On his way to the US to find a better future in America in 1929 Matthias Schmidt’s dream to return as an American success story changed when he saved the life of an American diplomat in Berlin’s Bahnhof. The heroic act established a friendship with the diplomat and three other German emigrants that sustained them through misconceptions of the American dream, the Great Depression, assimilation into American culture, and WW II.
However, the war severed contact with his family and sent him and his friends on separate paths. To a shipyard to build ships to carry the means to destroy Germany and their Heimat. Into the US Army to fight in the Pacific after surviving the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Conscription into Germany’s Wehrmacht to invade France, Russia, and fight in the Battle of the Bulge against American forces.
And the Nuremberg trials to bring Nazi war criminals to justice.
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