were going to be exchanged at a 1:1 ratio. Everything else would be exchanged later at a 10:1 ratio. That is, for ten old Reichsmarks, one would get one new Deutschemark. All debts were to be exchanged at a 1:1 ratio, with only a short extension. The biggest surprise was that every property owner who’s house was not destroyed during the war would be saddled with an additional 50 % mortgage on the property. That mortgage was payable to the future German Government’s reconstruction fund and would be used to finance the rebuilding of housing in Germany.

On Friday, June 18, 1948, the law about the change of the currency was published, and the old Reichsmark was declared invalid. All business involving an exchange of money came to an instant stop. On Saturday June 19, large convoys of American military trucks with armed guards on each vehicle, plus armored personnel carriers, rolled up to the banks and unloaded the new bank notes.
On Sunday, June 20, the banks opened to issue only 40 new Deutschmarks for 40 old Reichsmarks, but made no savings account exchanges yet.

Over night the store windows filled with goods that people hadn’t seen in years. The furious citizens were cussing the merchants who had hidden all these goods. I saw everything I needed in the stores now and had no money to buy it. In addition, a general price increase of up to 300 percent was permitted.

That action by the western Military Governments brought the whole economical situation back to a more normal condition. Now businesses would sell or render services for just plain money, and the Camel or Lucky Strike “currency” was eliminated and reduced to just a commodity. Most people’s savings accounts were later reduced 10:1. The Russian Military Government didn’t like these Allied actions and on June 24, started the blockade of West Berlin, as a retaliation.

My mother suddenly left Berlin, and moved to Hamburg and didn’t explain why. Mother was always holding her cards close to her chest. I had often suspected that she didn’t like sex, and that my father had extramarital affairs. A short time later, my mother wrote me that father was in a hospital with a kidney infection. She said that he had gotten numerous penicillin injections, but that he wasn’t doing well. When I asked if I should come to see him, she answered that my appearance in Hamburg would only tell my father that his condition was hopeless and she didn’t think that was a good idea.

A week later, I got a telegram, telling me that father had passed away and to please attend the funeral. I was very angry at my mother. I would have liked to see my father once more before he died.
November is not the best time for weather in Germany, and the November of 1948 was no exception. I used a private bus service to go to Hamburg. When the bus reached the main northbound Autobahn, we ran into impenetrable fog in the area around Frankfurt. The fog was so dense that the driver asked the backup driver to sit on the front fender of the bus, and show with hand signs where to steer the vehicle. He had to slow to a crawl, and I didn’t envy the poor guy out there, because it was beastly cold. The two drivers changed positions every 15 minutes, but even the inside of the bus, an old diesel burner, was not warm. The girl next to me moved closer and we spread a blanket over our legs to keep warm. After about ten hours of this misery, the bus arrived in Hannover at five o’clock in the morning. The passengers going to Hamburg had to walk through the bombed out inner city to the main railway station, which was also heavily damaged, but functional. About three hours later the train rolled into Hamburg-Dammtor Station.

Mother had rented a small room in a larger apartment. When I entered her room, the first thing I saw was my father’s picture on top of a dresser, with lit candles on each side. Mother said hello to me in tears. She fixed coffee and cake, and we smoked a cigarette. Then she told me about father’s sickness and his last days. He was down to 90 pounds when he died.

In those days all the doctors believed that penicillin was THE cure-all and administered it indiscriminately, not knowing that it was ineffective against inflammations of the urinary tract. Penicillin also kills the bacteria of the intestinal tract, which are essential for digestion and absorption of the food into the body. Father got so many penicillin injections that he was literally starved to death.

The next day mother introduced me to father’s girlfriend who, as she put it, “Did it just for chocolate.” I could not figure out how she meant that. Was this woman just a prostitute, or father’s lover, who happened to like chocolate ? When the woman came to visit, I could not warm up to her. She was a young woman, maybe in her late twenties, tall and fairly attractive. If I had been more diplomatic, we could have met privately and I would have found out more about my parents’ relationship.

Mother never explained to me why she went to work for a widower with a large farm and five kids during the war. She claimed that she had to go to work and didn’t want to work in a factory. Maybe her decision was the reason for the separation. I was sure father also had some affairs in Berlin. It also seem to explain why my mother didn’t want me to come and talk to father before he died. I was really offended by all that secrecy.

The funeral was attended by many former colleagues of my father, his girlfriend, and some old friends from Landsberg. To my surprise Anni Timmerman, the oldest daughter of our Dutch neighbors in Landsberg, was there too. I had been very fond of her in Landsberg, and the feeling hadn’t changed. Hildegard Piechatzeck and her son Frank were also present. I sadly said good-bye to my father. Due to his profession and constant absence from home, I never had a chance to know him well. After the very moving nonreligious service was over, we all went to a restaurant and had a farewell dinner together, and later I saw Anni, Hildegard and little Frank off at the railway station.

I finally questioned my Mother by putting pressure on her to reveal the reason for her hasty trip out of Berlin. She apparently had pulled some illegal deals with food stamps and was due to be arrested, but had been warned and fled to West Berlin. From there she flew to Hamburg. There were too many loose ends in her story. I was at the end of my patience and returned to Stuttgart. Mother had hinted that I could stay in Hamburg, since father’s boss at the Shell Oil Company had offered to help me get a job at the company. I didn’t like the Hamburg ambiance and atmosphere, so my answer was “no.”

Back in Stuttgart, Martha and I continued to improve our relationship. I told her that I had applied for immigration to Canada and she accepted that. She had two cousins in Chicago, and if she had been on the ball, she could have asked them to sponsor our immigration to the States. These relatives were sending her CARE packages, they were well off, and all were active in the “Schwaben Verein”, a big Chicago German Club.

About a month after I had applied for immigration to Canada. I got a letter from my mother, telling me to contact people in Stuttgart-Weil im Dorf by the name of Woltmann. An old friend, Dieter Bergner from Landsberg, was living with them.

Finding an old friend

The Woltmann’s house had bomb damage which they had temporarily repaired. Dieter was surprised to see me. He introduced us to the Woltmann family and to his cousin Vera, who was the oldest of the four Woltmann girls. Vera and Dieter were engaged and were going to get married soon, because she was pregnant.

We talked about what had happened since we had last seen each other in Landsberg. Dee had been sent to a so called NAPOLA (a Nazi Political school) by his half Jewish father. In those schools they were trained to be the future cadres for the Nazi upper crust. Peter Bergner might have thought that it was a good way to save Dieter from going to a concentration camp.

Two days before the Russian troops had reached Landsberg, Dieter came home from school to urge his father to crank up the old Packard car and flee with the whole family. His father told him that was nonsense. He was convinced the Russians would need his dry cleaning and laundry services and so he was going to stay. After the Russian Army entered Landsberg, Peter Bergner, a capitalist, was deported to a labor camp in the Ural Mountains, where he died. Dieter’s youngest sister Inge was abducted by a Russian officer and was never heard of again. All efforts to locate her through the Red Cross failed. She was probably raped and then murdered. Dieter’s oldest sister Anneliese had been murdered earlier in the war by her husband, a staff sergeant in the Luftwaffe. He had learned that she had an affair with another man while he was at the front in Russia. He took an emergency furlough, came home, confronted her while she was walking down the street and point blank shot her. Dieter’s mother, and the two other sisters survived the war. I was shocked to hear the gruesome news, especially about Inge, who had been a good friend of mine.

Whenever Martha and I went out to visit Dieter we had to keep an eye on the clock, because the last streetcar departed at 10:30 PM. We each lived about 15 miles away, and in two different parts of Stuttgart. We often had to sprint to catch the last car.

On my first visit with Dieter I had mentioned that I had applied for immigration to Canada, and Dieter said that sounded interesting, and that he would also apply. I was skeptical, because he was not the type of person to do something in a hurry. On one of my following visits Dieter mentioned that he had filled out an application and sent it to the Canadian Immigration Consulate. Dieter was at odds with his uncle and father-in-law. Mr. Woltmann, who was Jewish, had been a member of the communist party, and had spent time in a concentration camp during the Nazi era. He still thought communism was the solution for the world’s problems.

Dee, Vera, Martha and I became close friends, and I especially liked Vera. After she had given birth to their first daughter, Judith, we often went on hikes and trips together. We exchanged a lot of ideas and enjoyed the beautiful surroundings of Stuttgart.

Traveling American style

Sometimes Henry and Ronney invited Martha and me to go on trips with them. Since Henry had a car it was a lot more fun than squeezing into crowded trains or buses. Henry smoked cigarettes and he always had some good cigars in his car. One time he offered me one, but even though I smoked, the cigar didn’t sit too well and I got sick to my stomach. Henry came to a screeching halt at the next farmhouse and got some Alka-Seltzer from his glove compartment. Ronney got a glass of water from the farmer. It worked and we continued on our way to Heidelberg.

The trouble with Henry was that it took an unreasonably long time to get from A to B. He was a compulsive eater, and whenever he saw a nice restaurant, he had to stop. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of good restaurants in southern Germany. He dragged us to far-out places that we didn’t even know existed. We roamed down the Neckar River valley, stopped at a place that he knew, and had a fantastic steak, at a time when the average German restaurant didn’t even know what a steak was. How he managed to have all these connections was a constant puzzle to me. Henry could hardly speak German, but he always got what he asked for.

I suspected that Henry was connected with a different American organization than what he said. Ronney sometimes had to retrieve his car from someplace, supposedly because he couldn’t show his face there anymore. Other times he disappeared for weeks. We never knew what he was up to. Ronney finally broke up with him, but a considerable time later he showed up at our place, this time in U.S. Army uniform, and with a new girl friend.

Then we lost track of him. Years later we discovered a picture in a Canadian magazine of the same Henry Kaminski, and just about keeled over. He was getting married to a German lady right on the border bridge between Canada and the USA. Henry was standing on the Canadian side, and his bride on the U.S. side. For some reason Henry, who was divorced, couldn’t remarry in the States, but could in Canada.

Getting married

In 1949 Martha and I finally decided to get married. Her parents were pissed off, because I didn’t want a church wedding, just a simple civil ceremony. My father-in-law immediately accused me of being a communist. To me that was the dumbest accusation I had ever heard. He was a member of the Social Democrat Party and his party was closer to the communists than any other party.

At breakfast on our wedding day, her mother served us only a piece of dry bread. She said that it was just a day like any other day. I had never encountered anyone that rude and obnoxious in my entire life, except in the military, and I should have walked out right there and then. But Martha wasn’t on good terms with her parents either, so I didn’t want to let her down.

After the civil ceremony was over we had a nice dinner at her parent’s home with Martha’s brother and his girl friend and a few other people. Martha wore a pretty white dress that had come from Chicago, and I wore the dark pin-striped suit that had been tailored from the material my uncle had given me. The wedding was small and simple and in tune with the tough times.

The biggest problem was to get a place of our own. We were not willing to put up with the constant complains and sarcastic remarks by Martha’s parents and her brother. Martha and I tried every possible angle with the bureaucracy that rationed living space, and the agency that tried to help refugees to get reestablished. It took us several months to get a reasonable room in the western part of Stuttgart.
Our 20 x 20 foot “apartment” (compartment would have been a better definition) soon started to look quite livable. It was on the third floor, and the windows opened towards the street side. There wasn’t a wash basin or toilet in the room, and we had to go over to the landlord’s flat for these conveniences. We got along just fine with the landlord’s family and there were never any problems.

Now that we had our own four walls, and privacy, we could have sex any time we wanted. However Martha was beginning to have serious female problems. After a consultation with a gynecologist, he discovered that there were several problems with her ovaries and fallopian tubes. The physician couldn’t determine exactly where the problem was, and suggested exploratory surgery.

At first we were both against it, but since she had a history of severe menstrual problems, and had several times been in the hospital for curettage, she finally decided to have the surgery. After that was over the doctor told me that he had to removed one ovary and fallopian tube. In his opinion she would not be able to have any children.

This information upset me, and I contemplated a divorce. Martha had a difficult time coping with the problem herself. It took her a long time to recover from the surgery, and I think that was an emotional turning point in our relationship. We made love like we had before, but something was missing. As time progressed, I, who was aware that I was the last male member of my family, felt that I was betraying my ancestors by not having any children.

I worked part time, and found another job in Ludwigsburg, but not in ophthalmic optics. The company was a nationally known manufacturer of fire extinguishers. It was an interesting job and the pay was much better, but I developed a severe reaction to a protective nitrocellulose lacquer that the company sprayed on the finished product. It was done in a spray booth that was supposed to have adequate ventilation, but the fumes were everywhere in the building.

My face and hands broke out in a rash, and I even had a rash on my penis. The doctor did not know of any medication for this particular allergy, so he decided to give me intramuscular calcium injections. His theory was that the calcium would “seal” the skin against external irritants. That theory sounded like believing the moon was made of green cheese. The physical sensation of these calcium injections was weird. The liquid was injected into the thigh muscles, it took a few seconds to get into the bloodstream. It felt like a hot liquid being slowly distributed throughout my body. After a few minutes the sensation ended. I must have had at least 10 injections and the rash didn’t even lessen. Then he put me on a high dose of vitamin A and that seemed to have an effect. I had no choice but to quit the job. It took me a long time to get over it completely.

What vintage is that?

I enjoyed writing articles for the South German Optical Journal and liked the owner and chief editor, Rudy Neuss. Rudy was a real character who had started the Journal on a shoestring. It filled an urgent need for trade information in the field of ophthalmic optics. Writing for a technical journal is a highly specialized field, which requires a thorough knowledge of the technical subject and an exact writing style, without being boring. Rudy was a very strict editor, and in the beginning I had to rewrite almost every article that I submitted.

Rudy taught me good technical writing.

Rudy had another skill. He was a wine connoisseur, who had been trained by his father who was a vintner. One could present Rudy with a glass of wine, and without seeing the bottle, he could tell what wine and what vintage year it was. I tested him many times at home and at restaurants and he never failed a test. Martha and I tried to trick him at times, but we couldn’t lead him astray. He loved wine, had grown up with it, and at times drank too much of it. When he was in one of those “drink just to forget” moods, he did crazy things.

He came to our place with several bottles of Piesporter Goldtröpfchen, and we went into a long “sampling session”. All of a sudden Rudy crushed an empty wineglass in the palm of his hand, as if it were a piece of paper. He cut his hand of course, but he then took a piece of the broken glass and chewed it. It was really crazy. We bandaged his hand before he left for home and I had to go down the staircase with him to unlock the main entrance door. Rudy slid down on the banister to the bottom of the staircase, grabbed the carved wooden ball on top of the last banister and twisted it off. He said nonchalantly good-bye and left. Martha and I were at a loss about his behavior, something must have really bothered him that day. May be it was the fact that I was married now, and he wasn’t. I carefully reattached the knob, but the next day somebody else grabbed it, and it came off again. The lady who owned the building was bitching about it for days. I never said a thing, for fear of being evicted. Rudy sincerely apologized.

Another time Rudy took me to a restaurant to have me sample a wine that he had discovered there. He told the waiter what to bring. After he had tasted the wine, Rudy said to the waiter, “That’s not the wine I had yesterday.” When the waiter assured him that it was, Rudy got angry and demanded to see the owner of the restaurant. When the waiter introduced the owner, Rudy asked him if that was indeed the so and so wine, and the owner assured him it was. Rudy stared at him for a few seconds, and then asked him how he stored that wine. The owner now sensed that he had a real expert on his hands, and got a little fidgety and visibly uncomfortable. Rudy waited, staring at him, and the owner then had to admit that he had put yesterday’s bottle back into the refrigerator, and the wine Rudy had sampled today was from that same bottle.

Rudy was really pissed, asked him for another bottle, and ordered him to “uncork at the table.” This was done, and after Rudy had tasted it, he declared that it now tasted like the one he had the previous day. After that, he let me sample it too. It was so good that we emptied two bottles of it. When we left the restaurant, he told me that he had noticed the distinct change in the bouquet of the wine. He knew his wines inside out, and all the restaurant owners who served wine in and around Stuttgart must have known and feared him. There was no way to deceive him.

As mentioned before, I had written a number of technical articles on ophthalmic subjects for his magazine, just to get recognition. I was a frequent visiter at the America House, the US library in Stuttgart. The ophthalmic articles published in the USA were most interesting to me. Since almost the entire German optical industry had been destroyed or dismantled during and after the war, there was an enormous product information gap.

To fill that gap, I wrote an article about Bausch & Lomb’s frames and lenses for the Optical Journal. It was published, and I sent a copy of the article to Bausch & Lomb in Rochester, New York. They wrote back thanking me for the article and they asked me if there was anything they could send me as a token of appreciation. I replied that one of their Ray-Ban frames with prescription sunglasses would be most welcome, since I couldn’t get anything like that in Germany. I provided my prescription and frame dimensions, and was surprised when they sent me exactly what I wanted. I never got anything from a German manufacturer after writing about their products.

An optical marketing company, having read my articles, asked me if I would be willing to model some of the glass frames for an advertising campaign. After negotiating my fee a top notch photographer took a whole serious of pictures of me waring various makes of frames. Some of the photos came out excellent, some of them I didn’t like at all, and it was strange that I saw my self in the show windows of many opticians.

How did he get away that fast?

In the summer of 1951 Dieter Bergner, much to my envy, got his immigration visa for Canada. It irked me that he was going first, especially since he had applied much later than I did. Dieter had a job offer in Edmonton, Alberta. We had one hell of a going-away-party for him, and I made him promise to help me to get over there after he was established in Canada.

Dieter was in Edmonton, Alberta for a few months, where he worked in a coal mine, then he found a job in dry cleaning and moved to Grande Prairie, 400 miles northwest of Edmonton. He bought an old house for $ 2,500 and wrote to Vera to come over. He wrote that she didn’t need to bring any household goods, because he had everything. Knowing Dieter I was a bit skeptical, but that was Vera’s problem.

In December of that year Vera and her two little kids boarded a ship for Canada. Vera, with Judith, 2 1/2 years old, and Regina, about 1 1/2 years old, got into one hellish crossing on an old Greek passenger liner. They got into the same storm that sank the “Flying Enterprise” near the southwestern coast of England.

The three Bergners were dreadfully sick when they arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They still had a five day train trip to Grande Prairie ahead of them. Vera couldn’t speak any English and when they arrived in Edmonton, Regina was in critical condition. The Canadian Red Cross finally helped them. When they reached Grande Prairie, the temperature was 20 below zero and the kids were just barely alive.

Vera went into the kitchen to prepare a bath for the kids, and looked around for a water tap. Dee pointed to a closet door, and when Vera opened it, there was a 55 gallon drum filled with water. So much for conveniences Canadian style. Vera was furious with Dee. She wrote to Martha and me that he only had the most rudimentary household items on hand. She also enclosed a picture of herself with a little baby and we couldn’t figure out who that was. When we looked at the back of the photo it read: Stewart 4 weeks old. We couldn’t believe that they already had another kid.

After I had recovered from my skin allergy, I went job hunting in Stuttgart again. I found a job with Marwitz & Hauser, a company with a modern factory in the Heusteigstrasse which manufactured high quality frames for eyeglasses. The company was owned by a Mr. Schneider, who ran a very tight ship, but offered extraordinary facilities and benefits to the employees. His company was miles ahead of any other in the field. He had made his money during the depression in the United States, returned to Stuttgart around 1930, and bought the company. The manufacturing operation was housed in a cheerfully painted building, and had the best machinery, manned by handpicked employees. By 1950 they were already exporting their non-plus-ultra lens frames to over 50 countries. Their products were sold to well qualified opticians only, and were the envy of the frame industry throughout the world. They were at a quality level of the Mercedes Benz cars that come from the same city. The company had about 350 employees at that time.

I was trained to work in the final quality control department. Every frame went through that department where 20 men shaped and aligned the product into its final shape. There was a nice dining area, with menued meals that were subsidized by the company. There were no coffee breaks, but about 10:00 am and 3:00 pm a food and beverage cart came to each work area, and we could buy a sandwich or Danish, cookies, coffee or tea. Friday afternoon we could even buy a bottle of beer. This system eliminated time consuming runarounds by employees during ten minute breaks, and made efficient use of work hours.

One attraction was an unheard of employee weekend outing with all family members to the wine growing area along the Rhein River. The company rented an entire railway train for the outing. On a Saturday morning we left for Rüdesheim am Rhein, where we embarked on an excursion steamer. It went up one side of the Rhein and down the other, stopping at all the famous wine growing towns so we could sample their products.

All that “sampling” caused a few casualties, unfortunately including my wife. She could normally hold her liquor well, but she got sick on this trip. This was an embarrassment for me, because each employee was being scrutinized by the bosses. We all had a lot to drink, but there was little tolerance for uncouth behavior and if there was, the bosses took notice. We returned late on Sunday, and I had to take a taxi to get Martha home and into bed. She was sick for several days.

I wasn’t too keen on events like that because I was never comfortable in the presence of masses of people, and I didn’t like to drink with that much “observation” either. Oktoberfest type of activities were not my thing. I was much more comfortable with friends, whom I could trust and drink with, without being scrutinized. Probably a hangover from the Nazi times and their mass rallies and marches.

Despite the good working conditions, I was restless and putting out feelers to other companies for a better job. At Marwitz & Hauser the atmosphere was too restrictive. Mr. Schneider was convinced that only he knew how to manufacture top quality frames. He laughed about all competitors, saying they didn’t even know what good lens frames looked like, let alone how to make them.

My articles in the optical journal had attracted industry attention, and a number of frame manufacturers contacted me, to see if I wanted to work for them. Only one looked worth the effort. I had to keep all contacts with competitors secret, or I would have been fired. After I had come to an agreement in Frankfurt/Main with a Mr. Boeller, I didn’t mention my reason for leaving at Marwitz & Hauser. I told the personnel office that my emigration to Canada had come through, and that I would be leaving via Frankfurt in the near future. That way they couldn’t force me to sign an exclusion document.
My colleagues kidded me right away and called me “Canada Hannes.” They said I would be drafted into the Royal Canadian Air Force. Since there was no conscription in Canada that was nonsense, but these guys didn’t know that and they had invented that reason just to ridicule me.

Former top Nazis reappeared in the newly formed West German Government. The mistrust among the former Allies, particularly towards Russia, had developed into the cold war. That was one of the reasons why they needed the German’s “expertise” about Russia, and why the old Nazis were able to resurface and offer their services. Of course the same happened in East Germany and I figured, that sooner or later they would try to outdo each other and merrily go to war again. I hoped to be away from Europe when this scenario took place. I didn’t trust the Russians, but I didn’t trust the western Allies either. The Canadian Government seemed to be the only one that kept out of this insane paranoia.

In 1951 after some hard bargaining I had an agreement with Mr. Boeller to come to Frankfurt and design a whole new line of eyeglass frames for his company and update his manufacturing facility to manufacture the new merchandise. We had to move to Frankfurt, but I thought my immigration to Canada would soon come through.

The Price of the damn war
The first statistics about the human losses in the war became available and they boggled my mind. They said that it is the first time in history that the Civilian losses exceeded the Military losses.
Germany, Military KIA: 3,250,000
Civilians killed 3,810,000
Total losses: 7,585,000
Austria, Military KIA 380,000
Civilians killed 145,000
Total losses: 525,000
All losses on German side 8,110,000*
* These are not exact figures, which will never be available!