In 1972, all of the black hats at the jump portion of jump school who met the bus on the first day, were Germans with heavy accents, it was an interesting thing to hear the accented yelling, when one was kind of caught up in the historical feeling of joining the Airborne of WWII fame, a little jarring.
Worked for a man here in NJ 30 years ago who owned a pvc pipe producing plant, damn if I can’t remember his name. He was German, a little rolly-polly guy, always smiling, he was a good boss. He served in the Luftwaffe as a machine gunner/wireless operator in a Heinkel 111 twin-engine bomber.In August of 1940 his plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire over southern England. It crashed landed in a field and he was captured. It was his first mission. Later he was sent to a POW camp in Scotland and when America entered the war, he was transffered to a camp in Arizona. He ended up staying here. “I was one of the lucky ones’’ he always used to say. He sure seemed to love America. Years after I left the company a friend I worked with told me before the war his father had been a trade unionist and was sent to a concentration camp in 1939 and was never heard from again. His mother and his only sister were killed in an air raid. “No wonder he stayed’’ my friend said. “He had nothing to go back to.’’’ Apparently he came from somewhere in eastern Germany. No point in going back to no family and Soviet occupation.