Thill Chills WWII Survivor
By Howard Pankratz Denver Post Legal Affairs Writer
Sept. 20 - She came to America to flee the memories.
But last week, 54 years after she lived through the carnage of World War II, the diminutive woman with a German accent sat in the same room with a neo-Nazi named Nathan Thill.
The woman, 66, was one of almost 200 people who showed up to be interviewed as potential jurors in Thill's murder trial in Denver District Court - a trial that has since been relocated to Pueblo because the court could not find enough impartial jurors to try the case here.
"I wanted to spit on him,'' the woman, who asked not to be identified, told The Denver Post. "I wanted to tell him, "You are a disgrace to the white race. You have no right to live.' I wanted to tell him, "You should be hanged.'
"I wanted to say, 'How dare you wear a swastika on your arm - you don't know what it is like!' ''
Instead, she kept her composure during the 10 minutes she was interviewed by lawyers and District Judge Jeffrey Bayless. In that brief time she conveyed, with deep emotion, some of her World War II experiences.
Thill, accused of murdering a black man on the streets of Downtown Denver in November 1997, has been the Colorado leader of the neo-Nazi group known as the Aryan Nations for the past few years, according to the FBI. The group has called for, among other things, the murder of Jews and the establishment of a whites-only state in the American Northwest. Thill's chest features a mosaic of tattoos that includes two Stuka dive bombers and a Nazi storm trooper.
Throughout the woman's account, Thill fidgeted and gazed at the floor uncomfortably.
The woman's questioning had started out innocently enough.
Lawyers wanted to know why she was opposed to the death penalty - something she had indicated on a juror's questionnaire.
In simple, short responses, she took them back to the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s, when when war raged across Europe and Nazi-induced terror swept Germany, particularly for people like her, whose family believed in God and attended church.
"As I was growing up, I'd go to church, and they'd say, 'There is no God,' '' she told the hushed room.
She recalled how people she knew were rounded up, lined up against a wall and "shot for nothing.''
Those meaningless deaths, she said, would make it impossible for her to impose capital punishment.
She remembered how the SS - the Nazi Party's elite military branch that carried out party policy, including mass exterminations - ransacked her house in 1943 after someone spotted a radio wire. The SS accused her father of listening to the BBC in London, but her father told the SS that he couldn't even pick up Berlin on the tiny radio.
"The doors (of homes) had to be open all the time,'' she said. "I've seen them walk in and ransack a house for nothing.''
Then in January 1945, as Russian troops swept toward Germany, the SS showed up at her family's home again. They wanted her father, then 56, who had fought for Germany in World War I and attained the rank of lieutenant, to fight the invading Russians.
The family believed it was pointless, that the war was lost.
"You have to fight,'' the SS told him. "If you don't come with us, we will shoot you in front of your family'.''
Her father left, was captured by the Russians and ended up in Siberia. He returned to Germany in 1950, where he was under a doctor's care for two years because of his wartime imprisonment.
All of what she told Bayless and the lawyers was moving. But she didn't tell them the most horrifying memories because she didn't want to offend anybody, particularly anyone in the room who might have been Jewish.
Living close to the Polish border, she watched every day at 1:30 p.m. as box cars of Polish Jews being taken to German death camps rumbled down the railroad tracks near her home.
The plight of concentration camp prisoners was brought home to her as she, her mother, brothers and sisters fled the invading Russians in 1945. In a village far from her farm, she and a couple of her sisters came across across a group of concentration-camp prisoners being guarded by the SS. When one of the prisoners asked her for a piece of bread, an SS guard took the rifle off his shoulder and slammed its butt into the back of the prisoner's skull.
The woman said she still fears that the Nazis may kill her.
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