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-BOOK REVIEW-
North
County
Times columnist tells little-known
story of
German-Americans fighting for Nazis
By: GARY WARTH - Staff Writer
San Diego North County Times
Sixty years of
movies, books, plays and TV shows would seem to have exhausted the
number of stories that can be written about World War II, but Oceanside
author Tom Morrow may have found a fresh twist on an old subject.
"Nebraska Doppelganger" ($15.95, Old Warrior Books) may be the first
book to tell the story of America-born men of German ancestry who
returned to Germany and fought for the Nazis.
"Almost every writer and every historian I talked to about this said they'd never heard of it," Morrow said. "They said this is a whole new aspect of the story."
But Morrow said he
had a hunch it did happen, which led him to raise the question to
someone he knew in U.S. Army Intelligence.
"I said, 'Is this possible?' He looked at me and started laughing and
said, 'There were hundreds of them.'"
Morrow, a newspaper reporter for 38 years and writer for the
Blade-Citizen and North County Times for the past 13, is a World War II
buff who grew up listening to war stories from veterans in Iowa and
Nebraska. Yet despite all he knew about the war, Morrow had never heard
of German-Americans fighting for Nazis until reading a passing reference
in Steven Ambrose's book, "Band of Brothers."
In the book, American soldiers meet a captured German soldier who speaks
perfect English. To the Americans' surprise, they discover the man
actually is from Oregon and had been sent to Germany by his parents, who
emigrated from there to the U.S.
Morrow couldn't find any documentation about American-born Nazi
soldiers, but he trusted Ambrose's account because it was based on the
recollections of actual American soldiers. The American who told the
anecdote about the Oregon soldier is still alive and even appeared in
the film version of "Band of Brothers."
But even if it didn't happen, Morrow said, "It's still a hell of a
story."
As outrageous as the premise may seem, he said conditions in both
countries at the time make it likely that some German-Americans did
fight for the Nazis.
Thousands of Europeans immigrated to the United States in the late 1800s
and early 1900s, and among those were many Germans who settled in the
Midwest. Their new country did not always kindly treat the
Volksdeutschers, or Germans living outside of Germany, and many of them
faced discrimination after World War I.
By the 1930s, though, Germany was emerging from an economic depression
and had a new nationalistic pride and a booming work program instigated
by Adolf Hitler. Some German-Americans returned to their homeland, and
others sent their children there to continue their education.
"They couldn't get jobs in the States, so they went to Germany," Morrow
said.
The central
character of Morrow's book, John Krauss, is one of those young men sent
to Germany to help rebuild the country.
"I had to go," the character tells his granddaughter early in the book.
"A good German son doesn't say 'No' to his parents or to the call of his
country."
In the book, Krauss is an unwilling soldier for the Germans and is
eventually captured and brought back to the U.S. as a prisoner of war.
"That's when the story really gets rolling," Morrow said.
While reading from his book at a recent publicity event, Morrow said
many people in his audience were surprised to learn that the U.S. was
home to some prisoner of war camps during World War II.
"There were over 600," Morrow said of the camps. "About 125,000 German
troops from the Africa Corps were sent to this country."
Growing up in the Midwest, Morrow said one of his first memories of
World War II was seeing a POW camp in Clarinda, Iowa, while riding in a
car as his father drove to his job in a Goodyear rubber plant, where he
worked as a supervisor building rubber gas tanks for the B-29 Super
fortress bomber.
"I well remember my mother pointing to the prisoners working in the
fields, telling me, 'Tommy, look at the Nazis!'" Morrow said in an
online interview on his Web site, www.OldWarriorBooks.com.
Morrow, 67, joined the Navy in 1958 and stayed for four years, missing
both the Korean and Vietnam wars. He retired from the Coast Guard
Reserves after 24 years.
He never forgot the World War II stories he heard as a child, though.
"It certainly wasn't the defining moment of my life as it would have
been in the service, but it certainly has defined my life," he said.
After a lifetime of nonfiction writing that included the 1995 books "The
Electronic Job Search Revolution" and "The Electronic Resume
Revolution," both written with Joyce Lain Kennedy, Morrow said he
answered the call many writers hear and tried his hand at fiction. He
naturally thought of World War II.
"I thought about writing books for years, but it was a really tough
transition for me," he said.
Trained to tell stories in tight sentences, Morrow's first attempt at a
novel-length work took all of about 30 pages.
As he loosened up his style to write a novel, Morrow said he recruited
some help from Werner von Gundell, a former Oceanside city planner who
was raised in Germany and once was a member of Hitler Youth.
"He was very well versed in what life was like over there," Morrow said.
"I'd say, 'Pick this apart. Tell me if this is what it was like in
Germany.'"
One of Gundell's uncles was in the Africa Corps and, like Krauss, was
taken to the United States as a prisoner of war, giving Morrow insight
into what his character would have faced in his book.
Just as World War II was the inspiration for Morrow's first novel, it
also has been an inspiration for much of his nonfiction writing,
especially his columns for the North County Times.
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