CONVERSATION WITH ‘THE HIGHEST-RANKING EX-HITLER YOUTH IN AMERICA’
“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides.” ― Elie Wiesel
By Gregory N. Joseph
ALFONS HECK, a small man with a shock of black hair, thick spectacles and a hushed, wispy voice, was not what one would expect an ex-Nazi to be.
But then, what would a Nazi be?
In retrospect, the Nazis’ ranks were swollen with quiet little people who became inflated and intoxicated with power and went on to do bad things, the very worst, in fact, that humanity had to offer.
Some of them, like Heck, looked like the people next door. And in many cases, they were. That was just the point: How could they?
But they did. And so was born The Holocaust: At the time the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, there were nine million Jews living in Europe. By the end of World War II in 1945, the Nazis had murdered two out of three of them.
When I met Heck in 1989, he was a youthful-looking 61-year-old man who billed himself as “the highest-ranking ex-Hitler Youth living in the United States.” From his point of view, it was both an achievement and a damnation.
In a nearly inaudible whisper, an emotionless monotone, he explained that he had a bad heart, which, he said, had forced him years earlier to retire as a long-distance driver for Greyhound. He now went around the country with Helen Waterford, a survivor of Auschwitz, giving lectures on the dangers of Nazism and how such a thing might again happen, including in America.
“Absolutely,” he replied with uncharacteristic firmness and volume when I asked if he thought Nazism or something like it could take hold in the United States.
As he told it, circumstances and elements similar to those that existed in Weimar, Germany, in spawning Naziism could produce a similar breeding ground here in America: economic disequilibrium and malaise; general unhappiness with the current political system and a feeling of rudderless drift; a forgotten, disenfranchised and angry underclass; the blind, desperate willingness to try anything to affect change, including actions once considered unthinkable and reprehensible; and finally, and perhaps most importantly, the creation of “enemies” upon whom to affix the blame for anything and everything, individuals and groups readily distinguished by their ethnicity, religious beliefs, or specialness, such as intellectuals.
Change. Change had to happen. A revolution. The old guard in charge, the heretofore respected gerontocracy, was not only out of touch, but responsible, and should step aside. Or be removed.
Personal rights, now as then, would be erased in the blink of an eye in favor of “the general good,” as would all norms, legal and otherwise, while a distracted and uncaring populace either turned away, or, all too often, eagerly took part.
No, it wouldn’t take much, Heck concluded, not much at all, for any country, even America, which views itself as “a shining city on the hill” impervious to such things, to follow in those footsteps. Citizens might even celebrate what was happening, he said. For a while. Maybe a good long while. Then it would all change. Oh, how it would all change.
That, he said sadly, is what happened to him and others just like him, good people who supposedly knew better. Yes, he said, it could happen here. Without question. Alfons Heck knew. From firsthand experience. He knew. People, after all, he insisted, are people.
Heck, who was born on Nov. 3, 1928, in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, wrote two books, “A Child of Hitler: Germany in the Days When God Wore a Swastika,” and “The Burden of Hitler’s Legacy.”
A 1991 HBO documentary based on his books, “Heil Hitler! Confessions of a Hitler Youth,” used news footage and Heck’s narration to explain how millions of youngsters evolved into what many regard as the most fanatic of Hitler’s followers.
Heck freely admitted he was among the worst of the worst.
He recently turned up on one cable documentary about the famous failed bomb attempt on Hitler’s life, recalling that as a youngster, “I was incensed. I felt that hanging was too good for the perpetrators.” He uttered those words as he sat in Nuremberg, an especially meaningful place to Heck.
By the time I met him, he claimed to have recanted, and I believed him. I still do. Yet, it was sobering, alarming, and even somewhat predictable, to listen to the path that he had followed.
Raised by his grandparents in Wittlich, Germany, a small town on the border with Luxembourg, he was picked at age 10 to represent his school’s Hitler Youth at the Nuremberg Party Congress.
He rose quickly through the Hitler Youth ranks from 1939 to 1945, and became the youngest boy to reach the top ranking as a glider pilot in the organization’s air wing. His goal was to join the feared German air force, the Luftwaffe, as a fighter pilot.
At 16, with Germany’s fortunes falling, he was put in charge of a small town on the Luxembourg border. At one point, he threatened to have an elderly teacher shot if he refused to let some Hitler Youth stay at a schoolhouse (the teacher relented and the order was rescinded).
That year, Hitler gave Heck the Iron Cross for excellence of service.
At war’s end, Heck was captured by American troops, put on trial by the French occupying forces, sentenced to a month hard labor and restricted to his hometown for two years.
He requested and, ironically, perhaps because of his youth, received permission to attend the war crimes trial in Nuremberg — something, he claimed, that changed his views on the Nazis completely.
After living in Canada for several years, where he met his wife and held a series of jobs, the couple moved to the U.S in 1963, settling in San Diego in 1970, where he eventually found employment driving a Greyhound bus.
He retired in 1972 because of heart trouble. A period of depression followed, and his wife suggested he study writing and tell his experiences in a book. “A Child of Hitler” was published in 1985.
He also wrote articles for various newspapers, one of which was read by Holocaust survivor Waterford, who suggested they present joint lectures on Nazism.
When I met Heck, it was a few short years since my mother and grandfather’s death, a time when I learned that some of my own distant relatives had perished in The Holocaust.
It was, then, with mixed feelings that I accepted the assignment to meet and profile an ex-Hitler Youth.
I was prepared to hate Alfons Heck. That I liked him and believed what he had to say surprised me.
A few weeks after my article about him was published, as I drove home and listened to him on a radio show hosted by a mutual friend, my name came up.
“A very fine writer,” Alfons Heck said in his wispy voice.
It gave me chills. Had I fallen prey to the same Nazi charm and dictum that had drawn in Heck himself and so many just like him, so many whom one would have thought should have known better, to disastrous effect?
I wanted to think not. But who really knows? We all want to believe, hope, and perhaps, if we somehow can, even to forgive. To see the best in people.
Alfons Heck, a little man with a shock of black hair and a quiet demeanor who once found himself with power, more power than he ever could have imagined, died of heart failure on April 11, 2005, at age 76.
He died, if you believed him, a haunted man.
