Ralph was born in Germany and fled the Nazis. 90 Years old.

Volunteered for US Army Counter Intelligence

Interrogated second level Nazis in Europe (the step under those that went to Nuremberg)

 

 

Born in Hamburg, Germany in 1945 August 31^st

Father- Felix Backrack a merchant banker

Mother- Ernie Muenden

The families name was Bacharach and my original name was Ralph Bacharach

 

In Germany a little over 9 years, my very energetic father insisted on moving the family to England because he saw the threat of Nazi Germany even though the family had not yet been affected very much.

He saw what was happening and all his life he was energetically foresighted and that was part of his characteristic.

I was not afraid, but my older brother had a bad experience at school where the Nazi’s were beginning to exert themselves and he was being bullied so my parents just whisked us off to England. We both spoke fairly good English because my parents had brought over an English governess who spoke no German so we rapidly had to learn English. I started speaking English at age four.

In England 6 years till age 15, we lost our home by a direct hit, my fathers office got a direct hit and we had to be evacuated and my brother and I were at boarding school outside of London so we were not as directly affected but for the time our parents home had been hit and for vacations we had to go in the boarding houses, we really felt the war. When we were at home for our home had been hit , my father made a shelter on the second floor, put up big wood planking across the windows and with one light bulb we spent the nights there while we were listening to the bombs and the aircraft shells meanwhile teaching us bridge. I used to enjoy playing bridge, played a few bridge tournaments before I was married. My wife tried to play bridge but was not talented, so we have not played much bridge since then.

We were hearing about the persecution of Jews, we were hearing about our family who said, “we’ve lived here for 300 years”, my mothers family had lived in Germany for 300 years and they said, “we are old, they won’t bother us.” Of course, they were deadly wrong. My father tried to persuade some of the relatives to leave, and they were lucky because they were leading a comfortable prosperous life there and if they had to leave at that time they would have had to greatly reduce their standard of living. It wasn’t until 1938 that they realized that even they had to leave. My grandparents and one uncle fled to Holland with sad results, My grandparents refused to go underground because they said we have limited resources and there are limited hiding places, and the hiding places have to be reserved for the younger generation, so they perished in Sorbibor (?). My uncle, his wife and young child went into hiding and were betrayed. My uncle did not survive. His wife and infant daughter miraculously survived and that was that part of the family.

My father tried to leave England in 1939, because he saw the war coming and he said it would be a disaster for England. Again, remarkably foresighted and energetic. Just at the time he was trying to get a visa, the Czech crisis arose and all the discretionary visas were given to people who had to flee Czechoslovakia.   So he came back to England and it took two years for him to be able to get transportation. He could get a visa but first he couldn’t get transportation for the family. He could get transportation for himself because he had business in the USA. So eventually we signed on as crew on a 4,500 ton Greek tramp boat. We had made payments to the captain so that we would act as crew only in emergency. But my parents had the captain’s cabin and my brother and I slept in a pantry. We were 28 days from the coast of Wales to Montreal, Canada which was terribly boring.

About 15 days out near the Azores, our ship which had two engines, old tramp boat, one of the engines broke down, and we could not keep up with the convoy. So we had to drop out of the convoy and the captain who was the only one who spoke any English was very reassuring. He says, “we’re old, we’re small, they won’t want to waste a torpedo on us.” And we hoped he was right. While we were on the ocean, one a day the captain came in and turned on the radio to listen to a news broadcast. We learned about the German invasion of Russia. We weren’t hearing very much because the news broadcasts were very short and very censored. So when we arrived in Montreal, Canada, we had $160 between the four of us. That’s all that we were able to take out in cash. We went to a good hotel where they put us up and they kept our luggage as security. We had a lot of luggage until my father could raise some money. For almost four weeks it took him to go and get all the paperwork so that we could enter the United States.

My father had a business in which he was a partner in the United States he started back in 1939 as a way of transferring money out of England. The British tried to get the money back and he was able to resist them. In those days Britain was very short of dollars and they wanted to try to grab any dollars that they could.

I was 16 and in England I was six weeks short of sitting for the high school diploma exam, When I came to the United States the question was what was I going o do now? So I was dragged down to the board of education where they said, “academically he’s ready for college” because in England many of the academic subjects were taught more intensively than in America, but they said “socially he’s going to be a disaster,” so they stuck me back in high school and I had three semesters in high school greatly to my initial disgust. Then after three semesters in high school I went at 17 to college at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute which is in upstate New York to study engineering.

 

The Army

-13:20- after 9 months I turned 18 and volunteered for the Army. Volunteered because I was an alien technically, an enemy alien by that time because the U.S. was at war with Germany. They couldn’t draft me but I could volunteer and be drafted so I volunteered to be drafted on the basis of, very clearly, if I didn’t volunteer I would ——-continue to be an enemy alien and that was the last thing that I wanted to do.

 

We did not feel any allegiance to Germany, and while we felt some allegiance to Brittan, we had no doubts in our minds that America was going to be the place where we were going to make our lives. On the 28 days we were aboard ship, we had very little to do except read and amongst other things, we read American history and memorized the 48 United States and a few other things. However, the history books we read were British history books of America, and we later discovered that the American view was not exactly the same as the British view of how America became separated from Britain. So I had one episode in high school about the third day in American History class when they were teaching the American Revolution, and the teacher told the class and in the book it said that all the British and the King wanted to fight the American colonists.   I stood up and I said, “that’s not completely correct. The Earl of Chatham stood up in the house of Lords and waved his cane and said, ‘I can defeat the American Colonists with this cane just as well as the British can try to defeat the Americans a continent away.’” Well, the class was absolutely delighted to hear the teacher contradicted. The school teacher let it go on for a couple minutes and then he settled the class back down and after class I was asked to stay. The teacher said, “Thank you for broadening the view of American History, but in the future I’d like you to wait until you are called upon before you get up and cause an uproar.” So at least I thought that was an amazing episode.

My mother came from an Orthodox family which converted to Reform during WWI. My father came from a family which was essentially non religious. He didn’t discover he was Jewish until 1933, at least that’s the way he tells it. He was in the German army during WWI, His upbringing was with ethical culture and not with any organized religion at all. So we came to the United States and my mother took charge of the religious upbringing, traveled down to Temple Emanuel which is the largest reform temple in Manhattan where a relative had been one of the founders. I I was enrolled in Sunday school. I was too old, so I went in the confirmation class and much about my Jewish background was acquired there. Although in England while I was at boarding school I had correspondence with a Rabbi in London to read Jewish history and give me some Jewish background. But the school I was in was a church of England school, and so we went to chapel every day, Twice on Sundays we went to Sunday school on Sundays for three hours, studied the New Testament and it didn’t do me any harm, It didn’t change my understanding that I was Jewish. The New Testament was somebody else’s and there were lots of good things in the new testament. So I had a very unusual upbringing.

 

The Army

-21:51- I had not much choice. The Navy wouldn’t take me, the Air Force wouldn’t take me because of my German birth. So I was stuck in the Army and trained to go into the infantry and had some interesting experiences.

The later experiences were more interesting. The training experiences were just physical demands, at that time, of getting into the infantry and were quite severe.

I weighed 118 lbs. I was 5 foot and still grew an inch and a half in the Army which caused a major problem, because the Army is used to people gaining or losing weight and changing the clothes, but once they’ve written down your height that’s it. There’s no procedure in the Army for recording a change in height, and I grew an inch and a half, so all my pants were too short, so it took some major effort to get me pants that fit. We went through all the usual training maneuvers which were quite strenuous and did me no harm. I’d been born with a heart murmur, and when I went into the Army the physician in New York said to me, “you have a murmur which I can still hear, the Army probably will ignore the murmur, which is fine, it’ll act up within six months, you’ll get an honorable discharge and be able to avoid all the hazards of being shot at.” Well, he was wrong, the heart didn’t act up, I went through very strenuous training and that was behind me. The physicians could still hear a very slight murmur today but apparently it has not stopped me from a strenuous Army experience and enjoying tennis and lots of skiing and lots of sports.

When you finish boot camp, the army decides to stick you in whatever they need to at that moment. I got stuck into a chemical mortar battalion. Those are mortars, 4.2 inch diameter, range of about 3,000 yards fired at a high angle, so we got trained to shoot, carry and deploy the mortars and get ready for combat.

The one experience I had was I was usually the lightest in my platoon. So I got to carry the lightest piece of the mortar, because you almost always had to take the motor out of the jeep trailer and carry it anywhere from half a mile to a mile to go into firing position, well the mortar is heavy and as the lightest man I got the lightest piece to carry, It was only 65 lbs. Well, that plus my backpack plus my gas mask plus my rifle weighed more than I did. Anyway, in retrospect good exercise. At the time I huffed and puffed but I made it.

26:52- in November of 1944 the invasion had started. Our training was completed and we were ready to be deployed to Europe. In December we were at the point of embarkation and I caught pneumonia, a full fledged case of pneumonia. So while my battalion shipped out, I was in the hospital with a high temperature and getting penicillin which was essentially the only antibiotic they had at the time. A month later I had recovered and I was sent to Fort Dix, New Jersey, and scheduled to go with whatever unit was going over to Europe which needed extra men. And, of course the hazard was that I would be stuck in an infantry unit, but by great chance, another chemical mortar battalion was being deployed. They wanted my particular skills which was communications, radio, Morse code and climbing telegraph poles. So I got put right into that battalion and shipped overseas and by the end of January was back in England after three and a half years. I’m not sure I was ever particularly conscious of the time lapse. What I was impressed by was the way it changed from the time that I had left. Since I had a grandmother there and relatives there which I got to visit briefly I realized how hard the war was on England in terms of food, in terms of everything.

One of my experiences was I got a compassionate leave. None of the others were allowed to leave because they were shipped from England to France to start fighting. But while we were getting our stuff together I got a compassionate leave to go for two nights to London to see my relatives. And I got the best sergeant to get me lots of meat and butter and all the things that the English weren’t getting. I arrived there and I realized what very meager rations they were on by the way they absolutely… I brought about three months worth of supplies for that family, but England had changed, People were still determined, but they were very shabby and not in good spirits.

The V1 bombs and V2 bombs were beginning. This was February 1945. They were beginning to hit, and after I had left there was a close hit to the home where my grandmother was living . The home was uninhabitable, so she was injured somewhat and had to be evacuated, but that was after I had left.

I was lucky enough to have started learning English at age four and I did not end up with a German accent. My German also was without accent, but it was at the level of a nine year old which later I found out had some limitations. My two year older brother never lost his accent completely. All his life he’s had a slight accent.

32:16- at the tail end of the war May 8^th, I was in a unit which was deep inside of Austria, and we got the command to go to a certain village and accept the surrender of a German army. We arrived there, and they hadn’t heard that they were supposed to surrender. They knew that something was supposed to happen, but they had not received the command to surrender and in the German army you didn’t do anything unless you received a command. So we were driving on a road and all the guns were tracking us. Nobody shot, but it was sort of uncomfortable. We wound up going to this village we drove past where we could see the command post was. The lieutenant colonel who in civilian life had been a grocery clerk, in the army he had been loyal in the State army groups and so he got promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. We arrived at the field and he said, “what do we do now?” So he said, “Baxter take two of our men and go down to the field and tell them to surrender.” So that’s what we did. While we were marching into the village the three of us agreed we wouldn’t take our carabiners off our shoulders, because we were totally outnumbered. We saw where the guards were posted, and the guards said, “halt!” and we ignored them. We walked inside this village city hall and there were two more guards standing in front of a room. We walked in there and we saw a large conference table with maybe twenty people around there. When we walked in there they all stood up and said, “Heil Hitler!” and I said, “who is the commanding officer?” A major general identified himself and he said in German, “What is the rank of your commanding officer?” and I said, “I am not authorized for any discussions, you will follow me” and he did! So we marched out to the field and when we got out there the Lieutenant Colonel said, “What do we do next?” in English, of course. I translated that “how many men do you have in your command?” Well, anyway, I ended up as a corporal, essentially organizing the surrender with some mishaps; like the place I suggested for the company which was coming behind us where we were going to go and pitch their tents turned out to be an ammunition dump. So in the middle of the night a German officer came and said, “do you realize you are camped on top of an ammunition dump?” So we had to move and, of course everybody’s mad at me because I had suggested that place, but that was a rather heady adventure for a 19 year old.

36:38- it was a very heavy experience… after a number of months we were withdrawn back to France to train to go to Japan, because that was when Japan was still going on. I went to Japanese intelligence school and learned a few words of Japanese including “danger mine fields.” Why? Because the Japanese thought that these stupid infidels couldn’t read their writing, so they posted their mind fields which said, “danger mine fields.” So we were trained to read those signs and know where the mine fields were. Well, the war in Japan ended just as I graduated from that intelligence school. Well, intelligence in quotes, it was not very sophisticated. A few months later I was able to get a transfer into intelligence where my German language skills would be useful rather than being transferred to Japan. I went back into Germany and became a special agent in the counter intelligence corps which was, again, a heavy experience, because within a few weeks I had great authority as a credentialed agent whose job was to find Nazis. The objective was to find war criminals and high ranking Nazi’s and get them interned and to get the lower level Nazis out of official positions so that those people who had not been serious Nazis, they all were Nazis, but the ones that had not been seriously active Nazis, to start rebuilding the German community. That was a very exciting experience as far as I was concerned, because you had power and for a 20 year old to have that much power and no real control over your power, there wasn’t anybody sitting over your shoulder to whom you had to get authority. So after about five months, to my surprise, I was offered to come home and be discharged. That’s earlier than I had expected. At the same time they offered me a commission if I signed a two year agreement to stay as an agent in the counterintelligence corps. I was tempted, but what turned me off for sure was just about that time we got instructions that we were to spend about 20% of our time tracking communists, because the cold war had started. At our level, we did not understand the Cold War at all, but the idea that I would have to go spend 20% of my time watching communists and all the antics they were up to, and at that time they were up to lots of antics in Germany, I decided, no, that was not for me. So I demobilized and came back to the United States. I was just a couple months short of 21 when I was discharged as a veteran and ready to go back to college.

 

After war

A great step down from lots of authority. At first going back to the discipline of college was hard and going back to the discipline of sitting down and doing your lessons. I had been away for two and a half years. Catching up, my first year was a hard year. My parents had moved to California; they had started a chicken farm in Van Nuys which at that time had one stop sign. Wilshire Blvd. was still fields with grazing cows. This was 1946. As an engineer I had to be able to use math.

The war ended when I was in Europe; first the German war and then the Japanese war. When the Japanese surrendered, I was on leave in London and I remember all the celebration of the people; finally, the war was over.

England essentially had exhausted themselves in the war

After the war in Europe, yes, when the war in Germany was over, I went back to retrain for Japan. Then Japan surrendered; then there was an intermission while they figured out what to do with the battalion. I went into the counterintelligence corps and spent almost 6 months in the counterintelligence corps, and then I came home.

I wasn’t that introspective. I was at that time anxious to get on with things and get my college degree and get to work. I had some of the psychology of a first generation immigrant. I wanted to have the security of being established and that influenced me for some time.

Everything was a different experience. On the East Coast college I had gone there during the war, lived at college knowing that I would go into military service then two and a half years later totally different environment. I don’t think I ever spent any time weighing the differences, I just went charging into what’s ahead.

I joined a Jewish fraternity. I was one of the founding members.

 

Working with chemical mortars

50:11-Chemical mortars at that time fired smoke and high explosives. They did not fire any gases. They were capable of firing gasses, but we had no ammunition with gas, so that was not one of the hazards. I was in the hospital with an ankle about four times the normal size, because I got shot at in a jeep and I jumped out of the jeep, landed badly and all sorts of other minor experiences. Didn’t lose anyone from the group I was with. I had a first cousin in England who was a navigator and a bomber. He crashed and was killed.

We got a tip that there was a high level Nazi hiding, so a colleague and myself went with guns drawn and we knocked on the door. When the door was opened there was a six foot 4 ramrod straight Colonel standing. He had been the commander of Hitler’s personal bodyguard, and he was the only person I interrogated in my spell as a special agent who did not claim to have rejected Natzism. Everybody else pretended they were never a Nazi. He believed in Nazis; he believed in Hitler.   He made no apologies. He had a German iron cross for his clasp. He was a second level war criminal and we shipped him off. The first levels were tried at Nuremberg and the second levels didn’t get much publicity, but they stuck them away for a very long time. The only other thing to mention is, “How did we get that tip?” Well, the colonel had apparently lived with this woman and she discovered that he was also having an affair with another woman. All of this just leads me to believe that hell has no fury like a woman scorned.

I did not talk about being Jewish, I did not, neither to my colleagues, nor to others. In later years, professionally, I had a lot of dealings over in Europe, in Germany, in Holland, in France in business and I never mentioned being Jewish. Some people assumed I was, but I didn’t mention it. I also never mentioned that I spoke German and conducted all my business affairs in English, sometimes listening to their conversations and hearing some things I wasn’t supposed to hear. This was not a way of denying being Jewish, it was just a fact that I felt from a business point of view I could get the business done better if that thing didn’t come up. For many years I used to travel to Germany on business, and I always tried to get out as fast as I could. I dealt with the older generation whom I had to presume had been involved with Nazis, and I dealt with the new generation who I knew were too young to have ever been Nazis, and yet something about Germany made me feel uncomfortable.

 

About Germany now

The Jews that are there are not German Jews, they are Polish Jews or Russian Jews. The German Jews were essentially exterminated or driven out with very few survivors and very even fewer who went back to Germany. The Germans made it very easy for them to come back They made sincere efforts to atone, but hardly any, certainly none of the ones we knew of ever went back to live in Germany, of the German Jews who had been driven out by Hitler who had survived somehow. And the Jews in Germany now don’t have those memories. And the new Germany is different. There is still some of the same there. It used to bother me that even the younger generation Germans had some of the arrogance which I remember of the older generation. Now I am probably much too sensitive of that and somebody coming from a much worse place in Poland where, of course, the Jews had a very miserable time would be sensitive to that, but it’s a new generation. One of the things you have to learn is that some of the things which were absolutely true 50 years ago or 40 years ago are no longer absolutely true; they are history.

 

The legacy of the experience

1:00:59- my experience was that in the service I changed from a boy to a man. I changed essentially from somebody who was stateless to an American. I started speaking American in self defense. When I first got into one of the units with an English accent they thought it was an affectation, and in self defense I had to stop saying “Caaunt.” I had to say can’t, And I had to constantly change some of the way I talked, because I realized that to the people that I was dealing with, this was offensive. So being in service did make a change in me in the way I interacted with people.

My feeling was that at that time there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that if anybody had to fight the Nazis, I had to. I couldn’t wait for somebody else to do it. When you get to places like Vietnam or Korea or places like that there is ambiguity, and some people generally felt that this was none of my business. I sympathize with the people who felt this ambiguity, because I realized that I never had that problem, and yet other serious, decent people have that problem, and it is one of the issues of our time.

I’m not very religious now. I am active in Jewish affairs but not religious to the desperation of the Rabbi, who I think is a great person, but we are not frequent temple goers. We are quite active in a number of Jewish affairs; Jewish Federation, Jewish family service, Anti-Defamation League are some of them and still active in some of them, and with conviction that these are good and worthwhile things to do. But the formal Jewish service is not something I feel strongly about. I’m also active in a couple of non-Jewish affairs; I’m active in Catholic Charities which does some very good work in Santa Barbara.

Even in the early 60’s British coffee was pretty dismal and tea, of course, was a great tradition and since I have been back in Britain many times over the years I’ve seen the enormous cultural changes between pre-war Britain and today. In so many different ways the pre war Britain was very narrow, and today’s version is much more broadly versed. And you can get a good cup of coffee; you can get a good meal, even if it isn’t Yorkshire Pudding.

1:09:38- relatively little. Most of it did not become public until bit by bit the camps were occupied and publicity. I did not realize the horror of the extermination camps. While in combat I liberated some slave labor camps, but that’s different from the extermination camps they had. I did not see the extermination camps and I was not aware, at least fully aware of the extermination camps. I had heard that they had extermination camps. I had heard that my grandparents had disappeared, but I had not seen it.

 

Advice for future generations

1:16:36- be prepared for change. Anything I can tell you now is likely to be marginal or useless 20-30 years from now because things change.