Family war stories

     I had a chance to speak with my father about Opa—his father, my grandfather—and Opa's association with Hanns Klemm, an important aircraft innovator and entrepreneur who, in 1943, was arrested by the Gestapo for the crime of resigning from the Nazi Party. (In May of '43, he wrote them, "I consider my membership of the NSDAP to be no longer compatible with my belonging to the Christian community." Six years earlier, owing to his constant objections to party meddling in his business—including removal of valued Jewish employees—the Nazis had declared him to be "unreliable.")
     As I’ve explained previously, Opa, who had been a communist, was a noisy denouncer of Hitler and the Nazis and, in 1943, was rushed, by friends, into the Wehrmacht (army) to keep him out of the reach of the Gestapo. Today, I asked my dad if there was any connection between Klemm’s famous "death sentence" resignation and Opa’s sudden military recruitment at the age of 36.
     He wasn’t sure. Indeed, he had never thought about the matter before. In 1943, he was eleven years old and so he does not have a clear memory of chronology or even an understanding of major events at the time. Most families, of course, need only refer to other family members for clarifying information, but our family lacks that resource. My grandparents are now long dead, my dad’s sister died a year ago, and no other knowledgeable family member lives in this country. There are some relatives in Germany, even some who are elderly, but only my dad knows them, and he is disinclined to pepper them with such questions. I’m trying to arrange an email, in German, to family there in hopes of getting more information.
     “Now that you raise the question,” says dad, “it does seem very likely that the two events were connected.” He was pleased that I was pursuing the matter, and he was very happy to receive the results of my initial research into the career and fate of the legendary (for him) Hanns Klemm. He had thought that the memory of Klemm, an important figure in his hometown up through the war, had fallen into obscurity, as so much has done.

     But such is not the case. As it turns out, Klemm is remembered and honored, both for his contributions to aviation and related technologies and, to a far lesser extent, his stunning resignation letter, which he would have known would have lethal consequences. (As it turns out, the allies invaded Germany just in time to save Klemm, who was in prison.)
     My father reminded me that, in about 1932, Klemm had asked Opa to manage a new factory, but Opa turned down the job, which infuriated my grandmother.
     "Really? Opa would have been twenty-five years old at the time. Klemm [who would have been 47] asked such a young man to run a factory?"
     "Well, yes he did."
     Dad explains that Opa was a supreme technician and a master of the kind of work he did, which generally involved the making of models as part of the design and fabrication process. His official title was "model maker."
     But Opa didn't want the responsibility of running a factory. "He was strictly a Number 2 man," says my father. "He didn't want to run the show."
     My father grew up in the shadow of this peculiar act of unambitousness, the resulting bitterness of which permeated Opa's marriage and indeed his family. I knew Oma, and I can well imagine the ferocious hectoring she would have unleashed on her husband. I knew Opa, too. He was remarkably stubborn. There is no stubbornness like German stubbornness, which is far deeper and more inveterate than any species known anywhere in the New World.
     Despite Opa’s decision to remain a mere R&D man at Klemm, he and his boss evidently remained friends and maintainted a close working relationship. My father recalls serving as a messenger boy for his father in his town of Böblingen (and its sister town Sindelfingen), and he is sure that he often encountered Klemm; this experience left him with the impression that Opa and Klemm were friends and routinely worked together.
     According to dad, Opa used to tell the story of how the Gestapo would come to Klemm’s place of business, demanding the aircraft maker's attention. Opa would go to the door, open the little view window, and shout “state secrets!” He’d then slam it shut and return to the business at hand. Evidently, Klemm was always pleased by such antics. “So, what did you tell them this time, Otto?”
     (During the war years, it was understood that the open expression of “state secrets” was punishable by death, and so there were many jokes and stories focusing on that phrase.)
     The information I have about my family's war and pre-war history (both sides) is largely provided by two people who were just kids when the war ended—my parents. Naturally, their accounts of events do not always square perfectly with the facts available in history books. But, in my experience, their stories always ultimately check out as essentially accurate. Talking with my parents is indeed a hellish or absurd thing, a cross between dinner with the Costanzas and conversation with Gracie Allen. They’re pretty zany.
     But they’re no liars.

     I recalled that my mother’s father (who was actually her stepfather and uncle) was often described as a “Marxist.” So I asked my mother about that today. Despite the “Gracie Allen” factor, I did learn a few things. He was a well-educated man from Berlin, and, along with most of his college friends, he was a Marxist. He often talked politics, and his politics were decidedly left-wing.
     So did this cause problems for him during the Nazi years?
     He died of tuberculosis in about 1941. He was indeed outspoken in his hatred for Hitler and the party until the end. But he was liked and respected in the little town of Bärwalde. Friends and other town leaders did routinely implore him to keep his views to himself, for they feared that Nazi authorities would not tolerate his defiance forever. But he ignored such entreaties. In the last few years of his life, he was clearly ill and then dying, and so, evidently, the authorities left him alone.
     “Were these friends and others Marxists?”
     “Oh no, not all of them” says mom. “Some of them were even Nazis!”
     I should mention that not all Nazi-era family members shared my two grandfathers’ hatred for the Nazis. My mother tells stories of her older sister’s haughtiness and contempt for the Polish prisoners, who  performed various jobs in towns and in businesses, including in the family lumber business. (The engineer of the train my mother ultimately took to flee the Russian invasion was a Polish prisoner.) On one occasion, Ilsa was in town and demanded of a Polish man that he step aside to make way for her on the sidewalk. That got back to her mother (by then widowed), and, well, there was hell to pay.
     “Our family does not do such things," she declared. Nazi notions of superiority and inferiority were strictly verboten among the Schultzes.
     Neither of my parents strike me as rebellious in any way. They voted for Bush.
     Maybe it skips a generation.