Oral History Interview with Joan Adrian

This is Sarah Milligan. I’m with the Kentucky Oral History Commission, and I am interviewing Joan K. McCarter Adrian for the Veterans of World War II Project, but I am interviewing Joan in respects to post-World War II in Nuremberg and some of the things that she witnessed as a very young adult.

Milligan:So Joan, I guess my first question is, give me a little bit of background on your life, leading up to this.

Adrian:Okay. My parents divorced just before World War II, and in the middle of the war, my mother went to work at a training camp near Muskogee, Oklahoma, and she was a switchboard operator. She met this young captain who was a VMI graduate from Virginia who was a military officer. They were married in June of 1943, and from then on I was a military brat [laughs]. They…he 1:00went overseas shortly after, and in the meantime, and when my father got out of the Navy after the war, I spent two years with him in Tulsa and attended Tulsa Central High School, one of the top one hundred schools in the United States in those years, and spent the tenth and eleventh grade at Tulsa. And then my mother and stepfather informed me that he was to be assigned to Germany, and I told my dad, “There’s an awful lot of stuff going on over there.” I was always a history buff, and I said, “Dad, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go…it’s just too much to miss.” So I waited until my stepfather got his orders and supposedly he was going to get his orders in September, so I didn’t start school in Tulsa. I told dad I would stay with him until they were ready to move. And so, it turned out that he didn’t get his orders until almost November, and I still hadn’t started school 2:00my senior year. And so I joined them in November and we sailed over on the General Hugh J Gaffey. That was one of the military transport ships—a very nice one. We actually traveled very nicely; we had two cabins with a bath between, because by this time, I had two much younger half-sisters. I was twelve years older than one, and fifteen years older than the other. The baby was not even two yet.

Milligan:So how old were you then?

Adrian:I was just short of my seventeenth birthday.

Milligan:And what year was that?

Adrian:This is was in 1948, November of ’48. We got into Germany just before Thanksgiving, shortly before. But the Hugh J. Gaffey was actually on the Pacific run, but in June of 1948, they allowed the American soldiers to marry their German girlfriends. Up until then, there was non-fraternization rule, and they were also not allowing 3:00them to marry, but of course, many of them ignored that rule, and lived with these young women. Many of the German women, of course, were widowed, some had lost their husbands in the war, they had…there weren’t any young German men left, practically, so you know you throw a lot of young people together, and there’s going to be marriages. And many of them already had children by the time they were allowed to marry. So there was the rule that came out, that they could marry them after June 1948, but they had to get them processed—they had to go through a CID, which is a Civilian Investigation Department. And they had to go through a CID investigation to make sure they didn’t have any ‘funny’ backgrounds.

Milligan:Ties to the Nazi party.

Adrian:Well, tied to the Nazi party, also, I think a little bit of prostitution was involved in that. 4:00And actually, I never blamed those women. Many of them were supporting elderly parents, children, younger siblings, and had no skills, and so many of them did sleep with American soldiers, because they were given not only money, but food, and commodities, and things that they didn’t…could not get on the market.

Milligan:So is that on the record, that they were prostitutes at one point?

Adrian:They could get some investigation going on that, and it was…and also, they were checked for diseases. They had to go through a medical checkup as well, so it was… they…if they could marry, if they—if the spouses—the German girls passed all the tests, they were allowed to marry. But they had to get them on the list to return to the United States by the end of 1948, or then they would have to come in under the quota system. So, all these German brides were waiting to…scrambling to get home, 5:00and of course we were going over in November, and they were still transporting, but what they were doing was bringing American families over on these ships, and loading them up with German war brides, and bringing them back to the United States. Of course, many of them were coming by themselves. Their husband’s tour of duty might not be up, and so, the husband couldn’t come with them, so they were coming home to meet in-laws that they had never met before. And of course, there were still many hard feelings here in this country, so I’m sure many of them encountered very hostile attitudes and a lot of these young men are from very small communities, who were still very up in arms about Germany, and the war. And so, you know, looking back on it, I can understand how desperate their situations were, and many of them of course had very poor English. It must have been extremely difficult for them. But that was going on, 6:00and that’s why the Hugh J. Gaffey was brought over from the Pacific, although they were allowed to marry Japanese girlfriends about at the same time, there weren’t as many Japanese war brides coming back as there were German and French. There were a lot of young French girls, and a lot of Italian girls, too, that the young men had married…wanted to marry.

Milligan:So how big was this ship that you were on?

Adrian:I’m not…I don’t recall. There were several decks on it and you know, there were…I don’t know how many passengers were on there. Of course, single men and enlisted men were down in the hold, and I think they were sleeping on hammocks, or something, you know, or those little bunks that you see on ships. And of course, they weren’t allowed to hob-knob with the officers’ section. We were up on the captain’s deck. My stepfather was just a captain. But it was rather lovely, and they had entertainment on board. 7:00There was a young doctor there that…I was the oldest dependent on board, and we did have a curfew. We had to be in our cabins by eleven, but it took us ten days. We ran into a storm, and had to reverse back toward New York, because the winds were so bad, and the boat was being battered so badly, so they had to travel with the wind for a day. So it took us ten days from New York to Bremerhaven. Once we got there, they took us by train down to a village called Bad Mergentheim. Any city in Germany that has ‘bad’ in front of it means it is a spa town, because ‘bad’ means ‘bath’ and that’s where people used to go for the mineral baths. And they had requisitioned a number of hotels in Bad Mergentheim for families who were coming in and housing wasn’t ready for them yet, and families who were leaving, and waiting on port calls, and that sort of thing. So my mother and my two younger half-sisters 8:00were deposited in Bad Mergentheim, and my stepfather had to go onto Vanberg. Vanberg was a sub-post of Nuremberg and he was with the local sub-post office administration. So he went on to Vanberg, and my mother and I were there until the 15th of December, which was the day after my seventeenth birthday [laughs], so I had my birthday in the hotel down there. And one of the German maids…I’d gotten very acquainted with…we had a German manager, who was very nice, and mother and I were there, for three week, I think. And my poor little sisters—most children, when you change their water and their food intake and everything end up with a lot of ailments, you know, colds, and diarrhea and that sort of thing. So my mother and I were spending our time taking these two little ones in and out of the dispensary, and getting them doctored and taken care of. And so, 9:00by the time we got…when I had my birthday, the German maid, one of the German maids brought me a potted plant for my new home, and they had made a cake for me, and so it was, you know…they tried to make it festive, and the manager was really nice to us too. In fact, he took us to a Thanksgiving dinner because my mother and my two little sisters and I were there at Thanksgiving time.

Milligan:Was it an American Thanksgiving dinner?

Adrian:It was an American Thanksgiving dinner, because he was manager of the hotel, and his boss was a sergeant. The sergeant invited him for Thanksgiving, and he said, “Well, I have this lady and her older daughter, and two younger daughters who are stuck here during Thanksgiving,” and he said, “May I invite them?” And so the sergeant invited us to come to the Thanksgiving dinner at their unit as well. But we finally got into Bamberg on the 15th of December, and of course, by now the school in Nuremberg is ready to let out almost…shortly 10:00for Christmas, and so there wasn’t any sense in my starting school at that point, so I missed the whole first half of my senior year, because I didn’t start in Tulsa because I thought I’d be leaving. So now, as soon as school was out, there were just a handful of teenagers in Bamberg. And the found out another teenager was in town, and they immediately came over and rounded me up, because new people were very welcomed because we were such a small enclave, and there wasn’t a lot to do in Germany. It was…the country was just devastated and trying to get back on its feet. And Bamburg was not bombed—it was not a military target. So it was…I didn’t know…hadn’t seen the destruction much yet. When we came on the train, from Bad Mergentheim, I saw some destruction along the way, but we hadn’t…in Bamberg there wasn’t any. 11:00And I was fascinated with the old, old part of the town, and the Dom Cathedral. Bamburg was the seat of the bishopric, for Bavaria for many years under the Catholic Church, and so the Dom Cathedral there was one of the few places that a pope is buried outside of Rome. So the Dom Cathedral is about two thousand years old. So, I was just fascinated with the history. I’ve always been a history buff. So then, after Christmas holiday and getting acquainted with the kids that were in Bamberg—there were probably about a dozen of us, from ninth through twelveth grade—and in January, right after New Year’s, I went into school. The school was…had been a German girls’ school, prior to the war, and then the Germans used it as a hospital, and the Americans used it as a hospital briefly, 12:00immediately following the war, for about a year. And in January in ’48, they turned it into the American High School. Up until then, the school had opened in ’46, but it opened in Erlangen, which is a university city, about 20 kilometers out of Nuremberg, and they used one of the buildings on the campus for the first couple of years. I had some friends who were the first group to come over, and they had some fascinating stories. The boys originally were dormed in German troop barracks, and they didn’t have any heat. They had hot water, but they didn’t have heat. So they would get under the hot water at night, take a hot shower, then put on as many clothes as they could, wrap up in those wool, olive drab army blankets, 13:00and jump into bed, because it was terribly cold—those first few winters in Germany were very, very cold. One night, they just could not get warm, and one of the boys went around and found some old chairs, and papers, and wood, and I don’t know what all, and they had a metal barrel out in the kitchen—the kitchen was not usable, it was not functioning. It was just an attachment on the end of the barracks [laughs]. And they started a fire in the metal barrel in the kitchen, and gathered around it, with the blankets behind them to keep the cold air off and keep the warm air in, just to keep warm. So they had it very rough, and the first few weeks, school was in a requisitioned house in Erlangen. They sat on the floor. The teachers just moved from room to room. There were no books; they took notes. Most of the teachers that came over brought their own books with them, and they just took notes, 14:00sitting on the floor. Then they requisitioned the building on the Erlangen University campus. So that was the early history of the school. By the time I got there, they were in a fairly nice building. We were dormed—if your fathers were over 50 miles away in the sub-post area. Würzburg was a sub-post, Bamburg was a sub-post, Bad Kissingen was a sub-post—all those little sub-post towns, you were dormed. About three blocks from the school, they requisitioned two big mansions, and…the boys’ dorm and the girls’ dorm. One of the single male teachers was the housefather for the boys, and we had a single female teacher for the girls. And we had a putzfrau, which is a cleaning lady. We weren’t allowed to use the kitchens in there. That was just strictly for the housemother and the cleaning lady. The cleaning lady lived there, and the only thing 15:00that she did was to dust the floors and the furniture and everything, you know. We were in charge of keeping our own rooms picked up, and making our beds in the morning.

Milligan:I’m trying to imagine this mansion, and about how many people lived there. How big was it?

Adrian:It was three-stories tall, and they could put…I was in a room with just two of us, and there were a couple of rooms that were bigger, that they had three, and I think there was one room that had four. We generally averaged anywhere from fourteen to seventeen girls. It constantly changed, because the fathers were being transferred all over the place, wherever they were needed. So people were coming and going all the time. And it was the same way with the boys’ dorm. The house they were in was a three-story house. And our dorm now, since I’d been there recently, our dorm now is a doctor’s home, single family home. And the boys’ dorm has been torn down, and an apartment unit has been built there. 16:00So, you know, we were three blocks from school. And of course, we had evacuation orders. The blockade of Berlin had started and the Cold War had started in ’48, and it was still going on, the Berlin airlift, and it wasn’t over until around the summer or fall 1949, was when it was over—but…when the Russians blinked. But we had evacuation orders because we thought we were going to war with Russia anytime.

Milligan:What were your evacuation orders?

Adrian:We were to walk three blocks—we were supposed to put on as many clothes as possible, and we were supposed to have a suitcase ready, with extra clothing, and so forth. And we were to walk three blocks up to the school, and wait for a bus to come from the motor pool, which was way across the other side [laughs] of Nuremberg, somewhere—I don’t know where it was, but it wasn’t any where near where our school was. We were in the Fürth. 17:00Nuremberg and Fürth were two ancient villages that just sort of grew into each other, sort of like Minneapolis-St. Paul. You think of it all as one city. And the school was in Fürth. But we [laughs] made our own plans; I can remember us—after dinner we were allowed social time, before study hall started. We had to have all of our meals up at the school. We had a cafeteria with German cooks, and servers in there, and the dorm students had breakfast, lunch and dinner up there. And we didn’t go home until Friday evening, and came back on Sunday evening. And the local students, whose fathers were stationed in Nuremberg, they got to go home every day after school. So the dorm students, we kind of formed our own little clique, and we knew we were too far from our parents—there was no way our parents were going to be of any help, if we had to evacuate, and we had this stupid plan, that never dawned on us, that we were…that 18:00we were going to be fighting about ten millions Germans trying to get the heck out of Dodge too, if Russia attacked. But we even had a girl who was in charge of the map. We had mapped our way to Switzerland, or France. We even…the girls were supposed to go up and break in the door to the cafeteria, and we were supposed to pile all the non-perishable food we could find—canned goods, bread, whatever wasn’t going to perish, you know, whatever didn’t need refrigeration—we were supposed to throw that in the middle of these army blankets, and make bundles out of them. And the guys were going to go around and steal cars, trucks, whatever—some of our guys knew how to hot-wire cars too [laughs]…I mean, military kids could have criminal minds [laughter]…but we were also kind of survivors, so…they were going to go steal cars, 19:00and pick all the girls up and we had somebody in charge of making sure she had the map, and somebody else, I think, was assigned to be sure you had a can opener, since most of our stuff would be canned goods [laughs]. But we had a plan. Never dawned on us that we would be killed by the Germans, to get whatever we had, and to throw us out, and get hold of whatever vehicle. And we knew the bus wasn’t going to make it across, even if they had armed MPs on the buses, the Germans would overwhelm them, you know, and grab the bus and the drivers were usually German. I mean, heck, he’s liable just to throw the MPs out himself, [laughs] and go get his family and friends! We just knew that bus was never going to make it across town, but that was the plan they gave us [laughs].

Milligan:How did you all decide…I mean, how do you come up with [ ]…. were you sitting around one night and decided we need to do this ourselves? 20:00Adrian:No, we just knew, I mean…well, you’ve got to remember that we were the kids who grew up without our fathers. Our fathers were military; they were gone all through the war, and our mothers and fathers, many of them were just getting reacquainted. Some of my friends didn’t see their fathers for two or three years, during World War II, and so you know…I saw my dad three times in six years. And, so, it was just…we got very independent, and many of our mothers went to work for the military war effort, and we were latchkey kids. So we were a very independent bunch. Another funny thing is when I got there, of course, everything was black market. The deutsch mark—there was nothing to buy with the deutsch mark. I mean the factories had all been bombed, 21:00and so…and displaced people, the people who had survived the camps were just wandering everywhere. And they were given first preference on jobs, and they were housed in former military German troop barracks, because they had no place to go. They had lost everything. And the trials were still going on, so it was, it was a rough time for everyone. And you could feel sorry for, mainly for the kids, because they would be scrambling around in rubble, looking for whatever they could salvage. They would stand outside the movie theaters where—we had our own movie theaters—and they would stand outside the theater while people were standing in line and wait for them to throw cigarette butts in the gutter. And they would salvage the cigarette butts. They had little pouches, or little tins, and they would strip the paper off, and dump the tobacco in there, and 22:00they were actually selling tobacco. Cigarettes were a big commodity. That was the main…main point of monetary exchange. They…we were rationed a carton and a half a week, at the PX, it was only $1.50…$1 for a carton…$1.50 for a carton and a half of cigarettes in the PX, and we only got it once a week.

Milligan:What’s the PX?

Adrian:Post Exchange—those are on every military base everywhere. And in Europe, it was called EES, European Exchange System. But, you know, we…a carton and a half a week, and you could see it for fifty, sixty deutsch marks, when the legal rate was somewhere in the vicinity of five marks, little bit more or less. But, you know, for a dollar-fifty [laughs], you could get about fifty to sixty deutsch marks 23:00instead of trading your dollar. We also did not have greenbacks. We had military payments certificates—MPCs. It was paper money; it was like monopoly. Even your nickels were paper—nickels, and dimes, and quarters, and fifty-cents were [ ], and all your dollars were paper [laughs] and it looked like monopoly money. And you’d think you had a lot of money until you started counting it, and it was all five and dimes and quarters, you know, but it was…you know we weren’t allowed to have greenbacks over there, because they were afraid of counterfeiting. And they just did not want our money being passed around over there, on the black market. So all we had was MPC.

Milligan:So where you could you spend the MPCs?

Adrian:In the PX—the Post Exchange, and in the snack bars, and in the officer’s clubs and the service clubs. We had a serviceman’s club, social…special services club, 24:00and the sergeant’s NCO clubs.

Milligan:But not in the town?

Adrian:Yeah, they were around…yeah, they were scattered around town. One of the service clubs was just inside the wall city in one of the few buildings that remained. The wall city of Nuremberg, which is two thousand years old, or so, had a wall all around it and there was a deep moat originally, back in the Dark Ages. And of course the moat is just a grassy ditch now. But the wall city was bombed pretty badly by…mostly by the British. I think the Americans only bombed it once or twice. There was very little other damage around Nuremberg. It was mostly in the wall city. Sometimes planes, if they had been fired upon, and were damaged, and they had to get back to safe territory, back in to their own lines, back behind allied lines, 25:00if they still had bombs on board, they’d just drop them, to take the weight off, so that the plane would have enough gas and get back, especially if they lost an engine or something, you know—why they would struggle back. And they would just drop the bombs wherever. So there was an occasional stray bomb. In fact the Palace of Justice, where the war crimes trials were held there—there was a stray bomb that was dropped on that wing, where the tribunal held the court—the war crimes trials. It was dropped on that one wing. So they did have to do some repair to that wing. The reason they wanted to use that particular court room, is Room 600, on the second floor there on the far right of the Palace of Justice as you face it, was because that was where the Nazi enacted the Nuremberg Laws, about Jews cohabitating with Aryan. 26:00They voided all the marriages; there were many Aryans that had married into Jewish families, and they voided those marriages, and declared their children illegitimate. They were not to socialize, and everything was just denied them. That was where the Nuremberg Laws were put in place, so it was kind of symbolic to have the war crimes trials in that same building.

Milligan:I’m going to go back there and close that door real quick [tape interruption].

Adrian:Let’s see…where was I? Oh, about the trials.

Milligan:Right, about the trials. We were starting to get into why they chose that particular courtroom.

Adrian:I just missed getting there, in the fall, around October some time, of ’48. They took the classes in to see some of the trials. Once the Nazi hierarchy trials were over, the Hermann Göring trial and everything, when that was over at the end of summer 27:00of ’46, and they started in ’45. They hung the group that was sentenced to hang—they hung them in October. They didn’t start…they started bringing the families over into places like Frankfurt Germany and Munich, and those places, but they didn’t bring the families into the Nuremberg area, because they weren’t sure if there would be a retaliation on the part of the Germans, once the hangings took place.

Milligan:So they didn’t bring the German families or the American families?

Adrian:They didn’t bring the American families in there until late ’46, so some of those students in ’46 did not start school until about October, and so the school went a little bit longer the following year in ’47. So it was…that was kind of a special area, and I think that’s one reason, too, why they started the school in Erlangen, 28:00because that was away from Nuremberg in the beginning. And they just gradually moved them in, and in January ’48, is when they moved them into Fürth. But I had just missed going to see any of the trials. And of course, there were no American families there during the first trial, but a lot of people don’t know it, but the trials were not over until the spring of 1949. The next group of trials, and some of my friends were taken to view some of these trials, were the medical trials, and they will still tell you how horrible—and one of my dear friends, he was year behind me, and he’s going to be at this reunion in Branson—Eddie still tears up when he remembers this woman that showed the scars that were experiments that performed on her, mainly on her legs.

Milligan:The medical trials were….

Adrian:Yes, they were next, after the Nazi hierarchy trials. The medical groups were next. 29:00Milligan:And what did that consist of?

Adrian:That was all the doctors, and the people at the camps that…the nurses, people that assisted in those terrible experiments and surgeries and they showed an awful lot of film. I find it a little difficult, and especially the experiments on the children, were just horrifying. By then, the press had lost interest in the trials. Russia had actually already pulled out after the prisoners from the first trial were hung. The Russians pulled out, and the Americans were the only ones who remained. And I don’t know if the British and the French were involved anymore. I’m not sure about that; I’d have to go back and reread my Nuremberg history books. But, it…the Americans were mainly the prosecutors in the subsequent trials. They 30:00had the medical trials grouped next, and then, the next grouping involved the industrial…owners, the industry owners, Farbin…all those huge German industries who used slave labor, and treated them badly. That was the next group of trials. The bankers were involved, because they confiscated all the Jewish holdings in the bank, and turned it over to the Nazi party. They even found gold teeth from the Jewish camp cadavers—a whole vault full of gold teeth in one of the banks that were holding it for melt down. Anything gold—gold jewelry, gold eyeglass frames, anything gold—they confiscated all of that. And the banks were holding that for a melt down.

Milligan:As people went into the camps, 31:00specifically, they confiscated it?

Adrian:Oh, well…they gassed them, and then went in and pulled teeth from the cadavers. In the beginning, they didn’t have those huge ovens. That came after. They used to just shoot them by the thousands, and dump them in huge ditches. Later on, they started the gassing and then the crematoriums. The next group of trials was the judicial system. If you’ve ever seen Judgment at Nuremberg, with Spencer Tracy and Marlene Dietrich, that is based on a real trial. The judicial system was tried for enacting the Nuremberg Laws—taking away all of the Jews’ privileges, and putting them in camps, you know, and null and voiding all the marriages, and illegitimizing 32:00the children of those marriages, so they did try the judicial system as well. So that is based on a real trial; it was not filmed until the late ‘50s but it’s an excellent film, and it’s pretty true to what really happened. They did not use the original—the real names of the people, but basically it was based on a real trial. But it was…I did get to go to the movie theater. They took us, you had to be sixteen, and we saw two hours of the film being used as evidence. And the Germans were very proud of what they were doing; they thought they were doing the world a favor, and they recorded everything.

Milligan:Which phase was this—did you get to go see?

Adrian:Oh, at the camps, all the campsites. And not only the German film, that they took, showing what all they were doing to the concentration 33:00camp victims, but what they…what our troops found after they opened the camps. So it was a pretty horrifying two hours, and I don’t think I could have sat through it, except it was black and white. If it had been in living color, I don’t think any of us could have stood it. And several of the girls in our group, and a couple of the guys too, several of them had to get up. The teacher said, “If you need to get up and leave, go out in the lobby and wait.” Milligan:Was there a discussion whether they show open those viewings to the general public? Was it open to the general public?

Adrian:No, we were among the first young Americans to see that. And of course, you see bits and clips of it on the History Channel today and you see pictures, you know, sometimes, but you don’t see…sit and see two hours of it. 34:00Milligan:So how was that invitation given? How was that presented, that you can come see this video?

Adrian:Oh, that was a school outing. That was a day trip. We were taken as sixteen year olds, and all of us that were sixteen and older in the school were taken to the theater and shown this. And we were among some of the first young people—we saw it before anybody in the United States saw this stuff.

Milligan:Did the German citizens in the area ever catch a glimpse?

Adrian:No, no. Of course, they were…when they liberated the camps, they did force the local Germans to go through that camp and view what had been going on, and you’ll see that on the History Channel, where they actually, you know, they…there was nobody backing out. You’re going to go through and see what’s been going on right behind your…a block away from where you live, or you know. You 35:00couldn’t smell all this? So it was…it was just horrifying, and as teenagers, we had such ambivalent feelings, because we’d be feeling sorry for the kids out in the rubble, scrounging for things, and women who had to prostitute themselves to survive…maids who were working for the families—for the American families. And you could feel sorry for them, because there was nothing on the German market, and they were struggling to survive. And then you’d go see this, and then…your feeling is that you want to go out and hit somebody. You know, you just want to slap them in the face, and say, “How could you, as Christian people, with some of the highest intelligence in the country, in the world…do this?” And, 36:00we…I still think everybody still has problems understanding how could you let this happen. But it was a slow takeover. They were so…after World War I, Germany was so devastated, and all the countries they had invaded wanted reparations, and they just bankrupted the country. They took all their assets and bankrupted them. There were no jobs, and people were desperate, and of course, the world was in a big depression during the 30’s. Well, theirs was even worse than what we had here in the United States. And all it took was one maniac, with a gift of gab, spouting all of this German superiority stuff at them, and he was going to bring Germany back to a world-class country. And they followed him, like sheep, because they were desperate. And then, once he was in control and had all these maniacs on his staff, 37:00it went downhill. But it was just—you can kind of understand how politically, people just want to live their lives out peacefully and fairly comfortably. You know, when someone promises that this is what’s going to happen to you—and I know every time somebody, one of the Germans in those early years would spout, “But he built the autobahn, and we had the best road system in the world”—of course that gave Eisenhower the idea of building interstate highways in this country, but you know, you look at them, and say, “Were these highways worth several million lives, and all that horror?” And then of course, once the war was over, Russia took over the eastern part and people who were from 38:00Poland, and Czechoslovakia, and all those countries, they wouldn’t let them back in, and they had nothing to go back to anyway. So you had all of these DPs and there were people who did not have housing. We were not allowed to go out and rent a house on the economy. Our government went around and requisitioned houses from German owners, and you were assigned a house to live in. Sometimes, it was an apartment building, that they requisitioned, and the whole apartment would be nothing but American. Sometimes they were individual houses, and they would requisition them, and sometimes the owner would stay on as the maid. Every set of quarters that you were assigned came with a maid; they were trying to create…some sort of revenue for the families to live on. We didn’t have to pay them. The military pays 39:00military families a housing allowance. That’s separate from the officer’s pay or the military personnel pay and it’s a housing allowance. If they supply you with quarters, you do not receive that housing allowance—it goes into a housing finance system, and so these maids were paid out of the housing finance system. But they were assigned, and you could reject them. They would send someone over for you to interview, or you could try them out for a while. My mother went through twelve maids the first year we were in Bamberg.

Milligan:What was the problem?

Adrian:They were either stealing things, or they were sneaking their boyfriends up into their attic room, and having sex, and you know…I had these two much younger sisters in the house, and so…. Sometimes, they would just decide that it was cheaper to go sleep with GIs, than it was to take care of two kids, and do housework. Of course, no one had washing machines, 40:00so washing had to be done in big washing bathtubs, and so it was hard for the maids. They did have to work hard. But many times, if there was a room available, they would live in the quarters, and so that would…a lot of times the families that they were working for would let them take extra things home to their other family members, to their parents or whatever. It was just kind of a give and take sort of thing, and mother finally found a lady that stayed with her for three years—Margaret. So it was a give and take thing, and you were allowed to fire a maid if you didn’t like her, or if she was stealing, or if she was abusing the children, or stealing stuff, or whatever, or sneaking her boyfriends in. It was trying 41:00to get their economy moving again. We had a sixteen-piece orchestra in our officers’ club in the Grand Hotel, down in Nuremberg. The Grand Hotel is right across from the train station, the Bahnhof. The Bahnhof had some damage done to it, and the Grand Hotel had a little bit of damage, but that was because they were in close proximity to the wall city, and most of the damage wasn’t caused so much from direct bombing, but by concussions. So the Grand Hotel was where most of the people lived who were working with the trials. After they started bringing families over, it was a transit billet for families who were coming in, and waiting on housing assignments, families who were leaving and waiting to check out, waiting for their port call, and so forth. So it was called a transit billets. The Armed Forces Network Station was on the third floor. The officer’s club was all down on the first level. And, 42:00we had a sixteen-piece orchestra seven nights a week. They’d play until midnight on a weeknight and then until 1:00 a.m. on Saturday night.

Milligan:They were German?

Adrian:Oh yeah, yeah. So, you know, we had a dance floor, we had a nice restaurant, and of course, all the restaurant was supplied with food from the commissary system, because we had a commissary we could go to. But it was a way of trying to create jobs for all these people to get their economy going, because we thought we were going to war with Russia. The Marshall Plan went into effect.

Milligan:Which is?

Adrian:General Marshall is the one who said that we needed to put the Germans back on their feet, we need to hire as many of them as we can, we need to build the economy back up, and so…the Marshall Plan donated…put a lot of money into German 43:00for rebuilding and reconstructing.

Milligan:Let’s get back a little bit, when you started school. I think when you left off with that, it was December, you had just really gotten kind of settled in, but not started school yet. So you really started school in Nuremberg, in January of 1949.

Adrian:Yes, but I only had a half year. But I took my transcript from Tulsa to the principal, Mr. Search, dear man; I spent three hours with him in Denver a few years ago before he died. I showed him my transcript and he says, “Well, you’ve had this…you’ve had this English course, but take it again, different book. Well, you’ve had this history course…take it again, different book.” He said, “You’ve had two years of typing, go in the typing class to keep your speed up.” And he put me in art and 44:00I had three study halls a day [laughs]. He didn’t know what else to do with me. And I still ended up with two credits over what I needed.

Milligan:So you were really done, essentially.

Adrian:Yeah, I had, at Tulsa, because it was a top school, I had had nearly every course they had to offer. The schools were very basic in the beginning, and in fact, I had twenty-three graduate in ’49 with me, June of ’49. And they….five of them were—a couple of them had already turned nineteen, and the rest of them were pretty close to nineteen. They were supposed to have graduated in 1948, but there were certain subjects not available in those very early years, that they didn’t have, and they didn’t have enough credits. So they had to go this extra year to get those credits. I was seventeen and a half when I graduated, so I was probably…there was only one other person in my class 45:00that was younger than me, by about ten days [laughs]. But we…they had to go to school, you know, and they were young adults by then—they were of legal age. But I had a ball, and every time Mr. Search needed somebody to pass notes around to the different classrooms to the teachers, he’d call me out of study hall, just trying to keep me busy.

Milligan:Like what else were you doing [laughter].

Adrian:And sometimes we were doing posters for something in art class, and he’d let me work over the class time, into the next study hall, you know, and go work on posters. And when the German club…I got there too late to take German, and Herr Krohner was a German teacher, and he was a German national, I believe. Someone said they thought he was Hungarian, but I don’t know. But anyway, 46:00he was our German teacher, and every time they went on a field trip, why Mr. Search would say, “Go get Joan out of study hall and take her.” [Laughs]. So I got to go on field trips—we went to a German brewery. We were walking around in the hops drying room in our stocking feet, and then we got one of the bottles of German beer each, at the end of the tour.

Milligan:What did your parents think of that?

Adrian:I don’t think they even knew, because we were at school, and they were busy doing other things. But it was just…the German teacher didn’t care. We were on the bus, on a military bus, and we had a German driver and an MP. MPs nearly always rode on the buses with us. But you know, we went back to school happy campers, I’ll tell you, because that German beer is about 12-17% proof, you know [laughter] and those bottles are about 47:00the size of a fifth. So, anyway, I had a good time [laughs] going on field trips with the German club.

Milligan:How was that as teenagers—you were away from your parents; you’re in these dorms with essentially a housemother. Did you get to go out in the town and socialize?

Adrian:We could after school—we got out, I forget when it was, around 3:00 or 3:30, something like that, and we did have to go to the dorms and sign out and say where we were going. Usually we would say we were going to Lindee Stadium, which was a recreational area that the Germans had, but we took it over for our recreational purposes. They had a swimming pool in the summer time, and they had a tennis court, and in the winter, they would flood the tennis court, and have ice-skating on the tennis courts. It was an EES, a PX snack bar—hamburgers, and hot dogs, and soft drinks and ice cream and stuff like that, 48:00and at one of end of it, they had a jukebox, and they had cordoned off one at Lindee Stadium to call the Teen Club. So, you know, we could go to the Teen Club. We could go downtown to that service club, which also had a snack bar, just inside the wall city. We could ride the streetcars and the German buses free; we just had to show our ID cards. But we did have to go back to the dorms, and say where we going, and we had to be back at school by 5:30 for dinner. And we had from six to seven in our social room—the living room of what the house was, you know, our social room—and the boys could come over during the social hour. From seven to nine was study hall [laughs], which I wrote a lot of letters and read a lot of books [laughter]. And then ten o’clock was lights out. So we did have a certain number of restrictions, and being military kids, 49:00we followed the rules.

Milligan:So you all weren’t sneaking out, and going to the bars or anything?

Adrian:No, no. Oh, one night one of the girls brought a cake home from…on Sunday evening, you know—we came back on Sunday evenings, and they bused us back, and her mother had let her bring a cake back. I think somebody had a birthday or something the next day, and we sneaked down into the kitchen and got plates out. I think the housemother knew we were doing it, but we were doing it—we had a birthday party like at eleven o’clock at night down at the kitchen or something [laughs]. Eating cake… Milligan:Pretty wild [laughs].

Adrian:Oh, yeah, we were really wild! [Laughs]. Of course, I was dating one of the guys that was over in the dorm—in fact, he’s the one I was telling you that was in Bamberg. We starting dating right there that Christmas. He left…his family was due to go back in March, so he left toward the end of March. But anyway, he and his wife are coming from Waco, Texas.

Milligan:To Springfield this weekend? 50:00Adrian:Yes, he’s going to be there. He comes to all the reunions, and he and I…really we lost track, but once I found him…he…we just are really good friends now, because we experienced so much together at those years, and he kind of helped me, because I was sort of lost that first month…I never knew where I was. I just kind of went along with the crowd, you know, and I never had any idea where I was, or what we were doing. I just kind of followed along. They’d say, “Come on, we’re going to go do this.” But it was such an interesting time, and he had been there in the very early years, and so he had so many interesting stories. He was the one that told me about the fire in the barracks that they had to build one night. So it was really just a big learning time. And going though the wall city at night, 51:00there was a curfew, and….

Milligan:For the city?

Adrian:Yeah, and we did walk…we missed the bus. The opera house, the Nuremberg Opera House, which was down near the wall city in the train station, and everything, the Opera House was also our movie theater. We used it as a movie theater and also live shows, USO shows would come in there. We used it as a community theater, the stage. And eventually, and I don’t remember when, I think it was around 1950, they started alternating letting the Germans Opera Company, the Nuremberg Opera Company, use it two or three…or every other night, or something like that. And so they started performing operas around 1950. And they just had it every night and they would use it every other night for either a movie theater, or a live show. That was downtown, and sometimes we’d go down there for the movies. 52:00We almost never went to our own homes. A lot of the Nuremberg kids would invite two or three of us to come and stay at their house, and of course, like I said, the parents had maids now, the wives had maids, they had done without their husbands many times…years during the war, and they all went to the officer’s club and partied. So the maids would have to make beds and pallets and everything for all the teenage visitors who showed up and we would just, we’d go to the Teen Club in Nuremberg. I went to Bad Kissingen with one of my class friends, who invited me to spend the weekend with her, because Bad Kissingen didn’t have many teenagers, so she was always inviting two or three people to come home, so she’d have somebody to do something with. And one of my…my roommate who was a senior, graduated with me, and she lives in Long Island, New York, and we’ve kept in touch all through the years. 53:00Jerry lived in [ ] which was the a maneuver area—that was where the armored tank people used to have maneuvers, and all the men would go there, you know, and train, and all this stuff, but they…she was the only teenager in town. Her father was a civilian engineer, and he stayed over there for about fifteen years, or so. Her much younger sister and brother did nearly all of their school years in Germany. But they had the grade schools localized, in the smaller communities, the sub-posts, they had grade schools, so it was just the high school students, the ninth through twelveth grade that had to be dormed, if they were not in the city. But she and I would get on the train. Because she was the only teenager, the bus did not bring her in and take her home. She had orders to travel 54:00on the train free, and of course, the military controlled the train system, and we had special cars for Americans only that the Germans were not allowed to sit in. So the prices were very cheap, but because she was a student, and going back and forth every weekend, she went free. So every time she’d invite me home, we’d get on there, and of course it was a little old German who’d come around looking for tickets and everything, and he didn’t speak a word of English, and we would convince him that I was also underneath her orders [laughs], so I wouldn’t have to buy a ticket.

Milligan:So did you all speak German?

Adrian:Very little. The Germans actually, most of the Germans wanted to speak English. It was hard to practice German on them, because the better English they spoke, the better job they had. The Americans had the jobs, and so they had to speak pretty good English to get the better paying jobs. So they wanted 55:00you to speak English to them, and correct them if they made a mistake, because that was going to get them a better job. So it was…kind of hard to learn German. Of course, the students who had German in school were better at it than I was, because they had…you know, they’d gotten there in time to take it, especially those who had been there for two or three years—they had German every year. But I had a little trouble with it at first, but I…I actually I could get along. I don’t have too much problem with it. And the thing is, if I’d say something wrong, I’d just laugh, you know, and they’d tell me I was wrong. I’d just laugh, and they’d laugh, and they’d think it’s funny. But I get along. But I don’t speak fluent German. I know some phrases, polite phrases. I don’t know conversational German.

Milligan:So may 56:00answer some questions I had about language while you were there as a student too, because, I guess the maids that would work in your homes and things, would be….

Adrian:Yes, nearly all of them spoke enough English to understand what you needed to ask. We were not to socialize with the Germans. It was not encouraged, and because the Germans had this feeling that if you treated them to a lunch, or something, they would have to treat you, and they couldn’t do that. There were very few restaurants still open, and they didn’t have a whole lot to offer, and so they, you were told not to put them in to that ‘owing you’ situation.

Milligan:So what was your stepfather doing over there? Why did he get stationed there?

Adrian:Well, he was a…just a sub-post commander, I don’t know what his title was, but you had this chain of command, 57:00and he was just, you know, they just managed the sub-post area. He was not with a fighting unit. He had been wounded quite badly in Italy, and had been in the hospital for near Washington, but he was in Virginia. He did not want mother to come and see him while he was in the hospital. We stayed in Muskogee. He had severe facial injuries, and they had to a lot of plastic surgery. Shrapnel…he was with the 88th Infantry Division, which fought at the Monte Cassino, but it was a good thing, actually, that he was wounded before they got to Monte Cassino, because several of his very good friends were killed, and the 88th Infantry Division had 80% of their men were either killed or wounded, from that division, so he was probably lucky that he was wounded before they reached that. But the shrapnel hit him in the face, and scarred up his chin, cut his lower lip off, 58:00knocked all his teeth out, and they had to take half an upper lip to make him a lower lip and they had to wait for the gums to heal, before they could fit him with false teeth. So he had false teeth. Extremely handsome man—absolutely knock, just Hollywood gorgeous, and I can see why mother just went dippy and my mother always reminds me of a young Irene…looked like Irene Dunn when she was young, especially the profile. Every time I see an Irene Dunn picture, and she turns profile, I think, oh God, there’s my mother [laughs]. She was quite attractive as well. So, they were both twenty-nine. He was only a month older than my mother, so he was only eighteen years older than me. But, they were both twenty-nine when they got married in 1943. But, yeah, he just died about three or four years ago in Richmond. 59:00He was eighty-nine. And mother died when she was sixty; she had a cerebral hemorrhage, so I was always very fond of him, because all of this would never have happened to me. Mother was actually engaged to a civilian in Muskogee, when she met Tom, and of course, she just went ballistic over him. And those [ ] jackets—darn those uniforms look good on those men, and he was six feet one and had black hair and big brown eyes, and he was just gorgeous—old Richmond family, VMI graduate, very cultured, and just a very honorable man. So, I was so glad he came into my life, because that man mother was engaged to—I didn’t like him one bit, and I didn’t trust him [laughs].

Milligan:You were probably ten then, weren’t you?

Adrian:Yeah, eleven, they married in…. she 60:00meet him in ’42 when she was working out at Camp Gruber, and let’s see, I was born December ’31, so I wasn’t twelve yet, when they got married. I was eleven and a half when they got married. I just thank God every day for Tom coming into mother’s life. I know he had thirty-five years of hell with my mother, but she would have been diagnosed as being bipolar in later years, but they didn’t diagnose people in those days, and she was either on a high or a low. He just kind of got through thirty-five years of hell. So, it was really kind of a blessing, when she died, and he ended up marrying a high school-college sweetheart; they’d broken up, shortly before the war for some reason, and he…friends of theirs, about 61:00a year after mother died…friends of theirs found out that she had moved back to Richmond. She was a widow—had been a widow for about five years, and he had been a widow for a year, and they got back together. So about two years after mother died, he remarried, and had ten wonderful years with her. Then at ten years, she died of cancer, so, he spent his final years by himself, at a senior apartment, and my two half-sisters, of course, checked on him and went up all the time.

Mulligan:So was that—with your mom’s condition—how did she do living in Germany, in Nuremberg and in the states?

Adrian:Well, she kind of enjoyed it, because she didn’t have to take care of the kids. She had the maid. She could go to the officer’s wives club, and play bridge, and you know they’d take trips around, and little day trips to go around and explore and of course, she 62:00did black market like crazy—they all did. German ladies would come to the back door with small items like little silver pieces, or porcelain, or whatever in these little knapsacks, and wanting to sell them to the Americans, because they were trying to get some money to survive, or they would take a trade—they would trade for cigarettes, they’d trade for coffee, they’d trade for chocolate, they’d trade for lard…cooking oils, so you know, they were desperate. And my mother was having a ball. And the Hummel factory was only 20 kilometers from us, and the women used to go up there and trade coffee and cigarettes under the counter with the show room supervisor, and buy Hummels—I think she had ever Hummel made by the time they left in 1952, from the late 40’s until ’52, I think she had every Hummel 63:00made [laughs]. I guess my sisters got them—I didn’t get any of them. I got a few on my own after I was married, but I don’t know what…my sister’s have them, I guess.

Mulligan:Well, if they didn’t pay them in trade, how did they pay them, what kind of money did they use?

Adrian:Well, they traded coffee, and cigarettes, and that sort of thing, and then of course, it was up to the Germans to go out and sell them. You know they had German friends who would buy them, and they could make get deutsch marks.

Mulligan:Was a D mark?

Adrian:Yeah, it was a deutsch mark. But, when I got there, I was under eighteen, and I couldn’t have a cigarette ration, so my cohorts in the dorm said, “Well, here’s what we do, Joan, when we don’t have a cigarette ration. We go to the post exchange, and we buy a box of Hershey chocolate bars, and you could get 24 in a box, and it only cost us 80 cents 64:00in the post exchange, and we could sell them to the cleaning women in our dorm for 30 to 40 deutsch marks, depending on the price. It was sort of like the stock market [laughs]…supply and demand. One week you might get 40 marks, the next week you might get 30 [laughs]. And the same thing with the cigarettes—sometimes 60 marks, sometimes 50. You know, it would kind of go up and down. But, we’d sell them to the putzfrau, the cleaning lady. Of course there was nothing to buy on the market. We’d go to the [ ] house and drink beer whenever we got out of school, and had our hour or two off, we’d go to the [ ] house and buy beer.

Milligan:With the marks, the deutsch marks.

Adrian:With the deutsch marks [laughter].

Milligan:Black market.

Adrian:Oh yeah, it was rampant. But…we had…I 65:00mean, we had a good time, but all the time we were observing all of this destruction, and I think we were probably the most anti-war group of people you would ever want to meet, anywhere. We just don’t believe in war.

Milligan:Because of what you witnessed?

Adrian:Because we saw what it was like for these people to struggle to survive. Well, I went home with a lot of my friends all the time, and I got to…Würzburg, Bad Kissingen, and I’d invite them home, sometimes, you know. I’d invite some of them home as well. But, one time, we had a basketball game with the Heidelberg team—there were only seven high schools at that time. They were in the major cities like Munich, and Frankfurt, and Nuremberg, and Bremerhaven…Bremen, and Heidelberg, Wiesbaden, 66:00where the air force base was, so there were just seven high schools, and Berlin, in the west German area. And so we had…school games—we played football against each other, and played basketball against each other. And there was a basketball game with Heidelberg with weekend, and so a bunch of us girls decided that we were going to go and be cheerleaders for our team in Heidelberg. So we convinced one of the teachers to come along as the girls’ chaperone, and the coach for the boys, you know. So we go to Heidelberg, and our team was terrible. My friend Eddie, that’s coming from Waco, was six feet one, and because he was so tall, they’d put him on the team, but he was one of those young men who grew so fast that his muscles hadn’t coordinated yet; he was the clumsiest kid you ever saw, but he was tall, so they made 67:00him play basketball [laughs]. He says he doesn’t remember a time he lived in Germany that he didn’t have an ace bandage on his ankle or his knees. He was always spraining something. But anyway, we all went to Heidelberg, and our team lost. And we were supposed to take the train back to Nuremberg that evening. Well, all the Heidelberg kids were, “Well, why don’t you guys stay over? We’ll put you up.” And so, one of the Heidelberg girls was a general’s daughter, and she said, “I’m having everybody up for a party tonight, up at my house.” And of course, Heidelberg wasn’t bombed, it was a university city, and it wasn’t bombed—there was no damage there. So there were all these beautiful homes that they requisitioned all over the place. So we talked the teacher and the coach into letting us stay over. And all of the Heidelberg boys invited 68:00[us] and said, “Oh, I can take two guys in my house.” “I can take three or four” whatever, you know. And one of the girls from Heidelberg said, “Well, I can have five at my house—I have pallets that we can put on the floor.” So anyway, we got to her house, and had the maid—her parents were off at the officer’s club—she told the maid to put the pallets out, and then we were going to this general’s daughter’s party, and she lived…I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Heidelberg, but they have all these beautiful homes that you have to walk up all these steps to get to them; they’re way up on the side of the hill overlooking the river. So the general’s home was one of those that sat way up on the side of the hill there, and I forget how we got there, I think we got an army bus. They army bus took us up to her house, picked us up. So 69:00we got up, went up to the party, and I mean, we just had a ball. We had records going all night, and we had…I think we were sneaking into her father’s liquor cabinet too, but we were having a big old party, and had a good time. This is when I was dating Eddie, it was before he left in March, because it must have been about February of ’49, and the girl said that we could use her bedroom to freshen up in, you know, and the bathroom was up near her bedroom and everything, so several of us from Nuremberg went up supposedly to comb our hair and put lipstick on, and we opened up her wardrobe. Of course none of the German homes had closets. The old houses had these big wardrobes, and here are all these cashmere sweaters. All different colors—I don’t know how many she had, and we were all cashmere nuts in those days—you know, hardly anybody could afford them. 70:00We were all trying to figure out if she’d miss one or two, because she had so many [laughs]. But we didn’t. Anyway, we left the next day. But what was so funny that the train we rode in on had a…food car you know, a restaurant car…a dining car. And so, when we got to the train at Nuremberg to head for Heidelberg, we couldn’t find enough seats for us all to sit together in the American only cars. So we decided to take over the dining car. So we’re all sitting in the dining car, and of course, the German waiters were trying to set it up for lunch, or whatever, and we’re shoving the silverware aside, and we’re playing bridge, and playing cards, 71:00and just having a good time taking over this dining car. And we just drove them nuts all the way to Heidelberg. So the next morning, when we go to the train station—that car had had an overnight, and it’s the same car, and the same staff, and they’re all leaning out the window, you know, watching and they go, “Ach mein Gott!” And we took over the dining car again [laughs]. I think the staff on the dining car was so happy when we left Nuremberg.

Milligan:I’m sure.

Adrian:I mean we were sprawled out—if we felt like napping we’d put some chairs together, and sprawl out, you know, and we kept shoving everything off so we could play cards. We just drove them nuts. In the winners, we were really terrible, because we were the winners, 72:00we were like, “get over it.” Milligan:[ ]. So during that one semester you were in school, you school took you to see the showing of the videos that they’d recovered. Now was there anything else like that, that your school did for the class, or did you…do you think [ ] , did the Nuremberg trials affect you directly?

Adrian:A number of the students had parents who were connected with the trials. In fact, Kathy May Smith, her father was a colonel, and he was a sergeant of arms at the trials. And she left…they left, though. Her brother graduated with the class of ’47. There were only eight people in the class of ’47. He went on to become a nuclear physicist—a 73:00doctor in nuclear medicine, and unfortunately died just shortly before I located them, sometime in the late 80’s, about ’86 is when I think he died. But Kathy, she was only twelve when she was there, so she doesn’t remember a lot, because I’ve told her a lot of stuff that was the background on this, that she never was aware of because she was just twelve. She was quite a bit younger than her brother. So she’s been interested in the CCC thing that her father commanded. But he was sergeant of arms at the trials, so her brother knew more about what went on at the trials than she did. He was old enough to sit up in the balcony.

Milligan:How old did you have to be to sit up in the balcony?

Adrian:Well, I mean, he was old enough to understand what was going on. Because his father was the sergeant of arms, 74:00and a colonel, he could say, well can I, and his father would bring him. So some of those students were taken by their parents to sit in the balcony. Of course, the first trials were pretty crowded, because that was the first time it had ever been done, and the press from all over the world was there. And so it was kind of a little bit difficult to get into the trials that first round. But later on, after the press lost interest, why they…it was pretty easy to get in. But it was…I think it affected me more later than it did at the time, when I found out more about it. During...my parents left in September of ’52. By then I had married, and I was expecting my first baby in December, 75:00and so I didn’t leave there until the fall of ’53. But now I went to work in the Palace of Justice after the trials were over in ’49. It became a special activities division, and the commanding officer, in fact, had been the commanding officer of the military police all over the American sector. His son was a year behind me in school, and his father, after the trials were over they asked his father if he’d like to stay on another couple of years, and take over special activities division, and he became a two-star general. He was a one-star general when he was in charge of the military police, and General Rickhard took over special activities. Special activities in the Palace of Justice was EES personnel—this was hiring 76:00personnel for the PX system, commissary contracts, entertainment division, the athletic division. The athletic division was the one that coordinated games, football games, and basketball games between military units, and so it was just basically taking care of keeping the community running. Entertainment division had what they called civilian actress technicians.

Milligan:[Laughs]. What’s that?

Adrian:A civilian actress technician…well, they were the ones who put together shows. They encouraged GIs; it was trying to create activities that soldiers could get involved in, and keep them out of trouble for one [laughs]. And, so, mainly for the enlisted personnel, to keep them busy, 77:00because there wasn’t a hell of a lot for them to do. They would put on musical variety show. Well, they always liked girls, so they would go to the high school, and ask the teenage girls if they would like to come and participate, so we performed on the Nuremberg Opera House stage in April of ’49, with a musical variety show, put on by a civilian actress technician. Getting costumes—they had taken all of the costumes from the Opera House and put them in huge, about five foot tall crates, down in the basement of the Palace of Justice. They had done that during the war, so that if the building got bombed, which it didn’t, but if had gotten bombed during the war, they could salvage the scenery and the costumes and that sort of thing. So that was where we went to get costumes. 78:00Some of those costumes were from World War I [laughs] and the 20’s and were almost shredding in your hands, but we managed to find costumes for these little musical variety shows…things that we did. But it was fun, and it gave us something to do. Some of the high school boys participated too, they invited any of the high school teenagers to participate, and so that was fun.

Milligan:What are some of the plays that you all were in?

Adrian:We did some little plays at the school, on our own. Our cafeteria had a stage—that was our assembly hall as well as our cafeteria. But after I got out of school, and was working, I did John Love Mary, which was a famous play for after the war, about a English war bride and the lady that was the civilian actress technician had done several 79:00movies in Hollywood, and had even performed with John Barrymore in his later years, when he was an alcoholic and couldn’t remember his lines. Her name was Tala Birell. She was in that movie with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, Bringing Up Baby, about the lion. And Tala was very talented. She was Hungarian, and had been brought over by the studios in the ‘30s as a threat to Greta Garbo, who was owned by another studio, and she just never quite made it. So she signed on as a civilian actress technician, but after I started working in the Palace of Justice, I got to meet a lot of people…Vic Damone, was a PFC in charge of sheet music [laughs] for the entertainment. He had made his first movie and had several hit records already and was dating Pier Angeli, 80:00who he married later. He was quite a little…he had this very fancy little red sports car convertible, two-seater, and there was a cute corporal, tall handsome blonde kid that he used to invite to go with him to Paris, and they’d take off for a three-day leave on three-day passes to Paris all the time, and of course, Vic Damone would pay all of their expenses and everything. He had all this money from his movie and his records, and everything. But unfortunately, they caught him messing around with a captain’s wife, who was a secretary in the Palace of Justice, and they shipped him off to Frankfurt Germany to the Seventh Army…Seventh Infantry Division, which only had male clerks [laughter]. 81:00Well, he was only in Nuremberg about a year, or a year and a half. He was quite a little Romeo.

Milligan:So what did you do when you worked at the House of Justice?

Adrian:Well, first job I got, in fact after Eddie left, I started dating Jerry Whitman, and Jerry’s father was assistant to the director of civilian personnel—American civilian personnel in EES, so Mr. Whitman got me an interview with the director, and because I had had three years of typing, and in Tulsa, I’d had filing and indexing, and shorthand, so he hired me to 82:00work in the personnel division. I was hired in what they called a non-appropriation position, which means it was normally hired by…normally they would hire a German for that position, so it was a very low paying job. I made $125 a month.

Milligan:Wow, could you live off of that?

Adrian:Yes, over there.

Milligan:Are we…okay…we’re just doing this interview over here, so… Adrian:We’re doing a recording… Milligan:Let us know, but if it’s possible to be quiet, while we’re in here.

Adrian:So anyway, he hired me, and because my parents were in Vanberg, they had requisitioned a five-story building not far from the Grand Hotel, and just across from the old wall city. They’d requisitioned two buildings—five-story buildings, and one of them 83:00was for all the single American teachers who were over there for the grade school, all the way up, and the other building was for clerical personnel, who…single American women who were working for the government. A lot of civil service women were over. They would sign up for two years at a time, and if they wanted to resign a contract they had a 60 day leave home and then they could come back again. So a lot of them stayed on for many, many years. They just every two years, would go home, and then come back. So I was assigned in the billets. And because I was what they called non-requisitioned, not appropriated position, I had to pay $15 a month for my room, and I had to pay for my own phone. And I couldn’t cook—there was no kitchen available there. I had to eat all my meals out. But, you know, it didn’t cost much but there were about six or eight of us working in the Palace of Justice 84:00who were dependent daughters, and I was the youngest at eighteen, and the oldest one was twenty-two, and we’d take the bus from the Palace of Justice at 5:15, and we’d be at the Grand Hotel by 5:30. We’d order the twenty-five cent drink special for the evening, and wait for all the lieutenants to come in and offer to take us to dinner [laughs] because we were all saving our money for trips, down to [ ] or [ ] or Paris, or whatever, and so…and we’d have lunch in the Palace. For twenty cents you could get a grilled cheese sandwich, and cup of tea of coffee [laughs]. We lived cheap, so we could travel.

Milligan:When we were talking the other day, you mentioned that you got to go to kind of a neat reunion in Washington, DC in the last few years. What was that all about?

Adrian:In ’96, in the fall, 85:00I forget now the exact dates of it, but around September or so, they tribunal people had a 50th anniversary reunion commemorating the end of the first trial, that was the Hermann Goering and the Nazi hierarchy trial. And I was coming back from England in 1995, and a lady sitting next to me was from a university in Evansville, Indiana. And we just to talking, and she wanted to know if I’d ever been in Europe before—she thought this was my first trip, and I told her when I’d been there. And I mentioned, you know, that I got there when the trials were there. And she said, “Oh, we have a professor who was a young lawyer during those trials.” And I got his name, and I sent a letter—found his address through the phone directory up at the Archive—and wrote, and I got a call from his wife. And she said her husband had Alzheimer’s. 86:00But she said they are planning a reunion, and this is the person you contact. So she said you might be interested in contacting him. What I was trying to do was trying to find alumni from the high school, because we were going to be having a reunion in ’96, and many of those judges and older lawyers had teenage children, and we hadn’t been able to locate them, because they were civilian, and they were scattered, and sometimes we didn’t even remember what state they were from. So, I was just wanted to know if he would put a little note in his next newsletter on their reunion, if you or any of your friends had teenagers at the American High School, please contact this person—they’re going to have a reunion, they have an alumni association. Well Drex Sprecker, marvelous, 87:00marvelous man. Drexel Sprecker lived in Chevy Chase, just outside of Washington, and he was third in command of the prosecuting team under Chief Justice Jackson. Jackson left right after that first trial, and he…General Telford Taylor took over, and then Drex was his right arm, after he took over for the rest of the trials. Drex was there from 1945 until the trials were finished—until the tribunal adjourned in spring of ’49—he was there all those years. And Drex invited me to come. He said, “I don’t think a lot of our people realize that there were American teenagers over there, and that you all got to see some of the trials, and the evidence and everything, once the families started coming over.” And I just thought, 88:00what an opportunity—I couldn’t pass that up, so I took my oldest daughter, who taught here in Frankfort, for twenty years or so—twenty-something years—because she was born in Nuremberg, and so we went and had two days of the most fantastic speakers. Chief Justice Jackson’s son came and spoke from his father’s personal notes. Senator Dodd of Connecticut—his father was on Truman’s staff, and his father was put in charge of finding a judicial system that was going to fit for these trials, and so Dodd Senior, I can’t remember his father’s name, but Dodd Senior had to come up with a system that was going to be compatible with the Russian, the French, the British, and the American judicial system, and they all had to agree on it. He came up with 89:00the system that worked for everybody. So Senator Dodd of Connecticut came and spoke from his father’s notes and papers, as well. And then people who had been prosecuting teams, and General Telford Taylor was there, but he had had a stoke, and couldn’t speak, so several people spoke for him, and what a magnificent job he did in those later trials…a very handsome man, about six feet seven, and so was Drex Sprecker—he was way over six feet, and so was his wife. Their kids, at the reunion, all you had to do…somebody would say, “Well, where’s so-and-so Sprecker?” Just look out over the heads, and there they are over there. His son and daughters are all six feet and plus, and so, you know, they were the tallest people in the room. But it was so amazing to talk to these people. 90:00One of the interpreters—I don’t know if you’ve ever watched the trials on the History Channel—but there’s a glass wall, with all these people speaking into microphones. Those are the instant translators, and they’re translating the depositions as these people are testifying. And every once in a while, you’ll see a long pause there, where nobody is saying anything. What has happened is that the translator has gotten behind—they’re talking too fast—and so he pushes a button and it shows up red on the desk. There are all these lights on these desks, and it shows up red, and that means stop for a minute and let me catch up. And then as soon as they see the green light, they continue on, so when you see these pauses, where nothing is going on, it isn’t that Chief Justice Jackson is trying to think what to ask next—he’s waiting for the translators to catch up. People are all sitting with these headphones on, 91:00and there were buttons in front of them, for whatever language they needed. That would queue them into the person behind that glass wall who was speaking the language they needed to hear. And they would just push the button for English, French, German, and Russian, whatever. And one of the translators I met was a remarkable woman. She was Jewish and from Vienna, and her father was deceased when the war started, and of course, Hitler just marched into Austria, and they just joined him right away—welcomed him with open arms. They started rounding up Austrian Jews. Well, her mother managed to get, through some friends of theirs, managed to get a pass for her to go to Switzerland—they made up a story that she had an aunt in Switzerland 92:00who was very ill, and needed someone to come and take care of her. And this woman was only about sixteen at the time. She had a younger sister, who was about fourteen, who was with the Corp de Ballet in Vienna, and so she got the older girl out to Switzerland. The younger girl—the troupe was getting ready to go on a world tour, to Australia, and so she got out with the ballet troupe, and then stayed in Australia for refuge. Her mother eventually got out and got to Switzerland, to her family, but by then the daughter, the one I met, her Swiss relatives treated her like a servant, and she was supposed to wait on everybody and do all the housework 93:00and everything, and she just did not appreciate the way she was being treated by these aunts and uncles, and so she managed to get a train into France. She was down in Cannes, which was sort of a neutral territory, once the Germans took France, so she goes into France, and she is working for a Jewish dentist. She knew how to type, and so she was keeping his office records for him. So then German invades France, and France falls. And they start rounding up all the Jews in France, so this dentist took her, and his family and fled to the west coast, and they managed to get on one of the last boats to England that was picking up Jews and bringing them into England. So she escaped to England, and 94:00her mother, after she had left Switzerland is when her mother finally was able to get a pass to go to Switzerland, and she had to live the rest of the war with her relatives who didn’t treat her very well. The sister was in Australia, and this lady, who was in England, and her English, of course, got very good, and of course, being Austrian she spoke fluent German, so when she found out they were looking for translators for the trials, she applied and got the job. So she was one of the translators. But a remarkable history on this woman, and you think, you know, she was just a step ahead of all of this.

Milligan:Yeah, absolutely.

Adrian:But she was amazing. But I met all these people—I was just such a great admirer of what they had accomplished and we had these marvelous speakers. One of the court reporters who went on to be the court reporter for the Colorado 95:00Legislature, and then during the Carter administration, she was a court reporter for Congress. And in fact, she was very instrumental in getting Jimmy Carter to declare National Holocaust Memorial Day. She had been a court reporter during the medical trials. She was over there for about a year and a half…an amazing woman. I met her, and in fact, she spoke to the Kentucky Court Reporters Association meeting in Lexington right after she was in Washington, and I said, “Oh, I want to hear you speak more.” Because everybody that spoke at this reunion had a time limit, and so I was just so fascinated with some of her stories, I thought I want to hear more of this. So, I did go to their meeting over in Lexington, and she spoke for an hour and a half, and there were about seventy something, seventy to eighty Kentucky 96:00court reporters over there. They were just…you could hear a pin drop…they were just fascinated with her stories, and she had some slides, and things like that, showing the courtroom, and some of the…a few of the terrible pictures that she had to witness. She talked about the medical trials—in fact, she’s written a book about it. It’s one of the few books written about the subsequent trials. Most of the books written are about the first one. But an amazing woman, and she’s living in Houston now. She moved from Colorado down to Houston to be close to some sons. She has two sons, and they live down there. But Drex asked me if I would like to speak. He says, “We’re going to have a little thing called ‘I Remember’ and we’re going to give you about three to five minutes.” And we were being 97:00filmed by Shoah—it’s an organization started by Steven Spielberg after he did Schindler’s List. He has financed a group of people to go all over the world and find the Jews who survived the camps, and to get their testimony. And that’s shown in the Holocaust Museum. They had a little mini-theatre there with all these testimonials. Shoah was filming this, because these were the people who did the trials, and so they were filming this. So I’m on a little piece of Shoah, because he asked me if I’d like to talk about being a student there, and impressions, and so forth. I said, “I won’t about so much about myself, but I’ll talk about our school, and give a little background on our school, and how involved we were with the trials.” And so, I did a short little thing 98:00about the school.

Milligan:Just basically saying what we’ve talked about today?

Adrian:Yeah, and just telling them you know whether they knew it or not, after the first trials were over that there were students sometimes in the balcony and that how impressed we were and how…impact…the impact it had on our lives, and our attitudes about war, and humanity. And where the school started, and very slow, and that many of our students had family involved in the trials. And I thanked them for making us a part of their history. So it was…and Drex was just such a sweetheart, he was just…when he started…he 99:00had started his book, and he actually sent me the first four chapters of his book—the rough draft—he said I thought this might be the part you’d be most interested in, because this was my impression of Nuremberg when I first arrived, and how we lived, and where we lived, and what had to do to get ready for the trials, and I thought this might be the most interesting part for you. So I had four pages of rough draft of his book before it was even published [laughs].

Milligan:Was it similar to what you remembered?

Adrian:Well, see, he got there in ’45, right before I did, so there was a lot that went on before I got there. There was a Molotov cocktail tossed through one of the windows of the Grand Hotel into the dining room during the trials, sometime in ’46, because there were people hiding out in…there 100:00were tunnels under the wall city. There were all sorts of tunnels, and wine cellars, and medieval tunnels and that sort of thing, and there were still Nazi sympathizers hiding out in there where all the rubble was, and evidently a couple of them got together and made a Molotov cocktail in a bottle and threw it through this window. Fortunately the people sitting at the table on the other side had just gotten up and left, so it didn’t hurt anybody. But, yeah, there were several incidents. One of the court reporters from Texas she was fired, and shipped home overnight, and the court reporter from Colorado that I got friendly with, Vivian Spitz, she said what happened was, she 101:00was going back into the Grand Hotel, she’d been out drinking, and she was going back into the Grand Hotel, and at that time, to get into the Grand Hotel, you had to show your military ID cards. And they had two black MPs checking cards, and she was drunk, she was from Texas, and she got belligerent, and started using some very nasty language about their race, and they reported her. She was shipped—she had a daughter in school too— Milligan:At the American School?

Adrian:And she and daughter were shipped out the next day.

Milligan:Wow. For that time period, that almost surprises me, but….

Adrian:Well, see, Truman did not integrate the military until 1948, and so it was a very new thing, and of course, Texas was a Jim Crow state. 102:00And she had been raised that way, and she just wasn’t going to take anything off of them. Some of the units had started integrating but there were still a lot with some problems—there were still problems. Of course, I grew up in Oklahoma with the Jim Crow, and I can remember, you know, people having to sit on the back of the bus, and there was a whole separate section of Muskogee that we referred to as the “N word,” which I hate, town. And there weren’t any paved streets over in there, and about the only jobs they had were manual labor and maids, but I can remember when I was in seventh grade in Muskogee, when my stepfather was overseas, we went back to Muskogee when his unit left in November ’43, and I can remember 103:00getting on the bus—I forget now if I was going to my grandmother’s or coming back from going into town, but I had an armful of books, and there were no seats available, and the bus driver told this black woman, who was in a maid’s uniform in the back of the bus to get up and give me her seat. And I said, “No, that’s all right—I’m not going very far.” And he says, “Well, they’re supposed to get up and give you a seat if the rest of the seats are filled.” And I said, “That’s all right…I only have two stops to go, I’m fine.” And so she reached up and said, “Here honey, let me have your books for you.” And she held my books and I got off about three stops before I intended to, because I was not going, you know, to stand on that bus and have that bus driver give her a hard time. 104:00I was just appalled that he would…she was probably 40 or 50…going to make her get up and give a seventh-grader her seat…I was appalled.

Milligan:Well, it’s a different world. Well, that’s…I guess my statement with that was that if that was something that happened in the mid-forties, then that clerk from Texas got shipped off…good, I mean… Adrian:Yes, this was in 1948. She got shipped off. I didn’t know them; they left before I got there—may have been ’47, it may have been before the integration.

Milligan:So you spent really three years there?

Adrian:Five.

Milligan:Five years…sorry, not doing math very well [laughter].

Adrian:Yes, five years, but I did, I got married in ’51 in June at Stein Castle. You’ve seen Faber pencils—F-A-B-E-R, 105:00it’s pronounced FARBER, because the ‘a’ has a little funny sign over it—Drex Sprecker actually was related to a woman who married into that family, and they had a country home, and they had turned their Stein Castle, which wasn’t a real castle—it was just a huge mansion built to look like a castle there in Nuremberg—and they had turned it over to the Americans to use as a VIP transit billet, and as an officer’s club. That was our other officer’s club besides the Grand Hotel. And the army had gone in there and built this huge olympic-size pool back in the gardens there, and that was…they opened that in June of ’49. The engineers went in and built this huge pool. It’s called the Farber-Castell 106:00family, it’s hyphenated, and he was related to the woman who had married into that family. Of course, Sprecker is a German-sounding name, but it’s Swiss ancestry, and this woman had Swiss ancestry, and I think she and Drex were second or third cousins, something like that. So he was invited out to their country home quite frequently. But they actually, and they didn’t cooperate so much with the Germans, they were sort of forced into it—they had to turn…Stein Castle was taken over by the German officers as one of their headquarters, and so when the Americans came in, they offered to the Americans as an officer’s club. It’s now a tourist thing—they don’t live in there anymore. But that was our officer’s club up until…mid to late 50’s, somewhere in there they turned it back over. But 107:00the…lost my train of thought there… Milligan:You were talking about, I think, getting married.

Adrian:Yeah, got married and our wedding reception was in Stein Castle. When we took the trip back in 2001, we got pictures in the same spot where our wedding pictures were taken, on our 50th anniversary. And our first daughter was born over there in December of ’52. We originally had quarters in Dombach, which is a little suburb of Nuremberg Fürth, it used to be a separate village, but again it’s one of those little villages that has grown into the city unit, but Dombach, they had a lot of requisitioned houses out there, because there was no damage whatsoever in Dombach, and so a lot of the houses out there were requisitioned for Americans. Our first quarters that we were assigned, they had turned this two-story house into 108:00an apartment for young married lieutenants, who had no children, so Don and I had the upstairs apartment and another lieutenant and his wife had the downstairs. She worked in the Palace of Justice as well. In fact, she became General Rickhard’s secretary. But I started out in EES, working for EES—the exchange system personnel files. They called them 201 files. Then a position opened up in central files for the whole special activities division, and I applied for that as chief clerk, and I had a German girl that did all the typing. But I had had that filing and indexing, so I knew the library system…the decimal system that you use for filing and indexing, and so that was my job. As all the correspondence came in, I decided what file it was supposed to go into, and she had to log it in, and file it, 109:00and we had a sergeant in charge of us, but all he took care of were the SOPs—Standard Operating Procedures, that were put out by the military, and so he took care of those. So I just took care of correspondence files. It was a pretty easy job, but I made more money [laughs].

Milligan:So looking back at your five years in Nuremberg at the end of the Nuremberg trials, really the beginning of the American School in Nuremberg, what’s one of the scenes that sticks in your mind out of all of that? What is that when you recall when you think about it?

Adrian:I think…the damage, the rubble, the burned-out buildings, I think seeing that starting to be cleared up, 110:00and things beginning to function and get back on their feet—fewer people…the moat that was outside the wall city, there were shacks down in there where people were living with no water, no electricity, no heat, and whatever pieces of wood and metal they could find—they were making these little shacks down in there and they went down in the moat, because at least they were out of the wind, and out of the weather. But I’ve got pictures showing those shacks down in that moat, where people were living without any facilities. The Germans had to live wherever they were ordered to live too. They were in charge of the American…the Americans were in charge of American housing and requisitioned housing, and the German people, who were displaced out of their homes had to live where they were told. 111:00The…it was not unusual for one family to have one room in a house, that they shared with other families in one room, and they shared kitchens and baths. So that was not unusual. To see things begin to function again…more restaurants were opening. She in 1952, summer of 1952, we ceased being occupation troops and became NATO forces. And so things changed then. Then after that, if you wanted a maid, you had to pay her yourself…you had to find your own maid. You could ask the post to send someone to you—they could still apply through the military base, but you know, if you met someone, or found someone on the market through some sort of contact, you know, why you could hire them yourself. 112:00But you paid for them yourself. Don and I had a maid the first year we were married in Dombach, at our quarters. Now we didn’t have room for her to live in, we had one bedroom, a living room, a big enough kitchen for an eat-in area, and we had a tiny little room that just held an army cot, and a small wardrobe. So we really didn’t have facility for her to live in, so she’d come in at nine o’clock in the morning, and we’d be at work—I was still working—and we would just leave the dishes from the night before…she’d have dinner ready when we came home, and then she could walk home to her…she just had to walk through a park, through a big field, and she lived on the other side of this big park. And so Elizabeth, you know, was our maid while we were in Dombach. Then in 113:00January of ’52, they started opening…building…well, they started building in ’51, those huge apartment complexes for Americans. And there were twelve apartments in each building, on three floors. Six…you had an entrance for six apartments, and then on the other end of the building there was an entrance for the other six apartments, but there were twelve apartments in each building. The fourth floor was maids’ quarters. They had rooms up on the fourth floor for maids. Laundry facilities were in the basement. Laundry facilities consisted of two huge tubs, with facets and you had to use scrub boards. So in, it was about first of December, just…well, 114:00my daughter was born on the 29th of December, and around the first of December is when they moved us off of…out of the requisition housing and into this brand new apartment. We had a first floor apartment, brand spanking new. But they had created jobs by building—and this was part of the Marshall Plan too—if you’re going to have troops over there for a long time, you’ve got to turn those homes back over to Germans, you have got to have housing for the American families, so they had contractors, who started building all these houses, and hired a lot of labor for it. You had furniture stores…factories that were beginning to function again, who were supplying all the furnishings for it, because we didn’t have furniture overseas, we didn’t bring furniture with us. And so, you basically had to have a furnished apartment. We had brand spanking new furniture. We had 115:00Rosenthall china, from the China Factory. The only thing we had to buy was sheets and pillowcases and towels [laughs] in the PX, so they created all these jobs by getting the furniture factories working again…the appliance factories working again…buildings being built, and they built a new school. In January of ’52, they moved from that school in Fürth into the school building near the…right next to apartment units. And so we had an American complex—it was like a little compound, which I think in some ways, might have been a mistake, because it was cutting you off from being able to socialize with the Germans. By this time, you could have some social structure, 116:00but it was really kind of isolating the Americans, I think. But they had, you know…the officer’s club, they built a new officers’ club, they gave up Stein Castle, they gave up the Grand Hotel. Now they kept part of the Grand Hotel for transit billets, but the main part they turned back over to the Germans; it’s all been redone inside—it’s a very pricey hotel now, beautiful inside, all marble, brass and glass, and it’s gorgeous inside. But they did keep a part of it, but of course Nuremberg post is closed now, there is no facilities at all for American personnel in Nuremberg. They closed in ’95—they closed that base. But it was just, I think, just watching all of this, being there long enough to see this progress going on. 117:00I got to go…well, jumping back to the school, I just remembered something we did. They have what they called German American Youth Clubs, and it was to get German students and American students together for discussions. And one of the meetings that we went to, shortly after I got into the school, we went into a bunker somewhere—and again, like I said, I never knew where I was half the time, I just got on the bus and went where they took us—but it was a bunker and we had to walk down and down and down. It was a bomb shelter, and nothing but bare light bulbs hanging on wires all the way down, and we got down to this room, and the German students were already there. Now, in 1949, most of the German students 118:00were older than we were. There schooling had been interrupted, and their schools were just getting back in progress in the last…from ’47, ’48. They had lost all their schools, they’d lost books, and some of these young people had gotten in on the very tail end of the fighting, because they were recruiting fourteen year olds during the end. So some of these young people had actually been involved in battle. They were now nineteen, twenty, twenty-one—they were much older than we were. And all we knew about the American political system was what we read in books, and we had a hard time defending against them. And they would…some of them would start spouting all the good things Hitler did for them, and of course, they had been part of the Hitler Youth—the Hitlerjugend—they had been a part of that, 119:00so they were still a bit brain-washed, and so we had, sometimes had some conflicts, in those, and we had both German teachers and American teachers who had to calm things down and interfere with the conversation, because some of it was getting…a lot of anger still going on.

Milligan:How often did you all meet?

Adrian:That was the only one I went to. I don’t remember—some of the others said they remembered going to quite a few. They had a…called it GY—German-American Youth—they had a meeting with a group of them, somewhere I don’t know, because I have pictures of them all dancing together. The German students were wearing traditional Bavarian costumes, or something, and the American students 120:00were showing them American dances and you know, they were doing folk dances and so forth, with them. So I have pictures of that—not moving pictures, but they told me what they were doing. I said, “What were you all doing?” “Well, we were dancing together—we were teaching them, and they were teaching us.” So, I guess some of the activity between the German American youth went well, but this one was kind of scary, to think that these nineteen, twenty, twenty-one year olds were still spouting Nazi rhetoric, and so it…that particular meeting, it went political and it didn’t go well. Actually most of us didn’t know what the hell we were talking about. We didn’t know about all the corruption that goes on in the American…we thought it went pretty well [laughs] but you know, I’ve found out more about our political system living here in this capital than I ever would have anywhere else. Being a small town, 121:00that’s about all there is to talk about here. But, I…it was interesting, but it was a little scary.

Milligan:Interesting.

Adrian:We were so outnumbered by their age and their experience—we were just outranked. A couple of our kids were pretty articulate, and you know, go toe-to-toe with them, but most of us were pretty intimidated. But anyway, I got to go to Vienna when it was a four-power city. Vienna was a four-power city just like Berlin was, and in May of ’52, when I was just a few months pregnant, I was going to quit, because once you started showing, they liked for you to quit—they didn’t want you to keep working. So one of the gals in the Palace of Justice, Don was on maneuvers down in Grafenberg with his ordinance unit—he 122:00was attached to the sixteenth infantry division…sixteenth infantry regiment, part of the first infantry division—and so his ordinance unit was on maneuvers down in Grafenberg. So this co-worker of mine, she was an officer’s daughter—Ann and I decided we were going to Vienna, and you had to have special orders to go there, because you were passing through Russian territory. And we took the train to Salzburg, and we boarded the train that evening, and we had…they only allowed trains through the Russian territory at night. So—and they were only allowed to do about ten kilometers an hour, and they had to stop, seemed like every hour, they had to stop, and we had two armed MPs on each end of the car. And there were several 123:00American-only cars on there, and every car had two armed MPs on each end. And they had our papers, and I had a passport. Normally, being under age, I would have been on my mother’s passport, but because I stayed in Tulsa, and waited until they were ready to go, I had to get my own passport. So I was one of the few teenagers that had our own passport. The rest of them just had travel orders, and so we had to turn travel orders and passport over to the MPs, and they would be stopped every so many kilometers, and they’d have to show the papers to the Russians, and we were only the sleeper cars. We had to keep the shades drawn—we were not to raise those shades, because if they saw anybody looking out the window, that would give them an excuse to board the train, and search—accusing us of being spies. So, we traveled all night. It took us all night to get from Salzburg 124:00to Vienna. I think you can drive it in two and half hours, or three hours, something like by car, and by train, now I think it’s about an hour and a half. But they wouldn’t let them go fast and they were stopping them all the time, checking papers all along the route, and so we left Salzburg late in the evening, around eight or nine o’clock, and we did not get into Vienna until early in the morning, around eight o’clock in the morning, because it took us all night to get through the Russian territory. We could go into the British sector, the French sector, and the American sector; we could not go into the Russian sector. That big Viennese Ferris wheel they have, that huge Ferris wheel, that was in the Russian sector, and of course it wasn’t operating—it was working. But that was the sector we could not go into. But the center of the city was common ground, and the first of every month, 125:00a different country took over the control of the city. And we got there whenever the Russians were taking over from—I believe it was the British had been in control—and now the Russians, so it kind of rotated between the British, the Americans, the Russians, and the French, and so we got there in time to see the ceremony on the first of the month—to see the ceremony of the takeover. And, so whoever was in control of the city….

Milligan:Interesting.

Adrian:So it was kind of—kind of exciting to be there, and of course in was in early May, and we…it was beautiful weather in Vienna, and Ann and I had a lovely time, and of course we were staying in authorized American requisitioned hotels downtown, and didn’t have to pay a lot. There were some nice 126:00restaurants. Vienna was not destroyed; it was not bombed. And so, you know the restaurants were functioning, and so it was….

Milligan:Nice trip.

Adrian:But I never got to Berlin. But our senior trip—they took the seven high schools, and all the seniors who graduated in June of ’49 were taken to Wiesbaden. We boarded Hitler’s river yacht for the day….

Milligan:Wow.

Adrian:…which was a very nice river yacht [laughs] and we had an EES snack bar on board, because it was used for recreational R and R for American families only for several years on the river. And they made a tradition for several years in a row—and I don’t know when they quit—to bring all the seniors who were graduating to Wiesbaden, and we would board the yacht early in the morning, and we would have 127:00an all-day excursion up the Rhine River to the Laurelei and back. So that was our senior trip, and there were—counting chaperones and everything—about 120 of us on board. And of course, I had twenty-three in my class, and Munich and Frankfurt had larger groups—there were more troop stations and families stationed there. But Berlin only had two seniors, and they had to fly out on the Berlin Airlift, in order to join us for the party. We had a five-piece German band on board that played music for us all day. We had deck chairs, we got in the sun—on the 7th of June, we were having absolutely gorgeous weather, in the low 80’s and we had card playing…played cards. We took over the boat; we just explored everything. We went down in the engine room, and…. 128:00Milligan:Did you ever sit there and think, ‘This was Hitler’s boat?’ Adrian:Yeah, oh yeah. Oh yeah—you know, it was like…ours now [laughs]. I don’t know whatever happened to it, you know. It was just one of those, and it only lasted for a very few years. And of course, I got to—right after I graduated—one of my classmates and her sister, who was a couple of years behind us, we talked our parents into giving money to go for three days to Berchtesgaden. We stayed at the Herren Chiemsee Lodge Hotel there, which is right on Chiemsee Lake, and Ludwig has a castle out in the island, in the middle of that lake, and so we got to tour the castle. We went into Berchtesgaden and we took the trip up to the Eagle’s Nest. 129:00Hitler’s home was still…it was about halfway between Berchtesgaden and the Eagle’s Nest—it was up the side of the mountain there. And of course, it had been bombed. It was the only thing around that the British were determined to destroy, was his house. And they pretty much destroyed it—there was nothing but some walls. So I got to see that. Eventually, not too long after that—maybe two or three years later, they decided to bulldoze it and bury and the remains, so that it didn’t become some sort of a martyr’s monument or something. So I did get to see the house before it was destroyed. And then we took the trip up to the Eagle’s Nest. And the bus travels on this little narrow road, and it’s like a sheer drop—no guardrails. And it gets up to this little parking area, and there’s a tunnel back into the mountain, about a city block long. And you walk back through this tunnel, and at the end of the tunnel, of course, they used 130:00to drive Hitler in the tunnel, but our buses would stop, and we’d walk back, but they used to drive him back in his car to the elevator. There’s an elevator—a very big elevator—beautiful wood paneling, brass rails, mirrors, and leather seating, leather-upholstered seating around the back of it, and it would shoot up through the mountain, and I don’t know how many feet it shot up, and you end up and it opens out into the Eagle’s Nest. The Eagle’s Nest was not a home. It was a very extravagant tearoom and meeting room. He was only up there maybe a half a dozen times. During the winter, you couldn’t get up there. The road was impassable when it snowed. So you couldn’t go then. So he only went up—Eva Braun used to go up and sunbathe in the nude up there, but it was…when she got bored…but, 131:00he wasn’t up there very much. He took some of his staff up there a few times, and they’d have dinner and all this stuff, and of course you can see about three countries from up there, because you’re on one of the real high peaks overlooking Berchtesgaden. It’s now a very expensive restaurant, because it’s only open seasonal, when the road is passable. But it’s a very fancy restaurant now. But it was and EES snack bar, when we went up [laughs].

Milligan:Wow, that’s funny.

Adrian:And did the salt mines, because there’s a salt mine near Berchtesgaden, and they put these little uniforms on you, and you straddle these cars, and it’s gravity takes it. I mean you’re whipping around down through these tunnels at about sixty miles an hour.

Milligan:So they really took you all out into the country, and showed you some of these places intentionally, it sounds like.

Adrian:Well, that was part of the tour 132:00with the American Hotel there.

Milligan:Oh.

Adrian:They had—you know, you’re there on R and R.

Milligan:Right.

Adrian:Rest and recreation, they called it. And it was a vacation spot for the American families, and so they had these tours all set up. And they cost a little bit—you’d pay something for them, because that paid the German guy that went with you, but, Coffey and I—Ruth Ann and I were running out of money toward, and we wanted to do the Eagle’s Nest and the salt mine, and we were running out of money. And they had a cute young German man, and we were both—I was seventeen and a half; Ruth Ann was eighteen, her sister was sixteen—and a cute young guy. And he says…we said, “Oh but we don’t have that much money left, and we’re not leaving until tomorrow.” We did pay for our meals, but they were very cheap. But our parents 133:00had given us about fifteen dollars [laughs] and thought we were doing pretty well with fifteen dollars. He said, “Ah, but you’re only twelve years old; you can go half price.” We got kind of indignant at first. He said, “Yah, yah, yah, you’re only twelve years old—you’re half price.” “Oh, yeah! [Laughter].” Milligan:That’s funny [ ] oh….

Adrian:So we went for half price.

Milligan:Gosh, Joan, we’ve been going for over two hours now. Does it feel like it?

Adrian:No.

Milligan:It doesn’t to me either. I think we’d better start to wrap this one up. Is there anything else that you want to add?

Adrian:I’m…having trouble…well, of course, my daughter was born in an army hospital. And children who were born of American parents abroad, you had to go to the embassy to register them. We did that down in Munich. Munich was the closest embassy, 134:00and in fact, when Don and I married, we had to have a German ceremony first before we had the American ceremony, because the marriage had to be legal in Germany. And we had to fill out—it took us forever to fill out all the papers, because I was working for the military, and he was in the military, and we had to fill out loads of papers that had to go through the chain of command, and all this stuff, and so we had our civil ceremony on a Wednesday, the 27th, and we went to Munich and got the name changed on my passport. Then we had our church service, with the American chaplain at the American chapel, on Saturday the 30th. And actually, the military didn’t care whether we had the American ceremony or not, as long as it was legal in Germany.

Milligan:Wow.

Adrian:We had to have…and the German’s civil ceremony required two male 135:00witnesses, to sign.

Milligan:Really?

Adrian:Yes, I could not have a female…two male witnesses, so Don had a couple of guys from his unit, and we had to have an interpreter. I think the interpreter left out a lot, because the German magistrate rattled on and on and on and on…and the interpreter came up with two short sentences [laughter]…so I think he left a lot of that out.

Milligan:[ ] tired of doing that.

Adrian:Anyway we drove down through Italy and got to…we spent three days on Capri. Money was very good in Italy at that time, you know, I mean it was almost seven hundred lira per dollar then; it was pretty inflated. And they were still struggling to recovery from all the fighting. When we drove down, we passed several villages that had been bombed out and totally abandoned. Anyway, we left our car in Naples, and 136:00spent three days on Capri. Then when we got back to Naples, we went to Pompeii—I am so glad I got to see Pompeii; I always wanted to go see Pompeii. So it was an interesting honeymoon. We got to do some interesting places, but a dollar was good over there.

Milligan:For that time.

Adrian:For that time.

Milligan:I really appreciate you coming in and sharing all these stories. I think it’s really interesting.

Adrian:Okay…well it’s been fun for me.

Milligan:Great. Is today the tenth?

Adrian:Yes.

Milligan:September 10, 2007. I forgot to say the date earlier. So I’m going to stop this.

END OF INTERVIEW