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Six years after his hometown, the small Bavarian village of Gauknigshofen, was blanketed with shattered windows and engulfed in flame on Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, Werner Kleeman returned as an American soldier and arrested the Nazi who had arrested him.
The 89-year-old Flushing resident was among the 30,000 men rounded up in November of 1938 and taken to Dachau concentration camp, where they slept on “platforms, triple-deckers, with a little bit of straw on it” and “got one bowl of soup a day if you were lucky,” Kleeman said.
Fortunately, at that point, however, the Nazis were releasing from concentration camps all decorated German war veterans and prisoners who had documented means of leaving Germany.
A distant relative in Omaha, Nebraska put a $5,000 letter of credit on deposit for Kleeman and sent an affidavit on his behalf, so the teenager managed to leave Dachau six weeks after he had entered. Kleeman asserts that he harbored no guilt about his early exit.
“You had to look out for yourself. You could not worry about other people. You had to save your life, that’s all,” he said, gesturing with vigor.
“You had to get out as fast as you could.”
Nevertheless, Kleeman’s voice shook as he held up an old passport with a photograph of him when he left Dachau. A stamp bearing a swastika covers part of the photograph.
War had been raging for a few months when the 19-year-old Kleeman finally made it to the U.S. - his parents and siblings arrived a month after him - eager to lend his support to the war effort.
“I would have volunteered, but a non-resident might be suspected of being a spy if they did that, so I had to wait to be called,” Kleeman wrote in his book, “From Dachau to D-Day.” Kleeman did not have to wait long, however, before he was drafted into the U.S. Army.
After a repeat 12-day voyage across the Atlantic, Kleeman found himself stationed alongside authors J.D. Salinger and Ernest Hemingway, got a job as an interpreter - after being rejected from Officer Candidate School because he was a Jew - and eventually landed in Normandy on D-Day.
However, Kleeman’s job was not finished. He had a personal “mission” waiting to be accomplished back in Gauknigshofen.
“I had rounded up by the Germans [the local police] the people who participated in Kristallnacht in my hometown,” Kleeman explained, his loud intonations revealing the permanent hearing loss he suffered in a fierce wartime bombardment, and the quivers in his voice illuminating the emotional anguish he still reels from 60 years later.
“One man I didn’t tell them to because I rounded him up myself: the man who arrested me. I went out with my jeep and my gun, picked him up, and put him into the jail. He couldn’t believe it but he had no choice,” Kleeman recalled.
The 11 accused Germans were tried merely on disturbing the peace, and only their initials were listed in the court papers. All served under a year of jail time.
“In other words, they were treated like neighbors and not like criminals,” Kleeman said.
Kleeman is nonetheless pleased with what he was able to accomplish in the war-ravaged country of his childhood.
He is also proud of what he recovered from the ruins of Gauknigshofen: a ceremonial Kiddish cup and spice box, as well as the 300-year-old handwritten member book, which a Christian neighbor - “a friend of the Jews” - had salvaged from Kleeman’s synagogue before it was destroyed.
Kleeman also still has one of his army ration cards from the war.
“Seeing this card is a bit like looking through a keyhole into a secret life that is long gone,” he wrote in his book.
But looking into his eyes and hearing his voice, it is apparent that Werner Kleeman’s “secret life” is still alive within him.
