Finding My Father's Footsteps: A Journey Within the Battlefields of World War II

A daughter unravels the mystery behind her World War II Veteran Father's acquisition of Heinrich Himmler's personally annotated copy of Mein Kampf.

Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and Gestapo and the architect and administrator of the concentration camps during WWII, oversaw the systematic murder of more than ten million Jews and other innocent people. The story of what happened to Himmler's personal copy of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, the book that inspired him, and the story of the soldier who brought it home from war-torn Europe are told for the first time in this tribute to the 4th Infantry Division's 22nd Infantry Regiment during the war.

Drawing on her experience in battlefield documentation for the American Battlefield Protection Program, the author undertook a journey to defend her father's honor after he was accused by a stranger of lying about how he obtained the faded and worn copy of Mein Kampf. She began with her father's narrative of his experiences as a Second World War infantry rifle platoon leader, which she discovered two days after he died in 1991. With that as a guide, she traced his regiment's footsteps from D-Day to VE Day to uncover the truth.

"I began this book to understand my father's silence about war," Marshall writes, "I finished it to honor that silence. The more I listened to the soldiers and civilians forever impacted by the deadly conflict, the more the faded Mein Kampf came to represent the profound warning of an old veteran, 'of the horrors that we are capable of, to remind us not to go down that road again'."

Karen Marshall lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania. She has worked in historic preservation for over twenty years including fifteen years as the county's Historic Preservation Officer where she managed the extensive documentation of the Battle of Brandywine (Sept. 11, 1777) for the American Battlefield Protection Program. Retired, she is remaining active in community preservation and serves on a number of boards of nonprofits that convey the stories of the past and how they inform our lives today. She holds a master's degree in Urban Affairs and Public Policy with a certificate in Historic Preservation.