Page 132 - Witness

Elly Gotz – Be Careful Who You Follow
I want to tell you one quick story about one man, a Nazi who actually, indirectly, asked me for forgiveness.
And I learned a lot from him.
I had a company in Toronto, and we were buying hardware and some metal parts from a company in Germany. So, I went to deal with them. The vice president of accounting comes up to me, takes me aside, puts his arm around me, takes us a little in the corner, and he says:
“Mr. Gotz, you were in Dachau?” “Yes.”
“You’re a Jew?”
“Yes.”
“Come, let’s go and talk. I want to tell you something.”
We go to a coffee shop, and as soon as we sit down, he says, “I joined the Nazi party when I was
18.”
After all day doing business, I’m not going to
argue with him about it.
I said, “I suppose you had to.” I’ll make it easy.
“No,” he says. “I didn’t have to, I wanted to.”
Okay.
He says, “My father said to me one day, ‘Don’t run with these people, they are bad people.’ And I was furious with him. I walked away. Two weeks later, he said it again. ‘Don’t go with these Nazis, they are bad people.’
“‘Father,’ I said to him, ‘if you say it a third time, I’ll go to the Gestapo!’”
He was going to report his father.
He says, “I was ready to send my father to Dachau!”
Now I was shocked.
You may disagree with your father politically, but you don’t send him to a concentration camp to die. So, I said, “Was he a bad father?”
“No, he was a wonderful father,” he says. “That’s what I want you to understand,” he says. “When I heard that man speak....”
Who is that man? Hitler.
“When I heard that man speak, cold used to run down my spine. I was prepared to do anything for him.”
So, I asked him carefully, “And did you do anything?”
And he understood immediately. He said, “No. I was at Stalingrad. I nearly lost my leg. I was wounded just before they were surrounded, but I survived.”
I said, “Did you know what was done in your name?”
“Yes,” he says, “I saw it. I saw in the Ukraine. They took a bunch of Ukrainian peasants, stuck them in their wooden church, poured gasoline and burned them all to death in their own church.”
So, I said, “Tell me, why is it that Germans now say, ‘We didn’t know this was done in our name.”’
124