A French resistance fighter, Robert Greiner was captured and sent to Dachau. He is the seventh from the left in the front row. In this picture, he is being inducted into the camp. To the far right background and at the right behind the camp kommandant, you can see many police and soldiers. Dachau was the prototype for all the other Nazi concentration camps. In total, over 200,000 prisoners were held there. [Image from Lotte Greiner]

Lotte Schmid Greiner walked into the museum at Dachau concentration camp in 1985. She browsed through the displays and studied the six-foot, poster-size enlargements of photographs taken forty years earlier during a war that institutionalized genocide. One image of newly-arrived prisoners in “protective custody” shattered her instantly. [See photo above.]

There in the group of men was one she had loved, the husband she lost during that war, the father of her three daughters.

“I stood there 10 minutes before I could open my mouth,” Lotte related in a recent interview. “I had the same old scared, lonely feelings that I had when the Gestapo came to my house. I was remembering the bad times of the war. All the sad memories rushed back. I was frozen. Dachau was a terrible place.”

Robert Andrew Greiner hated Hitler. He was German born, and as a French citizen, spied for the French, spied on the brown shirts, anything to obtain information about the Nazi party. When captured, he was sent to Dachau.

They could not prove that he spied, so he was not killed. Instead, he was held in the section for non-Jewish Volksgenossen who deliberately ignored their duties towards the community or endangered state security. “They must submit themselves to the national interest and respect state discipline,” according to Regulation 34/37 of March 3, 1937.

Robert is dead. Lotte discovered from the museum personnel that he was taken, along with any available man or boy at the end of the war, to be used as cannon fodder, a bullet stopper for the German army advancing behind him. He died at Breslau in Poland.

Robert’s third daughter, born in 1945 six months after his death, lives in Palm Springs with Lotte. Maria Regina Greiner is a bank manager now working at a brokerage firm in Rancho Mirage. Even though she was only a child in Germany, emigrating to the United States as a schoolgirl in 1951, she carries an unreasonable burden of guilt for the German blood in her veins, shame for what was done to the Jews.

In a letter to a German newspaper reporter in 1983, Regina described the origins of this shame as an immigrant to this country after the war. “The movie houses were full of films depicting the Germans (all of them) as monsters, Nazis, lower than subhumans. The studies at school were the same. I learned how shameful it was to be German. I remember an incident where Mother and I had garbage thrown at us by tenants in the apartment house we lived in.” She described another time when Lotte had had enough of her children being treated violently because they were German and she beat up another woman.

“War changes even the timid,” Regina wrote.

“What happened [in Germany] brings a shame. It tarnished the fine works of people such as my grandfather,” she continued, writing of Lotte’s father, Johann Schmid, who was a well known sculptor and opera singer in Hechingen. His sculptures are scattered over Germany. “It tarnished the beauty of the hills in the Black Forest, the music, the flowers, the arts and history of a beautiful country. During the ‘70s I became interested in my family history. I wanted to be able to speak the language I was forbidden to speak even in our home -- German. I wanted to bring to the surface all the anger I had harbored for so many years. I wanted to stand on the highest hill and with my chin held even higher say to the world, ‘Look at me. Hear what I say. I’m German. Born of a fine heritage and damn proud of it.’”

Regina’s shame in her background was unfounded. Not only was her father, Robert, a Nazi-fighter; but her mother, Lotte, is a woman of reluctant courage who was caught up in a savage storm of hate, who coped and survived as honorably as she could. In her 20s, Lotte risked her life to save the life of Mrs. Schwartz, a Jewish widow from Ludwigsberg. She could not understand why Mrs. Schwartz should suffer. Her father had taught her to look at people for what they are inside, not on the outside.

“This was 1942, when the national drumbeat was the Jewish problem,” Lotte said. “Ninety-five percent of the people were angry with the government, but we were not able to express ourselves. We were brainwashed, raised to believe what we were told. You maybe knew things were not really right, but you knew you had better behave. When Hitler came into power we had only the poor and the rich. People ask us, ‘How did you Germans let Hitler do what he did?’ People over here do not understand. They have not gone through such a thing. We were glad when we lost the war, so glad. Believe this.”

“It was overnight,” she went on, “like they put something in the air, and the next day Hitler was God. It was so fast. People were afraid to say anything. You had to say ‘Heil Hitler.’ In school we had to stop and meditate for two minutes and think of how good it was now that we had Hitler as our führer. Whoever fought back against the Reich was not alive the next day. They controlled us through fear.”

Clara was a blond and blue-eyed girlfriend with whom Lotte would go dancing. Tempting the wrath of the Reich, knowing that Mrs. Schwartz’ life was in danger, she conspired with Lotte to plot Schwartz’ escape.

One Saturday afternoon, after traveling to Konstanz, 150 kilometers to the south on the border with Switzerland, they cased the bridge over the Neckar River, a narrow, shallow strait of the Bodensee that constitutes the border at this point.

Lotte said, “I will never forget this day when we were in Konstanz. It was packed with people. There were some Russian prisoners held in cattle cars. They were starving them [as an example of what happened to enemies of the Reich]. The prisoners had to eat the flesh of their dead. It was awful.”

There were two guards on duty at the bridge at all times. It was December and they noted that it got very dark at 7 p.m. The girls flirted with the guards, promising to return in a few days. They then went back to Ludwigsberg and planned how to distract the guards, timing it to the minute.

Two days later they rode with Mrs. Schwartz to Konstanz. Schwartz saw where she would cross and they returned once more to Ludwigsberg. On the black market, they bought some Russian vodka schnapps, a virulent cousin of the tamer peppermint drink available in the United States. To this they added cigarette ashes, which enhances the effects of the alcohol.

The following Saturday, the three women took the schnapps, some cigarettes, four little glasses, and the would-be refugee’s suitcase back to the border. Schwartz was dressed all in black; Clara and Lotte were wearing pretty, floral dresses.

Approaching the guards, the two girls noted that no one else was around. Knowing that they were isolated and invisible there in the dark, the guards drank and smoked and flirted with the girls. In the meantime, Schwartz was in position under the bridge. They signal was to be three coughs from Lotte when she though it was safe to cross.

Engaging in an intimate act with the guard, Lotte paused and gave the signal. After a few moments, Lotte said, Schwartz “must have fallen down in the water, because the guard I was with heard her and called, ‘Halt, what is that?’” Terrified, she convinced the guard to continue with the sex act and ignore the splash.

The girls never saw Schwartz or heard of her again, and Lotte thinks Clara was killed somehow in the war. Even though she would have been shot had she been caught, Lotte does not believe she was a heroine for helping someone she liked very much.

Although Schwartz would be 96 years old now (1992) if she survived, Lotte very much wants to see her once more. A desire to reconnect is not unusual in these cases, says Harvey Sarner, a Palm Springs resident who is deeply involved at Yad Vashem in Israel (pictured below, image from Brittanica Online).

On the Walk of the Righteous Gentiles at Yad Vashem, they have trees planted in the names of people who saved Jews. The Righteous Gentiles want to know that the risk they took was worth it, that children and grandchildren were begotten, that books were written, crops planted, songs sung -- that life has been reaffirmed, rising from the ashes of brutality, degrada- tion, and death.”

When Sarner first visited Yad Vashem, he noted that many of the Righteous were Eastern Europeans but few could afford the trip to Israel. Thinking he might like to get involved with paying to bring Righteous Gentiles to Israel, he did a pilot program with 12 of them, personally accompanying them to Yad Vashem and footing the bill. “I had such a good time, I decided to continue it,” he said. Sarner has since spent $1 million of his own money flying 300 of the Righteous to Yad Vashem.

A writing project that began as an interview with Rabbi Hurwitz of Temple Isaiah in Palm Springs about a concept called the righteous gentile -- at the suggestion of Regina Greiner -- was no longer abstract in nature. It has leapt to life, personified by Lotte Schmid Greiner.

Sarner is particularly sympathetic to Lotte Greiner because of the embarrassment she is willing to suffer in going public with her story. Young women from good families in her generation did not have sex outside of marriage. Lotte said, “For twenty years I couldn’t talk about it because I felt ashamed and dirty.”    

When told Lotte’s story and of her emotional conflict, a journalist of our acquaintance who works with a cultural exchange peace group based in Moscow, smiled in understanding and admiration, granting Lotte absolution from her shame. He said of her act of heroism, “Somewhere the angels were applauding.”

"Fascism will come to our shores, wrapped up in the American flag."

 -- Sen. Huey Long

This article was published in Elan Magazine, June 1992.