Siegfried
From Immigrant to International Fugitive, the Life and Death of a Man of God.
Part One of Ten
One
Siegfried Francis Widera was born in Dortmund, Germany, in the midst of a Royal Air Force bombing campaign. It was just before Christmas of 1940. Soon after his birth, Siegfried’s father, Otto, moved the family into the Ruhr Valley countryside to avoid the bombs. But the British destroyed the Edersee Dam and the valley flooded. The family was forced back into the ruins of the city.
*
The Widera’s were ardent Catholics. In their son’s thirteenth month they pushed his stroller through the rubble to Heilig Kreuzkirche for his baptism. Not long afterward, the church was bombed. The Widera’s watched the blaze from the windows of their flat at 6 Wittekindstaße. By daybreak, only its tower remained.
*
Dortmund was an industrial city, important to the Reich for its coking plants, its steel works and oil refineries. According to New Zealanders with the Royal Air Force, “the hundreds of factory chimneys continuously belching smoke produced a thick and persistent haze which made it almost impossible for crews, even on a moonlit night, to pick out a given aiming point.” The offensives, then, were imprecise; bombs meant for factories took out residential blocks. The smog and the haze were made even worse once the plants were engulfed in flames.
*
On a single night in 1943, the RAF dropped more than 2,000 tons of bombs on Dortmund. It was, to that point, the largest air attack in human history. The Associated Press reported that “scores of four- and two-ton bombs and tens of thousands of incendiaries kindled vast blazes in Dortmund, the smoke of which licked angrily into the night sky three miles above the city of 500,000.”
*
Three miles above the city. 15,480 feet. The flames would have licked the bellies of the planes that had dropped them.
*
Bombs, firestorms, wreckage, death. The acrid taste of chemical fires. A sky made unceasingly black. These came to define the first four years of Siegfried Widera’s life. Later, when asked to recall his childhood, Siegfried told a psychologist that the ruins served as his playground. “The basements made great caves,” he wrote in a self-evaluation, “and the walls, standing, made towering mountains to climb.”
Two
Otto Widera was a mechanical engineer. After the war he was invited to join Ladish, Inc., a forging manufacturer based in Cudahy, Wisconsin. Ladish had produced aircraft brake drums and propeller shafts for B-26 bombers. Now the company wanted to revert to its civil expertise, which was in the forging of chest casings for steam engines.
*
In the 1980s, Siegfried began telling people that his father had worked for a top-secret Nazi space program. There is no evidence to support this claim.
*
What is known: trailing the frontlines of the Allied Liberation of Europe was an agency known as the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee. According to Annie Jacobsen’s Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America, “The goal of Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee was to investigate all things related to German science. Target types ran the gamut: radar, missiles, aircraft, medicine, bombs and fuses, chemical and biological weapons labs.” In 1945, as Allied troops regained the campus of Bonn University, the CIOS was informed by a lab technician that important papers were sitting in the toilet of one of the faculty restrooms. A German professor had attempted to flush them before they could be found. The papers became known as the Osenberg List. Jacobsen writes that the List was “a Who’s Who…of German scientists, engineers, doctors, and technicians.”
*
The CIOS operated as a subcommittee of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Committee which itself was a subcommittee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Their interest in the Osenberg List was not to bring virologists and chemists who’d developed secret weapons to justice. Instead they identified them in order to profit from a brain-gain: the work of the CIOS allowed nearly 2,000 former high-ranking Nazi scientists, medical doctors, and engineers to assimilate into American society and be granted white-collar jobs without facing charges of war crimes.
*
Intellectual reparations.
*
Those on the list included Kurt Blome, Deputy Surgeon General of the Third Reich, who introduced the plague into the bloodstream of concentration camp victims; Otto Ambros, whose namesake is represented by the letter ‘A’ in SARIN gas; Dr. Konrad Schäfer, who injected saltwater into the veins of prisoners at Auschwitz; and Wernher von Braun, the V-2 rocket scientist who, upon being captured, “posed for endless pictures with individual GIs, in which he beamed, shook hands, pointed inquiringly at medals and otherwise conducted himself as a celebrity rather than a prisoner.”
*
And Otto Widera.
*
At thirty-pages, the intelligence briefing on Otto Widera is relatively short. He was born in 1906, in a tiny town traded back and forth between Germany and Poland many times over the course of history. 1906 happened to be a sweet spot. It meant Otto was too young for duty in World War I and too old during World War II. Instead he attended college in Köln where he met Gertrude Yzermann, who was three years his junior. They married soon after and began a family. The file describes Otto as an expert in the heavy forging of equipment and large ring rolling, which are important in the development of air frames and jet engines. There is no indication that Widera was involved in anything along the lines of the actions of Blome or Ambros. In memos to the CIA and the FBI, the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency notes that Widera “was cleared by the Occupation Forces in Germany and the Consul General at Bremerhaven as not having been a member of the Nazi Party nor having taken any interest in their activities.” They conclude that “his presence [in America] will be a definite contribution not only to the national defense but also to American industry.”
*
He came to the United States in 1949. He traveled alone. Gertrude and the Widera children—three sons, Ernst, Hans, and Siegfried; and a daughter named Kristel—stayed in Germany. Otto spent a year in Wisconsin, acclimating himself to the new country, considering whether he felt it suitable for his young family. It did not take long. Milwaukee, Otto decided, was perfect. Though anti-German sentiment had been rampant in the U.S. before and during the War, Milwaukee was something of an outlier. More than one-third of its citizens were of German heritage; many still spoke the language in the home. There were German-language newspapers and social clubs. The Milwaukee Historical Society notes that beginning in the mid-19th century, “the city had become a national center for German Catholicism.” In other ways, too, Milwaukee was a good fit. It was an industrial city. Otto found the Midwest—with its smokestacks and cold weather—comforting.
*
In November, 1949, Gertrude and the children were granted first-priority non-preference quota numbers by the American Consul in Bremerhaven. A few months later they traveled to the United States aboard the HMS Queen Mary. Siegfried was nine years old. He spent the four-day voyage in their cabin’s bathroom, seasick.
*
Siegfried could not recall the exact date the family arrived in Wisconsin, but he remembered that it was a weekday afternoon. The next morning, Gertrude dressed her four children in lederhosen and sent them off to Sacred Heart Grade School. They spoke no English. Siegfried: “It was a shock to me to learn that there were people who did not speak German.”
*
The family settled into a house on Hawthorne Avenue in the desirable Grant Park neighborhood of South Milwaukee. The house was four miles south of the Ladish plant in Cudahy and within walking distance of the banks of Lake Michigan. The backyard overlooked the county’s only golf course. Across the street was Seven Bridges Trail, a WPA-developed park that wraps itself around Oak Creek, which feeds into the lake. The Milwaukee County official website offers this bit of purple prose to describe Seven Bridges:
*
As you wind your way through the ravine on unpaved and lannon stone paths, lannon stone staircases, and numerous foot bridges, you'll discover the delights of nature – a carpet of spring wildflowers, the songs of migratory birds, fabulous fall color, the refreshing sound of water rushing in a brook. Following the trails, you'll be led among enormous trees such as the native beech, along creeks, into secluded areas, and onto the shore of Lake Michigan.
*
The children adapted quickly. They made friends and learned English. An idyllic postwar American childhood soon followed. They played in the woods around Seven Bridges. In the summers they worked on a farm and spent their pay at the movie theater. Siegfried and his brothers became altar boys.
*
Otto Widera thrived at Ladish, Inc. He was placed in charge of an engineering team taxed with the design and construction of the No. 85 counterblow hammer, a piece of machinery that increased Ladish’s forging capabilities from 10,000 to 50,000 pounds. When No. 85 was completed in 1959, it stood taller than a three-story building—the largest counterblow hammer in the world. A photo of Otto and his team posing in front of the hammer appears in Cudahy: Snapshots of Commerce along with a caption that reads: “Each blow delivers a staggering 125,000 meter kilograms of energy, which can be heard—and felt—in nearby neighborhoods when in operation.” He was named Vice President of the company.
*
Energy, weight, steel-on-steel. Power felt for blocks. The amalgamation of the nuclear family and industrial force.
*
Siegfried, who’d been malnourished during the War, grew stronger. He excelled at sports. He loved golf and tennis in the summer and ice skating in the winter. Though an American diet gave him bulk, he avoided contact sports—Midwestern mainstays like football and hockey.
*
Despite physical improvement, a number of developmental problems began to emerge in Siegfried’s pubescence. His verbal skills had been a concern since infancy. One doctor told his parents the boy might not ever speak. He did speak, but not often. He was a quiet boy.
*
His siblings lost their accents. Siegfried never did. English remained difficult for the rest of his life.
*
During his sophomore year in high school, the boy gained thirty pounds. He began to show signs of depression. He ate ravenously when sad, and he was sad all the time. Neither of his parents understood. How could they?
*
Otto Widera bulldogged conversations. He had a temper. There was no use disagreeing with him on a subject; he was always correct. It was best to sit and listen and to keep your thoughts to yourself, especially if they ran counter to the engineer’s. Siegfried’s counselor described Otto as “somewhat ridden through with the stereotyped German rigidity.” Siegfried admired the man but never felt comfortable in his presence. He never felt he could discuss his feelings.
*
“If opposites attract,” Siegfried wrote, “it surely applies to my mother and father.” Gertrude Widera—who went by Gerda—was gregarious and loving. She listened to Siegfried, to all of her children. “We take walks together and talk.” She had friends in the neighborhood, played Bridge, joined social clubs connected to the Church. She was a happy person. How many women of her generation were now dead? Not only had she survived the war, but she was here, in America, with two oceans separating her from the dreaded and feared Soviets. Her family was healthy. Her husband had means and prestige. She felt blessed by God.
*
Though thankful to have her in his life, his mother’s optimism and love filled Siegfried with guilt. “She has been a good mother to me,” he wrote, “and maybe that is something I have never returned as a son and may have taken her for granted and not returned her affection.”
*
A darkness had overtaken the boy.