Fritz Krenkler: A Story of Fate, Family and Friendship

Fritz Krenkler chats with ease over the phone from his home in sunny Arizona. He talks about his family, upcoming trips he is planning to the east coast with his wife, Verna, and the beautiful mountains that cradle his home. Ironically, those Arizona mountains aren’t that much different from the mountains he grew up near in the small German town of Grossbettlingen.

Fritz was a young man when he came from Germany and settled in Pennsylvania with his family. He had dreams of attending college and becoming a mechanical engineer when World War II came to American shores. Fritz enlisted in 1942 but was told that all military forces had enough men. He was needed more on the home front, as a toolmaker, to make supplies. However, in 1944, life took an unexpected turn for Fritz. He was drafted into the Army and after completing ordinance basic training in Maryland and low-level intelligence basic training in Georgia, he found himself back in Germany as a replacement soldier in the 42nd Rainbow.

Returning to Germany as an American soldier was initially uncomfortable for Fritz. “These were my people; my relatives, and now I was there not as family but as a soldier,” he explained. It was long-time friend Richard Marowitz, also in Intelligence and Reconnaissance, who told Fritz within a few days of his arrival that the first time he heard bullets whizzing above his head, all of his reservations would disappear. Fritz confirms that his friend’s advice was correct. “I didn’t hesitate one moment,” he said. “I knew what I had to do.”

This included an encounter about a week after the war ended. Fritz was near the border between Germany and Austria, riding his German motorcycle, when he noticed a caravan of military vehicles that he didn’t recognize. With the war ending, he knew that there were many German soldiers traveling through Italy and Austria to reach their homes in Germany. Fritz remembers that German soldiers would receive papers from Allied forces showing they were screened, and from which camp they had been processed. This then allowed them to get work papers and food stamps on their return home. So, he was not that surprised when the caravan of vehicles was in fact German. He pulled his motorcycle to the side of the road and, because of his fluency of German, spoke to the German captain leading the caravan. The German captain wanted to know where he could bring his troops to be processed and ultimately go home. The German captain didn’t recognize the young American soldier right away. But, after a few seconds he asked Fritz: “Are you Frederick’s boy?” Fritz said he answered, “Yes, I am.” The man standing in front of him was not just a German captain, but his Uncle William. Fritz wonders how the scene must have looked to those German troops in the stopped caravan: A scruffy American soldier hugging a well disciplined German officer.

In that moment Fritz shared with his uncle it didn’t matter whether they were American or German. What mattered was that in the end they were only people; family. So, when Fritz learned recently about the Purple Heart Jewel, created by a German man as a token of friendship to those who liberated the Dachau Concentration Camp, it was again another humbling experience. The Purple Heart Jewel was created by Ludwig Stoeckl and on May 28, 2009, Fritz traveled to Germany, with a few others representing the Rainbow, to honor Ludwig as an honored member of the 42nd Rainbow Division Veterans Memorial Foundation.

The Purple Heart Jewel is symbolic of more than just friendship. Ludwig named the jewel after the same Purple Heart created by George Washington during the Revolutionary War. In that time it was the one declaration given to common soldiers (it wasn’t until years later that it was awarded to those soldiers injured in battle). Ludwig wanted to honor those common soldiers that liberated Dachau more than 60 years ago. The Purple Heart Jewel is worth over $20,000 and has 29 diamonds, representing the day in April 1945 that the camp was liberated.

“Ludwig is a very honorable man,” Fritz said, “He was not alive during World War II but he of course knew of it, of things like Dachau, and recognized that the world today has lost sight of important things from our past.” The past is something that Fritz doesn’t forget. That would be something hard to do when the days, months, years he spent in the Army included moments of fright, laughter but most importantly friendships.

Interview conducted on 8/30/2009 by EMT