Your house is on fire. Everyone including pets are out safe and sound. You can save one thing, what is it and why?

It was known simply as Internment Camp 75, aka IC 75, and was located in Kornwestheim, near Stuttgart. He spent about two years there. During the war he was a fire chief (of a fire department) in a fairly small town, so nothing sinister.

He died when I was only three years old, so I never got the story directly from him, and my grandmother never talked about it. So all of the information I have about his activities before and during the war, and his subsequent internment, came from my mother and aunt, who were both very young during World War II. They don't remember much, except that he went to work and came home every evening, so he wasn't off fighting somewhere far away like a regular soldier.

I also requested his "file" from an archive in Germany and received a fat stack of papers about a month later. According to the file, my grandfather was an early Nazi Party member, and joined the SA (Sturmabteilung, aka "Brownshirts") in 1925. He attended many SA rallies before the war and received several medals for attending, all of which are documented in that file. I don't think there's anything particularly unique about the medals. I suppose they were like particiption trophies and all or most of the men got one. He also got "loyalty" medals after his 10 and 15 year anniversaries of joining the Nazi party. In 1931 he joined the National Socialist Motor Corps (Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrkorps, or NSKK).

The NSKK was a Nazi paramilitary organization that served as a training group, mainly instructing members in the operation and maintenance of high-performance motorcycles and automobiles. The NSKK also transported Nazi and SA officials and members, and performed roadside assistance duties, similar to AAA in the United States.

I've done some online research into the internment camp and as far as I can understand, it housed German political prisoners as opposed to military men directly connected to specific war crimes. I believe the men in IC75 tended to be civilians with strong ties to the Nazi party.

I think he and most of the other men were in the camp so long because the Americans investigated each of them very thoroughly. There was a great deal of interrogation that he went through to find out exactly what he was involved in before and during the war, and he also went through a "denazification" process. But I'm not an expert so maybe I have it wrong.

My grandfather was a very talented artist, and the book he made in the camp has about a dozen watercolors of scenes related to life there, as well as some poems he wrote. There is a particularly good painting of the dark silhouette of a guard tower and barbed wire against a colorful sunset. Barbed wire is a recurring image on many of the pages, and I read that the prisoners in that camp actually made barbed wire. The title of one poem in the book translates to "I Sleep Behind Barbed Wire."

There are also scenes of waiting in the camp's "chow line" and of the room he bunked in with several other men. He painted a couple of nostalgic scenes of his hometown. There are love poems to my grandmother, and poems about how much he missed her and his children. Another poem laments the utter destruction of "the Fatherland." My mother has told me that after he was reunited with his family when the camp released him, he was a broken man, very different from before the war.

I truly believe that although he may have been active with the Nazi party, he worked for the fire department and so it is unlikely that he was directly involved in any atrocities. He was probably just a young guy who allowed himself to get caught up in all of that fervor.

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