Henry’s Paper

One of the family treasures that Carolyn (Peters) Stucky shared is an agricultural workbook that Grandpa’s younger brother Henry created during the 1928–1929 school year, when he was in seventh grade. We will likely devote a number of posts to the information inside that school book, such as a description of Henry’s daily chores, a full accounting of the family’s machinery, and the like. However, that is not our interest at the moment.

Several nights ago when I opened the workbook to explore its contents, I noticed one sheet (pages 3 and 4, to be exact) of a German newspaper tucked inside. The first article that caught my eye was titled “Helsinki, die Stadt am Meere” (Helsinki, the city on the sea). To the left of that article was another: “Dr. Jekyll und Mr. Hyde: Die Geistesverwirrung des englischen Bürgertums” (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: the mental confusion of the English middle class [or bourgeoisie]).

The date on the paper (upper right) was intriguing: 10 February 1944. Why would Henry have kept a paper from that date? I glanced quickly through the rest of the articles but did not see anything that might relate to him personally. Now I was really curious: Why this newspaper on this date?

The search took a turn toward the dark side when I learned that the paper, the Völkischer Beobachter (National Observer [upper left]), was the official newspaper of the Nazi Party between 1920 and 1945. Why would Henry, who was married to a Jewish woman, have kept a Nazi newspaper among his treasured items?

Looking again at the date of the paper, it suddenly became clear: on 10 February 1944, Henry, Bea, and Lois Gunden were still being detained in the Baden-Baden hotel, under the watchful eye of the Gestapo; they were released a little more than a month later, on 15 March.

Although we can never know for certain, it is reasonable to think that Henry received the newspaper from his Nazi captors. The Völkischer Beobachter, whose purpose was to propagandize on behalf of the Nazi Party, would no doubt have been freely shared with the prisoners, as a means of impressing them with accounts of Nazi success and discouraging them with stories about Allied setbacks. Henry, it seems, kept the newspaper as a souvenir of his experience, a tangible reminder that he had survived the year-long ordeal.

If this explanation of the paper’s provenance and significance to Henry is correct, then we have another piece, another object, from our family history connecting us to Henry and, beyond that, to his internment by the Nazis. History, I think, is most meaningful when it resembles that school-time activity called Show and Tell. Likewise, our family history is richest when we do not tell stories in the abstract but rather show the objects that our forebears treasured and recount the story of those items’ significance. So it is that we can now say: this is the newspaper that Henry read during his internment by the Nazi regime, the paper that he carried with him when he was released on 15 March 1944.