George Leitmann was 19 years old when he came to Germany as a soldier. It was the spring of 1945, not long before the end of in Europe. US, British and Soviet Red Army soldiers were advancing on all fronts to liberate Europe from the crimes of under .
The war was still raging when Leitmann and his comrades from the 286th Combat Engineer Battalion of the 6th US Army set foot on German soil. The situation in the southern German villages was confusing. “The front line was extremely fluid,” he remembers.
In the last months of the war, the Wehrmacht (the German army) and the SS fought fanatically to preserve the floundering Nazi regime.
George experienced many of the war’s horrors. Some he will never forget.
“We were coming to a suburb. We stopped,” he recalls almost 80 years later. “And there were 15, 20 kids, all boys. They were 10 to 12 years old.” They were dead. They had been hanged. “I knocked at the first door. I wanted to know what had happened.” The residents told him that members of the notorious German Waffen SS had killed the children. “Apparently, Waffen SS had come through and rounded up kids from that age and handed each one a Panzerfaust [rocket-propelled grenade] and told them to fire [it] at the first American tank they saw.”
When the tanks came, the boys ran away. “A day later, the SS came … rounded up every kid they could and hanged them.”
Historians later documented numerous murders in the final stage of the war by the Wehrmacht and SS of German civilians who no longer wanted to fight.
Lost faith in humanity
His wartime experiences have shaped George Leitmann forever, with the image of the children hanging in the wind forever in his mind. “This picture became so pervasive that you get your doubts about humanity. Maybe that’s what disturbs me most, that you can’t trust yourself.”
In the decades after the war ended, almost all German mass murderers and their helpers denied their own responsibility for a war that cost more than 60 million people their lives.
And they denied their support for the fascist ideology which divides human lives into worthy and unworthy, and ended in the industrial mass murder of Jews, Sinti and Roma and numerous other people. In the , the Germans shot, gassed and murdered 1.5 million children alone — most because they were Jewish.
George Leitmann is not only a US soldier who fought against Nazi Germany. He is himself a Holocaust survivor. He was born in Vienna, the capital of Austria. His Jewish family decided to emigrate in 1940, after the country was taken over by the Nazis. George, his mother and his grandparents received visas to enter the US, but his father Josef did not. He escaped to what was then Yugoslavia. When it seemed like Josef had found safety, George and the rest of his family boarded a ship to the USA. He would never see his father again.
Leitmann has never let go of the magnitude of the crimes committed by the Germans. After the war, he built an academic career in the US. For many years he was a professor of engineering at the prestigious Berkeley University in California. He has received numerous honors and awards.
Today, he lives in a retirement home in Berkeley with his 100-year-old wife, Nancy. And he continues to contemplate hard questions: “I often ask myself: how is it possible to make something so terrible in such a short time from such educated people as the Germans.”
He has no answer to this question, as with so many others. But they do not let go of him. They circle in his mind: “When I encountered Germans, I asked myself how guilty they or their parents were.”
Searching for his father
When he decided at age 18 to volunteer for military service with his then-new home, the United States, he also had another incentive: the uncertainty about his father’s fate. His fight against the Germans was also a search. That differentiated him from many of his comrades.
“When we were encountering a concentration camp later — I only did this once, near Munich in Kaufering, they were all horrified. But it wasn’t a personal thing, it was disgust. To me it became immediately connected to something with my father. I could always still hope that somehow, he got away. It’s a wish you can hold. When we encountered the [freed] persons, there was always the hope to see him.”
Today’s specter of fascism
The specter of fascism is back — the power of the strongest, as Vienna-based historian Florian Wenninger criticized in a speech.
“Elon Musk considers empathy to be the biggest weakness of Western civilization,” Wenninger said “Despite this, it is important to remain firm. If social behavior, if the sense of justice, if compassion is deliberately attacked, then conversely it is clear that coldness and ruthlessness can backfire on us all, threaten us all.”
The current political situation is also concerning for George Leitmann.
“A man like Donald Trump can become president. That is astonishing,” Leitmann said. “The fact that large parts of the population support fascist ideas is unsettling. Blaming certain groups of people for things has always led to disaster.”
In May 2025, George Leitmann turns 100. Despite all the hardships, he has lived a good life, he explains. He was able to travel the world, build a family and meet fascinating people. His advanced age is also a burden.
“Try not to get so old,” he says, raising his pointer finger. “It’s no fun — and I mean that sincerely.”
It was not until many years after World War Two that he discovered how his father died. The Germans had shot his head off, along with hundreds of other prisoners, in a camp in Yugoslavia. Because he was a Jew.
George Leitmann still imagines how his father experienced the final minutes of his life. He thinks about it every day.
This article was originally written in German.
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