大象传媒

My name is Christoph Bull. I am half German and half Kentish.
I am interested in the Second World War because my parents met and married in war torn Germany and my German family were one of millions ethnically cleansed by the Soviet and Polish authorities after 1945.
It is terrible how innocent people are caught up in a whirl wind not of their making - my German family were either anti Nazi or indifferent to politics. The exception was my uncle Ernst Schultz - who joined the Nazis for a variety of reasons - as a rebellion against his father (who hated the Nazis & the scum which rose up to govern Germany in 1933), but mainly because he was desperate for work after the years of unemployment. I asked him, when I was about 12, why did you join - he said "You know they were called the National Socialists - well I joined the "Socialist" bit and had no wish to be involved with the rest."
My mother loved her homeland with a passion which I have inherited - not in a blinkered or arrogant way, but just a real love for the times and roots she had with Pommerania and her home town. We all as a family, travelling from Kent, felt at home in any German speaking part of Europe during our family holidays in the late 1950s and through the 1960s up to the present day.
My mother certainly understood racism - seeing it in Nazi Germany which greatly upset and frightened her. She also knew in in England after the war when she was ignored, shut out of houses and had her children bullied at school. When our area began having large numbers of Indians my mother and I were so encouraged that at last their were other foreigners, and with India's similar expereinces to Germany of having ethnic cleansing perpetrated on them after the partition, we felt a great affinity with our Punjabi friends - which I still feel to this day.