Death-Rays as Life-Savers in the Third Reich - Pedro Waloschek ...

only the most blinkered fanatic (i.e. Germán Armando Plett) had any
faith in a German victory.
At home in Buenos Aires we had pinned a large map of Europe on a
board. This map had been produced and distributed by the ‘German La
Plata Newspaper’ at the beginning of the war in anticipation of a
predicted conquest of the Ukraine (Europe’s corn basket). Like so
many others I used to pin little coloured flags on the map to record the
progress of the front lines. Even to a fourteen year old as me the war
situation was crystal clear.
My parents chose their words with great care and discretion when
they spoke about the war and about politics. They had endured years in
fear that Hitler may win. The general mood in Argentina tended to be
pro-Germany and, for a variety of reasons, the Germans were held in
high regard.
Back in 1933, following several interrogations by the armed Nazi
party police (SA and SS), after all his files and documents had been
seized, and his projects cancelled (he had been a successful architect in
Dresden until that time), my father managed to escape Germany
narrowly avoiding arrest. For him the possibility of a German victory
must have been an utter nightmare, yet he never spoke about it. On the
contrary he stubbornly declared that his leaving Germany in 1933 and
then Vienna in 1936 had been voluntary and that his emigration had
been in search of work. His earlier political activity as a committed
Social Democrat and his father-in-law’s Jewishness were facts he
either decided to ignore or repress. His policy of silence was so
rigorous that my sister Jutta and I were not entirely sure for a while
whether ‘we’ (i.e. our family) were supposed to be for the Germans or
the Allies. It came as quite a shock when my sister did eventually
discover that she had a Jewish grandfather.
My father’s family in Vienna was not having an easy time of it
either. His mother had always been an advocate of the annexation of
Austria’s to the much-admired German Reich. When this finally
happened in 1938 most Austrians cheered. My father’s sister Emmy
(my aunt) wrote us long letters (which I still have [Wa00]) expressing
at length her veneration of the Führer and his achievements, and her
hatred for Jews and trade unions. In these letters she also reproached
11