Letter of the Month
Willi Huber and a family discovery.
The title story about Mount Hutt’s Willi Huber and his dark Nazi past touched me deeply, not just because I grew up in post-war Germany. It also brought to life a family story I only discovered a few weeks earlier, when a distant cousin emailed an article recently published in the history section of the renowned German weekly Die Zeit. It was a full-page essay about my uncle, who served in the German diplomatic service from 1920 until 1944.
Like Willi Huber, my uncle had joined the Nazi’s NSDAP party prior to the war; in his early diplomatic career he was also briefly a member of an SS equestrian group. By 1934, when he was posted to Romania as a German Consul, he was beginning to turn his back on the fascist ideology, its racism and inherent inhumanity that grew increasingly aggressive around that time.
Like Spielberg’s Oskar Schindler, my uncle remained a member of the Nazi party, later using his diplomatic influence to convince Romanian authorities to prevent the westward deportation of Jews into concentration camps. He also issued travel documents that saved many Romanian lives. His
