Same as my cousin and he was a star tennis player before the war. He needed custom made shoes for the rest of his life. His daughter married a guy from Germany and he and his SIL’s dad spent time trying to figure out if they shot at each other.
Mel Brooks was in Bastogne during that time.
Interesting... As you surely know, the Bulge was a very ‘dirty’ battle by Western front standards with prisoner executions, etc. Wonder if there was any animosity between your cousin and the German you reference? Surely with their kids being married, that was in the past?
Both of my grandfathers were ww2 combat vets... one in the European theatre the other in the Pacific. The ET vet hated Germans until the day he died. I made the mistake of taking the PT grandpa vet to a Japanese steakhouse where he refused to eat and didn’t say a word the entire dinner. I apologized to him later... he was a very kind man and told me “don’t worry about it, old feelings sometimes never go away”. We lost him in 2018 at 97 years old... the greatest man I have ever known (and that’s saying something) I miss him every day.