A great post in today’s New York Times, showing Dads Against Martyr and Military Methods at work. Enjoy—b.

May 30, 2010
Journeys

By STEVE DOUGHERTY

A STEADY stream of BMWs, Porsches and Mercedeses buzz by as I walk south on a lakeside bike and pedestrian path on a glorious Sunday afternoon in May. The cars carry apparently prosperous day-trippers from Munich, a 45-minute drive to the north, bound for Tegernsee, a popular resort town on the small Alpine lake of the same name in Bavaria.

The town comes into view as I round a bend. It is a cluster of red roofs nestled at a graceful curve in the lakefront about a mile to the south. Behind it, thickly forested mountains rise ruggedly into the blue, and in the distance, sunlight glints off fields of snow and ice high in the Alps. Across the sun-speckled waters to my right, small sailboats tack in a light breeze. As I take in the peaceful beauty of the scene, I try to imagine what it must have been like 65 years ago, late on a spring day like this one, when my father walked along the same shoreline and the same tranquil valley exploded in violence.

It was May 3, 1945, in the tense final days of World War II. My father, then a 24-year-old second lieutenant forward artillery observer, and 200 other American infantrymen were advancing south toward Tegernsee in pursuit of remnants of Germany’s already defeated military. The quiet was shattered by exploding artillery shells fired by diehard German SS troops retreating through the town toward the Austrian border. As the Americans scrambled to return the fire, the fear of being killed in what proved to be some of the last fighting of the long war — it would end officially on May 8, the day before my father’s 25th birthday — was trumped by anger.

Fewer than 48 hours earlier, my father and his comrades had witnessed a sickening glimpse of Nazi Germany’s vast machinery of evil. West of Munich they entered the smoking ruins of a small slave labor prison, part of the Landsberg-Kaufering network of concentration camps.

Hours before the Americans arrived, SS troops, members of the elite corps that helped carry out the enormous crimes history remembers as the Holocaust, herded the prisoners into barns, set the barns on fire and machine-gunned those who managed to claw their way out. The memory of burned and bullet-riddled corpses and bloodied bodies hanging limp on barbed wire fences haunted my father the rest of his life. The Americans were so revolted by what they saw, he later recalled, “we did not view Germans as people that day.”

But a lesson in shared humanity awaited on the road to Tegernsee. As he was about to give his gunners the order “Fire for effect,” initiating an artillery barrage sure to reduce Tegernsee to rubble, my father was startled to see a German officer approaching on foot and carrying a white flag.

Maj. Hannibal von Lüttichau was a decorated German Panzer division tank commander recovering at Tegernsee’s crowded military hospital from brain surgery to remove fragments of an American hand grenade. When the German unit opened fire, the wounded but ambulatory major left the hospital, confronted the commander and persuaded him to cease fire and withdraw; presumably his imposing size (6 feet 6 inches) and rank, the Iron Cross for valor he wore on his tunic and his Prussian military bearing proved persuasive.

As the SS unit withdrew, Major von Lüttichau marched unarmed to confront the Americans. Through an interpreter he urgently explained that Tegernsee and the entire lake valley were sanctuary to thousands of wounded German soldiers and as many as 12,000 civilian war refugees. If the Americans returned fire, untold numbers of unarmed soldiers and civilians in the overcrowded town would surely perish. The troops had already retreated south, the major assured my father’s company commander. To prove it, he escorted the Americans into town — an act that would have doubtless proved fatal had he been wrong.

As a result of Major von Lüttichau’s bravery, my father’s battery held its fire, the town of Tegernsee was not destroyed by an artillery barrage, the lives of unknown scores of defenseless people were saved, and my father was spared a lifetime of regret.

Fifty years later, he welcomed the chance to express his gratitude.

Reunited in 1995 thanks to the sleuthing of an amateur historian in Germany and an unlikely trans-Atlantic network of mutual acquaintances and family friends, my father, with my brother and me in tow, visited Hannibal von Lüttichau at his home near Heidelberg. With a noble visage, a booming voice and a deep scar cleaving his forehead, he welcomed us with bear hugs and invited us in for a raucous, wine- and brandy-fueled reunion.

The two old enemies became instant friends. Speaking in broken English, pidgin German and pantomime, the two exchanged stories about their war experiences and their lives. At one point as Major von Lüttichau told a story about the German general Erwin Rommel, the legendary Desert Fox under whom he trained as a young tank officer, he grabbed a set of invisible reins, perched at the edge of his chair and galloped until we finally shouted “Cavalry!” like a team of overmatched charades players.

When it was time to go, my father thanked his host for having persuaded him to hold his fire. They exchanged warm auf wiedersehens, but my father later wondered if they would ever “really wiedersehen” (see each other again).

As it happened, they did not. Hannibal Von Lüttichau died seven years later, in 2002 at age 86. My dad, who began his newspaper career shortly after the war ended and was still writing a popular column, the Dick Dougherty Report, in Rochester, N.Y., half a century later, died in November 2008, at 88.

LAST May, six months after my father died, I was visiting friends in Munich, and I drove south to Tegernsee. As I stood at the bend in the road where my father and Major von Lüttichau first met, a weapon boomed and a puff of white smoke floated across the lake — not the retort of an artillery piece, but a starter’s gun, signaling the beginning of a sailing regatta.

Walking south toward Tegernsee, I passed beneath the Baroque spire of the stately Hotel Bayern visible among the treetops on the heights above. My father saw the same red-tipped tower as he marched into Tegernsee in 1945 and found the town teeming, as Hannibal von Lüttichau had said he would, with wounded men and frightened refugees.

No scars of war are visible today in Tegernsee. On cobbled walkways and public squares, couples in their Bavarian Sunday best — lederhosen and colorful dirndls — enjoy the spring sunshine. A tuba and accordion band plays oompah music in the crowded beer garden of the municipal brewery. Lovers walk hand in hand along the shoreline promenade, and families row across the rippling lake waters in wooden boats.

There is no plaque commemorating the day that Maj. Hannibal von Lüttichau risked a bullet to make an appeal to a young American artillery man to hold his fire; almost certainly none of the people enjoying the fine spring day on the lake shore remember the soldiers’ names and few know how close war came to Tegernsee.

But the enduring peace and pristine beauty of the place is lasting tribute to the two enemies who stopped fighting and in so doing saved lives, saved the town and not only preserved the future for all of us who are left behind, but also enriched it.