Of the twelve years that comprised the Thousand Year Reich, I have lived through eleven, eight of them consciously as a young boy who was well on his way to premature adulthood by the time the end came in 1945. My story begins at the time of the Berlin Olympic Games where my father, in his capacity as staff colonel-MD in the army medical corps, assisted with the health aspects of the international Olympic village designs, and extends well beyond the fall of "Fortress Berlin" to the Soviet Army of occupation in 1945 and its cruel aftermath.

I experienced the eventual entry of the US Second Armored Division "Hell on Wheels" into Berlin as part of the Four Powers Agreement, and then the beginning of the Cold War around a checkpoint that would become famous as "Charlie." From there it widened into a world crisis, the end of which I witnessed as an American citizen living in California.

My story follows many paths and is marked by many adventures along the way — from Berlin to eastern Germany and southern Europe, to the United States and to South America, until it finally doubles back to the nation I proudly call my own. Along that way I have washed army jeeps, became a wheelwright's apprentice, helped smuggle refugees out of East Germany, graduated from an American high school in Texas, worked in a department store, dug ditches, gauchoed and learned the hotel business in Argentina, worked my way back to the United States as a deckhand, graduated from an American Ivy League University, joined the corporate world, then left it to become a business owner, failed in spite of Herculean physical and financial efforts, delivered the Wall Street Journal and Barron's to their dispenser boxes every night until my wife and I were able to create our own new opportunities; eventually recovered and rebuilt by building a new business.

Adventures aside, during my early years I had the misfortune to experience many of the evilly momentous events of the time, and the ideas that shaped them. For nearly sixty years now I have been a citizen of the United States by overwhelming personal choice, and as an unabashed patriot I have watched as our national dialogue has gradually embraced ideas which I thought had long been permanently discredited and happily interred. I do not love the United States because I was born a native son.  According to generally accepted thinking, I should hate the United States. However, a series of extraordinary events, utterly atypical for the Nazi period, allowed a few seeds of freedom to fall quietly onto the still blank page of my early existence.

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