I grew up in a house with a Nazi flag hanging in the basement. It had been there since before I could walk, in my father’s den, a book-lined room with a dehumidifier running all summer. My father was an intellectual, a history professor at a large state university in the Midwest. But he had also been an army infantry officer in World War II. He went ashore at Normandy in July of 1944, and fought through the Battle of the Bulge to Germany and to the end of the war.
One day it occurred to me to ask him where he’d gotten the flag. He said a sergeant in his battalion pulled it down from the city hall when they took a German town in the war. April 1, 1945. Recklinghausen, Germany.
My father learned he had been selected to receive the Légion d’Honneur, the Legion of Honor, and they wanted him to come to France to receive the award and attend the anniversary of D-Day. I knew I had to go with him. Seeing him receive the award in the American cemetery on the cliffs of Normandy was humbling.
World War II had been a constant presence in my youth, from watching the Combat TV series to war movies like Sink the Bismark, Patton, and The Dirty Dozen. They all helped confirm the story I knew, that it was the good guys against evil, and the good guys won. It was the perfect story that you could hear a hundred times, because you knew it would always turn out right. No matter what part of it you read about or examined, no matter how dark or twisted a particular part of the story was, no matter how haunting or scary, it all came out right in the end. And the present given to my generation from my father’s was the gift of defeating the evil of Nazism.
After the celebration in Normandy, I took my family on a short driving tour of Europe, and the one place I insisted on seeing was Recklinghausen. I had to see where my father’s flag had come from.
It was there we had encountered the neo-Nazis with their masks and torches. We went to a few other places in Germany, but I didn’t enjoy the trip after Recklinghausen. On the flight back, chasing the sun westward and never seeing darkness or sleeping, I had a lot of time to think. I thought about the flag in my father’s den flying over the city hall at Recklinghausen. I thought about the men who had defeated Nazism in the forties. And I thought again of my father.
His division was made up mostly of Midwesterners from Kansas and Missouri, with a few others like him thrown in from Indiana. When my father got to France in July of 1944, the battle line in Normandy was a few miles inland. His division was sent to take a city in Normandy called St. Lô. It was a terrible, bloody battle; and there began the massive casualties that decimated his battalion. They fought the Germans hammer and tong. From village to village and town to town, across rivers all the way to the Elbe River and to the end of the war. Of all of the officers in his battalion who went ashore at Normandy and fought to the end of the war, he was the only one who wasn’t killed or wounded.
But as I sat on the airplane on the way home, I was hit by the stark awareness that the poisonous philosophy that had grown to full bloom under Hitler’s Third Reich still lived. Some of its original advocates were still living, and now there were new advocates in Germany and elsewhere. I lay my head back on my seat and looked at my sleeping family.
They were exhausted from the trip and the way it had ended. They hadn’t recovered, and truthfully neither had I. Unable to sleep, the images of those neo-Nazis in Recklinghausen haunted me. I decided to make some discrete inquiries when I went back to work at my job as a special agent of the FBI in the J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington, D.C.