Synopsis
When the Depression turned America into a land of hardship, young Walter Schroder's family moved back to Germany. The boy was only nine, and he entered an Old World that was borning anew--the Germany of Nazi dreams.
Events moved swiftly. Schroder joined the Hitler Youth and learned the ways of the Fatherland well. When war broke out, he was called up at age 15 to man antiaircraft guns against planes from the land of his birth. But 1945 turned Schroder's Luftwaffe unit into British POWs, and his captors soon realized that the young man spoke "Yank." With his birthright discovered, Schroder became a translator and conveyor of orders for a new regime; U.S. citizenship properly documented, he was--incredibly--drafted into the U.S. Army. The vanquished youth had become a victorious warrior.
This is a unique first-hand account of life under two mighty powers in a major war, and its early Cold War aftermath. It is also the story of an impressionable youth, caught up in circumstance but willing to lend his life to a cause--one where children were turned into soldiers, or soldiers into cogs in a war machine. But mainly it is a fascinating observation of the vagaries of war. After all, when Schroder was an interpreter for U.S. intelligence in occupied Munich, both German and American eyes had already turned to the east, where the USSR crouched over all of Europe.
Reviews
Unsophisticated yet engrossing memoir about a remarkable childhood and adolescence. Schroder's German parents came to the US to escape the chaos of post-WW I Germany, but while their son grew up American, the family remained very German, buying him German toy soldiers to play with and returning to the homeland for vacations. When his father found employment in Hitler's reviving Germany, Schroder returned and joined the Hitler Youth. At 15, he became one of Hitler's teenage soldiers, and his description of these young combatants meeting Allied paratroopers in a small engagement at the end of the war reveals how Hitler subverted youth's spirit of play and sport: The teenagers proceeded innocently through the battle, displaying no normal adult fear or even caution, until their surrender. Taken prisoner, the author eventually faced yet another incredible adjustment--released from POW camp, he was ordered to report for induction into the US Army (where he ate his first full meal in months). Through all this, Schroder bobs like an unsinkable cork, sane, reasonable, and cooperative, a true survivor--and, like any true survivor, reveals himself to be essentially apolitical, never scrutinizing his shifting loyalties, at least not here. Lack of deep emotion makes this a curious memoir, but the splitting of Schroder's family by the division of Germany, and his recurrent dreams of his father (whom he loves too much to question) give some dimension at the end. Solid, fact-oriented, and conventional, Schroder is by no means a born writer, but those interested in the period will find his reminiscences worthwhile. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
An American citizen whose family returned to prewar Germany, the author was swept from 1930s Manhattan to the Hitler Youth and a Germany rushing headlong into war. Schroder wound up attached to an anti-aircraft unit charged with shooting down American bombers. Captured by British troops in 1945, he continued his odyssey in prisoner-of-war camps, where he made himself useful to victor and vanquished as a translator. His American accent brought him to the attention of U.S. authorities, who promptly drafted him into the American army. This is not your everyday World War II memoir. Of interest primarily for descriptions of life during the Nazi period and of his plight as a POW.
- John R. Vallely, Siena Coll. Lib., Loudonville, N.Y.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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