Americans in Post War Germany
April 8, 2008 – 6:00 amSeveral weeks ago, I entered memories from a friend who was in the occupation forces in Japan. Today I’ll share a story from Molly who appears in my book, We Knew We Knew We Were at War: Women Remember World War II. Following the war, her family lived in Germany, first in Duisberg where her father, a Captain in the Transportation Corps, monitored the barge traffic on the Rhine, and later in Berlin where he worked with other countries in the movement of trains throughout the city.
In both places Molly lived with her parents and her younger brother in large houses, staffed with cooks, maids and chauffeurs, who lived in the houses with them. In order to help feed and clothe the German people, our government had a policy of providing our officers with these workers. The maids and cooks wanted nylon stockings, and one of the chauffeurs, who had contracted malaria in Rommel’s Africa Corps, needed medicine, which Molly’s mother found for him at the Post Exchange.
In Berlin, Molly lived in the British Zone but attended an American school along with 65 other junior-senior high school students. She talks of movie nights, bus tours around the city, and a barge ride on a lake into Switzerland. (That must have been Lake Constance, where I have been, also.) This trip was particularly enjoyable as the local people began to sing folk songs – the kind where one person sings the verse and the others respond with a chorus. She realized it was so different from a trip in the United States where people do not even talk to one another.
Molly recalls the devastation she saw in Cologne and Frankfurt, and the lovely Cologne Cathedral blackened from fires. To this day, whenever she sees houses or factories being demolished, her mind goes back to the destruction she saw in Germany. As she says, “War does terrible things to people’s lives.”
For more on World War II, please go to www.peggeorge.com.
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