Chapter 23

Germany – May 1945

War Bride

Captain Weber opened the squeaky wrought iron gate and walked up the flagstone path to the front steps of the small house with its steeply peaked slate roof. To the right and left, weeds and debris littered what once had been a neatly kept front yard. This part of Augsburg, far from the bombed Messerschmitt factory, had been luckier than others when it came to bomb damage. He adjusted his uniform, tugged on his worn, olive drab M1943 field jacket, adjusted his pistol belt, holstered Colt .45 1911, familiar. Reset the steel helmet on his head, not ready to wear a soft cap this close to the end of the war.

A glance at the house number confirmed it matched what he’d been told in Munich. He used the metal knocker on the stout wood door to rap twice, then stepped back and waited.

Marcus waited nearly a full minute until locks were thrown, and the door eased partially open. A tired looking blue-eyed blonde woman stared back, clutching a worn black shawl around her young shoulders. Like most Germans, her initial reaction was fear as she stood still in the doorway eyeing the American soldier on her doorstep.

“Yes?” she said in German, a language he knew well. He answered in near-flawless German.

“Fräulein, I am looking for Heinrich and Anna Weber. Do they live here?” Two years of combat with the 3rd Infantry Division lent gravitas to his question, amplified by his uniform.

Turning her head, she called, “Mama, there’s an American here asking for you and Papa.” Not opening the door further, she added, “Is something wrong?” Her eyes took in his uniform, perhaps the Jeep and driver waiting behind him.

The door opened wider, and an older woman with blonde hair streaked with gray stood in the opening. “Yes, I am Anna Weber.” Her eyes examined him, a spark of recognition flickering. Her faded blue dress was worn but clean, tight over her bust.

Marcus took an envelope from inside his coat and handed it to her. “A letter from my father, Friedrich. I’m Marcus.” She took the letter, and he waited.

Anna put a hand to her mouth, the shock of his words visible in her eyes. “Come in.” She stepped back, allowing him to enter.

In the small vestibule, she said, “Kathi, this is your cousin, one of your uncle Friedrich’s boys. This is my daughter, Katharina.”

Marcus eyed his cousin, her beauty striking despite obvious exhaustion and the plainness of her dress. She had high cheekbones, full lips, golden blonde hair in a loose bun. She stuck out a hand, and they shook. Her hand was warm, the skin felt rough.

Kathi saw his look. “We both work.” He followed them deeper into the house.

They sat in the kitchen, the two women staring at the bounty on the table: canned meat—Spam, coffee, tea, chocolate, powdered milk, soap, and a few odds and ends he’d tossed into his musette bag.

As Marcus talked with Aunt Anna, his cousin ground the coffee beans and carefully heated some water. A pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes sat open on the table, next to his notebook and pencil. Anna opened the letter, scanning the German words penned by his father. His helmet rested on the floor by his chair, jacket on a hook, his olive drab shirt open at the neck. His blue and silver wreathed Combat Infantry Badge was pinned to his left breast above the pocket. They began to talk.

Their experiences over the last decade created a vast gulf, bridged only by family ties. His two other cousins and their father were unaccounted for. The oldest, Klaus, a fighter pilot, had been testing a new jet at an airfield near Munich. Karl, the middle child, somewhere in Italy with a Luftwaffe Flak Regiment at war’s end. Anna and Kathi lived alone in the house on the outskirts of the old city.

He watched Katharina’s backside as she worked, slender, almost skinny. She had a bit of the movie star Marlene Dietrich in her looks and the way she held herself, he thought. Both women’s faces appeared tight from hunger and war’s stress.

Marcus tried to square this branch of his family with his parents back in North Carolina. He’d passed through Dachau concentration camp just two weeks ago, its horrors piling onto all he’d experienced since landing in Sicily in ‘43, where he joined the 3^rd Infantry Division as a replacement.

Aunt Anna said, “My husband Heinrich is a Luftwaffe General.” He didn’t react. “We haven’t heard from him in weeks,” she added, taking a cigarette from the pack, rolling it in her fingers. Her full chest heaved gently under the tight, faded fabric of her dress, revealing the curves of a still-striking woman. Her chin quivered with emotion. Marcus was human; he could feel for her, understand her feelings. He placed a hand over one of hers. For a moment, they held hands, her blue eyes meeting his, “Danka.” Anna said as he let go.

His face neutral, Marcus picked up his pencil and made notes, making no mention of his new job in Army Counterintelligence (CIC), tasked with tracking thousands of wanted Nazi war criminals. Generalleutnant Heinrich Weber, Deputy to the Chief of Luftwaffe Development, was on the CIC list of wanted persons.

Katharina handed him the first cup of steaming black coffee, her smile big and white, blue eyes clear and deep. His heart skipped a beat. He hadn’t been with a woman since France. He caught a flash of skin where her dress dipped at the neckline, his gaze lingering a moment longer than it should on her delicate white breasts.

“And what about you? Are you married?” he asked, curious.

She stood straighter, pushing her chest out proudly. “I’m a widow. My husband was a Fallschirmjäger officer. He died in Normandy; we’d been married less than a year.” Pride mixed with sadness.

Marcus took it all in, his jaw tightening at the mention of Kathi’s dead paratrooper husband. They’d been tough bastards to fight, German paratroopers. He acknowledged the news with a false smile and sip of coffee, not bad. He would write a long letter to his parents soon. Before leaving, he took a compact 35mm Leica camera from his Musette bag and snapped a couple of photographs of the two women out in the sunny vegetable garden.

North Carolina – 2006

Diary of a Girl

Donna looked at her granddaughter Kristy and daughter-in-law JoAnn. “That’s how my dad met my mom. I’m the youngest of their four children.” She finished her coffee.

Kristy, sixteen-years-old, gazed at the old black-and-white pictures in the open album on the kitchen table, curious, also thrilled to hear more family secrets.

Affixed to the open page was a black and white photo of a pretty, young woman, about fifteen or sixteen, sitting nude for the camera, posing, on a patch of grass beside a lake. Her blonde hair in two tight double braids, small firm breasts thrust forward, slender legs crossed. A very fit example of Aryan womanhood. In another nude photo, the young woman, smiling behind aviator sunglasses, stood posing at the end of a wooden pier jutting into a lake, proudly showing off her beautiful athletic form, tits firm and proud, arm around the waist of an older woman, presumably her mother. Her full, ample breasts and curvaceous figure bare, her blonde hair swept into a sleek low bun, soft tendrils framing her attractive face.

Kristy glanced at her grandma as Donna flipped past a few pages of old family photos, more nudes, men in uniform, a serious-looking pilot in front of a fighter plane. She stopped at a picture of the two women posing in a garden, dated 1945. Next, Kristy’s eyes fell on the same young woman, older now in a wedding dress, a bouquet of flowers in her hands, standing with a handsome, uniformed American soldier, both smiling, happy. Marcus and Katharina, Augsburg, June 1946, read the handwritten caption.

“Your parents were cousins?” Kristy asked, just to be clear, noting the resemblance to the young woman in the photographs with her grandma. She wasn’t weirded out by the thought of cousins marrying. It was kind of hot, and they were both good-looking.

Donna slowly closed the album and stood. “Yes, we will talk more about my family later. Now we need to get moving. It’s a four-hour drive to the nudist resort.”

Kristy lay on the bunk above the driver and passenger seats. Grandma Donna drove the RV just above the speed limit, talking quietly with Kristy’s mom, JoAnn. Her fourteen-year-old twin sisters sat in the back, reading and listening to music. Even though they were heading to a nudist resort in Georgia, no one had taken their clothes off yet.

Before leaving the house, Donna had given her a 100-page unpublished manuscript, Diary of a Young German Nudist at War: 1935 to 1945. She thought the title a bit long. Grandma explained it was a work in progress, editing her mother’s diary, translating from German, and adding context.

Kristy had been reading for half an hour, flicking through the pages. Katharina, nicknamed Kathi, was a young girl when she started writing. The emotions were raw and all too familiar to Kristy. When she reached the summer of 1939 entries, her jaw dropped. Kathi’s thoughts and entries grew rawer and more personal. Kathi wrote about a FKK (German Nudist Movement) trip at the beginning of summer with her parents and older brother to Lake Starnberg, describing in detail its crystal-clear waters in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, where there was a nudist camp.

Into Kristy’s head popped the famous movie scene of Maria, Julie Andrews, singing ‘The hills are alive with the sound of music,’ as she danced on a green meadow overlooked by the Alps. She kept on reading Kathi’s entry as she wrote about the warm sun, handsome boys, athletics like archery and rowing, and sex. Real sex, not just a boy touching her tit or a stolen kiss. Her heart racing, she read the entry twice.

Kristy leaned down from the bunk. “Grandma, your mom had sex with her dad! She wrote about it,” she said, her own experiences with her dad fresh in her mind, no regrets, just like Kathi.

Donna kept both hands on the steering wheel, not taking her eyes off the road. JoAnn looked up, then at her mother-in-law. “Really, when?”

From behind her sunglasses, Donna said, “Summer of ‘39. A few months before the war started, everyone knew it was coming, except the Poles. Things happened. My mom and I talked about it, the first time I read the diary back in the ‘70s. But yes, before the war started, my mother had sex with her dad.” She paused. “It was common in some of the nudist communities, a rite of passage that was kept very quiet.”

“Okay, I’ll keep reading,” Kristy said, back on the bunk, slipping off her jeans and panties, one hand dropping to her moist pussy, drawn to Kathi’s story. In her entries that summer, Katharina wrote about pressure from the government to have Aryan babies; she was young and didn’t want to, but a few of her friends from the BDM, the Nazi Party’s youth organization, were already pregnant. From the diary entries, her great-grandmother appeared to have been a bit of a Nazi slut, had an eye for detail, and noted in her diary that her father was not the only boy or man she had sex with that summer.

JoAnn had a 2005 Rand McNally Road Atlas open in her lap, though Donna didn’t appear to need it as they headed southwest towards Georgia. Donna knew the route well; she and Jim had been to this resort many times over the years.

Donna turned up the volume on the radio, the unmistakable sounds of the Doors – Riders on the Storm spilling out of the RV’s Dolby speakers. Donna’s eyes back on the road, traffic light, fingers tapping to the melodious beat, lost in her own thoughts. JoAnn took a sip of coffee from her insulated cup and sat back in the passenger seat, adjusting the safety belt across her chest, letting her mind wander. The trip had been Donna’s idea, and she’d made the reservation for three nights. With Jim and Kevin hunting in South Africa and Bob in Iraq. It didn’t take any convincing at all for a girl’s trip to The Pines nudist resort in Georgia to be agreed on. The twins were easy: a swimming pool, crafts, and a safe place they could run around naked all day, and they could not leave soon enough.

With Kristy, it was a matter of guaranteeing they would be back by the weekend so she could go on a date with her college guy, Nathan, on Saturday night.

Then she made a couple of phone calls.

Georgia - Easter Week

Naked Friends

The Pines Family Resort, a gated 50-acre nudist property nestled among the pine-covered hills of Northern Georgia, was renowned for its friendly atmosphere. With RV pads, small rustic cabins, recreation facilities, walking trails, and pools fed by a warm mineral spring, it offered the perfect escape for the Wilkins’s for a few days.

Kristy sat on the sunbed by the swimming pool, the sun’s rays warming her nude body. Sitting up, she had Kathi’s diary in her lap. It was 1943 in the diary, but her mind was on the previous weekend. A golf lesson with Frank and Raquel, and this time Allen, a widowed banker friend of Frank’s, joined them for some outdoor putting on a green at the Country Club. That had been fun practicing on real grass in her sexy new golf outfit. White tights, a short, pleated green skirt, Polo Ralph Lauren pink sweater over her shirt, and new Nike golf shoes on her feet. It had been cool out, the sky gray this close to Spring. Then Nathan and his father walked out onto the green, clubs in hand.

She found herself blushing, caught, wearing a new sexy outfit with two older men, bent over practicing her putting, her dark hair in a tight braid under her sun visor. The moment was awkward at first. Nathan’s dad knew both men from his work as a building contractor and developer. She’d briefly hugged Nathan while he reminded her of their date as Kristy hurriedly explained she was taking lessons from Frank, a friend of her family from church. He’d smiled, handsome, her heart beating, and said it was a great idea, the golf lessons.

After the lesson and nice lunch in the members’ dining room, they went back to Frank’s house, where the sex had been over the top. Almost three weeks had passed since they had last fucked. The four of them got naked. Nancy and Cassandra were not home. The girls drank expensive Napa wine, the men Kentucky bourbon. Allen, older in his 70s, charming, his hands roamed the bodies of both her and Raquel, boobs, asses, kisses. She’d played her part protesting but letting him explore. All good, the sex with Frank was enjoyable until Allen had asked for a swap from his position between Raquel’s legs. Surprised, she looked back at Frank, who had her doggie. He shrugged, “She’s all yours,” and let Allen take his place as he got busy with his big-breasted granddaughter Raquel. Kristy had felt used, her emotions hurt, like a whore, traded to the next man without asking, an undeniable thrill even as hot tears ran down her cheeks. After Allen shot his load of warm cum on her back, he’d promised both girls a shopping trip. Sure, she let him wash her back and boobs in the shower while she cleaned his cock. Aunt Hannah had said sex was often transactional, so true. Later, her therapist, Rachel, told her the hurt, excitement, and tears were just her dealing with conflicting teenage emotions and the teachings of her deep Christian faith.