During the dying days of the Second World War, a young German named Reinhard Krohn was captured by the Russians on the far eastern front and interned in a work camp. For four months the 17-year-old soldier slept on the cold wood floors, his pillow alive with bed bugs, the floorboards crawling with lice, and his mind churning with thoughts of his mother and family back home. IN 2007, the Register published a story about Krohn, who was by then long-settled in Iola. The first line ran: “Someday, Reinhard Krohn supposes, his life story might end up in a book….” Unfortunately, a week before Christmas the following year, before he had a chance to turn his hand to that life story, Krohn died, at his home in Iola, 5,000 miles from his place of birth. He was 81. THE SECOND son of Hans and Olga Krohn, Reinhard grew up in a large, gothic-styled, 17th-century home, whose landlord was a hunchbacked doctor named Otto Boyksen. Krohn remembered the home growing so cold during the winter that his mother’s mop would freeze to the floor during her rounds of chores. As a boy in short pants, Krohn used to visit a shop on his road, run by a man named Paasch. Paasch, writes French, had a “clean-shaven, round face, and equally round spectacles, behind which one eye did not move.” The shopkeeper had no children of his own and used to give the boy a handful of extra pennies to “rattle” in his pocket on the way home. FRENCH’S manuscript does not skirt the — to understate it — brutal politics of the Third Reich, or the fraught nature of what it means to be an American émigré who once donned the German uniform. But what French is able to rescue from the story of warring armies are the details of a single human life. She tells the story of her father “from birth to death,” someone placed by chance at the center of world-historical events. “What he did in the war was purely following orders. He had nothing to do with the atrocities. He only did his duty to his country.” IN JANUARY 1955, the Great Bend Tribune ran a weekly column, called Golden Belt Nuggets, written by Everett Brown — a man who went by the name “Nuggets”:
The dutiful son of a Hamburg city worker — but a boy touched by a passion for farming from the start — Krohn passed through the normal stages of a prewar German adolescence, which included mandatory stints in the Jungvolk and Hitler Youth, before being drafted into the army during the war’s last gasp, as the Nazi forces scrambled to stiffen their defenses against an advancing Red Army.
But on May 4, 1945, the German lines having failed to hold and its troops in full retreat, Krohn was captured along with six of his comrades in the woods near Brandenburg.
But there was something like pluck at work in Krohn’s character even then. At a risk to his life, the young soldier hid in the woolen lining of his pants a diary, and each night he transformed its blank pages into a detailed account of his days as a prisoner of war. As the pages advanced, weeks becoming months, Krohn’s writing grew faint; until, near the end of his stay, undernourished and down to a brittle 115 pounds, his hand still weakly grasping the pencil, the entries are barely visible.
From a page dated Aug. 9, 1945: “Many times we were sitting out resting or laying down — to get up we would have to do it in steps. Sit up, look around, then try to push yourself up — we lacked strength.”
Many around Krohn died. The rest subsisted on bowls of gruel. Meat was rare. Fish meal was added to the soup on occasion, as a cheap source of protein — a coarse nutrient that Krohn learned to crave. Extreme hunger has a way of narrowing one’s focus, and in time Krohn became consumed by a single thought, which revolved nightly like a searchlight through the young man’s brain: food, food.
From July 23: “Food is the number one subject of conversation during the day. The number two conversation is our release. … In between deliveries, we talk about German recipes. There is a man here who was a cook before the war in Vienna. There are three cooks from Holstein. The cook from Vienna talks about food preparation and how to cook different recipes. … When we talk about those things, water gathers in our mouths.”
On Sept. 4, 1945, Krohn was released. And though at first she didn’t recognize the skin-and-bones boy with the shorn head who walked through the door only a few months after she’d bid him goodbye, his mother “melted when she realized it was Reinhard.”
At which point she made dinner.
The famished Krohn gorged himself on horse meat and cabbage and potatoes, happy to be ingesting solids again. The feast of course was a shock to his altered digestive system and the sated soldier proceeded to be sick for a number of weeks thereafter.
But in the middle of Krohn’s life, luck delivered him a daughter, Becky French, who refused to let the promise of a book perish. French spent the years prior to her father’s death collecting his stories, his family pictures, the documents detailing his immigration to Kansas — first to Great Bend in his late-20s, then eventually to Iola. Crucially, French retained the prisoner’s diary, which she eventually translated, and which now forms the centerpiece of her newly completed biography of her father. (French is “technically” Krohn’s stepdaughter, but the bond between the two is rooted in such mutual affection, French says, that the “step” fell away years ago. “I was always his ‘little girl.’”)
As of this month, the ink still drying on the final manuscript, French is in search of a publisher.
“I just felt so strongly that it’s a story that needs to be told,” said French, whose dayjob is as a doctor of nursing practice at Family Physicians. “He was so different than people may have assumed he would be. He was very soft-hearted. A very devoted husband and father. I knew what kind of a man he was to our family, and so sometimes it was a daunting task. What if I’m not doing him justice, you know? I want to do this right. For him.”
This is French’s first book, but her gifts are ample. French’s talent, especially, is for the vivid image. The manuscript begins with a description of Krohn’s boyhood, which includes a cast of characters drawn, seemingly, from a volume of European folk tales.
Across the street lived an elderly man named Raabe. Krohn would watch his frail neighbor sweep the front walk, and “when Raabe swept his sidewalk, he struggled and he frequently leaned on his broom to catch his breath.” When Krohn was of an age to handle a broom, he took over sweeping for the old man every Saturday, and was paid in fruit, in the “apples and pears, which had fallen from Raabe’s five trees.”
A significant early influence on Krohn was his second-cousin, a widower named Emil — who wore long sideburns, dressed in a black and white suit, and “always shaded his face with a broad-brimmed hat” — and whose small farm the Krohns would visit and help cultivate during the summers.
According to French, this was one of many formative moments that fired the German youth with the ambition to farm. In his teens, Krohn turned down a place at university to attend agricultural college instead, and pursued that line until the war eventually interrupted his apprenticeship years in the fields.
(At the start of the war, Krohn’s childhood home, with the “two gothic windows emerging from the gables,” was demolished, and the site made into a bunker.)
After the war, according to French, Krohn hired himself out as a worker for a series of landowners, but, as his twenties ticked by, he was distracted by the desire to have a farm of his own. The likelihood of buying his own piece of land in postwar Germany — where farms were passed from father to son — was slim. And so Krohn looked to land-rich America.
Through mutual acquaintance, the young man was introduced to an older, childless couple from western Kansas, Hugh and Emma McIlrath, who happened to be visiting Germany. In time, impressed by the polite, young man, the McIlraths invited Krohn to help them on their farm in Kansas.
And so in October of 1954, Olga Krohn waved goodbye to her son again, and in a few weeks’ time Krohn was installed at the McIlrath farm outside Great Bend, and was soon turning his first furrows of American soil.
Krohn went on to become a naturalized citizen in 1960 — “He really wanted to become an American,” said French — eventually acquiring his own land in Neosho Falls a few years later.
Perhaps the richest event in Krohn’s crowded life, however, was his meeting and marrying Carolyn Ahlf in 1977, a union which introduced into the middle-aged farmer’s life three step-children, one biological son, and, in time, a cadre of grandkids.
What his neighbors in Iola saw in Krohn was simply another affable, plaid-shirted Kansas farmer, a devoted husband and father, a good Christian, and a dedicated community volunteer. “But when you look back, you see his life had so many bumps,” said French. “But, in spite of that, he was such an amazing guy, gentle, someone who loved everybody he met.”
Writing the book, said French, brought her closer to her father. Peering fiercely at the nearly invisible writing in the diary at a distance of 70 years brought French into touch with a facet of Krohn’s life that few on this side of the Atlantic were familiar with. At the end of his life, French remembers, the two would sit — “me and the tall German gentleman who became my father” — both weeping as the elderly Krohn remembered his time in the camp.
“Nuggets had the pleasure this week of shaking hands and sitting down to a nice conversation with a young man ‘just off the boat’ from Germany. Fellow had been a GI in the Wehrmacht, artillery branch, had been captured by the Russians and finally sent home again. Reinhard Krohn, at 27, is a likeable fellow with as much on the ball as anyone we’ve ever met, and what’s more, he still has retained a sense of humor despite the fact that at an age when most American kids are out racing each other in the hottest of rods, he was doing military service with a rough outfit on the eastern front.
“Reinhard is determined to become an American citizen. He’s a bit frightened and unsure of himself after six weeks of trying hard to learn a new language, new customs and new friends. But we know,” promises Nugget, “he’ll make it!”
War-time diary provides impetus for biography
