Bob Spaethling has never forgotten details of a horrific event that happened when he was only 16. Walther, a young friend and fellow German army recruit, was shot dead in front of him, not by enemy soldiers, but by SS troops at the order of an officer. The unfortunate victim had run from the army truck that he drove. When it was disabled, he had failed to blow up the vehicle as standing orders required.

That was in 1944 and, though things were going badly for the Wehrmacht of which he was a member, this teenager from a small town in Bavaria had felt glad about going into combat. In fact, years before, he had refused the chance to join relatives in California because he looked forward to being in the army.

On arriving at the front lines, it took him less than 30 minutes of enemy shells raining on the members of his platoon to realize how unrealistic his notions of warfare were. He had entered hell, where human life was agonizing and desperate. As a regimental runner this teenager faced hazards on every side. That he survived the traumatic experiences to reflect on them and share his recollections with me some 60 years later has to qualify as a kind of miracle.

“How do you forget a war? How do you forget the sights of men killing each other, or the sounds of dying?” These are questions Bob asks in the unpublished memoir he has written for family and friends.

Flashing forward a few years to as new setting, he tells me about joining the American army at age 25. To his own amazement, in 1953, he found himself drafted to serve in the armed forces of the nation to which he had emigrated after the war. “I’m a peace-loving man,” he says, “but I’ve been in two different armies.” When he explained to the American recruiting officer that he had already fought in a war, the man said to him: “Son, that was the wrong side.”

Fortunately, his service in the army of the United States did not require him to fight. Though he could have been sent to the Korean War, instead he was shipped to Mannheim in his native Germany, to a unit responsible for tending huge cannons aimed toward the Soviet Union and capable of firing atomic warheads.

A theme that emerges strongly in conversation with Bob is his love of America and his fellow Americans. It started at the time of his first contacts with American soldiers, right after the war. “I felt total amazement about the humanity of the American soldiers,” he says. “I could not believe it: they did not want anything.”

And about us as a national community he speaks with conviction: “The American people have a sense of common decency that will never go away.”  At the same time, he still cares about his original country, though it no longer feels like home. One of his life goals is to be “a decent American and a German at the same time.” He wants to reconcile the two cultures, a tall task that he describes as “endless.”

Bob does not hesitate to reply to questions that many people regard as still sensitive and painful. Asked what drove his people to accept Nazi domination, he replies: “Most Germans were not evil but they were cowards.” When I asked about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Protestant pastor and prisoner of conscience who was hanged for rising up against Hitler, Bob answered: “He is a person there should have been more of.”

Was there something in the Germans that made them especially vulnerable to dictatorship? “No one in those days,” Bob says, “could imagine the depths of depravity that Hitler represented. They totally underestimated the power that was coming through the Nazis.”

His fellow Germans had a distorted view of obedience. In Bob’s view, they had internalized a teaching of Martin Luther, centuries before. “Your body belongs to the State,” is the way Professor Spaethling puts it.

He can claim that title as an academic retired after a long career on the faculty of two universities. From the vantage point of age 76, Bob regards as one of the best decisions he ever made an action that all of his friends and colleagues disapproved of: he gave up tenure in the German department at Harvard to join the faculty at UMass as that branch of the state university was starting.

In retirement he continues his scholarship and calls it the best time for him. “I’ve had my best writing energy as an older person.” In 2000, after working seven years on his major opus, he published “Mozart’s Letters, Mozart’s Life.”

As I gaze on a photo of Bob Spaethling in his German army uniform at age 16, I feel yet again a sense of awe at the astonishing changes of fortune in his long life.

Richard Griffin