William Katzenstein

WILLIAM KATZENSTEIN

SCHENKLENGSFELD, GERMANY

505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division

Normandy and Holland

William Katzenstein left Germany in 1937 and settled in New York. He was sent to the Military Intelligence School at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, and soon volunteered to join the paratroopers. After jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia, he vas sent to England and joined the 82nd Airborne Division, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR) regimental headquarters company, “Intelligence Section, S-2 Section. He is pictured above in 1945.

I was born on May 5, 1924, in Schenklengsfeld (county Bad Hersfeld) in Central Germany. My father was Isfried Katzenstein, whose grandfather came from a town named Katzenstein near Fulda, Germany. My mother, Lina (nee Weinberg), could trace her family roots to Spain.

In 1929 my family moved to Bad Langensalza, about 18 kilometers northeast of Eisenach-Thoringia, Germany. My father was a successful dairy cattle dealer and had built up a great business in Langensalza from 1929 on. He lost his business in 1937.

As a child in Germany, I played soccer and other games with other children in my town. I had a normal childhood in the late 1920; and early 1930s. By the mid-1930s, things started to change in Germany. I remember that things really started to change when most of my friends began joining the Hitler Youth. At that time, they started calling me a “dirty Jew.” The insults soon escalated into violence that included beatings. I remember many trips home from school that included bloody noses and broken glasses. Only ten to twelve Jewish families lived in the Bad Langensalza, and almost everyone in town ostracized us. I began to find different ways to go home, but that did not work.

My father asked me if I wanted to take some boxing or wrestling lessons so I could defend myself; I wanted both. A day or so later, my father found a man named Georg Ehrlich, who was not Jewish. Ehrlich means “honest™ in German. He had been a professional boxer and wrestler. He was about thirty-five years old and a socialist [of the left, not a National Socialist], and the Nazis banned him from all professional sports. To make a living, he taught wrestling and boxing. In the basement of his house was the gym where he gave his lessons.

Ehrlich taught me boxing, wrestling, and judo. His lessons included stuff both in the book and not in the book. I trained three afternoons a week for six months. Finally, he told me, “You’re ready.”

One afternoon shortly after my last lesson, the same Hitler Youth gang that regularly assaulted me on the trip home from school confronted me again. That day I felt prepared and confident. Recalling my lessons with Ehrlich, I was able to maneuver the fight to the ground of my choosing. I chose a building that had a large brick wall and had my back to the wall to eliminate the possibility of being jumped from behind. That day, five or six boys taunting me.

When they confronted me, I turned around but didn’t cringe or plead with then to let me go, as I had in the past. They were surprised and shocked at my reaction. I pointed at the largest boy and said “Who's the first Fatherland’s fighter to beat up on the dirty little Jew?” I told the largest boy to step forward and fight me one on one. As he moved forward, I kicked him as hard as I could in the groin. He crumpled forward in a great deal of pain. I grabbed him on hair and swiftly and forcefully raised my knee to his face. As I pushed him back, I gave him a kick in the belly and he landed at on his back. I then said to the other boys, “Who’s the next Fatherland’s fighter to beat up on the dirty little Jew”? At that, the boys fled and left me alone thereafter.

About a year later, we immigrated to New York. Our family had several relatives in America who sponsored us. My mother visited in 1936 and returned with visas (good for one year), so we came to the United States in 1937. Before that, my mother had arranged for a tutor in English in addition to my three and one-half years in school. I was very anxious to go to the United States and experience freedom for the first time. We went by train to Holland, stayed for a few days with friends in Hoofdoorp, and then came to United States via the SS Staatendam. We landed in Hoboken, New Jersey, in October.

First of all, everything was bigger; we lived in Manhattan in the Washington Heights neighborhood, so populated with German refugees it was jokingly called, “the Fourth Reich.” There we knew many people and were constantly visiting back and forth. I delivered groceries and laundry packages, shined shoes, delivered newspapers, and so forth. My father, a businessman who didn’t speak English, had a terrible time, but we eventually moved to Middletown, New York, in October of 1939, where he bought a farm with big barn and an eleven-bedroom house. He started in the cattle business again, my mother opened a summer resort, and things were looking up. After I graduated from Middletown High School, I went to Baltimore, Maryland, where I worked in a dental lab and took pre-dental at Johns Hopkins University at night.

We still had family members trapped in Germany. My second cousin Rosel, my great aunt Minnie, and other distant relatives remained behind. My father “bought” my aunt Minnie out of a concentration camp, but could not get Rosel out. Prior to the big roundup in 1940 and 1941, he got visas for forty-eight people. He accomplished that by having $20,000 in a bank; to sponsor each person, you had to guarantee you had $5,000 by getting affidavit from the bank and then you got four visas. He would then money to another bank, get an affidavit from that bank, and bring over more people, etc.

My father anticipated the war. When the United States started sending convoys to Britain, he said, “Sooner or later, we will have to get in.” I wanted my revenge, so I volunteered at the draft board.

In March 1943, I was inducted into the U.S. Army. I went to Camp Pickett, Virginia, for my basic training. Solicitation boards arrived on base and I signed up for the Military Intelligence School at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. At that school, I learned numerous ways to think on my feet. For example, I learned everything from how to drive a train to flying a Piper Cub plane. I even learned how to make a crude map with just a pencil, a piece of string, a clipboard, and a piece of paper.

Following Military Intelligence School, I volunteered for airborne training because of what I had been through, and what the Nazis were doing to my people. I figured that Uncle Sam was doing me a great favor by training me and providing me with transportation and weapons to help me get my revenge. It was strictly voluntary and more dangerous. To my thinking, it was well worth putting my life on the line. Most of the guys I trained with were okay, but there were always a few anti-Semites. Since I had good hand-to-hand training, I usually challenged the biggest one and quickly put him on his behind; as a rule, the rest wanted to be friends with me after that. Every once in a while, I had dealings with a few refugees and we helped each other.

In May 1944, a few months after I graduated from the Parachute Training School at Fort Benning, Georgia, I was shipped to England and assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division, and subsequently to the 505th PIR regimental headquarters company, Intelligence Section, S-2 Section as a translator/interpreter/interrogator. My unit went from Boston to Southampton, England, via the Queen Mary. It only took three and one-half days, since the Queen could outrun the U-boats.

My first action was on D-Day, the night before the beach landings on June 5. Before my jump, my heart was beating like crazy and my guts were churning, but I got used to it. I was a “pathfinder” and part of the first unit to hit the ground and liberate the French town, St. Mere-Eglise. My primary job was to be in charge of observation posts from which we went on night patrols to take prisoners alive (if possible) for interrogation. We mere aware of impending attacks and laid ambushes. On one occasion, we annihilated about thirty Krauts and took prisoners. With prisoners, I usually asked about family, their hometowns, etc., and then led into pertinent questions. Out of 150 interrogations, | had only 2 who refused to answer.

When we invaded Holland—Groesbeek and Nijmegen. In Normandy, there was constant movement, but Holland was different. We had taken it and the Germans were constantly attacking. A few days after our initial jump into Holland, at about ten in the morning, I was “requested” to go to a U-shaped hill outside the small town of Reithorst. I was to interrogate and bring back a captured German captain and two enlisted men. I traveled to the hill with a lieutenant in a small staff car we had liberated. As we approached the hill, there was no activity, not even small arms fire. There was a windmill on top of the hill, as well as a small building that resembled a log cabin. The prisoners were inside the building guarded by one of our men, who left after I arrived.

Suddenly, all hell broke loose. It was the beginning of another German attack on the hill. The building had a sliding door with a latch on it, which I closed. I had my Tommy gun with me and went down the hill to join the fighting. As I made my way toward the men, the Germans were coming out of the woods attempting to overrun our position. This was my first eye-to-eye contact with the enemy. It was different from Normandy, where I had fired a few shots, but because of the tremendous hedgerows, I could not tell if I hit anybody, although sometimes I heard someone cry out.

A German soldier charged out of the woods in my direction, less than thirty yards away, and my finger froze on my trigger. I let the whole thirty rounds of ammo go into this man, ripping his waist open. I was pretty scared and also out of ammo. Another German lunged at me with a bayonet. I called to the guy next to me to throw me another magazine of ammunition, but he wasn’t able to get the ammo to me quickly enough. So I reached for my knife, which I held in my right hand, while deflecting his bayonet with my left. Although he ran his bayonet over the knuckle of my index finger (the scar is still faintly visible), I managed to shove all seven inches of my knife into his belly, just above his beltline.

I often reflect on this encounter and realize that if it were not for my training, I would not be here to tell this story. Moreover, most of us young Panthers thought we were invincible and I was an agnostic; however at that moment I became a believer. While the military hand-to-hand training was excellent, I felt that there must have been someone “up there” looking out for me. My old trainer, Georg Ehrlich, must be looking down on me smiling from ear to ear.

At any rate, the attack was repulsed within about ten minutes after my encounter; however, during that short period of time, one of our lieutenants was in the top of the windmill directing mortar fire while the Germans were firing mortars on our position. I called up to the lieutenant, “Sir, you better get out of there quickly.” A moment later, a shell sheared off the top of the windmill, not more than two seconds after he left the premises, the lieutenant then directed me to get the prisoners out of the area. I found a jeep and driver and piled the Germans in the jeep. There was no more room, so I jogged along the right side of the jeep with another trooper on the left. About one to two hundred yards from where we started, we were fired upon. I yelled out, “You sons of bitches, stop firing!” thinking it was likely that it was our own men were firing on us after seeing Germans in the jeep. A few seconds later the firing stopped, but not before our right rear tire was blown out. The driver asked me whether we should change the tire. I responded, “To hell with the tire, let’s get out of here.” We then proceeded to regimental headquarters on the double.

My next action was the Battle of the Bulge where we were trucked in. I was only in the Bulge one day and was wounded. I caught shrapnel above the left knee and, the next morning, was evacuated and sent to recover. Although I left to rejoin my unit in March on French 40 and 8s (trains from World War l), we were constantly sidetracked to other places, so I didn’t get back until May 13, after the war had ended. I was more than overjoyed, if not totally ecstatic, that I had been a conquering soldier. I felt that I got my revenge for my cousin, Rosel Faist, many cousins more removed, and murdered friends. I did not have the opportunity to return to my

hometown until 1995.

I was awarded the Purple Heart, Bronze Star with four clusters, Combat Infantry Badge, ETO Ribbon, French and Belgian Croix, and Fleur De Guerre. I even got a good conduct ribbon and more. For the last sixty some odd years, I have often reflected on my war experience; I told my friends and grandchildren war stories. The latter fought over my medals.

As a civilian, William Katzenstein continued to work in U.S. Army Intelligence for many years in Washington, D.C. He lives in Virginia and remains active in the 82nd Airborne Association.

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.