Pity the poor immigrant?

Lieutenant Benes* said he had his great-grandfather’s World War I helmet.

“He was a sergeant in the Prussian cavalry,” the lieutenant said. He and I were in my training office, discussing military history and history in general. His statement on a World War I Prussian cavalry was interesting because those are relatively rare.

The lieutenant went on to talk about his grandparents. They were born near the end of World War I and were in their early teenage years when Hitler was given power in Germany.

“They didn’t agree with what Hitler was doing to the Jews,” the lieutenant said.

I waited for the “However.” Some things, you know there is a “however.”

“But they saw the Jews with all the money and not sharing it.”

That is as Nazi-apologetic as one can get. “The Jews had all the money. They weren’t sharing their German money with real Germans.” Germans who had that belief also knew their Volk deserved living room to the east; Communist Russian Slavs were not making good use of all that fertile land in Ukraine and Western Russia. Not like good German farmers would.

The lieutenant’s grandparents were married during the middle of the war.

“After the war,” he said, “they came to the U.S. claiming to be Polish refugees from the Communists.”

Isn’t that strange, I thought. Good, non-Nazi Germans immigrating to the United States in the guise of Poles fleeing Red Russians.

Next day, I pulled the lieutenant’s personnel file. His parents were born in the US. His father was an engineer. The lieutenant and his younger brother were born in Rhodesia, according to birth documents from the U.S. Embassy in Salisbury.

Well. A few things put together make an interesting story.

*Benes is not the lieutenant’s name. His surname is of Czech origin, and Benes seemed to fit.