A Mind in Prison: The Memoir of a Son and Soldier of the Third Reich by Bruno Manz

Author:Bruno Manz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-09-30T04:32:00+00:00

C H A P T E R I I

t was Roper who brought me the first and only news I heard about Nazi atrocities. During a tense encounter, while facing the enemy, this luckless comrade confronted me with the truth, but I turned him down. The fateful meeting occurred in the spring of 1944. The tundra was still covered with a thick blanket of snow when I visited the stronghold of one of our platoons. Corporal Roper, who was stationed there, had sent me a message that he was "fascinated" by my political ideas and wanted to tell me his own. Since he did not wish to speak in the presence of the other men, he asked me to join him while standing watch. That was quite unusual because talking on watch was generally not allowed. However, his solemn face and secretive manner persuaded me to follow him to the rampart.

Since we had the same rank, we were on a first-name basis, but today I recall only his last name, not his first. With the benefit of hindsight I am inclined to believe that this gap in my memory has some deep-seated, psychological reason. At any rate, the fact is that I remember only his family name, Roper, which lives in my memory as a painful reminder of that somber morning in 1944 when I failed to respond to a call of destiny. I believe that everybody, once or twice in his life, is called upon to stand up for truth and decency. Of course, had I done so, I would not be alive today, for it is a distinctly German tragedy that it does not always speak well of a man's past if he has survived his nation's darkest hour.

Roper and a few other men had joined our company a few weeks earlier as reinforcements. Thus, I was only superficially acquainted with him, but somehow I had learned that he was half-Jewish. That was unusual in the German army. Even more extraordinary was the fact that his brother was serving in the SA Standarte Feldherren Halle, an elite division of the SA, equivalent to the Waffen SS. Such things happened only toward the end of the war, when Hitler needed ever more lives to be sacrificed on the battlefield. There is also the possibility that Roper was not half but "only" one quarter Jewish. Anyway, as I learned later, his father was a renowned neurosurgeon in Hamburg, and his mother was the Jewish part of the family.

It was a cold morning. The Russians were only a few hundred meters away. Roper, who had come directly from Germany, wanted to tell me a few things he had learned there. We were standing behind a rampart of beams and rocks. In the east a pale stripe of daylight was rising in the gloomy sky. I was nervous because, only a few days before, the Russians had tried to overrun one of our strongholds. I also suffered from the old weakness of seeing movement where there was none.

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