The rest of the war for him consisted, as he explains, of chasing German women and interrogating German prisoners.
#Ww2 soldier liberated 2 pow camps with just his pistol full#
He finished the day in a villa he and his men liberated along with a full wet bar. Some shots were fired shortly after occupying the city center - and a pitched battle was fought the next day at the Munich airport - but for the most part, Robinow says, the city was left undefended. His grandchildren have probably put it in a frame and it is hanging in some living room somewhere."īy the end of the day, Robinow and the US soldiers who followed had almost completely taken Munich. First Lieutenant Infantry US Army' or whatever came into my head. So he got me some paper and a pen and I wrote him out a receipt and wrote something like, 'received this day the 30th of April, 1945, 102 pistols. Before I could take them though, the man insisted on my giving him a receipt. "On one of them was the number of the pistol and on the other was the number of the officer who had been issued the pistol. "And if you can imagine - German efficiency - on each pistol there were two tags," Robinow recalls laughing. Prepared for the worst, he was surprised to be greeted with military salutes - and to find the weapons already boxed up and prepared to be taken away. Having noticed a police station, he marched inside in full battle gear to confiscate their weapons. It was just on the other side of Marienplatz that Robinow encountered his first armed Germans. And they were now happy to be 'liberated?'" It was where the Nazi party got its start and where its main propaganda organ the newspaper the Volkischer Beobachter was headquartered. This was, after all, the capital of the movement. We were greeted as the great liberators of the city, which, to be honest, really made me angry at the time. Most of them were made up of very old people who were too old for the Volkssturm (a last line of defense made up of old men and young boys). "On Marienplatz there was a bunch of people," Robinow says. And as he and his troops began approaching the center of the city, they began seeing more and more people - by 2:00 in the afternoon, they were standing in the middle of a small crowd of people on the central square of Marienplatz. Munich was to be the last serious action he would see in World War II. In January 1945, he returned to Germany as a US soldier. When the Allies began preparing for occupying Germany, however, Robinow was recalled from Bermuda and retrained to interrogate German prisoners of war and Nazi functionaries because of his fluency in the language. Robinow soon decided to enter the US military and, having been turned down from the air force because he was German, he ended up in the army and was posted to the island of Bermuda in 1941 to help guard an airstrip. "My roommate took me home with him a number of times and that's how I learned what gefillte fisch was." "I didn't know a thing about Jewish culture," he says. It was there, while studying English on the campus of Swarthmore that he had his first contact with his Jewish roots. It wasn't long before Robinow moved to Denmark and then, in 1938, a sibling already in the United States was able to arrange for him to emigrate to Pennsylvania. "I felt like a kid that was punished for something I didn't do." He had to leave the Hitler Youth the next day. SPIEGEL Media Menü SPIEGEL Media aufklappen.Alle Magazine Menü Alle Magazine aufklappen.SPIEGEL-Heft Menü SPIEGEL-Heft aufklappen.Gutscheine Anzeige Menü Gutscheine aufklappen.Marktplatz Anzeige Menü Marktplatz aufklappen.Partner-Inhalte Anzeige Menü Partner-Inhalte aufklappen.Wissenschaft Menü Wissenschaft aufklappen.