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A Personal Biography Of Otto

Otto was born on July 28, 1925 in Bremerhaven, Germany. He immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1950. He married in 1955 to a young Spanish girl whom he loved very much. They settled in Philadelphia, PA, and began a life together. Otto channeled his love of art and architecture into a career and worked his way up in a large architectural firm while he and his bride began their family. They have four children. It is through their second son that I came to know them, as he married my sister almost 6 years ago. It was at their wedding that I first met Otto and was enthralled by his accent and intelligent manner of speaking. It was also when I first heard the beginnings of the story which tells of the difficult life he led in his late childhood. He was a young man entrapped by his country’s leader, following along with his peers, and being what his country expected of him. He was one of the “Hitler Youth”, though as a child, he had little knowledge of the reality of Hitler and his concentration camps. Like the young men of this organization, he was later a member of the Nazi Army. He shared with me an account of his time in the war, when he fought at the front lines of Hitler’s army.
The Hitler Youth, the Nazi party's youth movement, indoctrinated German youth to perpetuate the "1,000 year Reich." The Hitler Youth movement emphasized activism, physical training, Nazi ideology, especially nationalism and racial concepts, and absolute obedience to Hitler and the Nazi Party. Indoctrinating children in National Socialist ideology was a key goal of the Nazi Party. Once Hitler assumed control over the German state, he used the Government to make the Hitler Youth the country's all encompassing youth movement. Hitler and other Nazi leaders saw the indoctrination of young Germans as of critical importance. In the same year that they took power, the Nazis organized German youth organizations into two branches of the Hitler Youth (Hitler Jugen), one branch for boys...