What does henry say about the war A long time ago...walking on the tree-lined sidewalks of Cologne, the majestic, historic German city that was my home, going out with my father to vote in 1933 German national election. That was, of course, the election that allowed Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Party—the Nazis—to seize power... My father was a veteran of the German Army, the Wehrmacht. He had fought in the Great War—World War I—just like millions of other German men... The only thing that was different about us was that we were Jewish. Which, at the time, wasn’t a big thing to me...I had no sense that we were different, no better or worse than any other German family... The first time I began to feel that there was anything wrong —my first experience of being singled out, being different, being persecuted—was my first day of school, in 1934... Like all the other children, I carried a huge cardboard cone that my parents had given me, filled with all kinds of lovely things—candies and little toys... It was German tradition to send kids off to their first day of school with this to help us feel more comfortable as we went into this strange new world. But when we came out of school that day, holding our precious sugar cones, we were smashed by a gang of young Hitler Youth...They were a big, noisy mob, waiting outside on the sidewalk, boys and girls a little older than we were... I remember looking up and seeing a sea of uniforms and angry faces. The people were yelling and taunting us, these furious kids with their Nazi neckerchiefs, all with the same swastika slides at their throats. The boys had daggers on their belts. They were just kids, 10 to 14 years old, but they each had their Nazi knives... As a six-year old kid, I had no idea what was going on politically, of course. But Germany was in a state of upheaval at the time. The country had lost World War I, and the countries (that) had won were (taking) the war reparations (payments), taking away territory and huge amounts of money that Germany really didn’t have... There was crazy inflation in the German economy; A loaf of bread would cost a million marks—a whole wheelbarrow full of nearly worthless paper money. When Hitler came to power, the German people were willing to follow a leader—any leader— who could convince them that he had a way out, a way to make German strong and wealthy again. He enlisted all those rootless, unemployed men, and gave them a cause. Now they had a gang to join, something to believe in, however bizarre and inhuman that cause turned out to be. He organized anybody who would listen to him. He let men out of jails and converted them to the Nazi cause—hardened criminals...He made them believe that they could be a part of something that could make Germany great again. He blamed the Jews for nearly all of Germany’s problems. Dictators [like Hitler]...often inflate their own status and power by convincing their people that they are under attack by some “other”—any group that looks, or acts, or believes differently.