A Duty of Remembrance

The book recounts the lives of two families during the first half of the twentieth century. August, a cooper, spent WWI in Flanders carting the dead and wounded by horse-drawn wagon to the field hospital. Son Gustel joined the SS at the age of twenty, saw his first action at the invasion of Poland in 1939, was deployed in an Einsatzkommando unit to Ukraine, was Gestapo officer in the Reich and Greece. After 1945 he spent three years as American POW. In 1965 he was called to stand trial in the Einsatzgruppen Processes. Gustel is the father of the author. School teacher Herbert's son Manfred joined the Waffen SS at eighteen, saw his first action in Dieppe, captured by Russians spent five years in the Gulags of Siberia before escaping. Daughter Erika fled from the Russians in a trek of women and children and was one of the few to make it to the West. Daughter Irmgard and her two little girls, evicted by the French, spent weeks on the road before reaching her in-laws home. Both families survived and were over the following years able to rebuild their lives.