Paul Schubert, a 95-year-old Chelsea resident, brings history to life with Immigrants’ Son, a vivid memoir of his German-American boyhood during World War II.

Photo: With television still in infancy, families would get their wartime news from the radio. Photo: Flickr, Public Domain

A Boyhood Shaped by War

““War! Japanese planes have bombed American ships in Hawaii! We’re going to war!”

That message resounded throughout a small German-American community in Wisconsin after church services on December 7, 1941. Everyone rushed home to crowd around radios in time to hear President Roosevelt describe the attack on Pearl Harbor.

“I’ll never forget his voice or the shock as we realized the import of the news: Americans were about to enter a global war for the second time in little more than two decades,” Paul Schubert, now a 95-year-old resident of the Chelsea Retirement Center, recalls. And he remembers his German-born father’s tone of voice when he predicted, “War with Germany comes next.”

His father had watched four brothers join the German army in 1914, but he had been too young for conscription. Now, however, the Schuberts knew that Fritz Schubert, a forty-year-old mink farmer and naturalized American citizen, might be called into service for his adopted country.

That night when Paul was finally sent to bed, he couldn’t sleep. “I pictured myself in a uniform, performing astounding deeds to the admiration of my family and fellow heroes.”

Eighty-four years later, shortly after moving from Dexter to Chelsea, the retired Lutheran pastor/therapist has published an engrossing memoir about his wartime boyhood as a Germani-American. Immigrants’ Son dishes up history as if it were a dramatic thriller, offering a panorama of war stories: from life on America’s homefront for resident aliens to life in Germany during World War I, the Depression, World War II, and even in a Russian prisoner of war camp for Germans.

From Chicago to Rural Wisconsin

Schubert’s parents arrived on American shores separately in 1923. “When I was a boy, my parents told me how hungry their families had been during and after the war, how much they worried about their family members who were fighting, and how discouraged my father, a cabinetmaker, felt as he looked for work without success.” Fritz Schubert decided to leave his homeland for America, the new land of opportunity, at about the time Helene Klank left Prussia when she was offered a childcare position with a German-American minister’s family in Wisconsin.

The couple met in an English language class in Chicago and soon married. Paul Schubert was born in January 1930, after the Stock Market crashed and America was freefalling into the Great Depression.

“I was named for my father’s brother, Paul Schubert, who was killed while serving in the German army during World War I, and for my mother’s brother, William, who would die outside the gates of Moscow while serving in the German army during World War II,” he explains, beginning his story.

“In the early 20^th century, immigrants didn’t want to—or expect to—separate from their roots and their families back in the Old Country. They wrote frequently, offered their homes to newly arrived relatives, socialized with fellow immigrants, ate traditional foods, spoke their native languages in the home, sang Old Country songs, danced Old Country dances, celebrated holidays as they had in their childhood, and longed to return for a visit with the relatives and friends they left behind. Our family was the same.”

The day that Pearl Harbor was bombed wasn’t his first experience with world politics. At the age of eight, the boy saw his first swastika—In a Chicago living room.

While visiting a “shirt-tail relative” who had returned from a trip to Germany, Paul and his father were confronted by a huge red flag with a white circle “and a kind of black spider in the center” tacked to Otto Bolle’s wall, alongside an ornate carved hunting rifle.

“Ja, die Fahne und das sport Gewehr waren mir von Adolf Hitler direkt geshenkt. (Yes, the flag and sport rifle were gifted to me directly by Adolf Hitler),” the man boasted.

“Even as an eight-year-old, the name Adolf Hitler was familiar to me,” Schubert says. “I heard it incessantly at home on the radio during German and American broadcasts. The general opinion of my parents and the relatives who visited our home was “Der Fuehrer ist Wahnsinnig! (The Leader is crazy!)” But here was a relative who obviously didn’t agree.”

Fritz Schubert ushered his son out of the apartment as soon as possible.

“Papa, did Onkle Otto really meet Adolf Hitler?” the boy asked as they hurried along the sidewalk.

“Dast ist Unsinn. (That is nonsense),” his father responded.

From that day on, Paul listened closely to the adults’ talk about Adolf Hitler, using the word NAZI.

“In 1938, I was too young to grasp what immigrant Germans called Weltpolitik, world politics, but during family gatherings, I heard Otto praise Germany’s resistance to something called the Treaty of Versailles, and he seemed to gloat over the emerging power of a strange—to me—entity called Germany’s National Socialist Party, NAZI for short. At family gatherings, I heard him blame Germany’s troubles on Jewish bankers, and I heard him call our President Franklin Roosevelt—a man my parents greatly admired—a curious name: Deutcher Jude (German Jew).”

“This is a lie Otto tells, even though he is making a good living in America in the midst of this Great Depression,” Paul’s father told him.

“My parents were loyal Americans. So were Mama’s four sisters, who joined us in Chicago. I remember the pride in my mother’s voice after her naturalization when she said, ‘I am an American,’” Schubert says. And when his mother’s youngest brother wrote to extol Hitler’s achievements, Paul’s father wrote him a short, cryptic response: “Today you say, ‘Hosanna in the highest. Tomorrow, you will shout, ‘Crucify him!’” (“After the war, my uncle wrote to us, telling Papa how he had thought of that prediction all through the war.”)

In 1941, the Schuberts—“city born and bred”—decided to try their hand at mink farming. With high hopes, Paul’s parents and his uncle’s family pooled all their money to rent a fifteen-acre farm in rural Wisconsin. On moving day, they passed a large black-and-white sign at the city limits of a small Wisconsin town that read: “GENTILES ONLY!”

“Papa, what’s a Gen-till-ee?” Paul asked.

His father hesitated before he said sternly, “Anyone not a Jew.” And then he pressed down on the gas pedal.

In fourth grade, Paul had served as interpreter for a Jewish classmate who had been sent from England to Chicago all alone. When Paul had asked Stanley what life was like in Germany, he responded with wide eyes, “Fuer uns war es schlecht! It was bad for us,” he said. “Als deutsche Soldaten die Juden verschleppten. German soldiers took away the Jews!”

“I couldn’t picture Germans being mean, even vicious—no, not even Otto Bolle, I told myself,” Schubert recalls. But he watched MovieTone News reels at the local theater—five- admission for children—and those newsreels often showed Nazis terrorizing Jews. “The memory of those scenes still seems terrifying to me.”

When the two families arrived to the farm they had rented, they entered a whole new world.

The Impact of Pearl Harbor

The parents had exchanged city streets for farmland, their shops for mink pens, and their small, cramped apartments for a large duplex (complete with outhouse). Paul and his Cousin Rudy exchanged huge urban elementary schools for a tiny one-room country school, where one teacher taught twenty-eight pupils ranging in age from four to sixteen. They had just settled into their new lives when the United States went to war.

As the country hurriedly prepared for what lay ahead, the boys asked countless questions about their German relatives fighting in Europe. Fritz’s older brothers—now in their forties and fifties—were once again conscripted into the German army. So were Paul’s cousins, among them another Paul Schubert (named for the same uncle), who became a Luftwaffe pilot.

The first news they received was a surprise to Paul, but not his parents. The F.B.I. escorted Otto Bolle from his apartment and interned him “as a guest of the United States clandestine services” for the next four years, thanks to his Nazi sympathies.

Meanwhile, Helene Schubert’s sister Hulda had chosen the wrong time to leave her Chicago home and visit Germany. She was stranded in Berlin when Germany declared war on the U.S. The U.S. government immediately contracted with Sweden, a neutral country, to help rescue stranded American nationals. Hulda was evacuated and spent years in Scandinavia.

As for German relatives in the military, details were hard to come by. “Most of our information came to us via the International Red Cross—and often that meant bad news.”

Loyalty and Identity in Wartime America

On the night of December 7, the Schuberts’ neighbor advised, “Buy bicycle tires. There will be a shortage of all shapes and sizes.” Fortunately, the Schuberts listened. By the end of the first week of the war, prices for all tires had skyrocketed. Soon, a great many products would be rationed—from shoes to sugar, meats to canned goods, lumber to gasoline. Within weeks, Fritz Schubert was sent to Illinois to build army troop gliders for the military in a factory that once built luxury railroad cars.

Paul, Rudy, and their mothers took over management of the farm—but not for long. Unfortunately, Paul’s Uncle Bruno fed the mink-tainted meat, and they all died, so the Schuberts’ career as farmers halted abruptly.

During the war, local businesses and factories called women into service when so many men volunteered or were conscripted into the military. Paul’s mother was hired to cook for a diner when its cook was drafted. Later, after her husband was transferred back to Wisconsin for a carpentry job, she worked at a factory that manufactured ammunition belts, canteen covers, and pouches for men fighting in the tropics. “The canvas products were impregnated with copper sulfate to prevent jungle rot,” Schubert explains. “Copper sulfate is dangerous to work with.” He learned that first-hand: his mother contracted blood poisoning from the chemicals and nearly died.

“We made money during the war, but we couldn’t buy anything because of rationing—except War Bonds, which cost eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents,” he recalls. “As schoolchildren, we saved our nickels and dimes, to help win the war.”

Americans’ diet and lifestyle went on a wartime footing almost immediately. “In February of 1942, automobile manufacturers were ordered to convert their factories to wartime production,” Schubert explains. “Instead of cars, they manufactured jeeps, ambulances, airplanes, trucks, tanks, motorcycles, or other war-related materiel, eventually in record time. No new cars appeared on our local dealers’ car lots for the next five years. (Immediately after the end of the war, Ford resumed producing its 1941 design. Not until 1949 did they release a new model.)”

The war put a heavy burden on supplies of leather, foods, metals, lumber, paper, silk, nylon, wool, cotton, and rubber. “America had to supply not only our armed forces, but also our allies’ military and civilian needs.”

To meet the huge demand for raw materials and products, the government began a rationing system to conserve supplies and—at least in theory—be fair to everyone, rich and poor. “Rationing impacted every single American,” Schubert recalls.

To prevent inflation and protect consumers, the government froze the prices of consumer goods on almost everything except agricultural products, and it created a rationing system to try to make the distribution of foods and products fair for all Americans. “By the end of the war, almost ninety percent of all retail food prices were frozen.”

Everyone—even babies—received a ration book with stamps that would be necessary to buy foods, clothing, and commodities. Newspapers announced Meatless Mondays, Wheatless Wednesdays, and poultryless Thursdays. Stores hung signs when they had a shipment of canned goods, for instance, and customers with ration books in hand would flock to those businesses. “Like many American servicemen during the war years, I came to hate Spam, a canned meat product made in Minnesota.”

When the boy’s Scout troop needed to cook meat over an open fire to earn a second-class badge, that requirement seemed insurmountable, until Paul suggested getting horse meat from a neighbor’s fox farm. The owner was willing to donate ten pounds to the Scouts, but suggested Paul ask his mother to cook it as a test.

“My mother took one look at the meat and said, ‘That’s horse meat!’ Schubert recalls. “Her family had apparently eaten it during the first world war.” She did cook it, her family ate it—“but she definitely didn’t want the Scouts to know,” he says. “‘Swear yourself to a lifetime of secrecy, she told me. I was long past seventy-five before I ever told anyone this story. We did earn our badge, though.”

Everyone worked for the war effort. Men went into the military or war-related industries. Kids worked on farms and collected aluminum, scrap metal, and cans, newspapers, books, worn machinery, cast-iron fences and gates around cemeteries, so they could be converted for a war industry.

Navigating School and Wartime Challenges

The schoolyard became the one place where children could play. “Because I spoke German, I was often called upon to play a German soldier in playground games, but I always refused,” Schubert recalls. “ ‘I’m an American!” I insisted. And then I pointed out that no name is more German than ‘Eisenhower.’”

Paul and another German-American friend had one episode when local bullies taunted them as “Nazis” and moved on them threateningly, but otherwise his knowledge of German paid off. One day shortly before Germany surrendered, a school bus full of German prisoners of war—“all of them kids about my age”—arrived in town and needed a translator. Paul stepped in.

“I know from my reading that Americans had a lot more enmity toward German Americans during World War I than my family experienced in World War II,” Schubert says. “We felt little of that enmity. It might have helped that we lived in a German-American community, but decades later, I learned that one-third of American troops serving during the war had German ancestors.”

Bringing the Past to Life in Immigrants’ Son

Immigrants’ Son chronicles wartime dramas, destruction, and the extraordinary fates of Schuberts’ German relatives. Some were killed, others shot down, one was a Russian prisoner of war for seven years. Paul Schubert’s homefront stories, laced with humor, paint a vivid picture of life in the United States during a crucial time in American history.

Immigrants’ Son is available on Amazon and from Paul Schubert himself (www.paulwmschubert.com).

“Getting this book published was a life-long goal, and I couldn’t have done it without the help and encouragement of my writing group at the Cedars of Dexter,” the soon-to-be-ninety-five-year-old author says. “I’m already starting my next book.”