De: Worldsecuritynetwork
Foundation [mailto:newsletter@worldsecuritynetwork.com]
Enviada em: terça-feira, 30 de abril de 2013 05:38
Para: Mr. David Fleischer
Assunto: Hubertus at "Hubertus Haus
World Security Network reporting from Diethardt in Germany, April 27,
2013
Dear Friends of the World Security Network,
In the still impressive “Hubertus Haus” Fritz Kraemer
lived with his mother and brother as a child from 1914 until the 1930s, before
he started his law studies at the University of Frankfurt and later emigrated
to the U.S. in 1939.
It had been the hunting lodge of Consul Hagedorn of
Essen and in 1921 after his death was extended into a smaller private school
for 30 boys and girls, several of them with Jewish background. Fritz' mother
helped Mrs. Hagedorn to establish the boarding school, which was closed by the
Nazis in the early 1940s.
When, in 1939, Fritz’s Swedish wife Britta came to
visit her mother-in-law in Diethardt with the little son from safe Sweden just
before the war started, they were trapped there from September 1939 until May
1945. The Gestapo interviewed Britta about her husband several times.
Fritz Kraemer joined the U.S. Army in 1944 and fought
with the 84th Infantry Division within LtGen George S. Patton’s
Third Army. He personally allowed him to take leave and look for his family
after the Americans had reached the Elbe river in Germany. In a jeep he stopped
at the “Hubertus Haus” in Diethardt and found his mother, wife and son alive
and well.
His mother Anna Johanna Kraemer, who had converted to
Lutheranism like her husband, but was strictly Jewish under the Nuremberg Nazi
laws was one of only approximately 12.000 - 15.000 German Jews to survive the
Holocaust hiding in Germany although the local Ortsgruppen-Führer knew of her.
Her divorced husband Dr. Georg Kraemer was deported from nearby Koblenz on July
27, 1942 to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and died in November.
Several family members from Diethardt worked in the
school and admired Mrs. Hagedorn and Mrs. Kraemer, which could have been the
reason for her survival. The local people of Diethardt protected her. The
school was the main source of income and the village children were educated
there as well. After the war she joined her son Fritz Kraemer and his family in
Washington DC .
The majors of Diethardt and Nastätten welcomed the
news about Fritz Kraemer and invited to visit the “Hubertus Haus” and the small
city house and to discuss the past and the story of a man who was forced to
leave his Vaterland, joined the U.S. Army with two PhDs and one monocle and
became the iron mentor of Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig and an influential
advisor in the Pentagon.
When once Kissinger was standing in front of the
house, he told: “Dr. Kraemer, if I would have been raised in such a grand
house, I would be as self-confident as you are!