Sent to me today: Interesting ......
After I recovered somewhat from reading the hatred of the German people
expressed in your father's memoir, I went back and read your post from
Day 1.
You said that your father had a tattoo on his arm from his time in
Buchenwald. Did you actually SEE this tattoo, or did your father just
tell you that he had a tattoo put on his arm at Buchenwald?
As far as I know, prisoners were tattooed ONLY at the Auschwitz camp.
Did he get this tattoo at Auschwitz? You implied in your blog post that
he was tattooed at Buchenwald, which I don't believe.
My brother and I were trusting our memories as to the number we had remembered from our Dad's arm as children - when I started blogging I assumed that he had been tattooed in Buchenwald as he was liberated from that camp. In fact, before blogging and reading my Dad's memoir, I had only a vague idea of what had happened to him during the second World War..
Later, after blogging for a while, someone put me in touch with a place where I could obtain his records and had suggested to me that he thought that the number we were remembering sounded like an Auschwitz number. Through this kind man's efforts, I was able to establish that the number on my Dad's arm was indeed, from Auschwitz. Since blogging, I have been able to obtain more information about my Dad, as many, many kind people have come forward to help us fill in the pieces and to help us learn more about my Dad's life!
You mentioned that he was a Nacht und Nebel prisoner. Nacht und Nebel
was an expression originated by Goethe. The English translation from
the German original words is Night and Fog. You can check with
Wikipedia on the meaning of Nacht und Nebel, as related to the prisoners.
This quote is from Wikipedia:
Begin quote:
The decree was meant to intimidate local populations into submission by
denying friends and families of the missing any knowledge of their
whereabouts or their fate. The prisoners were secretly transported to
Germany, vanishing without a trace. In 1945, the seized
Sicherheitsdienst (SD) records were found to include merely names and
the initials NN (Nacht und Nebel); even the sites of graves were
unchronicled. To this day, it is not known how many thousands of people
disappeared as a result of this order. [1]
The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg held that the
disappearances committed as part of the Nacht und Nebel program were war
crimes which violated both the Hague Conventions and customary
international law.[2]
End quote
The Nacht und Nebel decree was used in an effort to prevent "political
prisoners" from fighting illegally. The idea was to make their families
believe that they had been killed, so that no other civilians would
become Resistance fighters. The idea was NOT to kill the illegal
combatants, only to make their families believe that they had been killed.
You wrote that the Germans SUSPECTED that your father was in the
Resistance, implying that he was not.
You wrote that your father's tattoo was etched in your mind as a symbol
of your father's INTEGRITY. A person who was an illegal combatant in a
war did not have INTEGRITY.
I think you should keep in mind that Germany surrendered in May 1945,
and *the country of Germany is still occupied after 65 years.*
I lived in German for two years after the war, and I saw first hand how
the Germans were treated. They were insulted and humiliated on a daily
basis by the American soldiers, whom they had to serve because there
were no other jobs for them. There were very few men in Germany after
the war because they had been kept in Eisenhower's death camps until
they died. There were 1.7 million German soldiers who never came home.
When I lived in Germany in 1957, the streets were full of German people
after midnight because all the Americans soldiers were in their
barracks. The Germans were dancing and singing in the streets because
the American occupiers were in bed and they could have a few hours of
freedom.
The German girls were all sleeping with American soldiers so that they
could get food for their families. The soldiers treated these girls
shamefully with a complete lack of respect.
Some of the German people were living in small garden houses after the
war because Germany was so completely bombed that there were not enough
homes left. These little houses were the size of a one-car garage. The
Germans, who had a house, were renting out rooms so they could make a
little money. There were many homeless people in Germany, who were
begging on the streets, 12 years after the end of the war, because there
were no jobs and not many houses left. These people were the
"expellees" who were ethnic Germans that were chased out of other
countries and forced to go to Germany.
Although the German people suffered greatly after the war, they honored
the terms of their surrender and did not become illegal Resistance
fighters as your father did. Today, the German people still have no
freedom; Germany is still an occupied country.
How would your father have fared if he had lived in an occupied country
for 65 years, instead of a few months?
Even after the shameful way that the German people were treated after
the war, they managed to bounce back and Germany is now the strongest
country in Europe economically. They have completely restored the
historic German towns that were bombed by the Allies just for the hell
of it.
Of all the counties in Europe that I have visited, the German people are
the nicest and the most polite.
