David Foster reviewed Gerhard Neumann‘s Herman the German ages ago, but I was recently reminded of it:
This is the autobiography of a man who was born to a Jewish family in Germany, apprenticed as an auto mechanic, attended engineering school, moved to China in 1938, was interned by the British as an enemy alien in 1939, transferred to the American forces, joined Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers, repaired the first Japanese Zero fighter to be captured in potentially flyable condition, became a U.S. citizen by special act of Congress, and went on to run GE’s entire jet engine business, which he played a major role in creating. (The preceding may be the longest single sentence I’ve ever written in a blog post.) The book should be of interest to those interested in aviation, technology, management, social history, the WWII era, and/or China.
Gerhard Neumann was born in Frankfurt/Oder in 1917, where his father was owner of a factory that processed feathers and down. Gerhard’s parents were Jewish but nonpracticing–a Christmas tree was traditional in the Neumann home–and their approach to child-raising was closer to stereotypically Prussian than to stereotypically Jewish: “You did exactly as you were told by your parents. There was no such thing as saying no to them!…You were not to have a hand in your pocket while talking to grown-ups…Showing any emotion in Prussia was considered sissyish. There was no kissing between parents and children–only a peck on the cheek before going upstairs punctually at nine o’clock; and there was absolutely no crying.”
On the other hand, Neumann could do pretty much what he wanted with his spare time. In 1927, at the age of 10, he rode his bike out to a grass strip where someone was giving airplane rides for 5 marks, which he paid with money from his piggy bank. His parents weren’t angry at him for taking this flight without permission; indeed, they were so entranced with his description of the way the town looked from the air that they soon took an airplane ride themselves! At the age of 13, Neumann bought a folding kayak and, with some camping gear and a 12-year-old friend, took long journeys on the Oder River, all the way to the Baltic Sea. Few parents in America today–or in Germany either, I’d bet–would now allow this level of independence to a 12- or 13-year old.
Neumann had no interest in the family feather business; he wanted to be an engineer. A 2- or 3-year machinist or mechanic apprenticeship was mandatory for admission to any German engineering academy: Neumann’s father asked the 10 cab drivers of Frankfurt/Oder to recommend the garage where they thought the boy would learn the most, and the answers were unanimous: Albert Schroth’s. So began Gerhard Neumann’s apprenticeship, which, other than the technologies involved, could have been something out of the Middle Ages. “In winter my hands were frozen purple. Wear work gloves? ‘What’s the matter, boy, are you a girl?’ When my hands were bleeding, Herr Schroth pointed to the large bottle of iodine in the backroom and mumbled something about faules Fleisch (lazy flesh.) No Band-Aids, no pitying, no time out.”
At first, Neumann had second thoughts about the path he had chosen. “My friends were still continuing at the Gymnasium, spending their days in comfortable and clean surroundings; here I was, accustomed to a fine home and the luxury of two maids and a chauffeur, becoming a grease monkey for three long years.” But Neumann found the work interesting, and took pride in the high reputation of the shop.
At the conclusion of the three-year apprenticeship, Herr Schroth said “Thank you, Neumann”…the only time that he had ever said “thank you” to his apprentice, or called him anything other than “boy”…and sent a bouquet of flowers to Neumann’s mother. “I felt sincerely grateful when I, in turn, thanked Herr Schroth–the man whom I had always addressed as Meister and who had given me a solid groundwork for what I hoped would be a rewarding engineering future.”
Neumann says that up to the time he left Frankfurt to attend engineering college in the mid-1930s, he encountered no open anti-Semitism at all. Even at the Mittweide engineering college, where he was one of three Jewish students (each of their fathers had been soldiers in the First World War, which made them eligible for a college education), he says that he was never insulted by Nazi fellow students. Even allowing for the fact that attitudes toward Jews did differ considerably in different parts of Germany, these statements are hard to believe given that the Hitler regime had been in place since 1933.
About 15% of the Mittweide students were foreign, and they were exempt from the requirement, binding on German students, to have previously undergone an apprenticeship. “Because they had never dirtied their hands or bloodied their knuckles in apprentice-type training, they did not benefit from the Mittweida-type education anywhere as much as did a German student.” The Mittweida approach to engineering education included drawings in which errors had been deliberately inserted–“We were taught to ‘get a feel’ for drawings laid before us. The question constantly posed was, Would it really do the job if it were built just as shown on this drawing?”
Engineering students were exempt from the draft while in school, but not after graduation. A few weeks before the end of 1938, Neumann noticed an item on the college bulletin board: the Chinese government was looking for German mechanical engineers. And the Chinese Nationalist government had arranged with the German Nazi government that these engineers would have their German military service requirement deferred.
“The notice was vague about the jobs, which apparently were somewhere in the interior of the Chinese mainland and were connected with defense. A job in faraway China sounded incredibly exciting…”
Incredibly exciting it turned out to be, and most of the book is concerned with Neumann’s remarkable adventures in China. It was also, surely, lifesaving–had Neumann remained in Germany, it is most unlikely he would have survived the Holocaust.
Read the whole review.
Thanks for the link.
Some editions of the book are subtitled “Just lucky I guess”, which phrase Neumann credits to Christine Keeler, who was a major figure in a 1960s British political sex scandal. It was her response when she was asked how she became such a successful courtesan, the questioner had probably had expected her to talk about her wrong turns in life.
Her friend Mandy Rice-Davies, the other women associated with the scandal, wrote a really excellent historical novel, The Scarlet Thread, which I reviewed here.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/66725.html
You’re more than welcome, David! I definitely did not know the backstory on ”Just lucky, I guess.”