14.

“You told me this book is about Nazis,” my wife, Carol, says as she goes over the manuscript. “But here it is, Chapter Fourteen, and I’ve only met one Nazi, Albert Speer.”

Ah, but maybe you’ve met more than you know.

Nazis didn’t start their childhoods in uniform, those lightning bolt Waffen-SS emblems on their collars, Nazis for all the world to see, Stahlhelme covering their heads and their ears; their calf-high, polished boots, goose stepping. Look at Goering, see, his fat cheeks, in his school uniform, the little leather knapsack on his back. See, he’s singing. Hear him? It’s “Heidenröslein.” The Schubert song from the Goethe poem. He’s his mother’s boy. Such a thin, sweet voice, don’t you think? Cute in his lederhosen. He’s not sending the fighters off on another mission. And Goebbels—the little brat: he’s arguing with his teacher. Oh, and Hitler’s over here doing those watercolors of his. Bormann, so serious as he hits the chalk erasers together, standing ghostlike, haloed by the chalk dust. And Uncle Rudi. Didn’t everyone in Germany have an Onkel Rudi? Onkel Rot, the children called him, because of his red face. Uncle Red. So happy, coming back from camp in that Hitlerjugend uniform. Just a boy, really, even though everyone called him Onkel. Later he’s an SS officer—and look, behind him, come the other boys, legions and legions of boys from all the centuries all over the world, boys who will later go to war, now coming home for supper, and somewhere there I am, too, just a boy—a little boy. See me there: kicking the ball on the playground, going down the slide, at the other end of the teeter-totter from you. I have freckles. I throw my head back when I laugh.

Nazis? Hardly. Little boys on their way.

That’s it, you see, the way it just kind of creeps up on you from somewhere. That’s what I’m trying to figure out—how that bouncing blue-eyed baby of me ended up working with Nazis. Why, they were the villains, weren’t they? Everybody knew that, right? Anyone who’d watched Walter Cronkite narrate You Are There knew that.

Me—how did this happen to me? Me, of all people. A pal of the Nazis arresting black soldiers?! Come on. I was a good guy, wasn’t I? I had almost worked for the civil rights movement in the sixties. I watched war protests and visited hippies. Me, of all people. Me, my mother’s darling young son.

You know those school questionnaires about what you’re going to do with your life? Who would answer by saying, “Oh, I’ll go to college, study poetry and then I’ll go in the army so I can work with old Nazis. Yes, my long-term goal is working with Nazis.” Who would say a thing like this?