|
There are some horrors that must never be forgotten, lest they be ignorantly
repeated. So I am moved to document my
conversations with a WWII SS (Schutzstaffel)
officer thirty years ago, with two surprising updates only a few weeks
ago. Given current events and their
unnerving parallels with the end of the Weimar Republic in Germany, it's
important.
Two weeks ago I began using my aunt's mid-20th-century reel-to-reel tape
recorder to play some of the tapes she had used around 1970 as a substitute for
long-distance phone calls with her parents, my grandparents.
My aunt and my mother were orphaned at ages 3 and 1, when their hard working,
hard luck immigrant mother died, and their immigrant father could not as a
tenant farmer support nine children. My
mom and aunt were the luckiest of the nine kids, being adopted by their uncle
John and his wife Elsie.
To me, John and Elsie were always Grandma and Grandpa. I had no others. My father was raised in a Catholic orphanage
from age 6.
When I played the tapes, I learned through Grandma and Grandpa's repeated
thanks to my aunt, that she was helping them financially more than I knew. My Grandpa's tales of living in
Austria/Hungary as a child in the 1890s before he emigrated to the U.S.,
reminded me of a different relative I would like to disavow. Cousin Franz, with whom I shared a
great-grandfather, chose to stay in Hungary.
But first, some background. Like most
Americans, I am descended from immigrants.
All my ancestors were in North America before WWI. My grandparents were born in four different
countries. Having a grandparent from one
particularly tribally diverse place, Austria/Hungary, from the ancestral family
name I happily think of myself as a Mongol mongrel, although I pass for
"white". As everyone who has studied
biology knows, we humans are all one species and "race" is a social construct
only. Our differences from one village or
continent to another are infinitesimal compared to the genes we all share.
My mother was able to keep in touch with her orphaned siblings in Oregon and
Canada, and cousin Franz in Europe.
Cousin Franz and his wife came to Oregon to visit my family in the early 1980s,
but I was working at sea, so I missed meeting them.
Then in 1996 my husband Grady and I were traveling through Europe, and I wanted
to meet this long-lost relative I'd heard so little about. I was able to telephone him from Switzerland
when we were about to head to Vienna, and he met us at the Vienna train
station. I had seen photos of him, so I
recognized him. He was unremarkable
looking, other than being taller and heavier than average. I tried my simple German with him and he was
unreasonably impressed. But after a few
sentences, to our relief he switched to English. He drove us to his home where his wife Mitzi
greeted us politely and showed us to our upstairs bedroom.
After we'd settled in, we came downstairs.
Franz said he wanted to take us out for coffee. He drove us to a fancy elevated revolving
restaurant, with a magnificent view of the Danube and surrounding city and
countryside. I felt like I was in a
James Bond movie, it was such an exotic and posh place. We'd been traveling on
the cheap, so this was a brilliant experience.
When the coffee and pastries were delivered, suddenly Franz's tone
changed. Instead of polite questions
about my family, he began to tell us of his actions as an officer in the SS
(initially Hitler's security force, but later, much much worse). My husband and I were stunned. One thing Franz said in that beautiful
restaurant has stuck in my mind all these 30 years. He looked me in the eyes and said, "I didn't
like machine-gunning the Russians, because they were white like you and me".
These memories are very painful, but important, so I must relate a few
more.
When we got back to Franz's house, Grady and I went upstairs where we could
talk. The first question was, could we,
should we, stay under the same roof as this man? How I wished I could ask my father about what
Franz told me, that after the war Franz was starving in a prison camp, and when
he wrote letters to family begging for food, my parents sent him care
packages.
My dad was in the navy in WWII. Some of
his comrades died in combat. He was a
very patriotic man, and not racially prejudiced. Why would he give aid to a former SS
officer?
Now I understand, after being reminded from the tapes how financially stressed
my grandparents had always been, that likely Franz wrote to my Grandpa John,
and John must have asked my mom and dad to send Franz help. Given the generous
benefits paid to veterans after WWII, my parents would have had enough money to
do so.
I suggested and Grady reluctantly agreed to stay at Franz and Mitzi's house,
given we had already accepted their hospitality. Mitzi made dinner, and I tried to help. She was very nice, but didn't talk much. I would have been hard to communicate with in
German, given my limited vocabulary.
As we sat at the dining room table, I saw that seven books were on the
sideboard behind Franz. After the war he
fled to Argentina, but when he returned to Germany no one wanted to hire him,
so he had become an independent insurance salesman to make a living. He had become fluent in seven languages, to
find more clients. The seven books were
dictionaries. He would occasionally pick
up the English one when he was not sure of a word when we spoke. My point is, Franz did not become an SS
officer because he was stupid. It was something else.
The next day Franz drove us to where my ancestors had lived. First Ilmitz, where my grandfather was born,
and the family winery was still operating along with a guesthouse. My grandfather's eldest sibling had been
given the winery, so all the younger kids had to figure out a way to make a
living, or in the case of my grandfather and great-uncle, leave the country to
find work. Next Franz drove south along
the shore of Lake Neusiedl to Holling, Hungary. At the border Franz mistakenly began speaking
Hungarian to the Austrian border guard, and laughed. We were let through without incident and had
lunch in Holling, where the family had moved after Ilmitz. Franz took us to a cemetery where our
great-grandfather was buried, with a cross at the top of the hill.
Then Franz took us to Sopron, the capital city of the region. As we walked the cobblestone streets, he
would strike up conversations with passersby, strangers, rather than talk with
us. I'm sure he was picking up on our
awkwardness with the situation. At the
town square, he told us that it was a speaker on that stage that recruited him. Franz pointed to some small still-empty
shops, saying, "The Jews would not trade with us, and they would not go back to
Israel, so we had to do something."
I asked, "Couldn't you just ask them why they were so successful, and learn
from them"? He snorted.
I hadn't thought about this episode for a long time. But besides listening to my aunt's tapes
recently, something else happened. A
near relative had a DNA test done. It
found many things (remember Mongol mongrel) but also a surprise - part
Ashkenazi Jew. I had no idea where that
came from.
Then I got an email from FamilySearch, the site the Mormons put up to help
search old records and identify relatives.
I'm not Mormon but they let anyone use it, and I'm too frugal to use
Ancestry.com. I had previously used the
site to search for more relatives on my orphan dad's side, to little avail,
although late in his life he had visited a few cousins in his father's home
town in Germany. The email alerted me to
a Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database at the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum. I searched for my dad's
father's last name, Heinemann. It found
1,132 matches. And then his mother's
maiden name, Schacht. It found 133 matches.
Today, here in the U.S., we do not yet have an SS.
But we do have a new paramilitary organization.
They were not recruited in the town square in Sopron.
Instead they were recruited using ad campaigns advertising bonuses including
$50,000 for signing up, which would be very persuasive for people who struggle
to make a living and want to blame it on someone other than themselves, like
Franz did. The ads use Neo-Nazi, White
Nationalist and KKK slogans.
At the time I spoke with Franz, I knew the SS were the worst of the Nazis, but
I have since learned more about the SS, and about ICE (Immigration and Customs
Enforcement).
The SS was composed of those with an absolute loyalty to Hitler's leadership of
the Nazi movement. As SS chief, Heinrich
Himmler received authority directly from Hitler to carry out ideological
policies that the laws of the state might not permit. This enabled
authorization of indefinite incarceration in the concentration camp system and
mass murder.
In January 2026, vice president J.D. Vance, after an ICE agent shot and killed
a fleeing civilian, said ICE agents have "absolute immunity" from
prosecution,. A leaked internal ICE memo
dated May 12, 2025
authorized ICE agents to illegally enter homes without a judicial warrant in
violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Just like the SS did, ICE agents are illegally breaking down doors. They are detaining people based on their skin
color. They are not providing due
process. We are spending at least $45
billion buying warehouses to use as detention facilities, while denying medical
care and telephone calls to those already detained.
Instead of the SS and prison camps, we have ICE and prison camps.
We know these SS tactics are not necessary to expel undocumented immigrants,
because President Obama expelled over three million during his tenure, legally
and safely.
We must not continue to follow the despicable path Hitler blazed almost 100
years ago. We know that all the
atrocities committed did not help anyone, but instead caused poverty and death
for his followers and many millions more.
Surely we Americans can stop making more of the same mistakes. Can't we?
Sources:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/ice-recruiting-9.7058294
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-01-29/us-spends-hundreds-of-millions-on-warehouses-for-ice-detention-centers
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trumps-45-billion-expansion-immigrant-detention-sites-faces-pushback-c-rcna257228
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/23/opinion/sunday/immigration-reform-biden.html
https://www.ushmm.org/online/hsv/person_advance_search.php
|
 |
|
