大象传媒

This is a true story.

My grandfather was the commander of a battery of eight-inch guns. When the Germans surrendered in 1945, his battery was assigned a patrol area ten miles by ten miles across. He was to supervise the disarming of military forces and to search for fugitives and hidden weapons.

One day, he knocked on the door of a farmhouse. The woman who answered the door was small and thin. Upon seeing several American soldiers on her doorstep, she let out a scream. She got down on her knees and began to sob.

My grandfather and his men took her into her house and calmed her down. After several minutes, she was able to speak. And out of her mouth came perfect English, with an American accent. She had met and fallen in love with a German scientist before the war.

She furiously denied supporting Hitler. She reassured my grandfather time and time again that she and her husband hated the Nazis and that they had been forced to stay when the war broke out. She told them again and again how relieved she was that the war was over and that Americans were in her kitchen.

My grandfather, 22 at the time, felt that someone was amiss. He ordered his men to search the house and the surrounding area. After an exhaustive search, one which was helped in every way by the woman, they had found nothing. My grandfather, having one last look around the house came upon a door on the top floor. The woman said it led to the attic but there was nothing up there. My grandfather did not believe her. She would not open it, so his men knocked it down.

The way he tells the story is that as he walked up the stairs to the attic, everything in his sight became red. Enormous red flags with swastikas in the middle. Guns, ammunition, pamphlets extoling the Nazi party.

Eventually, the Army found out that this woman had voluntarily moved to Germany in the 1930s because she believed that Hitler was going to bring the new world order. Her husband was a leading German scientist, specializing in physics and rocket propulsion.

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