Can I tell you a story?

[NBachers]

6. A few years ago, I met a man at work who said he'd been in Hitler Youth. He wasn't old enough yet to serve when the war

ended. He told me about how, in his town, when they heard Hitler had died and Germany had fallen, everyone took their uniforms and Nazi paraphernalia and threw them in the river. He said the river was clogged with all the Nazi cast-off items. I took it to mean that they were afraid they'd be judged guilty when the foreign troops arrived, and wanted to get rid of the proof.

In Miami, in the early '70s I worked on a crew headed by a man named Helmut. He'd been a lieutenant in the German army on the Russian Front. He was taken prisoner, and had frozen so bad he lost all the hair on his body. He owned a BMW motorcycle. He often talked about the war from their perspective, and the lead-up in Germany. Like many Germans from that time, he still held on to the "good things" Hitler had done to restore Germany's faith and confidence in itself. He was an old-school carpenter who'd apprenticed himself at 15. He was probably the best boss I ever had. The entire crew loved him for his staunch advocacy for his workers. He always made sure to have a large population of Black workers on his crews. He said the Black mess staff at the prison camp was the only reason he survived his Russian wartime prison ordeal.