Coleshill, Renate

The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project RENATE COLESHILL Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial Interview Date: January 19, 2012 Copyright 2015 ADST Q: This is the 19th of January 2012. This is an interview with Renate Coleshill, and this is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, and I’m Charles Stuart Kennedy. To begin with, when and where were you born? COLESHILL: I was born on April 26, 1946 in Mannheim, Germany. Q: Your maiden name is Zimmermann? COLESHILL: It is, with two n’s. Q: Could you talk a bit about on your father’s side, the Zimmermann family, what you know about it? COLESHILL: My grandparents also came from the Mannheim, Germany area. Unfortunately my family history doesn’t go back any further than my grandparents. My dad was the younger of two. I have no idea what my grandfather did. He died before I was born. My grandmother was a pastry chef. They were firmly middle class people. They both worked, they owned a house, a very nice house. My father’s older brother, Martin, was 13 years older than my dad. Uncle Martin came to the United States before the 1929 crash. He was a traveling salesman, I think selling nylons and such, door-to- door. When Wall Street crashed in 1929, he returned to Germany, and eventually became a vice president for Daimler-Benz. Sometime in the mid-50s he went to India, to build one of the first Daimler factories somewhere in India. I mention this because this becomes important when we talk about how I joined the Foreign Service. My dad left school at age 14. He told my grandfather that he wanted to be a member of the German merchant marine. My grandfather told him that was a fine ambition which he could pursue after he got a trade. He apprenticed with a company called Bopp and Reuther and was a journeyman tool and die maker with them until he was conscripted into the German army in 1938. Q: Were you getting from the family at all stories about particularly the Hitler time, the Hitler side and the war and about the life in Mannheim? COLESHILL: More about life in Germany than the politics of the day. 1 Q: What were you hearing? COLESHILL: My parents and their families were working class folks who were fervently anti-communist. My mother was a bookkeeper for a fairly large department store. Initially they thought Hitler was good for Germany. For example, the economy improved, the inflation rate reduced; unemployment dropped thanks to massive construction projects of roads and railways. Hitler was a great speaker and roused the population to believe in his rhetoric. Once it became apparent that a lot of this was merely propaganda, they bought into the theory that Hitler would take care of the communists, and then Germany would vote Hitler out of power. Dad was conscripted into the Army in 1938. My parents married in late 1941 while my dad was still stationed in Mannheim. My dad was shipped out in 1942. When my mother learned she was pregnant, she moved back into her family home, a good-sized house outside of the city limits, where my maternal grandmother raised chickens, had an extensive vegetable garden, and fruit and nut trees. They were almost self sufficient with eggs, poultry, and fruits and vegetables. Of course my maternal grandmother’s house had to be “good-sized” because my mother was the second youngest of 11 children, seven of whom were still alive after the war. My sister was born in the spring of 1943. My mother wrote him that she was a healthy dark-haired child. When my dad saw her the first time some eight months later, Inge’s hair had turned blonde but it was such a gradual change that my mother failed to mention it in her letters. The story was told that my dad was in a unit with other men from Mannheim and from the Gutchenstap, which was the neighborhood of Mannheim where he lived. When the Germans recruited or conscripted, they put people together into the same unit from the same neighborhood. He was in this unit with his best friend and his cousin and lots of people he knew. On the Russian front he was in an anti-aircraft unit. He often told stories about how it was very difficult to tell whether they were shooting down a Russian plane or a German plane. Most decisions were made on the basis of which direction the plane was flying. Toward the end of the war an officer who was from Mannheim Gutchenstap came to my dad and said he, several other officers and some other enlisted men were going to desert that night because they thought the war was coming to an end and Germany was losing. He said, “We don’t want to be caught by the Russians, so we’re going to desert tonight, and we’re going to head west to surrender to either the British or American troops.” And that is indeed what they did. A week and a half later they surrendered to French troops. He then went to a French prisoner of war camp for six weeks before being released. His best friend was released earlier and came my mother and said, “Erich is okay. He hasn’t been injured, and he is held as a prisoner of war by the French. They are processing everyone out. He will be home within a week, 10 days at the most.” 2 So the war was lost; Germany was in shambles. They two bright spots in my mother’s life were that her two-year old was healthy and her husband was coming home, apparently also in good health. Even though she was Catholic, she decided to use birth control. She went to her eldest sister who is in those days was a fallen woman because she had had a child out of wedlock, and she asked to my Aunt Erika, “So, Erich’s coming home. What can I do?” My aunt lent my mother a diaphragm [laughter] and here I am!” Of course it didn’t fit my mother because diaphragms are sized. How naïve my mother was and my fallen aunt was equally naïve. That’s possibly why she was a fallen woman. [laughter] Q: Was she known in the family ever after as the fallen woman? COLESHILL: Oh, God, we have always talked about her as the fallen woman! [laughter] My mother accumulated a little furniture and household things during the early war years. Towards the end of the war, Mannheim, as you know, was bombed very heavily because it was an industrial town, and it was very much part of Germany’s war machine. Everyone was scrambling to save their possessions so she found someone who shipped her furniture across down the Rhine River and across the Lauter River for safekeeping in a warehouse. Unfortunately, at the end of the war, the furniture warehouse was in France and she could not get it back. At the end of the war there was great hardship because they had nowhere to live. Food was of course very rationed. Q: These were extremely difficult times. I served in Germany in ’53, ’54, ’55 in the military in Frankfort and one knows what the difficulty is. COLESHILL: Of course you had food. Q: Oh, yes. I mean no. We’d get the stories of the difficulties of living and surviving. Did you ever read an excellent book called A Woman in Berlin? COLESHILL: No. Q: There’s an English translation. She wrote a book. She was an editor of something. I think they finally located who she was. She tells of being in Berlin with the Soviet occupation and all and how she had to seek out a protector to keep her from the ravages of the… That whole German story is the occupation as one that probably hasn’t really been told yet. An awful lot of memories. COLESHILL: I’m sure. The interesting thing is my parents didn’t talk a lot about either Hitler’s rise to power to the run-up to the war. I know that my dad felt that Hitler came to power because he restored German pride and improved economic conditions. It seemed to him the choice was Hitler or the communists. He said many Germans felt that if they 3 let Hitler take care of the communism and they would take care of Hitler on the next election. Of course it did not happen that way, and he never actually addressed why he thought that the Germans weren’t able to get rid of Hitler or to see what Hitler was doing. My first assignment was in Warsaw, Poland, and it was really there that I got a fuller measure of what happened in Germany and the horrific slaughter at the concentration camps. Certainly I had read The Diary of Anne Frank, but never really grasped how horrific Hitler, the brown shirts and the Nazis were. This is my heritage for God’s sake, so I came home and tried to get into a dialogue with my parents about this. My mother’s reaction was, “Well, we didn’t know what Hitler was doing.” I said, “But Mom! They were shipping Jews in cattle cars across the country.” She said, “They could have been Jews, and they could have been soldiers, because they traveled the same way.

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