Recently I have received comments from Jewish readers of Immigrant Soldier regarding Herman’s friendship with the SS Officer Richard Schulze.
One of these, an acquaintance and fellow author, wrote, “I understand that your uncle needed the help of Schulze to organize the POW camp, but I’m wondering how he could let their relationship become a close friendship considering the evil men that he [Schulze] assisted?”
Another reader of my blog, a long-lost second-cousin through my paternal grandmother wrote, “I am intrigued by the relationship Herman developed with Richard Schulze-Kossens. I’ve learned elsewhere that they remained good friends for the rest of their lives. I wonder if you have further insight into how Herman could feel such kinship [with an SS officer]?”
The issue of Herman’s friendship with Schulze was something I had to struggle with as a writer and as a student of the Holocaust. In order to be true to Herman’s story, I felt it was necessary to keep their developing friendship in my novel. Gradually, I came to see that it was important as the culmination of the book’s message of forgiveness without ever forgetting.
As a writer, I am not an apologist for my uncle’s actions, simply a reporter of his story as it played out. I tried to show in Immigrant Soldier how Herman’s character and experience made it possible for him to deal with Richard Schulze the way he did and eventually feel a kinship with him.
• Herman was always easygoing—a man who did not carry his bad experiences forward into his new life. He developed the habit of not thinking about things that were unpleasant. I believe that, in the beginning, he did this purposefully, and later it became a habit. I tried to show this well-known, psychological coping mechanism in the earlier chapters.
Page 104—”Lost in a world of books, he made himself ignore all the harsh changes outside, and he became adept at blotting out unpleasant thoughts. He would not acknowledge the ugly graffiti or the signs that shouted, ‘No Jews Allowed.’ He ignored the low grades he was given for good work.”
• Herman seems to have been forgiving by nature—never one to hold a grudge. He quickly forgave his brother for the unwelcoming letter he received in Chicago.
Page 119—“Herman poured out his disappointment at the withdrawal of Fred’s invitation to live with him and his own determination to go to California, with or without his brother’s help. ‘He’s still my brother,’ he tried to explain. ‘There’s a special bond with family, . . .”
Page 124—“The long bus trip across deserts and mountains dissipated Herman’s anger toward his brother.”
• Herman did not have any truly brutal personal experiences while still in Germany. His experiences, though distressing (loss of friendships, loss of freedoms, loss of citizenship, etc) were fairly mild on the spectrum. Other than his great-uncle, no close family members were lost to the Holocaust.
• Herman’s visit to Dachau toward the end of the war opened his eyes to the horrors of the concentration camps. What he saw there caused nightmares and long sleepless hours. In the morning, he reminded himself it was hatred and prejudice of a group and every person who was part of the group that formed the essence of antisemitism. He had seen prejudice against African-Americans in the United States and the US Army and abhorred it as well. He made a conscious effort to put aside group hatred of any kind. Herman promised himself not to perpetuate any attitude of racial prejudice.
Pages 316-317–”Hate was what had destroyed Germany. He would not allow it to be part of him. He was a man of action now, and in his small way he would try to make the world better.”
• Herman judged Schulze by the German’s known actions—not on the actions of the men he worked for as an adjutant. Herman was particularly impressed with how Schulze protected the young cadets in his care, boys of about 16 and 17, from combat in the last days of the war.
Page 323—“It was said that the surrender was on Schulze’s orders and that none of the young soldiers had been injured during the two weeks he had marched them around the countryside, avoiding conflict with the Americans as much as possible. . . . In spite of his rank and association with Hitler, Richard Schulze seemed to have maintained a core of humanity that would set him apart from many diehard Nazis.”
• Herman’s feelings of kinship with Schulze surprised him, and it took him some time to acknowledge them.
Page 381—“His feelings about Richard Schulze were conflicted. Why did he respect this German—even feel a kinship with him? How could he continue doing his assigned job if he visited a man who had been Hitler’s aide, the type of Nazi that his work required him to weed out and expose?”
• Finally, on the last pages of Immigrant Soldier, Schulze seems to sense the awful burden future Germans will pay for the Nazi years. He and Herman share a short conversation of intense emotion, in which the SS officer asks, “Would you live here again? Or have we poisoned the homeland for generations?”
Herman was actually proud of the fact that he maintained a friendship with Schulze after the war. He told me how he was able to get Richard Schulze to be a witness for the prosecution at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials. Though there was surely a degree of self-preservation in his actions, Schulze’s insider’s knowledge of events at Hitler’s headquarters, The Wolf’s Lair, may have been instrumental in the conviction of several top defendants at the trials. In later years, Herman was pleased to have the ex-SS officer as a guest in his home in Long Island. In fact, it was at Herman’s family home that Richard Schulze was interviewed by Pulitzer Prize winning author, John Toland, for his book, Adolf Hitler, The Definitive Biography, published in 1976.
It was always my intention to write a true story, and Immigrant Soldier is true to the way Herman shared his memories with me. I knew the friendship between the hero of the novel and the SS officer would be troubling to some, especially to survivors of the Holocaust who lost everything and everybody they loved. It is understandable that they would prefer to see all SS officers portrayed as unredeemable. But that is not how Herman saw it.
Though I firmly believe the events of the Holocaust should never be forgotten, I also wanted Immigrant Soldier to be a bridge to forgiving current generations of Germans for the evils perpetrated by their fathers and grandfathers. Perhaps Herman was simply ahead of his time on the road to forgiveness.
How did you respond to Herman’s friendship with Richard Schulze? Did it make you respect him more or did it do the opposite?
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