Movies VALKYRIE and SOPHIE SCHOLL Both Show a Few Good People Trying to Stop the Nazi Regime

In the spring of 1971 as a new Mrs. Lieutenant I finally managed to cut through the U.S. Civil Service red tape in Munich, Germany, and obtain a job as a GS-2 at the Army Air Force Motion Picture Service. My job was to type the list of movies passing from one small group of American soldiers on a mountain top to another small group of American soldiers on a different mountain top in Italy.

There were two other young army wives in that typing pool along with a middle-aged German who, as I recall, held her long-time position under the Status of Forces agreement which gave the German WWII losers the right to several jobs on each U.S. Army kaserne (post).

Fraulein Winkler explained that she had not joined the Hitler Youth only because she had somehow fallen between the cracks. But on the night of Kristallnacht -– the Nov. 9, 1938, night of the supposedly “spontaneous” action by the Nazis against Jewish businesses and synagogues – she had been sent home early from night school in Munich so as to be home safely before the “spontaneous” action began.

Fraulein Winkler also spoke about not having very good soap during the war; a statement that I chose to ignore rather than spit angry words at her in the close confines of the typing pool. And she also described that her mother had insisted on traveling during the war and had been killed by an American bomb dropped on a train station, apparently forgetting why the Americans were dropping bombs on German-held territory.

But the memory of Fraulein Winkler that has always been the strongest is when I asked her why Germany went off to war only 20 years after the end of WWI. Her reply: “Hitler said we needed more land.” I resisted demanding from her where the German people thought that land was coming from.

A few months later my security clearance came through and I moved over to the 66th Military Intelligence Group, which was housed in the former headquarters of the Luftwafte, the Nazi air force.

Thus it was with a very personal interest that I saw the movie VALKYRIE starring Tom Cruise (with an eye patch) as the German army officer instrumental in the July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler. I could vividly imagine the scenes in Munich and Berlin, and I could understand the few high-level Germans who wished to stop Hitler from ruining Germany.

When I told someone I had seen the movie, she said she had heard it was an apologia for the Nazis. Not at all. These were only a very few men against an overwhelming nation that still supported the man who said Germany needed more land.

And it was also eerie to have recently watched on Netflix the 2005 movie SOPHIE SCHOLL: THE FINAL DAYS about German university students in Munich who tried to organize a protest against the Nazis after the defeat at Stalingrad.

Both movies have the same ending –- the good guys die. And both movies serve as a warning of what happens when totalitarian regimes take over and force their ways on an entire people.

ARMY WIVES Episode 6 of Season 2: Derogatory Reference to Gypsies

In episode 6 of Season 2 of Lifetime Television’s ARMY WIVES there was something that bothered me very much: Betty, the owner of the Hump Bar, uses the word “gypped” to mean “cheated.”

It amazes me that the writing staff of ARMY WIVES did not realize that this is a derogatory word based on the word Gypsy. The use of this word as a verb is very offensive to Gypsies.

Many people may never have seen real Gypsies. When my husband and I were stationed in Munich, Germany (from September 1970 to May 1972), the tram line ended at our stop. Sometimes Gypsy wagons would camp there overnight.

Yet my image of Gypsies – that is as clear today as it was the moment I saw it – comes from a visit to Dachau, a concentration camp near Munich. Dachau was established in March 1933 as a political prison camp only two months after Hitler became chancellor of Germany. And although many people died in Dachau, it was not a killing camp like Auschwitz and other concentration camps.

But in Dachau there were ovens that burned the bodies of the dead prisoners. Standing in the main camp, I chanced to look towards the gate separating the ovens from the main camp.

Silhouetted against the sky were three Gypsies, a woman and two men. For only a second I was startled – focused as I was on thinking about the six million Jews killed by the Nazis. Then I remembered that Gypsies had been another group designated for extinction by the Third Reich.

Those three Gypsies were doing exactly what my husband and I were doing – visiting Dachau in memory of our people’s murdered victims.

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Yom HaShoah -- Holocaust Remembrance Day -- Part II

The Nazis’ brutal murder of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others didn’t end with the millions of people considered untermenschen. The Nazis also killed many “normal” people.

When my husband and I were stationed with the U.S. Army in Munich, Germany, from September 1970 to May 1972, we got two newspapers: the army newspaper The Stars and Stripes and the International Herald Tribune.

Below is an article from the October 18, 1971, International Herald Tribune with the headline “Nazis of Oradour Massacre Hail War in Beery Reunion.”

ROSENHEIM, West Germany, Oct. 17 (Reuter) – Some 500 members of the Nazi “Das Reich” SS division, which massacred over 600 men, women and children in a French village in 1944, today wound up a weekend conference to form an old comrades’ association with beer and wartime songs.

The massacre was in revenge for the death of an SS officer.

Middle-aged and many a little paunchy, they cheered as the chairman of the newly formed association, Lt. Col. Gunther Wisliceny, pledged them to “preserve the comradeship of the last war, sealed in blood.”

Col. Wisliceny, of Hannover, one of the most decorated officers in the Nazi forces, was chosen chairman of the association at the foundation meeting yesterday. He was the last commander of a Panzer regiment within the division.

One of the organizers of the meeting, Hermann Buch, is a brother-in-law of Hitler’s deputy Martin Bormann and a former staff officer of SS leader Heinrich Himmler.

Units of Das Reich division fought all through the Russian campaign and the retreat through Hungary and also in France in the closing stages of the war.

On June 10, 1944, a detachment entered the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, where an SS captain had been shot, and wiped out the population. The 190 men were herded into barns, which were set ablaze, while the 245 women and 207 children were mowed down by machines guns. Only 10 people survived. After the war, 20 men were convicted of responsibility for the massacre. Only two were executed.

Other detachments of Das Reich division were accused of hanging partisans in the French village of Tulle and of various killings in the Soviet Union.

Press officer Martin Schwaebe, who served as divisional historian during the war, said the new association has no political aims. It is a social and welfare organization formed to maintain the division’s traditions “in the same way as members of British, French and American regiments had stayed together since the war.”

The Bavarian Social Democratic party in a public protest commented, “The comradeship of Das Reich division was not sealed with blood, but smeared with the blood of innocent citizens like those in Oradour.”

During yesterday’s meeting about 1,000 West German trade-unionists marched around the hall carrying banners with slogans proclaiming “No More Nazis” and “Once was enough.”

In response to my reproducing this article, many people might say that this cheery reunion of brutal murderers took place in 1971 and would not, of course, take place today. And, yes, perhaps it would not take place so openly now. But we are much mistaken if we think such “reunions” of infamous mass murderers no longer take place.

One can only hope that those dedicated Nazi hunters – such as 86-year-old Tuviah Friedman in Israel – continue their quests to bring to justice the still-living notorious Nazis from World War II. And one can also hope that this long arm of the law will serve as a warning to all current and future mass murderers.

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