Karl Koerber

I was born in a small town near Heidelberg, Germany, and migrated to Canada with my parents in the early 1950s. I grew up in the Kootenay region of British Columbia, Canada, where I have lived and worked for most of my life. Through the Whirlpool is my first full-length book.

All my life I have lived with a kind of dissonance set up by competing voices—what I learned in school and what I heard at home. At school I learned that the Nazis were monsters who ruled Germany with an iron fist and started the Second World War in a drive to take over Europe. At home I heard a different story—the lived experience of my parents who grew up in Nazi Germany. Their German experience was one of optimism and prosperity, a revival of hope and national pride led by the man they viewed as the saviour of their country—Adolf Hitler.

Over the years I came to understand that my parents’ perspective was conditioned by their immersion in the Nazi message that was deployed throughout the country’s institutions in the 1930s. The Hitler Youth, the school curriculum, the media, the arts—all were infused with and reshaped by Nazi ideology. Among a large segment of the population Hitler attained the status of an idol, drawing hysterical, worshipful followers at his public appearances. How could my teenage parents have seen through this glorious vision to the darkness that lay beneath it? The sad part, for me, is that they could never fully relinquish the notion that the utopian dream of the Third Reich was somehow sabotaged by outside forces rather than the ruthless racism and aggression of Hitler and his Nazi Party.

My parents are both gone now, but I remember them with fondness and love. They were kind, goodhearted people, not unlike ordinary folk anywhere. Their individual stories, as they journeyed through the Nazi era and the war years, are as compelling, in their way, as the global tragedy that was the backdrop to their personal trials and adventures. Their stories fascinated me.

At age 19, my father found himself fighting under Erwin Rommel in the Sahara Desert. After his capture as El Alamein in 1942, he was a POW in Egypt, South Africa (after jumping overboard from his transport ship in Durban), the United States and finally Great Britain. In America he escaped three times, all documented in newspaper stories I was able to find online.

My mother’s story is equally captivating. The daughter of ardent Nazi supporters, she believed a German victory in the war was inevitable until, one day in February 1945, she was suddenly fleeing her home with a caravan of other refugees, dragging their meager possessions westward as the Red Army closed in from the east.

When I retired from my job in 2015, I began to write these stories down. I soon realized that it was necessary to place my parents’ story into the context of the larger German story, and to document my personal reflections as I traveled alongside them through the turbulent currents of the times. It has been a fascinating journey of discovery for me: learning so much more about my parents’ early lives, coming closer to an understanding of how the Nazis achieved not only power, but such a level of support among Germans such as my grandparents, and reaching a sort of rapprochement with my German heritage.