View Single Post
  #215  
Old 05-08-2023, 03:24 AM
Ursus Maior Ursus Maior is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Sep 2020
Location: Ruhr Area, Germany
Posts: 327
Default

Different nationalities, different war stories. Of my three grandfathers - and why I have one spare is another, albeit postwar story - two were ardent nazis. One was a cook and hotel owner in Switzerland before the war. But he was so bad in running his own business that they had to leave the country for the Reich. His side of the story always was that he wanted to go back anyway. Not sure, since debt was mounting.

He participated on two around the world trips as a cook on board German CL Karlsruhe, both of which he photo documented. This was about the only good thing for his family he ever did. During the war, he rejoined the Kriegsmarine and again was a cook on CA Admiral Hipper. After the big units were restricted mostly to harbors and fjords, he was transferred to Luxembourg were the Kriegsmarine apparently ran a recuperation site for U-Boat crews. He remained as a cook there until the Allies liberated the site and he became a POW.

Never met the guy, which probably was good for both of us. My dad grew up seeing his father beat his wife and when my dad stood up to him at the age of 16, he got beaten up to.

The other nazi grandfather wasn't known for his violence though. More a simple fellow, I guess. He was an infantry grunt in Greece after the Balkans campaign. At one point, his unit was supposed to get visited by the brass, but lacked a cook to take care of the higher-ups dropping in. Somehow, the job landed on my grand father's feet and he seems to have done a half decent job. For this or any other military bureacracy reason, he remained a cook until the end of the war.

My last grandfather, the one who wasn't a nazi, was drafted in 1939 and trained in a signalling unit. He was deployed to Finland for most of the war. When the Finns gave the Wehrmacht the boot to comply with the peace terms they had signed with the USSR, the situation heated up a bit until they had redeployed to Northern Norway. He remained there until being relased from his POW status.

He met his future wife while in the service. My grandmother was a Blitmädel, aka a member of the German auxiliary corps, handling office and signalling duties. They fell in love and when the order came that he was to be transferred to the Eastern Front after a promotion to sergeant, she talked his officer into demanding that he stayed. Certain personnel in core functions could be exempted from these drafts (known in German as "Operation Heldenklau", lit. "operation hero snatching"). My grandfather hence coined the family phrase "lieber ein lebender Oberstabsgefreiter als ein toter Unteroffizier", translating into: "rather be a living specialist than a dead sergeant". Not sticking your head out and taking the safer route probably saved him from his older brother's fate: he was a tank commander and got killed near Orel in 1943.

The third of these brothers had been a police officer before the war, got drafted during the war with his division occupying Yugoslavia. He refused to visit the country after the war, fearing they might not let him go there. No one ever knew, if these fears had a specific reason or not. However, Tito's government was known to prosecute war criminals when they could take hold of them for decades and Yugoslavia was a beloved tourist destination for Germans during the 60s and 70s.

The only sister of these three brothers served as a nurse during the war, staying in Germay. She married grandfather No. 2 - hence the connection - and became my grandmother.

My father never served in the army. When Germany rearmed in 1956, men born in several cohorts (most of the 1930s) were exempt from service. One of his school buddies joined voluntarily, though. First he entered the German Coast Guard and then, when large parts of it were transferred to the nascent navy, he switched into the Bundesmarine. He retired in 1989 as rear admiral lower half, after having commanded a fast attack craft squadron and then serving in NATO HQ in Brussels. He died in 2019. I was the first in my family to serve again, after more than five decades of hiatus. Currently in the light infantry reserve.
__________________
Liber et infractus
Reply With Quote