Saving My Enemy

How Two WWII Soldiers Fought Against Each Other and Later Forged a Friendship That Saved Their Lives

Bob Welch

• Publisher: Regnery History
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781684510740
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Zweiter Weltkrieg

"A quintessential tale. Once read, never to be forgotten."—Erik Jendersen, lead writer of Band of Brothers on HBO Saving My Enemy is a "Band of Brothers" sequel like no other. Don Malarkey grew up scrappy and happy in Astoria, Oregon—jumping off roofs, playing pranks, a free-range American.Fritz Engelbert's German boyhood couldn't have been more different. Regimented and indoctrinated by the Hitler Youth, he was introspective and a loner.Both men fought in the Battle of the Bulge, the horrific climax of World War II in Europe. A paratrooper in the U.S. Army, Malarkey served a longer continuous stretch on the bloody front lines than any man in Easy Company. Engelbert, though he never killed an enemy soldier, spent decades wracked by guilt over his participation in the Nazi war effort.On the sixtieth anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Bulge, these two survivors met. Malarkey was a celebrity, having been featured in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, while Engelbert had passed the years in the obscurity of a remote German village.But both men were still scarred— haunted—by nightmares of war. And finally, after they met, they were able to save each other's lives. Saving My Enemy is the unforgettable true story of two soldiers on opposing sides who became brothers in arms.

PART I YOUTH

Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die.

—Herbert Hoover, 1944 Republican Convention speech

CHAPTER 1 Hitler Youth and Huckleberry Finn

Fritz

Fritz Engelbert was thirteen years old on the night when the family’s butcher, Seligmann Hony, was dragged from his shop and nearly beaten to death for being a Jew. It was November 9, 1938. The incident happened less than two hundred yards from Gasthaus Engelbert, the inn that was frowned upon by Nazi party members because, among other things, its owner flew the old German flag, not the swastika, on national holidays.

At the sound of breaking glass, Fritz awakened in his bed, above which hung a poster of a blond-haired boy superimposed over a headshot of Adolf Hitler, the placard punctuated with large, bold words: Jugend dient dem Führer (Youth serves the Führer). He rushed to the window.

Though at sixty-five he was growing hard of hearing, Seligmann, too, was awakened by the sound, which came from his shop directly below the apartment in which he lived alone, his wife having died four years before. He cautiously crept downstairs to investigate. What he saw sent shards of fear through him: three Nazi stormtroopers, guns drawn, eyed him like rabid dogs, having stepped into his shop from the window they had obviously just shattered.

The trio stood in jackboots, brown shirts, and peaked caps stitched with an eagle above a skull, their left biceps wrapped in swastika armbands. Seligmann knew who they were: members of Hitler’s paramilitary wing, the Sturmabteilung, men whose job was to suppress and terrorize Nazi opposition—and a major reason why his son, Kurt, his son’s wife, Hilde, and the couple’s four-year-old daughter, Alice, had already fled to America.

The Brownshirts smelled of liquor and looked pleased; the power and age imbalance were to their liking.

“Wir haben gehört, dass es Filet im Sonderangebot gab,” said the leader while the other two muffled laughter.

No, Seligmann told them, there was no special tonight on tenderloin.

Apparently, they didn’t appreciate his earnestness.

“Dann kommst du vielleicht besser mit uns!” the leader shouted.

What was going on here? Why must he go with them? What had he done wrong?

“Du wurdest als Jude geboren!” the leader said. It was as simple as that—because he had been born a Jew. The other two grabbed Seligmann’s arms and flung him forward through a jagged fin of glass that had survived the window’s breaking. He stumbled onto the sidewalk and fell, his head bloodied by glass and cobblestones. The three spit on him, cursed and kicked him.

“Stinkender Jude!”

The lead stormtrooper put the barrel of his rifle to Seligmann’s head to frighten him and remind him who was in charge. Then he twirled the rifle and rammed the butt plate into the man’s nose for emphasis. Blood gushed.

At the sound of Seligmann’s screams, Fritz opened his bedroom window. He could hear more than he could see: the laughter of soldiers, a man’s groans, more glass breaking. Beyond Seligmann’s place, he saw flames. Smelled smoke. Heard screams. It was happening. It was actually happening! He had heard the rumors a few days ago at his Home Meeting. But now it was obviously taking place.

Fritz Engelbert smiled ever so slightly.

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Hilchenbach was home to only four other Jewish families at the time: the Honys, Sterns, Schäfers, and Holländers. All were paid similar visits during the pogrom that would become known as Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”). Seligmann would be one of thousands of Jews whose blood would be spilled in the streets that night.

Soldiers shouted. Civilians screamed. Windows shattered. Dogs barked. The bedlam seemed only to embolden the soldiers, fueled by hate, alcohol, and a license to destroy whomever or whatever got in their way. Blam! A dog barked no more.

Jewish men were crammed into the backs of trucks and taken to concentration camps. Synagogues were burned, homes vandalized, shops looted, schools ransacked, family fortunes stolen, women raped, and children traumatized.

Compared to some others, Seligmann was fortunate. He was being led to the back of a truck when Constable Schramm—not a Nazi—intervened.

“As Hilchenbach’s constable, I am well aware of this man’s misdeeds,” he said, shooting Seligmann a knowing glance. “I will arrest him and see to it that this menace finds a home elsewhere.”

The three Nazis looked at Schramm, then at each other. “Good riddance,” the leader said. “For us, one less rat to dispose of.” Soon after the Nazis left, the constable let Seligmann free; he knew and respected the butcher as a reputable part of the community.

Across Germany, in two days of rioting, more than 30,000 Jews were arrested and 236 killed—shot, beaten, or burned to death by Brownshirts carrying rocks, rifles, and grudges. Killed for the same reason the stormtroopers had given Seligmann: Because you were born a Jew.

The New York Times later editorialized that the nationwide riot had produced “scenes which no man can look upon without shame for the degradation of his species.”

Fritz’s reaction was different. When he was younger, Mr. Hony would often wink at him and slip him bite-size pieces of sausage. He had liked the man. But he was a child no more. He was now in his fourth year of Hitler Youth. Why would the Brownshirts—the very men whom Fritz had been taught to honor, to emulate, to aspire to be—attack without justification?

In the last few years, as Fritz replaced his childish thinking with a growing understanding of the “new Germany,” he had become a tad suspicious of the butcher and those like him. He had begun wondering if Seligmann was more foe than friend. Perhaps the scales in the meat shop had been rigged to Seligmann’s advantage. Perhaps he was overcharging his customers. If Fritz’s Hitler Youth leaders had said it once they had said it a million times: “Die Juden sind unser Unglück!”

And the teenaged Fritz Engelbert had begun to believe it. The Jews were our misfortune.

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He had not always been so suspicious of others, but he had been born into a world—a place, a movement, a fear—that fed on suspicion. Just as a raging river sweeps away anything along its banks, so did this movement take the innocent and unsuspecting. As a little boy, Fritz Engelbert—like millions of others—was among those swept away by the Third Reich.

He had been born in Hilchenbach, a village of about six thousand people, seventy miles north of Frankfurt in central Germany. It sat on high rolling plains in the most heavily forested county in Germany. The town’s roots dated to 1292; a thirteenth-century stone castle’s keep—a refuge of last resort should the rest of the castle fall to an enemy—was still standing on the town’s fringe. Over the centuries Hilchenbach had survived numerous wars, two major fires, and economic collapses, the latest a fallout from World War I. The biggest employer in town was the Lederwerke, which turned hides of cows and other animals into leather goods.

Through a child’s eyes, the world in Hilchenbach was not so dark. Fritz kicked soccer balls, cross-country skied, and ate ice cream. But the culture of his home was stained by the past, which portended a storm for the future. World War I had ended only seven years before Fritz was born on May 10, 1925. Disabled veterans still wandered the streets regularly seeking handouts from Gasthaus Engelbert. More than a million orphans cried for dead or missing mothers and fathers. Half a million women had become widows. Such pain was twisted in a twine of shame; the world blamed Germany for starting World War I, and the Treaty of Versailles was making the country pay for its aggression.

Amid such darkness, people clung desperately to any sliver of hope—and many began finding it in an upstart Austrian-born leader named Adolf Hitler. When Anna Engelbert went into labor in May 1925, editors at the Franz Eher Nachfolger publishing company in Munich were preparing the final galleys for a book the house would release in two months. It was to be called Mein Kampf (My Struggle), and it had been dictated to Rudolf Hess in the Landsberg Prison by Hitler, who at the time was a fledgling political leader clawing his way to prominence in the far-right National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or the Nazi Party.

Hitler had been imprisoned for high treason for his role in a Nazi Party uprising that came to be known as “the Beer Hall Putsch.” In reaction to the German government’s resuming payment of World War I reparations to Britain and France—an unwarranted burden on Germany, in the Nazis’ view—the party was trying to seize the government by force. Hitler hoped that a national uprising would mobilize the German army to bring down the government in Berlin.

The plan failed, and Hitler was jailed. When he was released 264 days later, the New York Times predicted that he would return to Austria and “retreat into private life.” History remembers otherwise. Mein Kampf, in which Hitler blatantly said that Jews and “Bolsheviks” were inferior and threatening while “Aryans” and National Socialists were superior, would serve as his national calling card. The book sold poorly at first, but in 1933, by the time Fritz Engelbert was eight, it was a national bestseller. And Hitler had not retreated to Austria. Instead, despite losing the 1932 presidential election, he had bullied his way into power—President Paul von Hindenburg was so burdened by political pressure that, in January 1933, he had little choice but to appoint Hitler as chancellor of Germany.

Even before his rise to the top, he had launched Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend, or HJ) in 1926, a year after Fritz had been born. The organization was similar to the United States’ Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, though with a decided twist of jingoism, Nazi indoctrination, racism, and, as the years passed, military fervor. Not, of course, that it was sold to children as such; it was promoted as an invitation to excitement, adventure, and personal and collective power.

“It gave [youth] hope, power, and the chance to make their voices heard,” wrote Susan Campbell Bartoletti in her book Hitler Youth. “And for some, it provided the opportunity to rebel against parents, teachers, clergy, and other authority figures.”

Fritz was all but predestined to be part of the organization, regardless of how his parents felt about it. He grew up as the only child of a loving mother and distant father—both much older than most first-time parents in 1920s Germany. When Fritz was born, his father, also “Fritz,” was forty-four, and his mother, Anna, thirty-nine.

Fritz at age six with his father, Fritz Sr., and mother, Anna. Courtesy of the Engelbert Family Collection

He was baptized and confirmed at St. Veit, a Protestant church—most Germans in the area were Protestants—less than a hundred yards from his house. He played games with buddies Heinrich Solms, Hans-Hermann Otto, and Günther Busch; tussled with Putz, the family cocker spaniel; and charmed guests at the family’s inn with his sweet smile and blond hair. But Fritz’s was a sheltered childhood, his imagination not taking him much beyond his tin soldiers.

Anna mothered him; Fritz disciplined him. The man, though not abusive, was strict, serious, and among the few wary of Hitler. His parents’ expectations were high. Among those expectations? Fritz was to be seen and not heard. And he was to think for himself, an honorable notion at the time but, when the Nazis took power, one with a dark side his father had not anticipated.

From dawn to dusk, Gasthaus Engelbert pulled Fritz and Anna numerous ways; beyond guest rooms, their business included a restaurant, a grocery store, a petrol station, a scale for weighing trucks, and even supplies for farmers. As his parents served customers this way and that, Fritz essentially raised himself.

In the 1930s, most Hilchenbach residents were poor. World War I had splintered Germany’s economy; only a steady flow of American dollars was keeping the country afloat. But when the U.S. stock market crashed on October 29, 1929, a wave of devastation swept across Germany like an aftershock. In 1933, poverty and unemployment in Germany reached all-time highs.

The Engelberts fared better than most. Fritz Engelbert Sr.’s decision to offer an array of services and products meant that despite small profits on each, the end-of-the-day receipts were substantial. The three-story Tudor inn had been built in 1689 and purchased by Fritz’s father around 1880. Fritz Sr. had been born there, and so had his son.

Like virtually all of the structures in Hilchenbach, it featured steep roofs to more easily shed snow. Its white base was accented with brown decorative half-timbering, giving it a Bavarian look. The ground floor was the lobby, restaurant, and kitchen; the second floor—called the first floor in Europe—was where the guests stayed; and the third floor where the Engelberts lived.

The inn was located in the center of the village, its front door opening to a cobbled commons that was popular for makeshift markets and fairs. In spring and fall, oak, beech, and birch trees added inviting dashes of color to the town; in the spring, snowmelt raised the level of Ferndorf Creek, a tributary to the river Sieg that ran through the town of Siegen and into the Rhine.

Fritz took his studies seriously, did well in school, and tried—with limited success—to learn the violin. He was quiet. Well-behaved. Organized. Easy-going. Lovable. In a forest of animals, a relative once said, he’d be the koala bear. Not particularly threatening. And yet as he grew, the Hitler Youth toughened his soft nature, twisting his more innocent bent.

Some saw Fritz as one of those children who was just “born old.” Not that he didn’t embrace the innocence of youth when the opportunity arose. In particular, he loved to run, loved what was known then as “athletics.” When Fritz was seven, Germany beat only one of ten nations competing in the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, winning three gold medals to the United States’ forty-one. Hitler seethed.

Still smarting from the defeat of World War I and from what the Nazis saw as unnecessarily harsh reparations demanded of the country after the war, many Germans had grown bitter about the country’s falling from a world power to a world laughingstock; Hitler saw that as an opportunity.

He plotted how he could gain power, how the Nazis could gain power, and how together they could Deutschland wieder großartig machen (“make Germany great again”). He reached out to a Germany battered first by war and then by the Great Depression, a Germany only too eager to follow someone somewhere for some illusive gain. He promised turnaround and triumph. He connived and lied. He blackmailed men who were above him and who obstructed his rise to the top. At times, he even killed—or at least had his henchmen kill for him. And within a decade of being released from prison, in 1933 Adolf Hitler became Germany’s new chancellor. The Third Reich had arrived, its new beginning soon announced by the sound of soldiers’ hobnailed boots as they goose-stepped—click, click, click—in vast courtyards for newsreels to be seen around the world.

To further his cause, the new German leader turned to unlikely allies: millions of young people. “I am beginning with the young,” Hitler said in 1933. “We older ones are used up.… We are rotten to the marrow. We have no unrestrained instincts left. We are cowardly and sentimental. We are bearing the burden of a humiliating past and have in our blood the dull recollection of serfdom and servility. But my magnificent youngsters! Are there finer ones anywhere in the world? Look at these young men and boys! What material! With them I can make a new world.”

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Fritz Engelbert Jr. was among those “magnificent ...