The Indian and the American: A War Story

My uncle lived around Fruita, Colorado in the late '70s and early '80s. He came back to California around 1982, with him and I meeting in person for the first time when I was a teenager. History, especially WWII and the Nazis fascinated me, with U-boats being my main focus after seeing the film Das Boot. Anything Kriegsmarine was on my radar…I had a whole library dedicated to the topic. U-boats Under the Swastika, U-boats Offshore, U-boat Commander, these were some of the books on my shelf. While other kids were listening to Heavy Metal, my friends and I were scheming on how we could raise some real "heavy metal" from the bottom of the sea to have an authentic German submarine of our own. As the years past, different historical topics grabbed my interests, like the American Civil War, the American West, the Revolution, Elizabethan England…but WWII and the Nazis continued to fascinate, and frankly, to frighten me. The ease in which Germany went from an advanced civilization to a degenerate fascist state in the blink of an eye still continues to astound me.  

Uncle Wendell told a story about a Nazi soldier that has stayed with me. When he shared it I was around thirteen, and just here recently I surprised my uncle by reminding him of the tale I never forgot...about an Indian and an American. I don't know the Indian gentleman's name, and my uncle surely had forgotten it. He was definitely Native American, and served as a paratrooper during the War. He probablt jumped into France on D-Day, fighting his way across Europe in one of out Airborne Divisions. When Uncle Wendell knew him, he was in bad shape. Like many Native American men, he was ravaged by alcoholism, thrown aside as just another drunk Indian, a blight on society, forgotten by those who had cheered the Greatest Generation’s accomplishments a few decades before. I'm sure this man had a million stories to tell, but this is the one I heard...

While fighting his way into Nazi Germany, he and his squad captured a group of German soldiers. They might have been regular army, Wehrmacht, or they might have been SS.  More than likely they were just regular army soldiers seeing the handwriting on the wall, surrendering before giving up their lives to a lost cause. Surprisingly, one of the soldiers spoke perfect, American English. Intrigued, the American paratroopers asked how he knew the language so well.  He told them he was an American, who had been in Germany before the War started, and once it had begun, could no longer return to the United States. He said he was forced to join and fight for the Nazis, and that's how he came to be standing in front of a group of American paratroopers, and an American Indian.

  

Who knows if he was telling the truth, maybe he was, but who knows. He probably thought his fellow American captors would have sympathy and understanding, once he reveled he was “one of them”. There was no sympathy. The American Nazi uniform was shot dead by the American paratroopers. Maybe my uncle's friend pulled the trigger, maybe all the squad participated. I imagine this Native American wasn’t one to hesitate. Either way, it's an example of what happened when you ended up on the wrong side of history.  

American soldiers did in fact execute German prisoners of war when captured and the Nazis were guilty of the same, so the shooting of a fellow American caught in enemy uniform is not a stretch, and the fact that an American was caught fighting for the Nazis in the first place, is extremely intriguing. That the story comes from a Native American who was a paratrooper in WWII, down on his luck and trapped in the purgatory of alcoholism makes the story even more awesome, and more plausible to me. I do not doubt this hero’s tale. There are a handful of known instances where Americans fought or served with the Nazis, but most of the documentation was destroyed by the flames of war. How many Americans fought for Germany? We will probably never know for sure. I’d bet it’s more than we would expect…