A Wilmette resident reflects on his empathy toward the ‘innocent’ Chicago family in Hitler’s Berlin who might have stood up against the Nazis.
By Gulnaz Saiyed
For the past two decades, Holocaust survivor Walter Reed, 88, a retired PR consultant who lives in Wilmette, has been speaking about his childhood and writing a book about living in a children’s refugee colony during Adolf Hitler’s regime. Born into one of only 24 Jewish families in the German village of Mainstockheim, he grew up while Hitler and the Nazi Party were gaining political power in the late 1920s and early ‘30s. When Reed was 15, his parents sent him to Belgium to live in a boys’ home to keep him safe. When the Germans invaded Belgium, he fled with more than 90 other children to the south of France, living first in a barn before moving into an abandoned chateau.
Reed, who also speaks regularly at the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, recently read Erik Larson’s “In the Garden of Beasts” about William Dodd, the U.S. ambassador to Germany from 1933 to1937, and his 24-year-old daughter Martha, who fraternized with Nazi officials. In Berlin, the Dodd family lived with the same backdrop of swastika flags and anti-Jewish rhetoric that Reed grew up with in the Bavarian countryside.
Reed shares his thoughts on survival, Larson’s book, and Dodd’s failure to speak out against Hitler with reporter Gulnaz Saiyed at Northwestern University in Evanston.
What is it like for a Holocaust survivor to read In the Garden of Beasts?
I know exactly what it was like. I remember the atmosphere and the goings-on and how people felt. In my village, as all over Germany, the Nazi party people constantly marched in parades and sang songs. One song included words from the national anthem, which they slightly altered to say: “Today we own Germany and tomorrow the whole world.” They meant it. I can still hear it. They had another song that included the words, “When the blood of the Jews squirts from our knives.” As a youngster, when I heard that it was meant for me, it was definitely scary.
The Ambassador and his family arrived in Berlin expecting a modern European capital. Does this book do a good job of explaining the atmosphere?
Yes, the book is extremely well done. These were innocent Americans—innocent and ignorant—who were thrown into this thing haphazardly. And they gradually woke up to the fact that this was not a nice, forward-looking kind of society. It was a society that considered it superior to others and, therefore, had the inherent right to brutalize – to take over what they owned.
You describe them as innocent, but do you feel that Ambassador Dodd and his family could have done more to speak out against the Nazis?
Sure, if they had known and realized how pervasive the [Nazis’ dogma] was. Even Jewish people in Germany and Austria were thinking things couldn’t get worse. The prevailing attitude was that it was bound to get better because the German people were smarter than that. As a result, out of the 600,000 Jews in Germany, about 200,000 to 300,000 managed to emigrate. An American ambassador comes to Berlin and thinks, “Well, it’s not as bad as they say” or, “I think it’s okay.” That’s not so unnatural.
What is your advice for people who might hesitate to read this book because they worry about painful, graphic content?
Cruelty among human beings is not something that was invented with the Holocaust. Why should you learn about it? Because there are things you can do about discrimination, about the well-being of other people. The reason the Holocaust is worth hearing about is to decide what you can do to make things better for people who are in need. End of story.
