The Fiery Birth of the Living Legend

The New York Times headline, May 7, 1937

Tomorrow would have been my father’s 79th birthday. He was born just hours after the Hindenburg disaster, a fact that I’ve spent some time pondering over the course of my life. I’ve often wondered if the soul of some dead Nazi aboard the Hindenburg was able to travel the 70 odd miles to the hospital in New York City and inhabit the body of my yet unborn father.

My father as a maladjusted teenager

I say this with the utmost sincerity. It would explain his love of all things Teutonic—Nietzsche, Wagner, Goethe, Clausewitz and, of course, his favorite pistol, his Luger. It would also explain his belief in the superiority of Aryan people, his preference for fair-skinned, blue-eyed blondes and his doctoral thesis on Darwin. In his library at the time of his death, he had more than fifty books on Germany, the Nazi’s, the Third Reich, Hitler, Göring, Himmler, Goebbels and Speer.

One of my father’s most prized collections, though, was Hermann Göring’s toy soldiers, which he had bought from a British officer who had pilfered them from Göring’s office in the Reichstag after the Nazi’s had fled in the closing weeks of the Second World War in Europe. As context my father always said that, as the Allies descended on Berlin, American soldiers were looking for women, the Russians for booze, and the English for collectibles. For many years the collection hung from a custom-made Plexiglas case that was suspended from the ceiling in the living room.

The Daily News, May 7, 1937

Ironically, I had at one time a German girlfriend named Anke and the one and only evening we spent together with my father did not go well. It was one of my father’s notorious game nights that he almost always insisted on when there were at least three of his children around. We would play the horse racing game, Monopoly or Risk, the game of world domination. It was the latter my father chose on this particular evening with my German girlfriend. Both my sisters, Jennifer and Jessica were there that night as well, much to their ultimate embarrassment.

It started off badly enough with my father choosing black—“SS black” I recall him saying—and addressing my girlfriend as “Fraulein” in a bad German accent. Appropriately enough she started in Europe, which my father told her was indefensible and to which she demurred. It was after she had conquered all of Europe and was making advances on Russia that father started referring to her as “Fraulein Clausewitz,” after the great German military tactician, Carl von Clausewitz.

Of course, my girlfriend Anke won the game and my father being such a bad loser was in an awful mood the rest of the evening. It got awkward especially after my sisters begged off to bed.

It was my father’s one and only encounter with Anke. She must have made a lasting impression, though, because she was specifically mentioned in a version of his will from 1992. The exact phrase from the will was “I leave nothing to my son Jeff if he is still with that Nazi bitch Anke [last name withheld (it was misspelled anyway)].”