Hello I am new to this forum. I thought I would share a story about a ww2 nazi veteran I befriended. I believe it to be true and saw no reason for him to concoct such an elaborate story. In the 80's and 90's I lived in Belize. formerly British Honduras. There was a large 200 acre private island there which had been developed originally as a private getaway club resort by and for some of Las Vegas' notorious entertainers. The resort subsequently changed hands and was converted into an golf course resort that became a failure. I had a work contract that required me to spend about 45 days a year on the island. It was closed down during that time and just had a skeleton maintenance and security crew living there overseen by am american managemant couple. The island had a fuel dock where I would get my gas. There was an old man whose only job was to allocate and guard the pumps during the day. He would sit in a golf cart , clip board in lap with his companion mongrel dog laying on the seat next to him. I was told by the managers that he was 'Smitty', an inherited old employee who had been on the island since day one and who had been a top machinist in his day. The managers were teetotalers from Kentucky and ran a 'dry' island. They instructed me to never buy and bring him rum if he asked me! I had heard of a famous smitty from the old timer boat captains who used to go to the island from all over the country to get parts manufactured or repaired back in the 70's. Anyhow thats the background. The first time I met him was during a cold front. He was wrapped up in an old blanket and smelled like he frequently peed himself and didnt bathe very often. I later learned that he had advanced prostate cancer. He was very frail, not friendly and spoke with a german accent. I remember being taken back by his striking blue eyes. I was an adventurer back then and had been researching the history of u-boat activity and skuttlings in that area. But thats another story. I hoped that maybe Smitty was one of the u boat crew members who had wound up down there at the end of the war so I decided to befriend him. Of course the first thing I did was to come back to the island with a bottle of real schnapps. It didnt take too long for us to become good chums over the following year. I was his only friend. Noone on the island gave him any respect. He had no family and no money. He had his paychecks sent to an old carib lady who lived on the mainland who used to be his wife at one time. He told me that not only would he be probably the only real nazi that I would meet in my life but also the only one who had fought on both sides of the war.... The story goes that he came from an old family of master machinists. When the war started he was enlisted into a panzer division and spent most of his time in North Africa keeping the tanks working. And then one day some civilian dressed officials showed up at his camp. He and another machinist were taken away and transported to either Sweden or Norway. I cant remember which. He spent about a month up there confined to quarters with around twenty other machinists and related tradesmen. They all were fluent in english and had no idea what was planned for them. Eventually they were secretly loaded onto a cargo vessel and wound up off the north east coast of the US. They were taken to a beach at night in lifeboats and received by plain clothes American agents. Not German agents. He never saw the others after that. He was indoctrinated, given a new identification and wound up working at the GW machine works in the Chicago area. I was dumbfounded by this story and he told me there were alot of things going on in that war that people didnt know about. He said big industry was not at war and the GW machine works company was actually the Grosse western machineabeiten or something like that! Anyhow the second part is that after a year or two working at GW he was drafted into the US Army seabees and wound up spending that last part of the war in the pacific theater fighting for the Americans! After the war he migrated to Guatemala and was employed by a german company for many years before winding up on that island in Belize. In confidence I learned much about the other side's outlook of the war and their justification for why they did what they did. One day I came back to the island and went to look for Smitty and clandestinely deliver his pint of schnapps. I couldn't find him and asked the managers where he was. They told me they had shipped him off to his ex-wifes family as he was not able to man the pumps anymore. I learned that he died shortly after that.
Welcome to the Forums Tesoro! Thar is quite the interesting story I must say, did he ever tell you his last name or his age? If so I would think you would be able to find records and confirm the story. It sounds pretty viable to me, as I have heard stories similar to this. It sounds like if his story is true he had quite the life!
Thanks. His last name was Schmidt or similar. I honestly cant remember his first name or age but he was definitely in the right age bracket back then 20 some years ago. He was very German and pragmatic. Not an embellishing type and he never volunteered to tell any of his war stories. He never drank in the day when I would visit him. He would sip his schnapps at night to help with his pain so he could sleep. I never doubted him so I didnt attempt to validate his story - not that I probably would have been able to do so.