As a German, I have to admit I am feeling so much futile shame when reading what terrible sacrifices were necessary to free Europe from Nazi terror.

There are so many lessons to learn from the way ordinary Germans fell for a madman who thought that young men exist to be slaughtered in war (that was the gist of Hitler´s reply to a general who wanted to remind him of the enormous German losses on the eastern front even very early on).

My father had to fight in Russia. In late 1941 he was looking at Moscow suburbs. In September 1943 he was so severely wounded in the Ukraine that not only was the war over for him, but some twenty years later he had to retire from work at age 46 - the year I went to school.

I can´t really remember my father going to work - I remember him at home all the time, with a lot of time on his hands and a permanent headache from the shrapnels inside his brain that could not be removed. In 1969 a little piece of shrapnel appeared in his ear, and when it stuck out far enough, my sister finally took it out whole.

My mother served as a typist and secretary for the German airforce in northern France. From her I heard the following story that goes to show that peoples don´t tend to hate each other, generally - they are sometimes forced to do so by some idiots who live on hatred.

My mother, along with some other young girls serving in the Luftwaffe, was walking through French fields one Sunday when they came across the dead body of a young Canadian bomber pilot who had been downed by German flak and was now lying amidst the flowers as if sleeping. My mother recalls that he was a handsome red-haired young man, and that the girls were all shocked by his innocent face and the fact that he had had to die so young. One of the German girls quickly gathered some flowers, arranged them, and put them in this hands to honour the life and the youth that he stood for. Through some dark channels, the event was brought to the attention of their commander, and they were severly reprimanded for their "irresponsible" action.

My father (who died last year) never spoke of war as anything heroic at all. He always related it as an endless nightmare of hunger, exhaustion, fear, and homesickness. And whenever he had to kill a Russian tank by sticking explosives to its outside, he recalled the terrible cries of the soldiers inside as the thing went off, killing all those young men who - as my father used to say - were just the same type of poor innocent young lads as himself, and had usually been raised on a poverty greatly exceeding the one my father had grown up in as an illegitimate child of a U.S. soldier after World War I in rural western Germany.

So, Hoosier, you studied in Bonn in 1976? I started studying there in 1977. If you had studied there a little later, you would have seen a beautiful girl with thigh-length silky smooth hair swaying it as she was walking through the Hofgarten. I haven´t seen her in sixteen years; she should be in her early forties now, and I sometimes wonder if she still wears her hair that long. She can be found on the web since she illustrates books, but she is never pictured on those homepages....

I have written a poem about the sight of her and the fantasies associated with her - if you e-mail me, I can send it to you, and we can together drift away into memories of good old Bonn. When I graduated from the University of Bonn, I had a girlfriend who had the most wonderful slightly wavy chestnut hair with blonde (natural) highlights that fell to her pants. She was clearly the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, and the smell of her hair and body remains unsurpassed in my life although I have been happily married to someone else for fourteen years.

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