NARA, College Park, February 28, 2006
Spent the day at NARA and found some really good OSS files.  The OSS recruited a number of Italians as agents.  Most were then sent to join a ‘mission’, a bit like the networks that SOE operated in France.  Anyway, I managed to come across the debriefings of these various agents and their missions.  Some were fairly brief, but others were very detailed, including the files of the ‘Zucca’ mission.  It’s always exciting coming across new material like this, especially when it was very clear no-one had looked at these files in decades.  I also found a number files relating to the Judge Advocate of the US 5th Army, which look interesting.

New York, February 27, 2006
Back in the US.  Today I’ve been to Shelter Island near the far end of Long Island to see Howard Jackson.  During the war he served with the 454th Heavy Bombardment Group and I was anxious to talk to him because he seemed very switched on from his emails and I am keen to give the Allied air forces their due.  It was noticeable that all three German veterans I spoke to the other week all continually mentioned the Allied air superiority  being a terrible blight on their time in Italy.  Furthermore, the Allied bombing offensive over Italy is still somewhat controversial – most of the destruction wrought on Italian cities was caused by Allied bombs – and this needs to be addressed in the book, I think.  Howard met me off the ferry and I followed him home.  It was a day of clear blue skies but felt crisp and there was a cold wind.  The island was lovely – and very peaceful after the hustle and frenetic pace of New York. 

Howard was great – good memory, with lots of detailed anecdotes.  He also has a load of papers and documents which his wife very kindly offered to photocopy for me.  I liked him hugely – he had a great sense of humour and, like most American veterans I have met, did not balk from talking to me completely frankly.  All in all, it was a good day and I’m glad I made the trip to see him.  

I drove back to New York, caught a flight from La Guardia to Washington and am now back in the boring old Quality Inn in College Park.  Feels like I’ve never been away.
 

Munich, February 22, 2006
A day trip to Munich from City Airport.  Got there OK and then took a train to the centre of the city and from there a cab to Helmut Ortschiedt’s flat.  He was different from the three I’d seen the previous week.  He had seen action in North Africa but after being wounded had returned to Germany and had become disillusioned.  He admitted the fact that his father – an officer on the Eastern Front – had been killed had played its part, but after recovering from his wounds, he had retrained as a medic and it was in that role that he had been posted to Italy.  He told me he knew the war was lost the moment North Africa was lost and had spent most of the Italian campaign in a state of near-perpetual gloom.  Despite this, he was actually rather good humoured and an obviously cultured and worldly sort of fellow.  He had some good photographs, too.  A long way to go, but worth it.

Berlin, February 15, 2006
Got up in good time and had a wander round Hamelin, which is a lovely town.  The streets around the old centre are lined with ageing and crooked houses with ‘1623’ inscribed on them (or some such date).  Curiously, though, most of the windows had been double-glazed.  Later, when I mentioned this to Sarah she laughed and said that was typically German.  It wouldn’t be allowed to happen with listed houses in Britain, that’s for sure.

We travelled to another town nearby where we were going to interview a former member of the 16th Waffen-SS.  Again, he and his wife were charming and we spent much of the day there.  He feels very strongly that it is important for men like himself to be able to tell their side of the story and so that was why he was willing to talk to us.  Later, he rang a friend of his who lives in Austria and asked him whether he would mind talking to us as well.   But his friend said no.  The Austrian police had recently raided his house and confiscated all his papers; from now on, he was saying nothing – he had his family to think of.  So too did my man: he asked me not to mention the town where he lives or even use his real name, which I promised not to do.  After the war, his childrens’ teacher said to them, ‘Do you know your father was a criminal?’  But was he?  It didn’t seem the case to me.  He had been in the division’s pioneer battalion, which had not been involved in any of the massacres.  And the Waffen-SS were quite different from the police wing of the SS.  I asked him why he’d joined the Waffen-SS in the first place and he answered quite reasonably, I thought: he had been in the Hitler Youth, as had virtually every German teenager at the time, and when recruiting units came round he had been impressed by the Waffen-SS because they were the elite and he wanted to serve with the best.   Afterwards, when we eventually reached Berlin once more, I recounted this back to Rachel.  ‘I hope you’re not about to become the new David Irving,’ she said.  No fear of that, I assured her, but this week has made me think that the vast majority of young men fighting in the German armed forces back then seemed very much like the majority of young men fighting in the Allied armed forces.
 

Hamelin, February 14, 2006
Another early start, this time to Dusseldorf, some 550 kilometres away, and where Franz Maassen, formerly of the 278th Infantry Division, lived.  Once again, we made good progress and reached Dusseldorf in time for a quick lunch before seeing Herr Maassen.  He was a small man with a pleasant, humorous face and ushered us in.  He used to be a baker but is no longer able to bake himself.  Instead he had bought us an array of rich and creamy cakes, and kept apologising for not having produced them himself.  ‘My wife has recently passed away,’ he explained, ‘and it’s difficult to be a proper host now.’  I still felt pretty full from lunch but felt I ought to at least tackle one of these cakes.  It was a mistake, because with coffee as well, I soon began to get really bad indigestion – something I’m not conscious of having suffered from before.  The stomach cramps were terrible and for the best part of five hours I kept shifting from one side of my seat to the other.  And this was a great shame because Franz Maassen was a fabulous interviewee: frank and articulate and with an astonishing memory for detail.  He told us about how he done amphibious training in early 1941.  Why, I asked him.  ‘Because we were going to invade Britain,’ he said.  I thought that was interesting because Hitler had postponed the invasion the previous autumn.  He told a funny story about how, after the war, he had finally gone to Britain on holiday.  His family had taken the ferry and as they approached the English coast he looked up and saw the White Cliffs.  ‘And then I thought to myself: we would have never managed the invasion!’

He really was fascinating – obviously he had been a brilliant NCO, the backbone of the unit in which he served.  You could tell by the way he explained himself and told various stories about his experiences.  He was also particularly interesting about his attitude to partisans.  He had served in Russia twice and had lost a good friend in a brutal partisan attack.  On arrival in Italy, having recovered from wounds on the Eastern Front, he was in Verona when the café he was in was attacked by Italian partisans.  He already had a very low view of these guerrilla fighters  - as do most regular army when confronted by them – but this attack made him think that Italian partisans were every bit as bad as those he had come against in Russia.  This, I think, is an important point.  I do so want to understand why German troops were able to line up civilians and massacre them, and I have a feeling Russia has a lot to do with it – after all, there were large number of Eastern Front veterans in Italy.  If their view had already been both tarnished and hardened by their Russian experiences that would have had a knock-on effect with other German troops in Italy.  And after all, Kesselring and a number of his commanders were also veterans of the war in Russia.

As we were leaving he looked at us wistfully and said, ‘You know, it was only after the war that I felt human again.’  I liked him enormously and was glad I’d had the chance to talk to him at such length.

We then drove in the dark to Hamelin, as in the Pied Piper.  It was late when we got there and found the hotel.