When George Leitman first arrives in Germany, he is only 19 years old. It is the spring of 1945, shortly before the end of the war in Europe. Soldiers from the United States, Britain and the Red Army are advancing on all fronts to liberate Europe from the crimes of the National Socialists led by Adolf Hitler.
When Leitman and his comrades from the sapper battalion of the Sixth US Army set foot on German soil, the war is still raging. The situation in the villages of southern Germany is chaotic. “The front line was extremely mobile“, he recalls. In the last months of the war, the Wehrmacht and the SS fight fanatically to preserve the fading Nazi regime. Leitman experienced many of the horrors of the war, which he still remembers today.
A sight he will never forget
“We arrived in a suburb”, he recalled almost 80 years later. “There were 15-20 children there - all boys. They were 10-12 years old and all of them were hanged. I knocked on the nearest door and asked what had happened”, Leitman recalled. Local people told him that the children had been killed by the fearsome Waffen SS (the military branch of the SS). “Apparently they gathered all the children in the village, gave them an anti-tank grenade launcher and ordered them to shoot as soon as the first American tank appeared. But at the sight of the tanks, the children ran away," Leitman told DW.
"A day later, the SS men returned, gathered the children together and hung them on trees. They had hung their own children!", says the American veteran. Later, historians were able to document numerous other crimes by the Wehrmacht and the SS, who also killed German civilians who refused to fight.
“I began to doubt humanity“
“The Germans killed millions of people in Germany and Europe, they even killed their own children, and this image is forever etched in my mind: how the dead bodies of children hang on trees and sway in the wind".
George Leitman's impressions of the war shaped him forever. "The image of the children struck me so hard that I began to doubt humanity. I began to think that you can't even fully trust yourself. Because there was nothing rational in what motivated the SS men in their actions," says the American veteran.
Also disturbing is the fact that in the decades after the end of the war, almost all of the German mass murderers and their accomplices denied their own responsibility for the war, which took the lives of over 60 million people. They also denied that they supported the fascist ideology that divided people into worthy and unworthy of life. It was this ideology that ultimately led to the mass extermination of European Jews, Sinti and Roma, as well as many other people. The Germans killed, shot or gassed nearly 1.5 million children - most of them Jews.
The Leitman family is also a victim of the Holocaust
George Leitman is not only an American soldier who fought against Nazi Germany. He himself survived the Holocaust. He was born in Vienna, and when the Nazis occupied the country, his Jewish family emigrated in 1940. George, his mother, his grandparents received visas to the United States. But not his father Josef, who left for what was then Yugoslavia in 1940. Then the rest of the family left for the United States by ship and George Leitman never saw his father again. After the war, George pursued an academic career in the United States - he became a professor of engineering at the elite American university “Berkeley“ in California and received numerous honors and awards.
George now lives in a nursing home in Berkeley with his wife Nancy. "I often ask myself: how is it possible in such a short time to turn such an educated people like the Germans into something so horrific", says Leitman and adds: "Every time I met Germans, I invariably asked myself whether they or their parents were not guilty and what exactly it was".
At the age of 18, Leitman decided to volunteer for the US Army, he wanted to find his father or at least learn more about his fate. Thus began his fight against the Germans.
„True Hell“
"When we reached the Kaufering concentration camp near Munich, my comrades were terrified. They were disgusted by what the Germans had done. Then I wondered again where my father was. When I looked at the liberated people, I kept hoping to see him again.
The Kaufering concentration camp consisted of eleven different camps – the Nazis deported 23,000 people, mainly Eastern European Jews, who were used as forced laborers for the German arms industry. Eventually, they all had to be liquidated. It was called extermination by labor.
When George Leitmann entered the liberated camp in April 1945, he was confronted with a “true hell” – that is how one survivor described the conditions in the concentration camp. – “There were corpses everywhere. Many of them were still smoldering because the Germans had tried to burn them. But because the people were just skin and bones, they didn”t burn,” the veteran recalled. To this day, these images still wake him up at night.
„Coldness and ruthlessness will turn against us all"
Today, a Holocaust memorial has been built on the site of the former concentration camp. At the solemn commemoration on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the camp's liberation, words of growing concern for the future are also heard: including because of Donald Trump's policy in the United States and Russia's aggressive war against Ukraine. „The ghost of fascism is returning - the power of the stronger“, says Viennese historian Florian Wenninger in a speech: “Elon Musk believes that empathy is the greatest weakness of Western civilization. Nevertheless, we must remain firm. If social behavior, a sense of justice and compassion are attacked purposefully, coldness and ruthlessness will turn against us all".
George Leitman is also concerned about the processes in politics. "It is amazing that a person like Donald Trump can become president. It is disturbing that large sections of society support fascist ideas. Whenever the blame for something has been thrown on entire groups of people, it has led to human tragedies", says the 99-year-old American war veteran.
In May, George Leitman turns 100. Despite all the difficulties, he says he has had a good life: he has managed to travel the world, start a family and meet interesting people. He only learned how his father died years after the end of the war: he was shot by the Germans in a camp in Yugoslavia - along with hundreds of other prisoners. Just because he is Jewish. To this day, George Leitman tries to imagine what the last minutes of his father's life were like. These thoughts never leave him.
Author: Hans Pfeiffer