Hitler’s Soldier in the U.S. Army: An Unlikely Memoir of WWII

Born into landed Prussian nobility, Werner H. Von Rosenstiel lived the largely predictable life of his class until two great changes intersected to forever alter his worldview: he attended college in Ohio for a year, and the Nazis came to power in Germany. Von Rosenstiel was drafted into the Wehrmacht, the German army, and had finished his legal education when the rising tide of Nazi madness and his affection for an American girl in Cincinnati brought him to resolve to leave Germany and return to the United States. Von Rosenstiel’s memoir is a straightforward and evocative account of this young man’s mixture of ambition, love, and anti-Nazi repugnance that convinced him to forego a promising professional career in the Third Reich for the uncertain future of another country and a new language on the eve of the Second World War. After Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941, and the United States entered the war. Von Rostenstiel immediately became an enemy alien as well as subject to the U.S. draft. He was sent to a camp in Pennsylvania where the U.S. Army stockpiled recruits it could not trust. Make-work assignments, loads of KP and laundry details, camp snitches, and hilariously inept FBI interrogations in an idyllic Pennsylvania countryside alternately alarmed, bored, and frustrated Von Rosenstiel, until he was finally able to convince the authorities that he was no danger, that indeed his German-language skills and legal training might be assets. Finally sent overseas to serve, Von Rosenstiel was promoted to second lieutenant and attached to legal units that worked their way eastward into a collapsing Third Reich. He later interpreted for Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg trials and served on the Allied team prosecuting Nazi leaders for their war crimes.