Can you describe your feelings or the feelings of
your family on the first day that Hitler became chancellor?
It's
very difficult to say because we were different. We were not Germans.
We were Belgians in Germany; we were already foreigners, and my mother
spoke very bad French—very bad German, I mean, she spoke, we
mostly spoke French at home. My mother had red fingernails; the Germans
had never seen such a thing. I remember that in the streetcar my mother
was always very elegant and perfumed and people would get up and say, "It
smells here," but that was anti-foreign. They were very resistant
to French elegance, and so actually I said goodbye with great pleasure
when we left Germany. I really didn't enjoy it too much and I didn't
like it and I remember until today that I never liked it very much.
We were Belgians and enjoyed a certain kind of home life that we had,
and the Germans didn't have it. The country was a cold country, and
Belgium is a very warm country; people are very friendly. Germans aren't
friendly by nature, and so—I can not say that all Germans were
bad or—I made some German friends. I have one friend that I brought
to America after the war; I went to look for him and brought him to
America and he built the Verrazano Bridge in New York. He was an engineer.
Did you relationships change with the friends you
had made before Hitler came to power and after?
I
wasn't there afterward.
I guess that's true.
But this friend for instance was of a French mother and a German father and
he, after, he was no Nazi that I knew, and he asked me, he said, "after
all, you came to help me. I'm German, why would you do that?" I said, "I
only knew one good German and that was you. By taking you out, there were no
good Germans left as far as I'm concerned." I brought him to America and
he lived again in the same house with me, and my children knew him and my wife
and...
This was a friend from school?
Yes.
Until today, he lives now in Zurich and we write to each other and
he sends me presents on my birthday and I became a U.S. citizen. He
has a bank account in my bank. I really helped him a lot, and yet he
was a German, but I felt that I wanted to purposely do that in order
to show the Germans that we don't have that kind of nature that we
would be as nasty as they were. But he was not guilty in any way so
there was no reason why I shouldn't have done it, but that is actually
to illustrate not everybody feels that way about the Germans. I don't
like them, we don't go there for our vacations, but there was a moment
right after the war that they started to travel and I would meet them
in Italy and I was very tough. I closed the elevator door right in
front of their noses in the hotel purposely. I made loud remarks against
Germans that they should know that they're not liked. I did the best
I could after the war to take my revenge in those ways, but I remember
that they were, from the boat that we left in Capri, a German woman
was throwing flowers and I said, "Imagine, now you're throwing
flowers, they used to throw bombs here!" She almost fainted from
what I—I had funny stories like that.
You
want to hear a funny story? Himmler was the worst of all the German
anti-Semites. He had a cousin by the name of Edith von
Kohler. She was a journalist, and she went to Bucharest as a
representative of Ribbentrop and lived in a hotel Athenee Palace and
my uncle said to me, "You know, Mrs. Von Kohler is here. Let's
ask her if it's all right for you to go over, when you want to go to
America whether you should travel through Germany. I went with my uncle
to see her in the hotel and she said, "By all means you should
not travel through Germany. Who knows what they can do. Don't travel
through Germany."
She was aware that you were Jewish or no?
I
presume that she assumed that my uncle was Jewish, and she knew him.
Now, I came here and got older, went into the army, and as you know
I was interrogator. One nice day Mrs. Von Kohler was brought in as
a prisoner. I knew all her story; a book had been written about the
intrigues that she made. She tried to introduce Romanian officials
to German officials and make friendships and she had an affair with
the king and all kinds of little things. She was called back into Germany
because she embarrassed the Germans with her behavior. Now, I knew
all that and I knew that she had been the mistress of a man who had
a mustache and he was a client of ours. I had to go and cash in money
for a pair of earrings that he bought from us, and he paid at three
o'clock in the morning in his stable. My uncle said, "Well, you're
young, you can go and cash in at this time," So I got up in the
middle of the night and I went there. The man had a nervous tic; he
always pulled on his mustache. When she was brought in as a prisoner
and she was assigned to me, but she didn't recognize me, and since
my name was not the same anymore, there was no way that she could know
that it was me. I interrogated her about her relations with the, personal
relations with Himmler and Hitler and she told us a lot of small details
about their Christmases together and things like that.
At
one moment I looked through her diary, and I said, "From three
to five there is always an M, what is this?" She says, "Oh
that's a friend of mine." Now I knew that stood for Malaxa,
that was the man that she had an affair with. I said, "Is he maybe?" and
I went like this, and the poor woman fainted. But she was only a prisoner
of war for a few days because there was really nothing she had done
that we could hold against her and I let her go. These are the funniest
stories. This woman couldn't imagine how an American knows her whole
life history.
She told you about Christmas with Hitler?
They
celebrated with Hitler and Himmler and Christmas with a tree.
Can you tell us what she told you?
They had a Christmas tree, and gifts around it. They all would imitate how
Hitler ate, Goering too, when we had him as a prisoner, he claimed that Hitler
was a "carpet eater." He had a disease, a type of epilepsy where when they would
get in a crisis, they would bite into the carpet. That's a symptom of the disease.
She told that he ate with his hands, she imitated him. Goering showed us like
he thought the whole thing was a big joke. Goering started to tell us about
Hitler, mocking him and making fun of him. They were human beings like we were.
I will show you the bad taste of his apartment; I took a whole series
of pictures that were printed postcards that they had, and they are in this
album that I have of Hitler's ugly interiors.
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