Kurt Klein

KURT KLEIN

WALLDORF, GERMANY

5th Infantry Division

Kurt Klein immigrated without his parents to the United States in 1937 to join his sister in who had fled Germany one year earlier. His brother arrived in 1938. Klein was inducted into the U.S, Army in 1942 and eventually became an intelligence officer in the 5th Infantry Division. He is pictured above in France, 1944.

I was born in 1920 in the town of Walldorf, which is a small town outside of Heidelberg. I grew up, of course, during the turbulent time between the two great world wars. I saw what the weak economy lead to in Germany and how, step by step, the Nazis gained more power until it culminated in 1933 with Hitler becoming chancellor of Germany.

World War I was always present in my life. I read a great deal, not only in books, but in current magazines. Sometimes my father would tell me some stories about it, and there were pictures around the house as well. He did not particularly delude himself about the aims of that war, but he played his part. I must admit that to me, it seemed like ancient times, but while I was growing up it was ever-present and collective feelings of frustration remained, which Hitler very cleverly used to manipulate the German psyche.

I always sensed that there would be another war even then, because there were so many people who were frustrated by the outcome of World War I and wanted to remake history. During the postwar depression, my father was hard hit economically. He had a hops and tobacco brokerage business and it was very difficult to keep it going during the inflationary period, which added to the lot of his problems. Many businesses suffered because whatever they sold at a certain price that day had no meaning by the time the customer would pay them. It was a constant struggle during that period to keep businesses afloat.

THE JEWS IN GERMANY were more patriotic than possibly in any other country. They felt themselves totally a part of that society. Some would try to be more German than some Germans. I myself grew up before Hitler thinking that things would remain exactly the same as always, and I simply grew up German. I never knew that anybody would make the distinction between being Jewish and German.

Also, unlike in America, the Jews lived anywhere in any given city, not just one area. Even today in the United States, you find certain sections of any city that are predominately Jewish. You would not have found this in Germany before the war. There was an easy interchange with the German population back then. We had many non-Jewish friends and didn’t make any distinction between each other.

By and large in our town, we felt it made no difference what religion we were; we simply celebrated different holidays. Sometimes we would share those holidays with our Christian friends. They would invite us around for Christmastime or Easter and we would invite them for our Hanukkah celebrations. We did not observe anything they did and vice versa, but this seemingly made very little difference and there was a free and easy interchange.

We were in each other’s homes and sat at each other’s tables, which was why it was such a blow to see that these very same people turned away from us. Some of my erstwhile friends with whom I had been very chummy were the very ones who, when I was already in the United States, invaded my parents’ home on Kristallnacht and smashed all of their furniture. One of my very best friends was the ringleader.

I know of one friend who fought the propaganda that the Nazis was spreading. After Kristallnacht and at great risk to himself, he spoke to my parents on the street after I had already left the country. Another time he came on the train to their house, which was extremely risky in those days, especially in a small town where everybody knew everybody else, and expressed his indignation at what was going on.

WHEN HITLER CAME INTO POWER, the Jews noticed the change immediately. When I came home from school one day, I found Stormtroopers guarding the door to our home and didn’t know what to expect, but they let me pass because they obviously knew me. Early on, there was a boycott of Jewish homes and stores. The Nazis wanted to point out to the German population that they ought not to conduct business with Jews or be friendly with them in any way. And it had side effects.

It became very obvious, if not in 1933, then in 1935 when the Nuremburg Laws were passed. These laws disenfranchised Jews and deprived them of their official decisions in schools, hospitals, and government. They also deprived Jews of citizenship. It was quite clear that there was no future in Germany, especially for young people. That’s when we made our first moves to see if we could get out. My sister was fortunate enough to be in nurses raining at the time, which would help toward her emigration. Also, in 1936, we had relatives in Buffalo, New York, who sent the necessary affidavits that were required. So she was able to leave in 1936 and, in turn, made it possible for me to follow in 1937.

There were, of course, other people on that ship who were fleeing the Nazis. I met a young non-Jewish American man who had just finished his studies in Heidelberg and with whom I became quite friendly and engaged in a correspondence after I came to the United States. Although he liked his experience in Heidelberg, he predicted that Germany would have to pay a steep price for some of the things it was doing. He believed that the regime was far too militaristic and that the outrages against the Jews would have dire consequences.

I LANDED in New York, and members of my family who had also lived in my hometown came to the pier to get me. I spent my first night with them in Brooklyn. They had gone to the States two years beforehand because their brother had been in the States since the mid 1920s, so they had an anchor there and were able to leave fairly early.

From the day I came to the United States I had the urge to become a mainstream American and wanted to become as Americanized as I possibly could. I did everything I could to follow. I soon developed friendships with American boys and others who had come from Europe, learned English, and acclimated. I would say that I could do all the things my American friends could do. It was a process that went on a great many years and has never really stopped.

I had seen New York City in films and photos, but I could hardly believe that I was there. Of course, to a young boy, the whole experience was an adventure not only because of the perils imposed on me and my family in Germany, but also because traveling to a place like that seemed immensely exciting to me. It meant that much more to me to see New York and discover all it could offer, but I didn’t have all that much time to explore. Even a subway ride was exciting. I changed my mind in later years, as I was somewhat less enthusiastic about subway rides when I visited again. For quite a while, I persisted in seeing something I hadn’t had in my former life and I found it exciting.

Naturally I rejoiced, for I now could lead a life of freedom. Unfortunately, the fact of the matter was that we had come at the tail end of the Depression in the United States, so it was not that easy to find jobs. When we did have a job, it was a menial one that paid very little. So the first couple of years were a struggle.

I knew, of course, that I was removed from the danger, but it weighed heavily on my mind that my parents were still in Germany. We sent papers several times and each time the events overtook us—some new catastrophe or disaster developed and we had to start from scratch. The first papers we were able to send them that would help them get out, the man who vouched for them died shortly thereafter, negating the papers, so we had to start from square one.

Then we had to look around for other relatives and when we found them, my parents were deported with an hour’s notice to the south of France. Of course, that changed the situation entirely and we were up against new problems. France was still neutral, so we could have gotten them out by way of Lisbon or North Africa, but there was nothing but red tape.

Additionally, the prevailing attitude in the U.S. State Department was to let in as few Jewish immigrants as possible. At every turn, obstacles were put in the way of completing our papers, and we had to get additional papers and endless papers and had to find people who would vouch that my parents had not been active politically, which was absurd. Also, the ages of my parents (my father was sixty-two) presented another obstacle and were used as a reason to delay their getting a visa.

I had hoped that, once the war started in Europe, America would get involved because I saw it as the only way to stop that tremendous evil. All of he political developments were absolutely predictable to someone who knew the conditions in Germany and the brutality of the Nazis. So I did expect war to break out, although I didn’t know when that would be. It was a great frustration for me to stand by and see all of these developments that I knew were going to happen without being able to do anything or help my parents more. So it came as a great relief when America entered the war, for as tragic and dramatic as that was for its people, it had to be done. Instead of being a powerless bystander, I found that now I could actually play a small role in the defeat of this monster.

I could not volunteer for the army, however, because I was considered an Enemy Alien. I registered with my draft board anyway and eventually it said that I qualified for induction into the army. By November 1942 I reported to the army. The induction center for Buffalo was Fort Niagara, which was not far from Niagara Falls on Lake Ontario. I stayed there for a rather long time because no one knew what to do with me. I was called in to the intelligence officer, who tried to test my loyalty to America by saying things like he had in mind to send me as a paratrooper behind enemy lines; how did I feel about that? I said anything he saw fit for me to do I would be prepared to do it. I convinced him that I was, in fact, loyal, and from there he sent me to South Carolina to Camp Croft to start my basic training. Being in the army came as a tremendous relief to me because I appreciated that America had given me the opportunity to serve as a soldier and possibly defeat evil. It was the first time that I felt good that I could help.

I didn’t find that anyone discriminated against me or inquired too much into my background. Those who did didn’t seem to have any feelings in particular against me for having come from Germany. I never found any overt signs of anti-Semitism wherever I was in the army, then or even later. A group of German Jews that included me, and was attached to various units, received some puzzlement from some of the troops who had never seen a Jew in their lives, perhaps because they lived in remote areas. I never found any feeling of hostility, however. They did inquire, and it was quite obvious that I was from Germany. Some of the German Jews had a stronger accent and some had less of one, but either way no one I knew ever found it to be a problem. I have heard stories from other Gls that they ran into anti-Semitism, but I personally never did.

I went to basic training in Camp Croft, and I was absolutely enthusiastic. I didn’t find it a great hardship, for I expected worse after the stories I heard about basic training. Frankly, I was in good physical condition, though somewhat short at the time. For me, it was just part of the adventure and I was perfectly willing to see it through all the way.

After four weeks of basic training, I was called in by the commanding officer. He told me that since I spoke German I would be sent to the military intelligence center at Camp Ritchie, which turned out to be in Maryland, not far from where Camp David is today. This was in January 1943. Obviously, my background was considered in my being sent to Ritchie.

I was among the initial classes (the third class) they had for the courses in military intelligence, and the camp was still not perfectly in place. I remember we had to wade through mud in the winter because there were no roads yet between the barracks, but we had some extremely interesting courses. We learned everything to do with military intelligence, the makeup of battle, and everything about the German army that would be of value to us. We actually knew as much about the German army as we did about the American army at the time. The classes were between fifteen and twenty people of all ranks. A private could be sitting next to a major, because we were pulled in from all over, as we had some capabilities that were appropriate for military intelligence.

I suspect that a lot of it came through the British Army. It had a very good intelligence service. Although as an ordinary person, I wasn’t aware of what intelligence gathering had gone on, I think for a long time it had compiled a lot of material on the German army, having been engaged with that army so much earlier than America. Whatever the British could find out was passed on to us. We also learned about the British army and its ranks and customs.

It gave us a certain sense of importance and satisfaction that such privileged information was accessible to us and to learn it all. Also, the rules were a lot more relaxed than they were in basic training, even if the conditions were a bit primitive while I was there. On the other hand, we would playfully refer to it as a country club because military protocol was not strictly observed and we had certain freedoms that others in an army camp didn’t have. We had discipline, but in certain areas it was certainly more lax than others.

We went out on these maneuvers and had training both in the field and in classrooms. As a matter of fact, the program tried to make it realistic by having members of my team dress up in German uniforms with German equipment and speak in German. We taught the troops how to take apart a German machine gun and put it together again, along with what other kinds of weapons they could expect to find and how to deal with them. We learned quite a bit about German weaponry. They had some really effective guns, such as the 88s. I became quite adept at taking apart some of their weapons.

We found that their rifles seemed to be inferior to our M1 rifles, but some of their other equipment was really better than what we had at the time.

I FORMED SOME GOOD FRIENDSHIPS there that still persist today. There were also notable people at Ritchie. There were some who had worked in Hollywood, which was extremely interesting to us. For example, my brother had Klaus Mann in his class, who was the son of Thomas Mann and was a writer like his father. There was also another well-known German writer, Hans Habe, who was there when I was. He organized something that was extremely fascinating to me at the time. We had a movie theater, and one day we were called to assemble in there. We found it decked out with all the paraphernalia that the Nazis had used for one of their party congresses in Nuremburg, including huge banners with swastikas. He gave a speech just as Hitler would have delivered. Everything was simulated to the highest degree that it could be.

Aside from that, we would go on field problems where some of us would dress up as German soldiers, and we had to capture and then interrogate them to show what we had learned in the courses. They would only respond to certain questions that were pertinent and had been pre-programmed. If we hit on the right combination, they would answer, otherwise they would refuse.

That would prove we had learned our lessons in class. I had assumed a certain authority through my training and often thought it was the fulfillment of a dream to find myself in that position. Certainly it was a position in the army that I never expected to have, so I was very happy I could be in that place in that capacity.

We knew that we were preparing for invasion. Although we didn’t know when that would be, we could see all the signs indicating that we would soon be leaving. In June 1943, after finishing our courses, we went on Louisiana maneuvers where they gave us simulated ranks. I was an acting master sergeant. After Louisiana maneuvers, which ended toward the end of July, most of us got the acting ranks confirmed back at Camp Ritchie, and I would be a master sergeant for most of the war. We were initially a six-man team attached to any given unit. That was cut down to four men, and some of our officers moved on, so I was in line to get a field commission. (Due to that fast forward movement, however, it wouldn't catch up with me until April 1945.) After Ritchie we were then sent to Fort Myers, outside of the Pentagon in Washington. There we were stationed waiting to go overseas, and they thought that we were important enough to fly us to Great Britain. That was quite an exciting trip that very few Gls got to take.

On September 14, we landed in Scotland and took a train to London. That, too, seemed like a great adventure. The bombing of London had diminished since I had been over there, but I could still hear the rumble of it and the sirens, which added a certain air to it that was, to a young man, quite exciting at the time. To meet and form friendships with the population who were quite friendly toward us was also exhilarating. In that sense, it was a great adventure, aside from our military duties. I realized that it took me places that I could not have traveled to at that time and I appreciated that.

After staying in London for a couple of weeks, we went to a pool, which was located in another camp in the Cotswolds. Again, we were split into teams or stayed in the teams to which we were originally assigned. From there, they assigned us to the various units in Britain. I was assigned to the 5th Infantry, which was stationed in Northern Ireland. I joined it in October 1943 and spent the following nine months with the 5th until the invasion in Northern Ireland.

I HAD ONE ROSH HASHANAH IN OXFORD, which was in a beautiful synagogue. I also had occasion to visit some relatives who lived in England at the time. I had a first cousin who lived with her English husband outside of London. Another more distant couple, who I had known in Germany quite well and had spent an unforgettable summer with them, lived in Chilton, which was very close to the camp I first went to in England.

While we were still in England, we went to a POW camp where we practiced interrogating real German prisoners. This experience gave us a little more of an inkling of what we would be up against once we were in the field. Two or three of us went into the interrogation room at a time. We were told not to have any short arms with us, because the prisoners could overpower us and use them against us, so we went in there without any weapons. It was sort of a funny feeling to be in there without being armed, but we got used to that.

Then we started to interrogate them. Some of them had been interrogated before, so they knew what to expect and would very often digress into something else. | remember one in particular because the digression happened to be in the field of my civilian endeavor of printing; one of them gave me a whole lecture on a typesetting machine and described every part just to detract from the other question I was going to ask him. I did cut him short and finally got to the point of the matter. Furthermore, they felt fairly secure in their position as prisoners. Some of them would answer quite easily. I found this quite funny: they would cooperate with us, but then, for example, would ask if we could end the interrogation by a certain time because they wanted to see a British film playing later and they didn’t want to miss it.

During interrogations, it was quite a bit like what courtroom lawyers do: do not ask any leading questions, sort of circumscribe and get to the point in many other ways until they reveal something. This method doesn’t seem as threatening to them.

I was always mindful of the fact that | would show my emotions, but I was able to control them sufficiently to do the job that I was meant to do and didn’t let my personal feelings about them interfere with the interrogation. What I thought of those prisoners was quite another matter, especially when I encountered the SS. We knew whether the prisoner had been in the SS even if he tried to hide it, because under their arms there was the SS tattoo—that was of course the giveaway. It wasn’t known in full detail, but we knew enough to know that they were the worst of the bunch.

I was still in Northern Ireland waterproofing our jeep, which was a long, drawn-out process that took a week to accomplish. We had to put a special compound on all the wires in the jeep, because it was expected that we would not land on dry land and the jeep would have to go through water. This process is what stands out most in my mind. After that, they shipped us to a staging area near Liverpool in Salisbury, and from there we embarked on our trip to Normandy.

We had heard how tough it was in the beginning, and it was a very precarious situation, but then after a few days it stabilized. Although the units were stuck in the beach not far from where they landed, they were dug in and fighting for short stretches of land. It was from one hedgerow to another. By the time we arrived, there was still an occasional German plane, but the artillery had been knocked out well before then.

I landed late in June on Utah Beach and we relieved the 1st Infantry by taking over the positions it had held. We dug in there in foxholes and there was not much movement until the big breakthrough at St. Lo, the day when a thousand bombers came over and blazed the way for the infantry to go forward in the armor.

I was attached to the 2nd Infantry of the 5th Infantry Division. We were with the regimental headquarters. I had a carbine and a pistol, a .45. At one time, I also had a Browning semiautomatic rifle (BAR). One of the first places my unit was sent was about two hundred yards from the frontline, but we had to get out of there in a hurry when Germans spotted us and began a mortar barrage, which could be very deadly.

The most nerve-racking thing about being entrenched anywhere was the artillery barrages—the noise, the sweating out of where they would fall. You would hear the whistle and would never know exactly where they were going to hit, and when you were exposed to that at great lengths of time, it could get on your nerves. I saw a few of our guys start to crack, but never completely. Some of them certainly showed signs of that stress.

German prisoners were being taken right from the start. It was our job to find out what units they had come from because it was important to determine what units we were facing. We would ask if there were, in fact, several units that had been put together, as this would show a certain weakness on their part, whether they had taken remnants from all over and put them together; what their strength was and armor was. We tried to find out as much as we could.

In the beginning, they all in varying degrees assisted in interrogation, but we had ways of soliciting information by telling them that somebody else had told us something that we suspected, and then have them confirm it. We would also threaten that, since we knew what the facts were, they had better not lie to us. Later on, during the French campaign, we would resort to some tricks. For example, prisoners who refused to give any information at all would be segregated from the others. Then we would hang signs on them with big red letters that said, “I am being turned over to the Russians.” In other words, we played psychological warfare on them.

Above all, they dreaded falling into the hands of the Russians. As we were to find out when we joined up with the Russians, they would hold out against the Russians much longer because they definitely didn’t want to fall into their hands. The Germans knew what they had done to the people in Russia and how the Russians dealt with them, as opposed to the American troops who were much more lenient. The Americans would stick more to the rules of the Geneva Convention, with which the Russians were not too bothered.

Some prisoners would ask where we learned to speak such good German. The joke among the members of my unit was that some of them would say they had taken a blitz course from Berlitz. I once interrogated an officer who claimed that he had played tennis with me in Vienna, which of course was not so because I had never been in Vienna.

In the end, I would try to get as much information as possible without bringing a lot of personal emotions into it. | wouldn’t say that it would have been wrong to bring it in. In retrospect, it might have had a stronger effect, but that was just my mode of operation at the time.

I enjoyed seeing Germans as prisoners because now the shoe was on the other foot. To see them bedraggled and kind of desperate to get out of the war felt very good. When I lived in Germany, they had the decision of life or death over us, and we could only stand with our hands tied. Now to see them in that state felt very good.

AT ONE TIME, we moved very fast with the advance; we were attached to Patton’s Third Army, and his tanks moved quite rapidly. First, we spent some time at the French/German border, when we were bogged down and the tanks had run out of gas, which wasn’t replenished right away because there was a shortage. After that, we took the town of Verdun, which was a significant city where a World War I battle took one of the heaviest tolls of the war. From there we went to Metz, which at one time had been German, but by the time we got there it was French though German-occupied. That’s where we were bogged down because of the forts that surround the city. It was probably a tactical mistake to stay there and wait for the surrender of the forts, because we could have bypassed them, which might have required a detour, but the forts would have been ineffective. Somehow, though, it was decided that those forts had to be taken, and we spent an undue length of time in Metz because of that. I was instrumental as an interpreter in the surrender of Fort Driant, which was one of the major forts and had command of the roads that lead out of Metz.

I had to meet the German colonel and his officers and arrange for their surrender. Again, it was somewhat an odd feeling going in there unarmed, not knowing what they were still capable of doing, because even if they wanted to surrender, some were still quite upset that they were surrendering. I remember one of their sergeants who, after the surrender, had put his communications system out of commission. Unfortunately he had already left me by that time, but I had to stay where I was, so I couldn’t reach him anymore. Once we found their message center and found that it had been decommissioned, I really wanted to get a hold of him for what he had done.

What really got me was that once they surrendered they were quite willing and, in fact, tried to get us to agree, to go against the Russians. I remember some high officers telling us that.

One time, I was walking outside of the fort with a German officer. We were going across the expanse around the fort and many horses had been hit. He expressed his regret that these poor animals had to die. I asked him if he had any regret that so many human beings died. I also asked him whether he had any regrets over what the Germans had done to the Jews. He gave me some nondescript answer, saying that there was always loss of life in any war and he had been trained to expect that.

AFTERWARDS, WE WENT TO ALSACE, which had constantly changed hands between Germany and France after every war. Now it was German again, and we moved into Alsace, but then when the Battle of the Bulge began, we were quickly pulled up north. It was quite a feat of logistics to move us as fast as they did. We went to Luxembourg to bolster our defenses and reinforce the units that were under siege there.

We left Luxembourg once the danger had been removed after the Battle of the Bulge. We went into Germany by way of Bitburg and then to a place near Trier, which was one of their major cities. At that time, I believe the Remagen Bridge had been found intact, but the 5th Division actually crossed the Rhine in a town called Nierstein, where our engineers had put up a pontoon bridge.

From there, we went south again and by 1945 we took the major town of Frankfurt. We then went into reserve and stayed there for at least a week or two. This break afforded me a chance to look for a cousin of mine who had lived in Frankfurt and whose wife was not Jewish, so I had some hope of finding perhaps the whole family, but if not, at least members. I was successful in locating his wife and two children, who were living on a farm twenty-five miles outside of Frankfurt. Some people began to filter back into Frankfurt after we took it; they were mostly members of mixed marriages, which was how they survived. I was able to find a place in Frankfurt for my cousin’s family, which was at least one thing I could do.

My cousin’s wife was immensely grateful that I had taken the trouble to track her down and was able to make life a little bit easier for her. Unfortunately, my cousin, late in the war, had been sent to some concentration camp, and she was doubtful of his fate. She hadn’t given up hope, but she didn’t know exactly what had happened. He was a doctor and presumably died on a death march in March 1945, so close to the end of the war.

It was an odd feeling to be back on German soil, but at the same time gratifying to be part of the American troops and be in power. At the same time, I was mindful of the great losses that we had personally sustained. So it was not unalloyed joy that I felt when I came back, because nothing was the same as it once had been. Nevertheless, it was better to be back in that capacity than the alternative possibility. I had a deep appreciation for the sacrifices that other Gls from remote areas in America—who had very little contact with European—had made in the name of defeating this tremendous evil.

THE WAR WAS OVER ON May 8, and after the city of Frankfurt, we advanced to the Czech border to the so-called Sudetenland, which was populated by Germans. Hitler had made the case of taking over Czechoslovakia because he considered that German territory, but it was just a pretext. I found it was odd to be in the place that he had used to start the war.

I was stationed in Bavaria after the war was over. I would scout the countryside after receiving some tips on where to find Nazis and jail them. It was not up to me to de-Nazify anyone that early in the game, it was done by other authorities, usually military governments, with which we worked closely, but that was not my domain.

Once we reached the border of Germany and Czechoslovakia, I happened to have what I call my rendezvous with destiny. We came across a group of what had been slave laborers, young Jewish women from Poland and Hungary. They had been abandoned by their SS guards in the town whose surrender we had taken just days before the end of the war. We had heard about them and knew we had to go there reinforced by our medical battalion and render some aid.

Once I walked into the factory where the SS had locked them up, I met a young woman who was standing at the entrance and who took me inside when I asked her. She left quite an impression on me. She was at the end of her strength and collapsed once. Our medics took them all to the field hospital that we found in town. Out of that encounter evolved a friendship with a person of rare caliber, which developed further and one year later we were married in Paris.

Now this makes me reflect on the fact that I had gone to Europe to fight the Nazis with hatred in my heart for all they had inflicted so gratuitously on Jews and the world. I had to witness the results of what they had done to my people. Also, I was 95 percent sure that my parents could not have survived the war. While all of that was true, for me personally the key to my own future was being able to go to back and be in that place at that time, which was connected to me by a tenuous thread.

If I had been born one day earlier none of this story I have told would have ever happened. When the war began, America had the first draft, and a while later it had the second draft that would take men of a certain vintage and it had a cutoff point of June 30 or July 1, 1938. I was born July 2, so I missed the second draft and was in the third draft instead. None of this would have happened if I had been in the second draft.

So you see how destiny can play tricks on us, but I am immensely grateful for this trick. We have always considered ourselves lucky that we met in the fashion we did. We supported each other in coming to terms with the losses we had sustained and felt that we could have continuity within our respective families by having children and grandchildren—in our case now a family of sixteen.

Being in the army proved to me that I could face tough situations and handle them adequately, which imbued a certain sense of self-assurance. Before going into the army, I could not know what I would run up against or how I would conduct myself, but I was glad to see how it affected me. Aside from serving, a great deal of army life is waiting around for something to happen. In that sense, during those periods, the army afforded me chances to see places and get to know people I would never have met otherwise. Even the Camp Ritchie experience was an extraordinary one. I was thrown together with people who were utterly fascinating to me, and I was able to form some friendships. It was certainly a relief from the routine of making a living back home. For me, it was somewhat akin to going to college, because I also formed a bond with the people with whom I was thrown together. Some of them lasted a lifetime, while others were of a temporary nature.

I felt proud that I could serve the United States in the capacity that I did. Nothing made me happier than being of some use to America after what it had given me, which was the idea that I could live in freedom. I live with the regret that my parents could not make it out, otherwise my happiness could have been complete.

Kurt Klein brought his wife, Gerda, home with him to Buffalo, New York, and worked for many years in the printing business. Gerda Klein's account of being liberated by her future husband was the subject of an Academy Award—winning documentary film, One Survivor Remembers, and both became internationally known humanitarians and public speakers. Kurt Klein died in Guatemala while on a lecture tour in April 19, 2002. 

The above content is from "The Enemy I Knew: German Jews in the Allied Military in World War II" by Steven Karras. Steven has given us permission to reproduce the chapters in their entirety. All content is copyright Steven Karrass and ‎ Zenith Press. No reproduction without permission.