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Old March 6th 04, 07:01 PM
Chris Mark
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From: Joe Osman Josph.Osman@veriz

I thought that he was in Military Government, there being a story of him
becoming "military mayor" of the town his family was from.


Heinz Kissinger came of age in Nazi Germany, having been born in 1923, the
first child of a Jewish couple in Fürth, Germany. In 1938, the family
immigrated to American and settled in New York City. Kissinger was a student
at City College when he received his draft notice shortly after his nineteenth
birthday and, by February of 1943, he left for Infantry basic at Camp Croft. He
became a naturalized citizen in Spartanburg on March 19, 1943, along with 348
other Camp Croft soldiers, 131 of whom were also Germans. Despite being away
from his family, and outside of a German-Jewish community for the first time in
his life, Kissinger found South Carolina to be more of a "new world" than New
York had ever been, and he wrote that the experience was "exhilarating." He was
said to have been a solitary figure but performed well during basic training
and after completing basic in June 1943, he was sent to nearby Clemson
University where he qualified for the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP)
and was sent to Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. When the program was
canceled in April of 1944, Kissinger found himself sent, along with 2,800 other
ASTP candidates, to Camp Claiborne, LA to join the 84th Infantry Division.
Assigned to Company G, 335th Infantry Regiment, Kissinger departed for Germany
in November 1944 and, as part of the Ninth Army, quickly pushed into Germany
only to be driven back into Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge. By March,
the company was back in Germany, arriving at Krefled where Kissinger, a PFC
with no security clearance but displaying other obvious qualities, became the
administrator of the city. Shortly afterwards, he was transferred to the
Counter-Intellegence branch, promoted to the rank of Sergeant, and served with
distinction in other important occupational duties. Demobilized in May 1946,
Kissinger worked for a time in Europe as an instructor at the European Command
Counter Intelligence School in Oberhammergau before returning to the US,
entering Harvard University under the G.I. bill.


Chris Mark