Rudolf Peller

“After my dad had been arrested, the family income was gone as well. So my mother was left behind with four kids and had no income at all. Fortunately, the mayor of the place was a decent man and he granted my mom an income of 5 Deutschmark a week. He told her, that when the income is restored, we’d have to pay it back. It was a loan. Furthermore, there were some people living there, who had mercy with us. They’d give us food occasionally. This was actually very kind of them. One of them was an outspoken Nazi who once gave us a basket full of food. This was very surprising for us at that time. I mean I was twelve years old by then and so I didn’t understand too much of such things. You just realized that something was going the wrong way.”

“When I was in the military, I noticed that my file was following me everywhere I went. They really knew my family background and our political attitudes and sentiment. I can give you an example. When I served in the Arbeitslager (labor camp), they were looking for volunteers for the Waffen-SS. For a start, they waited to see who’d volunteer. But of course there weren’t many to volunteer for the SS. At that moment, I was trying to come up with something to tell them in case they approached me the offer to join. After just a handful of volunteers signed up, they started to make the rounds of the men. They would ask each man individually if he wanted to join and if not they wanted to know the reasons for the denial. And when that officer from the SS was talking to me, the chief of the labor camp took him aside and talked with him for a bit, whereupon he came back and said: ‘all right, you can go’. So it was clear to me that they knew about my and my family’s political attitudes. And it was the same everywhere I went. They knew about my background before I even arrived somewhere.”