I'd like to share this because I think this board will find him interesting if not outright heroic.
He was the son of a ww1 veteran, born in Baden-Württemberg, his father became a Freikorps fighter who was sent to the baltic to fight the advancing red army and was lynched by a soviet mob.
He was a teenager at the time, and, fearing what had happened in Bavaria, and the neighboring province of Germany, and now lacking a father, he took his family by railroad to Kiel, stowed away on a random cargo ship, and left.
Where did this ship end up? The port of Latakia, Syria.
He lived with his family in syria and Iraq off and on for a little over 20 years. He learned arabic, he became integrated with the local culture, and he became a fisherman.
When war broke out once more, he went back to germany and offered his services to the wehrmacht - he was recruited into the Brandenburgers. If you do not know what that is, it was a unit of the wehrmacht made up of German diaspora in foreign countries. Which he was. So he was sent to the north African and middle eastern campaigns.
Side note: he had converted to Islam a few years after he arrived in syria, but came back under the fold of Lutheranism during the second world War. He stayed a Lutheran for the rest of his life. Even after converting back to Christianity though, he still refused to drink or eat pork. Ever.
He did a lot of shit he never really spoke about in North Africa, the Middle east, and into Afghanistan. I don't know exactly what he did, neither does my family, but he did them. When the division was transferred into a panzergrenadier division and sent to the eastern front in 1944, off he went too, and he fought to the bitter end.
After the war ended in 1945, he ducked out of the danger of occupation era germany and snuck back to Syria to take care of his family.
He returned to fighting once more in 1948 in the Arab liberation army against Israel during the first arab israeli war. Because he was personally a virulent anti semite and did not believe that Israel should be a state. Based. He also was effectively an Arab in every way but blood, so he felt it was duty to fight on their side against the jews.
After this, he went to Morocco. Mostly due to the newly created severe instability in the levant. Morocco was far from it and was comparitively very stable. He was also very stubborn about NOT leaving the middle east and was waiting for another war against israel. He stayed in morocco for about 5 more years. Disappointed about the lack of any happenings yet, he relocated to the United States for economic opportunity, and because it was a better environment to raise a family. He moved to Boston, he expunged his record because he was worried about mossad operatives capturing him (he was mildly paranoid for good reason), got married to an American woman, and had children. He changed his last name, nobody in my family knows what his actual last name was. It's a secret he took to his grave.
We know that his last name isn't even a real german name, but burgers in america didn't give a fuck. It sounds like a germanized version of an Arab name, Sadaf. Which may or may not have been the name he took when he immigrated to the middle east. And which may or may not itself be an arabization of his birth surname. We have no idea. But considering that germans tend to take native names that sound like their own when immigrating (schmidt to smith), this is likely. But the last name he had on death does not exist in any surname lookup websites. It's basically german sounding gibberish. The only person who *ever* had the surname was him. He gave his children their mother's name. This was probably done on purpose to tie him to exactly 0 people whatsoever.
He probably would have joined the egyptian army during the Yom Kippur war if he wasn't already pushing his 60s and didn't have grandchildren by this point (my father was born at the same time this happened). He did support the war and king Faisal's oil embargo though.
His brothers and sisters remained in the levant, however, and married into arab families. Both muslim and christian. One of his nephews was an Iraqi soldier who was killed during the first gulf War. I still have relatives over there, technically speaking.
Native german speaker. Fluent in Arabic, Berber, English, and competent in Pashto.
He was a fisherman for the rest of his life. After all the shit that he did, he died in his late 90s of a heart attack in his boat. These are his words from his last days, when he knew his health was failing and it didn't matter anymore.
