I very much doubt that I would have written I Was Hitler’s Baker if it had not been for the stories my parents told me of their experiences during World War II. I can remember studying the second world war in the eighth grade. Sitzkrieg. Blitzkrieg. The Normandy invasion. But these lessons were dull and dusty. My parents’ accounts, however, made the war come alive for me. In 1940 my mother and her family were witnesses to the German invasion of Denmark.
My mother recalled hearing Hitler’s diatribes on the radio. She moved to Copenhagen in 1943 during the brutal Nazi occupation, and became accustomed to the sight of German tanks rumbling menacingly through the town square. There were armed soldiers stationed on every street corner. Frequently they would demand to see her Ausweiss, a German-issued ID card. Inge worked as a bookkeeper at Burmeister and Wain, the largest shipbuilder in Denmark. The shipyard, which repaired and made engines for German U-boats, was a prime target for both the British Royal Air Force and the Danish Resistance.

My father also had stories to tell of the war years. Bob Peterson had been employed at a shipyard in New York City. He had worked on the design of the Higgins boat, better known as the LST, or Landing Ship Tank, without which the Normandy invasion would not have been possible. A Higgins boat could carry thirty soldiers and several tanks, and deliver them to the shallow waters on a French beachhead. Sergeant Bob Peterson drove an M-4 tank across the snow-covered roads of France in the harsh winter of December 1945. He narrowly missed out on the fighting in the Battle of the Bulge due to a case of measles, which had delayed his departure from England for nearly two weeks. Serving in an artillery company, he fired shells at German positions from a Long-Ton Gun, which had a range of seven miles. Near the end of the war he and several of his men were dropped via a glider to conduct reconnaissance behind enemy lines in Belgium.

Wow! I was unfamiliar with some of these details until after my father’s death in 1990 when I examined his military service record. Like many servicemen of his generation, he would only occasionally open up and tell what he had done in the war.