Hello Gerold,
This has been a most interesting discussion, and I too am impressed. I was
caught by your statement that "As far as I know. . .there was no major
military ground-combat in the duchy of Oldenburg. . . ." On our trip to
Oldenburg in 2004 we stayed in Hude, and as you may have seen, there are
12-15 graves in the Friedhof there marked "unbekannt Soldat." I understood
that these were the graves of men killed in an action with Canadians as they
drove through the area. Of course, that is certainly not a major military
action. Are there any statistics about the number of men and boys who lost
their lives as Oldenburg was occupied?
I found it most moving to read the names on monuments from both wars at the
churches in towns where my family had resided and to see many must have been
cousins. Fortunately, as others have reported, the men in my family all
fought in the Pacific, so at least our family does not bear the sadness of
knowing cousins were fighting one another.
I was also moved deeply by the small bronze memorial in Jever where the
pre-war synagogue had stood. It is shaped like a stack of books, each
bearing on its spine the name of person who died in one of the camps? or on
Krystallnacht? with dates of birth and death. I don't know who placed the
memorial--the town or the Jewish community itself--but I was so glad that it
was shown to me. Manny hands had rubbed the bronze until it shone in places
like new.
The war, of course, as some of have mentioned, came close to killing our
German heritage over here. My father's family came from Oldenburg, his
mother from Ostpreussen, so he was raised in a German home. But I, born in
1937, was not told anything about this. I caught him speaking a few words
of German many years later, and asked if he knew the language (which I had
studied in high school and college). "My God, boy," he said, "in my home if
you couldn't have spoken German you wouldn't have gotten food!" In his soul
he had just put to death his entire heritage. I've spent a lifetime trying
to recover things he knew intimately but would not talk about.
Today, finally, we are beginning to take pride in our German-American
origins. But even so, I notice that while there are documentaries about
Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Polish-Americans, etc., there are almost
never any about our German-American heritage, though it is one of the oldest
and more people trace their origins to Germany than any other country.
Hugo Schroeder