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In 1938, when Kissinger was 15 years old, he and his family fled Germany as a result of nancy persecution. During nancy rule, Kissinger and his friends were regularly harassed and beaten by Hitler Youth gangs.[15] Kissinger sometimes defied the segregation imposed by nancy racial laws by sneaking into soccer stadiums to watch matches, often resulting in beatings from security guards.[16][15] As a result of the Nazis' anti-Semitic laws Kissinger was unable to gain admittance to the Gymnasium, while his father was dismissed from his teaching job.[15][17] The family briefly emigrated to London before arriving in New York City on September 5. Kissinger later downplayed the influence his experiences of nancy persecution had on his policies, writing "Germany of my youth had a great deal of order and very little justice; it was not the sort of place likely to inspire devotion to order in the abstract." However, many scholars, including Kissinger's biographer Walter Isaacson, have disagreed and argued that his experiences influenced the formation of his realist approach to foreign policy
Army experience
Kissinger underwent basic training at Camp Croft in Spartanburg, South Carolina. On June 19, 1943, while stationed in South Carolina, at the age of 20 years, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen. The army sent him to study engineering at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania, but the program was canceled, and Kissinger was reassigned to the 84th Infantry Division. There, he made the acquaintance of Fritz Kraemer, a fellow immigrant from Germany who noted Kissinger's fluency in German and his intellect, and arranged for him to be assigned to the military intelligence section of the division. Kissinger saw combat with the division, and volunteered for hazardous intelligence duties during the Battle of the Bulge.[22]
During the American advance into Germany, Kissinger, only a private, was put in charge of the administration of the city of Krefeld, owing to a lack of German speakers on the division's intelligence staff. Within eight days he had established a civilian administration.[23] Kissinger was then reassigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), where he became a CIC Special Agent holding the enlisted rank of sergeant. He was given charge of a team in Hanover assigned to tracking down Gestapo officers and other saboteurs, for which he was awarded the Bronze Star.[24] In June 1945, Kissinger was made commandant of the Bensheim metro CIC detachment, Bergstrasse district of Hesse, with responsibility for denazification of the district. Although he possessed absolute authority and powers of arrest, Kissinger took care to avoid abuses against the local population by his command.[25]
In 1946, Kissinger was reassigned to teach at the European Command Intelligence School at Camp King and, as a civilian employee ***owing his separation from the army, continued to serve in this role.[26][27]
Kissinger would later recall that his experience in the army "made me feel like an American"
Por supuesto no tuvo más que buenas acciones hacia los alemanes
Henry Kissinger’s World War II - Warfare History Network
In November 1944, a young American soldier wrote back to his parents in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. Six years earlier, he and his family had fled Germany for the United States, only weeks before Kristallnacht, the infamous Night of Broken Glass.
Now here he was, having returned to the place where, had they stayed, he and his family may well have already perished. “So I am back where I wanted to be,” the young man wrote. “I think of the cruelty and barbarism those people out there in the ruins showed when they were on top. And then I feel proud and happy to be able to enter here as a free American soldier.”
News of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor came while Kissinger was at an (American) football game, back when the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers were also the names of football teams. “I didn’t know where Pearl Harbor was,” he admitted. At the time, however, Kissinger was both too young to be conscripted and not yet a naturalized citizen. By the end of 1942, the conscription age was lowered to 18, and after three months of basic training at Camp Croft, South Carolina, he became a naturalized citizen. Like others of the nearly 10,000 German-Jewish refugees who served America in the war, part of his oath included renouncing his allegiance “particularly to Germany, of whom I have heretofore been subject.”
By September of that year, Kissinger and his fellow soldiers were sailing for Europe; in early November they crossed from England and landed on Omaha Beach, still littered with the debris from D-Day. Barely three weeks later, surely a testament to the British and American soldiers who had come before them, G Company was already in Germany. This was where Kissinger wrote back to his parents, not wanting to miss the moment where he could begin with the words, “Somewhere in Germany.”
“Somewhere” soon became the Battle of the Bulge, and Kissinger’s letters home about the mud in Germany that “crept into your hair, your food, your teeth, your clothes and sometimes your mind,” soon became complaints about the ice and drinking water out of mud holes and tank tracks. He described the firing of German machine guns “like a curtain tearing,” and it was around this time, amid a company that suffered proportionally high casualties, that he was promoted to special agent in charge of the regimental Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) team. Kissinger took to this work immediately, rounding up and evacuating German civilians “considered unreliable,” and poring through mail and paperwork left behind. In one town, where he described people living “in houses with cardboard in place of windows, with quagmires instead of streets,” he could nevertheless also remark, “Germany now knows what it means to wander and to be forced to leave places dear to one’s heart…. It is tragic no matter how [much] you hate the Germans.” He also added: “They are not mistreated. We are no Gestapo.”
By March 1945, however, with the 84th Division now in the city of Krefeld, many of whose civilians still remained, the difficulties of prioritizing the work of an occupying force, which would consume thousands of minds in the years to come, began to show itself. Was it, for instance, the job of Kissinger and others to restore relative order and local administration of the town, or (still with VE-Day unknown and in the future) was it necessary to put such goals aside in favor of finding and arresting career Nazis and separating them from those who had passively gone along? For a time, the latter became a priority, which also meant assessing the full sympathies of the local population to the nancy regime, many of whom could not be detained but had nevertheless lived with nancy propaganda for so long.
As Kissinger wrote in a CIC report, “For twelve years the Nazis have had a stranglehold on those in public office. Officialdom and Nazism have, as a result, become almost synonymous in the public mind. It becomes the duty therefore of the occupying authorities to clean the city administration of these cliques of Nazis.” Such a job was ideal for Kissinger, who could speak the language, and whose psychological insight into the enemy was already keenly perceptive.
Kissinger’s Jewishness also came into play: his dog tag identified his religion, and if captured he undoubtedly would have been killed immediately, as had happened to German-Jewish interrogators taken in early 1945. Kissinger would also have been aware that, of the 800 or so Jews that had lived in Krefeld before the war, only four remained, the rest having emigrated or been rounded up. And it was on April 10, 1945, that he came to witness what nothing, not his childhood experiences of anti-Semitism in Fürth, not his knowledge of the nightmare of history, not the hell of battle and the closeness of death, could have prepared him for. Even the words of his Rabbi in 1942, who had also fled Fürth for Washington Heights, describing “unimaginable mass murders” carried out against Jews, could have meant much to seeing it firsthand.
While a labor rather than a death camp, and with only a handful of barracks, when Kissinger and the rest of the 84th came upon the concentration camp at Ahlem, they found hell in miniature. Perhaps at the now more well-known camps it was possible to even get lost or awed by the scope of death and destruction; this was not possible at Ahlem, located only a few miles west of Hanover, where every detail was near at hand. By January of that year, some 600 out of a total of 800 prisoners were still alive, and in early April all but 200 or so were force marched to Bergen-Belsen. Those who stayed behind were too sick to make the journey, and they would have been murdered and the complex destroyed but for the swift advance of the Americans. We only know Kissinger was there thanks to a fellow soldier, Vernon Tott, who long after the war published the photos he took at Ahlen. Only then did Kissinger admit to “one of the most horrifying experiences of my life.
Images that have become so familiar by now lay before these men in the flesh, close enough to touch, as indeed many of them were: emaciated corpses everywhere, indoors and out, stacks and piles of them, and a mass grave holding hundreds more. Tott remembered a young man they came upon in one of the barracks: “[T]here was a boy, about fifteen years old, who was lying in his own vomit, urine and stool. When he looked at me, I could see he was crying for help…. Our troop had just come through six months of bloody battle but what we were seeing here made us sick to our stomachs and some even cried.”
Another recalled: “The war will probably fade from memory, but those were the most pathetic human beings I have ever seen or hope to see in my whole life.” They also found “huge bull whips as well as some cat-o-nine tails,” and indeed one of the survivors mentioned how the SS guards frequently beat them: “They seemed to like to hit us.”
Soon after the liberation of Ahlem, Kissinger wrote a never published reflection called The Eternal Jew, repurposing the title of a nancy propaganda film to make a different point entirely. In part, it reads: “The concentration camp of Ahlem was built on a hillside overlooking Hannover. Barbed wire surrounded it. And as our jeep travelled down the street skeletons in striped suits lined the road. There was a tunnel in the side of the hill where the inmates worked 20 hours a day in semi-darkness.
“I stopped the jeep. Cloth seemed to fall from the bodies, the head was held up by a stick that once might have been a throat. Poles hang from the sides where arms should be, poles are the legs. ‘What’s your name?’ And the man’s eyes cloud and he takes off his hat in anticipation of a blow. ‘Folek … Folek Sama.’ ‘Don’t take off your hat, you are free now.’
“And as I say it, I look over the camp. I see huts, I observe the empty faces, the dead eyes. You are free now. I, with my pressed uniform, I haven’t lived in filth and squalor, I haven’t been beaten and kicked. What kind of freedom can I offer? I see my friend enter one of the huts and come out with tears in his eyes: ‘Don’t go in there. We had to kick to tell the dead from the living.’
“That is humanity in the 20th century. People reach such a stupor of suffering that life and death, animation or immobility can’t be differentiated anymore … Folek Sama, your foot had been crushed so that you can’t run away, your face is 40, your body is ageless, yet all your certificate reads is 16. And I stand there with my clean clothes and make a speech to you and your comrades.
“Folek Sama, humanity stands accused in you. I, Joe Smith, human dignity, everybody has failed you. You should be preserved in cement up here on the hillside for future generation to look upon and take stock. Human dignity, objective values have stopped at this barbed wire…. As long as conscience exists as a conception in this world you will personify it. Nothing done for you will ever restore you. You are eternal in this respect.”
Kissinger remained in Germany until 1947, long after he could have returned home. Writing back to his family in the United States who wished to see him, he said, “I agreed that no matter what happened, no matter who weakened, we would stay to do in our little way what we could to make all previous sacrifices meaningful. We would stay just long enough to do that. Continuing to work with CIC (also in the ranks was author J.D. Salinger), he helped both transition intelligence focus to the Soviet Communist threat and continuing to round up fugitive Nazis and make more pragmatic judgments about other Germans who also remained.
“We have not come here for revenge,” one of Kissinger’s secretaries recalled him saying, and indeed the complexity of these events lies in a small anecdote. One of the SS guards at Ahlem was Otto Harder, and while he did serve time in prison after the war, it is disturbing that his Wikipedia page today is more about his career as a professional soccer player.
It was “shocking incongruities” like these that faced Kissinger then, and which seem to have defined his life ever since. And whether in Ahlem, or slowly along the way during his time in the army, Kissinger lost his religious faith. On the one hand he did make the familiar point, “There was also the argument that in a world where one’s relatives are burnt to death, there could be no God.” But the experience of absolute horror carried with it the knowledge that, one might say, the world has to go on, not every perpetrator will be punished, not every murdered man or woman will be avenged, and life from then on will be compromised somehow.
Such realities also seemed to preclude anything like the God he had believed in as a child. These words he wrote to his parents must indeed have shocked them. “To me there is not only right and wrong but many shades in between…. The real tragedies in life are not in choices between right and wrong. Only the most callous of persons choose what they know to be wrong. Real tragedy comes [illegible] in a dilemma of evaluating what is right…. Real dilemmas are difficulties of the soul, provoking agonies, which you in your world of black and white can’t even begin to comprehend.”
Yet he also made time to visit Fürth, making sure his grandfather’s grave there was the “best kept in the cemetery.” He also took in a soccer game at the old stadium. “Fürth lost and the referee got beaten up, which was standard practice,” he wrote. “The German police couldn’t rescue him, so the American military police came up and recused the referee, and one guy sitting down next to me got up and yelled, ‘So that’s the democracy you guys are bringing us!’”
To have sat in the very stadium he had once been forbidden by law to enter and to know that in part his actions had made such a day possible, indeed possible enough to tell a funny story from his old hometown, provided him with some satisfaction. “I am usually not smug or self-satisfied,” Kissinger wrote, “but in Fürth yes.”
Army experience
Kissinger underwent basic training at Camp Croft in Spartanburg, South Carolina. On June 19, 1943, while stationed in South Carolina, at the age of 20 years, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen. The army sent him to study engineering at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania, but the program was canceled, and Kissinger was reassigned to the 84th Infantry Division. There, he made the acquaintance of Fritz Kraemer, a fellow immigrant from Germany who noted Kissinger's fluency in German and his intellect, and arranged for him to be assigned to the military intelligence section of the division. Kissinger saw combat with the division, and volunteered for hazardous intelligence duties during the Battle of the Bulge.[22]
During the American advance into Germany, Kissinger, only a private, was put in charge of the administration of the city of Krefeld, owing to a lack of German speakers on the division's intelligence staff. Within eight days he had established a civilian administration.[23] Kissinger was then reassigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), where he became a CIC Special Agent holding the enlisted rank of sergeant. He was given charge of a team in Hanover assigned to tracking down Gestapo officers and other saboteurs, for which he was awarded the Bronze Star.[24] In June 1945, Kissinger was made commandant of the Bensheim metro CIC detachment, Bergstrasse district of Hesse, with responsibility for denazification of the district. Although he possessed absolute authority and powers of arrest, Kissinger took care to avoid abuses against the local population by his command.[25]
In 1946, Kissinger was reassigned to teach at the European Command Intelligence School at Camp King and, as a civilian employee ***owing his separation from the army, continued to serve in this role.[26][27]
Kissinger would later recall that his experience in the army "made me feel like an American"
Por supuesto no tuvo más que buenas acciones hacia los alemanes
Henry Kissinger’s World War II - Warfare History Network
In November 1944, a young American soldier wrote back to his parents in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. Six years earlier, he and his family had fled Germany for the United States, only weeks before Kristallnacht, the infamous Night of Broken Glass.
Now here he was, having returned to the place where, had they stayed, he and his family may well have already perished. “So I am back where I wanted to be,” the young man wrote. “I think of the cruelty and barbarism those people out there in the ruins showed when they were on top. And then I feel proud and happy to be able to enter here as a free American soldier.”
News of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor came while Kissinger was at an (American) football game, back when the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers were also the names of football teams. “I didn’t know where Pearl Harbor was,” he admitted. At the time, however, Kissinger was both too young to be conscripted and not yet a naturalized citizen. By the end of 1942, the conscription age was lowered to 18, and after three months of basic training at Camp Croft, South Carolina, he became a naturalized citizen. Like others of the nearly 10,000 German-Jewish refugees who served America in the war, part of his oath included renouncing his allegiance “particularly to Germany, of whom I have heretofore been subject.”
By September of that year, Kissinger and his fellow soldiers were sailing for Europe; in early November they crossed from England and landed on Omaha Beach, still littered with the debris from D-Day. Barely three weeks later, surely a testament to the British and American soldiers who had come before them, G Company was already in Germany. This was where Kissinger wrote back to his parents, not wanting to miss the moment where he could begin with the words, “Somewhere in Germany.”
“Somewhere” soon became the Battle of the Bulge, and Kissinger’s letters home about the mud in Germany that “crept into your hair, your food, your teeth, your clothes and sometimes your mind,” soon became complaints about the ice and drinking water out of mud holes and tank tracks. He described the firing of German machine guns “like a curtain tearing,” and it was around this time, amid a company that suffered proportionally high casualties, that he was promoted to special agent in charge of the regimental Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) team. Kissinger took to this work immediately, rounding up and evacuating German civilians “considered unreliable,” and poring through mail and paperwork left behind. In one town, where he described people living “in houses with cardboard in place of windows, with quagmires instead of streets,” he could nevertheless also remark, “Germany now knows what it means to wander and to be forced to leave places dear to one’s heart…. It is tragic no matter how [much] you hate the Germans.” He also added: “They are not mistreated. We are no Gestapo.”
By March 1945, however, with the 84th Division now in the city of Krefeld, many of whose civilians still remained, the difficulties of prioritizing the work of an occupying force, which would consume thousands of minds in the years to come, began to show itself. Was it, for instance, the job of Kissinger and others to restore relative order and local administration of the town, or (still with VE-Day unknown and in the future) was it necessary to put such goals aside in favor of finding and arresting career Nazis and separating them from those who had passively gone along? For a time, the latter became a priority, which also meant assessing the full sympathies of the local population to the nancy regime, many of whom could not be detained but had nevertheless lived with nancy propaganda for so long.
As Kissinger wrote in a CIC report, “For twelve years the Nazis have had a stranglehold on those in public office. Officialdom and Nazism have, as a result, become almost synonymous in the public mind. It becomes the duty therefore of the occupying authorities to clean the city administration of these cliques of Nazis.” Such a job was ideal for Kissinger, who could speak the language, and whose psychological insight into the enemy was already keenly perceptive.
Kissinger’s Jewishness also came into play: his dog tag identified his religion, and if captured he undoubtedly would have been killed immediately, as had happened to German-Jewish interrogators taken in early 1945. Kissinger would also have been aware that, of the 800 or so Jews that had lived in Krefeld before the war, only four remained, the rest having emigrated or been rounded up. And it was on April 10, 1945, that he came to witness what nothing, not his childhood experiences of anti-Semitism in Fürth, not his knowledge of the nightmare of history, not the hell of battle and the closeness of death, could have prepared him for. Even the words of his Rabbi in 1942, who had also fled Fürth for Washington Heights, describing “unimaginable mass murders” carried out against Jews, could have meant much to seeing it firsthand.
While a labor rather than a death camp, and with only a handful of barracks, when Kissinger and the rest of the 84th came upon the concentration camp at Ahlem, they found hell in miniature. Perhaps at the now more well-known camps it was possible to even get lost or awed by the scope of death and destruction; this was not possible at Ahlem, located only a few miles west of Hanover, where every detail was near at hand. By January of that year, some 600 out of a total of 800 prisoners were still alive, and in early April all but 200 or so were force marched to Bergen-Belsen. Those who stayed behind were too sick to make the journey, and they would have been murdered and the complex destroyed but for the swift advance of the Americans. We only know Kissinger was there thanks to a fellow soldier, Vernon Tott, who long after the war published the photos he took at Ahlen. Only then did Kissinger admit to “one of the most horrifying experiences of my life.
Images that have become so familiar by now lay before these men in the flesh, close enough to touch, as indeed many of them were: emaciated corpses everywhere, indoors and out, stacks and piles of them, and a mass grave holding hundreds more. Tott remembered a young man they came upon in one of the barracks: “[T]here was a boy, about fifteen years old, who was lying in his own vomit, urine and stool. When he looked at me, I could see he was crying for help…. Our troop had just come through six months of bloody battle but what we were seeing here made us sick to our stomachs and some even cried.”
Another recalled: “The war will probably fade from memory, but those were the most pathetic human beings I have ever seen or hope to see in my whole life.” They also found “huge bull whips as well as some cat-o-nine tails,” and indeed one of the survivors mentioned how the SS guards frequently beat them: “They seemed to like to hit us.”
Soon after the liberation of Ahlem, Kissinger wrote a never published reflection called The Eternal Jew, repurposing the title of a nancy propaganda film to make a different point entirely. In part, it reads: “The concentration camp of Ahlem was built on a hillside overlooking Hannover. Barbed wire surrounded it. And as our jeep travelled down the street skeletons in striped suits lined the road. There was a tunnel in the side of the hill where the inmates worked 20 hours a day in semi-darkness.
“I stopped the jeep. Cloth seemed to fall from the bodies, the head was held up by a stick that once might have been a throat. Poles hang from the sides where arms should be, poles are the legs. ‘What’s your name?’ And the man’s eyes cloud and he takes off his hat in anticipation of a blow. ‘Folek … Folek Sama.’ ‘Don’t take off your hat, you are free now.’
“And as I say it, I look over the camp. I see huts, I observe the empty faces, the dead eyes. You are free now. I, with my pressed uniform, I haven’t lived in filth and squalor, I haven’t been beaten and kicked. What kind of freedom can I offer? I see my friend enter one of the huts and come out with tears in his eyes: ‘Don’t go in there. We had to kick to tell the dead from the living.’
“That is humanity in the 20th century. People reach such a stupor of suffering that life and death, animation or immobility can’t be differentiated anymore … Folek Sama, your foot had been crushed so that you can’t run away, your face is 40, your body is ageless, yet all your certificate reads is 16. And I stand there with my clean clothes and make a speech to you and your comrades.
“Folek Sama, humanity stands accused in you. I, Joe Smith, human dignity, everybody has failed you. You should be preserved in cement up here on the hillside for future generation to look upon and take stock. Human dignity, objective values have stopped at this barbed wire…. As long as conscience exists as a conception in this world you will personify it. Nothing done for you will ever restore you. You are eternal in this respect.”
Kissinger remained in Germany until 1947, long after he could have returned home. Writing back to his family in the United States who wished to see him, he said, “I agreed that no matter what happened, no matter who weakened, we would stay to do in our little way what we could to make all previous sacrifices meaningful. We would stay just long enough to do that. Continuing to work with CIC (also in the ranks was author J.D. Salinger), he helped both transition intelligence focus to the Soviet Communist threat and continuing to round up fugitive Nazis and make more pragmatic judgments about other Germans who also remained.
“We have not come here for revenge,” one of Kissinger’s secretaries recalled him saying, and indeed the complexity of these events lies in a small anecdote. One of the SS guards at Ahlem was Otto Harder, and while he did serve time in prison after the war, it is disturbing that his Wikipedia page today is more about his career as a professional soccer player.
It was “shocking incongruities” like these that faced Kissinger then, and which seem to have defined his life ever since. And whether in Ahlem, or slowly along the way during his time in the army, Kissinger lost his religious faith. On the one hand he did make the familiar point, “There was also the argument that in a world where one’s relatives are burnt to death, there could be no God.” But the experience of absolute horror carried with it the knowledge that, one might say, the world has to go on, not every perpetrator will be punished, not every murdered man or woman will be avenged, and life from then on will be compromised somehow.
Such realities also seemed to preclude anything like the God he had believed in as a child. These words he wrote to his parents must indeed have shocked them. “To me there is not only right and wrong but many shades in between…. The real tragedies in life are not in choices between right and wrong. Only the most callous of persons choose what they know to be wrong. Real tragedy comes [illegible] in a dilemma of evaluating what is right…. Real dilemmas are difficulties of the soul, provoking agonies, which you in your world of black and white can’t even begin to comprehend.”
Yet he also made time to visit Fürth, making sure his grandfather’s grave there was the “best kept in the cemetery.” He also took in a soccer game at the old stadium. “Fürth lost and the referee got beaten up, which was standard practice,” he wrote. “The German police couldn’t rescue him, so the American military police came up and recused the referee, and one guy sitting down next to me got up and yelled, ‘So that’s the democracy you guys are bringing us!’”
To have sat in the very stadium he had once been forbidden by law to enter and to know that in part his actions had made such a day possible, indeed possible enough to tell a funny story from his old hometown, provided him with some satisfaction. “I am usually not smug or self-satisfied,” Kissinger wrote, “but in Fürth yes.”
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