He Fell In Love With A Nazi

It’s odd the things that can make an impression upon us. Odd? Maybe surprising. Things we wouldn’t expect to make an impression that do end up making an impression.

10, 12 years ago when my youngest son was still in middle school, he had a homework assignment. He had to watch a World War II documentary, and then write a 300 word essay about what he had learned.

Bro, you know how many fucking World War II documentaries there are on Amazon Prime? Is there a more overworked subject in the field of history than World War II? We know everything about anybody who even so much as ripped an audible fart from 1939-1945.

Which fucking documentary was my son gonna pick? Scrolling through all these titles, it was probably the same shit, anyways, so I suggested to him he just pick the first one that was less than an hour long. Why ruin the whole evening? So that’s how he picked *The Battle of Aachen.*

I couldn’t give a shit about the Battle of Aachen. A bunch of people killed each other. Like that hasn’t happened before or since. The documentary was one-sided. It was basically just a series of interviews with old American GIs. Skinny geezers in their faded uniforms reciting the same cliches about freedom, camaraderie, sacrifice, honor, country, like they were reading from the same American state historian’s script, or they’d all watched the same *Greatest Generation* documentary before they filmed their own documentary. They were all pretty satisfied with themselves.

With one exception.

Gerard Crabb.

I’ll never forget the name. His brief interview, no more than 7 or 8 minutes, not even an interview, really, the documentarian just asked him what he remembered most from Aachen, and that was it, at least for the finished film.

His answer made a lasting impression. Unforgettable. Toward the end of this paint-by-numbers World War II documentary came this astounding kernel of human experience. Buried under mountains of WWII drivel, the treasure of the human soul.

I’ll summarize as best as I recollect.  The brief quotations are, I believe, remembered word for word:

As the Battle of Aachen was winding down, Gerard Crabb’s unit or battalion or whatever was going door to door looking for Nazi stragglers. They had just cleared a rooming house, and their sergeant had told him they could take a break before moving on. Crabb told the sergeant he was going back into the rooming house to look for some souvenirs to loot. When he opened the door to a second floor room he was startled to see a German soldier, a Nazi, in reality just a kid. Crabb at this time was 20 years old, and he believed the Nazi was even younger than himself. 18, maybe even only 17 years old. The boy was in the process of stuffing his Nazi uniform under a mattress. The only clothing he wore was a pair of dirty underpants.

Crabb and the Nazi boy stared at each other. Crabb knew he had a Nazi that he had to take into custody to be transported with the other detainees to a prisoner of war camp. ‘Put your uniform back on, you’re coming with me,’ he said in English.

It was obvious the Nazi boy didn’t understand. As he thought about what he should do next, he continued looking at the Nazi youth in his dirty underpants. He was hungry-looking skinny, blonde hair, blue eyes. Crabb said he thought he was three or four inches taller than the Nazi boy. He said he’d never felt so strong in his life as he did when he stood there looking at the boy. This occurred in a matter of seconds, Crabb said. And in even less time than those mere seconds, and less than the couple of seconds it took for the Nazi boy to take off his dirty underpants and stand naked before him, Crabb, for the first time, understood he was a living being in an impossible to comprehend state of existence. Crabb had, he believed, killed Nazis from a distance. And he had seen some of his own fellow GIs die. But it wasn’t until he was undressing himself in front of the Nazi boy that Crabb understood the awful wonder of life.

After Crabb undressed, the Nazi boy haltingly moved closer, then wrapped his arms around Crabb and rested his head against Crabb’s chest. They moved to the bed. They kissed and groped each other in, in Crabb’s words, ‘the fashion a normal boy and girl would.’ And then he said they 'made love.'

Crabb said that in less than a half an hour he was dressed and back with his fellow American soldiers. Given the era and circumstances he found himself in, he felt he had no other choice than to return to his army. He did not turn the Nazi boy in.

Crabb said he has never thought of himself as ‘queer,’ that later in life he was married twice and he had three children. He also had a ‘few one night stands with women.’ But he said though he had many moments of great personal joy, every day was a sad day after the day that he left the Nazi boy in a rooming house in Aachen. 'Of course, I have wondered and wondered about him. Life is tears, I would wipe all his away, if I could.'

Crabb said he understood how and why his fellow soldiers felt they had won something, and how they were able to participate in the national pride of War victory, but he personally never felt like he had won anything. At the most basic level of human existence, Crabb felt he and his Nazi boy had both been victims of the war and he often wondered how much human beauty had been choked out by mankind’s collective struggles.

As soon as Crabb’s segment of the documentary ended, I said to my son:

“Damn! I did not see that coming!“

“Right?” he said.

In my son’s essay, he wrote that he learned that in historical events too much emphasis is placed on national and political outcomes, and whether they were positive or beneficial, and not enough to the literally millions of individual lives that were impacted, and that it would be impossible to accurately assess the good and the bad outcomes to the point one could say any historical event was truly positive or negative. Only God could know such a thing. He got a B+.