ABSTRACT
Born in 1927 in Berlin, I had a sheltered upbringing in two Brandenburg villages as the only child of an elementary school teacher and his wife. For me, my early school years were dominated by the educational principles of the “Third Reich,” and my youth by the Second World War, the beginning of which saw my father drafted into the Wehrmacht (German Army of the time), and to me suffering the same fate towards its end. Before this happened, however, I and my high-school classmates had already been deployed for air defence activities.
