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Author and filmmaker Georg Stefan Troller: "People were starving and were in a zombie state"
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Jakob Schnetz and Janek Stroisch / DER SPIEGEL
Georg Stefan Troller has lived a century of life: as a Jew he fled the Nazis from Vienna, as a US soldier he helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp, as a writer and documentary filmmaker he met Muhammad Ali and Romy Schneider, Woody Allen, Pablo Picasso and hundreds other. Today he turns 100. For the SPIEGEL book »› A summer like no other since ‹. How peace began in Germany in 1945 - contemporary witnesses report «Alexander Smoltczyk and Hauke Goos visited him in his Paris apartment.
This conversation was first published in July 2020.
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Hauke Goos, Alexander Smoltczyk
»A summer like no other since then«: How peace began in Germany in 1945 - contemporary witnesses report - A SPIEGEL BOOK
Published by Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt
Number of pages: 240
Published by Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt
Number of pages: 240
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Troller:
May 1, 1945, shortly after Dachau was liberated.
I was there
And that was the end of the war for me.
On the same day we learned that Hitler had "fallen in the field".
It was the crucial day for us.
SPIEGEL:
You moved to Munich with your troops, when was that?
Troller:
Munich was conquered around April 28th.
And on May 1st I went to Dachau with our team of prisoner-of-war interrogators in our jeep.
SPIEGEL:
Did you have any idea what to expect in Dachau?
Troller:
Not that way, not that extent.
These hundreds of skeletons, covered with yellow skin, lying around there.
I also think I heard the word Auschwitz here for the first time.
I'm pretty sure that my father spent a week in Dachau after the Reichskristallnacht, but he never said a word about it.
But of course everyone knew the rhyme back then: "Dear Lord, make me mute so that I don't come to Dachau."
SPIEGEL:
The people of Munich also knew that saying?
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