Spring 2006 By Nathan
Meina Oma
My grandmother Margarete Rudolph was born December
25, 1936 in Dannenfels, Germany, a small Rhineland town of about 1000 people who were mostly farmers. Before Hitler began
his conquest of Europe, her family lived happily farming on their land near the mountains. Her father owned his own business,
a bakery in the town in the nearby town. When World War II started little changed. Everything in town seemed to remain the
same.
Her family
was never for the Nazis and the Nazis knew it but they could never do anything because her and her family never did anything
against Hitler. Margarete was always told to never touch the Nazi propaganda that was put on their barn gate for the Nazi
officers would arrest the adults. To speak badly about Hitler could cost you your life. The town’s people used to say
the enemy is listening but they weren’t talking about the Allies but about the other Germans that would turn you in
for speaking badly about Hitler.
My grandmother
first became afraid of the war when she was in the fields and an Allied pilot shot at her and her friends when she was only
seven years old. Near the end of the war the Nazi’s put a headquarters in their house. Her uncle and father were drafted
into the war. Her father was killed in France in 1941 and her uncle was killed in Italy in 1944 at the age of 23. Her family
never experienced the hunger that affected many people during and after the war because they were farmers. As the Allies pushed
further into Germany the Nazis put a flank gun in her front yard. Her grandfather got into an argument with a SS officer over
this and it almost cost him his life. The 63rd Armored Infantry division was the US Army unit that liberated her
town. The allies encountered very heavy German resistance.
The Nazi’s deployed road blocks
and antitank guns. The resistance was so heavy that the GI’s could not win a frontal assault and had to go around the
town to take it. When the GI’s pushed into the town my grandmother and the rest of her friends ran to the hill with
a dipper on a stick to show them ment no harm. House to house fighting lasted for a few days. When it stopped my grandmother
said Nazi soldiers run to the hills stripping off all Nazi party signs. After the war my grandmother married an American GI.
They moved to Japan, were my mother was born then returned to Deutschland and lived there for awhile till they moved to America.
