German anecdotes - and a marriage due to penmanship

A friend on a Fulbright Fellowship in France asked me if I had heard about the Malmedy Massacre.  Yes, I had, I said - I had described (with a map) a little bit here:

http://www.wynn.org/JLWynn-POW-narrative-revised.htm

As the Battle of the Bulge unfolded quickly in late December 1944 in the Ardennes Forest region of Belgium, the German Army captured quite a number of American soldiers, including my Uncle James. Eighty-four surrendered American soldiers were murdered nearby at Malmedy, somehow missing Uncle James.  The massacre was perpetrated by Lt. Col. Joachim Pieper's infamous Waffen SS troops, the 1st SS Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler. Including Malmedy, Kampfegruppe Pieper murdered more than 500 POWs and civilians at more than ten different locations in Belgium. Pieper was sentenced to death for this in 1946, but the sentence was commuted. After he got out of prison in 1956, he emigrated to Italy to work as a manager in a Porsche factory, but was forced to leave amid accusations of atrocities that his Kampfgruppe Pieper had committed in Italy. In 1976 Pieper was shot during a fire-fight at his home in France, and his house set afire by unknown assailants.

You can find Malmedy on the map vis-a-vis the Battle of the Bulge frontlines at the web-page I built for my Uncle (link above).  It appears possible that the officers and noncoms who abandoned him and his platoon of privates - basically as a sacrificial rear-guard – may have been killed at Malmedy and paid for their sins, but I have no way of knowing for sure.

Follow the link above and you can scroll down to see the maps. Uncle James’ 1944 Christmas dinner - his first meal in 6 days after being captured - was a 50-gallon bucket of sauerkraut and pork fat shared with about 500 American POWs. This was the same kind of food he had grown up with – and that I grew up with, as we were both raised by the same great lady, Anna Josephine Schneider Wynn, his mother and my grandmother. I called Uncle James on Veteran's day and talked with him; he's a remarkably gentle-souled, forgiving, and ethical individual considering what was done to him. He was born in 1926, drafted in January 1944 despite being married.  The criteria then was you were deferred if you had a child already born, but imminently draftable if you were just newly married... this same thing happened to one of Louise's uncles, who sadly didn't survive an incompetent American doctor while on the European front.

During an extended series of interviews, it became clear that my Uncle James' entire experience in the US Army consisted of being treated like crap - worse than a slave. The only difference after he was captured was that he was also starved, and forced to bury gruesome war remains. He went from 180 lbs to 95 lbs in about 6 months - Red Cross rations sent for the prisoners were confiscated by their German jailers and sold on the black market. The photo you will see at the top of the webpage shows him clean-shaven... but he had not shaved in six months.  Neither hair nor fingernails grew during that time, they were starved so completely. After he got back, the Army refused to acknowledge that he had ever even BEEN in the Army until he could provide Red Cross letters and his American and German-POW dog-tags. He was still awarded a Bronze Star 57 years after the fact.

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Another German anecdote: I was trying to trace my Grandmother's ancestry; she had been born in Neu-Ulm, Bavaria, in 1885 and emigrated with her family when she was 9 months old to Louisville, KY. I sent a letter to the Neu-Ulm clerk-record-keeper, who sent a letter back saying all records had been destroyed by "war events."

Then out of the blue a letter came to me from a lady I had never heard of, the widow of a great-uncle and brother of my grandmother. This widow was living in a rest-home in Compton, CA, and said in the letter she had heard I had interest in the German part of the family. 

In the letter she enclosed an original birth certificate for this great uncle - already dark brown with acid damage from the poor manufacture of the paper. However, it had a recognizable official stamp on it. At the time there was a German post-doc in our high-pressure physics lab at the University of Illinois. Helmuth Moller got very interested in this goal of mine, but said that there were a number of towns called "Goggingen" in Germany, and asked me to send a Xerox copy of the certificate to him after he returned to Frankfurt. I did, and he got back to me saying the stamp was from Goggingen-Augsburg, and provided an address for the equivalent of city hall. I sent a letter there asking for information, and didn't get anything back for 6 months.

Then a package nearly a centimeter thick arrived, with birth, marriage, and death certificates extending my family lines all the way back to a Donat Stegmann in the 1790's. It turns out that the recipient of the letter had spent hours researching, tracked one line to Hiltenfingen, and forwarded my letter there. The package I received included results from both sides of my Grandmother's genealogical line. I was absolutely amazed.  

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My German language skills are rudimentary – they consist of one summer-school session while in physics grad school at the University of Illinois. My grandmother (who raised me after my Dad abandoned my Mom) never taught either my Dad nor me any German, though that was all she spoke until she was 7 years old and entered elementary school in Louisville. Her maiden name was Schneider (Tailor). My grandfather, George A. Wynn, Sr., worked in a railroad shipping office in Somerset, on the opposite side of Kentucky. He saw her handwriting on a number of packages and was enthralled by it. He traveled all the way up to Louisville to meet the 17-yr-old lady who wrote like that. He courted her and they were married.

True stories.

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